Chapter 7 #4
“Fine, it was oxy. I’m an addict. Jesus, Bonnie, why the third degree? It was a pain reliever. My legs are achy.”
“Why are your legs achy?” Diane asked, coming around to their side of the crossover.
Rosa rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Because I’m sixty-frickin’-five years old, maybe?”
Christine had got out and was eyeing her suspiciously. Rosa was glad she hadn’t glimpsed the pill. She could identify a two-millimeter narcotic at thirty yards.
The medication would take fifteen minutes to kick in. By then the walk would be over. She should’ve taken it sooner.
“I need to pee,” Diane said.
“We all need to pee,” Christine replied.
Bonnie threw up her hands. “Well, it’ll definitely look fishy if we all walk in to use the restroom and don’t order anything.”
“She’s right, we have to order something,” Rosa said. “I should listen to you more, Bon-Bon.”
Bonnie gave a nod and was placated. “It is my murder, after all.”
“This is true.” Rosa led the way into the diner, checked her watch, and slid into a booth. She didn’t mean to sigh in relief when she took the weight off her legs. It just sort of came out.
Diane frowned at her, but a server came by and distracted her curiosity. Rosa was going to have to be more careful. Or just tell them the truth.
God, she didn’t want to do that. It would change everything between them, she knew it would.
A teenage girl with dead eyes who looked as if she would not alter her expression even if one of them broke into can-can kicks, came to their table and mumbled, “I’m Em, I’ll be your server,” while barely pronouncing a single consonant.
“Coffee,” Rosa said. “High test.”
“Same,” the others muttered. Yeah, they were living dangerously tonight.
“And four of those pastries.” Bonnie pointed at the glass case on the counter, where gooey Danishes glistened. When the others sent her daggers, she added, “In a to-go bag. Because we’re going for a walk.”
The server just stared.
“Um, restroom?” Bonnie asked.
The girl pointed with her pen and walked away.
“How are they like that?” Christine whispered.
Rosa shook her head, forced a smile she didn’t feel, and drank water in hopes it would help the pain pill dissolve faster in her stomach.
They took turns going to the restroom. Rosa waited until last, noticing that each of them seemed to take longer than necessary in there. Were they trying to give her legs a break?
Hell, things were changing already, and they didn’t even know yet.
The wait-lump set their coffees in coated cardboard cups with plastic lids right beside the cash register, glanced their way and muttered what sounded vaguely like, “Whenever you’re ready.”
They all got up and Christine paid, as it was her turn.
Then she handed around the cups. As they left the diner, high test in hands.
Rosa tried to put a little bounce into her step.
It had been twenty-two minutes. The pill hadn’t yet kicked in.
She didn’t want to think about what that might mean but thought it anyway.
Either her experimental drug cocktail was a placebo or it was a failure, and maybe the cancer was getting worse and had spread into her bones from her brain, and maybe her life with her friends and her precious Jenna was winding down.
What a pile of bullshit!
But she walked, and as she walked, she thought it might be hurting a little less, and maybe nothing was worse after all, and maybe the pill had taken longer to kick in because of a hundred other variables, like what she had eaten or that she was building up tolerance for it, or whatever, and maybe her legs ached from all the extra walking she’d been doing—ironically, for her health.
Mr. Terrence’s driveway came into sight first. If there was a moon, it wasn’t shining through the clouds leftover from the night before, but you didn’t need moonlight to see that bleached white log square.
Rosa, her legs no longer aching, her head amazingly clear despite the extra pain pill, hesitated at the end of the driveway.
“The car’s gone,” she said. “Where the hell’s his Porsche?”
Bonnie shook her head. “Stolen?”
“Repossessed?” Christine suggested. “I mean he was a glorified teacher, right?”
“He was no teacher,” Bonnie said, her voice low. “He was a predator conman posing as a teacher, scamming schools out of money while preying on students.”
Rosa flashed back to the four of them struggling to carry the comforter-wrapped body out through his own front door and into Diane’s pretty blue hybrid. Literal chills spread outward from her spine and wrapped around her like a corpse’s hug.
She took a breath, nodded hard. “Let’s do this before someone sees us standing out here like the frickin’ Gentlemen Callers.”
Nobody had to ask who that was. They all knew where to find them. Book of Buffy, 4:10. They headed inside, walking, not floating, and none of them smiling.
