A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

  Patti came through the swinging doors. She glanced at me, then did a double take and said, “You look like you ate bees.”

  I rol ed my eyes at her. “You talk so weird.”

  “Oh, she does not,” Big said. “You do not,” she told Patti. “You want to stay for supper? Just Tuna Surprise and a pot of green beans, but I made plenty.”

  “Sure,” Patti said.

  “I have to run,” Big said. “I’m late.”

  “For your errands,” I said.

  “For my none-of-your-beeswax,” Big answered, tart. As she passed by us on her way out the swinging door, she gave Patti’s hair a quick rumple.

  Patti leaned into it and looked up at Big in that same starvey way Bogo looked at Liza. Big breezed out past, not even noticing.

  Al at once I was sick, so sick in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine putting a single bite of that casserole in my mouth, even though it was the good kind I liked, with the chips on top.

  Because what was I to Big, real y? Just another little stray like Patti, and if she knew, maybe that’s how she would touch me, too. A quick head rub and a smile, like I was a broken-y dirty dog and she was setting out to be kind to me. Not like I belonged to her. I didn’t belong to anyone, except maybe whoever halfcocked57 was.

  After Big left, I did al the right things. I made plates for us and Liza, and we ate them in front of the TV so I didn’t have to talk much. I especial y didn’t want to talk to Liza, so when Patti left, around nine, I went ahead and helped her to bed early. Big stil wasn’t home. She was off on her none-of-my-beeswax, and I guess nothing she did was my beeswax, real y. That meant nothing I did was her damn beeswax either.

  I looked under the bed, and sure enough there was the netbook, charging. I pul ed it out and sat down with my back braced against the door so Big couldn’t come in and surprise me, if she even bothered to come home. I pirated onto our neighbor’s wireless and jumped right to Hotmail.

  Liza had a new e-mail.

  I gulped. I couldn’t breathe wel . I went to the in-box, and sure enough it was from halfcocked57.

  The message was short. How do you forget my address, asshole? And then under that, 91 Fox Street. No city or state, so halfcocked57 must think Liza would remember those things, but there was a chain of five numbers that had to be the zip code.

  I put the zip code into Google and came up with Montgomery, Alabama. That meant halfcocked57 was only about four hours away.

  I was trembling so hard I couldn’t hardly get my phone open. I texted Roger the address, just that, and then sat there, waiting for him to text back. It took him about thirty seconds, like he’d done nothing but sit in the basement holding his breath and the phone until this moment.

  Whoop, there it is. So. Mosey. We going to check it out?

  I swal owed, unsure. But my thumbs decided to click and send words back to him al on their own, while I sat there shaking.

  O. Hel z. Yah.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Big

  MELISSA RICHARDSON. THAT girl was poison from day one.

  She was blond and so tal that she always looked older than she was, with the kind of model’s body that was made to show off clothes. She had the clothes to show off, too, and she was quite pretty, though not half the beauty her mother was. Her eyes were set too close together, and the things that made Claire’s face so elegant—razor-blade cheekbones and that long, thin Meryl Streep nose she loved to look down—were blunted on Melissa.

  Liza and Melissa were the very devil in middle school, but that was just the start. By ninth grade the only person with any control or influence over either of those girls was the other. I remembered Melissa standing in a slouch on my front porch wearing her signature bright blue eyeliner. She put it on so thick it was like she hoped her icy pale eyes would leach color from it. Or maybe she wanted to distract me from noticing how red the whites were. Either way, it wasn’t working.

  Liza answered the door, but I’d fol owed her. I stood right behind her with my hand on her shoulder, like that could hold her with me.

  “Hey, Liza. Ms. Slocumb.” Melissa gave me the insincere smile of a dog who has already been down to the henhouse to suck every egg you’ve got. She was wearing leggings and a baby-dol dress that probably cost more than my whole week’s paycheck, yet she looked like second place beside Liza in her tatty jeans. Her pale gaze stared right through me. “I wanted Liza to go down to DQ with me for a cone.” She wasn’t real y asking for permission, or even informing me as a courtesy. She was speaking in code to Liza.

