Roger pressed the doorbel . It made this long, fancy ringing in that same tune Big Ben plays right before it bongs the hour. A breath later, Claire Richardson swung the door wide, a huge smile already plastered over her face. She had it aimed at Roger, and then she caught sight of me and it curdled up and al but disappeared.
One eyebrow twitched, and her nostrils flared. She said, “I thought this was for the Calvary High Herald?” She was looking at me, but it was pretty obvious she was talking to Roger.
Roger said, “It is. Mosey came along to take some pictures.”
Roger nudged me and I held up the iPhone, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t stop thinking about this book Big used to read me al the time when I was little. This baby bird fal s out of the nest and he goes al over, asking things if they are his mother. He asks a dog and a cow and a dump truck, Are you my mother? Are you my mother? Standing here looking at Claire’s flared nostrils and cold eyes, that book made perfect sense to me, in a way it hadn’t since I was three. Right then, if a dump truck had pul ed up, I’d have asked it if it was my mother and cried with relief if it had nodded.
Roger stepped forward, crowding her, but she stood firm. “Don’t you think a Calvary student should take the pictures.” It wasn’t a question. Not real y. It didn’t curl up on the end. “It counts as extra credit for the kids who have journalism as their elective.”
“I didn’t think of that,” Roger said, al guileless, pressing forward. “And Mosey’s here now.”
If he nudged up toward her again, he’d be standing on her feet, because she wasn’t budging. Not an inch. “No need to waste her afternoon. You can send someone to take the pictures another day.”
The message was flat clear: No Slocumb trash was coming over her doorstep, which real y ought to have put paid to Roger’s crazy theory right then. Because if I was Claire Richardson’s kid, wouldn’t she somehow know it? Wouldn’t she sense it, if only a little bit in her scaly, Sleestak heart, and not be such an enormous bitch to me?
Watching her lip trembling with the effort it took not to let her mouth twist into a more truthful shape with al her teeth bared, I could tel she felt no twinge of doubt or hope when she looked down at me. To her I was just only Liza’s, and she blamed Liza for getting Melissa into drugs, and drugs had kil ed her baby and made Melissa run away. Easier to blame Liza and drugs than Melissa, I guess, and now here I stood on her porch, feebly waving an iPhone like I wanted her to say cheese for me.
Roger said, “Okay. But I’m Mosey’s ride, so she’s kinda stuck here.…”
Claire Richardson final y looked away from me to him. She made a tut noise. “Wel , that’s too bad. Maybe you can come back and do the interview another time.” She started to close the door.
Then I heard my own voice talking. “It’s fine. Go ahead in and get your story.” Roger kicked my foot, because if he went in alone, he wouldn’t get a chance to escape Claire. Too bad on him. “I have things I need to do at home anyway, and it’s not that bad a walk.”
“Al righty, then,” Claire said, brisk, like everything was settled and everyone was pleased. She swung the door wide, and Roger shot me a furious look and walked through it to spend the next three hundred years listening to Claire warble and coo about her prime genes and al the Glorious Dead in her lineage. She wheeled to fol ow Roger, pushing hard at the door as she spun. She meant to slam it in my face.
I watched the door swinging hard toward me, and my arm shot out like it was someone else’s arm. Chuck Norris’s, maybe, flying through the air in slo-mo. The door banged into its frame at the exact second that Claire’s outsize crystal knob smacked into my hand like a basebal . I caught it perfect. The door was a hair away from closed, but the lock hadn’t caught. I could feel it hanging in its frame, unlatched, my elbow and shoulder flashing pain at the impact.
I realized I’d been holding my breath. Oh, my God, that woman hated me. I final y breathed out, and if my exhale sounded a little bit like saying, Bitch…oh, wel . I meant it, too, even if I was her kid. Genetical y. Because inside I was total y Liza’s. Big was only tricked into having me. Liza had taken me on purpose, so I was hers no matter what. And right now I was damn wel doing exactly what Liza would do. I’d caught the door, and that was way too cool a move for me. Liza-level cool, for sure. I gave them two minutes to get out of the foyer, and then I swung that door wide open.
