Kill You Twice (23 page)

“What are you looking for?” Bliss asked.

“This person’s down there now?” Susan asked. Where was her phone? Downstairs on the couch where she’d left it, that’s where. How many people had been murdered in
their homes because they couldn’t get to the room where’d they’d left their cell phone? Bliss’s landline was in the kitchen.

“You’re not being calm at all,” Bliss pointed out.

Susan looked down at her hands. The mug. She smacked the mug against the wall. It exploded into pieces and smelly golden tea splashed everywhere. It dripped down the wall, splattered their feet,
and scalded Susan’s bare thighs.

Bliss stammered something about vintage pottery.

“Stay here,” Susan said.

She took a good-sized piece of broken ceramic and held it in her hand like a shiv, or at least how she imagined people held shivs.

She had one goal: get to the landline.

She peered out of her bedroom into the hall. No intruders. Only the hardwood floor and the open doors to the bathroom and to her mother’s room. George McGovern smiled at her from a framed
campaign poster across the hall from her room.
COME HOME, AMERICA,
1972. She could see her reflection in the glass, superimposed over George McGovern’s huge head as she tiptoed past toward
the stairs. Susan could smell blueberry pancakes.

“She’s not dangerous,” Bliss said from behind her.

Susan jumped and nearly shivved her mother in the gut. “Shh!” she said.

Bliss said, “She says she knows you.”

Susan stopped. Her thighs stung where the tea had burned them.
She says she knows you
. Bliss had a habit of burying the lead. Susan lowered the shiv. George McGovern looked at her wisely.
Susan groaned. The landline. She had given it out one time. She had written it on the back of her business card. In case of an emergency. If you Googled a landline number, you could get the street
address that went with it pretty easily. Any teenager would know that.

“Pearl?” Susan called.

It was quiet.

Then a small voice from downstairs answered, “Yes?”

“Un-fucking-believable,” Susan said.

“She told me everything,” Bliss said. “Over breakfast.”

“You made blueberry pancakes for our home invader?” They were Susan’s favorite.

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bliss said.

“I’m calling Archie,” Susan said. She stormed back into her room and pulled on a pair of sweatpants from the pile in front of the closet. “The police are looking for her.
She ran away from a halfway house. She’s a witness to a murder. We’re turning her in.”

Bliss knelt down and started picking up shards of the mug. “Just talk to her,” she said.

Susan pushed her hair behind her ears and, very purposefully not helping deal with the mug, headed down the hall. She would call Archie, and then she would give this kid a piece of her mind.

Bliss was a pushover. Susan knew that. But if Pearl thought that she could sell Susan a bill of goods, she had another thing coming. Because telling-lies-as-a-teenager-to-get-out-of-trouble?
Susan had invented that.

But before Susan could storm downstairs, Pearl appeared at the end of the hall, her mouth stained with blueberries.

Susan froze, stunned by the sight of her.

Archie had told Susan that Pearl looked different. When Susan had last seen her, she had been a pierced, angry steampunk moppet. Now the facial jewelry was gone. She was taller. Prettier. She
looked like a street hippie, long hair, gypsy skirt; like those girls who sell beads off of blankets on Hawthorne Boulevard while their boyfriends play guitars for change.

“Someone’s trying to kill me,” Pearl said.

CHAPTER

S
usan took a
sip of Stumptown organic Holler Mountain Blend black coffee, collected her thoughts, and looked gravely
over at Pearl. The table was cluttered with the remnants of the breakfast that they had enjoyed without her. Bliss started clearing dirty dishes.

“So tell me what happened,” Susan said.

Pearl’s lips flattened into a little frown and her eyes darted toward Bliss.

“Just tell her what you told me,” Bliss told Pearl.

Susan took another sip of coffee. She didn’t need this. Pearl was lucky she hadn’t called the police already. In fact, she was lucky Susan hadn’t stabbed her with a mug
handle.

“He said he was a cop,” Pearl said.

Susan put down her coffee cup.

