I glare at Detective Shergold. The best defense is a strong offense.
Shergold’s standing behind her car’s bumper, arms crossed, next to Bellows. I ignore him. Her hair’s freshly cut, the bangs a touch too short. The effect’s a bit dominatrix, especially in her long black trench coat.
Dana’s behind me. I march closer to the detectives.
A few feet away I stop and hoist my book bag higher on my shoulder. “Since when do you allow victims’ families to learn their loved one’s been murdered from the news? Why didn’t you tell her?”
“That’s why we’re here,” says Detective Bellows.
“Well you’re too late,” I snap, scowling at Shergold.
Dana stops beside me. She dabs her eyes with a tissue.
“We’re sorry,” says Detective Shergold, speaking to Dana. I doubt this. I bet she planned it. She’s doing everything in her power to crush Dana. That’s her job. “Can we go inside?” asks Detective Shergold.
Dana starts to answer. I cut her off. “What for?”
The last thing I want is the cops poking around now that I know that knife’s AWOL. How the hell did that happen? Did someone take it? I think back to the list Dana and I made of potential blackmailing suspects. Most of them could access Dana’s house. One of them might have grabbed it. But why? Did Owen nab it? He likes knives, using them for his wood carvings.
Detective Shergold reaches into her purse. I hold my breath. Shit. Did she get a search warrant?
She extracts a manila folder. “We have questions about Stan’s injuries,” she says. She’s still watching Dana. Her tone is pleasant. “Would you like to answer them here or down at the station?”
Dana responds before I can. “On the news, they said he’d been stabbed. Is that true?” Her voice is tortured. Despite my ire, I feel some grudging respect. God she’s good at playing the innocent little woman. How often did she pull this on me, growing up?
“Can we please go inside?” repeats Detective Shergold.
Dana nods. “Of course. I’m sorry.” She blinks up at the house. Like she’s been a bad hostess.
“After you,” I say tightly and motion the detectives toward the steps. I take Dana’s arm and give her a pointed look, a reminder to keep her mouth shut.
She’s still crying, which is good. She should be. The fucking murder weapon’s missing! Fresh fury speeds me up the stairs. I release Dana’s arm so she can unlock her giant front door.
We all step into the foyer. There’s a new floral arrangement in somber blues and purples. Nothing too cheery. The dark blue vase looks suitably mournful. It reminds me of the vase we dumped with Stan’s body, the one Dana claimed she’d used to bash him. When all along the knife was missing.
Back then we might still have found it. Anger has quickened my breathing. Why the hell did she lie about that? Stab wounds or blunt force trauma, what’s the difference? Either way, she killed him. Although I might not have helped if I’d known. Compared to grabbing some random vase, using a knife seems premeditated. You don’t stab someone unless you’re trying to kill them.
“The kitchen?” says Dana. She eyes me when she says this. I nod. The kitchen’s fine. Surely the knife would have been found by now in the kitchen. Unless it got washed and shoved in a drawer. Or left in the drying rack. Was the blade distinctive? Might the cops recognize it? The police don’t need a warrant to collect an item if they’re invited in and it’s in plain sight.
In the kitchen doorway, Shergold stops. She’s blocking our way. “We’d like to speak with Mrs. McFarlane alone,” she tells me.
I want to protest, but that might seem suspicious. I don’t want to look too invested.
“No,” says Dana. She mops at her eyes. “Whatever you have to say to me, Jo can hear it. Please.” Her voice wavers. “I just— Right now I need a friend.”
Some of my old admiration for Dana resurfaces. She really is a master of persuasion. Shergold is better off with me than if Dana balks and demands a lawyer.
“Fine,” says Shergold. She enters the kitchen. The rest of us follow.
The cops decline Dana’s offer of drinks. She ignores them and fetches San Pellegrinos from the fridge. I scoop ice into four Finnish mouth-blown glasses. We’re buying time to calm down. We all sit at the table. Thanks to Gloria—where is Gloria?—the glass tabletop’s gleaming.
Detective Shergold opens her manila folder. The top page is a photocopy. It shows two simple line drawings of a man’s body, front and back. Someone’s marked Xs and slashes in various places. I’m horrified and fascinated. It’s Stan’s autopsy diagram. Lines depict slash marks on his hands and arms. Defensive wounds? Or degeneration, after nearly two weeks in the ocean? There’s a cluster of marks on the chest and a big line at the throat. A word’s visible here: decapitation.
