Andy checked her map again as she turned down Paula’s street. She had studied the street on her laptop, like she was some kind of burglar casing the joint, but the images had been taken in the dead of winter when all the shrubs and trees lay dormant—nothing like the lush, overflowing gardens she passed now. The neighborhood had a trendy feel, with hybrids in the driveways and artistic yard ornaments. Despite the rain, people were out jogging. The houses were painted in their own color schemes, regardless of what their neighbors chose. Old trees. Wide streets. Solar panels and one very strange-looking miniature windmill in front of a dilapidated bungalow.
She was so intent on looking at the houses that she drove past Paula’s on the first go. She went down to South Congress and turned back around. This time, she looked at the street numbers on the mailboxes.
Paula Kunde lived in a craftsman-style house, but with a kind of funkiness to it that wasn’t out of touch with the rest of the neighborhood. An older model white Prius was parked in front of the closed garage door. Andy saw dormers stuck into the garage roof. She wondered if Paula Kunde had a daughter in her apartment that she couldn’t get rid of, too. That would be a good opening line, or at least a second or a third, because the onus was going to be on Andy to talk her way into the house.
This could be it.
All the questions she’d had about Laura might be answered by the time Andy got back into the Reliant.
The thought made her knees rubbery when she stepped out of the car. Talking had never been her forte. Amoebas didn’t have mouths. She threw her new messenger bag over her shoulder. She checked the contents to give her brain something else to concentrate on as she walked toward the house. There was some cash in there, the laptop, Laura’s make-up bag with the burner phone, hand lotion, eye drops, lip gloss—just enough to make her feel like a human woman again.
Andy searched the windows of the house. All of the lights were off inside, at least from what she could see. Maybe Paula wasn’t home. Andy had only guessed by the online schedule. The Prius could belong to a tenant. Or Mike could’ve changed out his truck.
The thought sent a shiver down her spine as she navigated the path to the front door. Leggy petunias draped over wooden planters. Dead patches in the otherwise neatly trimmed yard showed where the Texas sun had burned the ground. Andy glanced behind her as she climbed the porch stairs. She felt furtive, but wasn’t sure whether or not the feeling was justified.
I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to scare the shit out of you.
Maybe that’s why Mike had kissed Andy. He knew that threats had not worked against Laura, so he’d figured he would do something awful to Andy and use that for leverage.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Andy had been so caught up in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the front door had opened.
Paula Kunde gripped an aluminum baseball bat between her hands. She was wearing dark sunglasses. A scarf was tied around her neck. “Hello?” She waited, the bat still reared back like she was ready to swing it. “What do you want, girl? Speak up.”
Andy had practiced this in the car, but the sight of the baseball bat had erased her mind. All she could get out was a stuttered, “I-I-I—”
“Jesus Christ.” Paula finally lowered the bat and leaned it inside the doorframe. She looked like her faculty photo, but older and much angrier. “Are you one of my students? Is this about a grade?” Her voice was scratchy as a cactus. “Trigger warning, dumbass, I’m not going to change your grade, so you can dry your snowflake tears all the way back to community college.”
“I—” Andy tried again. “I’m not—”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Paula tugged at the scarf around her neck. It was silk, too hot for the weather, and didn’t match her shorts and sleeveless shirt. She looked down her long nose at Andy. “Unless you’re going to talk, get your ass—”
“No!” Andy panicked when she started to shut the door. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
Andy stared at her. She felt her mouth trying to form words. The scarf. The glasses. The scratchy voice. The bat by the door. “About you getting suffocated. With a bag. A plastic bag.”
Paula’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“Your neck.” Andy touched her own neck. “You’re wearing the scarf to hide the scratch marks and your eyes probably have—”
Paula took off her sunglasses. “What about them?”
Andy tried not to gawk. One of the woman’s eyes was milky white. The other was streaked with red as if she had been crying, or strangled, or both.
Paula asked, “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“To talk—my mother. I mean, do you know her? My mother?”
“Who’s your mother?”
Good question.
Paula watched a car drive past her house. “Are you going to say something or stand there like a little fish with your mouth gaping open?”
Andy felt her resolve start to evaporate. She had to think of something. She couldn’t give up now. Suddenly, she remembered a game they used to play in drama, an improv exercise called Yes, And . . . You had to accept the other person’s statement and build on it in order to keep the conversation going.
She said, “Yes, and I’m confused because I’ve recently found out some things about my mother that I don’t understand.”
“I’m not going to be part of your bildungsroman. Now cheese it or I’ll call the police.”
“Yes.” Andy almost screamed. “I mean, yes, call the police. And then they’ll come.”
“That’s kind of the point of calling the police.”
“Yes,” Andy repeated. She could see where the game really required two people. “And they’ll ask lots of questions. Questions you don’t want to answer. Like about why your eye has petechiae.”
Paula looked over Andy’s shoulder again. “Is that your car in my driveway, the one that looks like a box of maxi pads?”
“Yes, and it’s a Reliant.”
“Take off your shoes if you’re going to come inside. And stop that ‘Yes, And’ bullshit, Jazz Hands. This isn’t drama club.”
Paula left her at the door.
Andy felt weirdly terrified and excited that she had managed to get this far.
This was it. She was going to find out about her mother.
She dropped the messenger bag on the floor. She rested her hand on the hall table. A glass bowl of change clicked against the marble top. She slipped off her sneakers and left them in front of the aluminum baseball bat. Her wet socks went inside the shoes. She was so nervous that she was sweating. She pulled at the front of her shirt as she stepped down into Paula’s sunken living room.
The woman had a stark sense of design. There was nothing craftsman inside the house except some paneling on the walls. Everything had been painted white. The furniture was white. The rugs were white. The doors were white. The tiles were white.
Andy followed the sound of a chopping knife down the back hall. She tried the swinging door, pushing it just enough to poke her head in. She found herself looking in the kitchen, surrounded by still more white: countertops, cabinets, tiles, even light fixtures. The only color came from Paula Kunde and the muted television on the wall.
“Come in already.” Paula waved her in with a long chef’s knife. “I need to get my vegetables in before the water boils off.”
Andy pushed open the door all the way. She walked into the room. She smelled broth cooking. Steam rose off a large pot on the stove.
Paula sliced broccoli into florets. “Do you know who did it?”
“Did . . .” Andy realized she meant Hoodie. She shook her head, which was only partially lying. Hoodie had been sent by somebody. Somebody who was clearly known to Laura. Somebody who might be known to Paula Kunde.
“He had weird eyes, like . . .” Paula’s voice trailed off. “That’s all I could tell the pigs. They wanted to set me up with a sketch artist, but what’s the point?”
“I could—” Andy’s ego cut her off. She had been about to offer to draw Hoodie, but she hadn’t drawn anything, even a doodle, since her first year in New York.
Paula snorted. “Good Lord, child. If I had a dollar bill every time you left a sentence hanging, I sure as shit wouldn’t be living in Texas.”
“I was just—” Andy tried to think of a lie, but then she wondered if Hoodie had really come here first. Maybe Andy had misunderstood the exchange in Laura’s office. Maybe Mike had been sent to Austin and Hoodie had been sent to Belle Isle.
She told Paula, “If you’ve got some paper, maybe I could do a sketch for you?”