Andy hefted a heavy box of old sneakers out of the back of the Reliant. Fat drops of rain smacked the cardboard. Steam came off the asphalt. The sky had opened after days of punishing heat, so now in addition to the punishing heat she had to deal with getting wet. She sprinted back and forth between the hatch and the open storage unit, head cowed every time a bolt of lightning slipped between the afternoon clouds.
She had taken a page from her mother and rented two different storage units in two different facilities in two different states to hide the gazillion dollars of cash inside the Reliant. Actually, Andy had done Laura one better. Instead of just piling the money on the floor of the unit like she was Skyler in Breaking Bad, she had cleaned out the back room of a Salvation Army store in Little Rock, then hidden the stacks of cash underneath old clothes, camping gear and a bunch of broken toys.
That way, anyone watching would think Andy was doing what most Americans did and paying to store a bunch of crap they didn’t want instead of donating it to people who could actually use it.
Andy ran back to the Reliant and grabbed another box. Rain splashed inside her brand-new sneakers. Her new socks took on the consistency of quicksand. Andy had stopped at another Walmart after leaving the first storage facility on the Arkansas side of Texarkana. She was finally wearing clothes that were not from the 1980s. She’d bought a messenger bag and a $350 laptop. She had sunglasses, underwear that didn’t sag around her ass, and, weirdly, a sense of purpose.
I want you to live your life, Laura had said back at the diner. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own. Andy was certainly on her own now. But what had changed? She couldn’t quite articulate even to herself why she felt so different. She just knew that she was sick of floating between disaster points like an amoeba inside a petri dish. Was it the realization that her mother was a spectacular liar? Was it the feeling of shame for being such a gullible believer? Was it the fact that a hired gun had followed Andy all the way to Alabama, and instead of listening to her gut and taking off, she had tried to hook up with him?
Her face burned with shame as she slid another box out of the back of the Reliant.
Andy had stayed in Muscle Shoals long enough to watch Mike Knepper’s truck drive past the motel twice in the space of two hours. She had waited through the third hour and into the fourth to make certain that he wasn’t coming back, then she’d packed up the Reliant and hit the road again.
She had been shaky from the outset, loaded with caffeine from McDonald’s coffee, still terrified to pull over to go to the restroom because, at that point, she still had the cash hidden inside of the car. The drive to Little Rock, Arkansas, had taken five hours, but every single one of them had weighed on her soul.
Why had Laura lied to her? Who was she so afraid of? Why had she told Andy to go to Idaho?
More importantly, why was Andy still blindly following her mother’s orders?
Andy’s inability to answer any of these questions had not been helped by lack of sleep. She had stopped in Little Rock because it was a town she had heard of, then she had stopped at the first hotel with an underground parking deck because she figured she should hide the Reliant in case Mike was somehow following her.
Andy had backed the station wagon into a space so that any would-be thieves would have trouble accessing the hatch. Then she had gotten back into the car and pulled forward so that she could take the sleeping bag and the beach tote out of the trunk. Then she had backed into the space again, then she had checked into the hotel, where she had slept for almost eighteen hours straight.
The last time she had slept that long, Gordon had taken her to the doctor because he was afraid she had narcolepsy. Andy thought of the Arkansas sleep as therapeutic. She was not gripping a steering wheel. She was not screaming or sobbing into the empty car. She was not checking Laura’s cell phone every five minutes. She was not fretting about all the money that tethered her to the Reliant. She was not worrying that Mike had followed her because she had actually crawled under the car and checked for any GPS tracking devices.
Mike.
With his stupid K in his last name and his stupid grasshopper on his truck and his stupid kissing her in the parking lot like some kind of psychopath because he was clearly there to follow Andy, or torture her, or do something horrible, and instead he had seduced her.
Worse, she had let him.
Andy grabbed the last box from the back of the car and approximated a walk of shame into the unit. She dropped the box onto the floor. She sat down on a wooden stool with a wobbly third leg. She rubbed her face. Her cheeks were on fire.
Idiot, she silently admonished herself. He saw right through you.
