One of Us Page 20

  As I listened to the familiar story, I seethed inside. I couldn’t understand how she could be so stupid and selfish.

  Unlike the raccoon, she wasn’t dead when I lit her up. She was asleep under her blankets. The wet splash of the gasoline on her face woke her but she was disoriented and I was fast and once her hair began to burn, the pain and panic drove her from the bed and I was able to finish dousing her everywhere else.

  I said the same thing to her that I said to Courtney: “I’m doing you a favor.” And I was.

  She was about to completely screw up her life. This guy would never be true to her. He was going to hurt her again. And it was obvious she was never going to get over him. I won’t deny that I was very upset over how she was behaving, but I also wanted to help.

  I DECIDE TO SPEND some more time in Lost Creek. I find the business card Nora Daley gave me and easily find her street.

  Her house is a well-kept, tasteful white house trimmed in green that stands out from its sagging neighbors freckled with peeling paint. Clean, white lace curtains hang in every window pulled back to reveal a single white candle on every sill.

  I knock and the door is quickly answered by Birdie, the activities secretary for the NONS, holding a pot of coffee in one hand. She’s wearing another one of her hand-knit sweaters. This one is neon pink patterned in yellow, orange, and red lightning bolts.

  “Oh,” she says upon seeing me.

  She glances at the pot as if it might tell her what she should do next.

  “The museum isn’t open today. It says so on the sign.”

  “I’d like to see the museum, but that’s not the main reason I’m here,” I tell her. “Can I come in?”

  She looks at the pot again, frowning slightly. It’s still not helping her.

  “Is Nora here? She invited me.”

  Nora steps up beside her. I get the feeling she was standing just out of my line of vision listening the entire time.

  She makes a frank appraisal of my Valentino studded miniskirt and tights, Balmain camouflage cotton top, Fendi motorcycle boots, and ankle-length fawn suede duster. I don’t know what her problem is. This is very hayseed for me.

  “We’re not open today,” she echoes her friend.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Now that the gallows are coming down, people might forget about the Nellies and I think that would be a shame. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that you’ve always wanted to put up a statue. I might want to make a donation.”

  Nora is nattily dressed in a pair of dark green polyester slacks, a high-necked white blouse, and a sweater vest covered in cardinals and accessorized with a pine-tree-shaped brooch made of green and gold crystals.

  “Come in,” she says.

  The interior of the house is as tidy as the exterior and as carefully put together as its owner.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t properly introduce myself the other day when we met at Kelly’s Kwik Shop. I’m Scarlet Dawes.”

  Nora puts on her glasses hanging from a beaded chain around her neck and examines me.

  “Scarlet Dawes?” Nora asks me. “The daughter of Walker Dawes?”

  “Would you like some coffee?” Birdie eagerly offers.

  “No, but I’d like to see the museum. Do you think you could make an exception for me?”

  “Sure, sure,” Nora says briskly and starts ushering me toward a staircase.

  “Normally we’d be open but we had to take a day off. Things have been bonkers around here. The amount of people,” Birdie informs me. “It’s the first time since Nora started the museum almost forty years ago we’ve ever had lines.”

  “So Marcella Greger’s death was good for you?”

  “We’d never say that,” Nora replies, shocked.

  “Poor Marcella,” Birdie laments. “She was such a kind, good soul. No one can figure out why anybody’d want to kill her.”

  “I thought the Nellies did it.”

  “That’s not funny,” Nora says.

  “Rafe says it’s some lunatic,” Birdie offers.

  “Who’s Rafe?”

  “Rafe Malloy. He’s a police officer in town. Our only detective,” Nora explains.

  “Does he have a granddaughter named Heather?”

  “Yes. He has quite a few grandchildren.”

  “Rafe says it’s a lunatic,” Birdie repeats.

  “I heard you the first time. A lunatic? Really?”

  “Here we go,” Nora announces as we reach the top of the third flight of stairs. “Watch your head.”

  She opens a door with a key. We have a few more stairs to go before reaching a spacious attic that takes up the entire top of the house. Birdie flicks a switch and the peaked ceiling is lit up with white Christmas lights that act as stars in the sky over an impressively detailed model of Lost Creek set up on an old Ping-Pong table covered in green felt.

  “This side is the town as it looked during the time of the Nellies and this side is how it looks now,” Nora explains proudly. “Rick Kelly made it. It took him two years to complete it. He’s Moira’s brother.”

  “It’s impressive,” I say.

  “We had a group of paranormal investigators spend the night here last night,” Birdie rattles on. “They have their own TV show. They found evidence that this room is haunted.”

  “What evidence?”

  “They wouldn’t tell us. We have to wait and watch the show.”

  “There are no ghosts in this house,” Nora insists. “I think I would have seen one by now.”

  “What about Wade Van Landingham going into that trance and starting to growl and shiver and scratch at that corner over there?”

  “It was all nonsense.”

  “Who’s Wade Van Landingham?” I ask.

  “Their psychic,” Birdie answers. “Nora didn’t like him.”

