Sleeping Beauties: A Novel Page 4

  He had taught her how to smoke dope—take small sips, he said. “You’ll feel better.” What a liar. What a bastard he had been, what a monster. So why was she crying over him? She couldn’t help it. She wished she could, but she couldn’t.

  8

  The Avon Lady who was not an Avon Lady walked away from the trailer and back toward the meth lab. The smell of propane grew stronger with each step until the air was rancid with it. Her footprints appeared behind her, white and small and delicate, shapes that came from nowhere and seemed to be made of milkweed fluff. The hem of her borrowed shirt fluttered around her long thighs.

  In front of the shed she plucked up a piece of paper caught in a bush. At the top, in big blue letters, it announced EVERYTHING IS ON SALE EVERY DAY! Below this were pictures of refrigerator units both large and small, washing machines, dishwashers, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, Dirt Devils, trash compactors, food processors, more. One picture showed a trim young woman in jeans smiling knowingly down upon her daughter, who was blond like Mom. The pretty tyke held a plastic baby in her arms and smiled down upon it. There were also large TVs showing men playing football, men playing baseball, men in racing cars, and grill set-ups beside which stood men with giant forks and giant tongs. Although it did not come right out and say so, the message of this advertising circular was clear: women work and nest while men grill the kill.

  Evie rolled the advertising circular into a tube and began to snap the fingers of her left hand beneath the protruding end. A spark jumped at each snap. On the third one, the paper flared alight. Evie could grill, too. She held the tube up, examined the flame, and tossed it into the shed. She walked away at a brisk pace, cutting through the woods toward Route 43, known to the locals as Ball’s Hill Road.

  “Busy day,” she said to the moths once more circling her. “Busy, busy day.”

  When the shed blew she did not turn around, nor did she flinch when a piece of corrugated steel whickered over her head.

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  The Dooling County sheriff’s station dozed in the morning sun. The three holding cells were empty, barred doors standing open, floors freshly washed and smelling of disinfectant. The single interview room was likewise empty, as was Lila Norcross’s office. Linny Mars, the dispatcher, had the place to herself. Behind her desk hung a poster of a snarling, buffed-out con wearing an orange jumpsuit and curling a couple of hand barbells. THEY NEVER TAKE A DAY OFF, the poster advised, AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU!

  Linny made a practice of ignoring this well-meant advice. She had not worked out since a brief fling with Dancercise at the YWCA, but did take pride in her appearance. Now she was absorbed in an article in Marie Claire about the proper way to put on eyeliner. To get a stable line, one began by pressing one’s pinky against one’s cheekbone. This allowed more control and insured against any sudden twitches. The article suggested starting in the middle and working one’s way to the far corner of the eye, then going to the nose side and working one’s way in to complete the look. A thin line for daywear; a thicker, more dramatic one for that important night out with the guy you hoped would—

  The phone rang. Not the regular line, but the one with the red stripe on the handset. Linny put Marie Claire down (reminding herself to stop by the Rite Aid and get some L’Oréal Opaque) and picked up the phone. She had been catching in Dispatch for five years now, and at this time of the morning it was apt to be a cat up a tree, a lost dog, a kitchen mishap, or—she hoped not—a choking incident with a toddler involved. The weapons-related shit almost always happened after the sun went down, and usually involved the Squeaky Wheel.

  “911, what is your emergency?”

  “The Avon Lady killed Tru!” a woman shouted. “She killed Tru and Tru’s friend! I don’t know his name, but she put his fuckin head right through the fuckin wall! If I look at that again, I’ll go blind!”

  “Ma’am, all 911 calls are recorded,” Linny said, “and we do not appreciate pranks.”

  “I ain’t prankin! Who’s prankin? Some random bitch just came in here, killed Tru! Tru and the other guy! There’s blood ever’where!”

  Linny had been ninety percent sure that this was a prank or a crank when the slurry voice mentioned the Avon Lady; now she was eighty percent sure that it was for real. The woman was blubbering almost too hard to be understood, and her piney woods accent was as thick as a brick. If Linny hadn’t come from Mink Crossing in Kanawha County, she might have thought her caller was speaking a foreign language.

