Light from a Distant Star (23 page)

“Stay, boy! Stay, now!” he ordered with a thump on his broad back.

Max followed her up the stairs to the apartment. She felt a little
giddy, wondering what fireworks would happen when Dolly saw him again. She figured that was why he wanted her there. He even stood behind her while she knocked on her door. No answer. She called Dolly’s name, knocked again. Still nothing, so she put the key in the dead bolt.

“It’s not locked,” she said.

“Go on in,” he said.

“I don’t know if I should.”

His hand brushed past and turned the knob. The minute the door swung open she saw Dolly. On the floor. Curled on her side, legs drawn as if to protect herself from whatever hulking rage had intruded before them. The bottoms of her feet were soiled, the glittery toenails, fuschia. Her card table and two folding chairs had been knocked over. There was a broken plate and bowl on the counter. A red mug on the floor, the toaster in a spill of burned crumbs. The white trash can had been tipped over. A greasy black plastic takeout container had spewed its noodly Chinese entrails near her blond ponytail. A trickle of blood ran from her nose and the corner of her mouth.

“She’s dead,” Max said from the step below.

Nellie turned and ran, through the cellar, stumbling on all fours, back up the stairs to her own orderly kitchen, where she lurched back and forth, gagging. She had to do something, couldn’t think what. Call, call her father. He came home. The Springvale police arrived next, then her mother. She brought Nellie up to her bedroom and held her so she’d stop shaking. Then the detective needed to talk to her. He sat in the rocking chair and let her huddle on the bed with her mother while he asked questions. Questions only she could answer. Questions about time. Time, when all of time had stopped.

Max stayed in the back of a cruiser for a while before they drove him to the station. They left Boone tied up outside, so Henry wouldn’t be nervous. Her mother wanted the dog brought to a shelter, but Nellie begged her not to. Instead, her father took Boone to the junkyard, then he went to Rollie’s, but Ruth wasn’t at work, hadn’t been all day. Afraid Max had done something to Ruth, too, her mother was inconsolable. Nellie told them to try Patrick’s house. Her father drove Ruth home dripping wet and shivering in a beach towel. In Nellie’s mind,
this was all her sister’s fault. If only she’d been here, everything might have been different. A part of Nellie felt dead. Ruth was grounded, forever, she hoped, as her sister sobbed up in her room. She’d gotten exactly what she deserved.

D
OLLY DIDN’T HAVE
a real funeral. Just a memorial service at her aunt Lizzie’s house. Only a few people came. Tray, some dancers from the club, and the manager. And Nellie’s mother and father. “You were, like, her only family,” one dancer told Nellie’s mother. “She’d tell us things, stories, like about Nellie, how she was like a little sister or something. And stuff they’d do. Like that time, the night she slept in the tree house with them.” Not true, but poor Dolly, Nellie hurt inside for her. And for Max, too. With the truth being turned every which way, it was easier to keep certain things to herself.

T
HERE’D BEEN TROUBLE
between them from before. Max swore he’d been fishing, but couldn’t prove it, so he’d probably come earlier than Nellie knew. Dolly’d probably let him in because of the plumbing work, and for some reason he’d snapped. He’d hit her, and in the struggle they’d both been cut. And then he’d put his strong hands around her neck and strangled her before going back to Charlie’s for a shower and fresh aftershave. Needing to cover his tracks, he’d returned with the used hot-water tank, then come next door so Nellie would think he’d just arrived. So there it was, the pieces fitting just right. Motive. Opportunity. A man with a violent past, who’d been in jail a few times. A cousin came forward to say she remembered hearing how as a boy he’d shot his own brother to death.

Everyone said how lucky Nellie was. It could have been her, too. If she hadn’t run.

She didn’t know what to think, so she tried not to.

