Lie Still

26

Leticia Abigail Lee Dunn whipped her monster black Escalade into Terminal B’s drop-off zone for the handicapped and slammed on the brakes.

It is a sign of how much God enjoys a good joke that Letty was the person I picked to come to the rescue. I had my reasons, of course, and number one was that I needed to get home before Mike found out I wasn’t.

I tried other alternatives. Misty didn’t pick up. Twelve out of twelve tow truck places said it would be ten to twenty-four hours before anyone could show up. The airport cabbies were reluctant to haul me all the way to Clairmont when they could make good dough with short hops in the rain. The rental car places in the terminal were booked solid unless I wanted to rent a red Ferrari for $900 a day.

Which reluctantly led me to Letty Dunn, now popping out of her vehicle in a lime velour tracksuit faster than the law of physics would say is possible. The rain pelted her frizzy head until she darted under the awning and wrapped me tight in pillowy arms like I was a child who had come back to Jesus. When she finally pulled away, her eyes were bloodshot. She held a wad of wet tissues in her hand.

“I totally, totally accept your apology for the other night. I always told the pageant girls that it’s the crises that pull us together.” She honked into her Kleenex. “It’s terrible, about Caroline, isn’t it? I can’t believe she’s gone. She was my friend.” Her shoulders heaved, while passengers rerouted themselves around her on the wet sidewalk like she was just another part of the airport obstacle course.

Surely this wasn’t pretend. Letty appeared to be demonstrating genuine grief. “Letty, it’s OK.” I awkwardly rubbed her shoulder. “You knew her for a long time. It has to be an enormous shock. We should go, though. I think you’re about to get ticketed.” A security cop was determinedly wending his way toward the Escalade.

“I can’t drive this thing of Harry’s,” she wailed. “It nearly killed me. My car’s in the shop.”

“No problem.” I pried the keys out of her hand, which was slick with a substance that I hoped wasn’t born in her nose, and pushed her toward the passenger door.

She sniffed loudly. “It was a lot to ask me to come get you while I’m mourning the tragic murder of my best friend.”

“Yes, it certainly was. I owe you a big one.”

Letty seemed to be turning this idea over in her mind as I switched on the ignition. The car’s friendly glowing readout confirmed that it was 3:33 p.m. and 97 degrees. Letty had agreed to come, but only if I’d wait three hours for her to get her hair highlighted. I pulled out, pretending not to see the security guard stepping off the curb and shouting at us to roll down our window. That was before Letty agreeably rolled down the window and shot him the finger. I stepped on the gas and took the first curve a little fast.

“Didn’t you notice I’ve lost weight?”

I barely nodded. I was back in the airport circle of hell, while the windshield wipers slashed violently at the rain. North or south exit?

Letty grabbed the wheel and wrenched us into the right lane. “North, honey, north.” I gasped, whipping the wheel back a little before we hopped a curb. Letty seemed not to notice.

“I’m trying this diet where you can eat all the bananas, hot dogs, and boiled eggs you want, but that’s it. Nothing else but water. I’ve lost seven pounds in four days. I’m getting a little sick of it. I gag if I eat more than six eggs and three or four hot dogs at a time. But throwing up wouldn’t be a bad deal, either. Maybe that’s the secret part of the diet.”

“Great.” I tried not to imagine those items working either way through her intestinal system. “Please don’t touch the wheel, OK?”

“You haven’t asked about Caroline,” she said accusatorily.

I sucked in a breath and pictured myself soaking in a hot bath in exactly one hour, protected by a house full of laser beams.

“It’s terrible,” I agreed. “I can barely think about it, much less talk about it.”

“The club’s gettin’ itchy. Some people are saying it was the midget man at the front gate, but I bet it was that tramp of a maid. She left town. After all Caroline has done for her. She’s right at the top of the suspect pool if you ask me. Or Jenny. Caroline’s had the goods on her since sixth grade. Jenny is not a role model for the Republican Party. But Jenny’d have to rent some muscle to get Caroline out of that window. Maybe the five volunteer firemen in town she’s screwed.”

