I drink a glass of water. It doesn’t help. My mouth still feels like I swallowed sandpaper. I force myself to sit down again at the table. I skip through the book with my fingertips, staying nowhere long.
The old cookbook has been completely torn apart and restuffed. Photographs, police reports, GPS coordinates, charts. Everywhere, scribbles and fine pencil drawings. Flowers, bats, a cross, Trumanell’s profile with her hair in a bun. Dated diary entries from beginning to end.
I reach a collection of four Ziploc bags. Is this evidence? I fumble open each one. I look but don’t touch. A bobby pin with a single blond strand, a handful of pot, a pinch of glitter, a tube of lipstick that I’m overwhelmingly relieved isn’t a finger.
I stop. Shove the chair back. What am I doing? Those thin pineapple curtains are all that separate me from someone watching. How could I possibly think it was OK to play house at Odette’s with chicken and dumplings? How high was I when I rolled my little orange Hook’em suitcase across the gravel?
No one should know I’m here. Not Finn. Not Wyatt. Not the woman planting petunias. What did that New York Times story call it? The Texas Town That Waits. Someone suddenly moving into the Blue House wouldn’t ever be anonymous—it would be big news, traveling fast. The killer would be more than curious. The media could show up. My father could show up.
Other questions are beating me in the head. Is this Odette’s book? Finn’s? Her killer’s? An obsession or a historical record? Proof of something?
I turn off every light in the house, check the locks on every window, pull each shade two inches past the sill, thrust all the boxes I packed with closet junk in front of the door, even though, outside, a piece of plywood is already nailed across it.
I tell myself that people as stupid as I am don’t deserve college scholarships, and that I should have at least left a goodbye note for Bunny under my pillow.
Trumanell, Odette, me. All of us, dead for no good reason, in our separate unmarked graves, mystery spots in the lake or a field. Fishermen, rowing over us. Hikers, never knowing their boots shake our bones. Dandelions, replicating and replicating and replicating.
My eye and Odette’s leg will be all that’s left hundreds of years from now when they brush off the dirt and we are finally found.
I tuck the cookbook back in the shelf, unfinished. My eye, aching, blurring, can’t read anymore. But my brain can’t stop processing. Bobby pins and glitter. Odd doodling. Trumanell’s bloody fingers.
For an hour and a half, I lie on Odette’s bed, the gun on the pillow beside me, and wait for it to get dark. The fan is perfectly still over my head, a dead propeller, so I can hear every little thing.
I feel ten years old.
Even then, I never gave up.
At 9 P.M. exactly, I slam the side door. I loudly roll my suitcase back across the gravel. I turn my headlights on and off several times. I “accidentally” set off the car alarm.
I’m doing all of this in the dark because I want people to know the stranger’s white car is leaving but I don’t want anyone to see my face. I screech out of the driveway, windows down, blaring Waylon Jennings.
The Girl in the Blue House is gone, people.
About a mile away, I slip the car into an open spot on a block lined with cars. A party, maybe. Middle-class families with driving teenagers and no room in the driveway. Whatever, it’s a good place for me to hide the car.
I punch in the number Finn left on the chalkboard. One ring. Two.
“Finn’s phone.” A woman’s voice. Light. Entitled. I almost hang up.
“Hi,” I say. “Is Finn around?”
A beat of silence. “He’s unavailable at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?” She emphasizes I, as if she’s running his life.
“Just tell him Angel called.” I slur Angel in a sexy stripper way, or the way I think a sexy stripper would slur things. I have no idea why I’m making the effort to torture this woman on the other end of the line.
I don’t have the sense that the woman will pass on my message to Finn even though she says, “I will be happy to relay the message.” After we hang up, I call every hotel in town, just in case. All of them reply with a recorded message that they are closed for roof and flooding repairs.
I consider dropping Betty in the mail to the FBI and heading for home, where my next list includes Twin XL sheets maybe blue for my dorm room.
Instead, I jog back to Odette’s house.
Willie Nelson singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” yanks my head off the pillow.
Groggy. Disoriented.
Crack of light under the door. Quilts under my body.
Odette’s legs.
Oh, yeah. Back in the closet. The Willie song I programmed for Finn’s number.
“What?” I say into the phone.
“You called me,” Finn says.
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight. What’s up?” Impatient.
“I wanted to let you know a few things. Give you an update.” I clear my throat. It still tastes bitter even though I sucked on a few old peppermints that I found in a coat pocket in the closet. “I’ve boxed up a bunch of stuff for Goodwill.”
“Terrific,” he says, in a way that doesn’t sound like he cares. “Is that all?”
“I was going through some stuff in the kitchen. Dishes. Cookbooks. Is there anything you specifically want to keep?”
“I told you. All of it goes.”
Not even a little hesitation.
“Do you mind if I keep the Betty Crocker cookbook?”
“Take whatever you can fit in your car. Your white Hyundai rental car.”
“How do you know what kind of car I’m driving?” I’m feeling a new line of worry. “It wasn’t parked here when you were.”
“I saw the rental agreement in your backpack.”
What else does he know?
“That seems immoral for a lawyer,” I say. “To steal information on me while I slept.”
“You lost all moral footing when I found you in my bed.”
“I hope that is the one line of this conversation your girlfriend overhears.”
“Why did you call, Angel?”
“It was a test.”
“Did I pass?” He seems amused.
“I’ll let you know.”
I hang up.
51
“Is Rusty here?”
The plump older officer at the front desk of the police station glances up at my interruption. She immediately starts giving my body the up-down tour with her eyes.
A little gold nameplate by her computer, almost out of view, says Mother-May-I, a nickname I do not plan to be using.
Her eyes are stuck on my DIY stick-and-poke tattoo, a lopsided heart, on the soft part of the back of my hand near my thumb. It’s impossible to hide.
Bunny says she will pay to have it lasered off, but Mary is out there somewhere with one that almost matches. The night before she ran away, she did mine. Then I did hers. Some people who are apart like to remember they’re staring at the same moon. This blurry little blue heart is my and Mary’s moon.
“Rusty is out on patrol at the moment,” she informs me. “Would you like to leave a message?” I can’t tell if she’s blowing me off. Either way, she’s making me think about how I look, which I never like to do. Like she’ll remember me.