The painful truth was, there was not much of a story to tell about Andy’s sex life. She would always trot out the affair with her college professor as a way to sound sophisticated, but she left out the part where they’d had sex only three and a half times. And that the guy was a pothead. And mostly impotent. And that they usually ended up sitting on his couch while he got high and Andy watched Golden Girls reruns.
Still, he was better than her high school boyfriend. They had met in drama club, which should have been a giant freaking clue. But they were best friends. And they had both decided that their first times should be with each other.
Afterward, Andy had been underwhelmed, but lied to make him feel better. He had been just as underwhelmed, but failed to extend her the same courtesy.
You get too wet, he had told her, shuddering dramatically, and even though he admitted he was probably gay in the next sentence, Andy had carried that debilitating criticism with her for the ensuing decade and a half.
Too wet. She mulled the phrase in her mind as she stared at the wall of rain outside the storage unit. There were so many things she would say to that jackass now if he would just accept her friend request on Facebook.
Which brought her to her New York boyfriend. Andy had thought that he was so gentle and kind and considerate and then Andy had been in the bathroom at a friend’s apartment when she’d overheard him talking to his buddies.
She’s like the ballerina in a jewelry box, he had confided. The second you bend her over, the music stops.
Andy shook her head like a dog. She ran back to the car, got the light blue Samsonite suitcase, and dragged it into the unit. With the door closed, she changed into dry clothes. There was nothing she could do about her sneakers but at least she had socks that weren’t peeling at her already sore feet. By the time she rolled the door up, the rain had tapered off, which was the first good luck she’d had in days.
Andy used one of her Walmart padlocks on the latch. Instead of a key, she had chosen a combination lock that used letters rather than numbers. The Texarkana code was FUCKR because she was feeling particularly hostile when she programmed it. For the Hook ’Em & Store outside of Austin, Texas, she’d gone with the more obvious KUNDE, as in—
I could talk to Paula Kunde.
I hear she’s in Seattle.
Austin. But good try.
Andy had decided back in Little Rock that she was not going to amoeba her way to Idaho like Laura had told her to. If she could not get answers from her mother, then maybe she could get them from Professor Paula Kunde.
She reached up to close the hatch on the wagon. The sleeping bag and beach tote were still loaded up with cash, but she figured she might as well keep them in the car. She should probably put the little cooler and the box of Slim Jims in the storage unit, but Andy was antsy to get back on the road.
The Reliant’s engine made a whirly Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang sound when she pulled away. Instead of heading toward the interstate, she took the next right into McDonald’s. She used the drive-thru to order a large coffee and get the Wi-Fi password.
Andy chose a parking space close to the building. She dumped the coffee out the window because she was pretty sure her heart would explode if she drank any more caffeine. She got her new laptop out of the messenger bag and logged onto the network.
She stared at the flashing cursor on the search bar.
As usual, she had a moment of indecision about whether or not to create a fake Gmail account and send something to Gordon. Andy had composed all kinds of drafts in her mind, pretending to be a Habitat for Humanity coordinator or a fellow Phi Beta Sigma, contriving some kind of coded message that let her father know that she was okay.
Just asking if you saw that great Subway coupon offering two-for-one?
Saw a story about Knob Creek bourbon I thought you might enjoy!
As usual, Andy decided against it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot she trusted about her mother right now, but even the slightest chance of putting Gordon in harm’s way was too much of a risk.
She typed in the web address for the Belle Isle Review.
The photo of Laura and Gordon at the Christmas party was still on the front page.
Andy studied her mother’s face, wondering how the familiar woman smiling at the camera could be the same woman who’d deceived her only daughter for so many years. Then she zoomed in closer, because Andy had never given the bump in her mother’s nose a second thought. Had it been broken at some point and healed crookedly?
The Polaroids from her mother’s storage unit told Andy that the explanation was possible.
Would she ever know the truth?
Andy scrolled down the page. The article about the body that had washed up under the Yamacraw Bridge had not changed, either. Still no identity on the man in the hoodie. No report of his stolen vehicle. Which meant that Laura had not only kept a battalion of police officers out of her house, she had somehow managed to drag an almost two hundred pound man to her Honda, then dump him in the river twenty miles away.
With one arm strapped to her chest and barely a set of legs to walk on.
