Just Between Us

Two boys fishing in a creek found the gun. That had been almost a week earlier. Somehow we’d all missed that news, though later I heard that the mother of one of the boys had claimed her fifteen minutes of fame by appearing on a local nightly broadcast to crow about her kid’s (never mind his friend’s) narrow brush with death, neither she nor the reporter bothering to mention that the gun hadn’t been loaded. The discovery of a random handgun garnered some attention, but when they linked the gun to Viktor Lysenko it was breaking news.

I saw it on TV after getting Eric and the kids off to work and school. As always it had been a mad rush. Eric’s belief in gender equality and sensitivity to the plight of the stay-at-home mother meant that he insisted on helping with breakfast or packing lunches, which satisfied his own sense of fairness, but didn’t really make life any easier for me, which was supposed to be the point. Every morning his “helping” would put him behind and there would inevitably be ten to fifteen minutes of panicked, last-minute preparations, Eric buttoning his shirt at the same time that he dashed around trying to find the papers he’d been grading the night before, while I filled his travel mug with coffee, packed up his lunch, and generally tried to help hustle him out to his car. And almost every day, he’d pop back out of his car to say that he’d forgotten his glasses or his laptop cord, or his phone, and one or both of us would run through the house again trying to find this or that missing item. It was exhausting and completely avoidable.

By the time everyone was out the door, I often felt as if I needed a spa weekend. That clearly wasn’t possible, but I’d try to re-create a little of that relaxation by adding some Prosecco to my orange juice. My own mimosa mix. Suburban moms needing an escape is almost a cliché, I know, but it’s not like I was taking Valium, so spare me the jokes about Mother’s Little Helper. This was only a tiny bit of Prosecco, not even one-fourth of the glass. But since Viktor’s death that on-edge feeling had gotten harder to shake, and so sometimes I increased the amount. I was never drunk though. Not really.

Sitting there that morning on the couch, sipping my mimosa, I felt the tension easing, edges softening as I stared at the hosts of a national morning show flip burgers side by side while wearing ridiculous, poufy chef’s hats in a segment on grilling that they called “Not Too Soon for Summer!” Every sentence they uttered seemed to end with an exclamation point. The show was abruptly interrupted just as the female anchor had accidentally-on-purpose flipped her burger at the male anchor’s apron-covered chest.

A slightly less photogenic local announcer spoke breathlessly into the camera: “Breaking news out of Sewickley this morning. Local police have identified the gun recovered from a creek last week as the same weapon used in the murder of prominent plastic surgeon Dr. Viktor Lysenko.”

I choked on my mimosa, orange juice dribbling down my chin as I reached for the remote, cranking up the volume.

The camera jumped to a press conference. Mostly male police officers clustered around a podium as a silver-haired white man identified as the Sewickley chief of police and a dark-haired white man who was the head of the Allegheny County Police Department vied for equal time in front of the microphone. “Our ballistics experts have provided a perfect match between the barrel of the recovered semiautomatic and the bullet found in Dr. Viktor Lysenko.”

Julie’s cell phone rang and rang before going to voice mail. In desperation I called her home, but the same thing happened. I called Alison, but she didn’t answer either. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I kept repeating as I paced up and down the living room. An unseen reporter asked, “Were there any fingerprints on the gun?” But the Sewickley police chief would only say, “We can’t comment on that at this time, but the investigation is ongoing.”

How had they managed to fish out that gun? We should have gotten rid of it somewhere else; we should have sunk it in the river with a concrete block. Or burnt it. Could you burn a gun? We hadn’t been thinking clearly, we’d just been desperate to be done with it. So stupid. The whole plan had been stupid.

Finishing my drink with one big gulp, I kept hitting the redial number for Julie. “C’mon, c’mon, pick up already.” I left voice mails again for her and Alison.

Would they trace the gun to Julie? I imagined there was a serial number on it somewhere, but I didn’t know how that worked. She’d said Brian didn’t even know she had the gun. Had she bought it illegally? Wouldn’t that make it worse if they found out it was hers? What if Alison hadn’t wiped it off carefully—what if they found Julie or Heather’s fingerprints on the gun? The thoughts cycled around my head, endless and obsessive without any clear answers.

The TV cut back to the morning show, where the grinning faces of the anchors now felt mocking. I shut it off and hurled the remote across the room as Julie’s phone went to voice mail yet again: “Hi! You’ve reached Julie Phelps. I can’t come to the phone right now, but your call is important to me. Please leave your name and number and I promise I’ll get back to you. Leave a message after the beep.”

“Where are you?” I shouted into it. “Call me as soon as you get this.” Finally, in desperation, I called the realty office.

“Gainsborough Realty, where every home is a masterpiece. How may I help you?” The melodious voice belonged to the basset-hound-faced receptionist.

“Julie Phelps, please.”

“Ms. Phelps is out of the office at the moment, would you like me to put you through to her voice mail?”

“No,” I snapped, adding in a softer voice, “no thank you. I need to talk with her—it’s urgent.”

“Is this the school nurse?”

“No,” I said, and thought better of it. “But this is the school and it’s about the kids.”

“Oh, I hope everything is okay?” A desire in her voice to hear someone else’s bad news.

“I really need to get in touch with her.”

“Have you tried her cell phone?”

“Yes, of course, but it’s going straight to voice mail.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you—wait, let me see if I can find out where she might be.” I heard keys clicking. “Yes, I thought so. Julie’s doing an open house at a new development over in Edgeworth. It has really bad cell reception, so that might be why you’re not able to get in touch with her.”

If I could just beat the police to that development—that’s what I was thinking as I clipped the curb turning on to Beaver Street, imagining a convoy of patrol cars, sirens screaming as they made their way to the house to arrest her. I don’t remember thinking of the speed limit at all, but I do remember pressing down the accelerator and hearing the tires squeal as I took turns without slowing.

As I flew down a stretch of road outside of town, I heard a siren and thought my fears were being realized, that the police were on their way to arrest Julie. Something flashed in my side mirror and I saw a police car behind me. My foot moved from accelerator to brake and I slowed to a crawl, moving over in the hopes that the car would pass. It didn’t. Instead, the driver moved over with me.

Shit! I broke into a sweat as I screeched to a stop along the side of the road, the cop stopping more smoothly behind me. I scrambled around my console in search of mints. It had only been half Prosecco this morning. I was not drunk, but I sucked hard on that mint, while frantically pushing buttons to lower the windows and sniffing the car interior. The smell of one of Sam’s abandoned soccer socks was crowding out any other odor as far as I could tell.

A patrolman got out of the squad car and walked briskly up to mine. “License and registration, ma’am. Any idea how fast you were going back there?” He spoke in that cowboy-like drawl that must be taught at the police academy, but he looked about thirteen years old, with a smattering of acne across his ruddy cheeks and forehead.

I passed them out the window, willing my hand to be steady. “I’m sorry, Officer, I didn’t realize I was speeding,” I said, trying a smile when he glanced from the license to me.

That was when I noticed his name, Derreire. “Say, are you by any chance related to Helen Derreire?” I said. “The one that owns the dry cleaner’s?”

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