Three
Monday, Presidents’ Day
Now my teeth chattered convulsively and my hands shook as I stared down at the man crammed into my trunk. Was he dead? He
was still as a mannequin, his open mouth forever paused at the end of a death rattle. I reached out and touched the back of
“Jesus Christ,” Layna said. “Jesus fucking Christ. What—? What the—?” She started making strange noises, like maybe she was
hyperventilating.
“He’s dead,” I said. I must’ve been in shock because I’d picked up my scrapbooking scissors, the blood on their long sharp
blades dried to a rusty maroon. My last name was on the handle in my mother’s handwriting. She’d always been obsessive about
labeling things, maybe because she couldn’t afford to replace anything lost.
The sound of Layna slamming the trunk shut made me startle. The scissors clattered to the asphalt, skittering to the middle
of the parking lot.
A Boise Co-op cashier with a severe black bob and huge hot-pink feather earrings appeared from behind the dumpster, where
all the employees went for smoke breaks. While I watched, helpless and immobile except for my clattering teeth, she scooped
up the scissors, using her green apron to hold the edge of the handles.
“The Satanists must’ve killed another goose out here,” the cashier muttered. “Assholes.”
The sliding glass doors of the co-op swallowed her up.
“Oh no! Oh no no!” I cried. “Those are my scrapbooking scissors! They have my fingerprints on them. And—” I couldn’t squeeze
out the words: And the dead guy’s blood. And my last name.
My knees wobbled. I was a split second from collapsing onto the icy asphalt when the Impala’s back door swung open. “Mom!
Mom! What is it?” Phoebe called.
More adrenaline shot through me and I went into Mom Mode. “There’s a spider in the trunk,” I said. Spiders were my go-to for
anything that scared me that I didn’t want the twins to know about. Boise was absolutely made of spiders. “Close the door,
honey. You’ll let the cold in.”
The car door clicked reluctantly shut, but the twins’ round faces popped up in the back window.
Layna gasped. “They’re straight out of The Shining.”
“Smile and wave,” I hissed. “They can’t know there’s something wrong.”
Layna plastered on a smile and waved dutifully.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Layna from my pole dancing class, here beside me in this parking lot. A dead man in my trunk.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I was gonna grocery shop!” Layna said. “How. Did that guy. End up—?” She covered her face with her shaking hands, unable
to go on.
“If I knew, you think I’d open it here? In the co-op parking lot?” My voice was coming out falsetto. Nothing made sense. “It’s
him. The creep. From . . . from Huckleberry’s.” My fingernails had made the scratch marks across his face.
“Tilly,” she said, “this is in my no-fly zone.”
“What do you mean, your no-fly zone? It’s in everyone’s no-fly zone,” I cried. “It’s a corpse!”
“But how did he get there?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “I don’t remember anything after like the third round of drinks.” An unsettling stretch of time, wiped from memory. Could I have been—? I didn’t want to let myself even think the terrible word. Roofied.
“Tilly,” Layna said. “Tilly, my friend. This is not good.”
“Do you think it could’ve been an accident?” I said.
“There’s . . . there’s blood. And bloody scissors. And it looks like someone maybe whacked him in the head,” she said.
I felt like I was crawling around in a pitch-black cave, searching and searching for a dropped flashlight. “My car. My car
was parked behind Huckleberry’s. All night.” Emmylou had driven me and the girls there this morning to retrieve it. Then I’d
come straight to the co-op to restock my bare cupboards. “My keys. I left them at the strip club. Today I had to use my spare
set.”
“Keys?” Layna said. “Who cares about your keys?”
“Someone else could’ve opened my trunk. Stuffed him right in there.” A niggling fear had lodged under my skin like a gangrenous
splinter. But I had too much adrenaline to really feel it. The back doors of the Impala swung open in unison.
“Mom! Mom! Mom! We’re booooored.” That was Alice.
Phoebe chimed in. “Mom! Mom! Mom! Let’s go!”
“Hang on!” I yelled. “I’m talking to my friend. Close those doors. You’ll freeze!”
“Oh, hon,” Layna said. “This is a lot. A lot. A lot. A lot. And with two little kids . . .” She looked at me with real pity.
Something in her gaze reminded me of my mom, who’d always been there to provide solace and advice whenever life did me dirty.
A tidal wave of sadness and overwhelm crashed over me.
“I was the one who chose to have kids on my own,” I said. “I wanted it so badly. But I had my mom to help me. With my mom,
I could get through anything.” I took a hitching breath. “She died. Ten months ago.”
Hot tears cut down my cheeks. The inside of my skull hurt so badly. I would have given anything to climb back in bed, pull the covers over my head, and wake up yesterday morning. I wouldn’t go to pole class and none of this would have ever happened.
Layna drummed purple Gel-X talons on the top of the trunk. When she spoke, I knew she’d decided to believe me. “So what do
you do now?”
My mom always taught me that when overwhelmed, it’s important to do the Next Right Thing, which is usually something small
like taking a shower, making the bed, or chopping vegetables. Her theory was that if you take care of the little things, the
big things will often take care of themselves. Suddenly I knew what my Next Right Thing was.
“That co-op cashier was carrying those scissors like a true crime fanatic,” I said. “I need to go inside and get them back.
Right. Now.”