“I was so afraid that, you know—that some of Mallory’s wildness was hereditary or something. God, that sounds stupid.”
“No, I get it,” I said. I remembered that last conversation I’d had with my own father, the way he’d said he was glad I turned out more like him. Be nice but not too fucking nice. I found myself blinking hard all of a sudden. “So were there ever any leads?” I said, to change the subject. “Any suspects.”
Joshua shook his head. “Not that Frank ever told me about,” he said. He tried to take a sip from his beer bottle, but it was empty.
Since he seemed more or less comfortable with me by now, I decided to steer the conversation toward my actual case. “Do you know if she was friends with a guy named Brad? Brad Stockton?”
He tipped his head to the side. “That name sounds familiar but I’m not sure—wait, that’s the kid who killed his girlfriend and her parents, isn’t it?” He leaned forward. “Why? Do you think they were friends?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but they would have been in school together.”
“Damn,” Joshua said softly. “She never talked about him, but I didn’t really know her friends that well.” Joshua rubbed his eyes again. He didn’t seem to want to know more about the connection between Mallory and Brad, so I didn’t press it. I wasn’t completely comfortable voicing my theory even to myself. “Shelby, hon, that smells great.” Then he looked at me. “You oughta stay for dinner.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to intrude,” I said. My phone began buzzing in my pocket: the Unknown caller. I rejected the call and put the phone away.
“No intrusion at all,” he said. “I mean, a good-looking woman like you, I’m sure you got plans on a Friday night. But if you don’t.” Then he pressed his hand over his mouth, his eyes sad and strained and desperate for something, company or attention or just some kind of reassurance. “Christ, that was embarrassing. Sorry.”
My phone started ringing again, but I ignored it this time. Realizing I was not all that keen on spending another evening alone in my apartment, I leaned forward and touched his arm. “Hey, no,” I said. “You’re sweet. I’d love to stay.”
Relief flooded through his features. “There’s plenty, right, Shelby?”
“Sure,” his daughter replied.
So we ate around their small dinette table in the kitchen. Unlike the living room, the kitchen was spotless and I wondered if that was Shelby’s doing. She had made fried tofu and spicy green beans. I told her it was the best meal I’d had in a while, which was true. “I can barely microwave a frozen dinner,” I said. “So this is great.”
“You don’t cook?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“It’s so rewarding, though.” Shelby wrinkled up her nose. “Rewarding, that’s a majorly uncool word.”
“Shelby makes this chocolate cake,” Joshua said. “You’d swear it had a dozen eggs in it, it’s so rich. But it’s vegetarian.”
“Vegan,” his daughter corrected. “Vegan baking is so cool. Orange juice and vinegar cause a chemical reaction to make it rise.”
“Science cake,” Veronica said. The girls looked at each other quickly, faces reddening with restrained laughter. Shelby was plain-looking at first, but she had a sparkle in her green eyes. Veronica, with her hair and eccentric clothes and jangly jewelry, was glamorous in a slightly desperate way. They both seemed like good kids, though, plucky with outsider charm.
“Have you ever been to the Angry Baker?” I said. “It’s downtown. They have a bunch of vegan baked goods. I go there all the time, it’s right by where I live.”
“Why is it called angry?” Shelby said. “Are they, like, mad in there?”
“No, they’re very nice,” I said.
“We should go there sometime,” Shelby said to her father, and he nodded.
Veronica said, “That’s so cool that you live downtown. I’ve always wanted to live downtown. I’m applying for the Fashion Institute of Technology for college, it’s in New York, in Manhattan. Which is like one giant downtown. And Shelby could move there eventually too and open a vegan restaurant and it would just be the best.”
Shelby nodded. But there was something wistful in her face at the thought of her friend going that far away for school. That was when I noticed how Shelby looked at Veronica, a slightly lingering glance, a flutter of pure happiness in her eyes when Veronica looked back. It reminded me of the way I looked at Catherine when I first met her, all those years ago. A hopeful, hopeless crush. Veronica seemed oblivious to it, and went on talking about her plans to be a fashion designer. Shelby caught me looking at her and blushed faintly. But I smiled, a silent understanding passing between us.
TWELVE
I had known Catherine since high school myself. She was lovely and odd, the darling of the art department and on the fringes of several social circles, and I was a nearly silent B student with a reputation among teachers for being a troublemaker, courtesy of Andrew, that I didn’t entirely deserve. Catherine and I had barely spoken to each other until the end of our junior year, even though alphabetical order dictated that she sit in front of me in several classes. Walsh, Weary. I spent a lot of time staring at her blond curls or the slender line of her neck and trying to decide if what I felt when I looked at certain pretty, aloof girls was envy or something else altogether. But then one day she turned around and met my eye and said, “I had a dream about you. Well, it was about your brother. But you were in it.”
I didn’t ask how she knew my brother. He’d graduated two years earlier. But everyone knew Andrew. “What was the dream?” I asked instead.
“We were in the library,” she said, “and he was trying to get me to help him hide a bunch of butterflies. But they kept flying all over.”
“As they do,” I said.
The corner of her mouth tipped up. “As they do. And you were watching but you didn’t say anything.”
“Weird,” I said.
“Definitely,” Catherine said, and started to turn away. Any of the few other times we’d talked, it had been circumstantial—do you have a pencil, what page are we on. This was different, electric almost immediately. I didn’t want the conversation to end.
“Everything in a dream,” I said quickly, “is supposed to be you. That’s one theory, anyway. For interpreting.”
Now she leaned against the back of her chair, her arm touching the top of my notebook. I looked down at it without meaning to and she caught me looking but didn’t move her arm, just said, “What do you mean?”
“You’re the butterfly,” I said, “and the library, and Andrew, and me.”
She nodded like she liked the sound of that. “But what’s the interpretation?”
“That’s up to you. It’s whatever it would mean to you, for you to be a butterfly.”
“Or you.”