Black-Eyed Susans (17 page)

“The heart is cool, huh?” Jo
pulls it off the shelf, snaps open the box, and hands it to me like it is a rubber dog
toy. It
feels
like a rubber dog toy. My instinct to take it was automatic, as
is the one to fling it across the room. I hand it back gingerly.

“Is it real?”

“Yes. Preserved through plastination.
I did it myself.”

So I wasn’t wrong about that part.
Still, I can’t believe that Jo, my hero, my good guy, is being so cavalier.

“Want to hear the story?” She
glances at her watch. This is apparently her idea of a good way to distract me for the
next ten minutes.

I shake my head, but her
head is bent down while she’s placing the heart back in its little customized
stand. “My grandmother and I were driving to my aunt’s the night before
Thanksgiving on a dark county road in Oklahoma. The deer darted out before I could slam
on the brakes.”

A deer. OK. Feeling better.

“It was a nasty clunk,” she
continues. “My grandmother and I were both OK. But I wanted to make sure the deer
was dead before we drove off. I wasn’t going to leave him on the side of the road
dying. But when I got to him, it was pretty clear the car did the job. Before I could
decide what to do with the deer, three different pickups had pulled over to the side of
the road. Three good ole boys passing by, and all three of them want to take the deer
off my hands. I notice one of them has a sharp knife hanging off his belt.”

A distressing turn of events. The heart,
back to being a question mark.

“I told the guy with the knife that
I’d choose him to keep the deer if he let me borrow his knife. So he hands over
the knife and I cut out the deer’s heart.”

Grimm’s fairy tale, Oklahoma-style.
I’m nauseated and relieved at the same time.

“Did these truckers … have any
idea you are a forensic scientist?” I interject. “Did they know why you
wanted the heart?”
Did you know why you wanted the heart?

“I don’t remember if it came up.
They were focused on deer meat.”

“And you brought the heart …
back to your grandmother in the car and put it … where?”

“A cooler.”

“And you brought it to …
Thanksgiving?” I didn’t ask if the pumpkin pie and Cool Whip had to make
room.

“My aunt was pretty distressed when
she ran out to welcome us and saw the bashed-in hood and blood all over me. We had a
good laugh about it.”

There’s something
else niggling at me. “How were you going to kill the deer if he was
alive?”

“I didn’t know. Maybe strangle
him with my shoelace. No matter what, he was going to be dead when I left
him.”

This is the Jo I know. And another one I
didn’t.

There’s a knock on the door, and a
student in a lab coat pokes her head in.

“Dr. Jo, the cops are here. I put them
in the conference room. The front desk is sending up the family now. Bill called to say
that the Stein family has officially rejected his request to be there but wanted to be
sure you and Tessa knew the mother is bringing a psychic along with them.”

None of this appears to ruffle Jo in the
least. After all, left alone on a black Oklahoma road with her grandmother, three
hulking strangers, and a knife, all she’s thinking about is cutting out the heart
of a deer.

“You ready?” Jo asks me.

Two detectives, one brother cop, one
mother, one psychic—all waiting in grim silence around a conference table in a
claustrophobic room whose only adornments are a stained coffeepot, a stack of Styrofoam
cups, and a brown box of Kleenex that sits untouched in the middle of the table. The
fresh-paint smell is so strong it stings my throat. Except for the brother, painfully
young and official in full dress uniform, I couldn’t in a million years
distinguish who was who. No weepy red eyes. No crystal balls or flowing peasant shirts.
No other uniforms or badges.

A man in Wrangler’s and a tie
immediately stands to shake Jo’s hand, as does a woman around fifty, with the most
motherly, kind face in the room. Detective No. 1 and Detective No. 2.

I drop into a chair, wishing to be anywhere
else on earth.

I turn my attention to the woman across from
me, who immediately reaches over to cover my hands. Her hair is stiff with hair spray,
and aggravated with bold blond streaks. Her eyes are the bluest
I’ve ever seen. Rachel Stein, I assume. Except I can tell from a frown on
Detective No. 2’s face that she isn’t.

“Ma’am, we’ve asked that
you not participate in this meeting unless asked to. You are here strictly as a courtesy
to the family.”

