“When did he give your dad the car?” I tried to keep my voice low and level, not to make her more nervous than she already was.
“Monday. He came to the house Monday morning, after they brought me home from the hospital. Ma had to be at work; they only gave her one hour off to bring me home, but Daddy was working a late shift so he didn’t leave until three. And then, then Josie came. I called her and told her to come here before she went to school. She and Billy used to meet here, see, it was a place she could come and be doing her homework so her ma didn’t mind, and my ma, she just thought Billy was a boy from school, we didn’t tell her he was one of the Bysens, she would, like, totally lose it if she knew that.”
Those school projects that Josie was so intent on, her science and health studies homework she had to do with April. Maybe I should have guessed that they were a cover story, but it didn’t matter now.
“Why was Billy so angry with his family?” I asked.
“He wasn’t angry with them,” April said earnestly. “Worried, he was worried by what he saw at the plant.”
“And what was that?”
She hunched a shoulder. “You know, everybody works hard for not enough money. Like Ma. Even Daddy, he made more driving a truck, but Billy said it wasn’t right, people’s lives being so hard.”
“Nothing more specific than that?” I was disappointed.
She shook her head. “I never listened that hard, mostly he would be talking to Josie, you know, off in one corner, but Nicaragua came in somehow, and Fly the Flag, I think—”
“What are you doing in here, bothering my girl?” Sandra appeared in the doorway, her tears gone, her face set in its usual hard lines.
“We’re making you a cup of tea, Ma. Coach says I can still suit up and be with the team, chart plays maybe.” April handed her mother and me each one of the mugs. “And maybe my academics will get me into college.”
“But they won’t pay your medical bills. You want to do something for April, don’t go putting ideas in her head about academics. Prove Bron was driving for the company when he died.”
I was startled. “Is By-Smart saying he wasn’t? Do they know where he was when he was jumped?”
“They won’t tell me anything. I went to see Mr. Grobian this morning over at the warehouse, I told him I was filing a claim, and he said, ‘Lots of luck.’ He said Bron was violating company rules when he was working, having that bitch in his cab, and they’d fight the claim.”
“You need a lawyer,” I said. “Someone who can take them to court for you.”
“You are so—so ignorant,” Sandra shrilled. “If I could afford a lawyer, Miss Iffy-genius, I wouldn’t need the money to begin with. I need proof. You’re a detective, go get me proof he was working for the company, and that the English whore wasn’t in his truck. It’s your fault she was there. Now you go make it up to me.”
“Bron’s behavior was not my fault, Sandra. And screaming about it won’t solve any of your problems now. I’ve got way more to do than take abuse from you. If you can’t calm down enough to talk sensibly, then I’m taking off.”
Sandra wavered, torn between the anger that consumed her and the wish to know about Bron’s death. In the end, the three of us sat at the kitchen table, drinking the weak tea, while I told them about Mitch leading me across the swamp to Bron and Marcena.
Sandra knew that Billy had lent his cell phone to Bron (“He told me he took it so he could stay in touch with April”), but she didn’t know about the Miata. This led to a little skirmish between her and April (“Ma, I didn’t tell you because you’d just do like you’re doing now, yelling about him, and I can’t take it.”).
Their priest had warned them that Bron was so badly disfigured that Sandra shouldn’t look at his body; did I think that was true?
“He looks terrible,” I agreed. “But if it was me, my husband, I mean, I would want to see him. Otherwise, it would always haunt me that I hadn’t said that last good-bye.”
“If you’d been married to that prick, you wouldn’t be so sappy, ‘that last good-bye’ and all that movie crap,” Sandra snapped.
She stopped at an outcry from her daughter, but the two began quarreling again over whether Bron really had a plan to find the money they needed for April’s health care.
“He called Mr. Grobian, and Mr. Grobian said he could come in and discuss it, Daddy told me that himself,” April said to her mother, scarlet-faced.
“You never understood that your father told people what they wanted to hear, not what the truth was. How do you think I ended up marrying him, anyway?” She bit the words off angrily.