There was only one way out. We were going to pass the car and sure as shooting, we'd be recognized.
"Hide, y'all," Evella screamed. "Lie flat in the bed!"
We squished ourselves flat against the bedliner of the old truck, huddling in one blue-tinged mass of naked girl flesh. Evella was gonna take the fall. She couldn't drive and hunch down under the windshield. So, she went out like Evella.
"It's Dickie!" she screamed back through the cab window. Dickie was the president of Beta Club, the smart kid club, and manager of the swim team. Towel Boy, they called him.
Evella pushed the accelerator to the floor and sat up straight, blue and naked, her big breasts pushed up against the steering wheel. As she passed Dickie, Evella let out a mighty Indian war whoop and kept on going. Evella really wasn't afraid of nothing or nobody.
We hightailed it back to Evella's, borrowed her clothes and took showers, hoping to clean up before the cops came to arrest us. For surely they were hot on our tails. But the cops didn't come that day. Or the next. It wasn't that our crime went unnoticed. It was more the way little Dickie related it to the police and the press.
"Oh, my gawd! Oh, Lord," he moaned to the reporter who wrote up the big front page story, "Union Grove High School Mauled By Blue Man."
"It was the biggest, meanest-looking man I ever did see!"
"Man!" Evella raved after school on Monday. "I ain't no man!" But of course she couldn't say it out loud.
"We were robbed!" I said. "They think a man did it!"
"But what about our clothes, back at the pool?" asked Lacy, who I believe trembled the rest of her senior year.
The clothes were never mentioned. Not in the paper. Not around the school. Nowhere. However, a few years later, the most peculiar thing did happen. Evella married Dickie. Little shrimpy Dickie and big old Evella. The rest of us always wondered if somehow he'd found out, taken our clothes and decided to cover for us, or realized later that the "man" he'd seen was really Evella. We never knew, but rumors circulated as always. Dickie and Evella live in a blue house, drive blue cars, and mostly wear blue clothing. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with the year the Union Grove Blue Man struck.
If Weathers had gotten to the bottom of that story, what other distorted ideas did he have about me? How would I ever convince him that I could be trusted, believed to tell the truth? How could I convince him that I wasn't a murderer? And how would I ever make him believe that someone was coming after me? And maybe not just me. I felt my stomach seize up and a wave of nausea swept over me. What about Sheila? Was she safe? What if the killer had been after us and only happened on Jimmy?
I had to get to my baby. I had to find some answers before we found ourselves in real danger.
Chapter Twelve
I sat out in my car for a minute and watched Sheila through the glass front of the bagel shop. This was not the Sheila I knew, the headstrong teenager who stomped out of my house and all over my heart a mere eleven months ago. Sheila had evolved into someone else.
The girl I watched had straightened her curly red hair and now wore it slicked back in a ponytail, just like the other girls in the upscale Irving Park shop. She'd toned down her makeup so she'd look "natural" like the others, not like a vampire runaway. I had to admit it was a positive physical improvement, but at what cost to my little rebel's freethinking spirit?
The Bun and Bagel was no redneck, lard-cake bakery. There wasn't a bun in the place that smacked of squishy white bread and Vienna sausages. It was wholesome, a quality I much dislike in my baked goods. Give me a hunk of greasy yellow cornbread with bacon drippings any day of the week.
Sheila saw me coming and seemed to cringe.
"Pretty uptown little shop," I said, stepping up to the counter in front of her.
"Hey, Mama." She smiled weakly. But like every child with something to hide, she didn't meet my eyes. This was made all the easier by her bagel cap. Designed to look like a bagel, it slid down lopsidedly onto her forehead, giving Sheila the appearence of a drunken angel.
"I need to talk to you, honey. Tell your boss you need to take a little break."
Sheila looked frightened. "Now?" she asked. "I can't right now, Mama. I'm working and we're swamped."
I looked around. There was one customer in the store, a woman in a fur coat, being waited on by another girl. I looked back at Sheila, raising my Mama-don't-buy-that eyebrow.
"All right." She sighed. "Mary Catherine, I'm taking a break for a second." She used a chatty little tone I'd never heard before, and pitched her voice an octave lower than usual. It was her version of an upper-crust accent, and it cut me to the quick. What was happening to my baby?
Sheila flung her cap down onto a stool and brushed past me, headed for the door. She walked past the storefront and around to the side of the tiny brick building where the girls inside couldn't see her. She was fumbling in the pocket of her bagel apron, her hand closing around a telltale rectangle.
"When did you start smoking?" I asked.
Sheila looked guilty. "I only smoke every now and then," she said. She looked up at me, and for a second I saw the Sheila I knew. "I know, I know. It's bad for me. It might even kill me one day if I do it until I'm as old as you and Daddy. But I'm only smoking now and then."
I couldn't believe it. Sheila'd always been so health-conscious, A sudden memory of her rushed back. It had been only a few months back, on the porch with Jimmy. She'd been getting onto him for smoking. What had changed her?
"Why are you smoking? Do all your new friends smoke?" That's what it was. Sheila wanted to fit in more than she cared about her health.
"No, Mama." She sighed. "Don't hardly a one of them smoke." She had lapsed back into her deep, country accent.
"Well then?" I stood waiting for an answer, forgetting all about my true agenda.
Sheila just shrugged her shoulders. If none of her fancy friends smoked, then who was she hanging around with who did? The image of Jimmy tossing his cigarette out into my front yard returned. He'd laughed at Sheila's earnest attempt to make him quit.
"That's not why I came to see you," I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tiny garnet and gold ring. "Look what I found."
I watched her face, carefully. Mama used to say the truth was like a doorbell. She'd never elaborate, but I always took it to mean you shouldn't go poking at it and running away. The truth has a way of catching up with a body. I didn't want to see Sheila's face mirror a lie, but that's what happened.
She swallowed, groped for her cigarettes, let go when she remembered that she was facing her mother, and then tried to smile. It was a pathetic performance to a mother. It might've fooled a stranger, but not me.
"I wondered where I'd left that!" she said, reaching out to take it. I folded my fingers over the ring and snatched my hand back. "Hey!" she cried, trying to look puzzled and hurt.
"Not so fast," I said. "How'd you lose it?"
Sheila shrugged her shoulders again. "I don't know! God, Mama, if I knew how I lost it, it wouldn't be lost!"
"Young lady!" I started, then thought better of it. "Let's fish or cut bait here, Sheila. Is this what Keith was looking for in my house?"
"I don't know what you're talking about!" she insisted.
I leaned back against the cold brick of the wall and watched my daughter lie to me. How had we come to such a place? Hadn't I been tucking her in bed, her arms wrapping around my neck, her "I love you" echoing in my ears, just a little while ago? When did this adolescent demon take over her body?