Chapter 5
Chapter Five
It was two a.m. when Diane finally got home from burying the dead pedophile.
She put the blanket into a second Hefty bag, one of her own with the spring-fresh scent and set it inside one of the trash cans in the garage, where it would fit right in and not raise any eyebrows until she had the chance to burn it.
The garbage had been picked up yesterday, so she had plenty of time.
She ran the portable vacuum all through the cargo hold and then washed the Weather Tech liner with bleach solution, just in case.
She left the hatch open to air it out. Finally, she tiptoed past her sleeping husband, as handsome now as the day she’d laid eyes on him, and into their bathroom for the hottest shower she could stand.
She thought she should be reacting to the night she’d just been through.
Crying or shaking or panicking or something.
It seemed odd to her that she wasn’t. She was as calm as if she buried bodies every day.
There was an odd sense of rightness about the whole thing.
The man was a pedophile. He’d been hurting little girls.
And he met his end when a grandmother of children the same age as his victims took him out and her friends had helped her cover it up.
Diane felt that nothing at all wrong had occurred, and she knew it was probably wrong to feel that way, but she couldn’t come up with any real argument as to why. Yes, it would have been better had he been caught and arrested and tried…
Or would it? Wouldn’t all that have exposed those poor girls to public humiliation, exposure, embarrassment, even more trauma than he’d already put them through? How many, she wondered, had suffered at Mr. Terrence’s hand? Bonnie said he went from school to school with his program.
The police would still know, but maybe without the need for a trial, it wouldn’t have to be so public. Honestly, she could not find a single negative repercussion of removing a predator from the planet, other than getting caught. That would be a big one.
Eventually, she climbed into bed beside Harry.
He was awake, though he’d been asleep when she’d sneaked through earlier. She wrapped her arms around his waist from behind.
He grumbled, “You were out awfully late.”
“Yeah, I was, and you didn’t even text to check up on me.”
“Figured you’d let me know if you needed me.”
She’d needed him. She’d needed him so much she’d almost called and asked him to come help. But she didn’t want to drag him into this mess.
If helping Bonnie through her grief, and Christine long before her, had taught her anything, it was that she was way too in love with her Harry. Men almost always died first. Her throat convulsed and her eyes burned at the thought.
“I was with the girls,” she said, though her voice was tighter than before. She didn’t have to name names. Harry knew the girls. “Bonnie had a crisis. Needed her tribe to get her through.”
“Poor thing,” he said, rolling slowly onto his back so she could cuddle up close and put her head on his chest. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.
“Honestly I don’t know what I’d do if it was you,” he said.
“Doesn’t seem like it’s been a year at all.
Hell, I still miss Mark, and I wasn’t married to him. Bonnie must be just lost.”
“She has been. But I can see the old Bonnie coming back. She actually laughed tonight.” Tonight of all nights.
“Did you get her out of the house, at least?” he asked.
“Yeah. We took her to the drive-in. And then we just talked for a while.”
“That’s nice,” he said.
“We’re going out in the morning too. Funeral for an old friend.”
“Anyone I knew?”
“Before your time,” she said. “Christine and I knew him at St. Agnes’s.” Then she tipped up her face and kissed his chin. “I’m kind of wound up, though. Might not be able to go to sleep just yet.” Hint, hint.
He rolled out his side of the bed as if she’d goosed him. “Well then, my lady, I am going to fix you some warm milk. You prefer cocoa, or plain?” Then he rolled his eyes. “Who am I talking to? Cocoa it is.” He left the room in his boxer shorts and t-shirt as if he were suddenly afraid of her.
Diane rolled over and screamed Christine’s favorite cuss word into her pillow.
Rosa took off her dirt-caked Reeboks outside the brick building’s back door in the shared parking lot and clapped them together to knock off the graveyard dirt.
Then she unlocked the back door and went into the bookstore’s office where she was immediately greeted by the comforting sounds of ticking clocks.
There were boxes of books stacked up too, though, silently nagging her to be shelved.
“I know, I know,” she muttered to the books as she locked up again behind her. “I’ll get to you soon, I promise.”
She took the stairs up to the second floor of the small brick building she’d inherited from her parents. It had been a Cuban diner, Sandoval’s, her entire life. But she didn’t like to cook. She did like to read, so the diner had become a bookstore, and its sign had been repainted: Rosa’s Reads.
