Eight
Monday, Presidents’ Day
“Did you kill him, Mommy?” Phoebe asked as I pulled the Impala out of the co-op parking lot. I almost hit a fire hydrant.
“Absolutely not!” I said. But did I know that for sure?
“So we still have a spider in the trunk?” Alice said, sounding terrified. “Is it poisonous?”
Relief gushed through me. “My new friend helped me get it out,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
Big white flakes had started coming down again. It’d snowed at least a couple inches overnight and the streets were in the
ephemeral powdery state they achieved right before turning sloppy as a chili cheese dog. At the stoplight, Layna’s purple
Porsche idled behind my Impala. As the hangover nausea swelled again, the dead guy’s waxy face appeared behind my eyes. I
opened my door and heaved onto the snow.
“Mommy? Are you okay?” Alice asked. As I pulled myself upright, the twins’ worried faces filled my rearview. Bags of groceries
were crammed in around their booster seats. Was this the day they’d remember as the beginning of the end of their (relatively)
happy childhoods?
A Jeep Cherokee cruised by on my right, Miranda Carson behind the wheel, her mother riding shotgun. Miranda stared at me,
eyes wide with alarm. Could the dead guy’s hair be hanging out of my trunk?
“It’s the pretty lady you don’t like,” Alice said. “Why’s she staring at us?”
“Maybe she’s surprised I’m driving Grandma Lulu’s old muscle car?” I said, voice trembling. Blessedly, Miranda sailed through the yellow light. I stopped and Layna pulled up behind me. “Nothing scarier in this world than a CPS worker who thinks she’s doing the right thing,” I muttered.
“What’s a CPS worker?” Alice said.
“They snatch people’s children,” I replied. “Sometimes for good reason. Sometimes not.” This was perhaps my worst parental
explanation ever, but it was the best I could do in my current state.
“Can we go to the YMCA?” Alice asked.
“We love it because it reminds us of Grandma Lulu,” Phoebe said. No subtext with these two.
“Not today, love.”
After my mom closed Cosmic Treasures, the vintage junk store she’d owned for thirty years, she worked the front desk at the
downtown YMCA. I was a member there now, not to get fit or even because it reminded me of my mom, but because they offered
one hour of free childcare daily. The catch? Parents had to remain in the building, ostensibly working out. But instead of
using the hour for self-improvement, I’d drop the twins at the Kids’ Club and hurry to the sauna, where I’d lie on my back
in the boiling-hot, cedar-smelling room and let my silent tears run into my ears. But I was way too hungover today for the
sauna.
The light turned green and I started driving, Layna still tailing me in the purple Porsche.
In the stark daylight, Huckleberry’s looked like the sort of establishment where a horny grandpa might go to drink himself
to death.
“This place is spooky,” Alice murmured.
“Yeah,” Phoebe chimed in. “Why are we here again?”
“When we picked up our car, there was no one here, so I couldn’t get my keys. I left them here last night.” I cruised around
the alley behind the club, parked, and handed the kids their one-eyed babysitter. “Wait here,” I said.
As Layna parked, I tromped through fresh snow to check the back of the Impala, which still sported my mom’s LuvLife vanity plates. From the outside, there was no sign of a dead man.
That was the last of the good news.
Layna and I turned in futile circles, craning our necks for security cameras. But no dice. I marched up to the back alley
door of Huckleberry’s and knocked. A skinny man in a dirty dishwasher’s apron and a backward ball cap answered.
“You again,” he said.
I’d never seen him before in my life. “I think I left my keys on the bar last night. They have a My Little Pony keychain?”
“We’re doing this again?” he said. He blew out a vape cloud that smelled like a pina colada car deodorizer. “I told you. Your
keys aren’t here.”
“Wait. What?” I could feel myself rapid blinking, trying to understand.
“I told you. You’re. Keys. Aren’t. Here.”
“Told me when?”
“At four this morning,” the dishwasher said. “After you were pounding on this door.”
“Any chance you saw me before then?”
He shook his head while sucking on his vape.
“Dammit,” I said. “Are there any security cameras back here?”
The dishwasher gave an amused hoot. “As if the Orca’s gonna splurge on something that doesn’t make him money.” He blew a vape
ring, reached out with both hands, and spun it into two vape rings.
“The Orca?” I said.
“Yeah. The club owner. Can I ask? Like, how’d you get that asshole’s ugly vest?”
“Wait. What?” I said again.
“How’d you get it off him? You let me take a pic, remember?