  I said, “Melissa, you know she’s grounded. Quite frankly, I’m surprised you’re not grounded, too.”

  “Oh, I am,” Melissa said. She tossed her hundred-dol ar haircut. “I think it means something different at my house than it does here.”

  “Wel , here it means you’re actual y grounded.” Melissa gave me a quick-flash grin, like I’d scored a point in some game I wasn’t playing. I stepped up, practical y between them, and started swinging the front door closed. “Good-bye, Melissa.”

  Through the narrowing crack, Melissa cal ed, “Check ya flip side,” to Liza. They exchanged a speaking glance that lasted barely half a second, but it held a thousand cues.

  Liza and I went back to doing laundry. I sorted darks and lights, and Liza carried the basket of socks and underthings to the nook in the kitchen. I heard the washer start, but a minute passed and Liza didn’t come back. I ran to the kitchen. The back door was hanging open, and Liza was already gone.

  When she got home, I’d scream and cajole in turns. I’d ground her again. I’d try a thousand different ways to get her to open up and talk to me.

  She’d look hangdog sorry when I shrieked at her. She’d promise to be better when I wept. She’d accept whatever punishment I handed out. But when it came down to it, yel ing meant nothing. Crying meant nothing. Punishment meant nothing. The second my eyes were off her, she was gone, doing whatever Melissa wanted.

  I tried taking away her favorite clothes and items, but any beloved object I took away, Melissa replaced. Claire Richardson kept her kid wel funded. And stil Claire blamed Liza for the drugs. It never seemed to occur to her that she, Claire, was paying the tabs that let our kids get high.

  Liza was too constantly on restriction to get even her meager al owance. Granted, Liza was so pretty and Melissa was so stylish that I bet they rarely paid for drugs, but Melissa paid for taxi rides and concert tickets, cover charges and fake IDs, a new one every time I ferreted out Liza’s and destroyed it.

  Not that Liza was a blameless lambkin. They egged each other farther down every bad path than either girl would have gone alone. They’d been a bonded pair, right up until Liza got pregnant and Melissa had decided that meant she wasn’t fun or useful anymore.

  Now Liza had said her name, twice, but she’d been looking through me with a thousand-year stare. It wasn’t easy to believe that Melissa Richardson had risen out of whatever hidey-hole she’d been stashed in al these years. Would she risk exposure, maybe arrest, to come back to Immita and poison Liza for some ancient slight?

  But the name sure had made me rethink. At that Calvary luau, Liza had worn her best white silk blouse, lined her eyes, and put on lipstick. She knew damn wel the fel ows liked her plenty in an old T-shirt with her hair wild, bare skin glowing, maybe some Burt’s Bees to make her mouth shine.

  In the past she’d fluffed herself up for female rivals in a way she never needed to for men. She’d been meeting someone, al right, but not a man, and not the long-gone Melissa either, though that was closer.

  Liza had gone to meet Melissa’s mother, Claire. It had to be.

  Liza had been standing by Claire Richardson when I first arrived at the luau. When Liza col apsed, Claire had ignored my seizing kid and gone to help the woman with the splashed sandals. That would have struck me as odd if I hadn’t been panicking. It would have been more in character had she snapped her fingers and cal ed for janitorial. Now I thought s
he’d bent to help that woman clean up her shoes for cover, so she could grab the Dixie cup and dispose of it. I’d swooped in and snatched it up first.

  I was hoping the cup would give me some answers, but when I cal ed Lawrence, I got his machine. The beep came and went, and I stood there breathing into the phone like a pervert, not sure where to begin.

  Final y I said, “I need to see you. Can you meet me at Panda Garden?” and hung up.

  On Friday he left a terse voice mail for me, saying he was up visiting Harry at his col ege and he thought we’d agreed that he would cal me after, in November. Ten minutes later he’d cal ed back and left another voice mail. This one he talked sweeter. “I keep listening to your message. Your voice sounds…something. Are you in trouble? I get back Saturday evening.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have picked Panda Garden, considering the history. It was the place where he’d blurted out, “I’m stil married,” and the way he’d said “stil ” had kept me sitting there with him. On the other hand, there wasn’t a memory-soaked queen-size bed set up by the fish pond or the big gold Buddha statue, so it wasn’t the worst place I could have chosen.

