Shuffle: A Novel Part 8

I nodded, unwilling to tell her that he definitely would know it was me.

"I'll drive you to school in the squad car every morning and pick you up every afternoon. Tell Ellen I'm being paranoid and overprotective after that accident you had the other day."

"Okay. What else?"

"We don't want Arbor to figure out that you're onto him, or that you're aware of any of the details of the murder case. But we do want to find out what he knows."

"So?"

Callie sat for a minute, thinking hard. "Invite him over here tomorrow night."

I stared at her. "This is Arbor we're talking about, remember? Possible murderer? And creepy starer?"

"And dinner guest," proclaimed Callie. "We'll pick him up together in the squad car, maybe make him sit in the back. I'll have Bubbies on me the whole time. You'll work on your project right here at the kitchen table, under my totally inconspicuous yet armed-with-a-deadly-weapon supervision."

I scoffed. "And this plan leads to what? Besides me getting a good grade in Latin."

"I'll corner him at some point and be like, 'I heard you were all over my baby sister on the dance floor last night.' Very intimidating and police officer-y."

I raised an eyebrow. "Go on."

"And I'll ask him all sorts of probing questions about his life, including where he was this summer on the Fourth of July and, if I get him in the right mood..." She made a chk-chk sound with her mouth and shot me a pair of dorky finger guns. "... why he emptied out the contents of Stevens Peak Public Library book locker number 112."

I was skeptical. "You really think that'll work?"

"I hate to toot my own horn, but I have a pretty sweet track record at interrogations."

"Oh yeah? In your five months of experience?"

"Hey," she grinned, "I'm one-for-one. I got Mr. Jenkins from the post office to admit to keying his ex-wife's car."

I rolled my eyes. "Awesome. That's totally the same."

She gave my shoulder a squeeze and went back to pour me some tea. We sat up for a while and talked about this and that. She was excited because Lieutenant Collier had given her flowers.

"Really?" I leaned in. "Wow."

"Oh," she waved her hand. "It was under sad circ.u.mstances, actually. There was another accidental death today. A little old lady got hit by a car on Main Street. She'd just bought a dozen roses, was taking them home to her husband for their sixty-third wedding anniversary."

"Yikes. That's awful."

"Yeah." She sighed. "Toby and I had to go deliver the bad news. We brought the roses with us a I mean, we couldn't just leave them there, lying on the ground a but the husband wanted Toby to have them. To give to a 'sweetheart,' was I think how he put it. Later, I found them on my desk. There was a queen of hearts taped to them."

"So it was the worst thing ever and the best thing ever at the same time."

She smiled softly. "Pretty much."

I felt better. At one o'clock I decided it was probably time to go to bed, so I trudged upstairs to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The counter was clean. Callie had put away my curling iron and all my makeup stuff.

Like Mom would have done.

I pictured Callie downstairs in that stupid, tattered old bathrobe and tears sprang into my eyes. No warning. It was just... all of a sudden I missed Mom. I imagined what she would have said to me tonight. What she would have said to Callie about her roses.

"You should be here," I said. "You should still be here for us."

I stared at my face in the mirror and tried to find my mother in it. I saw her eyes, but not much else. Her blonde hair and slim figure had gone to Callie. I pictured her as Dido on the pyre, blood pouring out of her belly from the gunshot.

"Why didn't you shoot yourself in the head and get it over with?" I muttered. She always loved her own beauty so much; maybe she didn't want to ruin her face for the funeral. The medical examiner told us that it had taken her a long time to bleed out. She died slowly, all alone, and in great pain.

"Did you regret it?" I asked myself. "After you pulled the trigger?"

But the image in the mirror couldn't answer.

I stalked back to my room and closed the door, dumping Ernest Tucker Smith's shoes under my desk. I sat on my bed cross-legged and stared at them for a while. Trying to see something. The shoes were old and dirty, but the laces were new. There were dabs and smears of polish on them a the wrong color and inexpertly applied a as though someone had tried to care for them.

"Mr. Smith," I said, "you must have loved those shoes."

I wished someone loved me. I wish my mom had loved me enough to get help instead of killing herself.

Quietly, I stole to my closet and opened the door. It was stuffed full of clothes and boardgames and old Halloween costumes I was never going to wear again. I stood on my tiptoes and reached for a cardboard box that I kept on the highest shelf.