“Maria’s gone?” I was getting better at pinpointing which of Letty’s rambling sentences to pay attention to.

“Yep, I heard from one of my friends who borrows her on Wednesdays that she and her family cleaned out their little Boon Hill shanty and took off. Suspicious, huh? Caroline’s house is neat as a pin, but Lord only knows what Maria took with her. I tried to get in to do an inventory but a cop your husband has parked at the door wouldn’t let me past the crime tape.” So how does she know of its tidy condition? I mentally high-fived Maria’s escape. One less needy, angry person with hidden motives for me to deal with.

“Toll-tag lane!” Letty’s voice sang out as her hand slung the wheel again, swerving us into the far right lane.

The driver behind us laid on his horn. My heart thumped, out of control. Not good for Baby, not good for Baby.

“See, Harry’s got this electronic doo-dah on his visor. We don’t have to pay. Look.”

I nodded without looking and breathed in deep from my toes. The air was suddenly infused with the smell of pineapple. Letty was digging a finger into a small pot designed in the shape of a coconut and animatedly smearing on lip gloss. This did not slow her down from talking in the slightest. “They won’t release her body until after the autopsy. She was naked. Did you know that? Somebody carved her up like a turkey. It makes me scared to go out and scared to stay in. Ever since she went missing, I’ve had my son Reggie’s baseball bat at the door and this gun in my purse at all times.”

She smacked her lips together and pulled out a pearl-handled revolver that looked like a kid’s toy gun just as we hit the highway. Suddenly the passenger-side window was wide open, bringing in a rush of traffic noise and damp, polluted wind. I hardly had time to wonder what the hell was happening when Letty took direct aim at a 70-mile-an-hour speed limit sign closing in on us. I heard a light pop.

“Right in the middle of the zero, going 65,” she said with satisfaction, drawing the gun back in. “The sign says 70. You can speed up a little. I certainly haven’t lost my touch since Daddy trained me on that little.22. If you don’t believe me, turn the car around and see the dent for yourself. Like a bullet through the heart.”

“No, that’s OK. I believe you. Impressive. That’s good, you’re putting the gun away.”

It calmed my nerves to say that out loud, while inside I raged at myself for putting my unborn baby in the car with this lunatic. I’d consider myself safer with a killer who cut up people like they were Thanksgiving dinner than with this 250-pound, unpredictable housewife/former beauty queen on a boiled egg and nitrates diet. Unless they were one and the same person.

I trained my eyes on the taillights in front of me.

Only twenty more miles. Tub. Bubbles. Laser beams.

“Did I scare you, honey?” Letty asked. “You look kind of green. Pull over up here at the Braum’s. Now that the rain’s stopped pissin’, I can take the wheel. Maybe we could drive through for a scoop of peanut butter pretzel. It’s amazing what can make you feel better. Four or five of those Little Debbie cakes always do the trick. I store up on the heart-shaped vanilla Valentine ones. I think they taste better than the Christmas trees or the Easter ones even though they are supposed to be exactly the same thing, just cut in different shapes. I don’t think it would hurt too much if I ate a few of those tonight. I bet all this grief is burning extra calories.”

My hands clenched the wheel tighter. “I’m fine, Letty. No problem driving.” And no way in hell am I letting you take the wheel.

Letty contemplated my rigid profile while I frantically punched radio buttons to break the tension or whatever it was now lodged between us. Maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe this was a perfectly normal one-on-one atmosphere with Letty Dunn.

“How about a little music to relax us?” I asked. “Or NPR?”

Letty slapped my hand away.

