Claude was supposed to open the deli, but I didn’t see him when I arrived, so I began prepping by myself. The shopping center was quiet for a hot day. When the pavement grew sticky enough to swallow your kickstand, you could count on people swarming inside for the air-conditioning. But today’s crowd was half its usual size. Where were they all gathering? Were they talking about Maureen?
“Hey,” Claude said, appearing from the back. “I stopped by your house to see if we could bike together. Junie said you’d left early.”
“Yeah.” I was staring across my till at the grocery store. Mrs.Pitt was picking up soaps from a display, sniffing them, setting them back down. The Pitts were rich, for Pantown. They even owned a microwave. Mrs.Pitt kept a glass of water inside so it didn’t accidentally start a fire.
“I heard about Maureen.”
“Yeah.” I wanted to keep watching Mrs.Pitt, but Claude’s voice was so mournful. I turned to him. His appearance—ashen skin, raccoon circles around his eyes—almost shocked me back to myself. “You okay?”
His mouth curled without opening. Then, softly: “What happened?”
His question felt larger than the two of us. “The sheriff says suicide.”
“He thinks she drowned herself?”
Brenda and I had thrown that back and forth like a hot, hungry rock on the bike ride home. “I guess. But you know what a good swimmer she was.”
“Those quarries are deep,” Claude said. “We’ve both heard of strong swimmers going down in them before. All it takes is a leg cramp. Maybe she was out there with someone.”
“Maybe.”Or maybe Sheriff Nillson killed her somewhere else and tossed her body in.“But why didn’t that person try to save her? Or at least report what happened?”
“Jeez, Heather,” he said, palms facing me, telling me to back off. “I saidmaybe.”
I hadn’t realized how mad I’d sounded. I rubbed my face. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep much last night. Thanks for walking Junie back home. She said you guys played Monopoly.”
But he wasn’t listening to me anymore. He was staring at the grocery store, his forehead wrinkled in worry.
I turned to see Gloria Hansen walking toward us. Her gait was odd, like she’d sat on something sharp. Her blouse was buttoned wrong, really wrong, with a gaping hole that showed her bra, the two unpaired buttons on top making her collar loop over itself.
“You can play the drums anytime you like,” she called in my direction, her voice too loud. She was still thirty feet away and lumbering toward the deli, her eyes vibrating in their sockets, hands twitching. “Just because Maureen won’t be there doesn’t mean you can’t be.”
I lifted the hinged countertop and rushed toward her. “You shouldn’t be out, Mrs.Hansen. You should be at home.”
“I know how important the drums are to you,” she said. She smelled sour up close, like stomach acid and unwashed clothes. “People think I don’t notice much anymore, but I see it all.”
“Let’s call my dad,” I said, trying to steer her toward the deli counter. “He can come get you.”
Her hands flew like startled pigeons, shaking me off. “I don’t want to see Gary.”
I untied my apron and tossed it toward the counter, talking more to Claude than to her. “Then I’ll walk you home. We’ll walk together. Would you like that?”
She nodded, her chin dropping to her chest. She was staring straight at the messy front of her blouse, but I don’t think that’s why she started crying.
Mrs.Hansen rambled on for most of the thirty-minute walk, the sweat running down her face intensifying her smell. It was a one-way conversation. “This town grinds girls up,” she kept muttering. “It’s insatiable. Take ’em whole or take ’em in pieces, but it gets all of us. I should have told Mo. I should have warned her.”
I patted her arm, led her home. She’d left her front door wide open. When we walked through the living room, single file, I saw that the palomino-frosted glasses were resting on a tower of boxes, where we’d left them last time I was there, mine still full of water. It felt like Maureen could be alive, standing in her house, rolling her eyes at the familiar piles. Like if I could slip through an inch of time, I could come out in a world where Maureen hadn’t died.
I didn’t know where to lay Mrs.Hansen down, but I knew we kept our secrets in Pantown. If she didn’t want me calling my dad, she didn’t want me callinganyone, so I brought her to the only place I could: Maureen’s bedroom. I apologized to her the whole way up the stairs, but she didn’t seem to be listening.
When we entered Maureen’s room, I was shocked to see every drawer open, piles of clothes on the floor, the bed stripped. “Mrs.Hansen, did you do this?”
She shook her head dumbly. “Jerome sent one of his deputies here to search for a note.” She made a wet noise. “A suicide note.”
I squashed the surge of anger. There would be no suicide note to be found because Maureen hadn’t killed herself, and anyhow, the deputy should have cleaned up before he left. I quickly made the bed and laid Mrs.Hansen on it, covering her with Maureen’s favorite sheet patterned in lemons and raspberries. I rubbed her head until she relaxed, just like I did for my mom. When her eyes drifted closed and her breathing grew regular, I started cleaning up the rest of the room as quietly as I could. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could think of to do.
When it was in order, I knelt next to Mrs.Hansen, like I was in prayer.
Her eyes were open.
