He nodded, a little reluctantly. “That’s my mother.”
“Oh, I thought you looked familiar! I’ve known your mother for years. She’s so proud of you.” I babbled on for a few minutes.
I did know his mother, a hardworking woman whose name I remembered only because I’d confused it the first time with “derrière.” She’d sighed as if she’d heard that before and simply corrected me, “It’s Dare-rare-ee.” I remembered nothing more about her beyond the photos pinned to a board behind the front desk, the corners curling from age and steam. “Do you still have that dog?” I said, having a dim recollection of a photo of grinning children around a slobbering beast. I felt like one of those TV psychics, fishing for information to fake a connection.
He smiled at that. “Waldo. He died. We’ve got Chip now.” I listened to a five-minute dissertation about the merits of black Labs versus beagles, uttering sounds of animated interest while I tried not to notice the time ticking away, before he finally handed me back my license. “I’m going to let you off with a warning, Ms. Walker—slow down.”
“Of course, thank you so much. I definitely will. Say hi to your mom for me.”
I wanted him to pull out first, but he indicated that I should go ahead, tailing me as I drove glacially slowly for the next mile, before he finally passed, giving me a short wave as he sped around and off.
It was only another five minutes before I arrived at the new development and then just a short, albeit confusing drive around the streets before I spotted Julie’s car in front of a colonial with a brick front and siding everywhere else.
A couple was coming out of the house as I pulled up out front, the wife heavily pregnant and listing like a ship at sea as she came down the steps, her husband providing support at her side like a tugboat. Julie clicked along on her heels behind them, chattering away in full Realtorspeak. Her eyes widened slightly when she saw me, but my presence didn’t slow down her patter and as I opened the car door I heard her saying how great it was to meet them and how excited she was that they’d gotten in to see this upscale property before anyone else, and how wonderful it would be to raise their new child in this exclusive development.
I waited until the wife had been wedged into the passenger seat of the couple’s two-seater sports car (Say good-bye, I thought, that will be a trade-in for the minivan once the baby comes) and the husband was out of earshot before racing up the front walk to Julie.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve found the gun—they know it was used to kill Viktor,” I said without preamble, regretting it when her face literally drained of color. I reached out an arm to grab her, concerned she was going to faint.
“Oh shit,” she said in a weak voice. “How did they find—who found—?” She tripped over her words, her mind clearly racing.
I helped her back inside, our footsteps echoing on the bare wood floors, and opened one of the water bottles sitting on a table alongside flyers about the house. “Here, sit down and drink some of this,” I said, pulling out a chair and thrusting the bottle into her hands. She took a gulp, then swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “Apparently some kids found it while fishing.”
“Have they traced the owner?”
It seemed an odd way to ask if they knew it belonged to her, but I shook my head. She took another gulp of water. Her hand was shaking. “Was it illegally purchased?” I asked, trying to imagine Julie at one of those furtive gun shows with people dressed in camo and complaining about government interference.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She tapped the bottle slightly on the table, the water rocking back and forth.
“So it’s registered to you?”
She shook her head and I let out a sigh, sinking into a chair across from her, feeling dizzy with relief. “Okay, that’s something.” At least the police wouldn’t be arriving any moment.
“What if they find fingerprints?”
“Alison wiped it down,” I said, trying to sound convinced, although I’d been scared of just that.
“But we were in a hurry, she wasn’t that careful.”
“It’s been soaking in muddy water for several weeks—surely if there were any prints on it they would have been washed away.”
Julie didn’t appear to believe this either. I kept thinking of fictional crime shows in which good-looking crime-scene analysts managed to solve cases with what appeared to be the slimmest of evidence—the imprint of a single tooth mark on a pencil, the oily smear that turned out to be from a particular moisturizer. In this high-tech world it was hard to believe that there wasn’t some way to retrieve prints from the gun. If there were any.
“So someone gave you the gun?” I said.
“Something like that.”
“Is it registered to them?”
She shrugged, tapping the water bottle more and more rapidly, the water jumping higher and higher. “I assume so.”
“I don’t understand—how did you get this gun?” I said, growing impatient, the drumbeat of the bottle echoing in the empty house. “Would you stop it and answer me!”
Julie slammed the bottle down, the water erupting up and over the sides. She ignored the rapidly spreading puddle, finally looking directly at me. “I stole it.”
chapter thirty-two
JULIE
It’s a nervous habit, not so different from Heather’s smoking, or Alison’s nibbling at her nails, or Sarah’s drinking. She had no business judging me. “You stole it,” she’d repeated, staring at me with a look of shock and revulsion, as if I’d revealed a forked tongue, or some bizarre body piercing.
When did I first start taking things? This was the question one of the police officers had asked me years earlier, when Brian and I were first married and living in Erie. I’d lied. I’d told him that I hadn’t really meant to take my coworker’s watch, that I would never, ever take something that wasn’t my own. This was before real estate, when I was a claims agent for a local insurance company, just one mouse in a maze of cubicles. It might have worked—I was young and pretty and truly tearful—except it turned out there were security cameras tucked high on the walls on every floor in that office building, and they had footage of me slipping into other people’s cubicles and rifling through their drawers.
My mug shot was truly awful, because by then I was openly sobbing, my nose red and my eyes swollen. I was charged with theft and of course I was fired, although I would have quit anyway. How could I have gone back into that building after I’d been escorted out by police in full view of all the other employees? I had to return the stolen property—the total value of which was estimated at $1,249. The sum stuck in my mind because it was so ridiculously specific and paltry. The insurance company was responsible for that amount of legalized theft on an hourly basis, I argued to Brian and my lawyer, who both insisted that I not mention this in front of the judge. “Do you want to go to prison?” Brian had finally yelled. “They are not the same thing at all!”