Eleven
Hopefully Shade could tell me where I’d been all Sunday night (and maybe how I’d ended up wearing the dead guy’s vest). If
not, my near miss with Agent Nate Duran had shown me I couldn’t leave the corpse in the Impala. Countless murder mysteries
had taught me a chest freezer would be the best option for hiding a body, but I didn’t have one. Luckily, during a Boise winter,
the whole damn town was a chest freezer. And so was my backyard shed.
This was what I was thinking about as I pulled the Impala into the snowy spot behind my duplex and spotted trash strewn around
my garbage cans. I cursed under my breath. As I started picking up broccoli stalks and errant used tea bags, Oat Willimena
appeared through her back gate wearing jeans, a brightly embroidered huipil, and no jacket. She was a libertarian potter in
her early seventies who’d recently moved to Boise from Austin, claiming any town with double-digit billionaires was no longer
a place for an artist.
“Raccoons in the garbage again!” she cried. “I’ll help you clean up.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. But Oat Willimena joined in anyway, grabbing empty cereal boxes and a deflated milk jug
half covered in coffee grounds.
“Oh, raccoon, friendly neighborhood bandit!” she cried. “Mija, raccoons wash their produce more thoroughly than my second mother-in-law.”
It did make me feel good when Oat Willimena called me mija. As if for that one moment I wasn’t an adult with more grief and responsibility than I could bear.
“Come by my place anytime,” she said as we threw the final bits of trash in the can. “I can give you a tour of my pottery
studio. Bring your foxy neighbor too.”
Did Oat Willimena have a crush on Emmylou? “I’m sure Emmylou would love to see your pottery studio,” I said. “Anyway, thanks
for your help. I gotta go make some calls.”
“Sure, sure,” she said, looking disappointed to see me go.
As I hurried through my back gate, my phone did actually ring. Miley O’Riley. We’d been friends in high school. Not besties,
but we’d often sat with the same gaggle of misfit pals at lunchtime, forever debating whether Ani DiFranco’s new album was
more of a reflection of our souls than her last. Miley and I had lost touch once I moved to LA, but she was now the only person
in town who didn’t want to talk about how my career was DOA. She was obsessed with some stand-up reels I’d posted on Insta
over a year ago, and she’d asked me to perform a set at Boise’s Winter Will Never End Festival. I’d told her I wasn’t up for
it, but she kept trying to convince me. Fresh off making a hot fed laugh until he cried, I thought for a second it might actually
be exciting. But I had no new material and more pressing things to deal with—like how to avoid being charged with murder.
I sent the call to voicemail.
In the backyard, the storage shed hunkered alongside the privacy fence. Technically I shared it with Emmylou, but she only
kept garden tools in there. A few boxes of my mom’s things collected dust inside, but otherwise it was empty.
My key was hovering at the storage shed lock when Emmylou popped her head out of her back door. Now in her mid-seventies,
she’d aged naturally and her beautiful skin was rosy pink and soft with wrinkles. She was solidly built and still strong.
Even though it was thirty-five degrees out, she wore a silk kaftan splotched with giant scarlet roses, her silver hair upswept
in a vintage turban à la Greta Garbo. Her philosophy was that hanging out around the house in winter wear was dressing to
depress.
“Want to come in for tea? I need the skinny on Job Talk Tuesday,” she called. “Were there any hot firefighters there? Or even a good-looking electrician?”
Instead of inspecting the shed, I headed into Emmylou’s side of the duplex to tell her all about Agent Nate Duran.
After I picked Phoebe and Alice up at the bus stop, the twins and I played approximately seventy-six rounds of indoor cornhole
as I counted down the hours until I could go to Pole Kisses and secure proof I hadn’t killed anyone. (I won most of the rounds,
with Phoebe coming in second. Alice was a distant third because she insisted on wearing her latex Betty White face mask, which
has very small eye holes.)
Once we’d finished an uninspired dinner of frozen fish sticks, I put on The Parent Trap again to distract the girls. They looked so innocent snuggled up on the couch. I could imagine how their lives would soon
be ruined by my absence and the ensuing media frenzy: MOTHER OF TWINS COMMITS brUTAL STRIP CLUB MURDER.
Desperate to prevent this outcome, I popped open my laptop to cyber-sleuth. For starters, I googled the dead guy’s neck tattoo—23/16—which
led me to the online database of hate symbols. There I read that twenty-three stands for the twenty-third letter of the alphabet.
Sixteen for the sixteenth letter. WP for White Power. At least the guy I might’ve murdered was a legitimately terrible person.