She draws her hands back reluctantly and
winks, as if we are on the same team. I am repulsed. I want back whatever she thinks she
has snatched out of me with her moist psychic paw.

The detective is droning out introductions
while my eyes are now fixed, by process of elimination, on Hannah’s mother—a
pale, sharp-faced woman in her sixties. Jo had told me she was a middle school English
teacher. She has that no-nonsense air about her. Except she brought a psychic.

For a split second, as our eyes meet, I
glimpse horror, as if I’d just crawled out of her daughter’s grave, like a
mud monster.

The Steins have already met the coroner this
morning to receive the official identification. Jo’s job is strictly to help them
believe it beyond a doubt. She is explaining the basics of mitochondrial DNA, the
careful lab work, the mind-blowing genetic probabilities, within half a percent, that
this is her daughter. It takes about ten minutes.

“Mrs. Stein, your daughter has been
handled with the greatest of care,” Jo says. “I am terribly sorry this has
happened to your family.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your time
with us. I believe this is Hannah.” She directs her gaze to the police. It is
obvious she is having a hard time looking at me.

“Tessa.” Detective No. 2, the
woman, is speaking. I heard her name but I can’t remember it. “Can I call
you Tessa?”

“Of course.” It comes out
scratchy, and I clear my throat.

“Since there is some …
speculation … in the media about whether the right man was convicted for their
daughter’s death, the Steins are curious if you can pick out a photo of a relative
who took an unusual interest in their daughter. A suspect at the time. He is no longer
alive, so you don’t need to be afraid of any kind of
retaliation. They are simply seeking peace of mind. No one wants the wrong man
executed.” She says this without rancor, but I wonder what’s really in her
head.

I suddenly want Bill to be here. I want him
to smother my hand with his again. “That’s fine.”

“You remind me of my daughter,”
Mrs. Stein says. “Not the red hair, of course. But you give off that same …
free spirit.”

The detective slides two sheets of mug shots
flat in front of me. The brother, up until now a silent, poker-straight soldier, leans
in. It occurs to me that he wasn’t even born when his sister disappeared. He was
the recovery baby.

“He was an awful person,” Mrs.
Stein tells me brokenly. The twelve men on the table swim before me. Bald, white,
middle-aged.

“I believe God sent that deer in front
of his car.” The brother’s first words are a cold, hard slap. “Put him
in a coma so we could yank the plug. So I didn’t have to shoot the bastard
myself.”

I’m bewildered. Seriously? A deer? I
want to meet Jo’s eyes but don’t. Too much deer metaphor for one day. Too
much coincidence. Too much anger and certainty about God’s wrath, when sometimes
everything is just pointless.

“I’m sorry,” I say
finally. “I just don’t know. There is so much I don’t remember.”
At the same time, I realize that I am remembering
something.
Fabric. A pattern.
I know where I’ve seen it before, but I don’t know what it means.

Impulsively, I reach my hands out to the
psychic.

“Do you mind?” I ask the female
detective.

“Not if you don’t.”
Bemused.

Mrs. Stein is nodding animatedly, a doll
brought to life. Her son is casting me a look of scathing disappointment.

I know I have to do this, whatever I
believe. For Hannah. For her mom, eaten by grief. For her brother, who is probably a cop
for all the wrong reasons. For her father, who is conspicuously absent.

“Something is coming back to
me.” This is exquisitely true. “There’s a curtain. Can you help me see
behind it?”

The psychic’s sweaty
grip tightens. Her nails bite into my flesh. I feel like I’m being consumed by a
slobbery shark.

“Of course.” Her eyes glisten
like shards of ice, the first thing that reassures people she is special and a window to
the netherworld.

“It’s a black man,” she
says.

I remove my hands carefully and turn to
Hannah’s mother. Rachel Stein’s eyes are not glistening. They are a boggy,
open sinkhole, and I don’t want to stumble.

“Mrs. Stein, I lay in that grave with
your daughter. Hannah will forever be a part of me, like we share the same DNA. Her
monster is my monster. So please believe me when I say I know exactly what she would
tell you right now. She would tell you she loves you. And she would tell you this woman
will only hurt you. She’s a liar.”