S
TRANGE HOW QUICKLY THE MOST HORRIFIC, THE MOST UNIMAGINABLE
events manage to find their place in a life. The family’s new norm was evasion and pretense. If on the surface everything appeared to be all right, then perhaps in the end it would be. Nellie’s mother continued going to work. She even had a few new clients. When pressed for the juicy details, she begged off, saying she couldn’t discuss it because of the upcoming trial and also out of respect for Lizzie, who had the chair next to hers. Lizzie, however, was eager to defend her niece. She wanted it known that Dolly was in no way the slutty little stripper the newspapers had made her out to be. If Dolly had a problem, it was always being too naive, and trusting.

One day, after going to the movies with Krissie Potek and her cousin from Wyoming, Nellie had taken the bus uptown to the salon. She didn’t like being alone in the house anymore. None of them did. Their family home, their haven, was now a crime scene, the back half wrapped in yellow police tape. Cars still slowed down out front. Police investigators had returned three days ago to see the apartment again. They had taken measurements of each room, which, her mother complained to Detective Des La Forges, had already been done. But apparently not to the enormous man’s satisfaction because, as he told her through the door screen, he “was all about details, especially when a life’s at stake.”

A life. Whose? Max Devaney’s? No longer did Nellie press her ear to the clammy bathroom plaster, not even to listen to the detectives’ terse voices. Far safer not to know, numbed as she was by her paralysis of dread and hope. She feared what might happen, all the while certain it
could not. She couldn’t think about who had actually killed Dolly, but knew it hadn’t been Max.

Ruth had taken Henry to the town pond at noon, her reprieve from being grounded. He was her reluctant companion, because all she did, he complained, was ignore him and hang out with her friends. But then again, she did supply him with as much candy and soda as he wanted. And she let him go into the swampy woods at the far end of the pond to catch frogs.

Jessica had been calling constantly, begging Nellie to do something with her, anything. What Jessica really wanted, though, were the gruesome details. “All right, just tell me one thing then,” she whispered into the phone. “Was her tongue, like”—she made a gagging sound—“sticking out? Cuz that’s what happens when you get strangled.”

Nellie repeated the party line: because of the trial, they couldn’t talk about anything; they weren’t allowed to. That might squelch most probing, but not persistent Jessica’s, who blind as she was to most social cues, just didn’t get it. Tragedy conferred a twisted celebrity, Nellie was discovering. It was like living in a bubble, both transparent shield and showcase. People were fascinated but also uneasy around them. And yet, as she would realize that day in the salon, everyone wanted inclusion, however peripheral their role.

She’d been speed-reading her way through the salon’s magazines. Her mother was in the back room folding the last dryer load of towels before going home. Lizzie’s client was a homely older woman in lavender pants. When Nellie first came in, she’d been struck by her teeth, how big and square they were, like horse teeth. Not wanting to make her feel bad, she’d looked away quickly. Lizzie was cutting the woman’s hair. Lulled by the soft music and the close blur of female voices, Nellie hadn’t been paying attention until she heard Max Devaney’s name.

“Even the first time she met him he tried coming on to her,” Lizzie was saying. “But it was, like, weird. Like something was wrong with him. Like, really wrong. The things he said, his whole … you know, it all just creeped her out.”

“No!” she blurted over the magazine. “That’s not what happened.”

Lizzie paused midcut, her full mouth caught in a sour pucker. She
and the woman stared back through the mirror. “Excuse me, Nellie, but I think I know a little better than you.”

“But I was there. I know what happened. Everything.”

Now Lizzie turned to face her. “Maybe you think you do,” she said with peevish deliberation. “But some things’re probably a little over your head, if you know what I mean.” Lizzie and her client exchanged glances.

“He fixed her car, that’s what happened. Her battery, it was dead.” Nellie held her breath in the silence.
Dead
—bad word. She was beginning to understand: more than sorrow and personal loss, this was Lizzie’s exclusive story to tell. But facts were facts, however damning or trivial. “He was very nice to her. He was!”