That part at least was a relief.
I read on until Emmylou breezed in, arms loaded with ingredients for caramel brownies. The girls weren’t allowed to go to
Emmylou’s side of the duplex much, on account of her crossbow. Mommy blogs had a lot to say about the dangers of keeping firearms
in the house with kids, but much less guidance about weapons originating in the first millennium BC.
The twins squealed, rushing to hug her.
“Emmylou, I meant to tell you earlier,” I said. “Oat Willimena wants to give you a tour of her pottery studio.”
“Really?” Emmylou said, setting the baking ingredients on the kitchen counter. “Did she say that? How did she say it exactly?”
I studied her, surprised. “Do you have a thing for Oat Willimena?” I started to sing the song of childhood torment. “Emmylou
and Oat Dub sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S—”
“I do not.” Emmylou sniffed, turning away to put the eggs in the fridge. “Though I have seen enough flaccid man parts to last
a lifetime.”
“Ow!” Alice cried, her face contorted in pain.
“What is it?” I said.
“She bit me!” Alice held out her forearm for inspection. I didn’t see any teeth marks.
“It was an accident!” Phoebe said.
I leaned down and looked Phoebe in the eye. “We do not bite other people. Those teeth are for chewing carrots, chicken nuggets,
apples. Not for chomping your sister.”
She nodded slowly, eyes huge and remorseful.
Emmylou cocked an eyebrow at me. “You want to nip that in the bud before it becomes a thing.”
I swallowed my irritation. “We’ll talk about it more later, okay, Phoebs? You all right, Alice?” They both nodded, and Phoebe
tried to distract me from her bad behavior by shaking a maraca and singing a song she’d made up called “Sad Mother Goes to
Sexy Dance Class.”
Fifteen minutes later, I slid into the blessedly warm Porsche with its buttery leather seats. Layna’s locks had grown seven
inches overnight.
“Nice hair,” I said.
“Thanks, babe. Five hours in the chair for this mane.” She gunned the engine and the car shot forward like a Hot Wheel out
of the racing gate. “I’m hoping I can get a man tangled up in it. Remember that co-op cashier, Magnus?”
“I do not,” I said.
“Well, he’s cute and he told me he has a yoga-coaching business. Next time he checks me out—pun intended—do you think it’s
too forward to hire him?”
“He’d be lucky to get to advise you on your downward dog.”
“Thanks! I just want to learn how to line men up and knock them down like bowling pins, you know?”
“Are you even going to ask?” I said.
“About the mansicle?”
“Yes, about that,” I said. Centrifugal force threw the back of my cranium into the head rest as she accelerated to pass a
Bronco. I told her what the dead guy’s neck tattoo signified.
“That’s disgusting!” she cried.
“Yep. It’s slang mostly used by a hate group called Imperial Dominion in Obliterating Tyranny.”
“A white power group with the acronym IDIOT?” A derisive snort escaped her. “That’s too rich.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But they call themselves either ‘ID’ or ‘the Dominion.’ According to the internet, they’re a Pacific Northwest
splinter gang that broke from the Aryan Brotherhood, because the AB prioritizes making money over racism. They’re into dark
shit. Arms trafficking, drug trafficking, extortion, murder for hire.”
Layna’s phone dinged and, as she braked hard for a stop sign, she glanced at it. “It’s Gucci. She sent me Cheyenne’s Insta
handle. It’s @cheyennethegoddess.”
While I didn’t expect Cheyenne to have posted any major clues about committing murder, I couldn’t help feeling hopeful. “Looking
it up now,” I said. With her pink hair, Cheyenne’s profile pic was unmistakable. “This is her!”
In Cheyenne’s most recent post, from the day before, she was clustered with relatives in a hospital waiting room.
I read the text caption out loud. “‘When I found out my dear Grammy had a stroke, I left my shift early and raced to the hospital. I’ve been here with my fam since ten last night. We’re praying Grammy pulls through. ’”
“If she left Huckleberry’s and went straight to the hospital, she wasn’t hanging around murdering an IDIOT and stuffing him
in your trunk,” Layna said.
My stomach sank like my phone that time Alice dropped it in the deep end of the YMCA pool. “Oh my god,” I said. “Was anyone
even there when he died? What if everyone has an alibi but me?” Even coming out of my own mouth, the word alibi sounded official and terrifying. But I needed one.
“As soon as we get to Pole Kisses, you can talk to Shade,” Layna said. “He’ll know where you two went.”