  “He chewed up one of my mother’s handmade doilies,” she says hotly.

  “He sounds interesting.”

  The ladies lead me to the exhibits. I was expecting something amateur, but each item is enclosed in a wood and glass case accompanied by a detailed description typed on an index card.

  I walk slowly past one of the tickets the Original Walker issued for the executions bearing his signature with its gold seal still intact, the bloodstained collar from the priest who lost his tongue after he blabbed information to O. W. that a Nellie told him in confession, the dented tin flask smuggled in to Footloose McAnulty his last night in prison by the very wife who had always tried to get him to quit drinking, a newspaper clipping detailing the construction of Walker’s Wonder complete with a sketch of the amazing gallows able to accommodate four men at a time, the petrified ear of the informant Mickey Duff that was sliced from his head by Prosperity McNab and nailed to the door of the Red Rabbit, a brass door knocker with LEWELLYN engraved on it, one of the two men the Nellies were accused of killing, Fiona McNab’s hairbrush and the small wool cap her son, Jack, wore while watching his father hang, the white hood worn by Kenny Kelly, and the noose that choked the life out of him.

  On the walls behind the exhibits is a framed series of an artist’s renderings of each of the executed Nellies sketched during the trial.

  I take a closer look.

  “Is something wrong?” Birdie asks

  “I met someone here in town recently who looks a lot like Prosperity McNab. Danny Doyle.”

  Nora nods her head excitedly as if making this connection has just won me a prize.

  “Prosperity was his great-great-grandfather. His mother was a McNab and married a Doyle.”

  “We’re all very proud of Danny,” Birdie chimes in. “He’s a famous psychologist in Philadelphia who puts murderers in jail. He’s in town now visiting his grandfather Tommy.”

  Hanging beside the
sketches is a haunting painting done in shades of green and gray of a woman on her knees in the dirt with tiny fearful faces peering out from the folds of her tattered skirts. She’s pleading with a well-dressed man in shiny riding boots on a blood bay horse. His hand is raised and holds a coiled whip.

  It’s titled Nellie O’Neill Pleads for Her Children.

  Beneath it in another glass case is the lace handkerchief Peter Tully’s mother gave him that had to be pried from his dead hands. I wonder how much it would cost.

  I reach into my purse and take out my checkbook.

  “So, Nora,” I begin, “how much do you need for this statue of yours?”

  nineteen

  I SPENT LAST NIGHT AT the house but I kept my room at the Holiday Inn. I go back there, watch a movie, and fall asleep.

  When I wake up, I’m starving and I want a drink.

  I’m glad to see Heather is working again tonight. I wave at her and she gives me a brilliant smile.

  A few tables are occupied and two women sit at the bar. I wonder if Anna and her cousin, Marcella, ever got together for a drink. I never thought about her having any kind of life outside of our house.

  From the way Marcella talked, it sounded like she and Anna confided in each other a lot. Part of me regrets acting so hastily. It might have been worth my while to have had a lengthier conversation with her, but she really got on my nerves.

  “Hi,” Heather greets me happily. “I was hoping you’d be back. Jack and Coke?”

  “Good memory,” I reply.

  “Extra strong,” she adds.

  “And do you have a bar menu?”

  She hurries off and returns with a drink, a laminated menu, and a bowl of complimentary stale party mix.

  “So how did your dad like Tweety?” she asks me.

  “Oh, he loved him,” I tell her, smiling. “Thanks again for giving me directions to that pet shop.”

  “No problem. I go there sometimes to play with the puppies and the hamsters. I’d love to get a pet, but the place where I live doesn’t allow animals.”

  “Do you live alone?” I ask while perusing my food options.

  I can’t find a single item that isn’t deep-fried or covered in an artificial cheese sauce.

  “I have two roommates.”

  “Boys?”

  She blushes and shakes her head. A cloud of girlish perfume wafts toward me. She smells like a sugar cookie.

  “My grandpa would go ballistic if I lived with guys,” she adds.

  “Is this the grandfather who’s a cop?”

  “He’s not a bad guy or anything like that,” she explains. “He’s just extra protective of me. My mom was his first kid with his first wife, and I’m his first grandkid.”

  “That’s a lot of firsts. Why don’t you sit down and talk to me for a minute? You’re not that busy right now,” I urge her.

  She glances around at the mostly empty tables and the bartender sitting on a stool with his eyes closed and his iPod plugs in his ears appearing to be fast asleep except for the slight nodding of his head in time to his music.

  I push a chair out from under the table with the tip of my boot. She smiles at me in wonderment as if I’ve just performed some amazing feat of magic.

  “Has your grandfather told you anything about that poor woman who had her head bashed in?”

  “No. He never talks about work.”

  “It would go against his ethics?”

  “I don’t know about that. I think it’s more about going against the rules of his job. He loves rules. I heard him tell my mom once he likes being a cop because he likes never having to ask if something is right or wrong. All he has to do is enforce laws. He said after Vietnam, he never wants to have to pass judgment or make a moral decision again.”

