I found her in Mirtha Grazeley’s admissions bathroom on her knees in one of the stalls getting sick.
“I hate throwing up. I’d rather die. Kill me, would you? Kill me. I beg you.”
For fifteen sickened minutes, I held her hair.
“Better,” she said, wiping her eyes and mouth.
After she rinsed her face in the sink, she collapsed facedown on one of the couches in Mirtha’s Greeting Room.
“We should go home,” I said.
“Give me a second.”
Sitting there in the quiet, the lights off, the green floodlights from the M. Bella Chancery lawn spilling through the windows, it felt as if we were at the bottom of the ocean. The thin shadows from the bare trees outside stretched across the wooden floor like sea grass and sargassum weed, the grit dappling the windows, a little bit of zooplankton, the floor lamp in the corner, a glass-rope sponge. Jade sighed and turned over onto her back, her hair stuck to her cheeks.
“We should get out of here,” I said.
“You like him,” she said.
“Who?”
“Coupon.”
“Like I like noise pollution.”
“You’re going to run off with him.”
“Right.”
“You’re going to have tons of sex with him and have his gift certificates. Seriously. I know these things. I’m psychic.”
“Shut up.”
“Hurl?”
“What.”
“I hate the others.”
“Who?”
“Leulah. Charles. I hate them. I like you. You’re the only one who’s decent. The others are all sick. And I hate Hannah most of all. Ugh.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No. I pretend I don’t because it’s easy and fun to go over and have her cook and watch her act like St. Francis of friggin’ Assisi. Sure. Blah blah. But deep down I know she’s sick and repulsive.”
I waited for a moment, enough time for, say, a spinner shark to swim by seeking a school of sardines, for that peculiar word she used, repulsive, to disband, dissolve slightly, like ink from a cuttlefish.
“Actually,” I said, “it’s a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they’re familiar with. It’s the Derwid-Loeverhastel Principle. It’s discussed in Beneath the Associated—”
“Fuck David Hasselhoff.” She raised herself up on an elbow, narrowing her eyes. “I don’t like the woman.” She frowned. “You like her?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Why?”
“She’s a good person.”
Jade huffed. “Not that good. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but she killed that guy.”
“Who?”
Obviously, I knew she was talking about Smoke Harvey, but I chose to feign ignorance, volunteer only the barest words as a question, much in the reserved manner of Ranulph (pronounced “RALF”) Curry, the intemperate chief inspector of Roger Pope Lavelle’s three standoffish detective masterpieces composed in a decade-long fit of inspiration, from 1901 to 1911, works ultimately overshadowed by the sunnier tomes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a pretext artfully assumed by Curry while interviewing all eyewitnesses, bystanders, informants and suspects, and, more often than not, leading to the discovery of a certain sharp detail that ripped open the case. “Tut, tut, Horace,” says Curry in the 1017-page Conceit of a Unicorn (1901). “It is a capital error in the art of detection to insert one’s own voice into the ungoverned words of another. The more one speaks, the less one hears.”
“That Smoke person,” Jade went on. “Dubs. Knocked him off. I’m positive.”
“How do you know?”
“I was watching when they told her about him, remember?” She paused, staring at me, her eyes snatching, then holding on to what little light there was in the room. “You weren’t around, but I saw the performance. Completely overdone. She’s really the worst actress on the planet. If she was an actress she wouldn’t even make the B movies. She’d be in the D or the E movies. I don’t even think she’s good enough for porn. Of course, she thinks that she’s going on Inside the Actor’s Studio like next friggin’ week. She went over the top, shouting like a crazy person when she saw the guy dead. For a second I thought she was screaming, ‘The dingo ate my baby.’”
She rolled off the sofa and walked toward the kitchenette behind Mirtha’s desk. She opened the small refrigerator door and, crouching down, was illuminated by a rectangle of gold light so her dress became transparent and you could see, in this X-ray, how thin she was, how her shoulders were no wider than a coat hanger.
“There’s that eggnog in here,” she said. “Want some?”
“No.”
“There’s tons. Three full containers.”
“Mirtha probably measures how much is left at the end of every day. We don’t want to get in trouble.”
Jade stood up with the pitcher, banging the door closed with her foot.
“It’s Mirtha Grazeley, who everyone knows is the Mad freakin’ Hatter. Who’ll listen to her if she croaks there’s something missing? Besides. Most people just aren’t that organized. Isn’t that what you said the other soir, ‘no method to the madness’ and such?” She opened one of the cabinets and took out two glasses. “All I’m saying is that I happen to think Hannah got rid of the man like I happen to know my mother’s the Loch Ness Monster. Or Bigfoot. I haven’t decided what monster she is but I’m positive she’s one of the big ones.”
“What was her motive, then?” I asked. (“In my opinion,” said Curry, “it is also a very useful achievement to make certain the speaker remains on course, does not skirt around what he knows, prattling on about latchkeys and boilers.”)
“Monsters don’t need a motive. They’re monsters so they just—”
“I mean Hannah.”
She looked at me, exasperated. “You don’t get it, do you? No one needs a motive in this day and age. People look for motives and such because they’re afraid of like, total chaos. But motives are out like clogs. The truth is, some people just like to execute, like some people have a thing for ski bums with moles all over like God spilled peppercorns or paralegals with full-sleeve tattoos.”
“Then why him?”
“Who?”
“Smoke Harvey,” I said. “Why him and not me, for example?”
She made a sarcastic Ha sound as she handed me the glass and sat down. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it but Hannah’s completely obsessed with you. It’s like you’re her freaking lost child. I mean, we knew about you before you even freaking showed up at this place. It was so freaking weird.”
My heart stopped. “What are you talking about?”
Jade sniffed. “Well, you met her at that shoe store, correct?”
I nodded.
“Well, like, immediately after that, or maybe even the day of, she was talking on and on about this Blue person who was so amazing and wonderful and we’d have to become friends with you or like, die. Like you were the fucking Second Coming. She still acts that way. When you’re not around she’s always, ‘Where’s Blue, anyone seen Blue?’ Blue, Blue, Blue, for Christ sake. But it’s not just you. She has all kinds of abnormal fixations. Like the animals and the furniture. All those men in Cottonwood. Sex for her’s like shaking hands. And Charles. She’s completely fucked him up and doesn’t even realize it. She thinks she’s doing all of us a big favor by being friends with us, educating us or whatever—”