I’m angry and seething, barely able to believe Jimmy’s double-crossed me by taking Zerena. Tricia might be lying for some crazy psycho reason, but I think back to Jimmy’s unflappable calm this morning when talking about Zerena. He never once mentioned going to the police himself to try to help the investigation, and yet he was dead certain we’d have Zerena back by the end of the day. How could he have been so certain Zerena would be back unless he knew exactly where she was and had the power to release her when he chose?
Tricia’s message cuts off just as a commotion arises in the hallway. People argue, saying rude things to each other right outside my room.
“She’s our daughter! Who wouldn’t want to see their parents? It wouldn’t be visiting hours if people aren’t supposed to visit.”
“But . . . but . . . but—”
“Woman, don’t you ‘but’ me!”
Two kinds of drunks exist in this world—the gregarious but genial kind like Jimmy and the bitter, combative type like Tully. I thought he stopped drinking, but he’s slurring his words and, from the heavy sound of his footfalls, stumbling. Hearing him bicker brings back bad memories of growing up in the trailer with them. No matter how well my mother tried to divert his anger, he’d always erupt something nasty, breaking plates and glasses and the fragile hopes of the little girl who once was me. I close my eyes with a sense of dread and pretend to be asleep, but my parents come into the room anyways.
“Aw, look at that, Tully,” Belinda says, her voice hushed like it would be when I was a little girl and she’d find me curled asleep on the couch. “She’s sleeping. I told you we shouldn’t come here bothering her. Let’s go and come back some other day.”
“Nonsense,” Tully says. He tugs my hand. Try as I might to still my breathing, it’s impossible not to squirm at his touch. “Honey? Honey? You ’wake?”
“Aww . . . you gone and woke her,” Belinda says.
“Wake up. Wake up.”
I open my eyes. Tully hunches right above me, his graying ponytail slung over one shoulder, the odors of gasoline and motor oil clinging to his gray mechanic’s coveralls. Seeing me awake, he steps back, scrunches his eyes, and says, “Man, you look horrible. What the hell happened to you?”
Before I can answer, he asks, “Has that man of yours shown up? I need to talk to him about my money.”
I’m no troublemaker, no snarl girl who looks forward to giving pricks their comeuppance, but Tully’s got to be told. “The money you gave Jimmy was bad money.”
Tully narrows his eyes. Contrary to what I expect, he remains calm. He taps his fingers against my bed rail, pinging it in a metronomic rhythm. Belinda, who’s holding my hand, tenses up as if she knows about the money. Tully asks her to leave the room.
“You’re not going to hurt her, are you?” Belinda asks, letting go of my hand.
“Course not. Only a fool kills the messenger.”
Belinda doesn’t want to leave, but probably not wanting to provoke a confrontation with Tully, she slogs out of the room. Tully opens a pouch of Red Man loose-leaf chewing tobacco that he pulls from the back pocket of his coveralls and stuffs a lump between his cheek and gum. “So about this money. What you know about it?”
“It’s counterfeit. Jimmy brought it to someone yesterday, and even before he could set up an investment account or whatever for the money, the money was flagged as counterfeit.”
Tully takes this information in slowly, shifting his brows, nodding. Never has anything I’ve said so captured his attention. Bourbon vapors spill out of his every breath, comingling with the chewing tobacco. “So he’ll give the money back to me. That’s not so bad, is it?”
“Did you know it was counterfeit?”
“Do you got a cup I can use for my spit?”
“Paper cups are in the bathroom. Did you know the money wasn’t real?”
“You don’t need to know that.” Tully walks into the bathroom of my maternity suite, and I hear him spit into a paper cup, and when he comes back into the room, he’s carrying that paper cup. Sitting beside me on the bed, he balances it on his knee. “I’m your daddy, girl. I’m supposed to look out for you, so trust me. Don’t go around asking about that money, okay?” He shoots me a glance, letting me know he’s serious. “You don’t want to learn anything that’s going to put you in the middle of someone’s crosshairs. The best thing in the world for you right now is to be a beautiful little fool. Stay stupid. Stupid’s good. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
In his own way, he’s saying that he loves me. He doesn’t want to see me dead, doesn’t want to see me maimed or wounded or fallen victim to whoever fronted him the counterfeit money, which is more consideration than Jimmy’s shown me lately. I asked that he divorce Tricia, but instead, he seems determined to leap into her arms every time he thinks I’m asleep or too sick to notice.
“So your Jimmy’s going to give me back that money, right?”
“The money’s still with whoever flagged it as counterfeit. They’re threatening to kneecap Jimmy because of it.” At the sound of that word—kneecap—Tully spits tobacco juice into his cup. “Jimmy gave them the money having no reason to think it wasn’t real.”
Tully looks off in the distance and whistles as if he can’t believe Jimmy would do such a thing. “That was stupid. Your Jimmy should have known better. I’m going to have to talk some sense into him, tell him to get the money back. If whoever your Jimmy’s dealing with turns the money over to the feds, it’s going to be trouble for everyone. Understand? So how do I meet up with your Jimmy?”
A chill goes through me. Has Tully ever killed someone? I can’t say for certain, but there’s no question he’ll turn violent if he can’t get his counterfeit money. I warned Jimmy that Tully’s a pit viper, but he chose not to listen. Now, one way or another, he’s going to face the consequences. Is that what I want? Should I sic my father on him? What kind of asshole steals a baby? From his mistress? As eloquent as Jimmy sometimes is, my father will know that Jimmy lied to him—there’s no way Jimmy can explain why he gave the money to a private investigator rather than investing it like my father expected.
“Come on, girl. I don’t have all day. Tell me where I can find him.”
I suck in a breath. What I’m doing is wrong, but what Jimmy’s been doing to me is equally wrong. I tell my father the address Jimmy gave me yesterday.
Tully scratches his head. “Where’s that?”
I grab my cell phone, punch in the address, which automatically loads it into the Google Maps app, and soon we’re both staring at a map of upper Georgetown. I click a thumbnail picture of the house itself—which is absolutely humongous. The thumbnail picture expands, filling my phone’s screen. Tully sucks in a breath. He, too, is shocked by the size of Jimmy’s house. I could get lost in a house that big. He’s totally played me. The house might really be in Tricia’s name, but you can’t tell me that a man who lives in a house that huge doesn’t have ample resources of his own. He didn’t even want to pay off my student loans.
“He lives there?” Tully asks.
“Go get him, Dad. Do what you have to do with him, okay?”
Five minutes later, Lois Belcher comes into the room again. “I don’t know what’s keeping the police so long.” She’s a nervous hen, that woman is. She goes up to the window, stares outside. “I called them up, just like you asked, but they still haven’t come.”
I glance at the chocolates next to the flowers and am filled with the desire to eat a couple of them. Because of the IV lines and electronic medical monitoring equipment hooked into me, I can’t reach over far enough to grab the box. Not really being a chocolate person, it’s the first time I’ve hungered for them, and I hope this hunger’s a sign of a returning appetite, a sign that I’m getting better. “Mrs. Belcher, could you hand me my chocolates?”
Lois Belcher brings them to me. I open the box and bite into a little cube of dark chocolate that’s rich and creamy and filled with some kind of coffee-flavored nougat. It’s delicious. None of the cheap drugstore chocolates or Hershey bars I’ve ever had tasted so good.
“You know, you’re real lucky to have Jimmy in your life.”
“Yeah. Right.” I nibble a milk chocolate swirl that tastes of cinnamon and citrus.
“Seriously. Bringing you here when he did, he saved your life. That’s what the doctors are saying.”