Evi's Treasures. It was dusty. I wiped a layer of grime off the top with my fingers, then wiped my fingers on my pants, where they left gray smudges. I hadn't opened it since March, and then only briefly. Before that... I don't remember. Elementary school, maybe. I took it to my bed, wrapped myself up in a blanket and popped it open.

A picture of Ellen and me fell out first; it must have been stuck up in the top of the box. I spent a few moments gazing at our younger selves. We were five or six, wearing bathing suits and eating popsicles, both of us missing our two front teeth. Both of us grinning as hard as we possibly could.

"You ever think we'd have a night like tonight?" I asked baby Ellen.

I set the picture on the bedspread and grabbed the envelope that was lying on top of the rest of the junk inside. The police had given Mom's suicide note to Callie after the funeral. She and I read it together, crying, and then Callie tucked it away in the office downstairs, inside an anonymous-looking manila file folder at the end of a row of books. Whereupon I stole it and put it inside my treasure box, right before I left for Montana.

I was afraid it might get lost, and I wasn't done with it yet.

I took it out of the envelope and spread it on my knee.

My children, Underneath this calm, motherly exterior, I've been feeling rotten, and it's just been getting worse as the years pa.s.s. Rest a.s.sured that I love you both. Don't worry about me; you two just take care of each other. Evangeline, listen to your big sister. Remember to eat healthy and get all your exercise in.

Well, that's it. The whole kit and kaboodle. Bye.

She'd signed her name below. Lainey Wild. As though she were signing a check.

I let the piece of paper flutter into my lap. This was the second or third time I'd read it, and as always, it left me frustrated and sad. Remember to get your exercise in? Really? That was the most important thing you had to tell me, Mom?

"Ugh." I slumped sideways onto the bed, feeling the letter crease and rip a little as it got caught under one of my legs. It hurt like a knife in my heart to know that Mom was so concerned about my weight, that it was so overwhelmingly momentous to her that it was the last thought she committed to paper before she died.

Tears p.r.i.c.ked my eyes. I knew she always secretly hated that I was such an ugly duckling. But really? Your parting message to me was "Get thinner?"

I buried my face in a pillow. I wanted to sob, to get it all out, but I felt emotionally exhausted. I just lay there, eyes wet.

The rest of the note was so weird, too. It was in her handwriting; that was obvious. The police said her fingerprints were all over the paper and the envelope. It was indisputable. She'd written it.

It just didn't sound like her.

The psychologist I saw in Montana said that she was probably in a mild disa.s.sociative state when she wrote it. She was so depressed that she wasn't fully aware of her actions, and therefore the tone of the letter was lighter than what you see with some suicide notes. Apparently it's a pretty common thing. Everything just happened so suddenly... Callie and I were utterly shocked. So were all of her friends. No one knew she was depressed.

I wondered, not for the first time, if she'd shot herself in the belly hoping that someone would find her. Maybe her suicide was meant to be a cry for help.

"You didn't cry loud enough, Mom."

There was anger in my voice when I said it.

I lay there, aching inside. A few minutes pa.s.sed. But life, both its suffering and its joy, must go on. So I sat up and uncrumpled the letter, folded it back into thirds and placed it neatly in the envelope. I put the box back up on the shelf in my closet. I opened my window, drinking in the cool night air. And I went to sleep.

I woke with a start. I'd been having that dream again, the one about my mom. Yelling at me across the crowded cafeteria at school.

I could almost hear her.

I was still groggy, but the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. I flipped on my lamp and squinted in the sudden brightness. Yup, it was the same sound that had woken me. My window. This time I was irritated rather than scared.

I stomped over to it. "Why can't you just stay up?" I demanded, shoving it back into place. The sky outside was still black. A splash of light from the streetlamp cast a long, dim glow over the backyard. I noticed something, in the shadows.

A rush of movement.

I peered until my eyes hurt, but it was gone. Maybe just a cat slinking off to scavenge for fish skeletons in the trash. Or was that only in cartoons?

I shook my head to get the fuzzb.a.l.l.s out. There was nothing in the yard. I went to climb back into my bed, first checking the closet and behind my piles of stuffed animals on the chair. You know, just in case. There was nothing to see, of course, and I settled back down in bed. Just before I turned the light out, my eyes fell under my desk.

"Oh, no." I had been so brave. But now that creeping sense of terror wormed its way back into my heart.

Ernest's shoes. They'd disappeared.

Chapter Six.

I was downstairs fixing breakfast before Callie was up. She smiled brightly as she smelled the coffee percolating and the bacon sizzling on the griddle. Then she remembered what had happened the night before, and her smile fell away.

