Everything You Want Me to Be(59)
I pulled out my phone and dialed the number before I could think about it too much.
“Sheriff Goodman,” she greeted me on the third ring.
“Fran, I need that DNA. Who do you know in the Minneapolis crime lab?”
“I’m well, thank you. And you?”
“I’m serious.”
She dropped the sarcastic tone. “And why is your murder any more important than any of the other thousand bodies that come through my morgue every year? Because it’s yours? Because Cowboy Goodman needs to save the day?”
“There’s no day to save, Fran. She’s dead.” I kept pacing, trying not to curse because I knew it riled her. “This isn’t about me. You can take shots at me until the cows come home, okay? You’re probably right—you always are—but this is my friend’s child. His baby girl. I’ve got two prime suspects for the semen and I need to know which one it is and I need to know today, while there’s any shred of evidence left.”
She was quiet after my rant. I kept walking, ready to argue with whatever she said next, until she sighed.
“All right, Del. I have a few contacts. I’ll make a call.”
“Good. Good.” I ducked out of the barn and started making a sweep along the perimeter of the building. It was old ground, already covered, but the momentum soothed me. “You tell them I need it today.”
“What you need and what they can do are two unrelated things. I’ll ask them to expedite the samples. That’s all.”
I squatted down by a tuft of dead grass outside the window, pushed it aside, and saw a mouse skeleton. It was picked clean and almost completely intact. “Thanks, Fran. I owe you one.”
“One what, exactly?”
“I’ll take you out in the cruiser someday. We’ll give tickets to out-of-staters.”
She laughed—actually laughed out loud, which was a small miracle—but then became suddenly serious again and sent me in an entirely new direction.
“If you really want to track down this murderer, Del,” she said, “there’s someone else you need to talk to.”
PETER / Friday, February 15, 2008
IT WAS amazing how life simply kept moving forward. You could do the most despicable, amoral thing you’d ever imagined and just drive home afterwards. Go to work. Get your dry cleaning. Pick up some wine at the liquor store and chat with the parents of the best friend of the girl you’d slept with behind your wife’s back. Pay for your wine. Go home.
Mary scarcely acknowledged my trip to Minneapolis in January. I’d taken the money for the hotel out of my personal savings account, which she would never see. When I got back, she’d asked about the friend I told her I was visiting. I said he was fine and it was good to catch up with him. She went back to mopping the floor and I went upstairs, laid on our bed, and relived every detail of what happened that weekend: Hattie’s confession at the restaurant, what followed on the hotel bed. And on the desk. And in the shower. Dear God, strike me down.
No one looked at me differently. No one even suspected. It made me wonder what else I could get away with, how far I could push this double life, and that question depended solely on Hattie.
In the month since our trip we’d barely spoken. There was no safe channel of communication. We couldn’t use email, phones, or the internet, nothing that could be traced, and so our relationship became a game of silent voyeurs. I watched her eat lunch with Tommy every day across the cafeteria. She watched me make notes on the board during lectures. When we passed each other in the hallways she looked right through me and kept chatting with her friends. I stood at the door to the classroom when the bell rang just to inhale her scent as she walked by. She always smelled light, airy, with a hint of fruit; either strawberry or raspberry, I could never tell. It was maddening, being so close to her. She must have felt the same, because she stopped by the classroom after school one afternoon under the pretext of having a question about the spring play, but I didn’t trust myself not to touch her. I moved the conversation quickly into the hallway, looking beyond her as I monitored the flux of bodies, sensing her mounting frustration. Finally she wrote a note in light pencil on one of her assignments—just a location and a date—that I frantically erased in the upstairs storage room as my blood started racing.
It was a rest stop along the Mississippi, a scenic overlook into Wisconsin, but no one toured the bluffs this time of year. I only saw one other car in the half hour before she arrived. I pulled her into the backseat without a word and we wrestled clothes off, panting, tugging, and twisting until she was straddling me, and then her long, tight body drove me insane.
I wanted her like I’d never wanted anyone. At the same time I was terrified of what she’d do with the immense power she had over me. She thought she looked up to me, that I was the one in control, but little by little she was going to realize that my life was like a house of cards at her feet and all it would take to destroy me was one stray kick from any of her myriad selves. I craved her, I was obsessed with her, and I feared her more every day.
The Friday after the rest stop I got home from work to see Mary walking around the outside of the house with a guy I didn’t recognize. He looked about our age, wearing a baseball cap, snow-covered work boots, and a tool belt, and he nodded in my direction as I headed up the walk to the house. These days I looked at everybody one second longer, just to see if this was the person who was going to raise their finger and expose me for what I was. Not this guy, not today. He resumed his conversation with Mary and I went inside. Elsa was asleep in her rocker in the living room. I grabbed a Coke and drank half of it while staring at the contents of the fridge, wondering how to see Hattie again. She could “visit” another college on spring break. We could go to Duluth, or Chicago. Hattie would love Chicago.