Lie in Wait (10 page)

 

Chapter 20

T
EST OPENED
J
ESSICA'S
bedroom door. The window shade was up, the room bright and stifling with trapped sunshine.

She took two pairs of surgical gloves from her jacket pocket and handed a pair to North.

“You carry two pairs?” he said.

“Four.”

They put the gloves on, and stepped inside the room.

The paneled walls and a tiny girl's dresser were painted a matching lavender. Posters of horses covered every wall except the one facing the door. This wall was adorned with posters of the Eiffel Tower, l'Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Bastille, the Louvre, the Royal Palace, and prints of Picasso's
The Doves
and Monet's
Water Lilies.

Each poster hung perfectly square.

In the right corner, a twin bed sat on a frame with no headboard or footboard. The mattress had no bedspread, but the top sheet was pulled tight and neat and the single pillow was fluffed and placed at the head. On the pillow perched a white teddy bear that clutched a red velvet heart to its chest. To the left was a doorless closet. A half-­eaten bag of potato chips and a neat stack of textbooks sat on the floor beside the mattress. There was scarcely enough floor space to take a step in the room.

Test knelt at the textbooks, each wrapped with a dust jacket of paper lunch bags. Test recalled covering her books in high school, writing R.E.M. lyrics on them. She was surprised and touched that kids still used paper lunch bags when most rituals of one generation never made it to the next generation. Jessica's covers were blank.

Test opened each book. On the inside cover of each, in neat print, was the name
Jessica Jean Cumber
. Test removed the dust jackets:
Geometry I, Earth Science, American History: The Colonial Period, Francais II,
and
Biology I
.

As North investigated the closet, Test sat on the edge of the mattress. She lifted each book by the spine and shook it to rid it of loose papers. Only one book produced anything: a quiz on biology: 10 out of 10.
Excellent work, again!

Jessica, as Test had been told by Gardiner and Jessica's friends and teachers, was not just smart, but studious. Curious. She enjoyed learning. She embraced it. Test remembered the exhilaration she herself had felt when first learning new subjects that had stimulated her young mind. The world was astonishing, bursting with magical possibility. It still was. If you looked. Claude, bless his artistic wiring, reminded her every day of what he called Common Joys. He was sappy and a sentimentalist. But he was right, mostly. She loved that about him. It was one of many reasons why she'd asked him to marry her.

She flipped through the pages. She recalled doodling and writing notes in the margins of her books, but the margins of these books had remained clean. She leafed through book after book. Nothing.

Then, on page 145 of
Biology I
, next to the image of a protozoa, in a miniscule version of the neat hand lettering from the inside cover was written,
I love you know who
.

“Look,” Test said.

North leaned over her shoulder.

Test put her fingertip under the declaration.

“Hers?” North asked.

Test flipped from the page to the inside cover and back again.

“Keep looking,” North said.

They sifted through the room.

They searched the pockets of Jessica's clothing.

They emptied dresser drawers onto the mattress to file through bras, and through panties blotted with menstrual fluid.

They found an old diary whose last entry was 2007, when Jessica had been twelve.

There was nothing in it that pointed to anyone or anything threatening, or any emotional upheaval. The entries were mostly about plans. Plans to own her own horse. Plans to be a veterinarian.

They found a sheaf of letters, all of them from Olivia. Gossip about other girls, movie stars, unfair teachers and their teacher's pets. It comforted Test to see handwritten notes between friends, charged with emotions, with possibility. Already, though cell ser­vice remained atrocious in many pockets, Test saw teenagers texting all the time wherever they got ser­vice. She wondered if texting would supplant the secret note passed among the grapevine of friends? It probably already had. She supposed one didn't miss what one never knew. It wasn't as if she missed phonographs.

Not one note from Olivia indicated troubles or a boyfriend.

“How did you know her name?” North asked.

“Whose?”

“Olivia's”

Test arranged Jessica's clothes back into their proper drawers.

North sighed and rummaged through the coats and shirts in the closet.

“About earlier, at King's place,” North started, then stopped. “Look,” he said.

North handed Test a scrap of paper. It had been folded twice. It contained Jessica's handwriting:

I wish I could tell the world about him. I wish I could tell someone. Anyone. It's not fair. Mom's mom got married when she was like sixteen, to a 27 year old! Married! All I want to do is date him. If I could, I'd hire Mr. Merryfield to sue the state and free me and V to be together. Even if he is such a jerk sometimes.