  “What is your name, ma’am?”

  “Tiffany Jones, but ne’mine me! They’s dead and I don’t know why she let me live, but what if she comes back?”

  Linny hunched forward, studying today’s duty sheet—who was in, who was on patrol. The sheriff’s department had only nine cars, and one or two were almost always in the shop. Dooling County was the smallest county in the state, although not quite the poorest; that dubious honor went to neighboring McDowell County, splat in the middle of nowhere.

  “I don’t see your number on my screen.”

  “Course you don’t. It’s one of Tru’s burners. He does somethin to em. He—” There was a pause, a crackle, and Tiffany Jones’s voice at once receded and pitched higher. “—oh my Christ, the lab just blew! Why’d she do that for? Oh, my Christ, oh, my Christ, oh—”

  Linny started to ask what she was talking about, and then heard a rumbling boom. It wasn’t particularly loud, it didn’t rattle the windows, but it was a boom, all right. As if a jet from Langley over in Virginia had broken the sound barrier.

  How fast does sound travel? she wondered. Didn’t we learn that formula in physics class? But high school physics had been a long time ago. Almost in another life.

  “Tiffany? Tiffany Jones? Are you still there?”

  “You get someone out here before the woods catch afire!” Tiffany screamed this so loudly that Linny held the phone away from her ear. “Follow your damn nose! Watch the smoke! It’s pilin up already! Out Ball’s Hill, past the Ferry and the lumberyard!”

  “This woman, the one you called the Avon Lady—”

  Tiffany began to laugh as she cried. “Oh, cops goan know her if they see her. She’ll be the one covered in Truman Mayweather’s blood.”

  “May I have your ad—”

  “Trailer don’t have no address! Tru don’t take mail! Just shut your gob and get someone out here!”

  With that, Tiffany was gone.

  Linny crossed the empty main office and went out into the morning sun. A number of people were standing on the Main Street sidewalks, shading their eyes and looking east. In that direction, maybe three miles distant, black smoke was rising. Nice and straight, not ribboning, and thank God for that. And yes, it was near Adams Lumberyard, a place she knew well, first from pickup truck trips out there with her daddy and then from pickup truck trips out there with her husband. Men had many strange fascinations. Lumberyards seemed to be one of them, probably falling somewhere just ahead of bigfoot trucks but well behind gun shows.

  “What do we got?” called Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity, standing outside his storefront across the street.

  Linny could practically see the columned figures of premiums scrolling across the backs of Drew T. Barry’s eyes. She returned inside without answering him, first to call the fire department (where phones would already be ringing, she guessed), then Terry Coombs and Roger Elway in Unit Four, then the boss. Who was probably asleep after calling in sick the previous night.

  2

  But Lila Norcross wasn’t asleep.

  She had read in a magazine article, probably while waiting to have her teeth cleaned or her eyes checked, that it took the average person fifteen to thirty minutes to fall asleep. There was a caveat, however, of which Lila hardly needed to be informed: one needed to be in a calm state of mind, and she was not in that state. For one thing, she was still dressed, although she had unsnapped her pants and unbuttoned her brown uniform shirt. She had als
o taken off her utility belt. She felt guilty. She wasn’t used to lying to her husband about little things, and had never lied about a really big thing until this morning.

  Crack-up on Mountain Rest Road, she had texted. Don’t try calling, we need to get the mess cleaned up. This morning she had even added a bit of verisimilitude that now pricked her like a thorn: Cat litter all over the highway! Needed a bulldozer! But a thing like that would be in Dooling’s weekly paper, wouldn’t it? Only Clint never read it, so perhaps that would be all right. But people would talk about such a humorous happenstance, and when they didn’t, he’d wonder . . .

