Twenty-Two

Lola tried to keep her questions to a minimum, fearful of slowing the gush of words.

Still. “What time was it?” Barely more than a whisper.

“Four thirty? Five?” Melena looked to her husband for confirmation. He continued his silent communion with the tabletop, nodding down at it.

Lola could see it. At that hour, it would have been cold, maybe even a touch of frost—she’d check the date against the weather charts later—the mornings a reminder that winter lurked. Camellia was far enough from the city center that its streetlights would have been no match for the sky’s black depths, the stars outshining the artificial light below in a final blaze before being vanquished by the lurking sun. The hush would have been absolute, as only a doors-locked, shades-drawn suburb could be, the well-watered lawns muffling nocturnal prowling—of scavengers like coyotes and raccoons, who’d learned fast that human-populated places provided far better forage than wilderness—and of the killer.

The church leaders’ car doors would have echoed like shots as they slammed shut behind the contingent arriving at Melena and Bryce’s home, lingering a moment before their purposeful march toward whatever awaited them at the house next door.

Already, Lola wondered at the narrative. Melena, of course, hadn’t been in the bedroom. Hadn’t seen the hockey stick. But Bryce had; he must have understood the implications, must have known that he and Melena and the leaders were possibly leaving the killer behind in their own home, giving him the chance to escape were he so inclined.

She sat on her hands to keep from pounding the table, bit her lip to hold back the question demanding to be shouted.

Melena’s glanced flitted again and again toward Bryce as she spoke. His head bobbed obediently, confirming her recitation.

“We stopped outside the bedroom.” Postponing by seconds the ordeal that awaited. Bryce and Melena waited in the hall until the leaders emerged, faces gleaming pale even in the darkened hallway.

“You should have seen them. Their eyes.”

Lola didn’t care about their eyes. Her teeth gnawed her lip raw. What about their feet? Had they stepped in blood? Tracked it around? Smeared it across other, more damning, footprints? She choked back a yelp as the air around her sparked and crackled, Charlie behind her again, leaning over her shoulder, his presence so vivid that she put up her hand to grasp his for support. Closed her fingers around air.

The men looked toward Tynslee’s room. Conferred briefly, chose one. That man stiffened his back. Walked the length of the hallway. Cracked the door. Saw the sleeping girl within. His shoulders slumped in relief. He turned to Melena, crooked a finger. Women’s work, this.

They all converged on the front step, Melena with an arm around the girl whose voice climbed in panic, tearing great rents in the still night air. “What’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

“I told her that there’d been some sort of accident. That an ambulance would be coming for her mother.”

So, no blood then, at least not out into the hallway. The killer must have been lucky—or very, very careful—to have avoided the arterial spray.

It’s messy, Charlie had always said about murder. Like you wouldn’t believe. It’s a wonder anyone ever gets away with it. On his watch, no one had. Of course, thought Lola, he’d never had to deal with the equivalent of a parade through any of his crime scenes.

“Then what?” Again in a whisper, so soft that Bryce gave no sign of having heard.

“We called the police.”

About damn time.

“We didn’t know how Frank would react. What he might do.”

He’d have heard the church leaders arrive, Lola thought, maybe even have peeked from his bedroom window to see the procession enter the house next door and emerge with Tynslee. Had to know what awaited. Had he feigned sleep? Or greeted them defiantly? Assuming he was the killer. But what if he wasn’t? What was he to make of the scene unfolding in the yard below? And when confronted by police, accused of murder?

“I was too afraid to go into our house, especially with Tynslee. So we waited outside for the police. Someone brought a blanket for Tynslee.”

And again, Lola could see it, the huddle on the sidewalk, Tynslee shaking in cold and shock and bewilderment.

“The police were good enough not to use sirens. But the whole neighborhood saw.”

She could see it, too, the forest of flashing lights outside the house, several cars called as a matter of protocol on something of this magnitude, an ambulance, too, useless though it would be. The cops, more arriving by the moment, their dark uniforms blending with the night, moving in a single mass toward the group on the sidewalk, pulling apart to flow around them, one group into Sariah’s house to begin the grim task of collecting evidence—whatever was left of it—another into Melena’s, emerging with Frank, his hair standing up in sleep-sculpted cowlicks, still in his pajamas. And handcuffs.

Twisting in the officers’ grip toward Tynslee as she screamed and sobbed his name. Bryce stepping in to help Melena hold her back. It took both of them.

“That poor girl. That poor girl.”

Bryce cleared his throat. Looked at his watch.

Melena went from a shell-shocked almost-witness-to-murder to a concerned wife, the transformation so fast and complete as to leave Lola blinking.

“Goodness. I’ve rattled on far too long. Sweetheart, I know it’s just after the funeral, but you need to at least stop by the office. It’s been days. Getting back into a routine will help. Lola can give me a ride home, right?”

