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ANDREA WOKE ON TAKA’S couch to the sound of running water. She froze, staring hard in the direction of the maddening gurgle. Taka appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, frowning, head turning to locate the sound. Dread pooled in Andrea’s belly. She gagged when the room spun as she struggled to sit up.
“You okay?” Taka asked in a low voice.
“It’s Billie Mae.”
Taka shook his head, easing over to her. “You’re here. With me, Andrea. At my place.”
“Do you hear that?”
He sat down on the edge of the couch, Andrea scooting back to make room for him. “The running water? Yeah.”
“That’s what I heard the other night and again on the phone.”
“It’s just a pipe that broke or something.” He frowned at her and laid his hand on her forehead. “You look really pale.”
She felt pale. Washed out and nauseous.
“It’s Billie Mae.”
Taka’s lips flattened and twisted. “I’m going to take a look around.”
******
ANDREA CLOSED HER EYES. She looked as white as a damn ghost. Taka didn’t know if her non-response meant agreement or resignation, but he knew damn well the noise wasn’t being caused by Billie Mae.
Barefoot in the hallway outside his apartment, Taka paused to listen. You’d think they were at sea, the water was so loud. But it was definitely coming from further to his left. He padded several steps that way. The hallway smelled vaguely of smoke. A door opened as he passed it and he startled, spinning around and dropping into a defensive crouch.
Mr. Talbot held his hands up. “Easy there, Taka,” he exclaimed.
Taka straightened, forcing a smile onto his face.
“You looking for the burst pipe?”
“Yes, sir,” Taka said, trying to keep the surprise off his face. Despite his determination to find the source, he found himself relieved that someone else could hear it, that it really wasn’t Billie Mae, somehow loosed from Andrea’s house to his place. He felt again the pressure on his bicep, her forearm under his fingertips, the rigid heat of her against his side as they talked about her concussion with Karie and his doubt about Billie Mae’s existence.
The fall had scared him, the call from the hospital, the vivid, blood-crusted line hidden in her hair, laced with tiny purple stitches. And then when she’d started talking about hearing things in the new rental, had tentatively asked him to look up the name, “Billie Mae Robbins,” his heart broke for her. Her doctor reassured him, told him to make her an appointment for further evaluation. But after he found the case files, after he’d talked to her landlord about who had lived in the house before Andrea, trying to find out how she heard the name, and when she didn’t show any further symptoms... he let it go. So what if her brain had tangled the facts up a bit? He still loved her. No one else, aside from the landlord, had to know.
“Sounds like it’s next door, doesn’t it?” Mr. Talbot said. “But there’s nothing wet in my place, at least not yet.” He stepped out and they walked down to the next door.
It was one thing for Taka to wonder if he had seen Billie Mae at Andrea’s. He heard about her enough, knew most of the lines of the one-sided conversations he heard through the bathroom door or in the kitchen by heart. Andrea had him jumpy and spooked and half-convinced it was real. But this was another thing altogether, Andrea claiming this unknown problem as Billie Mae’s doing even though they were here, at his place.
Taka would’ve preferred to slam his fist through 311’s door. He knocked.
God damn it, he should have known. Made that follow-up doctor’s appointment for her.
No one answered.
Mr. Talbot gave the door three good fist poundings and they waited. Nothing.
“Is this unit even occupied?”
“I think so,” he said, pounding one more time. “There was a lady going in and out the other day with boxes. Suzanne? I think she said she was Suzanne. I was in a hurry.”
“Huh,” Taka said, listening to the sudden silence.
“Do you think that’s good or bad?” Mr. Talbot asked, cocking his head and putting his ear to the door.
Taka shrugged. “I guess that depends on if we have water in our apartments still.”
“Let’s see,” Mr. Talbot said. Taka followed him back into his apartment, loitering just inside the door. The older man reached over the kitchen counter from the entry hall to flip on the faucet. Water spewed out.
“Guess we’re good then,” Taka said with forced cheer. “Have a good night, Mr. Talbot.”
“You too, Taka. Stay outta the papers!”
“I’ll try, sir.” Taka closed the door behind him and took a deep breath. Did that mean Mr. Talbot had seen the article on the shooting in the paper or that he hadn’t? Stupid Zach Taylor, stupid Dewey Sanderson, stupid him for going into law enforcement in the first place.
Closing his own condo door behind him, he leaned back against it, not meeting Andrea’s eyes, although she watched him with a solemn expression from where she sat cross-legged in her blankets on his couch.
“Five doors down. No one answered the door and then it stopped.”
“I heard voices in the hall.”
“Mr. Talbot. He has the apartment next to that one. Said there wasn’t any water seeping through. No wet carpet or wall or anything.”
“It was Billie Mae.”
