Playing Dead (8 page)

Here, I had curled up in a slice of sun on the pine floor, listening to the steady vibration of the dryer, watching Mama pay bills or write letters.

It had always been my safe room. If there was anything to discover, I was certain it would be here.

I set the gun on the top ledge of the desk, moving aside a
Hummel figurine of a girl playing piano, a bowl of seashells, and a small blue-velvet-covered book of Emily Dickinson poetry.

The gun looked ugly beside them, its character changed forever today, the first time I fired out of fear.

Mama’s window loomed, a big black hole into the night. The security lights shone only on the front of the house and tonight’s schizophrenic moon was in hiding.

I imagined a face emerging in the glass like a floater rising to the top of a lake.

A man, an attacker, could be standing on the other side and I wouldn’t know until the shards shattered and rained all over me.

Stop it
, I told myself.
Stop it!

I yanked at the cord of the blinds, slamming them down.

The desktop rolled up easily. Inside, the desk was riddled with cubbyholes and rows of tiny drawers.

The middle drawer in the top row always held the most fascination for Sadie and me, with its miniature keyhole and a crudely carved monkey gargoyle, its hands over its eyes.

The irony was not lost on me today. I pulled on the drawer, but it didn’t open. I closed and opened ten other drawers, but they revealed only the usual debris: paper clips, old car keys, a bundle of rubber bands, a handful of buttons that weren’t related.

I saved the large right-hand drawer for last, giving it a solid yank. I knew what was inside: a plain white business envelope grimly labeled “Read After My Death.” As one of her last lucid acts, Mama made a specific point of showing me exactly where it was. Funeral arrangements, she said. I flipped over the envelope, tempted to break the seal. Instead, I slid it deliberately back into the drawer. There were other things to discover first.

I heard a scratching sound. A rat running along the woodwork?

No. At the window. Something outside.

It’s nothing
, I told myself. Just like all those times as teenagers when Sadie and I lay in our beds upstairs, egging each other on, imagining all sorts of things congregating in the dark.

I cautiously pushed aside the blind because the nine-year-old version of Sadie wasn’t there to pay a dollar to do it.

Not a face. The fingers of a tree danced on the glass.

The wind was beginning to blow, the storm coming. The moon, gone. I dropped the blinds and checked the locks on every door and window in the house. I yanked every curtain closed, flipped on every light. When I was done, I felt marginally more secure.

Rummaging around in the large cabinet over the washing machine, I found a feather pillow with the right degree of mushiness and a set of striped blue sheets, smelling like they’d just been pulled from the line outside the window.

Halfway up the staircase, exhaustion overtook any paranoia about what lurked out there in the night. My bandaged knee ached. I turned on the light when I reached my room, taking in the bare twin mattresses, the bright yellow furniture, the red curtains running with black ponies.

With what little energy I had left, I thought about Fate. I thought about it as I kicked off my boots, as I tugged on the fitted sheet, as I yanked my hair out of its sloppy pin-up job, as I tucked the gun under my pillow, a big McCloud no-no.

I thought about my brother, Tuck, who used to sit on the edge of this bed and tell me stories before he died in a car wreck on his eighteenth birthday and left a bottomless hole in my childhood. I thought about Rosalina, still searching for her stolen daughter. I thought about Anthony Marchetti, a killer of children, and wondered again what in the hell he had to do with me.

The rain came as I shut my eyes.

I never knew Roxy Martin, but I saw gauze from her prom dress hanging like a turquoise ghost from a hundred-year-old oak tree a half-hour after the breath left her body. It plays like a movie in my mind. The mangled Mercedes convertible in the ravine. The flashing lights of the police cars that blocked the road, their headlights pointed toward silhouettes of three men down by the river searching among the wreckage for pieces of a pretty girl. The loud drumming of the helicopter ambulance landing on the black road ahead of us.

I read about Roxy in the paper the next day and the next: a sophomore, a star volleyball player, a daughter of a single mom, and the victim of a senior boy who drank straight vodka out of a plastic water bottle at the dance and survived the accident with a bruised spleen and two broken legs.

That was four years ago. I had been in Wyoming, driving back to Halo Ranch on my day off after picking up a prescription for a sick horse. Sitting there in my pickup, the police lights strobing my face, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the scene. I couldn’t breathe. A psych major halfway to a Ph.D., I could identify my first panic attack.

I could also draw a line to its source.

Tuck.

I’d never had a full-blown attack since. But this morning, after a brief, fitful night of sleep in my old bed, I sat at Mama’s kitchen table and my hand trembled while I pulled my gun apart to clean it.

I could be the daughter of a monster. For the first time, I gave that realization the freedom to roam my brain. Sadie’s revelation about Daddy’s words had opened a dark chasm.

I love her like she was my own
.

My childhood could be a complete fraud. My DNA, an especially sick, twisted double helix formed by a stripper and a hit man.

Mama and Daddy could be champion liars. Kidnappers. Sadie might not be my real sister.

When a sharp pain jabbed me in the chest, I stood up and sucked in some slow, ragged breaths, opening the refrigerator for something to do, for some way to avoid a trip to Panic City.

