Pieces of Her

  “Come now,” Nick spoke in a teasing tone. “We’re so close. Do you know how important we’re going to be when this is all over?”

  When this is all over . . .

  Jane put her hand to her stomach as she walked across the room.

  Would this ever be over?

  Could they go on after this? Could they bring a child into this world that they were trying to create? Was there really a flat waiting for them in Switzerland?

  Jane reminded herself again: Nick had sold his furniture. Stripped away the fixtures in his apartment. He was sleeping on the floor. Was that a man who thought there was a future?

  Was that a man who could be a father to their child?

  Jane kneeled beside the bed.

  She lowered her voice a few octaves, warning, “Don’t say a word.”

  She pulled down the gag from the woman’s mouth.

  Alexandra Maplecroft started screaming.

  August 23, 2018

  11

  Andy hefted a heavy box of old sneakers out of the back of the Reliant. Fat drops of rain smacked the cardboard. Steam came off the asphalt. The sky had opened after days of punishing heat, so now in addition to the punishing heat she had to deal with getting wet. She sprinted back and forth between the hatch and the open storage unit, head cowed every time a bolt of lightning slipped between the afternoon clouds.

  She had taken a page from her mother and rented two different storage units in two different facilities in two different states to hide the gazillion dollars of cash inside the Reliant. Actually, Andy had done Laura one better. Instead of just piling the money on the floor of the unit like she was Skyler in Breaking Bad, she had cleaned out the back room of a Salvation Army store in Little Rock, then hidden the stacks of cash underneath old clothes, camping gear and a bunch of broken toys.

  That way, anyone watching would think Andy was doing what most Americans did and paying to store a bunch of crap they didn’t want instead of donating it to people who could actually use it.

  Andy ran back to the Reliant and grabbed another box. Rain splashed inside her brand-new sneakers. Her new socks took on the consistency of quicksand. Andy had stopped at another Walmart after leaving the first storage facility on the Arkansas side of Texarkana. She was finally wearing clothes that were not from the 1980s. She’d bought a messenger bag and a $350 laptop. She had sunglasses, underwear that didn’t sag around her ass, and, weirdly, a sense of purpose.

  I want you to live your life, Laura had said back at the diner. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own. Andy was certainly on her own now. But what had changed? She couldn’t quite articulate even to herself why she felt so different. She just knew that she was sick of floating between disaster points like an amoeba inside a petri dish. Was it the realization that her mother was a spectacular liar? Was it the feeling of shame for being such a gullible believer? Was it the fact that a hired gun had followed Andy all the way to Alabama, and instead of listening to her gut and taking off, she had tried to hook up with him?

  Her face burned with shame as she slid another box out of the back of the Reliant.

  Andy had stayed in Muscle Shoals long enough to watch Mike Knepper’s truck drive past the motel twice in the space of two hours. She had waited through the third hour and into the fourth to make certain that he wasn’t coming back, then she’d packed up the Reliant and hit the road again.

  She had been shaky from the outset, loaded with caffeine from McDonald’s coffee, still terrified to pull over to go to the restroom because, at that point, she still had the cash hidden inside of the car. The drive to Little Rock, Arkansas, had taken five hours, but every single one of them had weighed on her soul.

  Why had Laura lied to her? Who was she so afraid of? Why had she told Andy to go to Idaho?

  More importantly, why was Andy still blindly following her mother’s orders?

  Andy’s inability to answer any of these questions had not been helped by lack of sleep. She had stopped in Little Rock because it was a town she had heard of, then she had stopped at the first hotel with an underground parking deck because she figured she should hide the Reliant in case Mike was somehow following her.

  Andy had backed the station wagon into a space so that any would-be thieves would have trouble accessing the hatch. Then she had gotten back into the car and pulled forward so that she could take the sleeping bag and the beach tote out of the trunk. Then she had backed into the space again, then she had checked into the hotel, where she had slept for almost eighteen hours straight.

  The last time she had slept that long, Gordon had taken her to the doctor because he was afraid she had narcolepsy. Andy thought of the Arkansas sleep as therapeutic. She was not gripping a steering wheel. She was not screaming or sobbing into the empty car. She was not checking Laura’s cell phone every five minutes. She was not fretting about all the money that tethered her to the Reliant. She was not worrying that Mike had followed her because she had actually crawled under the car and checked for any GPS tracking devices.

  Mike.

  With his stupid K in his last name and his stupid grasshopper on his truck and his stupid kissing her in the parking lot like some kind of psychopath because he was clearly there to follow Andy, or torture her, or do something horrible, and instead he had seduced her.

  Worse, she had let him.

  Andy grabbed the last box from the back of the car and approximated a walk of shame into the unit. She dropped the box onto the floor. She sat down on a wooden stool with a wobbly third leg. She rubbed her face. Her cheeks were on fire.

  Idiot, she silently admonished herself. He saw right through you.

  The painful truth was, there was not much of a story to tell about Andy’s sex life. She would always trot out the affair with her college professor as a way to sound sophisticated, but she left out the part where they’d had sex only three and a half times. And that the guy was a pothead. And mostly impotent. And that they usually ended up sitting on his couch while he got high and Andy watched Golden Girls reruns.