Pearl ran her finger along the lip of the glass in front of her. The glass was coated with the last of the orange juice. A few sips remained at the bottom of the glass. A fruit fly was drowning
in it.“He had a badge,” Pearl said. “I was smoking outside, and he said he was there to take me to talk to Sheridan.” Her eyebrows twitched together. “He didn’t
look like a cop. He was wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt. And he didn’t have a gun or anything.” She stopped moving her finger along the glass, but kept it there, touching the lip. The
fruit fly had stopped moving. “And he didn’t have a cop face.” She looked up at Susan for affirmation. “You know, that face cops put on when they’re pushing you
around. Even Archie has it. I had a foster dad who was a cop, so I know.” She was quiet. Then the finger started again, around and around the glass.

“He didn’t have the face of a cop,” Pearl said again. “So I said I had to go ask Miss Bea. He said, ‘Get the fuck in the car, Margaux.’ ” She looked up
at Susan, like she expected a reaction.

Susan didn’t know what to say.

Pearl blinked. “He called me Margaux,” she said, emphasizing the name. “No one calls me that.”

“Oh,” Susan said.

“Then he grabbed me by the arm.” She put her left hand over her right upper arm to illustrate, and said, “I socked him in the balls.”

“Way to go, girl,” Bliss said with a fist pump from the sink.

“Mother,” Susan said. “Let her talk.”

“I guess I got him good,” Pearl said, “because he let go and I pulled away and ran inside. I went straight upstairs, got a few things from my room, and split out the side
door.”

“Why did you leave your phone?” Susan asked.

“They can find you with those things,” Pearl said. “I didn’t want him to triangulate me.”

Susan didn’t know whether to believe Pearl or not, but she knew enough to know that if she was telling the truth, it was serious. “You have to go to the police, Pearl,” Susan
said. “You saw this guy. What if he’s the killer? They can catch him.”

Pearl looked stricken. “You don’t get it,” she said. “Margaux is my legal name. It’s the only place I use it. I’m registered at the center as Margaux Clinton.
My juvie record is under Margaux Clinton. The police reports would have used that name. What if he was a cop and he knew my name because he had access to those records?”

“You said he didn’t have a cop face,” Susan reminded her. Pearl leaned forward, eyes wide, suddenly looking like a scared teenager. “Maybe he’s a bad
cop.”

“Two people have been murdered,” Susan said, and that wasn’t even counting the widow Beaton and who knew what the hell had happened to her. Then she realized that Pearl might
not even know about Gabby Meester. Susan tried to sit up straight, to channel her inner grown-up. “A woman was murdered after Jake Kelly. Burned to a crisp. They think it’s the work of
a serial killer. You might be able to help find the killer before he strikes again.”
Before he strikes again?
Had she really said that?

“I didn’t see anything that morning,” Pearl whined. “I barely knew Jake Kelly.”

“You might have seen something and not known it,” Susan said. It sounded like something that Archie might say. “You certainly were a witness to your own attempted kidnapping.
Unless,” Susan added, “you’re making that up.”

Pearl looked authentically offended. “I slept on the street the night before last,” she said. “Under a bridge.”

Bliss gasped and came around behind Pearl and put her hands on Pearl’s shoulders. “Poor thing,” Bliss gushed.

This, from a woman who had lived on a beach for three months in the sixties.

“Oh, please,” Susan said, groaning. “It was seventy-five degrees last night. It’s like camping.”

Bliss gave Susan a scathing look.

“You said it,” Pearl said to Susan. “This guy killed two people. And now he’s after me. It doesn’t matter if I saw something or not now, does it? I’ve seen
him. Now he has to kill me.” She looked up at Bliss, her eyes all wide and Bambi-like. “Please let me stay here.”

“Mother,” Susan said sternly.

Bliss patted Pearl’s shoulders. Her dishwater hands had left suds on Pearl’s T-shirt, but neither of them seemed to notice it. “You go upstairs and take a long bath and clean
up,” Bliss told Pearl, “and then we’ll get you into some of Susan’s clothes. We’ll figure things out down here.”

Pearl nodded and, with one last pitiful gaze at Susan, got up, grabbed a last piece of toast for the walk, and then trudged off upstairs.

“She’s not some Bosnian war orphan,” Susan said, crossing her arms. “She’s a teenage hustler. She Tasered Archie so her boyfriend could hang him from meat
hooks.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Pearl called from halfway up the stairs. “And I said I was sorry.”

