“She hasn’t talked about her at all, though,” she continued. “For some reason, I was under the impression that Luna was gone. Like, left California completely.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.” Too bad I couldn’t be as convinced as Vee was.
“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. I don’t think she’d be dumb enough to come around.”
“No, Luna is definitely not dumb.” Sometimes I wished she was dumber. She would have been a lot easier to defeat if she was.
Gibson cleared his throat, staring at me pointedly. Vee ducked her chin, going back to fiddling with the microphone stand.
“Well, my coffee’s getting cold, I guess,” I said.
“Yeah. Okay. You’ll come back sometime? When you can stay, I mean.”
“Definitely.”
I grabbed my food and stacked the three coffee cups, balancing them by using my chin for support. Vee called my name. I turned.
“I just realized. Shelby’s been hanging around at igNight a lot.” She slid the microphone into the stand, glanced at Gibson, and came to me. “She has been for a few weeks. Acting really weird. Like she’s going to quit the band or something. It may be nothing. Shelby’s kind of a flake. She might have met another guy, or who knows what. But it’s just weird that right when you’re looking for Luna again, Shelby’s . . . being like she was. Before.”
“igNight?” I asked. The bottom cup was starting to burn my hand through the cardboard.
“Hookah dance club in the city. Full of dopeheads, mostly. But also rich girls like Shelby who think smoking orange-flavored tobacco makes them look sophisticated. Not really my kind of scene. She goes, like, every night.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “And she broke up with Gibson, so things are totally awkward right now. I’m not complaining when she doesn’t show up to practice. She is constant drama. It’s kind of nice not having her around, you know?”
“Vee,” Gibson barked.
She checked the clock behind the counter. “I should get going.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know about igNight. I’ll check it out.”
She grinned, letting her hair point flop forward over her face. “Have fun with that.”
She went back to their little nook and turned on the mic. There were a few muffled whumps as she tapped it to see if it was on. Gibson turned knobs on a small amplifier and then gave her a nod. He sat back on a stool and strummed out a few soft chords. Vee began to sing. Her voice was low and sultry, and while not exactly smooth, it was still coarse in the way waves are coarse crashing onto shore.
I recognized the opening lines of the song.
She was singing “Black Daisy.”
“GOD, FINALLY,” MARISOL breathed when she saw me with the food. She grabbed a coffee and pulled the lid off the top. “Ew, black?”
“Seriously?” I said, ready to punch her no-white-food-no-dressing-no-black-coffee face.
She rolled her eyes and sat on a box, hunkered over her coffee as if it was twenty below zero outside. Which it most definitely wasn’t. The back of my neck was damp with sweat. I was kind of wishing I’d opted for soda. Though I wasn’t sure a place like Morning Glory would be the kind of place to sell soda. Organic unsweetened fruit juices, yes. Pepsi, not so much.
I pulled out a sandwich and handed the bag to Dad, then opted to sit on the ground at the opposite end of the alley. That way I didn’t have to listen to Princess Marisol bitch about the cheese being too cheesy or not eating mayo. Bonus: from where I was sitting, I could very faintly hear Vee’s singing. She’d moved on to something even more mournful. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a song to sound more mournful than “Black Daisy.”
After a few minutes, there was a scuffling of shoes. Dad was coming toward me. He held out my coffee. I took it and set it next to me. I really, really wanted that soda now.
“Can I join you?” he asked.
I scooted over to make the slightest amount of room and kept eating wordlessly. All morning I’d been watching and listening for numbers. Anything that might tip Dad’s hand as to what the code for that locked box might be. I noted the exact time that we got started, in case he started at the same time every session, or some weird superstition like that. I noted the serial numbers on his cameras and his tripod. I even noted the model number on the back of his car. Nothing seemed like it would be the one, but it was all I had.
“So what do you think?” he asked, groaning out the last couple of words as he lowered himself to the ground.
“Think about what?” I asked around a mouthful of sandwich.
“About this. You think you might want to follow in your parents’ footsteps?”
I almost choked. Which footsteps would those be? The ones where my mother hid her prostitution-borne baby, or the ones where he lied and hid whatever it was he had to do with it? I chewed extra slowly to give me time to measure my words. “I don’t know. I’m not very artistic.”
“You can learn that.”
“I don’t like to get up early.”
“Well, you’ll have to get over that, no matter what you choose.”
“I don’t like Marisol,” I said. I swallowed and ran my tongue over my front teeth, where a gummy piece of bread was stuck.
Dad glanced over his shoulder and then back at me. “Neither do I,” he said, and laughed. “You don’t have to be her best friend to take good pictures of her. Why don’t you try snapping a few when we’re done with lunch?”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re going to let me use your cameras? Those are your babies.”
“No, you’re my baby.” He shrugged. “I let your mother use them.”
“Mom was a photographer, too. She knew what she was doing.”
He chewed, swallowed, pushed his glasses up on his nose. In this light, I could see his hair was beginning to thin. Before I knew it, Dad would be old and would still be alone. Why? Why, when his wife betrayed him, did he stay loyal to her, even after death?
Because he’s guilty, Nikki, and he knows it.
I pushed the thought away.
“Mom was more of a director. She was good at telling people what to do.”
Except for Bill Hollis. Nobody told Bill Hollis what to do. But Dad knew that already. He just didn’t want me to know that he knew.
There was a long pause while we finished our sandwiches. I didn’t have a choice but to wash mine down with the coffee, which had gotten cold. Marisol was right; it was gross without cream and sugar. I peeked over at her. She had her sandwich open and spread out on one thigh and was picking through its contents with her long nails. At her feet was a small pile of refused food.
That would have been what Peyton would have captured on film, I thought. Dirty, discarded food, next to a shiny stiletto heel. A perfect commentary about this town, this life.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Hmm?” He was poking around on his phone.
“Why did you give up?”
He glanced at me. “Give up on what?”
“On Mom. Why did you stop trying to find her killer?”
He opened his mouth, stopped, let his phone rest on his lap. “Why are you asking this, Nikki?”
“Because I’ve been almost killed twice in the past year. And it just seems really odd to me that Mom was killed, too. Like, what are the odds that two people from the same family are murdered? It’s almost like . . . like she had to know who it was. Like someone has a grudge against us.”
Dad’s face clouded over and he concentrated on tightening the laces of one shoe. I couldn’t tell if that was because he knew I was on to something about Mom, or if it was because he hated talking about what had happened to her, and what had almost happened to me. Maybe it was a little of both.
He straightened, softened, and pushed my hair behind my ear. “I didn’t give up. I just knew when it was hopeless. I couldn’t make the police find her killer. As much as I would have liked to.”
“But weren’t there any suspects?”
“No.”
“None at all? I find that really hard to believe, Dad.”
I saw his jaw stiffen. “The police weren’t motivated, I guess.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. His head whipped up.