  Still, he was better than her high school boyfriend. They had met in drama club, which should have been a giant freaking clue. But they were best friends. And they had both decided that their first times should be with each other.

  Afterward, Andy had been underwhelmed, but lied to make him feel better. He had been just as underwhelmed, but failed to extend her the same courtesy.

  You get too wet, he had told her, shuddering dramatically, and even though he admitted he was probably gay in the next sentence, Andy had carried that debilitating criticism with her for the ensuing decade and a half.

  Too wet. She mulled the phrase in her mind as she stared at the wall of rain outside the storage unit. There were so many things she would say to that jackass now if he would just accept her friend request on Facebook.

  Which brought her to her New York boyfriend. Andy had thought that he was so gentle and kind and considerate and then Andy had been in the bathroom at a friend’s apartment when she’d overheard him talking to his buddies.

  She’s like the ballerina in a jewelry box, he had confided. The second you bend her over, the music stops.

  Andy shook her head like a dog. She ran back to the car, got the light blue Samsonite suitcase, and dragged it into the unit. With the door closed, she changed into dry clothes. There was nothing she could do about her sneakers but at least she had socks that weren’t peeling at her already sore feet. By the time she rolled the door up, the rain had tapered off, which was the first good luck she’d had in days.

  Andy used one of her Walmart padlocks on the latch. Instead of a key, she had chosen a combination lock that used letters rather than numbers. The Texarkana code was FUCKR because she was feeling particularly hostile when she programmed it. For the Hook ’Em & Store outside of Austin, Texas, she’d gone with the more obvious KUNDE, as in—

  I could talk to Paula Kunde.


  I hear she’s in Seattle.

  Austin. But good try.

  Andy had decided back in Little Rock that she was not going to amoeba her way to Idaho like Laura had told her to. If she could not get answers from her mother, then maybe she could get them from Professor Paula Kunde.

  She reached up to close the hatch on the wagon. The sleeping bag and beach tote were still loaded up with cash, but she figured she might as well keep them in the car. She should probably put the little cooler and the box of Slim Jims in the storage unit, but Andy was antsy to get back on the road.

  The Reliant’s engine made a whirly Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang sound when she pulled away. Instead of heading toward the interstate, she took the next right into McDonald’s. She used the drive-thru to order a large coffee and get the Wi-Fi password.

  Andy chose a parking space close to the building. She dumped the coffee out the window because she was pretty sure her heart would explode if she drank any more caffeine. She got her new laptop out of the messenger bag and logged onto the network.

  She stared at the flashing cursor on the search bar.

  As usual, she had a moment of indecision about whether or not to create a fake Gmail account and send something to Gordon. Andy had composed all kinds of drafts in her mind, pretending to be a Habitat for Humanity coordinator or a fellow Phi Beta Sigma, contriving some kind of coded message that let her father know that she was okay.

  Just asking if you saw that great Subway coupon offering two-for-one?

  Saw a story about Knob Creek bourbon I thought you might enjoy!

  As usual, Andy decided against it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot she trusted about her mother right now, but even the slightest chance of putting Gordon in harm’s way was too much of a risk.

  She typed in the web address for the Belle Isle Review.

  The photo of Laura and Gordon at the Christmas party was still on the front page.

  Andy studied her mother’s face, wondering how the familiar woman smiling at the camera could be the same woman who’d deceived her only daughter for so many years. Then she zoomed in closer, because Andy had never given the bump in her mother’s nose a second thought. Had it been broken at some point and healed crookedly?

  The Polaroids from her mother’s storage unit told Andy that the explanation was possible.

  Would she ever know the truth?

  Andy scrolled down the page. The article about the body that had washed up under the Yamacraw Bridge had not changed, either. Still no identity on the man in the hoodie. No report of his stolen vehicle. Which meant that Laura had not only kept a battalion of police officers out of her house, she had somehow managed to drag an almost two hundred pound man to her Honda, then dump him in the river twenty miles away.

  With one arm strapped to her chest and barely a set of legs to walk on.

  Her mother was a criminal.

  That was the only explanation that made sense. Andy had been thinking of Laura as passive and reactionary when all of the evidence pointed to her being logical and devious. The almost one million bucks in cash had not come from helping stroke patients work on their diction. The fake IDs were scary enough, but Andy had walked that back a step and realized that Laura not only had a fake ID, she had a contact—a forger—who could make documents for her. Every time Laura had crossed into Canada to renew the license or the car tag, she had broken federal law. Andy doubted the IRS knew about the cash, which broke all kinds of other federal laws. Laura wasn’t afraid of the police. She knew that she could refuse an interrogation. She had a preternatural coolness around law enforcement. That didn’t come from Gordon, which meant that Laura had learned it on her own.

  Which meant that Laura Oliver was not a good guy.

  Andy closed the laptop and returned it to the messenger bag. There wasn’t enough memory on the machine to start listing all the things that her mother needed to explain. At this point, how Laura had disposed of Hoodie’s dead body wasn’t even in the top three.

