7. Thank You for the Galaxy
Thank You for the Galaxy
Vedder
The house was…pristine. At least for what it was. The floorboards squeaked under my weight, and there were the nicks and scrapes of a house well-lived in.
The entire place smelled like her.
Like tea leaves and lavender with the clean scent of disinfectant wipes. Like a home. The cows outside were mooing as they walked the grassy little enclosure, their noses down, their coats pretty damn clean. I wondered what she did to take care of them.
“How are you, darlin’?” I leaned on the doorjamb, not quite walking in, but not stepping out to let her slam the door in my face, either.
“I’m okay.” She swallowed.
I’d noticed it was one of her tells. Like she was literally swallowing something she didn’t want to spill from her mouth.
“Are you?” I asked. She wasn’t.
“I have to be.”
At least that was an honest answer.
She was casually dressed. Jeans, a buffalo plaid shirt with pockets, hair that looked air-dried and quickly brushed out. Not a stitch of makeup on her red-rimmed eyes. Bare feet. Cute little toes.
Domestic in the best possible way. A woman who made a house a home. The kind of person who turned an ordinary holiday into a memory.
“Not around me, you don’t.” I reached out and tucked a lock of her wavy black hair behind her ear, letting my index finger graze her skin. She blushed. I liked it.
My perverse mind didn’t take long to go from wanting to see her blush with compliments to wanting to watch her flush with pleasure.
And that was creepy. Really creepy. So I dropped my hand and put the space back between us.
“I have to go identify the body tomorrow.”
That’s right, sweetheart. Tell me what’s going on.
“I’ll drive you.”
“You…what?”
“You’re going through something here. It’s hard, no matter what your relationship with the old man might have been.
Let me be your chauffeur. We don’t need to talk, but…
I don’t want you to drive distracted.” It didn’t take long to know that my little bird was alone in this world.
She had her siblings, but they weren’t with her.
They depended on her. “You don’t need to go through that alone. ”
She scoffed. “I go through everything alone.”
“You don’t have to.” I’m standing right here. Use me. Let me be useful to you.
“Yes, I do.”
It was a slap in the face. A rejection of me and what I offered.
But she always did that. The first time I met her, her truck was busted and she’d climbed up the McClanahan driveway, looking for a bit of help.
She had her two brothers and sisters to feed, and I knew what that was like.
I’d been in charge of my younger siblings once, too.
Parentified is that the psychologists call it nowadays.
She didn’t want my truck keys. She didn’t want the cash I shoved into her hands. She didn’t want the jacket I put over her shoulders, even when she stood shivering in the snow.
But she took them, anyway—after a while. Because everyone deserved help sometimes.
“No. You really, really don’t.” Take my help!
I need to be useful to you. I need to matter to you…
I took her silence as consent and fought the urge to kiss her on the forehead as I turned to leave. She hadn’t said no to my driving her tomorrow, so I assumed we would go as planned. Best not to give her time to come to her senses.
Sure, stalking Melody was part of the job I’d been assigned. But that didn’t feel like work. Watching her had kind of turned into a hobby.
But this? This was a job, and it was fucking weird. I found myself with my ass parked on a distressed brown leather Chesterfield couch with a dainty china tea set on the coffee table while Braun and I awkwardly waited for our interview to begin.
Valerie Gray stood in the kitchen that we could see from our sitting area. Her phone was in the middle of a ring light beside her laptop, and her personal assistant sat nearby with another slim computer in front of her.
“Thank y’all for all the hearts, and I see you there, Lionel, sending me a lion. Rawr!” Valerie said, making a pawing action with her hand before smoothing the front of her blue gingham, lace-frilled apron.
What in the 50s housewife was this?
Her southern accent was off. Light and pleasant, but it hit me as less genuine than a penguin in a white fur coat at a polar bear exhibit.
I looked at Braun, who looked back at me. Neither of us touched the tea set.
“Well, thank y’all so much for your thoughts and prayers.
” She put a hand over her heart. “You know it always means so much to me, how y’all keep showing up for me in my time of need.
I am so heaven blessed to have people like you in my life.
I don’t know how I’d get through such turmoil if it wasn’t for you. ”
She put her fingers to her lips and blew the camera a kiss.
“Oh!” She squealed. “Thank you Lilah, for that galaxy. You are a heaven-sent sweetheart.”