Her mother was a criminal.
That was the only explanation that made sense. Andy had been thinking of Laura as passive and reactionary when all of the evidence pointed to her being logical and devious. The almost one million bucks in cash had not come from helping stroke patients work on their diction. The fake IDs were scary enough, but Andy had walked that back a step and realized that Laura not only had a fake ID, she had a contact—a forger—who could make documents for her. Every time Laura had crossed into Canada to renew the license or the car tag, she had broken federal law. Andy doubted the IRS knew about the cash, which broke all kinds of other federal laws. Laura wasn’t afraid of the police. She knew that she could refuse an interrogation. She had a preternatural coolness around law enforcement. That didn’t come from Gordon, which meant that Laura had learned it on her own.
Which meant that Laura Oliver was not a good guy.
Andy closed the laptop and returned it to the messenger bag. There wasn’t enough memory on the machine to start listing all the things that her mother needed to explain. At this point, how Laura had disposed of Hoodie’s dead body wasn’t even in the top three.
Rain tapped at the windshield. Dark clouds had rolled in. Andy backed out of the space and followed the signs toward UT-AUSTIN. The sprawling campus took up forty acres of prime real estate. There was a medical school and hospital, a law school, all kinds of liberal arts programs and, despite not having its own football team, countless Texas Longhorns flags and bumper stickers.
According to the class schedule on the school’s website, Dr. Kunde had taught a morning class called Feminist Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault followed by an hour set aside for student advisory. Andy checked the time on the radio. Even assuming Paula’s sessions had run long or she’d stopped for lunch, or maybe met a colleague for another meeting, she was probably home by now.
Andy had tried to do more research on the woman’s background, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot about Paula Kunde on the internet. The UT-Austin site listed tons of academic papers and conferences, but nothing about her personal life. ProfRatings.com gave her only one half of a star, but when Andy dug into the student reviews, she saw they were mostly whining about bad grades that Dr. Kunde refused to change or offering long, adverb-riddled diatribes about how Dr. Kunde was a harsh bitch, which was basically the hallmark of her generation’s contribution to higher education.
The only easy part of the investigoogling was finding the professor’s home address. Austin’s tax records were online. All Andy had to do was enter Paula Kunde’s name and not only was she able to see that the property taxes had been paid consistently for the last ten years, she was able to click onto Google Street View and see for herself the low-slung one-story house in a section of the city called Travis Heights.
Andy checked her map again as she turned down Paula’s street. She had studied the street on her laptop, like she was some kind of burglar casing the joint, but the images had been taken in the dead of winter when all the shrubs and trees lay dormant—nothing like the lush, overflowing gardens she passed now. The neighborhood had a trendy feel, with hybrids in the driveways and artistic yard ornaments. Despite the rain, people were out jogging. The houses were painted in their own color schemes, regardless of what their neighbors chose. Old trees. Wide streets. Solar panels and one very strange-looking miniature windmill in front of a dilapidated bungalow.
She was so intent on looking at the houses that she drove past Paula’s on the first go. She went down to South Congress and turned back around. This time, she looked at the street numbers on the mailboxes.
Paula Kunde lived in a craftsman-style house, but with a kind of funkiness to it that wasn’t out of touch with the rest of the neighborhood. An older model white Prius was parked in front of the closed garage door. Andy saw dormers stuck into the garage roof. She wondered if Paula Kunde had a daughter in her apartment that she couldn’t get rid of, too. That would be a good opening line, or at least a second or a third, because the onus was going to be on Andy to talk her way into the house.
This could be it.
All the questions she’d had about Laura might be answered by the time Andy got back into the Reliant.
The thought made her knees rubbery when she stepped out of the car. Talking had never been her forte. Amoebas didn’t have mouths. She threw her new messenger bag over her shoulder. She checked the contents to give her brain something else to concentrate on as she walked toward the house. There was some cash in there, the laptop, Laura’s make-up bag with the burner phone, hand lotion, eye drops, lip gloss—just enough to make her feel like a human woman again.
Andy searched the windows of the house. All of the lights were off inside, at least from what she could see. Maybe Paula wasn’t home. Andy had only guessed by the online schedule. The Prius could belong to a tenant. Or Mike could’ve changed out his truck.