  “He wants to be caught,” she had said to Clint when they were watching an HBO documentary—The Jinx, it was called—about a rich and eccentric serial killer named Robert Durst. This was early in the second of six episodes. “He would never have agreed to talk to those documentary guys if he didn’t.” And sure enough, Robert Durst was currently back in jail. The question was, did she want to be caught?

  If not, why had she texted him in the first place? She told herself at the time it was because if he called and heard the background noise in the Coughlin High School gymnasium—the cheering crowd, the squeak of sneakers on the hardwood, the blare of the horn—he would naturally ask where she was and what she was doing there. But she could have let his call go to voicemail, right? And returned it later?

  I didn’t think of it, she told herself. I was nervous and I was upset.

  True or false? This morning she leaned toward the latter. That she had been weaving a tangled web on purpose. That she wanted to force Clint to force her to confess, and for him to be the one to pull the unraveling string.

  It occurred to her, ruefully, that for all her years of experience in law enforcement, it was her husband, the psychiatrist, who would make the far better criminal. Clint knew how to keep a secret.

  Lila felt as though she’d discovered that there was a whole other floor in her home. Quite by accident she had pressed a certain scuffed spot on the wall and a stairwell had been revealed. Just inside the secret passage was a hook and draped on that hook was a jacket of Clint’s. The shock was bad, the pain was worse, but neither compared to the shame: How could you fail to perceive? And once you did become aware, once you did wake up to the reality of your life, how could you live a second longer without screaming it out loud? If the discovery that your husband, a man you had spoken to every day for over fifteen years, the father of your child, had a daughter that he had never mentioned—if that didn’t warrant a scream, a throat-ripping howl of rage and hurt, then what did? Instead, she had wished him a good day, and lain down.

  Weariness at last began to catch up and iron out her distress. She was finally going down, and that was good. This would look simpler after five or six hours of sleep; she would feel more settled; she would be able to talk to him; and maybe Clint could help her understand. That was his job, wasn’t it? Making sense of life’s messes. Well, did she ever have a mess for him! Cat litter all over the road. Cat shit in the secret passage, cat litter and cat shit on the basketball court, where a girl named Sheila dropped her shoulder, making the defender scramble back, then crossed over and headed for the hoop.

  A tear dripped down her cheek and she exhaled, close to the escape of sleep.

  Something tickled her face. It felt like a strand of hair or maybe an errant thread from the pillowcase. She brushed it away, slipped a little deeper toward true sleep, and was almost there when her phone bugled at her from the utility belt laid across the cedar chest at the foot of the bed.

  She opened her eyes and swam into a sitting position. That thread or hair or whatever it was brushed her cheek; she swatted it away. Clint, if that’s you—

  She got the phone, stared at the screen. Not Clint. The single word was BASE. The clock read 7:57 AM. Lila thumbed ACCEPT.

  “Sheriff? Lila? Are you up?”

  “No, Linny, this is all a dream.”

  “I think we might have a big problem.”

  Linny was clipped and professional. Lila gave her full marks for that, but her accent had crept back into her voice, not I think we have a big problem but Ah thank, which meant she was serious and worried. Lila popped her eyes wide, as if that would help her wake up faster.

  “Caller reported multiple homicides out by Adams Lumberyard. She might have been wrong about that, or lying, or even hallucinating, but there certainly was one hell of a bang. You didn’t hear it?”

  “No. Tell me exactly what you got.”

  “I can play the call—”

  “Just tell me.”

  Linny told her: stoned woman, hysterical, says there’s two dead, Avon Lady did the deed, explosion, visible smoke.

  “And you sent—”

  “Unit Four. Terry and Roger. According to their last call-in, they’re less than a mile away.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “Are you—”

  “On my way.”

  3

  She was halfway to the cruiser parked in the driveway when she became aware of Anton Dubcek staring at her. Shirtless, pecs gleaming, pants riding (barely) the spars of his hipbones, the pool guy appeared to be auditioning for the position of May pin-up boy on a Chippendales calendar. He was at the curb by his van, retrieving some piece of pool cleaning equipment. “Anton the Pool Guy” written on the side in Florentine script.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Morning glory,” Anton said, and favored her with a radiant smile that had probably charmed every barmaid in the Tri-Counties.