"The shoes," she said.

"Already taken care of," I replied, brusquely, flipping the bacon with a pair of tongs. "I was up early, so I took a walk over to Union and threw them in the dumpster behind the Co-op. No one saw me."

I felt bad about lying, but if I'd told Callie the truth, she'd have just freaked out, called off the whole Arbor plan and taken me to a hotel. I was scared, yes, but I really wanted a chance to figure out what was going on. Plus, my brain-cogs were already spinning. Perhaps there was a way to catch the dirty shoe thief in action next time he tried to climb in my window.

Callie sighed. "Good. I'm sorry we couldn't use them as evidence." She came and put her arm around me, squis.h.i.+ng me and cramping my rapid-fire breakfast-making style. "It was a good try."

"Thanks, Cal. Ready for tonight?"

She nodded, pouring herself a cuppa. "I've got my strategy all figured out. I'm going to play on his British sense of decorum and politeness and then right when he least expects it, BAM!" She smacked her fist into her palm.

"Who are you, Emeril?"

"I'll give him the old one-two. What are you doing with my sister? Where were you on the night of the Fourth?"

"So basically, you're going to be the good cop. And then also the bad cop."

She nodded. "Basically, yes."

The bacon was done, and only a little burned. I tossed it onto a plate with some cheddar scrambled eggs and toast, and we sat down to eat.

"Oh!" Callie exclaimed suddenly, mouth full of eggs. She chewed quickly and swallowed. "Did you invite him yet?"

"I sent him an email."

I hadn't been able to get back to sleep after the incident, so I'd done some homework and sent a message to Subject line: Cicero.

Hey Arbor, I think we're scheduled to present on Friday. I really want to get a jump on putting the whole thing together. Do you think you could come over to my house today at around 4 or 5? We'd pick you up and feed you.

- Evi I realized as soon as I clicked Send that I was now guilty of writing my own weird early-morning email. Oops. The odd thing was, I got a reply back in like, less than two minutes.

Evangeline, I shall arrive at 4 o'clock sharp. No need to chauffeur; I have my own car as you are, I think, already aware. I am a vegetarian.

- Arbor Huh. Didn't he ever sleep? Ehn, he was probably just up playing Warcraft or something. If I had a newer computer I'd probably be doing the same thing.

So I told Callie we were on for four o'clock, and helped her clean up breakfast.

And then I waited. I tried to read my AP Psych textbook, but I couldn't concentrate. I kept catching glimpses through the windows of people walking by on the street, and nearly jumped out of my skin, thinking they were Arbor. I flipped through the TV channels a nothing good was on, and I couldn't sit still anyway. So I grabbed my jacket and went out for a walk.

"Look both ways," Callie called after me. "There's been some pretty reckless driving around here lately."

"Thanks, pesky p.o.o.p." I took my keys out of the bowl and shut the front door behind me, glad to be out in the sun.

I didn't have anywhere in particular to go, so I just headed up to Algoma and turned right. There was a little neighborhood park tucked a few blocks away. I thought it would be nice to sit on the swings a while and watch the kids play. The air was crisp and just chilly enough to require long sleeves. It sure gets cold fast in the fall, up here in the Rockies. But the leaves on the trees were still green and the gra.s.s was still growing. Daylilies were still blooming. People were out grilling in their driveways on this early Sunday afternoon; I smiled as I smelled the hamburgers and heard the laughter of good company. I waved at a guy out mowing his lawn.

I cut through the gra.s.s at the edge of someone's property, following a little path down by a stream that led to the playground. A woman was throwing a frisbee out over the stream; her golden retriever jumped, s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air and splashed down into the water, then paddled gaily back to sh.o.r.e and shook himself out. They looked happy together.

I walked over and sat on the swings, pus.h.i.+ng myself idly back and forth. The chains creaked as I rocked myself; they were getting a little rusty up at the top. Would have to be replaced soon.

Kids were playing a game of freeze tag out on the gra.s.s, parents reading or chatting on benches. I smiled as I watched them try to hold ridiculous positions, waiting for a teammate to come and unfreeze them.

I remember when I was that age. Nothing but carefree days and games of freeze tag.

After a few minutes a cloud pa.s.sed over the sun. A breeze struck up; I s.h.i.+vered in my thin jacket. The dog lady left, and the kids dispersed. I watched them all go, watched the wind make the long gra.s.s at the edge of the park dance.

Then a oh G.o.d.