” He held up his phone. Absolute dread gripped me as Layna and I leaned in to inspect it.
In the damning photo, I stood alone in the same exact spot, my eyes lit up red like a possum’s in the headlights—and I was wearing the dead guy’s teal vest.
Shock rippled through me, of the sort you feel in the instant of a car wreck, when glass flies, metal crunches, and you can’t
yet fully assess the damage done. Because when Mr. Neck Tattoo sidled up to me at the bar, he’d been wearing that vest. The
image of his dead body in my trunk was burned into my brain. I’d been able to see the bloodstain on his checked flannel shirt.
Because the vest was gone.
I’d been keeping my suspicions at bay, but now they slammed into me like a pack of roller derby girls on a banked track. Maybe
I did it. Maybe I killed him.
“I sent that pic to the whole staff,” the dishwasher said. “Seriously, you’re a legend.”
I let out an agonized groan.
“Did you and that guy like kiss and make up? Or did you kick his ass and take the vest off him? You wouldn’t say.”
My queasiness worsened. “Was I with anyone?” I managed.
“I heard some woman yelling your Uber was here. You stumbled out of the alley. That’s the last I saw of you.” He repeated
his one-vape-ring-into-two-vape-rings trick and paused to give us a chance to admire his talents.
“Jesus, kid. Get a real cigarette,” Layna said.
His face fell. “Anyway, I gotta hit the dish pit.” The alley door slammed in our faces.
“This is not good,” Layna said, turning to face me.
“Not good” did not begin to cover it. I’d been trudging through life, miserable, depressed, grief-stricken. But I’d been with
my kids, able to take care of them. I had actually been in heaven all along, and I hadn’t even known it. But what I was facing
now was literally hell. “I’m gonna have to go to the police, right? What else can I do?” The strip-club back alley with its
dumpster, looming telephone poles, and gray sky held no answers.
Layna looked at me sadly. “So, the douchebag. He’s the district attorney, right?”
The douchebag. Her soon-to-be ex-husband. I nodded.
“There were four unsolved murders in town last year,” Layna said. “Before we split up, the douchebag was always saying Boise
PD needs a good murder with a slam-dunk conviction. Something to make them look competent.” She gestured at my trunk. “I’m
not saying you’re guilty. I’m saying that—unless you come up with a solid alibi—it looks like a slam-dunk case to me.”
“But I’m a mom!” I shouted the words like an incantation.
Layna’s shrug said that the justice system didn’t give a shit.
I started pacing, the snow crunching below my feet. “Okay. Okay. I need a pro/con list.”
Layna nodded furiously. “That’s right.”
“Going to the cops. Pro—they’ll get the corpse out of my trunk.” I couldn’t make a Costco run with that body in there. “Pro—I’ll
look helpful. More innocent, right?”
“Maybe?” Layna said, her voice pitching high. “Cons?”
“Con—the police have a murder weapon with the dead guy’s blood and my name and fingerprints on it.”
“Major con,” Layna agreed. “Con—the entire staff of this strip club now has a photo of you in this alley wearing the dead
guy’s vest at four a.m.”
This pro/con list was not going well. “I have no idea where I was last night. And I’m a single mom. I get put in jail . .
.” I trailed off. I couldn’t even say the rest out loud.
How long would I be in jail? I didn’t have bail money, not for a murder charge.
And who would take my kids?
And what if they ended up in foster care?
And what if I’d really killed this man?
“I can’t go to the cops,” I said. “At least not until I have more information.”
Layna’s big brown eyes brimmed with compassion. “I won’t tell,” she said. And even though I’d known her less than a day, I believed her. “High this week is thirty-seven degrees. It’s not like the mansicle’s gonna thaw.”
“Can I get your number?” I handed her my phone.
She typed with her thumbs and handed it back. “Call if you need me. Don’t text anything incriminating. To anyone. Tomorrow’s
Tuesday. I’ll see you at pole class, right?”
“I’m not going back to pole!” I cried.
“You disappeared with Shade,” she said. “You might’ve been with him all night.”
If that was the case, I could prove—first to myself, then to the police—that I didn’t kill anyone. The thought could hardly
cheer me before another wave of anxiety kicked in. “But what if Shade roofied me?” I said. “I think somebody definitely roofied
me.”
Layna raised one eyebrow. “It’d be the first time in history a gay guy roofied a straight woman.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Okay. Tomorrow night. Pole. I’ll see you there.”