Taka’s heart dropped. He looked up at her. “It wasn’t, Andrea. It’s just a pipe or something. I’ll report it tomorrow morning if no one answers the door on our way out.”
“It’s Billie Mae. It means something important, Taka.”
“It doesn’t!” he yelled, before he understood the catch in his chest, the pulse of furious energy carrying him forward. He stopped himself two strides from her, lowered his raised hands before he could grab her. He wanted to shake her, make her stop all this. “Look,” he said. He closed his eyes, concentrated on stilling the quiver of his anger. When he opened them again she was standing, dark eyes wide and jaw set, fists clenched at her side. “Talking to Karie tonight made me remember a few things I’d forgotten about along the way.”
She raised her chin.
“This.” He threw both his hands up, palms up, trying to indicate everything that had happened over the last few days. “All this. It’s—I shouldn’t have let it escalate. I shouldn’t have bought into this.”
“My crazy?”
She might as well have sunk a knife into him. The stabbing pain was the same.
“Explain. Explain it then,” she challenged. “Explain the fact that you saw her, that you heard her. Explain the shoes and Mr. Huntley seeing the girl with the snake on our steps.”
He couldn’t. But there must be some explanation other than ghost. And he suspected Huntley could enlighten him on at least the snake and the shoes.
“My steps, my front steps,” she corrected herself when he didn’t say anything.
Did she really think he cared about that slip? At all? All he cared about was her and whether she was okay or not.
“I love you, Andrea,” he said. And god damn. Each word tore itself off his heart. “I love you.”
He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her as she started to cry, unyielding and braced against him.
******
ANDREA WOKE LATER IN the morning all cried out. Her nose was stuffy and her eyes burned. The shower was running. She peeled herself up and rinsed her face with cold water from the kitchen sink and brushed her teeth and re-packed the go-bag she’d taken from her car. Fortunately, since she’d been up half the night, she didn’t need the bathroom at all, so she just let herself out.
Five doors from Taka’s end unit, she noted the condo number and knocked. There was no answer. Outside the day was already bright, the sky a brittle blue with high, flat clouds and the incoming cold front delineated to the south. In the parking lot she said hello to Taka’s elderly neighbor, Miss Betty, and cooed at Miss Betty’s equally old schnauzer.
She opened her car door and then had a thought. She called out, “Miss Betty! You don’t know who’s moved into 311, do you?”
“I think he said his name was Vernef Itch, sweetie. I made him repeat it. Maybe it’s Russian, or something? He seemed real nice.”
Andrea bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “Thank you, Miss Betty!”
On the river road Andrea’s phone sang out Taka’s tone. She didn’t pick it up, just let it ring through, tears pricking her eyes. A minute later the voicemail pinged.
She’d shaken herself into a semblance of research mode by the time she turned into the Waltham’s parking lot. She had to focus on her clients this morning before turning her day over to Billie Mae.
******
AT NOON, ANDREA CHECKED her phone and found six messages from Taka and one from Etta Robbins’s sister, Mrs. Hooper. Her heart beat harder as she listened to Mrs. Hooper state that Billie Mae’s brother wanted to talk to her. She could call back after seven in the evening, when he got home from baseball practice.
She pulled out the yellow legal pad on which she’d made notes from her interviews with Mrs. Robbins and Mrs. Hooper. Reading over them made her wonder again about the missing wicket. Phone still in hand, she speed-dialed her landlord.
“Meyers,” Kenny answered. He was older, a full-time landlord who did all his own maintenance and renovation.
“Hey, it’s Andrea. Listen, thank you for being patient with me the last few months. Did you see that two kids were pulled from Lake Vickers last week?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice softening. “Saw it in the paper.”
“I found a kid’s shoe in the yard, a blue Keds. The police confirmed it belonged to the second kid, Adam Ward.”
Kenny made a distressed sound, low in his throat. “Geesh, Andrea, really? That wasn’t in the paper. No one’s called me.”
That was something Andrea hadn’t considered, either calling him before now or not saying anything about the shoe. “Yes. I’m sorry. You should probably be prepared to talk to CPD if they call you,” she said, while typing on her keyboard for the latest news updates, seeing reports on Adam’s death right away. She skimmed the first article, relieved to see physical details. She sat back to concentrate on the conversation. “The thing is, Billie Mae’s been really, really active. You know me, Kenny, I’m an archivist. I’m addicted to research. I’ve decided to document her case from the ground up. Maybe I can prove her mom didn’t kill her.”
“Andrea,” Kenny said, the word full of warning.
“It’s a matter of public record, Kenny. Billie Mae’s still here for a reason. She’s haunting your house. Etta Robbins’ sister-in-law and her lawyer never believed her confession. I just need to know, Kenny. Please? You were there. I need answers.”