I look at Dana. She’s so pale I’m glad she’s sitting down. I look back at the paper. If all those marks are stab wounds, the attack was frenzied. Could she really have done that to Stanley?
Detective Shergold flips the page. The next paper bears a sketch of a knife.
“His throat was slashed,” says Shergold. “Based on the wounds, we believe the blade was between four to six inches. Short and sharp.” Like me, she’s studying Dana. “The tip may be curved.” She taps the diagram. Her fingernails are short and unpainted. “Have you seen anything like this?”
Dana’s sitting beside me. She looks at me, pleading. It’s obvious she doesn’t know what to say. I kick her gently under the table. I will her to give the right answer. It’s not like they don’t know.
Maybe she gets it; all those years of teenage telepathy, covering for each other, knowing when to confess what and how much. I keep my face still.
Dana clears her throat. “That looks like a florist’s knife.”
Shergold smiles, sharklike. “Have any of yours gone missing?”
Dana blinks. Don’t fuck it up, I think at her. I will the word from my head into hers. Yes. Yes. Yes.
“Ah, yes,” says Dana. “Some weeks back I . . . uh . . . misplaced one. But I have others, so it didn’t really . . .” Fresh tears fill her big blue eyes. “It didn’t register.”
I pat her hand as if I’m consoling her. I’m not. I’m telling her she got the job done.
The detectives want to know more. When did she last see it? Where might she have left it? With the slightest of head tilts, I give Dana the sign. Time to plead ignorance.
“I don’t know,” she repeats, apologetic. “I . . . I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
Shergold concedes. She shuts her folder and slips it back into her bag. “The missing knife,” she says. “Do you have any similar ones?”
Dana’s gone too still. I kick her ankle again, just hard enough to rouse her.
“Yes.” She’s nodding like one of those bobble toys that sit on car dashboards.
I hold back my sigh of relief. At least if they do reveal a search warrant, she won’t be caught in that lie. “I have half a dozen,” says Dana.
“May we see them?”
Fresh fear snakes through me. Could one of the remaining knives be the one that killed Stan? Might tests prove that? It’s the most logical explanation for where the knife went: back onto her tool rack or in a drawer. Should she demand a search warrant?
My uncertainty feeds hers. I can see it in the way her eyelids flutter. The silence is stretching too long. That in itself is suspicious. Bellows shifts in his seat. Shergold’s half smile has turned gloating.
Dana pushes back her chair and stands so swiftly I’m startled. “This way. To my studio.”
I push back my own chair much less forcefully. My legs feel weak as I follow the cops down the hall. Does Dana know where that knife went? If she’s still lying to me, I’ll kill her.
She opens the studio’s door and leads them in.
In the doorway, my steps falter. Being back in this room elicits a visceral reaction. The smell. The white lights and bright flowers. The marble, smooth and slippery as ice. And the police, missing nothing. Everything feels treacherous.
I watch Dana lead Detective Shergold to her tool rack.
“We’ll need to take these,” says Detective Shergold, smoothly. She turns to Bellows. “Can you bag them?”
Dana’s face falls. “All of them?” she says. “But they’re my work tools. I special order them from Japan. You can’t buy them here.”
I stay where I am. My ears are roaring. I imagine the prosecutor displaying Dana’s knives to the jury. Some expert explaining that a knife like these made the wounds on Stan’s body. They’re building their case against her. How long until she’s arrested?
Detective Shergold looks my way and smiles. “Are you alright?” she asks, too sweetly, just to tell me I haven’t been forgotten.
I realize how I must look, hanging in the doorway in my tatty, too-tight long dress. Like some weirdo.
“I . . . I’m allergic to certain flowers,” I say.
Shergold nods. Her tone is dead flat. “Oh. Really?”
I fake a sniffle. My God. I’m doing it too: lying for no good reason. In my shrunken dress, I’m sweating. Detective Shergold isn’t just after Dana. She’s a gray wolf, closing in on the pair of us: two stupid Little Red Riding Hoods who should have stuck to the straight and narrow path of the law.