“I need to go now.”
But that bastard cop, with his mean eyes, he wasn’t going to let her go until she heard everything he had to say.
“Jacky slid that girl under your bed. You spent eight hours sleeping six inches above a young woman your husband had killed.” A bead of sweat ran down Loren’s forehead, into his eye, and he swiped it away absently. She realized he was enjoying this, watching her squirm. He’d be able to tell all his buddies about it later over beers, she could practically hear them laughing at her expense. “Jacky liked keeping his victims close, even when he was done with them. Damn. Maybe if you’d given it up a little more—if you would’ve occasionally bent over and took one for the team, he wouldn’t be where he is now.”
She didn’t say anything. She could feel a migraine coming on, a screaming-bad one, she’d spend the next ten hours in bed with a damp washcloth draped over her eyes. She considered taking the Coke and throwing it right in Loren’s face, bounce it off his forehead. She wanted to hurt him for blaming all this on her, make him bleed.
“You can certainly go into the house and collect your things,” Detective Loren said. “But there’s no fucking way you can live there anymore.”
So here she is, on a Tuesday, usually her grocery day, pulling into the driveway as if this is still her home, the keys jangling loosely in her palm and she walks to the front door. There’s a car parked at the curb, the engine idling so the air conditioner keeps chugging away—it’s warm for March—keeping the two men inside out of the heat. The one in the passenger seat raises his hand, and she nods in return, although she’d much rather flip him the bird. They’re cops. There are always cops here now, keeping watch over the house until it’s torn down, which is a waste, she thinks, because why not let the bums and delinquents have a turn before it’s all razed to the ground? She’s heard that people have tried to break in, because they want to write ugly things on the walls in spray paint and kick holes in the doors, or they want to steal something, a morbid piece of Jacky Seever to show off to their friends.
She unlocks the front door, goes inside. She was last here the week before, with two young men and a moving truck, and they’d carried out everything she’d pointed at, loaded it up to take away, even though they were nervous, they’d heard all the stories about the house, and the crawl space was still exposed although the cops had nailed a tarp over the open hole and roped it off. She had them box up her photographs, and the set of Christmas china with the scalloped edges and the sprig of holly imprinted in the centers. All the furniture in the guest bedroom, the nice wicker set with the lace coverlet. She’d slept in that bed sometimes, when Jacky’s snoring got too loud, or when her insomnia was particularly bad and she didn’t want to keep Jacky up, and it was nicer than the stuff in the master bedroom, more comfortable.
“The police confirmed that a few of your neighbors complained of a bad smell coming from your house on several occasions. Is that true?” That was one of the questions from that newspaper reporter, she couldn’t remember her name, who had showed up two months before. Gloria had tried to close her door on the girl when she’d said she was from the Post, but then the girl had said she thought Jacky was innocent, that he was being raked over the coals for no good reason. That was why Gloria had let her into the apartment, had set her down in the tiny living room and served her coffee and cookies, the crispy butter kind in the blue tin.
“I remember that happening once or twice. On hot days.”
“Okay.”
“We always had a rodent problem,” Gloria said. “Jacky would set out poison, and the mice would crawl up in the walls and die.”
The young woman frowned, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She was young, very pretty. By the look of her flat stomach she didn’t have any children; she might not have been married. Gloria didn’t ask—it would’ve been rude.
“Mice?”
“Yes. Having that pond out back attracted all kinds of pests.”
“Did your husband tell you that? About the mice, I mean?”
Gloria sat back in her chair, a hideous shiny black leather thing with silver buttons punched up the arms, a monster that was supposed to be southwestern-style but was only ugly. It struck her that this girl, who was drinking her coffee and taking polite bites of her cookies, didn’t believe that Jacky was innocent at all, and probably thought she was a liar too.
“Yes. That’s what Jacky told me.”
“And you believed him?”
Gloria bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard enough that it would be tender and swollen all the next day, and sores would form on the broken skin, causing her misery for a week.
“Why wouldn’t I believe him?”