“Honey, let me do that. I only listen to country.” For the next fifteen minutes, Letty ignored me and sang along squeakily about how her give-a-damn was busted and how tequila makes her clothes fall off and how she’d happily pack a lunch and stuff Earl in the trunk ’cause Earl had to die. She nearly busted my eardrums with the chorus, “I’d like to check you for ticks.”

My give-a-damn was temporarily busted, too. Country music was making sense. Just screw and drink and shoot if necessary. It was a life philosophy that the very poor and the very rich had in common.

“Sorry,” she said, during a commercial. “I’m musical. Singing was my pageant talent. Now people can mostly hear me at First Baptist. You should come the next time I do ‘He Touched Me.’ I’ve saved a few souls for Jesus with that one. They stream down the aisles. The preacher likes to keep me in his pocket for revival time.”

“Uh-huh.” I turned onto the exit ramp for Clairmont.

Three more minutes and I’d be off this roller coaster. I probably wasn’t going to die today at the hands of Letty Dunn.

I braked the Escalade sharply at my front curb, and exhaled.

“Thank you.” Two soft words, intended for a higher power than Letty.

“You owe me one.” Letty unbuckled her seatbelt.

“Yes, I certainly do.” I cleared my throat. “Letty, will you please do me a favor and not mention this to Mike? You know, about picking me up? The car stalling at the airport? I don’t want him to worry about any of it. With the Caroline stuff going on.”

Letty narrowed her eyes at me. This Phi Beta Kappa pageant queen was nobody’s fool.

“Honey, I won’t tell Mike if you don’t tell Harry. He thinks I’m at Pilates. Like I’m going to do that liberal shit.” She grinned. “Now you owe me two.”

When she lurched over to embrace me, I had a fuzzy thought that she might be about to stick a knife in my ribs.

The next morning, wrapped in a robe, wet hair in a towel turban, my mind briefly, pleasantly repressing everything, I found the letter in the stack of yesterday’s mail on the side table by the door. Mike must have dropped it there.

Stamped, no return address, careful print lettering in blue ink, every sentence on a single line, like a free-verse poem.

Dear Ms. Emily:

I am taking your husband’s advice.

We are leaving town to stay safe.

Those women are bitches.

The man you heard that day is helping me.

He turned out not so bad.

I read Ms. Caroline’s diaries from when she was little.

I do not hate her anymore.

I understand.

My niece is writing this.

I did not find my file.

If you do, please burn it.

God forgive me for my sins.

Dios bendiga a su nino,

Maria

Dios bendiga a su nino.

I plugged the words into my iPhone app translator.

God bless your little boy.

Who was Maria’s man? And what did she understand about Caroline after reading those diaries? Did they point to her killer? Was Maria hinting that I should tell Mike to forget the files and read the diaries?

Caroline’s killer had cut her up, buried her in the backyard, and topped off her grave with a sarcastic makeshift cross like a decoration on a Halloween cupcake. For the last hour, I’d been trying to forget, to reacquaint myself with routine things: the cantankerous hot-cold shower, a cup of loose-leaf Fruta Bomba tea, the daisy wallpaper that now seemed comforting enough to leave stuck to the kitchen walls until the end of time.

But the carefully constructed dam I’d built in my head was bursting, flooding my head with horrible images. I considered Caroline’s last unspeakable hours aboveground, really considered them, for the first time. Her lovely, fine-boned face twisted in pain. Her honeyed voice begging for mercy as the knife slid deeper into her like she was a stick of butter. I thought about how much I’d complicated things by digging into my past. If it was simple, like Mike said. If her killer was my stalker. If my past had nothing to do with all of this. The baby rolled over restlessly.

The other piece of paper I held in my hand was a note from Mike, left on his pillow, asking me to meet him for lunch. He signed it, Love, Mike XXX. Always three X’s for some reason, no more, no less, no O’s to water it down.

A versatile letter, the X.

Kisses.

Multiplication. The Roman numeral ten. The twenty-fourth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. The unknown African tribe Malcolm X descended from. The signature of an illiterate human being.