The thought sent a shiver down her spine as she navigated the path to the front door. Leggy petunias draped over wooden planters. Dead patches in the otherwise neatly trimmed yard showed where the Texas sun had burned the ground. Andy glanced behind her as she climbed the porch stairs. She felt furtive, but wasn’t sure whether or not the feeling was justified.
I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to scare the shit out of you.
Maybe that’s why Mike had kissed Andy. He knew that threats had not worked against Laura, so he’d figured he would do something awful to Andy and use that for leverage.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Andy had been so caught up in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the front door had opened.
Paula Kunde gripped an aluminum baseball bat between her hands. She was wearing dark sunglasses. A scarf was tied around her neck. “Hello?” She waited, the bat still reared back like she was ready to swing it. “What do you want, girl? Speak up.”
Andy had practiced this in the car, but the sight of the baseball bat had erased her mind. All she could get out was a stuttered, “I-I-I—”
“Jesus Christ.” Paula finally lowered the bat and leaned it inside the doorframe. She looked like her faculty photo, but older and much angrier. “Are you one of my students? Is this about a grade?” Her voice was scratchy as a cactus. “Trigger warning, dumbass, I’m not going to change your grade, so you can dry your snowflake tears all the way back to community college.”
“I—” Andy tried again. “I’m not—”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Paula tugged at the scarf around her neck. It was silk, too hot for the weather, and didn’t match her shorts and sleeveless shirt. She looked down her long nose at Andy. “Unless you’re going to talk, get your ass—”
“No!” Andy panicked when she started to shut the door. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
Andy stared at her. She felt her mouth trying to form words. The scarf. The glasses. The scratchy voice. The bat by the door. “About you getting suffocated. With a bag. A plastic bag.”
Paula’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“Your neck.” Andy touched her own neck. “You’re wearing the scarf to hide the scratch marks and your eyes probably have—”
Paula took off her sunglasses. “What about them?”
Andy tried not to gawk. One of the woman’s eyes was milky white. The other was streaked with red as if she had been crying, or strangled, or both.
Paula asked, “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“To talk—my mother. I mean, do you know her? My mother?”
“Who’s your mother?”
Good question.
Paula watched a car drive past her house. “Are you going to say something or stand there like a little fish with your mouth gaping open?”
Andy felt her resolve start to evaporate. She had to think of something. She couldn’t give up now. Suddenly, she remembered a game they used to play in drama, an improv exercise called Yes, And . . . You had to accept the other person’s statement and build on it in order to keep the conversation going.
She said, “Yes, and I’m confused because I’ve recently found out some things about my mother that I don’t understand.”
“I’m not going to be part of your bildungsroman. Now cheese it or I’ll call the police.”
“Yes.” Andy almost screamed. “I mean, yes, call the police. And then they’ll come.”
“That’s kind of the point of calling the police.”
“Yes,” Andy repeated. She could see where the game really required two people. “And they’ll ask lots of questions. Questions you don’t want to answer. Like about why your eye has petechiae.”
Paula looked over Andy’s shoulder again. “Is that your car in my driveway, the one that looks like a box of maxi pads?”
“Yes, and it’s a Reliant.”
“Take off your shoes if you’re going to come inside. And stop that ‘Yes, And’ bullshit, Jazz Hands. This isn’t drama club.”
Paula left her at the door.
Andy felt weirdly terrified and excited that she had managed to get this far.
This was it. She was going to find out about her mother.
She dropped the messenger bag on the floor. She rested her hand on the hall table. A glass bowl of change clicked against the marble top. She slipped off her sneakers and left them in front of the aluminum baseball bat. Her wet socks went inside the shoes. She was so nervous that she was sweating. She pulled at the front of her shirt as she stepped down into Paula’s sunken living room.
The woman had a stark sense of design. There was nothing craftsman inside the house except some paneling on the walls. Everything had been painted white. The furniture was white. The rugs were white. The doors were white. The tiles were white.
Andy followed the sound of a chopping knife down the back hall. She tried the swinging door, pushing it just enough to poke her head in. She found herself looking in the kitchen, surrounded by still more white: countertops, cabinets, tiles, even light fixtures. The only color came from Paula Kunde and the muted television on the wall.