She finger waved, bouncing and jostling the big blue bow that held back the top half of her chestnut hair.
“What happened?” She squinted, reading something on her computer. “Oh, Trevor, it was just tragic. My brother-in-law was found in Mourningkill Lake. So tragic. He’d been gone a whole year. Can you imagine?”
What the fuck was happening?
“We’ve been worried sick, and it’s just…We’re relieved to have a resolution to it all, but it’s just so tragic. Our family is just so heartbroken.”
Was she…talking about Luke Gray’s body on the internet?
She wiped at a nonexistent tear while looking askance, her other hand on her chest as if to control the palpitations of her beating heart.
“I just don’t know how we’re going to get through this, ya know?”
No, I do not fucking know. What the shit is happening?
Braun and I looked at each other again, this time with mouths open as we watched the fucking train wreck.
“Oh, thank y’all so much.” She blew another kiss at the camera. “Oh, thank you for the likes, Jeffrey. Oh, and Rodney, thank you so much for your kind words. They mean so much to me.”
She continued reading, blowing kisses, and responding to comments as they appeared on her computer screen while we just sat there watching as she monetized tragedy.
I couldn’t put into words why I hated this. But I did.
She wasn’t exactly doing anything wrong; it wasn’t an open case, but they had wanted it to be an open case.
“Anyway, y’all,” she said, plucking her phone off the little clip stand. “I’ve gotta go and talk to these lovely gentlemen.”
She swung her back to us with her phone held up in front of her, and to my absolute fucking horror, her front camera pointed right at us.
“These handsome fellas are going to help us figure out what happened to my beloved brother-in-law and”—she paused, reading a comment then turning to us over her shoulder with a mischievous look—“are you boys single?”
If we had been drinking the toy-sized cups of tea in front of us, it would have gone out of my nose. What the fuck?
“Oh, Britney, I can’t believe you would say that!” She laughed into her camera. “Young man, they wanna know what your name is.”
She pointed a manicured and bejeweled finger at me.
“They’re guessing it’s Rex, or Thor, or…” She looked at the screen and giggled. “Perhaps a Rip, or a Wayne? They wanna know if you ride horses. Do you?”
I had no idea what to say.
“Uhm, ma’am, I’d rather not.” I lifted my left hand to cover my face from her live stream, but that only made her squeal.
“See that, ladies? No wedding ring.” Then she shushed her audience. “Alright, I’ll stop tormenting the little heartthrob and sign off. Maybe I’ll convince him to come online with me sometime.”
She blew more kisses, then gave another finger wave. “Have a great day, y’all!”
She cut the feed, put her phone face down on the counter, unplugged her ring light, then turned to us. Her smile was gone. Her shimmer was gone. Her accent was gone.
“Jane, get us three coffees. What the hell is this nonsense?” She waved at the tea set.
Jane got up from her computer station and cleared the tea before coming back with three healthy mugs of steaming, black-as-tar coffee.
Valerie took a seat in a chair catty-corner to us, crossed her long legs, and steepled her fingers under her chin.
“So, what are we here to talk about?” She lifted a brow and looked at us with cold, calculating blue eyes as light as an iceberg; stunning in the sense that they were unexpected and rare. Like an arctic wolf.
It took me a minute to get my glitching brain back online as I struggled with the whiplash of her transformation.
“Ma’am,” Braun started, just as flustered as I was—he must have a better poker face than I did. “We’ve been hired by your in-laws to figure out—”
“They want to frame Mellie Gray for murder.” She interrupted. “And we can drop the aw shucks, ma’am bullshit, okay? We’re not on camera right now.”
She beckoned her assistant over, and Jane put forward two pieces of paper and two pens on the coffee table in front of us.
“Nondisclosure agreements, gentlemen,” Valerie said. “I’ll answer what you want to know, but this conversation remains absolutely confidential.”
I scanned it and signed. Braun took longer, reading every single line before also putting his sloppy signature across the entire line, and then some. That was a real John Hancock signature.
“And I should also warn you that I take my NDAs seriously. I’m fueled by only two things: A love of my children and spite.”
She sounded like any ol’ New England broad, with a knife-sharpness to her that could cut.
“You say they want to frame her,” I said, leaning forward in my seat, elbows on my knees. “What do you mean by that?”