She doesn’t need to finish, anyway. I know what she would have said: It was impossible to say no to Kaycee. She could talk you into anything.
Dogs like that should be put down.
“What did she do with the photos after people paid up?” I ask. “Did she actually return them?”
Cora frowns. “What do you think?” She leans forward to stub out a cigarette. “She kept them.”
Chapter Thirty-One
On the way to Monty’s house that afternoon, I get two calls from the same Indiana area code—Shariah, I assume, has found my note. Joe’s face pops up cartoonish in my head, saying focus, saying this is about what’s happening now, but I send the calls to voicemail instead.
The water results have bought us all the time in the world. We have nothing but time now: years of litigation, of grunt work, of remediation and blame-casting and bureaucratic red tape.
But I let Kaycee disappear once before. I can’t let her disappear again—not when I’m closer than ever to finding the truth.
Cora’s words play again and again in my head.
Her daddy used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.
Always running some scheme.
She’s right about some of it. Even as a kid, Kaycee stole things—little things, trinkets from other people’s houses, stuff from the cubbies at school. She was never sorry about it afterward. I remember when Morgan Crawley cried until her nose bubbled with snot over a pair of mittens her grandmother had knitted her—mittens Kaycee had showed me, gloating, at the bottom of her bag the day before.
“Then she shouldn’t have been so careless with them,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “If you love something, you have to take care of it and keep it safe.” She was so angry at me that she took the mittens and threw them in a storm drain, and I’ll never forget how she looked then, standing in the street while a rush of rainwater roared the mittens down into the sewer. “Look. Now they’re not stolen anymore. Now no one has them.” As if it had been my fault all along.
Nothing was ever her fault. She was immune to guilt, and her memory worked like one of those old gold sifting pans, shaking away all the dirt, all the bad stuff, leaving intact only the things she really wanted to remember, the things that made her look good.
That’s why the thing with Chestnut’s collar has always puzzled me, too. What made her keep the collar and then, so many years later, give it back? Why was that so important to her? It was as if Chestnut’s death wasn’t proof of something terrible she’d done, but proof of something terrible done to her.
But what? It didn’t make any sense.
Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.
—
I follow the school bus right to Monty’s doorstep, expecting to see him pour out through the open door, all six feet of him. But only a girl disembarks, bent nearly double beneath the weight of an enormous backpack, and trudges across a browning yard to a neighboring house.
Maybe Monty caught a ride home with his mom: she works in the cafeteria at the high school and part-time in one of the tollbooths on Interstate 70, which runs between Columbus and St. Louis. She told me once she liked to wear her hairnet there, too, tried to dress herself down and look as plain as possible, so the late-night drivers coming through would be less tempted to stroke her palm when she was giving change or whisper dirty things to her.
Monty lives in a funny patchwork house that looks like two ranch homes got into a collision and never got unstuck. An American flag hangs over the door.
The house is dark inside. But his mom, May, comes to the door as soon as I knock, still wearing her hairnet.
“Abigail,” she says, and gives me a huge hug. She smells like cinnamon airspray. I’ve always thought May was like a favorite quilt, colorful and comforting, soft to touch. The kind of mother who makes you feel, right away, like you’re at home. My mother was exactly like that.
“It’s good to see your face.” She holds my cheeks briefly between her hands. “I came around the other day to visit your daddy but he said you had your own place…?”
I nod. “Yeah, I rented a place behind the hair salon,” I say. Feeling suddenly judged, I add, “I just didn’t want to put my dad out. And I’ve gotten used to my privacy now, living in Chicago.”
“Seems lonely to me,” she replies, and I’m not sure whether she means it as a criticism. But a second later, she smiles.
“Come in, come in.” She steers me into a cramped seating area wobbly with teetering sports trophies and framed family photographs: she must have tripled her collection since I was last here years and years ago. “Sit down. Make yourself at home. Can I get you anything? Water? Soda? I got some of my special tea!”
“Sure, tea is great,” I say, as she bumps off into the kitchen. I sit down next to a shrine to Monty’s incremental growth from grinning, gap-toothed child to enormous muscle man.
She returns a moment later with a tall glass of tea clinking with ice. “Monty told me he saw you last night at the game.” She puts a coaster on the table and takes a seat across from me, sighing as she eases off her feet. “You know half the kids showed up today still smelling like beer. Alcohol-free zone, my you-know-what. Last week of school, too. Some of them don’t even bother bringing books to class anymore.”
“You didn’t go?”
She shakes her head. “Football and more football. Seems like that’s the only thing anyone can agree on.”
“Is he at home?” I ask. But before she can respond, I get my answer: from deeper in the house, the crash of something heavy to the ground.
“Gimme a second,” she says, stiffly, and pushes up from the sofa. She disappears and I hear a muffled dialogue, the rapid back-and-forth of teenage stubbornness. She returns looking not angry, just exhausted.
“Hun, he’s not up for talking,” she says in a low tone. “I had to take him out of school early today. He turned over his desk, got into a shouting match with the principal.” For a second, she looks like she might lose it. “I’m just at my wit’s end with him. But what do they expect, dropping that kind of news at assembly?”
“What news?” I ask, and she stares at me.
“Lord, I thought that’s why you came by.” She scooches forward on the couch and lowers her voice, casting a nervous glance in the direction of Monty’s room, as if he might overhear. “Terrible, terrible thing. She’ll pull through okay, though. Still, a girl so young…a good student, too…”
“What girl? What happened?”
“Tatum Klauss,” she says, and my heart stops. The girl who accused Monty of stalking her, according to Sheriff Kahn. “Monty’s had a thing for her for ages—since they were freshmen and they used to ride the same bus, before her parents divorced. Sweet as anything, and always so polite when she sees me in the line. Not like most kids. Look at you like you’re trash. A bright student, too.”
Talking to May has always been like trying to separate strands of spaghetti left to cool in a colander. Every idea leads to ten others. “What happened to Tatum?”
“Got ahold of a bunch of her brother’s attention medicine and took them all at once—last night, when everyone was at the game.” May makes the sign of the cross. “Thank God her momma wasn’t feeling well and came home early. Found her puking her guts out and barely conscious. She rushed her right to the emergency clinic in Dougsville.” The same clinic where I rushed my father, after his fall. “They say she’ll be just fine. Can you imagine? And she’s a straight-A student, too. Got one of them Optimal Scholarships. Supposed to be heading out to college in the fall…” May says “college” the way someone might say “heaven.” In some ways, it isn’t surprising. Around these parts, both are just as hard to get into.