  Even so, when I walked in and saw him sitting in the exact same booth that we’d started in, with his hair brushed back and his big, square hands folded on the table in front of him, sex reared up inside me and started battering at my insides like a homeless animal. It wanted to run at him, eat him up, then lay its head down, tame and sweet, in his warm lap. It didn’t care how much I had on my mind. It only cared that Lawrence had come when I’d cal ed, just because my voice had sounded “something.”

  Our booth’s window faced the parking lot, and Lawrence had his face close to the glass, peering into the lot like he was watching for me. It wasn’t dark out yet, but the sun was going down. He must have missed me coming in.

  I slid in across from him. He glanced up and said, “Hey,” but then went right back to looking out the window.

  “Are you on some kind of Panda Garden stakeout?” I asked, a little irky to see he hadn’t been watching for me after al .

  He shook his head and turned to face me, settling back into the booth. “No, this guy out here— Ah, probably nothing. I’m off duty. What’s going on?”

  “Straight to business, Lawrence?” My voice stayed tart for no good reason. I wanted to get to business myself. I just didn’t want him to want to.

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot I want to say to you, Ginny, that doesn’t have damn-al to do with any kind of business. You know that. But what else can I say right now?”

  I thought he could try, I can’t keep breathing with you this close and me not touching you. Let’s go out to my cop car and climb in the cage and break some public-decency laws, and I will never let you go, and if it turns out the Richardsons are truly coming after your family, I will take my big cop fists and beat them until they stop. That seemed to me like a great start, but he didn’t say any of those things.

  “Business, then,” I said. I took out the Dixie cup in its plastic bag and set it on the table.

  “I think someone poisoned Liza, and that’s why she had that stroke. There’s some dried Virgin Colada in the bottom of this cup, and I need to know if that’s al that’s in there. I figured someone at some lab somewhere might owe you a favor?”

  Lawrence said, “Wait, what? Why do you think someone poisoned Liza?”—the very second the waiter dashed up to our table. He was a pudgy kid with dark hair and eyes that were shaped round already. They went rounder when he heard Lawrence. He looked back and forth between us, twice, while I tried, and failed, to look bland.

  “Hi, John,” Lawrence said.

  “Hey, Officer Rawley. What’s going on?”

  “Just hungry,” Lawrence said. His bland look was better than mine.

  The kid nodded and asked for our drink orders. We both said water and hot tea, and then Lawrence went ahead and ordered food, too: steamed dumplings and moo shu pork and General Tso’s chicken. Al our old favorites. He looked to me to see if I wanted anything else, but I didn’t. The kid wrote the order down, but then he lingered, staring at us like we were zoo monkeys, I guess to see if we were going to talk any more about poisoning people.

  Lawrence leveled a patient cop gaze on the kid, and he got fidgety under it and went scurrying.

  When he was good and gone, Lawrence asked, “Why would you think that?”

  I said, “Liza said so. She’s been working hard for weeks to tel me.”

  His mouth thinned down. It was his thinking face. “What are you not tel ing me?”

  “A lot,” I said.

  The hostess, a high-school-age blonde in a fake-silk kimono, came close to us then, leading a lone man past the goldfish pond to the booth across from ours. Lawrence watched, his brow crumpling, and we both shut up until she’d seated him and walked away. The man put his face in the menu. I leaned in closer to Lawrence to talk, but he shook his head, barely, in a faint no. He glanced at the guy in the booth beside us, a speaking glance. I looked, but al I saw was a regular-looking fel ow, maybe fifty, balding, in a blue suit and wire-rim glasses.

  While I was looking, Lawrence stood up, and in one smooth move he stepped across the aisle and pushed himself into the booth by the man. He shoved the guy over with his hip.

  “Hi,” Lawrence said to him, fake and bright.

  “Lawrence?” I said, but he kept his eyes on the guy, who was starting to sputter, very indignant. I stood up and stepped across the aisle, sliding into the seat across from the two of them. “What are you doing?”