“Come in already.” Paula waved her in with a long chef’s knife. “I need to get my vegetables in before the water boils off.”
Andy pushed open the door all the way. She walked into the room. She smelled broth cooking. Steam rose off a large pot on the stove.
Paula sliced broccoli into florets. “Do you know who did it?”
“Did . . .” Andy realized she meant Hoodie. She shook her head, which was only partially lying. Hoodie had been sent by somebody. Somebody who was clearly known to Laura. Somebody who might be known to Paula Kunde.
“He had weird eyes, like . . .” Paula’s voice trailed off. “That’s all I could tell the pigs. They wanted to set me up with a sketch artist, but what’s the point?”
“I could—” Andy’s ego cut her off. She had been about to offer to draw Hoodie, but she hadn’t drawn anything, even a doodle, since her first year in New York.
Paula snorted. “Good Lord, child. If I had a dollar bill every time you left a sentence hanging, I sure as shit wouldn’t be living in Texas.”
“I was just—” Andy tried to think of a lie, but then she wondered if Hoodie had really come here first. Maybe Andy had misunderstood the exchange in Laura’s office. Maybe Mike had been sent to Austin and Hoodie had been sent to Belle Isle.
She told Paula, “If you’ve got some paper, maybe I could do a sketch for you?”
“Over there.” She used her elbow to indicate a small desk area at the end of the counter.
Andy opened the drawer. She was expecting to find the usual junk—spare keys, a flashlight, stray coins, too many pens—but there were only two items, a sharpened pencil and a pad of paper.
“So, art’s your thing?” Paula asked. “You get that from someone in your family?”
“I—” Andy didn’t have to see the look on Paula’s face to know that she’d done it again.
Instead, she flipped open the notebook, which was filled with blank pages. Andy didn’t give herself time to freak out about what she was about to do, to question her talents or to talk herself out of having the hubris to believe she still had any skills left in her hands. Instead, she knocked the sharp point off the pencil and sketched out what she remembered of Hoodie’s face.
“Yep.” Paula was nodding before she’d finished. “That looks like the bastard. Especially the eyes. You can tell a lot about somebody from their eyes.”
Andy found herself looking into Paula’s blank left eye.
Paula asked, “How do you know what he looks like?”
Andy didn’t answer the question. She turned to a fresh page. She drew another man, this one with a square jaw and an Alabama baseball cap. “What about this guy? Have you ever seen him around here?”
Paula studied the image. “Nope. Was he with the other guy?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” She felt her head shaking. “I don’t know. About anything, actually.”
“I’m getting that.”
Andy had to buy herself some time to think. She returned the pad and pencil to the drawer. This whole conversation was going sideways. Andy wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t know she was being played. She’d come here for answers, not more questions.
Paula said, “You look like her.”
Andy felt a bolt of lightning shoot from head to toe.
You-look-like-her-you-look-like-her-you-look-like-your-mother.
Slowly, Andy turned around.
“The eyes, mostly.” Paula used the point of a large chef’s knife to indicate her eyes. “The shape of your face, like a heart.”
Andy felt frozen in place. She kept playing back Paula’s words in her head because her heart was pounding so loudly that she could barely hear.
The eyes . . . The shape of your face . . .
Paula said, “She was never as timid as you. Must get that from your father?”
Andy didn’t know because she didn’t know anything except that she had to lean against the counter and lock her knees so she didn’t fall down.
Paula resumed chopping. “What do you know about her?”
“That . . .” Andy was having trouble speaking again. Her stomach had filled with bees. “That she’s been my mother for thirty-one years.”
Paula nodded. “That’s some interesting math.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed.”
The sound of the knife thwapping the chopping board resonated inside of Andy’s head. She had to stop reacting. She needed to ask her questions. She’d made a whole list of them in her head on the seven-hour drive and now—
“Could you—”
“Dollar bill, kid. Could I what?”
Andy felt dizzy. Her body was experiencing the odd numbness of days before. Her arms and legs wanted to float up toward the ceiling, her brain had disconnected from her mouth. She couldn’t fall back into old patterns. Not now. Not when she was so close.
