CHAPTER 46
Strobe lights.
A row of three men.
Flashes of brightness then darkness scissoring them, illuminating only their waists to their knees, that same light slicing my chest, lighting up theTAFTpatch sewn into the borrowed fatigues.
Elvis, singing.
Well, that’s all right, mama, that’s all right for you.
A girl on her knees, her head at the waist of the middle man.
That’s all right, mama, just anyway you do.
Her hair long and blonde.
Flash. Strobe.
With green streaks.
The hand at the back of her neck pressing her face into his crotch. He was wearing a copper-colored bracelet that I recognized.
No no no no no
My dad.
It had been my dad.
My dad.
It had been my dad.
That litany cycled through my head as I biked away from the hospital. I didn’t know how I managed to pedal, how I kept my balance.I’d been shot in the gut, my intestines turned into a slurry, the wound so gruesome that I couldn’t look down, but I felt it.
Oh, I felt it.
My dad. It had been my dad. My dad. It had been my dad.
I stepped off the bike in the front yard, walked away from it while the tires still spun, strode up the porch and through the front door, didn’t close it behind me because I was dying.
I continued to Dad’s office.
Dad who wasn’t Bluebeard, who was worse.
Dad who’d put Maureen’s mouth on him andheld it there.
Who’d said he’d look into Maureen’s “suicide,” but of course he wouldn’t. Sheriff Nillson and my dad weren’t going to look in that direction at all.
His office was empty, but it wouldn’t have slowed me if he’d been in it. We were past that now. The room was arranged like I remembered from when I was a little girl and he’d let me play dolls on the floor while he worked. A desk near the window. A closet. Bookshelves. A filing cabinet. I marched to the closet, yanked open the door. Shoeboxes were stacked on the overhead shelf. Four suits and a sports shirt were draped on hangers.
The copper ID bracelet lay on the floor next to a pair of shiny black shoes, the jewelry sloughed off like a snake’s skin so my father could resume human form.
I reached for it, convinced it would be hot to the touch.
“I knew you saw me.”
I spun around. Dad stood in the doorway, his face flat. He was staring at the wicked bracelet I held.
