Black-Eyed Susans (26 page)

I prop the door open for Effie. Charlie
follows while carefully
balancing a clear plastic box loaded with a
sea of blue hair gel and precisely arranged food products.

Effie sniffs the air deliberately.

“It’s my 3-D animal cell
project,” Charlie tells her. “Starting to rot.”

“Well, set it on the counter here and
let’s take a look.”
Animal cell
and
3-D
take the stink out
of it for Effie, who lifts the edge of the Saran Wrap cover with enthusiasm. Charlie
snatches the offending letter out of Effie’s other hand.

“Miss Effie, this letter is from your
insurance company.” Charlie begins to skim. “They’re going to give you
$100 off your deductible and a $25 Amazon card if you fill out this form and they
approve your numbers. They also want your cholesterol.”

“Damn spies, all of them.” She
pokes a finger into the blue cesspool. “Put
1984
on your reading list,
Charlie dear. The man was a soothsayer. My waist used to be nineteen inches. Maybe
I’ll write that in their little chart. And then I’ll call the cops and sue
for sexual harassment when they send somebody around with a tape measure.” Her
finger continues to poke away in the box. “Hair gel for cytoplasm. Clever girl.
What grade did you make on this project?”

“A minus. Which is like, really good
for this teacher. The average in her class for this project over her twenty-six-year
career is a C plus.”

“Well, I’d say that’s the
sign of a bad teacher. What was the minus for?”

“The nucleus. I used a clear plastic
Christmas ornament from Hobby Lobby.”

“And the nuclear membrane isn’t
rigid. Hmm. Gotta hand that one to her, I suppose.”

“Should I dump this in the compost,
Mom? The jar said the hair gel is all-natural.”

“It seems like more of a biological
weapon at this point. I will let you and our neighborhood scientist make the call.
I’m going to change into some sweats.” And swig down a couple of
aspirin.

I navigate the hall in the
dark and flip on my bedroom light. There is a man, sleeping on my bed. Face turned away.
And yet his reaction time is still better than mine. I’m looking down, fumbling
for the gun in my waistband, and he’s already leapt the six feet across the bed,
shoved a hand over my mouth, and stifled my scream.

I struggle against him. His other arm is
pressing my back against a brutal chest.
Charlie is in the house.

“Shh. OK?”

I stop squirming. Nod. He releases his grip
and I flip away, stumbling. I find myself staring furiously at Charlie’s
father.

“Jesus, Lucas,” I hiss.
“You scared me. Where in the hell did you come from? Why can’t you knock on
the door like a normal person?”

He shuts the door. “I’m sorry. I
meant to text as soon as I got here. It was a twenty-nine-hour journey that involved
turbulence and an Army pilot who enjoyed it a little too much. The cab dropped me off a
couple of hours ago. Your bed was very comfy. I went right to sleep. Might have left
some sand in your sheets.” His face is closer to mine than necessary. “You
smell like strawberry crepes.” For a second, I remember what it was like to be
wrapped in a burrito of solid Army muscle. And then I feel another little ping for Bill.
He’d texted twice today.
How’s your day?
About two hours later:
Come on, butterfly girl, talk to me.

“Why, again, are you here?”
Trying to hold my ground in every way.

“I had a disturbing Skype session with
Charlie. After your night with a domestic terrorist.”

“Oh.” I sit on the end of the
bed. She hadn’t mentioned telling her dad, but why wouldn’t she?

Lucas plops beside me and tosses his arm
around my shoulders. “I figured I might be needed, but you’d be afraid to
ask. Also, I’m trying to be respectful of your parental boundaries. If you
don’t think I should be here, I’ll go. Charlie doesn’t have to know. I
can slip out the way I came in.”

“Which I assume is
through the front door.”

“Well, yeah. You’re paranoid
about everything but your security code. You should change it more than once every five
years.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t want you to sneak
out. Charlie should know you’re here.”
That you’ll come for
her.

I knew Lucas. It didn’t matter what
had just rolled sweetly off his tongue—he wasn’t about to go quietly after
traversing an ocean for his daughter.

