He was standing across the street, watching her.
Eureka froze mid-slide onto the driver’s seat and watched him through the window. He leaned against the trunk of a chinaberry tree, arms crossed over his chest. Cat didn’t notice. She was teasing her bangs in the sun visor mirror.
From thirty feet away, Ander looked furious. His posture was rigid. His eyes were as cold as they’d been when he grabbed Brooks by the collar. Should she turn around and run back into the station to tell Bill? No, Ander would be gone by the time she stepped through the door. Besides, she was too afraid to move. He knew she’d gone to the cops. What would he do about it?
He stared at her for a moment, then flung his arms down at his sides. He stormed through the brush that edged the Roi de Donuts parking lot across the street.
“Feel like starting the car anytime this year?” Cat asked, smacking glossed lips together.
In the instant Eureka glanced at Cat, Ander vanished. When she looked back at the lot, it was empty except for two cops walking out of the donut shop with to-go bags. Eureka exhaled; started Magda; blasted the heat to fend off the cold, damp air that had settled like a cloud inside her car. She didn’t want a banana freeze anymore.
“I’ve got to get home,” she told Cat. “It’s Rhoda’s night to cook.”
“So you all have to suffer.” Cat understood, or she thought she did. Eureka didn’t want to discuss the fact that Ander knew they’d just tried to turn him in.
In the sun visor mirror, Cat practiced a human highlight reel of the doe-eyed expressions she had just used on Bill. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said as Eureka turned out of the parking lot and started winding back toward Evangeline, where she’d drop Cat at her car. “I just hope I’m with you the next time you see him. I’ll squeeze the truth from him. Milk it right on out.”
“Ander is good at changing the subject when the subject is himself,” Eureka said, thinking he was even better at disappearing.
“What teenage boy doesn’t want to talk about himself? He’ll be no match for the Cat.” Cat turned up the radio, then changed her mind and turned it all the way down. “I can’t believe he told you you were in danger. It’s like, ‘Hmm, should I go with the tried-and-true Does Heaven know it’s missing an angel? Nah, I’ll scare the crap out of her instead.’ ”
They passed a few blocks of dilapidated duplexes; drove by the drive-through daiquiri stand, where a girl stuck her big chest out the window and handed gallon-sized Styrofoam cups to boys in souped-up low-riders. That was flirting. What Ander did this morning, and just now across the street, that was different.
“He isn’t hitting on me, Cat.”
“Oh, come on,” Cat sputtered. “You have always, like since the age of twelve, put off this sexy-broken-girl air that guys find irresistible. You’re just the kind of crazy every boy wants to wreck his life.”
Now they were out of the city, turning onto the windy road that led to Evangeline. Eureka rolled down the windows. She liked the way this road smelled in the evenings, like rain falling on night-blooming jasmine. Locusts sang old songs in the darkness. She enjoyed the combination of cold air brushing her arms and heat blasting her feet.
“Speaking of which,” Cat said. “Brooks interrogated me about your ‘emotional state’ today.”
“Brooks is like my brother,” Eureka said. “He’s always been protective. Maybe it’s a little more intense since Diana and … everything else.”
Cat propped up her feet on the dashboard. “Yeah, he asked about Diana, only”—she paused—“it was weird.”
They passed dirt roads and old railroad tracks, log cabins chinked with mud and moss. White egrets moved through the black trees.
“What?” Eureka said.
“He called it—I remember because he said it twice—‘the killing of Diana.’ ”