  She looked down and saw that she had neither tucked in nor buttoned her shirt. The plain white bra beneath showed a lot less than either of her two bikini tops (and a lot less glamorously), but there was something about men and underwear; they saw a girl in a bra, and it was like they had just won fifty on a five-buck Dollars ‘N’ Dirt scratch ticket. Hell, Madonna had made a career of it back in the day. Probably before Anton was born, she realized.

  “Does that line work, Anton?” Buttoning and tucking in. “Ever?”

  The smile widened. “You’d be surprised.”

  Ah, such white teeth. She wouldn’t be surprised.

  “Back door’s open, if you want a Coke. Lock it behind you when you leave, okay?”

  “Roger-wilco.” He snapped off a half-assed salute.

  “And no beer. It’s too early even for you.”

  “It’s always five o’clock somewh—”

  “Spare me the lyrics, Anton. It was a long night and if I don’t manage some shut-eye down the line, it’s going to be a long day.”

  “Roger that, too. But hey, Sheriff, I got bad news: pretty sure you got Dutch Elm out back. You want me to leave you the phone number for my tree guy? You’re not going to want to let that—”

  “Whatever, thanks.” Lila didn’t care about the trees, not this morning, although she had to appreciate the thoroughness of the bad timing: her lies, Clint’s omissions, exhaustion, fire, corpses, and now infested trees, all before nine o’clock. The only thing missing was Jared breaking an arm or something, and Lila would have no choice but to go to St. Luke’s and beg for Father Lafferty to take her confession.

  She backed down the driveway, headed east on Tremaine Street, did a California stop that would have earned her a ticket if she hadn’t been the sheriff, saw the smoke rising out Route 17 way, and hit the jackpot lights. She’d save the siren for the three blocks that constituted downtown Dooling. Give everyone a thrill.

  4

  At the traffic light across from the high school, Frank Geary tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. He was on his way to Judge Silver’s house. The old judge had called him on his cell phone; by the sound he’d barely been holding it together. His cat, Cocoa, had been struck by a car.

  A familiar homeless woman, bundled in so many layers of garments that you couldn’t see her feet, crossed in front of his truck, pushing her shopping cart. She was talking to herself with a bright, amused expression. Maybe one of h
er personalities was planning a surprise birthday party for one of her other personalities. He sometimes thought it would be nice to be crazy, not crazy like Elaine seemed to think he was, but actually crazy, talking-to-yourself-and-pushing-a-shopping-cart-full-of-garbage-bags-and-the-top-half-of-a-male-mannequin crazy.

  What reason did insane people have to worry? Crazy reasons, probably, though in his fantasy of madness, Frank liked to imagine it was simpler. Do I pour the milk and cereal over my head, or do I pour it all into the mailbox? If you were bonkers, perhaps that was a stressful decision. For Frank, there was the stress of the upcoming annual cutbacks in the Dooling Municipal Budget that might put him out of work, and there was the stress of trying to hold it together for the weekends when he saw his daughter, and then there was the stress of knowing that Elaine expected him not to be able to hold it together. His own wife rooting against him, how was that for stress? Milk and cereal over the head or into the mailbox, by comparison, he thought he could handle with no problem. Cereal over the head, milk in the mailbox. There. Problem solved.

  The light turned green and Frank swung left onto Malloy.

  5

  On the opposite side of the street the homeless woman—Old Essie to the volunteers at the shelter, Essie Wilcox once upon a time—jounced her shopping cart up the short, grassy embankment that surrounded the high school parking lot. After she had gained the plateau of the pavement, she pushed toward the athletic fields and the scrub woods beyond, where she kept house in the warm months.

  “Hurry along, children!” Essie spoke forward, as if to the rattling contents of her shopping cart, but actually addressing her invisible family of four identical little girls, who trailed behind in a row, like ducklings. “We need to be home for supper—or else we might end up as supper! In a witch’s pot!”