“Mrs. Knox, I—”
“A grown woman so jealous of a child that she physically attacks her. Can you imagine the rage inside? What do you think a woman like that is capable of?”
She looked at them, they looked at her.
“But this is something we’ve dealt with Devon’s entire life. The envy of others.”
Chapter Eighteen
The detectives were still standing in her driveway, talking.
She watched from the window, watched how closely they stood, and how near the garage. Furey was nodding at everything Renton was saying, his mouth moving ceaselessly.
Then she saw them looking across her lawn.
To Mr. Watts’s fading ranch house. The driveway. Mr. Watts was there, the hood of his green Impala open, doing one of his endless repairs.
They walked over to him. They said something to him and he looked up, his old aviators flashing.
She imagined what he might say:
On the garage floor, Detective. The boy thought they were silverfish.
Yes, I showed them to Mrs. Knox.
Later I thought, Oh, paint from her husband’s car. Yes, it’s that color exactly.
She must’ve thought the same thing.
She watched as Mr. Watts shook his head, then shook it again.
Then they left.
“Mr. Watts,” she said, her feet still bare, soles sunk in dew, “were they bothering you?”
“Nope,” he said, wiping his hands with an oil-soft rag. “Were they bothering you?”
“But what did they ask you?”
He paused, looking at her, those aviators reflecting herself back in both mirrored teardrops.
“If I had a permit for my RV,” he said. “What’d they ask you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Someone’s been harassing Devon. It’s very upsetting and I’m…very upset.”
He nodded, folding his arms. “That is upsetting,” he said. “I hope they’re helping you. Your daughter’s in the paper so much now. That brings out the crazy.”
“Yes,” Katie said, catching a glimpse of her drawn face in his sunglasses. “It does.”
“I always try to keep an eye out for all of you. I still think about Devon’s accident. Things like that can do bad things to a family.”
Katie nodded. It had happened soon after they’d moved in, and they barely knew Mr. Watts. But he’d run over to help. Leaning down, he’d tried to talk to little Devon, What’s your favorite ice cream, anything to distract her from the blood and chaos. The smell of gas, the shrieking lawn mower.
“I’ll never forget seeing you at the screen door before it happened,” he said now, pointing up the driveway. “I was out there in my garage and saw you watching her run out to her daddy.”
“Standing at the door?” The way she remembered it, she went to the door only after hearing Devon’s screech, like a cat caught in a hunting trap.
“What a thing,” he said. “It was like you were frozen. Like ice.”
The sexy, slashing violin thrusts.
Her phone again, those opening jabs of “Assassin’s Tango.”
That song, the one from the spring invitational, Devon performing her floor routine to its slinks and jabs, the day Ryan died.
The slippery magenta of her leotard, her buttocks high, those hard-hewn legs, muscles grooved and bronzed. Undulating under her leotard with every move. The staccato march of her colt legs, the sharpness of the foot flick, the haughtiness of the head snap. The slow glides.
There was something different in it, in that performance. At the time, Katie hadn’t been able to put her finger on it. Now it seemed so clear.
That hip swing, slow and mesmerizing. Then down on the mat, lolling and rolling, the straddle. Thump, thump, whip, snap, the purr of her feet. Earthy, carnal.
My God, how had she missed it? All the clues right there.
Before, Devon had always been so intent on her performance—the physics of it, the aerodynamic logic of it—it never even seemed like she heard the music at all.
But that day, Katie realized now, it was as if Devon really heard it, moved with it and in it. And her body was no longer a machine, a tool, a weapon, but a body. Moving. Taking pleasure in itself, in its power. Seducing.
Had Eric seen it too? How could he not?
The exultation as she landed her last dizzying run, her feet bolting to the floor, face piped pink and exultant. Radiant under the fluorescent lights.
The look on her face as they all walked to the car after the meet had been a look Katie had never seen, almost prurient. I finally got it. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like. It was almost too much for Katie. But Eric couldn’t even look at his daughter, averting his eyes, dropping his keys, walking faster.
“Teddy, you just called?”
“Katie, I know you don’t want to talk to me,” he said, his voice scratchy like after a long coaching day.