There were three years between Trumanell and me, too many to be close friends. But she knew me well enough to slip me lipstick. I was her brother’s girlfriend, and that counted.
I hear the patter of the shower going again. Finn is up. I need to hurry.
I flip to the back, to my random notes, a diary of sorts. From my phone, I copy the GPS coordinates of the land on which Wyatt found Angel. I write my guesses at suspects who might have broken into the drawer in my father’s desk. I time and date the call from the crying man earlier this morning.
I feel under the bottom of my chair for the baggie from Daddy’s drawer, where it is stuck with a thumbtack. I write “unidentified organic material” across it in marker and tape it to the page. In the margin beside it, I draw a dandelion, doodling the vine into a series of question marks.
The shower cuts off. The medicine cabinet creaks open and shut. I tuck the murder book back on the shelf, making sure it is perfectly even with the other spines.
Finn has never touched this cookbook. His idea of cooking is to google chicken vegetables easy on his phone. He doesn’t know that for the last five years he has eaten every meal in the company of my violent art.
I was seventeen when I ripped the recipes out of this book and threw them in the trash. Betty Crocker smiled the whole time with a motherly stamp of approval. I appreciated that, so I left her picture in place on the inside cover. She smiled just as sweetly when I placed the first dark things inside.
This book, I tell myself, is proof of nothing. It is more a scrapbook of years of personal anguish than of objective professional effort. I never showed it to Finn because I knew he would never look at me the same way again. I never showed it to my father because I was afraid it would be the grenade that blew us up.
The coffeepot is spitting out a last death rattle. I need to leave for the meeting at the lake soon. But I want to shore up last night with a kiss goodbye. I want to make us work. I don’t understand my marriage but neither do I understand anybody else’s.
The longer Finn takes, the more it feels like the room is creeping in on me. Betty Crocker, incognito on the shelf. Santa, leering from the lid of Daddy’s box. Jesus, conducting The Last Supper on the wall.
The least I can do for Finn is get rid of the painting he hated. I lift it off its hook, laying it facedown on the table.
Finn doesn’t know that this painting and I have a very personal history. My father always chose this chair and the view of this wall when he thought I needed to think about what I had done.
I had plenty of hours to memorize every stroke of this da Vinci, down to the salt Judas knocked over, making it forever bad luck to spill salt.
One of my uncle’s most effective sermons was called “Devil and Salt.” He preached that when you spill salt, the noise wakes the devil, who sleeps on your left shoulder. But if you throw a little extra salt over your shoulder, the devil is blinded. Just don’t forget which shoulder he sits on. And don’t miss. After that sermon, my uncle bragged that half of the congregation gave up salt for a month.
To this day, I toss salt over my left shoulder without thinking. More than once, I’ve hit Finn in the eye.
My father called da Vinci one of the great detectives. He told me I’d learn everything I’d ever need to know about body language in the brushstrokes that captured this second after Jesus told his apostles he would be betrayed. A head turn, a quirk of the lip, a betrayer’s jerk of an elbow.
While I recuperated from the accident, da Vinci hovered in my bed. I read about his obsession with the human body while I obsessed over mine. Drawing after drawing, autopsy after autopsy. Da Vinci was documenting the physical puzzle of man long before a drop of blood could tell us the color of skin and eyes, the shape of a nose.
“When a man sits down, the distance from his seat to the top part of his head will be half of his height plus the thickness and length of the testicles.”
Finn and I tested that out once after a few margaritas.
In the bedroom, he swishes a broom across wood. Glass clanks into a trash can. A window glide squeaks. The mattress whines like a knee is punched into it, like Finn’s making the bed, even though he never does.
I restlessly flip through my voicemails. Rusty is asking me to meet up outside the station house around ten tonight so we can talk. Maggie is going to take Lola and Angel to the movies and orders me to get some more sleep.
No more sounds from the bedroom. In my own house, I absorb the humiliating feeling of a one-night stand. Finn is waiting for me to leave.
“Sometimes, I think Odette is all titanium.” I overheard Finn say that once.
But I’m not.
I telegraph my goodbye as loudly as possible. I rinse and clank my coffee cup into the rack, “accidentally” set off the alarm on my iPad before I plug it in to recharge, slam a cabinet shut. On the chalk message board, I squeak out a one-legged stick figure blowing a kiss, my private signature for him only.
I tuck the painting of The Last Supper under one arm and use the other hand to grab the Santa box. In the hall by the front door, I yank open the coat closet, still crammed with my father’s old uniforms and hunting jackets. I slide The Last Supper upright against the side of the closet wall and let a coattail fall over it. Kneeling, I shove the Santa box as far as I can to the back, but something’s in the way.
It was Maggie who stormed through the closets in this house after the funeral. She insisted. Every pocket, every box. But my father’s uniforms—I couldn’t bear to get rid of them. I insisted Maggie put them back exactly as she found them.
Ever since, I’ve used this closet as a place for what I want to throw away but can’t. It’s not a surprise that the closet is finally fighting back. My cheek brushes up against rough wool, a brass button, as I reach back to see what the problem is.
I pull out a boot from the back corner. It takes the second boot for me to register. These used to be my father’s favorite boots. Rattlesnake. He loved wearing things he killed.
Except he told me he threw these boots away. He said they were destroyed the night he sloshed through the field hunting for Trumanell.
Mud cakes the soles. Brown stains color the toes, splash up and down the sides. I know mud. I know blood.
And on these boots, there are both.
Blood from a deer?
Trumanell?
Frank Branson?
I’ve hunted Frank Branson as long and hard as I’ve searched for Trumanell. I’ve wished him alive on every eyelash, every wishbone, every penny, every white horse, every rainbow, every fluffy fucking dandelion.
I’ve wished him alive so he can confess to all of it.
If Trumanell has to be dead, I want Frank Branson to be the one who killed her.
I pray for that while my father’s boots are dead weight in my arms.
22
I swipe at a crumb of mud on my shirt, mesmerized by the long black whisper it leaves across the blue.
Dirt from my father’s boot. Dirt, I think, from Trumanell’s grave.
I can’t think that. It makes no sense. My father wouldn’t bury Trumanell and let her rot. She was a beautiful, loving girl. My cheeks are wet. I try to shove the Santa box in the closet again, on the top shelf, but the lid pops open. Memories, raining onto the floor. I feel myself slipping through the paper, all because one of my feet is forever asleep.