Millicent raises her eyebrow at me and follows me into the kitchen. I get four bowls, and everyone gets three scoops. She starts to say something, and I cut her off.
“Let’s not talk about sugar content tonight. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” And it’s true. Naomi will be on the news every night, and they will go over every detail of how she was found and how she was killed. It will get even worse when Josh receives my letter, because then they will spend hours debating if Owen is really gone or if he is just waiting for all of us to get complacent again.
Eventually, it will fade. Something else will take its place, and Owen will be gone for good.
But until then, three scoops of ice cream.
We go back into the family room, and the teenage drama has ended. Rory changes the channel, and we watch the end of one show in anticipation of the next. In between, there is a newsbreak. Before Millicent has a chance to grab the remote, Josh is on our TV. He repeats the same information we heard on the other channel.
When he is done talking about the discovery of Naomi’s body, Rory turns to his sister. “You think she was tortured?”
“Yeah.”
“More or less than the last one?”
“Hey,” I say. Because I do not know what else to say.
“More,” Jenna says.
“Wanna bet?”
She shrugs. They shake on it.
Millicent gets up and leaves the room.
I take my ice-cream bowl into the kitchen. My phone is about to die, and I root through our junk drawer in search of a charger. They’re always lying around, but never when I need one, and there isn’t one in the drawer. Next, I try the pantry, because weird things end up in there. When Jenna was younger, I used to find her stuffed animals sitting around the cookies, protecting them. Now, I find electronic gadgets.
Tonight, I don’t. But on the bottom shelf, behind some cans of soup, I find a small bottle of eye drops.
The kind Millicent is allergic to.
Forty-eight
When I see the eye drops, I think of Rory. If Millicent used them to cover up the fact that she was stoned, then surely other teenagers have thought of the same idea. Maybe that’s what he does when he sneaks out at night. Maybe he and his little girlfriend smoke weed.
There are worse things. Much worse things.
The pantry is not a logical place for eye drops, but I imagine he just stashed them there. Perhaps he had come home high and put them in at the last minute. Or maybe he thought no one would look on the bottom shelf behind the soup.
Then again, it could be Jenna. Maybe she’s the one who has been smoking.
No, that doesn’t seem right. Jenna wouldn’t ruin her lungs. Soccer is too important to her for that.
I take the bottle. On my way to the club, I wonder what would cause red eyes other than smoke or dirt or some other irritant. Allergies and fatigue, though neither is something to hide. Maybe hangovers. Maybe some new drug I’ve never even heard of.
When Kekona arrives for her lesson, I am sitting on a bench staring at that bottle of eye drops.
Kekona is so amped on gossip she bounces up and down on the balls of her feet like she is six instead of sixty. As soon as she walks onto the court, she starts talking, because she has to get it all out before leaving town. Every year, Kekona goes back to Hawaii for a month, and her trip is coming up fast. She is afraid of all she will miss, now that Naomi’s body has been found.
“Strangled,” she says. “Like the others.”
“I know.”
“And the torture. All those damn paper cuts.”
My heart skips. “Paper cuts?”
“Police said she was covered with them. They were even on her eyelids.” She shivers like it’s cold outside.
Paper cuts.
I close my eyes, trying not to imagine Millicent doing this. Trying to erase the idea that she has turned our private joke into something so sick.
It is only eleven o’clock in the morning. Earlier, they said her fingerprints had been filed off, but the police had Naomi’s dental records ready. It was her.
“The police said this about the cuts?” I say.
“Not officially. Just unnamed sources,” Kekona says. “But if you ask me, the weird thing is the timing.” She pauses.
So I ask. “What about it?”
“Well, the last woman was held for a year. But Naomi? A month and a half.”
“Maybe Owen got tired of waiting for the police to find him.”
Kekona smiles at me. “Kind of cheeky today, aren’t you?”
I shrug and hold up a tennis ball, indicating that we should play, since that’s what she pays me to do. Kekona stretches a little and swings her racket around.
“If this were a movie, the timing difference would mean something,” she says.
She is right, but for all the wrong reasons. “Aren’t you the one who said life isn’t a horror movie?”
Kekona does not answer.
“Serve,” I say.
She serves the ball twice. I don’t return her serves, because she still doesn’t want to volley. She wants to serve an ace.
“They also said she was burned,” Kekona says.
“Burned?”
“That’s what they said. She had burns all over her, like she had been scalded.”
I cringe at the thought of being scalded on accident. Yet Millicent did it on purpose.
“I know, it makes me sick, too,” Kekona says. She serves again and stops. “This morning, they said he might be re-creating his old crimes. He burned another one of his victims, Bianca or Brianna. Something like that. They showed a picture of her this morning, and she looks a lot like Naomi.”
I missed all of this. Not being able to watch the news at home can be a problem. “That’s odd,” I say. “Serve.”
She does, and I count nine of them before she stops again, except this time she does not talk about Owen.
She talks about Jenna.
“I heard about your daughter,” she says.
It does not surprise me that Kekona heard about the incident at Krav Maga. This used to be exactly the sort of thing we gossiped about. It just didn’t involve my family.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to think of how to explain, how to excuse my daughter for hitting a kid with a rock. She had a bad day, flunked a test, forgot to take her medication? They all sound bad. They all sound like my daughter cannot control herself.
Kekona walks over and pats me on the arm. “Not to worry,” she says. “Your daughter is going to be a badass.”
I laugh. And I hope she is right. I would rather Jenna be a badass than any of the other options.
When Kekona’s lesson is over, I finally get to check the news. She is right about this former victim. Bianca and Naomi do look alike; both had dark hair and that wholesome girl-next-door look. Bianca had also been scalded, though not with water.
Oil.
This similarity makes the media go back and look at Lindsay again, and now they have come up with an earlier victim who also had straight blond hair.
I think it is all a stretch. The media just needs something to talk about, and, without any real information, they have made connections that do not exist. If Millicent wanted to re-create a crime, the details wouldn’t be similar. They would be exact.
This news upsets me a little. On the way to work, I mailed the letter to Josh. It was early enough that the post office parking lot was empty, so no one saw the surgical gloves on my hands as I slipped the letter into the slot. But if I had seen the news, I would have changed the letter. I would have told Josh the media is wrong, and, as usual, they’re just making things up. The old victims are not being re-created, so stop talking about all the various ways they were tortured.
My daughter does not need to hear it.
But I did not see the news, did not hear about Bianca, and now it is too late.
In the clubhouse, Josh is on multiple screens, looking exhausted but wired. He is still standing across from the Lancaster Hotel. The daylight makes the building almost look gaudy.