“V,” North said.

Test reread the note, an electric pulse surging along her spine at a possible lead. But, that was all it was. Possible. She would not make assumptions. Would not form a theory. Not until they discovered who V was and how, and if, he fit.

“This is it,” North said. His face was set with certainty.

“Maybe,” Test said. “I don't want to rush—­”

“The note is dated last week.”

“I know.”

“So, if this V had nothing to do with it, where is he? Why hasn't he come forward if his girlfriend, the girl that loved him so much, just got murdered?”

“He's older. Maybe too old. She's fifteen, by weeks. How do we start to figure out who V is, when none of her classmates so much as mentioned a boy, let alone a boyfriend?”

“That's how you knew Olivia's name” North said. “You
went
to Jessica's school?”

“To interview her friends.”

“You can't do that.”

“I can.”

“But you shouldn't. I had ­people going there at noon, damn it. We need to coordinate. Not waste resources on redundancies.”

“Our budgets are separate.”

“I'm not talking about budget. I'm talking about time. Wasting time. Your chief Barrons is not going to be pleased his budget is eaten up by redundant interviews. I can assure you.”

Test kept her back to him. “We can trade notes.” She said it coolly, but North's mention of Barrons left her uneasy. Would North report her to her Barrons, use budgetary reasons to keep her at bay? The more Test learned of Jessica—­serious, quiet, studious, curious, goal oriented—­the more Test felt an affinity with her. The more Jessica reminded her of herself. The more she needed to felt a need to act on her behalf, as a detective, and as a woman.

“You need to keep your word. Share information,” North said.

“I just
got
it this morning,” Test said. “Was I going to talk shop in front of a grieving mother out there? When I go over the recordings and make notes, I'll give them to you.”

“You should have told me you were going in the first place. Beforehand. I hope for your sake you'll cooperate and not—­”

“I got you into this house,” Test said. She could not restrain herself. It was juvenile to bring up, but it was true. She had gained capital for providing North entry into this home, but she had to spend that capital judiciously. Not push. She wanted to be done with this prattling.

“We'd have been glad to include you this afternoon,” North said.

She didn't believe him.

“Now you don't have to,”she said.

North worked a palm over the back of his neck and squeezed. “OK,” he said. “Maybe my men will get something you didn't. Or maybe the kids you spoke to were lying about a boyfriend. Hiding it.”

“All of them?”

“Some. Olivia. For example.”

“If she knew, there'd be mention in the notes between the girls.”

“Maybe.”

“No. No maybe. I know. I was a girl.”

“Kids lie. They're no different than us.”

“Cynic,” she said, though she knew he was right.

“Realist.”

Test held no naïve delusions about kids being wide-­eyed innocents. She'd seen enough from George and Elizabeth to know how manipulative they could be. King and queen. Ugh. She'd never once given thought to her kids' names being linked to royalty.
George
was an old family name on Claude's side, and Test was simply fond of the name Elizabeth, though not Liz or, God forbid, Lizzy. Never Lizzy. But when she'd told friends what she'd named the second of her two children, her friends had yipped: the king and queen! Test had been aghast, and swore she'd never refer to her kids as such; though now she used it when she was peeved at the two children for giving off an air of snootiness and entitlement, especially when they lied to get their way. Sure, kids lied. All kids. God, had Test ever lied to her parents. North was right. Still, there was a balance to be drawn. Kids lied, usually, in
reaction
to something: to get out of something, mainly trouble. Adults lied for the same reason, too, of course. But they also lied premeditatively to
get
something. For personal gain. An end game.

“Jessica never told
anyone
about V,” Test said. A theory was forming in her mind. The waters still muddy. “V is a secret for a reason. The tone of the note. The content.” She read the note again. “V is older. It's plain.”

“How much older?”

“I hate to think.”

She tapped the bag that held the note to her lips, thinking. Aligning her thoughts.

How would they track down this V? She'd need to go over her recording of the kids and teachers she'd interviewed. Perhaps there was something there. Perhaps—­

A thought tugged at her mind but she could not place it.

“You all right?” North said.

“Ruminating.”

North nodded. “Earlier, at Jed King's, you—­”

Test didn't want to hear it. Not while she was trying to focus. And she didn't need to be reprimanded by North. “It'll have to keep,” she said and left the room.