“Put on the gloves,” Diane said.
Rosa had nearly forgotten. They each had a pair of Playtex Living Gloves in their pockets, because that’s what Bonnie had brought from home. No point leaving fingerprints. Each woman donned her fuchsia-colored crime-aids.
“How do you plan to get us inside?” Diane asked. “We locked his keys in there when we left.”
Rosa tried the doorknob. It turned free and easy. “It’s not locked now,” she whispered.
“Oh Jesus God,” Christine said, so scared she apparently couldn’t even take the Lord’s name in vain properly.
Rosa swung the door open, turned the light switch.
Nothing happened.
Diane said, “Why aren’t the lights working, Rosa?”
And Rosa replied, “I don’t know, Diane.”
Christine shushed them, but gently, as Rosa stepped into the darkness with her friends crowding close around her, and that was when she caught the camera’s red light from the corner of her eye.
“Fuck you, pervert!” She strode across the dark room and put her face right up close. “It isn’t my friend you need to worry about, it’s me.” Then she yanked the camera off the shelf, threw it on the floor and stomped it until its guts were spread far and wide.
Somebody finally turned on their flashlight app, and then everyone did. Beams of light fell on bare walls. The sofa and ugly area rug were gone. So were the computer, TV, books, and the plants that had been concealing the camera before. The place had been all but stripped to the bare walls.
Bonnie’s phone went off. She shrieked and dropped it on the floor.
Rosa picked it up and read what it said.
Unknown sender: Leave what you took.
Rosa replied on Bonnie’s behalf as the others gathered close to the screen.
Bonnie: What is it you think I took?
Unknown sender: Leave it and get out. NOW.
“Let’s get out of here,” Bonnie whimpered.
“We’re taking a look around first,” Rosa said.
“He can’t see us without the camera. Obviously he left it here to watch for us to come back after he looted the place to the walls.
Must not have found what he was looking for.
But maybe there’s still some clue he missed.
Come on, split up, be fast. Every nook and cranny, then we’re out of here. ”
So they did.
Rosa found a broom, dustpan, and a few unused trash bags in a kitchen closet. She swept up and bagged all the parts of the camera to bring them home. Her phone light caught a little black memory chip among the camera’s debris, and she hoped she hadn’t ruined it.
The girls had vanished into different parts of the small house, and now were returning, each dropping her finds into the pillowcase Diane was carrying.
“Even the bed’s gone. Pillowcase was on the bedroom floor,” she said.
“I got some mail from behind a radiator,” Bonnie said.
“There was a memory chip in that camera,” Rosa added.
Christine crooked one perfect eyebrow. “Did you smash it to bits with your tantrum?”
“Doesn’t look like it. What did you find?”
Christine held up a plain metal keyring with two keys on it.
The large silver key ring had two D’s on it, front facing, and back facing, overlapping each other.
The smaller gold key had an X engraved across its center, with an E and an H on either side of it.
“I’ve tried them in everything but the front door,” she said.
Then she went to the door and tried them there. “Nope.”
“Can we get out of here now?” Bonnie asked.
Everyone nodded and they walked out, locking and closing the door behind them. Then they went down the front steps and the driveway and started their walk back to the diner.
It was dark. It seemed their footsteps echoed on the paved country road as they walked along.
Peepers were singing a chorus as they did every spring.
No crickets yet, though. Too early. The shoulders of the road were cushioned by inches of brown, still-fragrant pine needles, dropped from the trees that lined both sides.
The aroma of the night sank into Rosa’s senses, where she really took a moment to enjoy it. She noticed things like that more now. Little miracles. They were happening all around them, all the time.
“So we’re thinking the guy on the other end of the camera came and cleaned the place out,” Bonnie said, looking from one of them to the next as they walked four-wide down the deserted country road in full darkness.
“That’s my best guess,” Rosa said.
“And he knows who I am,” Bonnie went on. “And he thinks I took something.”
“That’s the way I’m reading it,” said Diane. “Bonnie, is it possible you picked something up without knowing it?”
“The only thing I picked up was my phone,” she said. She even started rummaging through her bag where she kept the thing.
Rosa said, “Girl, I’ve got your phone right here,” and held it out to her.
But Bonnie had stopped walking with her hand still in her bag and her eyes round. “Then…what’s this?” She pulled a phone from her bag. It wore the same rainbow phone case her own did.