If I’d been trying to bust into Big’s house, the hinges would have creaked and squealed on me. Claire’s ritzy-ass door glided open al polite and silent. Sometimes it sucks to be rich. I stepped inside and eased it shut behind me, my heart hammering so loud I was surprised that Claire didn’t come running back to see who was pounding nails into her gleaming hardwood floor.
There was a fancy chandelier hanging over my head and one of those vomity-looking rugs with the fringe and al the colors on the floor. The air conditioner was real y cranking. It felt like you could take your time eating ice cream with no danger of it melting and plopping off the cone.
I’d never been in this house before, but I could hear Claire talking somewhere off to my left, so I went right, into a hal way. The wal s looked like leaf skeletons had been ironed one by one into pale gold paint and then glossed over with some kind of shiny top coat. I came to a closed door and tiptoed past with my mouth ful of spit. My throat had closed up so tight I couldn’t swal ow. I kept picturing Coach, home already and right behind that door, flipping through his secret stash of old CosmoGirl magazines and touching himself.
The first open door showed me a home office that looked completely fake. No bil s or papers piled on the desk, and al the books were leather-bound and the same height, with the titles gleaming gold down the sides. They were for looking good, not for reading. I hurried on and came to a gilt powder room, al fake-French-looking and smel ing so strong of roses that the stink of it leaped out at me.
I thought, Claire must have taken her usual flower-scented shit in here, and that made me grin and feel proud. It was a Liza line, and I had come up with it in the middle of breaking and entering and feeling so nervous I thought any second I might puke up everything inside me, first the Real Pit food, then everything else al the way back to the pizza I ate a week ago. Then I’d puke up my own guts.
I had to make my legs keep going. At the end of the hal , I peeked through a half-open door and saw I’d struck pay dirt. It had to be the master bedroom, the exact room that I wanted. I wasn’t Roger, hunting mythological postcards to Melissa, trying to dig up Liza’s past. I was me, and interested in right now, in this woman I might belong to in a truly awful way. The light was off, but the sunlight peeking around the edges of the pale blue drapes showed me it was empty. I slipped inside and closed the door silently behind me.
Just like the office, the bedroom barely looked lived in. It was al icy pale colors, except for these round crimson throw pil ows that looked like blood spatter on the big white bed. I found myself drawn over toward that bed. It was so big and crisp-looking, like a hotel bed. I wanted to rol on it, leave my old school dust, spit between the sheets, and then wipe my feet on the pil ows.
I figured Coach must sleep on the far side, because two remotes sat on that bedside table and Liza always said she’d never marry, because the first thing a guy did was take the remote. He had the alarm clock, too. I went on tiptoe to Claire’s bedside table. It was made of a frosty, pale wood that was “distressed.” Al our furniture had knock holes and pits, because it was mostly hand-me-downs and just plain old, but someone had done this to this table on purpose. Nothing on top but a coaster, a lamp, and a couple of books. The Help and Water for Elephants. Calvary Mom Book Club picks, but the spines didn’t look like she’d so much as cracked them.
Her table had three drawers, a flat one at the top and then two deeper ones. I pul ed the top one open and found a sleep mask and a battered paperback. The cover showed a big-boobied lady pushing away from this bare-chested muscle goon in a kilt. This book looked read to practical tatters.
There was a squeeze bottle of K-Y right next to it, and I shut the drawer right quick, making a quiet gag noise.
The next drawer had a little sewing kit and a box of expensive-looking buttons, some scented candles, and a spray bottle of lavender pil ow spray. Nothing interesting.
The only thing in the third drawer was a large velvet pouch. My mouth dropped open. It was a deep blue velvet, and Liza’s had been purple, but I knew exactly what this was. I touched it, and sure enough I could feel the hard outline of the wooden box inside. I thought, I bet Noveen Duckins has one just like this in green, and a sil y little giggle tried to rise up in my throat at the idea that every possible mom-o-mine would turn out to own this same-style box-o-perv.