“Can—” Andy tried a third time, “How do you know her? My mother?”
“I’m not a snitch.”
Snitch?
Paula had looked up from her chopping. Her expression was unreadable. “I’m not trying to be a bitch. Though, admittedly, being a bitch is kind of my thing.” She diced together a bundle of celery and carrots. The pieces were all identical in size. The knife moved so fast that it looked still. “I learned how to cook in the prison kitchen. We had to be fast.”
Prison?
“I always wanted to learn.” Paula scooped the vegetables into her hands and walked over to the stove. She dropped everything into a stew pot as she told Andy, “It took over a decade for me to earn the privilege. They only let the older gals handle the knives.”
Over a decade?
Paula asked, “I gather you didn’t see that when you googled me.”
Andy realized her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She was too astonished to process all of these revelations.
Snitch. Prison. Over a decade.
Andy had been telling herself for days that Laura was a criminal. Hearing the theory confirmed was like a punch to her gut.
“I pay to keep that out of the top searches. It’s not cheap, but—” She shrugged, her eyes on Andy again. “You did google me, right? Found my address through the property tax records. Saw my course schedule, read my shitty student reviews?” She was smiling. She seemed to like the effect she was having. “Then, you looked at my CV, and you asked yourself, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, West Connecticut State. Which one of those doesn’t belong? Right?”
Andy could only nod.
Paula started chopping up a potato. “There’s a women’s federal corrections facility near West Conn. Danbury—you probably know it from that TV show. They used to let you do a higher ed program. Not so much anymore. Martha Stewart was a guest, but that was after my two dimes.”
Two dimes?
Paula glanced up at Andy again. “People at the school know. It’s not a secret. But I don’t like to talk about it, either. My revolutionary days are over. Hell, at my age, pretty much most of my life is over.”
Andy looked down at her hands. The fingers felt like cat whiskers. What awful thing did a person have to do to be sentenced to a federal prison for twenty years? Should Laura have been in prison for the same amount of time, only she had stolen a bunch of money, run away, created a new life, while Paula Kunde was counting the days until she was old enough to work in the prison kitchen?
“I should—” Andy’s throat was so tight she could barely draw air. She needed to think about this, but she couldn’t do that in this stuffy kitchen under this woman’s watchful eye. “Leave, I mean. I should—”
“Calm down, Bambi. I didn’t meet your mother in prison, if that’s what you’re freaking out about.” She started on another potato. “Of course, who knows what you’re thinking, because you’re not really asking me any questions.”
Andy swallowed the cotton in her throat. She tried to remember her questions. “How—how do you know her?”
“What’s her name again?”
Andy didn’t understand the rules of this cruel game. “Laura Oliver. Mitchell, I mean. She got married, and now—”
“I know how marriage works.” Paula sliced open a bell pepper. She used the sharp tip of the blade to pick out the seeds. “Ever hear of QuellCorp?”
Andy shook her head, but she answered, “The pharmaceutical company?”
“What’s your life like?”
“My li—”
“Nice schools? Fancy car? Great job? Cute boyfriend who’s gonna do a YouTube video when he proposes to you?”
Andy finally picked up on the hard edge to the woman’s tone. She wasn’t being matter-of-fact anymore. The smile on her face was a sneer.
“Uh—” Andy started to edge toward the door. “I really should—”
“Is she a good mother?”
“Yes.” The answer came easy when Andy didn’t think about it.
“Chaperoned school dances, joined the PTA, took pictures of you at the prom?”
Andy nodded to all of this, because it was true.
“I saw her murdering that kid on the news.” Paula turned her back on Andy as she washed her hands at the sink. “Though they’re saying she’s cleared now. She was trying to save him. Please don’t move.”
Andy stood perfectly still. “I wasn’t—”
“I’m not saying ‘Please don’t move’ to you, kid. ‘Please’ is a patriarchal construct designed to make women apologize for their vaginas.” She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. “I was talking about what your mother said before she murdered that boy. It’s all over the news.”