At the top of the stairs, carrying her sneakers, she went through the door and directly into her own cozy living room.
“Well, well, well, you are alive.” Jenna, 24 going on 35, was curled in the corner of the sofa with a cup of tea and a Hostess cupcake.
Her long sable hair hung over her shoulder in a single braid and her big brown eyes, framed in paintbrush lashes, were mildly accusing.
“Where’ve you been all night, Mom?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Were you with a guy?”
Rosa rolled her eyes at her late-in-life daughter. She’d had her at forty after a brief, fiery summer love affair so passionate it had scared her. She’d sworn off men after that. Her daughter was all she needed. “I was with the girls,” she said.
“Well, if you’re just hanging with the girls, then why are you so damn secretive lately?” Jenna went on. “It’s two in the morning.” Her eyes were extra big and round, like the eyes of a cartoon princess.
“I know, Jenna, I’m sorry. I did text you I’d be late. Bonnie had a crisis and she needed us.”
Jenna closed her eyes. “I need a girl gang like you have.”
“Nights like this, I could do without mine.” She made a face, then said, “I don’t mean it.”
“I know you don’t. You love the girls. So Bonnie, huh? Over Mark, still?”
“It’s only been a little over a year, babe. From your angle, that’s a long time. From ours, it’s barely a minute. I read a piece that said it takes half the time you were with someone to get over them. She and Mark were together forty years.”
“That doesn’t make me eager for a lifelong partner,” Jenna said. “No wonder you stayed single.”
“I stayed single because I wanted my daughter to be my singular focus. And look how beautiful and wonderful and perfect you turned out.” She tousled Jenna’s hair playfully as she walked past the sofa toward their small kitchen.
“Water’s still hot if you want tea,” Jenna called. “So what did you guys do?”
“Went to the Auburn drive-in. Double-feature. Then we hung out for a while after.”
“A drive-in?”
“Google it.”
“I know what one is, I just didn’t know they still existed.”
“There might still be one in Unadilla, and I think another in Elmira. Maybe they’ll make a comeback.”
“Doubtful,” the girl opined. “So is Bonnie okay now?”
Rosa wondered if any of them were okay now as she went into the small kitchen for a cup of chamomile.
“I don’t know, to be honest. She had a really rough night.
It might take a few days. Speaking of, I promised I’d go with her to a thing tomorrow at ten.
Can you handle the store for a couple of hours? ”
“What kind of a thing?” Jenna scrolled her phone as she asked.
“Funeral. An old friend of hers.” She winced when the words slipped out, because she was really trying not to outright lie to her daughter. Although she was keeping a lot from her and had been for months.
“Shouldn’t she be avoiding death and funerals and shit?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah, everybody grieves in their own way. Are you free or not?”
“I’m looking,” she said, a hint of teenage impatience emerging from the past. “Yeah, I have to cover a town board meeting, but it’s not till two, and then I interview Mayor Harris at five about the upcoming primaries. So I’m free all morning.”
“Thanks, honey. You’re a lifesaver.” Rosa lifted her cup of chamomile and said, “I’m taking this to bed. You all good?”
“All good here,” Jenna said, with a little extra weight on the final word.
Rosa frowned at that. Jenna was picking up on something. She had to be more careful. Or just tell her.
But no, not yet. Not until she had no choice. She was still feeling pretty good, after all. Mostly.
She headed into the bathroom between their two bedrooms and locked the door behind her.
The bathroom was cute, its most recent addition, three little ceramic fishies hanging on the wall, orange, blue, and yellow, each with friendly cartoon eyes and smiles.
She took hold of the largest one, the orange one, and tipped its bottom out away from the wall, holding an open palm underneath.
A prescription bottle landed. There was another behind the second fish, and another behind the third.
The pills were the reason she’d bought the fish. Their backsides were concave.
Two of the pills were part of a clinical trial, a new drug or maybe a placebo. There was no way to tell which she was taking, and no way to know whether it would work, even if it was the real deal. What she did know for sure was that nothing else would.
The third bottle was for pain, and she’d been reaching for it more frequently.
She took her pills, put them back behind the fishes, then took a warm, soothing shower and crawled into bed.
For two hours and twenty-three minutes, she slept like the dead.