Flowering Judas(11)

“Charlene,” Stew said.

“She killed him,” Charlene said. “And that’s all there is to it.”

Stew got up. The percolator was making odd noises. It was probably finished, or something. Charlene had never gotten the hang of how to use it. She looked down at her hands. Her fingernails were cracked. She hadn’t put polish on in years. If Chester were still alive, he’d come back to find her an old woman.

But Chester was not alive.

Charlene got up from the table.

“I’m going to watch television,” she said, even though she never watched television, and Stew knew it.

Stew was getting a coffee cup down from the cabinet. “There’s no evidence,” he said, for at least the third time. “You can’t go calling people murderers when there’s no evidence.”

“You can call a murderer a murderer no matter what kind of evidence there is,” she said.

Then she marched through the swinging double doors and away from him, and from the posters and the flyers and the endless reality of the last twelve years.

7

Althy Michaelman didn’t give a rat’s ass about … well, about anything, really. It was just that the goddamned empty trailer bothered her.

It didn’t bother her all the time. Sometimes she had enough of a buzz on to forget all about it, sort of, unless she heard a noise over there. Then she got spooked, because of course the trailer was empty. The trailer had been empty for years, ever since Chester Fucking Morton had disappeared. Althy wasn’t surprised he’d disappeared. He was the kind of person who disappeared. He was a fucking-A idiot.

Tonight, there was not enough of anything in the house to really get buzzed on, and Althy didn’t like the idea of going out and stealing it. There was no advantage to stealing from liquor stores. They had cameras, and most of the ones around here knew who she was, anyway. The whole point of drinking instead of doing all the other stuff she used to do was that she couldn’t go to prison for just having it around. Robbing a fucking-A liquor store therefore made no sense.

Therefore.

Althy thought it was funny as hell that she’d thought of a word like “therefore.” Haydee would love that, if she ever heard it. Haydee wasn’t even home. There was a fucking tragedy, there was. Haydee over there at the junior college, what was anybody supposed to think? The girl was a fucking-A idiot, and always had been.

And besides, who did she think she was?

The trailer over there was absolutely quiet. It was absolutely empty. Every once in a while, that crazy woman, Chester Morton’s mother, came to look it over, but that was it. Althy thought it had to be nice, having enough money to rent something you weren’t even going to use. Just rent it and leave it there. Leave it empty. Then every couple of months, kids would break in and the police would be out here and how was that good for anything?

Althy was lying on the bed in the bedroom at the back of the trailer, the one that spanned the whole width. The bed was full of dirty clothes and the floor was full of dirty clothes, too. You had to take clothes down the street all the way to Colonial Plaza to get to the laundromat. It was too long a walk carrying a bag of shit like that, and besides Althy didn’t like Colonial Plaza anymore. It used to be a real shopping center. Now half the stores were empty and the place felt like there were vampires in it. Althy had seen a movie with vampires in it on TV. That was before they’d shut the cable off.

This time.

Althy sat up. Mike was somewhere around. Haydee was over at the college, going to class with that woman she couldn’t stop talking about. Penelope London. What kind of a name was that? She was a snob. All the teachers Althy had ever met were snobs. You could tell the woman was a snob with a name like that.

Althy’s head hurt. It was getting dark. It was always getting dark. Haydee had money in this trailer somewhere. It was a lot of money. Haydee squirreled away money in coffee cans and weird places trying to make it so that nobody could find it, but what sense did that make? If you had money, you spent it. Especially when there were things you needed. Althy didn’t understand why she let Haydee live here anymore at all.

Besides, the money should be going to the rent on the trailer. It should be. Haydee threw in a little every month, but it wasn’t enough. She had room and board here. That was going to cost you. She couldn’t just stuff all her money away in coffee cans and expect it to be there when she went back to it.

Althy steadied herself against the side of the bed and got to her feet. She was swaying a little. This was the worst hangover she could remember in months. Everything glowed, and everything shimmered. She steadied herself against the dresser, next, and then against the wall. She pushed herself out into the narrow hall. Everything in this trailer was narrow. It was a single wide. There was that. No fancy double wides with cathedral ceilings and gourmet kitchens in this trailer park. It was just single wides and cinder block.