“Is that a threat?” I breathe out.
“Jesus.” His hands are tightening up on the wheel. Knuckles, white.
I’m taking one more shot before I jump out of the car. “Odette visited her childhood therapist right before she died. She thought the therapist was secretly taping her. Odette gave me an address. And a name. Dr. Andrea Greco. Her house is about three hours west.”
My memorization skills became remarkable after losing my eye, like some kind of consolation prize. They are why I was able to deliver excellent grand jury testimony about my father at age ten, why I scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, and why I remember Dr. Andrea Greco’s name and address when there is no longer any reference material on the cookbook shelf to refresh me.
“Odette came to me last night,” I persist. “She said she thought she told her therapist too much. Like maybe she remembered something. She’s worried about what’s on that tape. She didn’t exactly say she was hypnotized but …” All those sentences construct a super shaky bridge, because I made them up.
Rusty slowly removes his sunglasses and lays them on the dash. “Angelica Odette Dunn, I’m going to tell you a story.”
My name. The real one. He knows it. My heart starts to thud.
“When I was in my twenties,” he begins, “I got my fortune told on Venice Beach with my buddies, right before I went to war. I wanted to know if I was going to die. It didn’t matter that this woman looked like she drew a dot in the middle of her forehead with a black Sharpie marker or that her eyes fake-rolled around like they were chasing flies. She peered in my palm for about a minute and said she was sorry, but she just couldn’t tell. If I wanted to know if I was going to die in battle, I’d need to give her another fifty bucks so she could read the other hand, too. I was drunk and scared and fifty bucks seemed a small price to pay to have someone assure me I was going to live. I gave her the other fifty bucks. And she told me I was going to die.”
Now I’m just irritated. “That’s why you don’t believe I’m talking to Odette in the afterlife? Because some crappy California fortune-teller was better at bullshitting than you are? Do you think Odette’s therapist could know anything or not?”
“Strap in,” he says, thrusting the car in gear. “We won’t be driving the speed limit.”
57
Dr. Andrea Greco’s house hangs off a small cliff like it was lowered very, very carefully from a helicopter. Big windows, sharp angles, rugged views. Bunny would call this house modern claptrap, although she’d appreciate anyone who had the guts to live out here alone.
So I’m surprised when the woman who opens the door looks like I could blow her apart like a dandelion. I wonder if she’s ill. I curve my lips in a smile, pageant-girl lite. Rusty had informed me in the car, at ninety miles an hour, that I would be keeping my mouth shut during this little interview. I had zipped my finger over my mouth and stuck in my AirPods the rest of the way.
Rusty’s first move is to flash his badge and ID and introduce me as a cousin of Odette’s and “the family’s liaison to the police department, committed to justice.”
The whole thing is easier than I thought it would be. Dr. Greco leads us to her back deck, if that’s what you call it. “Holy crap,” I utter, unable to resist leaning over a wall that looks like glass protecting a giant landscape painting. “I want to hang glide off of here.”
“The person who said money can’t buy happiness never had money,” Dr. Greco replies. Rusty just looks pissed that I’ve already broken his order of silence.
I agree with Dr. Greco. If I had money, my mother and I would have made Betty Crocker’s chicken and dumplings on a shiny black granite countertop instead of on the ten-inch yellow Formica space between the sink and coffeepot in her sister’s trailer.
She could have paid my father, her ex-boyfriend, to never come back, or hired an assassin to kill him, or moved us a million miles away.
I would have 3-D vision. I could hug my mother tonight if I wanted.
Money is everything. It is life. It is happiness. It is the kind of blind I want to be.
Except Dr. Greco isn’t proof that money buys anything. In the sunlight, she has the skinny hardness of my aunt, who ate Oscar Meyer ready-cooked bacon and toast for breakfast and drank her lunch and dinner.
A bottle of Johnnie Walker sits on a small table, along with a half-finished glass. Rusty and I decline the whiskey but accept two chilly bottles of Topo Chico.
“It has come to light that Odette Tucker visited you right before she disappeared,” Rusty begins abruptly. “I’d like you to tell me why.”
“That wouldn’t be legal. Or moral, anyway.”
“She said you secretly recorded her. That wouldn’t be moral, either.”
“It also wouldn’t be true.”
“So why would she think that?”
She shrugs. “She sat right where you are. It’s the chair I used for interview subjects when I was researching my book.” She points to a large vase dripping with ivy. “The camera lens is in that planter. I can assure you it’s not on now and it wasn’t when Odette sat there, either. I don’t record anybody without their consent.”
I’m interested in what she’s wearing—the kind of untucked, floaty cotton shirt that either says I Feel Fat Today or I’m Concealing a Weapon, and fat does not apply.
On the way here, I Google-educated myself about Dr. Greco. She was once the most renowned and hated therapist in Texas. She’d take on any case and testify in any trial no matter how volatile or controversial.
She famously offered sympathetic testimony for a mother who shot her three children while the father was on the other end of the phone, begging for their lives. I had to stop googling after that. I’m always reminded there are worse things than losing an eye. The last two years of practicing, Dr. Greco hired a former Green Beret bodyguard. And then she quit suddenly, without giving a reason.
The highlight of my search was a YouTube video of her with Dr. Phil. I saved it to show Bunny. Bunny hates therapists in general and Dr. Phil in specific. She calls him Dr. Philistine or Dr. PhDumb or sometimes just Fame Whore. Every year on the August 20 anniversary of one of his most heinous tweets, Bunny retweets it with a middle finger emoji. It is pretty hard to believe that he tweeted If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil. #teensaccused.
On our first anniversary together, Bunny said it was good she met someone else from Oklahoma to get her opinion of Oklahomans out of the toilet.
“Is this your book, the one you were talking about?” Rusty has picked up the copy lying beside the Johnnie Walker. “Walking Through the Black Door,” he reads. “By … you. Interesting title. Great cover.”
He holds up the book jacket so I can see—a photograph of a black door with dozens of locks running top to bottom. Chain locks, padlocks, barrel bolts, deadbolts, cylinder locks, night latches. I know my locks.
“It was a terrific cover,” she says. “A terrific book. That’s my life’s work right there.” She tips the glass and finishes it, pours another quarter inch. “It sold 631 copies.”