“You’re really bringing that up?” Amanda asked.
“It seems relevant. Doesn’t it?”
The year before, while Amanda had still been working her grant-writing job, one of the guys from the IT department started showing a great deal of interest in her. He manufactured excuses to come by her office and tinker with her computer or printer. He happened to bump into her during the lunch hour at nearby restaurants and coffee shops. He invited her out for happy hour.
“What was his name?” I asked. “Steve?”
“What’s your point, Ryan? Some guy hit on me at work. So what? Do you know what it’s like to be a woman in this society? When I was eight months pregnant and walking into the grocery store in sweatpants and a maternity top, two different guys whistled at me. That’s what it’s like for women to navigate a world of men. At least Steve never whistled at me. He was polite. And when I gave him the cold shoulder, he backed off. End of story.”
“Just like Jennifer,” I said. “I ignored her, and she went away.”
“But I told you about Steve.”
“And I wasn’t eight and a half months pregnant when he asked you to coffee.”
Amanda cocked her head. “That was the last time you heard from this Jennifer? When I was as big as a house?”
She had me there. And I couldn’t deny it. Even though I didn’t know how she knew.
“Somehow you know she wrote to me again?” I asked.
“Yeah. And you didn’t tell me about that either. And now all of this.” She waved her hand in the air, a gesture that seemed to be intended to encapsulate Jennifer’s death, my all-nighter, my skipping work, and anything else odd that had transpired in the last twelve hours.
“She wrote to me once more. Just a couple of days ago. And I don’t know what made her do that out of the blue. I hadn’t seen her or talked to her. But I didn’t respond to that message at all. In fact, when I got that message two days ago, I finally unfriended her on Facebook. I didn’t realize we were still friends then. She friended me originally when we were doing the bid for her.” My mind flashed back to the night before, standing over Jennifer’s body and receiving the friend request. Then the other friend request right before Blake had showed up. I was no closer to understanding those requests than I was to understanding anything else. “How did you know about that if you’re not snooping around on my computer or phone?”
Amanda sighed. She looked over at Henry, who bobbed his head between the two of us. “I looked last night. I hadn’t looked since the first messages came. Since that night I was pregnant. I feel gross doing that. But last night . . . you were gone. It was weird. It was weird when I called the basketball game. It was weird the way you left. And I’m sitting here, feeling a little isolated, to be honest. You’re basically working two jobs, and I’m working none. It feels like your life is going by like a speeding bullet. The job, the bar, the sports. And I’m here lactating and changing diapers. So I snooped. I couldn’t help it.”
“You know I would never . . . I wasn’t.”
“I know that. And I’m as disappointed in myself as anything else. That’s not who I am. But then . . . what the hell is going on? You’ve been acting awfully strange, last night and this morning. And you’re glued to the news about that woman being killed. And she was after you. What am I supposed to make of that?”
“It’s not like that,” I said, shaking my head.
And I was ready to come clean, to tell her everything. Wouldn’t someone crack apart under the pressure of being two-faced all the time?
“Then what is it like?” she asked.
Somebody rang the doorbell. At the front of the house.
“Who the hell is that?” Amanda asked. “Who would come to the door this early in the morning?”
“I don’t know. I’ll get rid of them.”
As I stood up, I noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from Henry’s direction. Either the milk had given him gas, or he needed to be changed. Badly.
“Did you—”
“I smell it,” Amanda said. “I’ll take him.”
“I’ll get rid of whoever it is,” I said. “And then we can finish talking.”
Amanda pulled Henry out of his high chair and took a whiff of his bottom. Every feature on her face curled. “Ugh. Funny how you get to go to the door, and I get the pile of shit.”
“We can switch if you want. Maybe it will be Blake. Would you like to talk to him?”
She shook her head. “He’s worse than the smelly diaper.”
“What happened to turning the page and moving on?”
“Oh, right. Okay . . . I’ll be kind.”
While she went upstairs, I went out to the front of the house. Before I opened the door, I peeked through the front window. I saw a woman in business attire—blue suit, white shirt—on the stoop. Middle-aged. Serious looking. As if she felt my eyes on her, she turned and looked at me, locking on to my eyes through the glass.
She waved. Not a friendly wave that said Hello. It was a wave that said Hurry up and open this door.
So I did.
“Ryan Francis?” she asked.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Marita Rountree, with the Rossingville Police Department. I’d like to ask you a few questions about an ongoing investigation.”