“Sure,” I said. “You’re still in school and all.”
“This is my last year. I graduate later this month. I didn’t even realize for a long time how much older than me she was. I thought she was maybe a year or two, but she was, like, seven or something. It’s like I’ve got this thing for older women.”
“What?” I said.
“Mrs. Langley?”
Right. The neighbor who’d been murdered years ago. Derek had been rumored to have had a sexual relationship with her. It was one of the things that had made him, briefly, a suspect.
He shook his head. “We don’t have to get into that, do we?”
“No.”
“Anyway, I started thinking maybe it wasn’t a guilt trip, that Marla really didn’t want me that involved, and part of that may be that her mom didn’t like me.”
“You met Agnes?”
“I never actually did, but Marla told me she wasn’t pleased. She runs the hospital, right? I mean, you’d know, if Marla’s your cousin. Her mom would be your aunt, right? She’s a bigwig around town. And I’m the son of a guy who runs a landscaping company. You could just guess how much she loved that.”
I felt as though I’d been dipped into a bucket of shame. Derek had my aunt pretty much nailed.
“And then,” I said, “Marla had the baby.”
The young man nodded, and then began to tear up. “It was so weird. I was really sorry I got her pregnant, and didn’t want her to have the kid, and didn’t want to have the responsibility, right? But when I found out the baby—it was a little girl, but you probably know that—died when it was, like, coming out, it kind of hit me. I never expected that to happen. But it hit me real hard.”
He sniffed, used the back of his hand to wipe away a tear. “All of a sudden I was thinking about what she might have grown up to be, what she’d have been like, whether she’d have looked like me and all that kind of shit, and I was so shook up about it that I kind of, you know, went to pieces.”
“What happened?”
“I moved back in with my dad. We’re pretty close. It was a good thing we hadn’t told Mom anything. I mean, it would have killed her to think she had a granddaughter, and that she died right away.” He swallowed. “Marla told me about holding her. Holding the baby when she was dead. She said she was in kind of a daze, but she looked at all her little fingers and her nose and all and said she was really beautiful, even though she wasn’t breathing. She even had a name chosen for her. Agatha Beatrice Pickens. Agatha sounded sort of like her mother’s name, but was different, she said.”
He wiped his eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “These things can affect you in ways you never expect.”
Derek Cutter nodded. “I guess.”
We both heard the sound of a car door closing. Derek got off the table and looked out the window.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I know that guy.”
I joined him at the window. I knew that guy, too.
“Detective Duckworth,” I said.
“Yeah. He was the one who thought I’d done it when our neighbors got killed. What’s he doing here?”
I could think of two possible reasons: Duckworth wanted to talk to him about Marla Pickens for the same reasons I had. Or maybe he wanted to ask him about his dead friend Mason Helt.
“I hate that guy,” Derek said. “Can you tell him I’m not here?”
“I can’t do that, Derek.”
“Great.”
“I want to ask you one last quick question.”
“Fine, whatever.”
“I want your gut feeling about Marla.”
“Gut feeling?”
“Can you imagine her killing Rosemary Gaynor?”
He thought a moment. “My gut?”
“Yeah.”
“One night we were at this thing at the college—this was before she got pregnant, I think. And there’s a whole bunch of kids around, and this guy was really giving shit to this girl about her talking to some other guy or some shit like that, and you could see she was really intimidated, looking real scared, and he went to raise his hand to her—I don’t know if he’d have actually hit her, but you never know—and Marla, who’s been watching all of this, grabs this beer bottle and throws it right at this asshole’s head. We were only like six feet away, so even if her aim hadn’t been great, she had a good chance of hitting him. And she does, right on his fucking nose. Lucky thing the bottle didn’t break or the guy might have lost an eye, but his nose started bleeding like crazy. And the guy looks at Marla, like maybe he’s going to come at her, and she shouts, ‘Yeah, I’m right here!’ Like she was just daring him to try something. Swear to God, you had to see it to believe it.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
“So when you ask me what my gut thinks about Marla, I don’t know if there’s anything she could do that would surprise me,” he said.
FORTY-THREE