A twelve-pack of Dr Pepper sat in the front. Whenever in Texas, I lived by Dr Pepper’s 1920s slogan: “Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2, and 4.” It was inspired by a long-dead Columbia University scientist who determined we had a natural drop in energy at those times of the day. I added a Pepper between the a.m. hours of six and eight whenever necessary. It was 7:08 a.m. according to the rooster clock above the old gas stove, which used to crow on the hour until Daddy figured out a way to shut him up.

I popped the top of a can and drank an icy, luscious, sweet sip, my legal alternative to crack cocaine. The thirty-nine grams of sugar ran straight to my bloodstream, respectable only if you compared it with the fifty grams in a can of Orange Crush. Maddie shared these numbers in a born-again manner during a brief stint when she drank only water at the behest of one of her TV pop-star princesses. A true McCloud girl, she returned to the Dr Pepper fold in two weeks.

As my blood pressure dropped to an acceptable level, I pulled my purse off the floor and dug out my phone. Three messages waited on my voicemail.

The first, from the Fort Worth police. Jack Smith’s arm was not broken, just sprained. His attackers had made bail. The two men explained the encounter as a case of road rage, claimed that Jack had cut them off on I-35, then flipped them off. They’d followed
him to the parking garage for “a conversation” and Jack had made the first move.

I didn’t believe it for a second but it was a pretty good story because we lived in Texas, where the rules weren’t always clear to people. I made a mental note to call the police and get the real names of Jack Smith’s attackers. In Texas, Bubba wasn’t derogatory. It was affectionate. It could be a nickname for anything.

I didn’t like that I’d pissed off two violent strangers who carried around a picture of me and were now free.

The second voicemail, from Sadie, was short: “Call me after your Dr Pepper.” The rooster said it was still a little early for that.

The third was Jack Smith himself. He asked whether I’d mind dropping by his hotel sometime this morning. No explanation.

Sorry, Jack, I have other plans today
.

As an afterthought, I checked my email, which I was stuck doing on my phone until wireless internet and cable were set up at the ranch. I didn’t much like reading email on a tiny screen; I’d meant to go through it on Sadie’s laptop last night but forgot because, as Granny would say, things took a turn.

I glanced at fifteen new messages with familiar addresses. Chicksaddlery, Equineglobe, Texaslonghorns, Potterybarn, Amazon, iTunes. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Eventually I’d weeded out all but five emails. Four were from staff at Halo asking how I was doing. Kind, concerned. I would miss these people.

The last email fell into neither category. Not obvious spam, not personal. The address was [email protected].

Subject line: Don’t let this happen to your loved one.

If an exclamation point had been tagged at the end, I would have immediately dismissed it as an ad for drunk driving or Lap-Band surgery.

But there wasn’t, and I opened it.

The message was a yawning square of empty white. No words. No picture of a smiling, size 12, Lap-Band surgery graduate holding up a pair of circus-tent jeans.

My finger hovered for a second before I clicked the attachment. My phone screen filled with a pixelated blur. I closed out the screen and tried again. I got the same garbled mosaic of tiny tiles.

Nothing, I told myself. Nausea began a dance in my gut. An email lost in space, meant for someone else.

Still.

How easy would it be to trace the email or to sharpen the focus? I could email the image to my laptop, but I didn’t have the necessary software. Or the skills, for that matter. I didn’t want to involve a commercial photo lab.

Or the police. Not yet.

If it was nothing, I could look foolish. If it was something, I lost control.

Once you went official, the game changed forever. Not always a good thing, Grandaddy said.

How clearly I heard his voice in my head these last few days.

The panic was awake again, stretching and yawning and curling inside me like a predatory eel.

I’m a psychologist, I reassured myself. Not a frightened girl.

I once won a collegiate prize for a thesis on Alfred Hitchcock and the cinematic techniques of the modern-day stalker.

I could play this game and win.

I knew the rules.

Even in my head, it sounded hollow.

I glanced at my watch, flexing the fingers on my left hand, an involuntary habit ever since the cast was removed all those years ago.

I needed to pull myself together.

Mama was waiting.

I
turned in to a parking spot in front of the Good Samaritan Center, my mind entangled in the past, suddenly bothered about Mama’s desk, about the day she caught me trying to unlock the middle drawer with a bobby pin.

I was nine and had just spent a weekend in bed with Encyclopedia Brown and the flu. Mama’s usually gentle fingers left red marks on my arm and a dime-sized bruise that took a week to fade.

Later that day, she apologized with a package of Hostess cupcakes and a Coke with crushed ice. Her eyes were bloodshot, like she’d been crying. She apologized, but she also made it clear I was not to do this again. Ever.

In my rearview mirror, I watched a man in a cowboy hat emerge from a black pickup. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but I waited until he entered the nursing home before I got out of my truck.

Jesus, I couldn’t start living like this, afraid of every tall man in Texas with a cowboy hat and a black truck. I’d be certifiably nuts in a few hours.

For the last year, Mama had lived in this building among a sad cast of people. The outside looked like an adult Disneyland, with
a grandiose arched entrance and golf-course coifing of flowers and trees. Fake lily pads danced on the surface of scattered ponds. Wrought-iron benches waited for company that rarely came.

All of it cleverly disguised the reality of the place once you hit the door: another L-shaped hospital ward where people came as a last resort. Expensive wallpaper, nice furniture, and pretty paintings on the walls didn’t make a bit of difference when there was only one way out.