Chapter Twenty
Twenty
I jumped from my seat and ran to Porter as he opened the front entrance to Painting Pots.
He froze in his tracks. “What are you doing here?!”
“What am I doing here?” I pushed him back out the door so that we wouldn’t be overheard. “What the hell happened to you?”
He scratched at the back of his head, thinking about what to say.
“What?!” I yelled, demanding a response.
“Gwen, I did something…bad.” He looked over my shoulder and noticed Elyse through the window. “What is she doing here?”
“Who cares? Tell me what’s going on. Where have you been?”
He danced in place, incapable of stillness. “There’s someone in my trunk.”
“Someone, like a human being?”
“Yes, like a human being.” He leaned in. “A fucking dead body.” He shook his hands out like the words had landed on his fingertips.
“Oh my God. Why is there a dead body in your trunk? Did you kill someone?!”
“No, I didn’t kill her.” He groaned. “Please help me. Please don’t call the cops.” He scratched at his arms like he was tripping, and I hoped that he was just hallucinating something awful.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“I need to put it in the kiln and you’re here having a Girl Scout meeting.” He peered back over my shoulder at Elyse with the audacity to be annoyed.
“You brought the body here?”
“I told you, it’s in my trunk.” He reached up and seized both of my arms. “You need to get rid of Elyse.”
I rotated a hair to peek at her sitting there, watching. “Okay. Bring your car around to the back and I’ll let you in once she’s gone.”
“Thank you,” he said, spinning around and running to his car.
I went back inside and took slow, awkward steps toward Elyse. “I have to help Porter with something. Is it all right if we call it a night?”
She stood and met me halfway. “What happened? Do you need my help?” She reached up and touched my arm. I shivered from the sensation of her hand on my skin. Why was she touching me? She used her thumb to wipe at something. Porter had left a streak of blood on my arm.
I moved to scrub at it, getting her hand out of the way. “No, it’s okay. He got in a car accident and is pretty shaken up. I’m going to help him get home.”
“Whatever you say.” She smirked in an insulting, accusatory way, but instead of pushing it, she brushed past me and out the front door—back into whatever shadow she had emerged from.
I wanted to stare at the last place she was visible, transfixed, focused on the meaning of it all, but I couldn’t stand around being a Jane Austen character when I had to help get rid of a dead body—reality, the enemy of romanticism.
- - - - -
I propped open the back door as Porter reversed his ancient car toward me. I met him at the trunk, where he inserted the key, then stopped. “Are you going to be okay seeing this?” he asked.
“Just get it over with.” What I meant was Yes, please. It had been so long since I had seen a dead body—a whole one anyway.
He popped the trunk and my throat closed.
She was loosely wrapped in a tarp and her frizzy auburn-and-gray hair was congealed with blood.
“It’s Reanne Haggerty,” Porter said. No shit.
“Who did this?” I choked out. “Why do you—”
“Just help me, okay?” He reached into the trunk and grabbed my mother by her armpits. “I’m going to puke,” he said, gagging and burying his nose and mouth in his shoulder for a moment. “Grab her ankles,” he ordered as he regained control of his stomach.
“Stop,” I said, and he paused. “We’re not bringing her inside.”
Porter released the body, but glared at me for further explanation.
“We can’t put her in the kiln. For a million reasons.”
His stare was so blank. It wasn’t because he was dumb. He wasn’t dumb. It was because he was incapable of thinking logically anymore.
“Will she fit? Does it get hot enough? Is it going to smell? How long does it take? Will there be traces of her everywhere? Porter, you can’t dispose of a body in the place where you work. You might as well try burying her in your backyard.”
He sighed, bringing his hands to his face and rubbing them up and down. “What should I do, then?”
I took a step toward his trunk like an answer would present itself. I stood over her body. Her throat was slit—amateurish, too messy, a terrifying death, a millisecond of time when you think maybe the knife missed before you start catching your own blood in your hand.
I didn’t like to admit it, but half of me had come from this woman. I’d never felt a connection, but I had grown inside her and she had fed me and dressed me and kept me alive before I was equipped do those things myself. Was I too hard on her? Was it just easier to hate her?
My plan had worked. Porter was with me, and instead, Reanne was dead.
This was my doing. I had felt so smart concocting the plan.
So why did I feel like complete shit now?
Maybe it was because of Gustus. He was going to be heartbroken.
He’d waited so long for her to get out of prison only for her to be taken away again.
It had to be that. It wasn’t possible these churning feelings were about losing her. I wasn’t ready for that.
I knew for my cover I should be freaking out, but I didn’t feel like it.
The kid was too far gone; he didn’t care if I was reacting appropriately.
That was my fault too. I never thought it would come to this, but I knew he was susceptible.
Not to anything specifically, but I knew he was young and lost and desperate for a place in the world.
I had taken a kid like that, who I supposedly cared about, and thrown him right to the wolves.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he insisted. “She was dead when I showed up—sitting on the couch, blood everywhere, throat slit. Her eyes were all open.” He kept rubbing his hands forcefully over his face and through his hair, spreading bits of dried blood all over himself.
“And my stuff…she had things that were mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like some of my old hair was on the floor, covered in blood. There was a receipt on the table that I know was mine, covered in blood. My debit card was sticking out from between the cushions…COVERED IN BLOOD. Do you see what I’m saying? I was being set up.”
“Why were you even there?”
“She asked me to go there. She said it was a friend’s house and I could crash there. Once I saw the body, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t do it, but it looked like I did.”
“Who told you to go there?” I asked.
He turned toward me, bracing for my reaction. “It was her…It was Marin Haggerty.”