  “What happened to him in Vietnam?”

  She shrugs.

  “He was a soldier.”

  I notice her eyeing my bowl. I push it toward her. She takes a small handful after checking for management spies. She’s adorably moral.

  “Tell me, Heather,” I say. “Does your grandfather know Danny Doyle? He’s some famous shrink who lives in Philadelphia but he grew up here.”

  “Sure, Grandpa knows him. He’s known Dr. Doyle since he was a little kid. When he went away to college he was so proud of him, you would’ve thought he was his own son. That’s what my mom tells me.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “He hardly ever comes back here. I’ve never met him.”

  “You must have a boyfriend,” I goad her. “A pretty girl like you. Come on. Tell me.”

  Her telltale blush heats her cheeks again. She bows her head and starts picking through the bowl for the yellow cereal squares and the cheese sticks, pushing aside anything brown.

  “I do kind of have a crush on someone.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Of course you can.”

  I sip my drink and watch her. I know she can’t keep her secret for more than a few seconds.

  “Troy,” she reveals breathlessly.

  “Is he cute?”

  “Very.”

  “So? What’s your status?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How involved are you?”

  “Oh, we’re not involved.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one reason, he works with my grandpa.”

  “He’s a cop?”

  She nods.

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She gives up her previously finicky manner of eating and starts tossing handfuls of the snack mix into her mouth.

  “We’ve gone out drinking a couple times. Him and his friend Billy; he’s a cop, too. Me and one of my girlfriends. And we meet up with other people. We’ve never gone out on anything like a date.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s never asked me.”

  I place my hand over the bowl. She looks at me, surprised. I hold her gaze.

  “Heather,” I say quietly but firmly. “You can’t wait for him to ask you. Men are completely content to play video games and wank off to Internet porn. If you want a man, you have to go after him. Call him.”

  “What?”

  “Call him right now and tell him to meet you for a drink when you get off work.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Heather, remember our talk the other day? Life is short. You have no idea how short it might be.”

  I take my hand off the bowl and place it over her hand instead.

  “Think about that poor Marcella Greger woman. Do you think when she woke up that morning she had any idea that someone was going to come to her home and kill her?”

  Heather slowly shakes her head.

  I squeeze her hand.

  “Don’t waste another second. Call him. Do it now,” I command her. “And tell him to bring his cop buddy for me.”

  I CAN SEE WHY Heather has a crush on Officer Troy Razzano. He’s darkly good-looking with big brown eyes and a flashy smile; one of those pretty Italian boys who will be twice the size he is now in another ten years and resemble every small-time actor playing a background paisan on the most recent mob show du jour.

  His friend, Officer Billy Smalls, looks and talks like a twelve-year-old Marine. He has ears that stick out and enormous hazel eyes set in a little boy’s angelic freckled face that makes his tough talk and attitude hard to take seriously.

  They aren’t as conversationally challenged as I thought they might be; however, the topics are severely limited and I’m unequipped to speak to any of them. It’s obvious the three of them know all the same people and are going to spend the night talking about them along with the hopes of a local speedway reopening in the
spring and the latest highlights from a few of their favorite TV shows.

  I watch them and think about how much their contentment with their pathetic lots in life would bother Walker and his abhorrence of mediocrity and belief that abject failure is better than bland survival. He once told me he’d rather have me be a crack whore than a soccer mom.

  I didn’t tell Heather my last name when we first met only because when people around here find out who I am they stop being who they are. I knew sweet little Heather would be intimidated by me if she knew I was the daughter of Walker Dawes and would be impossible to pump for information.

  I toyed with the idea of not giving the boys a last name either but decided to be honest.

  I was right about Heather. She can barely look me in the eyes anymore. Troy seems cowed, too, but the information thrills Billy.

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with Scarlet Dawes. Seriously, how much freakin’ money do you have?” he asks, grinning at me over a shot glass of Jägermeister.

  “A lot,” I say, grinning back.

  “Drinks are on you!” he proclaims joyfully, and signals for the whole bottle.

  The evening progresses and as I knew would happen, I get bored.

  Troy has managed to stay relatively sober while Billy is almost too drunk to walk. He barely makes it to the men’s room for the fourth time. Troy and Heather have become fairly cozy and I can tell by the way Troy winces at the sight of Billy stumbling across the room that he’s concerned for his friend’s welfare but would also like to ditch him. I volunteer to drive Billy home. His car can stay in the hotel parking lot overnight.

  Troy and Heather pledge me their undying gratitude.

  Billy has a surprisingly tidy little bachelor pad complete with state-of-the-art electronics, a Coors Light dartboard, and a framed poster of a mostly naked starlet whose name I’ve never been able to remember. Within moments of our arrival, he’s pouring more shots.

  I sit down next to him on the couch and he starts talking about his job, trying to impress me with his selfless pursuit of protecting and serving. The next thing I know he gets up and disappears into his bedroom. He comes back with his gun.

  “Look at this,” he slurs, waving it in front of me. “You wanna hold it?”