  The guy said, “Yes, what are you doing?”

  Lawrence crowded in even closer to him, smiling easy. “Don’t bother. Your car fol owed hers into the lot, and then you sat tight til she was al the way in. I saw you peering in her car windows. What were you looking for, buddy?”

  The guy edged farther into the booth, trying to get some room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Now his affronted sputtering sounded so fake even I wasn’t buying it.

  “This is a four-top booth, and there’s plenty of two-seaters open down the other wal . So you asked to sit here. By us.” Lawrence stretched his arm over the back of the booth and leaned in closer to the guy. Real y close. Now the guy’s head was pressed against the back wal . Lawrence showed the guy his teeth, but it didn’t look like smiling. “You’re so interested in my friend here, I figured we better join you. See if we could satisfy your curiosity.”

  The guy’s righteous indignation dropped from his face like a hat he was removing. “Back off,” he said, hard, and al at once he didn’t look so regular. Lawrence eased back a few inches, giving the guy the room he asked for.

  Immediately the guy swel ed up like a puffer fish, leaning into the space Lawrence had made like he’d won a round. He said, “Now, get out of my way,” as Lawrence’s free hand disappeared under the table. His last word, “way,” came out an octave higher than the rest of the sentence. He sucked his breath in, and his face went white, and his mouth twisted. His spine went very stiff, jacking him up straight. His hands jumped up off the table and hovered in the air, almost as high as his shoulders.

  “That better?” Lawrence said, fake friendly and conversational.

  “No,” the guy said in a strangled voice.

  “Lawrence?” My voice sounded thready and scared, even to my own ears.

  The guy’s shoulders flexed, bracing, and Lawrence leaned a little closer, talking low. “Try it. I’d love for you to try it. But I’m fast. And I’ve got freakishly strong hands. See?” The guy gasped. “You won’t get these back. Not whole.” Then Lawrence said, louder but very calm, “It’s okay. Set the tea down on our table and go.” I saw that our waiter, John, had come back. His mouth was frozen in a silent O shape.

  “Cal the cops,” the guy managed to say to John. His eyes were bulging in their sockets.

  John blinked and stuttered, “But…but he is the cops.” His voice was wobbling. I couldn’t blame him. I felt
wobbly, too, al over. I stuffed my hands under my thighs to make them stop trembling, or at least so I couldn’t feel them doing it.

  “Set the drinks down, John. It’s fine,” Lawrence said, unworried and almost soothing, but his eyes never moved off the guy in the booth, and his expression didn’t match his voice. Not at al . John set the whole tray down on our table and abandoned it, scuttling back toward the kitchen. “Now, I could just cal you ‘asshole,’ but I’d like to know your name, I think. Show me some ID.”

  A fine sweat had sprung up on the guy’s forehead. He reached into his inside jacket pocket, gingerly, got his wal et out, and flipped it open.

  Lawrence glanced at the ID and read, “Mitchel Morissey. Nice to meet you. You’re a PI? Interesting. Why don’t you put your hands flat on the table for me. Nice and slow.” The guy did what Lawrence said, his wal et under one palm. “Good dog. Ginny, why would a private investigator be fol owing you?”

  “Fol owing me?” I said. My throat had gone too dry to swal ow, and a panicky spit was building up in my mouth. “I don’t know.”

  “You want to tel me why?” Lawrence asked Mitchel Morissey.

  “No.” It was more like a gasp then a real word.

  I couldn’t quite take it in. Lawrence, my straight-arrow Baptist, was doing something very bad, and not coppish, and probably il egal, under the table.

  Lawrence smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. His arm twisted a little. Tears sprang up in Morissey’s eyes. “You sure? Because this woman you’re shadowing, she’s important to me.”

  “I don’t think so,” the guy said, his voice going higher stil .

  “Shame,” Lawrence said. “Hope you’ve already had your kids.”

  Morissey’s only answer was a squeak.

  It was awful, and wrong, and the worst part was, in a deep and primal place down in my bel y, a dreadful, girlie piece of me liked it. I had to stop it, though. I had to stop him doing it before he got into trouble.