Lola nodded. Bryce stood and held out his hand. She touched his fingertips with hers, the Indian way, and then snatched her hand back before he could inflict further damage.

“Pleasure,” he said. Even though it hadn’t been. And he’d said nothing useful. Somehow, sometime, she’d have to get him alone.

Meanwhile, she had Melena to herself.

“The church leaders … ” She made an intuitive leap. “Are they telling you—advising you, I mean—how to handle this? Is that why you haven’t gotten a lawyer for Frank yet?”

Melena nodded. “They’ll find just the right person. In the meantime, we’re to stay away. It’s hard. Especially for Bryce. Fathers and sons, you know.”

Lola didn’t know about men and their sons and now she never would. The conversation kept turning back on her own situation. She had to put a stop to it.

“Is that why you adopted? Because you only had daughters?” Only. For God’s sake.

Melena held her orange juice in both hands and bent her head to sip from it. “It was the right thing to do.”

Then, before Lola could question the concept, Melena added, “And Sariah had just gotten Kwesi.”

There it was again. Gotten. Like something she’d pointed to on a store shelf: I’ll take one of those. And no mention of Galon. As though Sariah had arrived home one afternoon after a shopping trip: Look what I got today, honey.

Judgment tightened Lola’s vocal cords. She cleared her throat and veered into safer territory, trying for small talk, never her strong suit. “I never got to meet you properly, the way I would have at the interview. We’d have had more time to get to know one another. You could have shown me—” What, exactly? “Your beautiful house.” Lola saw it again, the suburban box, maximum space, minimum style but for that riot of flowers surrounding it, in contrast to the severity of the stone cairns next door. “Your flowers. They’re lovely.”

“Oh, that. Bryce does all of that.”

So much for gardening. Lola tried again. “What do you do?”

“Do?”

“Your job.” Lola’s foot in her mouth again, all the way up to her knee. The woman had five children of her own, and then another. And this was Utah. She had just stomped squarely on the steaming heap of mutual disdain between stay-at-home moms and the career variety.

Melena straightened. Lifted her chin. “I’m a mother,” she pronounced, with none of the condescension Lola had expected. “And a wife.”

Motherhood as work, sure. Lola got that. In fact, after she’d had Margaret, she’d started referring to each day at the newspaper as her eight hour—or nine, or ten—vacation. But wife? Lola never thought of her marriage to Charlie as a job. It just was.

She took a guess. “Sariah, too?”

“Of course. Even though she only has”—something shifted in her face, that mental reminder again—“had two kids.”

“Is that why they adopted? Because Tynslee was their only child? Or”—Lola almost choked on the phrase—“also because it was the right thing?”

Melena gave no sign of detecting her aversion to the phrase. “A little of both, probably. She and Galon were so in love. Like a fairy tale. And then they had their golden princess. Tynslee. They just wanted to share their happiness. Bryce and I always said they were the only couple as happy as we were.”

Clang! One a scale of zero to ten, Lola’s bullshit meter hit twelve. In her experience, people who felt the need to proclaim themselves happy rarely were. A point she’d often argued with Charlie, bringing the inevitable retort: “Or sometimes things are exactly as they seem.”

“Are you?” she said now to Melena. “Are you and Bryce happy?”

She held her breath. She’d crossed the line, both of courtesy and journalistic strategy. It did no good to piss off someone so soon into a conversation, especially in circumstances so fraught. Melena might never talk with her again.

But the gaze Melena turned upon her was wide-eyed, guileless. “Of course. Weren’t you?”

Well played. Lola fought an urge to touch her coffee cup to Melena’s juice glass in a kind of acknowledgment.

Melena swallowed the last of her juice. “I should go. Did you see the way everyone was looking at me? They’ll be calling, stopping by. Pretending they care about how I’m holding up. I wonder who will be the first to ask about Frank?”

Dispelling with a few vinegary sentences the initial impression of a personality as beige as her neighborhood. Not the simple housewife she appeared, not at all, Lola thought as she steered the rental car back into Camellia, the streets so familiar by now she barely needed the orders from the Directions Bitch, supplemented by Melena’s far more palatable guidance. Lola wondered what it cost the woman to maintain that docile, whispery facade.

Melena clasped her hand before getting out of the car. “Thank you.”

For what? “Good luck” was the only response she could manage. And, self-servingly, “I hope we’ll talk again.”

“Count on it.”

Lola held her face very still, hoping the relief didn’t show.

Melena turned toward the house. Then back again. “Five months?”

Lola’s breath caught. She managed a nod.

“It hurts that long?”

Lola dragged the words from the bottomless hiding place of truth. “It hurts forever.”