I was about to close the drawer, but then I didn’t. I had that weird feeling rising in me again, a little like when I’d slipped Coach’s framed picture off his desk and down into my pants or stalked Patti Duckins and lifted her book. But more than that. I didn’t only want to do a thing that Mosey Slocumb wouldn’t do. It wasn’t even that it was such a Liza-like idea; I wanted to get at Claire fucking Richardson.
The box in its velvet pouch was already in my hands, like it had leaped there. I was already rising, running light-footed and quiet as I could back to the door. Maybe I could write her name on the box in Sharpie and have Roger slip it into Calvary’s lost and found. She deserved it.
As I tiptoe-sprinted down the leafy-wal ed hal way, I could hear Claire droning on to Roger. I grinned a mean grin; he must be ready to put a knife in his eye. I let myself out the front door and went to wait in his car. I put the box on the floorboards and grabbed Roger’s manila folder, pul ing out al those run-off articles and layering them facedown over the box like shingles until it was buried. Just in case Claire walked him out.
It was about a thousand degrees in the black Volvo, so I rol ed the windows down and sat sweating to death in the faint cross-breeze. I got bored after a little and picked up my backpack, doing my homework like a model kid until Roger final y came out about four hundred years later.
He sagged out to the car empty-handed and grumpy. He opened the door and slumped into his seat.
“Oh, my God, but that woman can talk about her family. Which you aren’t part of, by the way. I was wrong,” he said. He started up the car, and at once the blessed A/C kicked in, pouring frosty air out in a mist. I wanted to lean into it, but I was watching his face too close. I was breathless with hope.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn sure. After the family tree, she got out family photos. She has about seventy bil ion, starting with her kids and going al the way back to those weird, grim-faced old-timey things where it took hours for the thing to expose so no one could smile. It’s al her ancestors, though. She made it clear that Coach’s family isn’t relevant. But anyway, she had to go answer the phone, and I poked around in the recent books. She had pictures of the drowned baby. You are so not that baby.”
“You mean it didn’t look like me?” I asked.
“It mostly looked like a potato. But it was a blond, blue-eyed potato. Not that muddy gray baby blue that can get brown like yours later either. Real icy blue, and it was super white-skinned to boot. You aren’t half that pale even in the middle of winter. So.”
“So I’m not a Richardson,” I said, giddy with relief and now almost sorry I’d taken her vibrators, but only almost, because she was stil a monstrous bitch. “It’s too bad, real y. I’d sure like a shiny red Coronado and some Prozac for my birthday.”
But Roger barely smiled. He was shaking his head as he drove off toward my house. “It’s been such a waste. Like, al this time in Ducktown, and the library, and here. We stil don’t know anything. Claire hardly talked about Melissa or your mom, and I gave her twenty openings.”
“I’m surprised she talked about them at al .”
Roger blew a big raspberry. “It was just for a second after she slammed the door on you. She didn’t apologize for leaving you in the yard like a dog or anything, but I guess she felt like she owed me some kind of explanation. So while we walked to the room where she scrapbooks—she seriously has a whole room for that—she talked sideways about y’al ’s bad history, said how Liza got Melissa al mixed up in sel ing drugs out of her tree house. Once we got to Scrapbook Central, mostly she talked about the Civil War, and did you know she had ancestors on both sides playing key roles? A Confederate plantation owner and a Union guy who was a big deal in Boston, and real y the only thing those ancestors had in common was that they were both super, super boring.”
He was stil bitching, but I’d stopped listening. Two words Roger had said had banged in my ear like fireworks. Tree house. Liza used to sel drugs out of her tree house. She hung out with Melissa in the tree house. That old Grampa Duckins, wrapped in his blanket heap, and Patti both had talked about Liza and Noveen taking boys up to the tree house.
Maybe we hadn’t been wasting our time. Because if it hadn’t kept coming up, over and over, from al those different people, I might never have realized.
Tyler Baines built my tree house in our backyard. He’d gotten the kit at Home Depot and built it when I was little. When Liza was a kid, my backyard tree house hadn’t even existed. Even if it had, Liza couldn’t have been sel ing drugs and hosting orgies in a tree house thirty feet from Big’s bedroom window.