Christ.

At whatever ungodly hour Mike arrived home last night, I was knocked out in a dark, dreamless sleep. I briefly remembered warm lips brushing my cheek, his hand tracing over my belly.

By some miracle of God, a Clairmont towing company named Hooker Services Inc. dropped the Volvo at a local service center long before Mike slipped into bed. Joe Ray Hooker was also a lay preacher at Sunset First Baptist. He asked for $219.23 and took my credit card over the phone. I told him to tip himself another $50 but to please not tell anyone where he picked up my car. He told me that was between “you and the Lord.”

I pulled off the towel, shook loose my hair, and picked up my purse from the couch. The cell phone was in the front left pocket.

It was 10:30 a.m. here, and in Lawrence, Kansas. A perfectly respectable time to call. Cereal had been eaten, coffee had kicked in. If Brad wasn’t lying, Renata Tadynski was expecting me. The first ring sent me to voicemail.

“Hi. It’s Miss T. If you’re a parent calling about a student, please remember that middle-schoolers are certifiably crazy, that grades don’t really count until high school, and that Colin Powell was a C student in college. Then let me know when and where I can reach you and a brief message about why you’re calling. Everyone else just leave a name and number.”

Breezy. Confident. Funny. She was a teacher. Not at all like the frightened girl rubbing the varnish off her rosary beads.

“Hello.” Then I babbled. “This is an old acquaintance of yours from Windsor. Emily Page. Well, I used to be Emily Waters-but then, I’m not sure you even knew my last name. Or remember my first. I think we both experienced something… terrible.”

Now, why, why did I say that? I readjusted, trying to sound more professional. “Brad Hellenberger gave me your number. I need to speak with you. Please call me at this number as soon as possible.”

I clicked off without saying goodbye and sank into the couch. Belmont hopped onto what was left of my lap and stretched out comfortably, purring like an idling Harley, doing his part to hatch our egg. Love was a bit much to ask of him, but he was making more of an effort. Once a day, I’d smash his obnoxiously cute furry face up to mine, and say, “Please love me, Belmont.” He would suffer through it. This morning, he lapped milk and I sipped coffee. We weighed together. I stood on the scale while he hung from my arms like a lazy dead thing, then stood on it without him. I subtracted from my large number to determine his large number. We needed to rethink the wet cat food and the red Doritos.

“Belmont, I think I’m going crazy.” I whispered it and scratched him behind one ear, wondering whether the cat could hear the baby’s heartbeat and Baby could feel the vibration of Belmont’s purring, if they enjoyed some private connection I couldn’t share.

The phone rang, shrill and loud, shattering the peace, and I banged my shins on the coffee table.

“Shit,” I said aloud, rubbing my legs. “Get it together, Emily. Stop cussing.”

The phone rang again, and again, as grating to me as a crying baby who didn’t share my DNA. Maybe like one who did.

I walked slowly toward the kitchen, praying that someone sane would be on the other end. That seemed a lot to ask.

Four rings. Five rings. Six rings. Seven rings.

I was in the kitchen now, staring at the machine.

PRIVATE CALLER.

My hand rested on the receiver.

Please let it be Aunt Tilda in Minnesota, complaining that her retirement center’s cafeteria had switched from cream cheese to cream cheese spread and that she sure as heck wasn’t paying $3,000 a month for cream cheese spread, now, was she?

Please, let it be her.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he said.

Not a voice synthesized by a computer device, so easy to do in the comfort of your own home these days. Apparently, he wasn’t worried about me recognizing it.

I didn’t.

He cleared his throat.

It sounded like he had a cold. Or that he smoked a lot.

He clicked off.

He said hello.

My mind was light, like it was flying off into the field of daisies on the wall.

But it whispered one more thing.

X marks the spot.

I imagined brute hands holding a child’s treasure map.

A red line that ran straight to the X that was me, and my baby.