20
A call from Mike’s office mercifully put a stop to our lunch conversation. I could hear the unmistakable chirp of the police records researcher on the other end of the line, a stout, fifty-three-year-old farmer’s wife named Billie Rhine. She often called Mike around midnight. He had told me that her mood for the day depended entirely on whether she had time to drive through for chicken biscuits before she got to work. Mike didn’t care. Even grumpy, she was dogged.
From the chattering I could hear, Billie sounded full of chicken and biscuits. I flipped on the TV in the corner of the kitchen for the first time since we’d moved in, keeping the sound mute. I flipped around the channels, stopping at the sight of a pretty brunette reporter perched in front of the Castlegate subdivision, gesturing animatedly to the seemingly impenetrable wall of stone. The news ticker underneath asked: POSSIBLE SERIAL KILLER?
Not the crew from WFAA. The local Fox News channel was now going at the story, too. Mike hung up the phone, and I slid over a little to hide the screen.
“Something popped,” he said. “You good?”
He was under crushing pressure, I knew. He wanted to insulate me, the pregnant me who’d lost all of our other babies. He scribbled out a check with way too many zeros for the clones, who’d just finished up; grabbed my uneaten half sandwich; and jogged out to his car.
I turned back to the TV. Caroline swallowed up the whole screen now, staring out at me from a flattering photograph of her I’d never seen. She looked like someone’s extra-pretty grandma. Like she wanted to please be found so she could go back to playing Scrabble and making chocolate scones. I clicked her off.
Mike’s exit left me with the cop outside, a fat primer on my new alarm system that I’d never read, a greasy skillet to wash, and blinking little red dots all over the house. I chose to tackle the skillet first and fix a hot cup of decaf before moving myself to the living room recliner. Every speck of fingerprint powder was gone, like it had never been there.
For a half-hour, I flipped the pages of a pulpy paperback thriller that a woman I met while roaming the book section at Walmart recommended, but it turned out to be less interesting and well written than Caroline’s files. My eyelids drooped a two-minute warning. I did love to sleep, so in that respect, pregnancy was a lovely drug. There had been countless nights in my life when I stared at the ceiling, my worries chasing their long cat tails.
I thought about Caroline’s files, just the few that I’d read. I should have lit the match.
I pulled the chair lever, propping up my feet, and stared at the yellow and pink polka dots on the fuzzy socks Mike gave me in the hospital after miscarriage No. 3. Unable to shake the sudden, certain feeling that we were both looking the wrong way.
My cell phone, resting on the arm of the chair, tinkled the cheerful notification of an email. Lucy, I hoped.
I stared at my inbox, scrolling slowly.
Lucinda Wells Beswetherick wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Leticia Abigail Lee Dunn wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Jennifer Foster Cartwright wants to friends with you on Facebook.
Mary Ann Pratt Kimmel wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Twenty-three friend requests from Caroline’s subjects, one after the other, like they were sitting in the same room, deciding.
Like they had voted.
One by one, I killed them all.
The flap on the front porch mailbox clanked, startling me awake. The mail usually arrived closer to 10 a.m., not 5. I hesitantly padded over to the door and cracked it, relieved to see a man in a postal uniform retreating down our walk.
I opened the door another foot. He appeared to be wearing a skunk on his head. Our postman was a semi-reliable night school student named Harold who was fighting off his name with a rhinestone stud in his left nostril and two white stripes that ran through jet-black hair. Harold had introduced himself by dropping his mailbag to help me dump a large bag of compost in the front flower bed.
He was now crossing the yard to make better time, about to hurdle the low iron fence that squared off our small front yard. Another police car crawling down the block paused a few houses down.
“Hey, dude,” Harold called out.
Apparently, the sight of a punk mailman wasn’t cause for alarm, and the two carried on a genial conversation in low volume before Harold plugged his iPod into his ears and strolled off. The cop car curved around the cul-de-sac and slowed to a stop, pulling up even with the cruiser already glued to my curb. The two policemen rolled down their windows and spoke, before the second car moseyed back down the street.
A little lazy cop chatter. I wondered what my neighbors thought of all this action.
My stationary cop waved to me. I waved back.
I turned my attention to the lumpy manila envelope protruding out of the old-fashioned metal mailbox. Apparently, the cop had not thought, as I did, that this package appeared mailbomb size. With one finger, I nudged the envelope over a little to see the return address… and read: 143 East 57th St., New York, New York.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
The concert violinist who occupied the apartment next to us in New York had offered to mail anything that sneaked through despite our change-of-address form. Shutting the door and plopping back in the chair, I slit the envelope open with a screwdriver the clones had left behind. I shook the contents into my lap.
I wasn’t going to catch a break. Right on top, in priority position, was an envelope that wavered in my hands when I picked it up, not because I didn’t know the sender but because I did.
The return address was loud, clear, and official.
The New York State Board of Parole.
I didn’t have to open it to know what it was.
More than a decade ago, Luke Cummings was a twenty-year-old Syracuse University sophomore, almost exactly my age, asleep at the wheel, when he slammed into the back of my parents’ Chevy sedan on the outskirts of the Finger Lakes. He flung their car into the kind of action-movie spiral where only Matt Damon gets to walk out alive.
My flesh-and-blood parents flipped over at least four times, the coroner ruled. For years afterward, I saw my parents’ surprised faces in my dreams. In real life, the impact had startled Luke Cummings awake. He screeched on his brakes only seconds before a minivan plowed into him from behind. A little red-haired girl named Zooey was in that van. She died three days later in the hospital, pulled off life support.
I saw a picture of her once. Well, a picture of her shoe. A white tennis shoe with pink sparkly laces tied in a perky bow. It sat upright in the middle of the highway, all alone. Three hundred feet from Zooey’s body.
My parents were returning to Rochester from a day of nature hiking with friends while Luke sped home from Syracuse University after his first-semester finals. Luke was coming off three beers, a tequila shot, and two all-nighters in the library.
During Luke’s sentencing, I stared at the back of his grandmother’s shaking blue-green cardigan while Zooey’s twelve-year-old sister hiccuped her sobs in the row behind me.
The judge hammered Luke with the maximum for intoxication manslaughter in the first degree. Fifteen years. Luke’s first letter, a ten-page apology, arrived five months after his trial. I didn’t write back. I was angry that he ripped open every wound.
A year later, near the anniversary of the accident, he wrote again, telling me how he’d been promoted to food service for good behavior and that he was finishing his degree in business from behind bars. He didn’t mention the accident.