“Camille. It’s a pleasure. A real pleasure,” he murmured in his monotone drawl. “All the way down in Wind Gap. Thought you had a moratorium on anything south of Illinois.”
“Just working, actually.”
“Work.” He smiled. It was the closest to a question as I would get. My mother reappeared, her hair now pulled up in a pale blue bow, Wendy Darling all grown up. She pressed a chilled glass of fizzing amaretto into my hand, patted my shoulder twice, and sat away from me, next to Alan.
“Those little girls, Ann Nash and Natalie Keene,” I prompted. “I’m covering it for my paper.”
“Oh, Camille.” My mother hushed me, looking away. When my mother is piqued, she has a peculiar tell: She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out. During some particularly difficult years when I was a child, she had no lashes at all, and her eyes were a constant gluey pink, vulnerable as a lab rabbit’s. In winter time, they leaked streaks of tears whenever she went outdoors. Which wasn’t often.
“It’s my assignment.”
“Goodness, what an assignment,” she said, her fingers hovering near her eyes. She scratched the skin just below and put her hand in her lap. “Aren’t those parents having a difficult enough time without you coming here to copy it all down and spread it to the world? ‘Wind Gap Murders Its Children’!—is that what you want people to think?”
“A little girl has been killed, and another is missing. It’s my job to let people know, yes.”
“I knew those children, Camille. I’m having a very hard time, as you can imagine. Dead little girls. Who would do that?”
I took a slug of my drink. Granules of sugar stuck to my tongue. I was not ready to speak with my mother. My skin hummed.
“I won’t stay long. Truly.”
Alan refolded the cuffs of his sweater, smoothed his hand down the crease of his shorts. His contribution to our conversations generally came in the form of adjustments: a collar tucked in, a leg recrossed.
“I just can’t have that kind of talk around me,” my mother said. “About hurt children. Just don’t tell me what you’re doing, don’t talk about anything you know. I’ll pretend you’re here for summer break.” She traced the braided wicker of Alan’s chair with her fingertip.
“How’s Amma?” I asked to change the subject.
“Amma?” My mother looked alarmed, as if she suddenly remembered she’d left her child somewhere. “She’s fine, she’s upstairs asleep. Why do you ask?”
I knew from the footsteps I heard scampering up and down the second floor—from the playroom to the sewing room to the hall window that gave the best spying vantage of the back porch—that Amma was certainly not asleep, but I didn’t begrudge her avoiding me.
“Just being polite, Momma. We do that up north, too.” I smiled to show I was teasing her, but she buried her face into her drink. Came back up pink and resolute.
“Stay as long as you want, Camille, really,” she said. “But you will have to be kind to your sister. Those girls were her schoolmates.”
“I look forward to getting to know her,” I mumbled. “I’m very sorry for her loss.” The last words I couldn’t resist, but my mother didn’t notice their bitter spin.
“I’ll give you the bedroom next to the sitting room. Your old bedroom. It has a tub. I’ll buy fresh fruit and some toothpaste. And steaks. Do you eat steak?”
Four hours of threadbare sleep, like lying in a bathtub with your ears half submerged. Shooting up in bed every twenty minutes, my heart pounding so hard I wondered if it was the beating that woke me. I dreamt I was packing for a trip, then realized I’d laid out all the wrong clothes, sweaters for a summer vacation. I dreamt I’d filed the wrong story for Curry before I left: Instead of the item on miserable Tammy Davis and her four locked-up children, we’d run a puff piece about skin care.
I dreamt my mother was slicing an apple onto thick cuts of meat and feeding it to me, slowly and sweetly, because I was dying.
Just after 5 a.m. I finally threw off the covers. I washed Ann’s name off my arm, but somehow, between dressing, brushing my hair, and dabbing on some lipstick, I’d written Natalie Keene in its place. I decided to leave it for luck. Outside, the sun was just rising but my car handle was already hot. My face felt numb from lack of sleep and I stretched my eyes and mouth wide, like a B-movie scream queen. The search party was set to reconvene at 6 a.m. for continued work in the woods; I wanted to catch a quote from Vickery before the day began. Staking out the police station seemed a good bet.