Chapter 3

 

 

 

Mom arrived a few minutes after the cops. They were out back with CJ when she came rushing into the house, panicked over the police cars with flashing lights parked outside her home.

“Joey! Oh my God, baby, is everything all right? Where’s CJ?”

She hugged me so hard I had to pull away to talk. “He’s okay, Mom. He’s just out back talking to the police.”

“What happened?”

“CJ found a dead girl in the wash.”

Mom pulled away to look at me in shock. “What…?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty weird.”

“Did you see it, too?”

I nodded, and Mom pulled me into her again, and it felt good, warm, safe.

“Oh, my poor baby.”

“It was awful, Mom. There was blood and she was…she was…” I broke off. If I said anything else I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to cry while there were cops around my house.

Mom got me settled down on the couch and then went out back in search of CJ. I knew she was worried about him, but I also knew he was going to catch a little hell for letting me see the body.

I almost told Mom not to go back there, not because it hadn’t been CJ’s fault that I’d seen the corpse—I was always happy to let CJ take a little heat—but because when Mom had hugged me I could smell alcohol under her Doublemint gum.

My mom wasn’t exactly an alcoholic, but she did like her afternoon cocktails with “the ladies.”  A lot of the moms on my street were members of the San Diablo Women’s Club, which met every weekday afternoon, either at their own clubhouse (yes, they had their own clubhouse), or—if it was Thursday—at the bowling alley. Their meetings were supposedly in part about fundraising—feeding starving children in Africa or some such thing—but what they were really about was a bunch of frustrated, bored, middle-aged housewives getting together to get sloshed.

If you’re under 40, you may not realize how different things were back then. The women’s movement was still nascent, and most women were expected to just have kids and stay at home keeping things clean and organized for their hardworking husbands. A few cocktails everyday didn’t mean someone had a drinking problem; it meant they were social. My mother was good at being social.

Which is not to say she was bad at being anything else. I actually thought she was a pretty great mom, and so did my friends. She talked out problems with us, she was fair when she had to discipline us, she was proud of my little accomplishments (like when I’d won an essay competition for fifth graders), and at 40 she was still attractive, while some of the other moms were getting a haggard, used-up look (due in part to cigarette smoking, which was still chic).

My dad was the mystery—literally. I knew he had something to do with rockets, but I wasn’t really sure what. He wasn’t a cruel or uncaring man, but he was always kind of distant, as if his mind was already up there with the stars. Sometimes after he’d been gone at Edwards for a few weeks, he’d come home and bring me amazing stuff—little models of space capsules or signed astronaut photos. I wish I still had all that; it’d probably be worth a small fortune now. I think I gave some of it away to friends at school, but I have no idea what happened to the rest.

The week of the dead girl, Dad wasn’t at Edwards, but wherever he was working (some aerospace company—there were a lot around here), he was pulling nonstop late nights. I heard Mom on the phone to him, telling him what had happened, but halfheartedly ending the conversation with, “No, we’re okay. I can handle it.” She looked a little lost when she hung up.

An hour later, she and CJ and I sat down together to watch the local news. There was a mention of the dead girl found in the wash. Her name was Mary Ann Wilson, and she was a year ahead of CJ at San Diablo High. Mom asked CJ if he knew her; he said he thought maybe he’d seen her around, but he didn’t know her beyond that.

I just thought about how Mary Ann Wilson had been somebody’s daughter and probably somebody’s sister and somebody’s best friend, and she certainly didn’t deserve what had happened to her. Nobody did.

The news report ended by noting that police were “still investigating,” which I knew meant they had no suspects. Whoever had done this to Mary Ann was still loose.

There was a killer in our neighborhood.