Eva
Hillary’s black SUV came roaring up the driveway not long after the police. What a difference in their approaches. The police, stealthy, crawling. Hillary, gunning it, breaking laws even on her own street. She left her car door ajar, alert beeping, as she strode up the walk and grabbed the search warrant from the shorter policeman. Her green eyes turned murky and dark when she was angry. I wonder if she knew that. That she could never play poker with her husband, because she had a pronounced tell.
I turned off her car with that silly button all the cars have now, closed her car door gently, and tried to stay out of the way. The police walked inside, not taking off their coats, not stopping to remove their muddy shoes the way Hillary preferred. Oh, that was a portent, wasn’t it? That they would ruin things before they began.
Hannah coaxed her sister away from the door, trying to calm her down. She took her by the hand, but Hillary yanked hers away roughly. By the time they reached me, she was practically foaming at the mouth.
“You want some kind of medal for giving me a heads-up? For being cozy with them?” Hillary spat.
“What? I’m not cozy with anyone!” Hannah said.
“And you,” she said, addressing me. “Were you…lurking here, too? Did you tell them something?”
I thought suddenly of the boots in the garage. Of the lack of boots in the garage. Would Hillary have seen those, too? Did she know even more? What was she worried about me finding?
“What is wrong with you?” Hannah asked.
“What is wrong with me, Hannah? Well, how about you tell me,” she whispered roughly, “why, when I called the best fucking criminal lawyer in town, he told me he couldn’t represent Ben because he had a conflict of interest in the case?”
“Hillary, I—”
“Did your shit ex-husband manage to kill a kid while he was out hunting deer?”
“No!”
“Well, what then?”
Hannah was taller and heavier than her sister, but she looked smaller now, folded up. She was so unaccustomed to being teamed up against her. It was always those two against me, against the world.
“What? What is it then?”
Hannah looked at me, the smallest of glances, but I knew what it meant. She couldn’t bear to say it. It was my signal, the parent bat phone, to step in. Maybe she knew I knew. Maybe she didn’t. But I intercepted it, and I acted to the best of my ability with what I had.
“Hillary,” I said softly, “I believe they’re also investigating Miles.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yes.”
Hillary’s eyes narrowed. She glanced toward the door, put her hands on her hips. She shifted from foot to foot as if testing her balance, preparing, coiling to pounce. She had on dark-green leggings and a black fleece jacket, and she started zipping her zipper up and down an inch or two, back and forth. It looked like a ritual a baseball player might go through before he stepped into the batter’s box. That or she was trying to buy time to figure out what the hell was actually going on. Or maybe, just maybe, for the second or third time in her life, she was nervous.
“So,” she said, turning back, “is that why they’re in my house? Not because of Ben but Miles? They think he hid something somewhere? He’s over here all the time, I mean—”
“No,” Hannah said.
“How do you know?”
“Because they told me.”
“Police don’t tell you anything that’s true, Hannah. They tell you things to…to throw you off. Especially when you’re a suspect, too.”
“Not always,” I said.
Hillary’s look sliced right through me.
“And you? What did you know?”
I held up my hands. She had a lot of nerve, really, when she’d all but asked me to keep her secret about the front door! Really, Hillary, this was beyond the pale. This was what stress could do to you—you couldn’t keep your secrets straight, let alone safe!
She stepped toward us.
“Both of you have been hiding stuff about my nephew being a suspect in a murder of a little girl? When he’s here all the time and plays with my daughter, who is half his size? Huh?”
“Miles wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything.”
“Well, of course you would defend him. You’re his mother.”
“Hillary, this isn’t about Miles! Your husband is a suspect! The two-hundred-pound man who cuddles my son and ruffles his hair! And you didn’t tell me anything!”
“There’s nothing to tell!”
“They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have a reason! And Mom—Mom wasn’t even surprised! Didn’t register a drop of shock. So you two kept something from me, is that it? Ben did something, didn’t he?”
Neither of us had the courage to speak, to tell her what we knew or didn’t know. But if I knew anything, I knew this much. Hannah already had suspicions, too. It showed in her face, in the fierceness of her argument.
I turned to say something to her, something loving, something to help these girls forgive each other. They always did; they just needed a nudge. But the simple words stuck in my throat. Not because I didn’t care or I couldn’t form them.
But because a backhoe was crawling up the street slowly, as if the day wasn’t almost over, as if it had all the time in the world.