Afterward, Andy had been underwhelmed, but lied to make him feel better. He had been just as underwhelmed, but failed to extend her the same courtesy.
You get too wet, he had told her, shuddering dramatically, and even though he admitted he was probably gay in the next sentence, Andy had carried that debilitating criticism with her for the ensuing decade and a half.
Too wet. She mulled the phrase in her mind as she stared at the wall of rain outside the storage unit. There were so many things she would say to that jackass now if he would just accept her friend request on Facebook.
Which brought her to her New York boyfriend. Andy had thought that he was so gentle and kind and considerate and then Andy had been in the bathroom at a friend’s apartment when she’d overheard him talking to his buddies.
She’s like the ballerina in a jewelry box, he had confided. The second you bend her over, the music stops.
Andy shook her head like a dog. She ran back to the car, got the light blue Samsonite suitcase, and dragged it into the unit. With the door closed, she changed into dry clothes. There was nothing she could do about her sneakers but at least she had socks that weren’t peeling at her already sore feet. By the time she rolled the door up, the rain had tapered off, which was the first good luck she’d had in days.
Andy used one of her Walmart padlocks on the latch. Instead of a key, she had chosen a combination lock that used letters rather than numbers. The Texarkana code was FUCKR because she was feeling particularly hostile when she programmed it. For the Hook ’Em & Store outside of Austin, Texas, she’d gone with the more obvious KUNDE, as in—
I could talk to Paula Kunde.
I hear she’s in Seattle.
Austin. But good try.
Andy had decided back in Little Rock that she was not going to amoeba her way to Idaho like Laura had told her to. If she could not get answers from her mother, then maybe she could get them from Professor Paula Kunde.
She reached up to close the hatch on the wagon. The sleeping bag and beach tote were still loaded up with cash, but she figured she might as well keep them in the car. She should probably put the little cooler and the box of Slim Jims in the storage unit, but Andy was antsy to get back on the road.
The Reliant’s engine made a whirly Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang sound when she pulled away. Instead of heading toward the interstate, she took the next right into McDonald’s. She used the drive-thru to order a large coffee and get the Wi-Fi password.
Andy chose a parking space close to the building. She dumped the coffee out the window because she was pretty sure her heart would explode if she drank any more caffeine. She got her new laptop out of the messenger bag and logged onto the network.
She stared at the flashing cursor on the search bar.
As usual, she had a moment of indecision about whether or not to create a fake Gmail account and send something to Gordon. Andy had composed all kinds of drafts in her mind, pretending to be a Habitat for Humanity coordinator or a fellow Phi Beta Sigma, contriving some kind of coded message that let her father know that she was okay.
Just asking if you saw that great Subway coupon offering two-for-one?
Saw a story about Knob Creek bourbon I thought you might enjoy!
As usual, Andy decided against it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot she trusted about her mother right now, but even the slightest chance of putting Gordon in harm’s way was too much of a risk.
She typed in the web address for the Belle Isle Review.
The photo of Laura and Gordon at the Christmas party was still on the front page.
Andy studied her mother’s face, wondering how the familiar woman smiling at the camera could be the same woman who’d deceived her only daughter for so many years. Then she zoomed in closer, because Andy had never given the bump in her mother’s nose a second thought. Had it been broken at some point and healed crookedly?
The Polaroids from her mother’s storage unit told Andy that the explanation was possible.
Would she ever know the truth?
Andy scrolled down the page. The article about the body that had washed up under the Yamacraw Bridge had not changed, either. Still no identity on the man in the hoodie. No report of his stolen vehicle. Which meant that Laura had not only kept a battalion of police officers out of her house, she had somehow managed to drag an almost two hundred pound man to her Honda, then dump him in the river twenty miles away.
With one arm strapped to her chest and barely a set of legs to walk on.
Her mother was a criminal.
That was the only explanation that made sense. Andy had been thinking of Laura as passive and reactionary when all of the evidence pointed to her being logical and devious. The almost one million bucks in cash had not come from helping stroke patients work on their diction. The fake IDs were scary enough, but Andy had walked that back a step and realized that Laura not only had a fake ID, she had a contact—a forger—who could make documents for her. Every time Laura had crossed into Canada to renew the license or the car tag, she had broken federal law. Andy doubted the IRS knew about the cash, which broke all kinds of other federal laws. Laura wasn’t afraid of the police. She knew that she could refuse an interrogation. She had a preternatural coolness around law enforcement. That didn’t come from Gordon, which meant that Laura had learned it on her own.
Which meant that Laura Oliver was not a good guy.
Andy closed the laptop and returned it to the messenger bag. There wasn’t enough memory on the machine to start listing all the things that her mother needed to explain. At this point, how Laura had disposed of Hoodie’s dead body wasn’t even in the top three.
Rain tapped at the windshield. Dark clouds had rolled in. Andy backed out of the space and followed the signs toward UT-AUSTIN. The sprawling campus took up forty acres of prime real estate. There was a medical school and hospital, a law school, all kinds of liberal arts programs and, despite not having its own football team, countless Texas Longhorns flags and bumper stickers.
According to the class schedule on the school’s website, Dr. Kunde had taught a morning class called Feminist Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault followed by an hour set aside for student advisory. Andy checked the time on the radio. Even assuming Paula’s sessions had run long or she’d stopped for lunch, or maybe met a colleague for another meeting, she was probably home by now.
Andy had tried to do more research on the woman’s background, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot about Paula Kunde on the internet. The UT-Austin site listed tons of academic papers and conferences, but nothing about her personal life. ProfRatings.com gave her only one half of a star, but when Andy dug into the student reviews, she saw they were mostly whining about bad grades that Dr. Kunde refused to change or offering long, adverb-riddled diatribes about how Dr. Kunde was a harsh bitch, which was basically the hallmark of her generation’s contribution to higher education.
The only easy part of the investigoogling was finding the professor’s home address. Austin’s tax records were online. All Andy had to do was enter Paula Kunde’s name and not only was she able to see that the property taxes had been paid consistently for the last ten years, she was able to click onto Google Street View and see for herself the low-slung one-story house in a section of the city called Travis Heights.