Andy looked at the muted television on the wall. The diner video was showing again. Laura was holding up her hands in that strange way, four fingers raised on her left, one on her right, to show Jonah Helsinger how many bullets he had left. The closed captioning scrolled, but Andy was incapable of processing the information.
“The experts have weighed in,” Paula said. “They claim to know what your mother said to Helsinger—Please don’t move, as in Please don’t move or the inside of your throat will splat onto the floor.”
Andy put her hand to her own neck. Her pulse tapped furiously against her fingers. She should be relieved that her mother was in the clear, but every bone in her body was telling her to leave this house. No one knew she was here. Paula could gut her like a pig and no one would be the wiser.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Paula leaned her elbows on the counter. She pinned Andy with her one good eye. “Your sweet little ol’ mother kills a kid in cold blood, but walks because she thought to say Please don’t move instead of Hasta la vista. Lucky Laura Oliver.” Paula seemed to roll the phrase around on her tongue. “Did you see the look on her face when she did it? Gal didn’t look bothered to me. Looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, right? And that she was a-okay with it. Just like always.”
Andy was frozen again, but not from fear. She wanted to hear what Paula had to say.
“Cool as a cucumber. Never cries over spilled milk. Trouble rolls off her like water off a duck’s back. That’s what we used to say about her. I mean, those of us who said anything. You know Laura Oliver, but you don’t know her. There’s only the surface. Still waters don’t run deep. Have you noticed?”
Andy wanted to shake her head, but she was paralyzed.
“I hate to say it kid, but your mother is full of the worst type of bullshit. That dumb bitch has always been an actress playing the role of her life. Haven’t you noticed?”
Andy finally managed to shake her head, but she was thinking—
Mom Mode. Healing Dr. Oliver Mode. Gordon’s Wife Mode.
“Stay here.” Paula left the room.
Andy could not have followed if she’d wanted to. She felt like her bare feet were glued to the tiled floor. Nothing this scary stranger had said about Laura was new information, but Paula had framed it in such a way that Andy was beginning to understand that the different facets of her mother weren’t pieces of a whole; they were camouflage.
You have no idea who I am. You never have and you never will.
“Are you still there?” Paula called from the other side of the house.
Andy rubbed her face. She had to forget what Paula had said for now and get the hell out of here. The woman was still dangerous. She was clearly working some kind of angle. Andy should never have come here.
She opened the desk drawer. She ripped the drawings of Hoodie and Mike out of the pad, shoved them into her back pocket, then pushed open the kitchen door.
She was met by Paula Kunde pointing a shotgun at her chest.
“Jesus Christ!” Andy fell back against the swinging door.
“Hold up your hands, you dimwit.”
Andy’s hands went up.
“Are you wired?”
“What?”
“Bugged. Mic’d.” Paula patted the front of Andy’s shirt first, then her pockets, down her legs and back up. “Did she send you here to trap me?”
“What?”
“Come on.” Paula pressed the muzzle into Andy’s sternum. “Speak, you little monkey. Who sent you?”
“N-n-body.”
“Nobody.” Paula snorted. “Tell your mother your stupid deer in the headlights act almost got me. But if I ever see you again, I’ll pull the trigger on this thing until it’s empty. And then I’ll reload and come after her.”
Andy almost lost control of her bladder. Every part of her body was shaking. She kept her hands up, her eyes on Paula, and walked backward down the hallway. She stumbled on the stair down into the sunken living room.
Paula rested the shotgun on her shoulder. She glared at Andy for another few seconds, then walked back into the kitchen.
Andy choked back bile as she turned to run. She sprinted past the couch, up the single stair to the foyer, and stumbled again on the tile floor. Pain shot into her knee, but she caught herself on the side table. Change spilled out of the glass bowl and tapped against the floor. Every nerve in her body was trapped inside the teeth of a bear trap. She could barely wedge her foot into her shoe. Then she realized the fucking socks were wadded up inside. She checked over her shoulder as she jammed the socks into her messenger bag and shoved her feet into the sneakers. Her hand was so sweaty she almost couldn’t turn the knob to open the front door.
Fuck.
Mike was standing on the front porch.
He grinned at Andy the same way he’d grinned at her when they were outside the bar in Muscle Shoals.
