Chapter 12 The Girl Whose Perfume Is Skunky Weed Is Beset by Police #3
I heard the sound of Harvey on the stairs.
He had followed me here, leaving the comfort of my bed, and plopped himself down in his dog bed near the kitchen table.
He looked up at me, registering that I had sat down and was likely going to be here for a bit, and with a great doggy sigh curled up into a ball.
Spencer was saying more about his job, but none of it was registering because the simple act of my returning to Manhattan tomorrow was going to make this sweet animal sad, and it seemed to me that all I did with my life was venomous and hurtful and cruel.
I made dogs sad and people unhappy, but I didn’t know how to change that—other than my sop to responsibility by vowing to never again sleep with a married man.
Still, at my aunt and uncle’s apartment was my journal, in which I had penned drafts of suicide notes.
Letters of explanation. As I looked at Harvey, however, his coat rising and falling as he fell into a deep doggy sleep, I wondered if I actually could kill myself and desert this dog forever.
Harvey had become a symbol for me of everyone. Of every person.
“Sis? You in Mira Land?”
“Sorry. I guess I was.”
“You okay?”
“No. But I am functioning. Mostly.”
“Damn straight you are. And Dad says you won’t be charged with a crime.”
“It would be kind of nice to get that reassurance from him, too.”
“He didn’t tell you he believes that?”
“He sort of did. When we were leaving the police station. But mostly he was talking to Mom and Mr. Barker. Going over what had happened inside. It was kind of like I wasn’t there.”
“Yeah, Dad won’t win any touchy-feely awards.”
Well, I thought, he would if my brother, the Pinnacle, were in this situation.
But, of course, the Pinnacle would never have hit a golf ball through a net and killed a kid, because he wouldn’t have had to atone for the sin of fucking a married man.
Or woman. (Was his life actually charmed?
Yes. But, in all fairness, so was mine, until I killed Kenny Foster.
Let’s be clear: I knew at eighteen and nineteen that I had won the birth lottery in most regards.
I had parents so wealthy that my summer job was playing mini-golf with rich rug rats at a country club, and I was smart and pretty and—for a time—planning to go to Yale.
And then I threw it all away by screwing Theo Catton and tempting fate.
And you don’t tempt fate. That’s swimming with sharks.)
“Well, when it comes to me, he sure won’t. I’m not the Pinnacle.”
“You have got to stop going there.”
“I know.”
“You’ll like Smith. Way better choice than Yale.”
“Spoken like a true Princeton Tiger.”
“I’m serious. It will be good for you to be farther from Tallmadge than New Haven. And Northampton is a whole different vibe. Maybe you’ll even discover you’re a lesbian.”
“After the last few guys I’ve dated, it’s a wonder I’m not gay already,” I said, and I found it interesting that I had used the verb date in regard to Theo Catton and Dennis Kerrington.
“Only losers in the city? At least, so far?”
“Yeah. Only losers,” I said.
“That’ll change. You’re a catch.”
“Or cursed,” I said, gnawing at a fingernail on my pinky.
“No such thing. Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t take down that target on the driving range net. And Harry claims he didn’t. So, who did?”
“I have no idea. What made you think of that?”
“Something Dad said on the phone just now. Something he said he and your lawyer were discussing.”
“Would have been nice of him to talk to me,” I said resentfully.
“He was mostly just thinking out loud. Using me as a sounding board the way he does.”
“Well, fuck him.”
“Come on, Mira.”
I tried to calm myself, but I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head, even though I was alone but for Harvey.
“Anyone looking for it?” Spencer asked.
“That’s what Dad was thinking about?”
“Uh-huh.”
Using my teeth, I yanked the tip of the nail free and felt the sting where I’d ripped skin, the blood already filling a slender runnel. “I don’t know. Maybe,” I answered.
“No one brought up a search warrant at the police station?”
“Nope.”
“I guess that makes sense. They wouldn’t want to give you the chance to get rid of it before they came to the house.”
“You are very smart, and you sound insane. Why would I cut the target off the net and bring it home? And if you could find a reason for that, why would I keep it around the house, especially when it became clear that cutting away the target had fucked up the net?”
“Why did Nixon keep the tapes?”
“If the target isn’t decomposing wherever garbage goes to rot, it’s at the club, because Harry was the one who took it down. Or, maybe, Curt, if Harry told him to cut it off. But, I promise you, it’s not there, because I’m sure Harry or Curt threw it away.”
“If one of them did it.”
“One of them did,” I said. “But let’s be fair. Whether it was Harry or Curt, he only did it because I was a club member and I threw a fucking hissy fit about it.”
He chuckled. “If you threw a fucking hissy fit, it would have been epic. But I doubt it was as bad as you think. And I’m pretty confident that kind of behavior is behind you now. You’ve always been kind of old for your age.”
Perhaps, I thought, that was why I caused myself and the world so much trouble by finding myself drawn to older men.
It would be years before I would understand the lunacy of that equation: It wasn’t that I was drawn to older men. It was that a certain type of middle-aged creep was always going to be drawn to young girls like me.