I felt my heart speed up. Somewhere Liza had a secret tree house. My brain leaped to another connection, remembering al those times Liza’d headed off into the woods with just a bedrol and a foster dog. No tent. I’d assumed she was sleeping in the nettles. Then I had fol owed her one day and seen her being a ful -on druid, and after that I had tried super hard to never think about her camping trips at al .
But no tent meant she stil had her secret tree house. She’d stil been using it, up until the stroke. No wonder I hadn’t found a single personal thing when I searched her room. If Liza had journals or old letters or any secret things, that was where she would keep them. Not at my house. Not with her old friends from high school, where Roger was looking. In an old hidden place that was al her own.
For the first time, I was glad I’d practical y burned my eyes out of my head when I fol owed her into the woods last year, because now I knew exactly where to go looking.
I breathed in sharp and opened my mouth to tel Roger, but in the next second I clamped it shut again so hard my teeth banged together. This was between Liza and me.
Roger had caught my intake of breath. “What?” he said. I shook my head, like it was nothing, but he knew me better than that. “Mosey, what?”
Al at once I had another reason to be glad I’d stolen that box. Roger would get a kick out of it, for sure, and since it wasn’t Liza’s, I felt like I could show him without it being weird. I said, “In the sadness of learning I wasn’t the lost heiress of two boring-ass Civil War colonels and a pack of current assholes, I forgot to show you. Pul over, pul over.”
We were back in downtown, so Roger swung the car into the DQ lot and looked at me expectantly.
“While you were talking to Claire, I total y broke into her house,” I said, scrabbling through the paper to find the velvet pouch at my feet.
“Holy shit! You did not,” Roger said.
“Hel zya, I did. I may have accidental y taken a little souvenir,” I said as I lifted the wooden box off the floorboards.
I think I knew even as I handed it to him. For sure I knew before he opened it. I hadn’t noticed when I was stealing it, because I’d been so freaked and in such a hurry, but as he took it, it final y hit me that it that it felt too heavy. A lot heavier than Liza’s box.
Roger was already sliding the box out of the velvet pouch, saying, “You’re my hero. What bal s! I mean, girl bal s. Whatever girls have like that.” He creaked it open, and then we both went stil and speechless, staring down into the case.
It was sleek and dul black and long and horrible. But my stomach popped a little, like it does in the movies when the guy final y kisses the gi
rl and it’s exactly right.
Roger touched the trigger with one reverent finger.
“I think it’s a SIG,” he said, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Boys knew things about guns.
Al I knew was, I had taken it. So it was mine.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Big
I GOT PREGNANT before I’d ever had a real boyfriend. It wasn’t until after Liza and I moved to Immita that I took a good run at figuring men out. There was the guy who turned out to be married and the guy who turned out to be gay. There was a good-looking fel ow with a col ege degree, but it was in English literature; he could quote the most beautiful poetry, but he wasn’t going to ever get a job. He mostly sat on his sofa smoking hash through a water pipe and watching British television.
When Liza was nine, we met Davey at the park. He was walking a golden dust mop of a dog with a manicure and a pink hair bow. Davey and I talked easy on a bench while Liza played fetch with Priss, who turned out to be his sister’s dog. He was perfect on paper: good job, good hair, good sense of humor, good kisser. He took me nice places, and he didn’t pressure me to fal right into bed. I liked it that he was doing the gentleman thing. I liked it even more when he told me he thought he should get to know Liza, since he hoped to become a constant in her life. We decided to go for a beach day, al three of us, that weekend.
I was packing up a picnic in my kitchen with a guy I was fal ing for, and then Liza came in the room to meet him. For a second, maybe less, his eyes slid sideways off me. He took a darting, siplike look at my gorgeous kid, her red-gold corkscrew hair, her little girl’s knob-kneed legs, preening in her pink bikini. I caught the faintest whiff of dark electricity, an ozone smel , sharp and unwholesome.
It was gone faster than a silent streak of lightning, but I thought, I met him in a kiddy park. He borrowed a dog to explain his presence, and it was tarted up to be the perfect little-girl bait. Liza put her hand, eager and trusting, directly into his as he leaned down and introduced himself. She smiled up at him, hoping he would like her, daddy-hungry and eager to please.