Put aside my fake eye, and it’s hard to hide myself as ordinary: a Mona Lisa/Sarah Jessica Parker nose that actually makes it even harder to see, large boobs for being skinny, and long black hair that doesn’t dye well so I don’t.
The biggest problem goes back to my eyes. They are so intense they could burn a hole in the sky, Bunny says, which she means as a compliment. I tried to tone down things today, going with the brown eye and matching contact lens. It doesn’t seem to be making this woman any less suspicious.
“Sure,” I tell her. “Please let Rusty know that I had a premonition about him. He was standing in a hallway with hundreds of doors.”
“Are you leaving a name?” she asks briskly. It’s clearly not the oddest thing a person walking in off the street has said to her. “A phone number?”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I do not. Young lady, do you have a crime to report?”
“Just tell him about my dream.”
“How do you spell your name?”
“Never mind,” I say.
I’m almost to my car when a hand grips my shoulder.
I jerk around, ready to kick, pull, scream. Slash don’t stab.
Bloody Betty has put me on serious edge.
“Whoa,” a man drawls. It’s another police officer—male, no more than late twenties, with lazy, flat features, like his face was rolled under a tire lightly.
His hand still possessively sits on my bare arm. I shrug it off.
“I overheard a little,” he says, gesturing back toward the police station. “She’s a bit of a brick wall. I’m Rusty’s partner, Gabriel. Maybe I can help.”
His eyes have moved from my breasts to my license plate, which an hour ago I slathered with a wet mud pie I’d gathered by the garbage cans at the Blue House. His face says he’d like to see me the same way, only naked. Barely legal is still legal.
How far away in this town could Rusty be? I throw on my pageant girl smile.
“I would so appreciate if you called him up,” I say. “Let him know that you just met a woman who dreamed about him in a hall of closed doors. You can tell him that Odette Tucker is hiding behind one of them and Trumanell Branson behind another. I’ll be sitting in that diner across the street for the next thirty minutes. I’d like to see him before the devil knows he’s dead. Tell him that, too.”
“I’ll bet you are the devil,” he says, grinning, as he pulls out his radio.
“You’re what?”
It took Rusty Colton just thirteen minutes to pull his cruiser in front of the diner and slide beside me in the red plastic booth.
Across the street, where I left my car, I can see his partner wiping off my license plate. Asshole. It was rented with a fake ID, but that won’t keep him off my case for long. I was stupid to use him to get to Rusty.
Focus on Odette.
“A clairvoyant intuitive,” I answer, and take another suck out of my chocolate milkshake.
“Look, it’s a busy day. Get to the point.” It’s bugging me that his eyes are hidden behind a dark pair of Oakleys.
“The point is that we can help each other,” I say. “Solve Odette’s case. She’s speaking to me from the grave, not to be too dramatic. She’s worried about something you stole out of her desk, among other things.” I decide to take another tiny step. “My personal sense is that she was killed by the same person as Trumanell.”
He lifts a finger in the air without taking his eyes off of me. A waitress slides over with a black cup of coffee like she’s been waiting for him all day.
Across the street, his partner is still messing behind my car. It’s giving me what I call the Group Home Chill, which runs down my neck whenever I smell antiseptic soap bars or worry that someone on a power trip will send me back to a bunk bed and a community toilet.
Rusty is standing up, pulling down the window shade—stealing my view on purpose. As soon as he sits back down, he shoves his sunglasses to the top of his head. His eyes are blue and bloodshot.
I take another long pull on my milkshake. He taps the sides of a packet of sugar on the table with four decisive clicks.
Five minutes pass, maybe more. His arm is now stretched across the back of the booth. His cup, almost empty. At the cemetery, from a distance, the red hair gave him a rowdy, boyish vibe. Up close, he’s a very old soul.
The pressure to say something, to break the silence, is overwhelming. I can’t hold out.
“Don’t you wonder how I know about your dream about the doors?” I burst out. “How I know that the line from the Turnpike Troubadours song about the devil is one of your favorites? How I know you took something from Odette’s desk?”
“I do,” he drawls. “I wonder quite a bit.”
He’s baiting me.
“Did you ever figure out what 70X7 means?” I hiss. “Those numbers painted on that shovel left on her porch?”
This is dangerous territory, and I’m sorry I said it as soon as it came out of my mouth. The 70X7 detail wasn’t even released to the press.
I see a flicker of surprise, but just for a second.
“You’re the first real psychic I ever met,” he drawls. Except his eyes say I’m lying.
Of course, if I had psychic gifts, my mother and Odette would be alive.
Around 4 A.M. when I couldn’t sleep, I’d dug up some old yellow dishwashing gloves under the kitchen sink, done some finger yoga and deep breaths, and settled down with Betty Crocker in the closet.
I wore the gloves because I couldn’t bear the thought of my skin touching the pages.
Every time I open the book, it seems to smell worse, like something decaying in a hot trash can. Like things fried in grease. I tell myself all Betty Crocker cookbooks smell a little like that. That I’m imagining the smell just like I used to imagine the wind outside the trailer whispering things.
It made me feel a little better that I could now mostly assure myself that this book was all Odette’s.
Except that meant I was stepping into the creepy basement of her brain.
From what I could tell by dates written randomly at the tops of pages, at least half of the book was collected and put together in the first few years after Trumanell disappeared, when Odette was still a teenager. She had tucked almost all of the pages in the metal rings, like an expert scrapbooker.
Other crime scene photos from the Branson place were protected under plastic sheets. A few things were loose and random: detailed sketches of leg bones, a crayon diagram of a house with distances measured to a barn and a tree, newspaper clippings I’d already seen online.
I immediately recognized the leg bones as a copy of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings. I had a six-week affair with mono last year, and I’d sleep-watched a documentary on da Vinci’s journals. It’s a snotty blur, but I remember that Leonardo loved diagramming the human body, a good autopsy, wearing pink hats, and saving animals—so much he’d buy caged birds from the market just to set them free.
But it was Odette’s notes in the back of the cookbook that brought me to this moment in the diner. Odette had outlined the events and encounters in the last weeks of her life. Rusty was in there. Maggie. Wyatt.
When I saw my own name, I slipped off the gloves. It felt like I was reading my own obituary except I wasn’t dead.