He has dropped his hand to my waist.
Distracting. He lifts up the bottom edge of my shirt, lets his finger drift, and tugs
out the .22. “You could use a little practice on your quick draw. You
shouldn’t carry a gun if you can’t get it out of your pants.”

I try to summon up a retort and fail.

“How about a little refresher
tomorrow?” he asks.

My head is no longer pounding. If I still
believed in them, I’d say this man was a godsend.

Lucas had never once judged my sanity, or
told me no.

He slips the gun into my hand. “Put it
up.”

“I need a favor tomorrow
morning,” I say.

“Which involves?”

“Digging.”

My bedroom is dark, except for the glow of
the iPad. I’m propped against a stack of pillows. A full glass of wine is within
reaching distance on the nightstand. Lucas is sprawled snoring on the couch, the
contents of his duffle spilled out on the living room floor. Charlie is texting under
her covers. The evening’s competitive father-daughter game of Assassin’s
Creed was a little too instructional for my comfort. I was relieved when Lucas snapped
off the video game about half an hour ago and tucked his teen-ager into bed for the
first time
in months. She pretended to be too old for tucking in, but
we all knew better.

The dark is friendly, for once. The man on
our sofa has sifted all of the bad things from the night and stuffed them under his
pillow.

Still, I’m not at rest. I’m
determined to take a little trip into the past.

I hold the picture in my hand closer to the
light, which makes her eyes dance. A trail of Spanish lace spills down her hair and
across her shoulders. A tiny locket nestles in her throat. A modern girl transformed
into a beautiful antique bride.

I had clipped Benita’s wedding picture
out of the newspaper a very long time ago, about two summers after the trial. It
contains only the most basic information. In the photo, Benita is beaming up at a very
white man with a very white name. The bride’s parents are listed as Mr. and Mrs.
Martin Alvarez and the groom’s as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Smith Sr.

OK, Benita aka Ms. Joe Smith. I type
Benita Smith
into the iPad search bar and click on
Images.
The
first twenty-five faces do not belong to my Benita Smith. The twenty-sixth picture is a
red Mercedes, and the next is a shopping mall Christmas tree followed by a pearl
bracelet and a baby’s foot. Farther down, a kitchen pantry with bright red rooster
door handles. In case she really did go into her uncle’s cabinet business, I click
to that page. No luck. I skip through endless, useless Benita Smith story links before I
head to Facebook to search for Benita
Alvarez
Smith. Nothing. I delete her
maiden name, and the Facebook screen rolls up hundreds of Benita Smiths.

Part of me doesn’t want to work too
hard at this.
Would she really know something that could help Terrell? Did she
overhear something? Suspect something?

I had let Benita drift out of my life
seventeen years ago. There has to be a good reason for that, right? We had met for
coffee every Tuesday afternoon for a few months after I testified. The last time, she
dropped all official pretenses. She entered the café in tight black
jeans and a
Remember Selena
T-shirt, with her six-year-old
sister in tow.
Texas Monthly
had made Selena its tragic cover girl that month
instead of me, so I was still feeling the naive bliss of being old news.

Not long after Terrell was convicted,
Selena’s killer had been sentenced and locked up in Gatesville. She was confined
twenty-three hours a day to a tiny cell because of death threats. The Tejano music fans
behind bars wanted Yolanda Saldivar to die for her sins. While Benita and I had
whispered about that, her sister carefully strung plastic beads onto a shoelace. She had
tied the bracelet to my wrist like a purple-and-yellow worm.

I doubt that Benita Alvarez looms boldly in
the official records of the Black-Eyed Susans case. If her name is mentioned at all,
Bill and Angie would have glanced right over it. She was never interviewed by the media.
She didn’t testify and only attended the trial on the two days that I took the
stand. She was a minor player to everyone but me, drowned out by the thunder of Al
Vega—or
Alfonso
as he calls himself now. Mr. Vega, 100 percent Italian,
picked up the
fonso
to court the Hispanic vote when he ran his first successful
race for Texas Attorney General.