“I wasn’t there, not when it counted.”
Andrea frowned. “Of course not, it’s not like you lived there. Wait, were you there?” If he had been, Detective Ford didn’t know, or didn’t talk to him, anyway. Or the interview wasn’t in the file.
“No, not until afterward. Bob Huntley called me. I got there just after Billie Mae had been taken out.”
“Was Mrs. Robbins still there?”
“She was. She was in shock. Acted like she didn’t even know who I was, kept asking for her husband.”
Something in his tone made her inner ear prick forward.
“Did you know her well?”
Silence crackled down the line. Faint music played in the background, a car radio maybe. Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising.” “I knew her like I know you,” Kenny sighed. “I spent a bit of time there with her and the kids when she needed help. She made me an occasional home-cooked meal.”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Kenny. I didn’t know.”
“No way you could.” He cleared his throat.
“We, uh, we found Billie Mae’s missing shoe. Planting blueberries near the carport. We also found a dog burial.”
“Shit,” Kenny breathed.
“Is that the Robbins’ dog?”
“Yeah. I buried it. Poured the carport concrete a couple of years later.”
“Do you know what happened to it? Mrs. Robbins doesn’t.”
“Dog was dead, Andrea. Just laying there in the kitchen. The cops noticed, when they took Etta’s boy, Steve, out of the house. I wrapped it in a blanket off the dryer and put it outside, but it took me a couple of days to bury him. That was...yeah... not so good by then.”
“That blanket was Billie Mae’s. There was a stuffed rabbit, too. Mrs. Robbins said Billie Mae had one.”
“Fortune, the sleepy rabbit. That’s what we all called it. Etta was in custody, already confessed to... you know. Her sister-in-law made all the funeral arrangements. She didn’t come back to the house, didn’t ask for anything of Billie Mae’s, so I put the rabbit in with the dog, figured Billie Mae’d have liked that. She loved that dog. He went with those kids everywhere.”
“I’m sorry, Kenny, to ask, but was there blood on the dog?”
“No, nothing like that. Older dog. Just bad timing, that’s all.”
To tell or not? For all Andrea knew, the dog’s skull fracture happened after he died. She glanced at the questions she had scrawled in the margins of her notes. The word “wicket” jumped out at her. She’d underlined it three times.
“Do you know if the Robbins owned a croquet set? “
“Etta said something about a wicket the one time I gone over to Lakin. I cleaned the house out. I don’t know what she was talking about. I don’t think she did it. None of us did. Not me, not her sister-in-law, but Etta, she said she did it and the cops didn’t look any further.”
“One cop did, Kenny. I have his notes and I have Billie Mae.”
“Okay.” He took a quick, shallow breath. “Okay.”
“Did you know Mrs. Robbins carried Billie Mae in from outside?”
“No.” His dismay was evident in his voice. “How do you figure that?”
“She told me.”
“Billie Mae?”
“No, Mrs. Robbins, when I spoke with her.”
“Can you really believe anything she says now?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wasn’t—Etta wasn’t wet. There wasn’t blood on her clothes, just on her hands, on her face. The kitchen floor had streaks of mud, but that was from Billie Mae tracking through. And the dog. That’s why Etta was upset with her. Why would she tell you that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s been years since anyone last asked her?”
“I don’t believe her, Andrea.”
Maybe she could talk to the ME’s office. Maybe someone could explain the autopsy report to her, tell her if it was even a possibility Mrs. Robbins could have physically strangled Billie Mae without her shirt getting wet or bloody. “Do you remember seeing Billie Mae’s missing shoe when you buried the dog? Maybe it got caught up in the blanket somehow?”
“I can’t.”
He sounded broken. She didn’t even know why she had asked him that. Her stomach turned over on itself. She tapped her pen on her notes, flipped the page. A name caught her eye.
“I have to go, Andrea.”
“Wait! Do you remember ever hearing the name Jason Cobb from Mrs. Robbins or in the neighborhood?”
“No, don’t remember a Cobb. I don’t know everyone on the street, though.”
“Thank you. I’m so sorry for bringing all this back up.”
He muttered, “See you later.”
She hit end and covered her face with her hands. The hollow emptiness in her chest felt terrible. Maybe she wasn’t built for this. She had probably not only ruined Kenny’s day, but his week. Maybe his month. She knew Taka could have talked to Kenny and stayed objective, but right now Andrea had no idea how. No idea how he did his job at all.
Her hands were shaking when she lowered them to scroll through her phone again. She found Taka’s voicemails and listened to them. The first three were “call me.” The fourth was a threat of sorts. The fifth was a real threat to call the front desk and make sure she was there at work and safe. The sixth said that yes, since she was there at work and safe, he’d wait for her to call him.