Nothing was going to be all right. She lost every one of the games, and the more she lost the more tense she got. The muscles in her arms were slammed tight and hard. They ached just hanging by her side. Her head felt like it was going to explode.
Waiting for the ax to fall. That was what she was doing. Waiting for the ax to fall. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t killed anybody. Kyle was right about that. It didn’t matter because everything else they’d done had been so screamingly wrong, both twelve years ago and now. They’d been behaving like children who can’t control anything they do, who get themselves into more trouble the more they try to get out of the trouble they had. But what were they supposed to do? What? None of it had been their idea, and none of it had been their fault. All they’d ever wanted was to steer clear of the whole mess and act like they knew nothing about it.
Twelve years ago, Kyle had been in favor of leaving for California. That had been his best idea. They should pack up their things and drive West and settle down somewhere where nobody knew them.
“You know what the Mortons are like,” he’d said. “You know what they’re like. This is never going to go away. Not ever.”
Darvelle changed her standards. She didn’t need to win three Solitaire games in a row. She only needed to win one out of three Solitaire games. As long as she won one out of three, everything would be all right.
She lost three in a row. She sat and looked at the computer. She picked up the phone and punched in a number she should not know, but that she knew by heart.
The phone rang and rang. Darvelle told herself she was being an idiot. Nobody would be home in the middle of the day. Charlene wouldn’t be home. Charlene would be at the business, because she always was. The woman spent all her time at work.
The phone was picked up. Charlene Morton’s voice said, “Yes?”
Darvelle hung up.
Somewhere on the other end of the room, women were gathering around a computer. Darvelle paid no attention to them. They were looking at The Daily Kitten site, probably, or at one of those “lolcats” pictures. The women in this office were always looking at pictures of cats.
Darvelle picked up the phone again. She put it down again. She pushed it away from her. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she wanted to do. What could she say to Charlene that she hadn’t already said?
Margie Cardiff looked up from the computer where all the women were and said, “Darvelle. Have you seen this? Did you know about this?”
Darvelle looked down at her own computer. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. She had come in well before noon. She had no idea what she’d been doing all this time.
“Is it a cat?” she asked.
“No, it’s not a cat,” Margie said. “It’s us. Go to Channel 8. Or come over here. We’ve got it up.”
Darvelle did not want to go over there. She wanted to go home—or, maybe, not home, but out to lunch, or shopping, or something. She wanted to find some way to not be anywhere at all. She wiped the Solitaire game off her computer and typed in the URL for Channel 8.
It was up there, right in front of everything, as soon as the page loaded. “Breaking News,” it read, in big red letters. Then there was a picture of the dam and next to it a big black pickup truck that she was sure she recognized.
She pushed her chair back. It moved on wheels. She hated chairs that moved on wheels. She pulled the chair closer again and tried to read.
“What is that?” she said after a while.
“Two people shot dead out by the dam,” Margie Cardiff said. “It doesn’t say who it was, but everybody knows. People have been calling for an hour. It was that terrible Michaelman woman, do you remember her? We had her daughter working here for awhile, and then she came in—the mother, not the daughter; the daughter was a lamb—anyway, the mother came in and she was drunk beyond belief and she chased away two clients, and then we had to let her go. The daughter, I mean. Oh, for God’s sake. You know what I mean. It’s those people over at the trailer park. Two of them, this Michaelman woman and somebody else, shot right through the head in a black pickup truck parked out by the dam.”
Margie was hanging over the desk now, looking at Darvelle’s screen. “There it is,” she said. “You can see it.”
Darvelle felt as if the skin of her lips had dried out and cracked. It hurt to touch them with her tongue.
“Who was the other person?” she said. “Was it the daughter, the one who used to work here?”
“No, of course not,” Margie said. “It was some man. Isn’t that something else? A woman like that, and she’s always got a man hanging around somewhere. Half the decent women you know can’t find a man to go out with, and women like that always have somebody. She’s dead now. They’re both dead. Isn’t that incredible.”