When a Terrell Darcy Goodwin question is
sprung on him, Mr. Vega declares
in no uncertain terms
that he would not try
the case any differently today. He sent a birthday card to me when I turned eighteen,
and a sympathy card when my father died. On both, he scrawled his name and wrote
underneath:
I will always be there for you.
The cynic in me wonders if those
words are just part of his regular signature to victims he wrestled into the witness
chair. But Tessie? Tessie believes she could pick up the phone and he’d be at her
front door in seconds.

I clear the search bar. Hesitate, just for a
second. Type. Most of my teen-age angst about my doctor is gone. I’m staring at
links to an array of bombastic papers he’s written for online blogs and
psychiatric journals. There’s a new one since I last searched: “The Colbert
Love Affair: Why We See Ourselves in an Imaginary French Conservative
Narcissist.”

I clear the search bar and
type another name, even more reluctantly. Click on the link at the top for the very
first time.

I’m staring at the weekly blog of
Richard Lincoln aka Dick the Dick, instantly regretting that I just provided him with a
hit, even the tiniest bit of incentive to carry on. Today’s post: “Gasping
for air.” It’s hard to look away now that I’ve come this far. Angie
always wanted me to talk to him. Thought it might bump something loose.
He’s a
changed man.

I can barely stomach the bio, so I skim.
Richard Lincoln, crusader. Nationally renowned death penalty lawyer. Author
of
The New York Times
best-selling book,
My Black Eye.

My Black Eye.
His confessional, a
year after the trial. Whenever I’m in a bookstore, I turn the cover around, even
though I’ve heard that he donates half the profits to the children of prisoners.
Because why doesn’t he donate all of them?

There’s a YouTube video link beside
his blog, which my fingers click without my brain’s permission. At once, his voice
is jarring the silent house, rising and falling like a preacher’s, still a saw
against my skin. I hurry my finger to turn him down. He’s an upright cockroach
roving an anonymous stage.
Lincoln-esque,
is how his fans describe him.
I
failed Terrell,
he’s saying
. I destroyed that girl. The Black-Eyed
Susan case was the turning point of my life.

I can’t listen to any more.

He didn’t just destroy me. He
destroyed my grandparents. The police and Dick the Dick worked in odd concert in that
regard. The police ransacked their castle and drove off with my grandfather’s
beloved truck as evidence. Nobody in Texas took a man’s truck unless he was guilty
as hell, so even his best and most stalwart farmer friends wondered. It didn’t
matter that the police said “whoops” months before the trial. Dick the Dick
still hammered away in court. A tabloid screamed,
Could Grampa be the killer?
No, I can’t offer
Dick
forgiveness despite the fact that, in the last
thirteen years, Richard Lincoln has used DNA evidence to free three innocent men from
Texas’s Death Row. I pull the cover over the iPad. Nudge a couple of
extra pillows to the floor. Slip deeper into sheets rough with sand
from a war zone. Squeeze my eyes shut. Imagine the doctor lounging in pajamas covered
with ducks in front of a
Colbert
rerun. Hope that Benita’s life is strung
like a party with purple and yellow beads.

I’m floating at the edge of
consciousness when Lydia finds a tiny wormhole.

It’s not like I haven’t dragged
the Internet for her a hundred times. Nothing. Not about her or Mr. and Mrs. Bell.
It’s like they are tiptoeing around in invisible ink while everyone else is
galloping in screaming neon. The Bells
were
odd. They had little family, and
made very few deep connections in town. Both sets of Lydia’s grandparents were
dead. I retain vague memories of a distant cousin of Mrs. Bell’s who sent a
poinsettia at Christmas. But how could a family simply vanish? How could nobody really
care?

Over the years, I’ve imagined all
sorts of outrageous plotlines about their fate. Maybe my monster killed them because
Lydia knew something. She was always clipping out articles about the Black-Eyed Susan
case and pasting them in a scrapbook she didn’t think I knew about. Scribbling
notes in the margins in her cramped, intelligent hand. My monster didn’t turn the
storm cellar into a family mausoleum, but he could have scattered their bones across the
West Texas desert.

Or their bodies could be lying miles and
miles under the sea with ocean garbage. The whole family could have bounced off on a
spontaneous vacation and sunk to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle in a wayward craft
piloted by Mr. Bell. He was always forgetting to buy a boating permit. They could have
slipped, undocumented, under the waves.