“Are you ready to nail a killer,
Tessie?”

Mr. Vega is prowling, from desk to window to
couch. “Because you need to be mentally tough. The defense attorney is going to
try to screw with your head. I want to make sure you’re prepared for his little
circus tricks.”

The doctor catches my eye and nods
encouragement. He managed not to get kicked out of the room today. Mr. Vega and Benita
have met with me two more times in the last week, once at a bowling alley and another
time at a Starbucks. Mr. Vega introduced me to Mocha Frappuccinos and grilled
jalapeños on hot dogs. He asked me
why
I like to run and
why
I
like to draw and
why
I hated the Yankees so much. I went along with the
“getting to know me” sessions because it was a lot less painful than hanging
out on the couch with the doctor. Like Dad said, they were all just doing their
jobs.

Things turned for me sometime during disco
bowling on lane 16, while the lights flashed psychedelic and pins thundered and Sister
Sledge got down. Mr. Vega and I were locked in a bowling duel. Benita was keeping score
and yelling some crazy Spanish cheer from her high school days. Mr. Vega wasn’t
cutting me any slack, even though I had to get my surgeon’s permission to
temporarily strip off the boot brace to play. The man about to prosecute my monster
threw a spare/strike/spare to win the game, even when I faked a limp
at the end.

So maybe he was manipulative and maybe he
was genuine and maybe he was a little of both. Regardless, when I sat down on the couch
today to officially prepare for the trial, I was in the game—no longer on Mr.
Vega’s team simply because there was no way out. I wanted to win.

“I know every play this guy
has.” Mr. Vega is still roving the room, like he’s already in court.

“He likes to get kids on the yes-no
train,” he continues. “Remember, the less narrative your answers, the less
the jury can feel your pain. He will ask you a series of questions, where the answer is
positively ‘yes.’ So you will answer, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Then he will
slip in a question that is absolutely a ‘no’ answer, but you’ll be on
the train, in the ‘yes’ rhythm. You’ll say ‘yes’ and when
you are immediately flustered and change to ‘no,’ he’ll ask whether
you are confused. And so it begins.”

I nod. This seems easy enough to handle.

“He will throw dates and numbers at
you until your head spins. Whenever you are confused, ask him to explain himself again.
Every. Single. Time. This makes him look more like a bully.” He steps toward me,
and his face goes slack.

“If four times six equals twenty-four
and twice that is forty-eight, what is fifty times that plus six?”

I stare at him, disbelieving. Begin to
multiply.

He jams his finger in the air. “Fast,
Tessie. Answer.”

“I can’t.”

“OK. That feeling right now, numb and
slightly panicky? That’s it. That’s how it’s going to feel. Times
four.” He is on the prowl again. I’m glad that Oscar isn’t here.
He’d be going nuts. “This will be the toughest part. He will insinuate you
are hiding things.
Why is it that you can remember buying tampons on the day of the
attack but not this man’s face? Why did you have a relationship with a crazy
homeless man? Why did you run alone every day?
”

“I run too fast for
most of my friends to keep up,” I protest. “And Roosevelt isn’t that
crazy.”

“Uh-uh, Tessie. Don’t just
react.
Think
about the question.
I always ran in the daylight hours on two routes
approved by my father. Roosevelt has been sitting on the same corner for ten years,
and is good friends with everyone, including the local cops.
Matter-of-fact.
Don’t let him get to you. You did nothing wrong.”

“Will he really bring up the …
tampons?”

“I would bet on it. It’s another
way to make you uncomfortable. A subtle move that the jury won’t notice. The
tampons are a fact of life for them. For you, a teen-age girl, they are intimate and
embarrassing. Believe me, Dick has no boundaries even when it comes to child victims of
sexual abuse.”

His eyes are laser-focused on me again.

“Why did you get suspended from two
track meets last year?”

The doctor shifts positions. He wants to
interfere. Mr. Vega senses it and holds up his hand in his direction, a halt signal. He
keeps his eyes trained on me.

Is this the Vega who is pretending, or the
real one? Either way, this question really ticks me off. Anger always starts as a little
tingle in the roots of my hair, and then spreads like spilled hot water.