“You did some foolish things when you were that age, too,” Bliss said.

“I never Tasered a cop!” Susan said, exasperated.

Bliss sat down in the chair Pearl had been in. “She’s safe here,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” Susan said, hunching forward. “Harboring a fugitive. Custodial interference.” She searched her brain for other scary-sounding
charges, but couldn’t come up with any.

“She’s not a fugitive,” Bliss said. “She’s wanted as a witness, not a material witness, and she’s not a suspect. She’s an emancipated minor.
That’s how she got out of the foster care system. She elected to stay at the center as a transition to independent living, and she can elect to leave. She says she didn’t see anything
the morning this dishwasher was murdered, and I believe her.”

“She saw something two days later,” Susan pointed out, “when a man came to
murder
her. Assuming her story’s even true.”

Bliss nodded sagely. Susan knew what she was trying to do. Bliss was trying to play the responsible adult. She even dabbed her mouth with her cloth napkin, which she
never
did. “And
she is safe from that man here,” Bliss said. She sat up straight and tightened her kimono sash. “End of discussion.”

“Excuse me?” Susan said, barely able to contain her sudden urge to break another cup. “No. If she’s telling the truth, the guy who came after her is probably the guy who
killed those people. Those articles I printed out the other night, about all the child murders, Archie thinks it’s the same guy.” She said it again, in case Bliss didn’t get it:
“Archie thinks the guy who killed those two people killed all those kids. This guy is a serial killer—if Pearl’s telling the truth about this man attacking her, that means she can
identify him. She needs to work with a sketch artist. If the cops have his picture, they can find out who he is. They can catch him.”

“And what if this freak is a cop?” Bliss said.

Then they were in big, big trouble. Then they would trade Pearl for their lives and move to Norway. “I’ll work it out,” Susan said.

Bliss stared into a coffee cup. She didn’t use it for coffee. She used it for tea. It had a picture of a moose on it. “She stays here,” Bliss said.

Susan had bought her mother the moose cup for Mother’s Day about a hundred years ago. It was a stupid cup, but Bliss used it most mornings.

“For now,” Susan said.

Bliss closed her eyes, exhaled, and nodded. Then she stood up and started gathering the brown sugar and organic honey and homemade raspberry jam off the breakfast table.

“I know why you’re doing this,” Susan said.

“She reminds me of someone,” Bliss said.

Susan said, “I was never that irritating.”

The room still smelled like blueberry pancakes. Susan plucked a crumb off the table and ate it. “Mom?” she called. “Will you make me a pancake, please?”

Bliss was drying dishes. “You know where the stove is,” she said.

Susan got up to use the phone. There was a glass with a little bit of orange juice left in it still on the table and she took it with her to the couch. By the time she realized that she had a
dead fruit fly in her throat, her only option was to swallow it.

CHAPTER

A
rchie had all
the Beaton photographs and documents that Huffington had boxed up delivered to his apartment. He and
Henry unpacked the boxes without talking and spread the contents out on the floor of Archie’s living room.

The dead children were in the bedroom.

A dead woman’s personal papers filled the living room.

That was about right.

“Gretchen could be lying,” Henry said. “About this whole thing. She could be lying about all of it.”

“We need to organize the photographs by subject,” Archie said. “If you think it’s the boy, put it here.” He paused. “I want to see any picture of a teenage
girl.”

There was a knock at the door, and then the knob immediately started to jiggle. Archie walked over, unlocked the door, and opened it.

Susan walked in.

“I need your help,” she said. She walked past him into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Claire said you were here,” she said, pulling an apple out of his produce
drawer. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”

“Help yourself,” Archie said.

Susan carried the apple into the living room. “Oh, hi, Henry,” she said.

“Hi,” Henry said.

Susan shuffled up a stack of photographs that Henry had just sorted and moved them over so she could take their place on the sofa. Henry stared, dumbfounded at what she had done. Susan
didn’t seem to notice.

“I know where Pearl is,” Susan said.

She paused, like she expected climactic organ music. Archie didn’t have time for this. He had other leads to follow. He lingered near the door, hoping Susan would take the hint.
“Pearl didn’t see anything,” he said.

“What if she did?” Susan said.