My limbs freeze. “How would I?”
He nods like he expected that answer and slides a new photo from the stack. I look at the photo and my mind rejects it almost immediately, like what my stomach did once when I ate a poison berry, but I can’t pull my eyes away. In the photo, in a trench of upturned dirt, is a face. Recognizable, even in its horror, even in its decomposition, the gaping orbits, the bare teeth. Jude’s mother. The crown of her skull is blasted apart in chunks around her face.
“She died of a gunshot wound to the head,” he says. “The bullet wound was so large, it split the skull into five pieces.”
He lets the quiet stretch. I take in the big orbits where Jude’s mother’s eyes had been. I wonder if they were the same warm brown as Jude’s, the kind of brown that listens and speaks at the same time. I can’t get over how completely her eyes are gone.
“You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?” he asks finally.
“I didn’t even know Jude six years ago.”
“But I think you may know what happened to her.”
I look up at him. “This isn’t relevant.”
“It’s not?” he asks. “This woman was murdered. The Prophet may have been murdered, too. It stands to reason that her killer and his killer might be the same person.”
“That’d be so nice for you,” I say, my voice rising in pitch. “So nice and neat, wouldn’t it? You could go back to Washington, DC, early. Take your wife out for an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant and eat till you puke.”
“I see I’ve struck a chord.”
“You haven’t struck anything.”
“I thought you wanted to help me catch a killer.”
“I won’t help you lay all the blame on Jude.”
His eyebrows dart up. “Who said anything about Jude?”
“Stop!” I shout. “Stop talking to me. Leave me alone.”
“Minnow, I know this may be difficult for you,” he says, “but you suggested this deal. I help you get free, you help me catch the killer.”
I squeeze my eyes shut until the bone behind my forehead threatens to break. I breathe heavily and after a moment he says, “Take some breaths,” a few times before standing to leave.
He will never get the truth about Jude’s mother out of me. Never.
Chapter 28
Being here, I’m only now realizing how much was kept from me in the Community. I’ve heard the other girls talk and I can tell that they knew much more than me at a much younger age, that when I was learning how quickly a calf becomes a cow and how seeds morph into potatoes just by living in the ground, they were learning how to solve the strange puzzle of their bodies.
In the Community, none of that was talked about. There was no need. Girls and boys never saw beneath their thick garments, and the events after a wedding night were relegated to our imaginations, the dull sounds that penetrated our fabric walls from where my father slept with one of his wives in the night, the sounds we didn’t understand but tried to block out anyway.
Today the girls were in a titter because, instead of their normal reading classes, they’re to have a special class on sex education. “It’s just an ancient video that Mrs. New plays in the cafeteria,” Angel said before she left. “Nothing good. Nothing we didn’t already learn firsthand years ago.”
I nodded, cheeks burning, not wanting to let on how much I’d like to be there anyway. I’m sure if I asked Benny for special permission to go, she’d let me since my suspension is almost up, but I doubt I could get the words out, even to her.
Instead, I sit alone in the cell block, running my eyes across the page of the book in front of me. It has a blue cover, and pages that feel like feathers when I run them over my stumps. This book is beautiful. It is also impossible.
“Psst.”
I look up. Miss Bailey stands at the door of my cell.
“Can I come in?” she asks.
“All right,” I say. She looks down the skyway and nods to a guard. The door buzzes open.
She adjusts her pink cardigan sweater and sits on the edge of my bed. “You’re missing quite the fun downstairs.”
“I’m still suspended.”
She nods. “What were you reading?” she asks, indicating the book I’d been paging through. A girl’s windburned face stares up from the blue cover.
“I asked Angel to get me a book from the library. It’s poetry.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not good.”
Miss Bailey nods. “Well, it’s one of my favorites. Would you like some help reading that book?”
When I nod, she lifts her tote bag in the air and dumps a pile of books and papers onto the mattress.
“I brought these for you. Hoped you’d say yes.” She picks out a big spiral-bound workbook and opens it to page with giant-printed letters. Her finger traverses the page and when it touches a letter, she says it big, with her entire mouth. Her entire face, really. I repeat the sounds.
“MMMM.”
“SSSS.”
“AAAAAHHH.”