“Really.” Lizzie’s stare was withering. “In any event,” she sighed, resuming her story and the cut, each
clip clip clip
punctuating her tale with impending menace. “So the very next night he shows up at the Paradise, and plunks himself down at a front table, big as life so Dolly can’t miss him. ‘Come sit with me,’ he says when she’s done her act. ‘Sorry,’ she says, but she can’t. So what’s he do but wave three twenties in her face. Says he’ll gladly pay for her time. Well, Dolly gets all insulted, of course. Who the hell’s he think he is, coming in to her place of business, treating her like she’s some kind of hooker or something. And then
he
gets all bent out of shape. ‘No, no,’ he keeps saying. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ So then, of course, one thing leads to another. And he starts saying, like, the most nasty things. And that’s when she tells him, just get the hell out, which he does, jumps up and storms out. Then, later, when she’s leaving, she spots his truck, and him in it, waiting next to her car, so she sends the manager out to get rid of him.”

Nellie flipped the magazine onto the table. Lies! But she kept her mouth shut as the story went on.

“But then what happens, the very next night Dolly’s leaving work and he jumps out from the shadows and says how he sorry he is, and how all he wants is to apologize for bothering her. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘well, if that’s true, then how come you’re bothering me now?’ Which, she can tell, really ticks him off, but as much as she hated to, she said she had to do it, cuz if she didn’t, she knew she’d never get rid of him.
So then a few days go by and a knock comes on her front door, and when she opens it, it’s him. He’s tryna give her some flowers, one of those supermarket bouquets, you know, wrapped in cellophane. She not only refuses to take them, but she tells him she doesn’t want him coming to her house anymore. And if he does it again, then she’s gonna have to call the police, that’s all there is to it. He didn’t say anything, she said, just kind of drops the flowers on the mat and takes off down the stairs. “Hey!” she yells. “I told you I don’t want them.” And she throws them on the ground. Not the smartest thing to do with a psycho, but anyway, he turns around and glares at her, hard, like he really wants to hit her, you know, but he’s tryna control himself, and then he gets in his truck and just takes off.

“From that point on, the poor kid, she was like petrified, but what could she do? I mean, he hadn’t actually done anything,” Lizzie said.

“She should’ve called the police anyway. Put the bastard on notice,” the woman declared with shaky vehemence.

“Someone should’ve,” Lizzie agreed, then with a quick glance toward the backroom door, lowered her voice. “I mean, he’s on the list, and no one says anything? What’s that all about?”

Nellie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The flowers on the lawn. So that’s where they’d come from. If that was true, what else had she been wrong about? Even her confusion about Mr. Cooper seemed to be exactly that: confusion. After seeing her in the yard that day, he had called her father saying he was ready to make an offer. That’s why the line had been busy when she’d called the store to tell him Max was there. He’d been on the phone for a long time with Andy, he’d told her mother. Talking, haggling back and forth on the price, her father was proud to report. He’d driven a pretty hard bargain.

“Have a good night, Sandy,” Lizzie said when her mother emerged from the back room with her purse. “And you, too, Nellie,” she added, and Nellie knew by the long look she and her wet-haired client shared that there was more to tell.

She and her mother were walking home. Good therapy, her father liked to call it, though the truth was the car was being repaired again for the third time in a month. She slipped her arm through her mother’s and felt her tense up. Nellie’s mind raced, trying to think
of something to make her feel better, but every subject seemed tied by invisible thread to the murder. When they got to their corner, her mother stopped and said she’d heard what she’d said to Lizzie.

“From now on, if you need to talk about what happened, would you please tell me and not everyone else?”

“Okay,” Nellie agreed slowly and a little hurt. Whenever she tried to, she’d wave her off, saying that she just wasn’t up to it yet.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” her mother said. “I can tell. Whenever his name comes up, you look so … so upset.”

Nellie thought a moment. Well, because the more she defended Max, the more upset everyone got with her. “I don’t know, it’s just all so kind of, you know … freaky.”