 

Chapter 21

J
ED
K
ING SAT
in his truck in the parking lot across the street, staring at the queers' house. His idling truck rocked on its springs. Rain dappled the windshield. The windshield wipers swept. The rain dappled. Jed watched.

He powered down his truck window and fished the wad of tobacco out of his lower lip, flicked it off his fingers, spat to the pavement, and packed a new pinch in his lip, resting his arm on the window frame, the rain wetting his shirt sleeve.

He enjoyed the buzz as the nicotine spiked his blood and he stared at the pansies' house.

The truck's radio was set to an AM station, the volume low, as if the talk-­show host and his guest were sharing secrets not meant to be overheard by just anyone.

“They
want
you to like them,” the host said. “They
want
your
kids
to
like
them, to see them as flawed but good ­people, just like you and me.”

“Amen,” said the guest.

“But they're
not
just like you and me. Are they?”

“No,” King said.

“They want you to believe their issue is the same as that of blacks in the sixties. A human-­rights issue. It is not. Being black is not a choice.”

King nodded, pounded a fist on the steering will.

“I have with me today Malcolm Johnson, an Afro-­American minister who feels it's an insult for homosexuals to relate their cause to that of the civil rights movement of Afro Americans.”

King turned up the volume.

The front door to the queens' house opened.

A neighbor's dog barked.

The screen door slammed.

Jed sat up, gripped the steering wheel.

The windshield wipers swept.

Rain dappled.

Jon Merryfield stepped from the house and pulled the collar of his jacket up against the rain then waved back toward someone King could not see.

How could a man defend such ­people? It made King sick.

Merryfield had always unnerved King in a remote way King couldn't quite nail.

King had known Merryfield since Merryfield was a strange, lonely kid living with his grandparents.

He'd always been off.

Fey.

King wondered.

Merryfield jogged across the lot behind King's truck. The guy was married, but that meant squat. Years ago, King used to spot Merryfield at Sarah's Sawmill when Merryfield had just come back from some fancy-­ass southern law school. He'd shoot pool in a polo shirt but try to act like he belonged among working men. He'd curse. Swill cheap draft beer. Dip tobacco. But his pool game betrayed him; it was all geometry. Dry. Calculated. No instinct. Just like a lawyer.

A guy who tried so hard to belong where he never would had a screw loose, if you asked King.

King watched Merryfield climb into his fucking Land Rover and rest his forehead on the steering wheel. Merryfield remained like that so long King thought he'd fallen asleep.

Finally, Merryfield stirred, stared out his windshield in a trance, then drove out of the lot.

King looked back at the entrance of the queers' house, eyes squeezed to the slits.

The ginger-­haired queer sauntered out of the house now, a black scarf tucked down the front neck of a buttoned suede coat as he swished down the sidewalk in his hurried fussy gait, as if he'd been born late and ever since had been trying to catch up to the person he was supposed to be. He had that lame old mutt on a leash with him. Not that the damn thing needed a leash. It could barely walk, and could barely squat now as it took a dump on the lawn and the queer scooped it up in one of those yuppie crap sacks. Why they didn't show the damned dog mercy and put it down, King didn't know. Selfish was what.

The queer brought the dog inside and came back out alone.

King grabbed a ball cap from the dash and got out of his truck.

The November wind raked his face. The air was raw and wet. He liked it.

A murder of crows swam overhead on the stiff winds, cawing raucously.

King set the ball cap on his head and squeezed the bill tight.

The queer disappeared around the corner.

King followed.

As the queer ventured into the Riverside Card Shop, King staged himself a ­couple doors down.

A few minutes later, the queer reappeared carrying a small bag.

King bent as if to tie his work boot as the queer entered Brew Ha Ha coffee shop one door down from King who spat tobacco juice on the sidewalk.

The queer walked back out, an enormous coffee in one hand, the bag in the other, headed toward King.

Here we go
, King thought, and he came at the queen full stride, shoulders squared, and caught the queer hard in his shoulder.

Steaming coffee sloshed from the cup all over the queen's suede jacket and hands.

“Fuck!” the queen shouted, dropping his coffee and the bag and gripping his burned hand with his good hand. He looked up at King.

King stared him cold. Into silence. The pussy.

“Careful,” King said and ambled back toward his truck, spinning his truck keys around a finger.