  Rain tapped at the windshield. Dark clouds had rolled in. Andy backed out of the space and followed the signs toward UT-AUSTIN. The sprawling campus took up forty acres of prime real estate. There was a medical school and hospital, a law school, all kinds of liberal arts programs and, despite not having its own football team, countless Texas Longhorns flags and bumper stickers.

  According to the class schedule on the school’s website, Dr. Kunde had taught a morning class called Feminist Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault followed by an hour set aside for student advisory. Andy checked the time on the radio. Even assuming Paula’s sessions had run long or she’d stopped for lunch, or maybe met a colleague for another meeting, she was probably home by now.

  Andy had tried to do more research on the woman’s background, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot about Paula Kunde on the internet. The UT-Austin site listed tons of academic papers and conferences, but nothing about her personal life. ProfRatings.com gave her only one half of a star, but when Andy dug into the student reviews, she saw they were mostly whining about bad grades that Dr. Kunde refused to change or offering long, adverb-riddled diatribes about how Dr. Kunde was a harsh bitch, which was basically the hallmark of her generation’s contribution to higher education.

  The only easy part of the investigoogling was finding the professor’s home address. Austin’s tax records were online. All Andy had to do was enter Paula Kunde’s name and not only was she able to see that the property taxes had been paid consistently for the last ten years, she was able to click onto Google Street View and see for herself the low-slung one-story house in a section of the city called Travis Heights.

  Andy checked her map again as she turned down Paula’s street. She had studied the street on her laptop, like she was some kind of burglar casing the joint, but the images had been taken in the dead of winter when all the shrubs and trees lay dormant—nothing like the lush, overflowing gardens she passed now. The neighborhood had a trendy feel, with hybrids in the driveways and artistic yard ornaments. Despite the rain, people were out jogging. The houses were painted in their own color schemes, regardless of what their neighbors chose. Old trees. Wide streets. Solar panels and one very strange-looking miniature windmill in front of a dilapidated bungalow.

  She was so intent on looking at the houses that she drove past Paula’s on the first go. She went down to South Congress and turned back around. This time, she looked at the street numbers on the mailboxes.

  Paula Kunde lived in a craftsman-style house, but with a kind of funkiness to it that wasn’t out of touch with the rest of the neighborhood. An older model white Prius was parked in front of the closed garage door. Andy saw dormers stuck into the garage roof. She wondered if Paula Kunde had a daughter in her apartment that she couldn’t get rid of, too. That would be a good opening line, or at least a second or a third, because the onus was going to be on Andy to talk her way into the house.

  This could be it.

  All the questions she’d had about Laura might be answered by the time Andy got back into the Reliant.

  The thought made her knees rubbery when she stepped out of the car. Talking had never been her forte. Amoebas didn’t have mouths. She threw her new messenger bag over her shoulder. She checked the contents to give her brain something else to concentrate on as she walked toward the house. There was some cash in there, the laptop, Laura’s make-up bag with the burner phone, hand lotion, eye drops, lip gloss—just enough to make her feel like a human woman again.

  Andy searched the windows of the house. All of the lights were off inside, at least from what she could see. Maybe Paula wasn’t home. Andy had only guessed by the online schedule. The Prius could belong to a tenant. Or Mike could’ve changed out his truck.

  The thought sent a shiver down her spine as she navigated the path to the front door. Leggy petunias draped over wooden planters. Dead patches in the otherwise neatly trimmed yard showed where the Texas sun had burned the ground. Andy glanced behind her as she cli
mbed the porch stairs. She felt furtive, but wasn’t sure whether or not the feeling was justified.

  I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to scare the shit out of you.

  Maybe that’s why Mike had kissed Andy. He knew that threats had not worked against Laura, so he’d figured he would do something awful to Andy and use that for leverage.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Andy had been so caught up in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the front door had opened.

  Paula Kunde gripped an aluminum baseball bat between her hands. She was wearing dark sunglasses. A scarf was tied around her neck. “Hello?” She waited, the bat still reared back like she was ready to swing it. “What do you want, girl? Speak up.”

  Andy had practiced this in the car, but the sight of the baseball bat had erased her mind. All she could get out was a stuttered, “I-I-I—”

  “Jesus Christ.” Paula finally lowered the bat and leaned it inside the doorframe. She looked like her faculty photo, but older and much angrier. “Are you one of my students? Is this about a grade?” Her voice was scratchy as a cactus. “Trigger warning, dumbass, I’m not going to change your grade, so you can dry your snowflake tears all the way back to community college.”

  “I—” Andy tried again. “I’m not—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Paula tugged at the scarf around her neck. It was silk, too hot for the weather, and didn’t match her shorts and sleeveless shirt. She looked down her long nose at Andy. “Unless you’re going to talk, get your ass—”

  “No!” Andy panicked when she started to shut the door. “I need to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  Andy stared at her. She felt her mouth trying to form words. The scarf. The glasses. The scratchy voice. The bat by the door. “About you getting suffocated. With a bag. A plastic bag.”

  Paula’s lips pressed into a thin line.

  “Your neck.” Andy touched her own neck. “You’re wearing the scarf to hide the scratch marks and your eyes probably have—”