He said, “What a strange coinci—”
Andy grabbed the baseball bat.
“Whoa-whoa-whoa!” Mike’s hands shot into the air as she cocked the bat over her shoulder. “Come on, beautiful. Let’s talk this—”
“You shut the fuck up, you fucking psycho.” Andy gripped the bat so tight that her fingers were cramping. “How did you find me?”
“Well, that’s a funny story.”
Andy jerked the bat higher.
“Wait!” he said, his voice raking up. “Hit me here”—he pointed down at his side—“you can fracture a rib, easy. I’ll probably drop like a flaming sack of shit. Or punch it into the center of my chest. There’s no such thing as the solar plexus but—”
Andy swung the bat, but not hard, because she wasn’t trying to hit him.
Mike easily caught the end of the bat with his hand. He had to step back to do it. His legs were about a shoulder-width apart. Or a foot’s width, which Andy soon found out when she kicked him in the nuts as hard as she could.
He dropped to the ground like a flaming sack of shit.
“Fuh—” He coughed, then coughed again. He was squeezing his hands between his legs, rolling on the front porch. Foam came out of his mouth, the same as Hoodie, but this time was different because he wasn’t going to die, he was just going to suffer.
“Well done.”
Andy jumped.
Paula Kunde was standing behind her. The shotgun was still resting against her shoulder. She said, “That’s the guy from the second drawing, right?”
Andy’s fear of Paula was overridden by her rage at Mike. She was sick of people treating her like a crash-test dummy. She patted his pockets. She found his wallet, his stupid rabbit’s foot keychain. He put up absolutely no resistance. He was too busy clutching his balls.
“Wait,” Paula said. “Your mother didn’t send you here, did she?”
Andy shoved the wallet and keys into her messenger bag. She stepped over Mike’s writhing body.
“I said wait!”
Andy stopped. She turned around and gave Paula the most hateful look she could muster.
“You’ll need this.” Paula dug around to the bottom of the change bowl and found a folded dollar bill. She handed it to Andy. “Clara Bellamy. Illinois.”
“What?”
Paula slammed the door so hard that the house shook.
Who the hell was Clara Bellamy?
Why was Andy listening to a fucking lunatic?
She crammed the dollar bill into her pocket as she walked down the steps. Mike was still huffing like a broken muffler. Andy did not want to feel guilty for hurting him, but she felt guilty. She felt guilty as she got into the Reliant. She felt guilty as she pulled away from the house. She felt guilty as she turned onto the next street. She felt guilty right up until she saw Mike’s white truck parked around the corner.
Motherfucker.
He had changed the magnetic sign on the side of the door.
LAWN CARE BY GEORGE
Andy jerked the Reliant to a stop in front of the truck. She popped the hatch. She found the box of Slim Jims and ripped it open. Nothing but Slim Jims. She opened the little cooler, something she hadn’t done since she’d found it back at Laura’s storage unit.
Idiot.
There was a tracker taped to the underside of the cooler lid. Small, jet black, about the size of an old iPod. The red light was blinking, sending back the coordinates of her location to a satellite somewhere in space. Mike must’ve put it there while Andy was passed out in the Muscle Shoals motel.
She chucked the cooler lid across the street like a Frisbee. She reached into the hatch and pulled out the sleeping bag and beach tote. She threw both into the front of Mike’s truck. Then she grabbed two weedeaters and a set of trimmers from the back and dropped them onto the sidewalk. The magnetic signs easily peeled off the doors. She slapped them onto the hood of the Reliant. Andy thought about leaving him the key, but fuck that. All the money was sitting in storage units. He could drive around in the Maxi-Pad box for a while.
She got into Mike’s truck. Her messenger bag went onto the seat beside her. The steering wheel had a weird fake leather wrap. A pair of dice hung from the rearview mirror. Andy jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life. Dave Matthews warbled through the speakers.
Andy pulled away from the curb. Her brain summoned up a map as she drove toward the university. She figured she had about one thousand miles ahead of her, which was around twenty hours of driving, or two full days if she broke it up the right way. Dallas first, then straight up to Oklahoma, then Missouri, then Illinois, where she hoped like hell she could find a person or thing named Clara Bellamy.