“Are you afraid of something else you’re not telling me?” he asks quietly.
I open my mouth to lie. Change my mind. “Maybe,” I say. “Yes. Always. I just can’t talk about it.”
He considers that for a few seconds. “I won’t mention your presence here as long as you don’t do anything that would require my professional services. Deal?”
“If the neighbors notice and ask why I’m here?”
“Tell them you rented from me on Airbnb. Tell them to give me a call.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t disappoint me. The empty boxes are in the garage. The house keys are taped under the silverware box in the drawer.” He walks over and scratches some numbers on the chalkboard, under the stick figure. “My cell. Use it. About the house. About any noises in the night.”
I shut and lock the kitchen door behind him. He is as magnetic and attractive as Wyatt Branson, just in a very different way. What Bunny would call erudite, although she pronounces it like Aphrodite. I can understand the tug and pull that all the tabloids said Odette had going on between her husband and old boyfriend.
I’m struck with something that feels a little like joy. I have a guilt-free place to stay. An official order to go through Odette’s things.
Day two, and I’m making progress.
Certainly, I’m bothering people on my list.
Finn’s car revs outside the window. I lean across the sink and peek out the pineapple curtains. Blue convertible. Creamy white leather. He backs out like a man who never doubts himself turning the wheel of anything, a car or a game of roulette.
I feel the joy fading. There has to be another reason Finn is allowing a strange girl like me to stay in his house. Maybe keeping me a secret, controlled, where he can find me, is exactly what he wants.
49
My butt is resting on a high branch of a tree that hangs over spot No. 7 on the murder map, labeled “Rape Site.” My mouth is aiming a stream of pot smoke at a small triangle of blue sky I can see through a patch between the leaves.
Here Is Where Trumanell Branson Stopped a Rape and Became a Folk Hero. It doesn’t say that on a plaque anywhere, and the map vaguely guided me to “the first big tree past the east head of Indian Trail off the parking lot; no marker per City Council ruling.”
I’m guessing that the crime occurred sixteen years ago in the flat spot of dirt under the giant oak that’s hosting me, or else I’m staring down at the park’s most popular hookup spot. Probably both.
From up here, I’ve got a good view of some dead grocery store flowers still in their plastic, a few empty wine bottles, two blue Trojan wrappers, and something white and lacy that didn’t get put back on. I take another puff and turn up Alan Jackson so my earbuds are practically vibrating with his twang. I want to get a sense, not only of this park, but the psychological landscape.
I want to roll around in the myth of Trumanell, of Odette, of this town whose whole purpose for existing is to wait. I want to stare into this lake, which is so much darker and uglier than in my dreams that I’m not sure it’s the same one.
A couple of weeks ago, I started a chart of people related to this case. I wouldn’t make a good cop. I gave up after I hit seventy-two. It seemed like if I kept going there would be as many names to think about as Stephen King put in The Stand.
Like the rapist who Trumanell beat up under this tree. Fred Lee Tippen might have decided to send someone after Trumanell while he rotted in prison. She’s the one who opened up his whole can of victims, all those girls in town who started to talk about what he did to them. But I can’t talk to Fred because he was sent back to Huntsville two weeks ago, charged with raping a woman in the back row of an empty theater during a Star Wars movie.
On the way out here, I drove by his house anyway. A toddler was playing outside in a kiddie pool, naked, totally unsupervised. I picked him up and knocked on the door. His mom acted shocked he was out there alone. I know better. I’ve delivered a lot of wandering toddlers to trailer park doors.
Like the girl who Trumanell rescued in this park. Eleisa Manchester, now thirty-one and a mother of two. She met her husband in law school. She named her daughter Nell and her boy Truman. A picture that ran with Trudette’s crime blog showed her in a pink pussy hat that she knit herself. So, here’s to you, Trumanell. You’re still saving the world. I take another puff.
Like the girl named Lizzie, Trumanell’s look-alike. She’s in hiding somewhere after writing some limp bestseller called My Sister Trumanell. Right after the book was published this spring, a leaked DNA test proved that Elizabeth “Lizzie” Raymond is definitely not Frank Branson’s biological daughter. But her mother told her she was. People are messed up. This whole town is messed up.
I suck in a last hit. Blow it to the sky.
It’s just me and a couple of muscled-up guys with fishing lines down there in the water, who followed me with their eyes a little too curiously as I muddied my way to this tree.
I blew them off with a better-not-touch-me vibe. I left the gun behind the Ritz crackers at the Blue House, but I did bring along a sharp knife. I practiced with it a few times on an old punching dummy that I hung from a tree on the land in back of Bunny’s house.
Slash don’t stab. That’s how Mary and I said good night and goodbye and I love you at the group home. The truth is, we only had a white plastic knife, and we used it to make peanut butter crackers. But girls didn’t mess with us because they weren’t sure.
The higher I get, the more the lake feels like a giant magnet, pulling at me.
I also have a terrible craving for chicken and dumplings.
The boys have stripped off their shirts to bare just how macho they are, which is pretty Matthew McConaughey macho. They’ve graduated to a little canoe just offshore and are standing up, rocking it. A fish is flopping in the air on one of their lines, glinting, swinging like a wild silver pendulum.
Why do men have to kill beautiful things?
I look around for my father before I crawl out of the tree.
Nothing says you belong more than acting like you do, so I wheel my white Hyundai Accent rental car right into the middle of the Blue House driveway.
I wave to the woman next door, who is on her knees planting red petunias, roll my burnt-orange Texas Longhorn suitcase that Bunny got me for graduation through the gravel, and stick a key into the side door lock.
I open the pineapple curtains to the sunshine and unload groceries. Coke, cheese sticks, protein bars, two kinds of chips, sour gummies, frozen eggrolls, queso dip, Mrs. Renfro’s salsa, chicken-mushroom soup, Bisquick, a bag of carrots, peas, chicken breasts, milk, garlic salt. I found the chicken and dumpling ingredients while I rolled my cart around eating a Whataburger.
Next, I arrange the bathroom, one of my favorite hobbies, which tops yelling at Wheel of Fortune with Bunny and cranking Amy Winehouse. I line up my makeup on the sink counter, lay my toothbrush and toothpaste on a white washcloth, tuck my shampoo and conditioner in the shower, and hang up a towel.
Organizing my things in a bathroom soothes me. I’m pretty sure it’s because I spent a year of my life living with a gang of girls who shared a single-minded goal to steal every Maybelline lipstick and tampon I owned.