Old Lydia kept all of my secrets.
New Lydia told my secrets to the world.
I’m standing over his bed. The covers are a rumpled drift, like snow is falling through the ceiling. Bill is facing the other way. His body, rising and falling, slow and steady.
It isn’t like me to do this, I think, as I shed my T-shirt and it falls soundlessly to the floor. I don’t play games. I’m not impulsive. I’m not that girl. I lift up the quilt and slide in. Press my bare skin against the heat of his back. His breathing stills. He waits pregnant seconds before turning over to face me. He’s left a few inches of distance between us.
“Hey,” he says. It’s too dark to read his expression.
This was a mistake, I think. He’s already mentally moved on. He’s reaching out now to push me away.
Instead, his finger travels my cheek, the side without the scar. I’m suddenly aware that my face is wet.
“You OK?” His voice, husky. He’s being chivalrous, offering me a last chance to escape, even as I make a naked present of myself in his bed.
“I’m not that kind of girl.” I lean in. Drift my tongue along his ear.
“Thank God,” he replies, and tugs me to him.
A bird’s distress call slices the silence and jars me awake. It’s a high-pitched plea from a branch by the window. Why is my world frozen? Where did everybody go?
I crawl out of bed, away from the delicious heat of Bill’s body. His breathing, rhythmic.
I shut the connecting door, back on my side of it. I relive the intimacy of what just happened. Things I didn’t do unless I was in love. How can I ever be sure his attraction is to me, and not the shiny glitter of Black-Eyed Susan?
My red North Face jacket drips like blood off the closet doorknob. A fresh white orchid is stuck all alone in a slim vase, even though no one knew I was coming. A young woman in the antique frame on the dresser gazes at me coolly as if I have no place in her room.
She’s just a girl in this picture, about Charlie’s age. A thick, migraine-inducing braid is roped around her head. I imagine her with loosened braids and a little of Charlie’s MAC eye makeup. I pick up the picture and flip it over.
Mary Jane Whitford, born May 6, 1918, died March 16, 1934, when a convict roaming the sugarcane fields stepped in front of her carriage and startled the horses.
A tourist attraction. Like me.
It makes sense that Lydia would come to me here, in this room, embroidered like a doily in the dark fabric of this town. Where I’m reminded by a pretty girl in braids that we don’t get to choose.
I almost died three hours ago on I-45, halfway between Huntsville and Corsicana. What an ironic end that would have been-the lone survivor of the Black-Eyed Susan killer taken out by an eighteen-wheeler packed with baked goods. A truck driver a hundred feet in front of our car had skidded on a patch of ice into a perfect jackknife. If skidding were an Olympic sport, he’d win. All I could think for six seconds, while Bill and I hurled toward a picture of a giant pink confetti-sprinkled donut, was, Is it all going to come down to this?
Instead, it came down to me completely rethinking BMWs. Their drivers act superior for a reason.
Lucas is opening my front door before I can, a good thing because I don’t remember the new security code he insisted on, and a bad thing because Bill is still in the driveway making sure I get inside safely. I turn to wave but Bill is already backing the BMW onto the street. I hope he believed me when I said I wasn’t sleeping with Lucas.
Breakfast at the B&B was a little awkward. Bill sat across from me, at a table formally appointed with fragile crystal and an array of silverware, while Mrs. Munson sat at the head of the table and chattered on about how prisoners carved the intricate detail on the cupboard behind us. It was impossible to resist the work of art placed in front of us by Mrs. Munson’s daughter, a Dutch baby pancake with a strawberry fan on top and a spritz of powdered sugar.
Maybe Bill was upset that he woke up alone in bed. Later, in the car, we each seemed to be waiting for the other to bring up those thirty intimate minutes. It almost seemed like a dream conjured by a house that missed the noise and meaning of its old life-the people who wed on its lawn, gave birth in its beds, lay dead in their coffins in the front parlor. Except I can still feel his handprints on my skin.
After Bill avoided the near-accident, the silence in the car grew even more awkward. As if Bill was exhausted from saving lives.
Because I’m distracted by such boy-girl worries, still wearing death like a coat, still delirious not to be a Dutch baby pancake, it takes a second to register the expression on Lucas’s face.
“Welcome home.” He seems uneasy. He’s pulling the backpack off my shoulder as I walk the few steps into the living room.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Someone leaked your… feeling… that the Black-Eyed Susan killer has planted flowers for you over the years. A few quack experts on TV are chiming in on your mental state. There’s a shadowy picture going around of a woman with a shovel at the old Victorian house where you used to live. It’s supposed to be you. Well, it is you. But it’s hard to tell.”
“When did you find this out?”
“Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’ve been sitting for hours.”
Lucas examines my face carefully. “Charlie texted me. It’s all over Twitter and Instagram.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
He hesitates. “I had to turn off the ringer on the phone. Why do you even have a landline?”
“Is it OK if we don’t talk about this right now? It doesn’t really matter, does it? Terrell’s going to die. It’s impossible to protect Charlie.” I’ve moved over to the kitchen island, where Lucas has stacked the mail. He’s behind me, rubbing my shoulders. Kind. Concerned. But not helping. His fingers are grinding the death that clings to these clothes into my skin.
I try to be casual as I move away. “What’s this?” I’m fingering an opened cardboard box. A new paperback lies next to it on the counter.
“That came in the mail yesterday. Charlie opened the box because she thought it was Catch-22 and wanted to get going on it for an English class. She says she asked you to order it a week ago?”
“I forgot. I didn’t order Catch-22. Or any other books.”
“Your name is on the address label.” He turns the box over so I can see.
“Where’s the receipt?” I’m staring at the book cover. A filmy image of half-spirit, half-girl rising out of a rocky sea. Beautiful Ghost by Rose Mylett.
Rose Mylett. The name stirs something unpleasant at the back of my brain.
Lucas reaches inside the box. “Here’s the receipt. It looks like it was a gift. There’s a message. Hope you enjoy. Nothing else.”
Hope you enjoy. Ordinary words that crawl like three spiders up my back.
“Are you OK?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say dully. “It’s just a book. A gift. I need to get these clothes off.”
“One more thing. Your friend Jo dropped by for a second. You need to give her a call. That geochemist friend of hers is coming to town, the one who’s been working on the Susan bones. She wants you to meet him. Oh, and that tooth from your grandfather’s yard? It’s from a coyote.”
Twenty minutes until Charlie gets home from school. A little longer before Lucas returns from his hunt for Catch-22 and coffee with a “new friend”-Lucas code for “female.”