What You Don't Know(13)

“Is that what you think?” Detective Loren said. She glanced at the young cop, wishing that he would speak more, he was so much nicer, but he was standing by the door, his arms crossed over his chest, watching his partner. “Do you know what your sweet, harmless hubby told us a few weeks ago?”

“No.”

“One of the girls he killed—Beth Howard, I think. Is that right, Paulie?”

The young one shrugged.

“Anyway, this girl, she’s walking home with a bag of groceries. And your husband, kind man that he is, offers her a ride. And she takes it. Maybe it was hot outside and she had a long way to go, or he propositioned her, or she was just a lazy idiot. But we’ll never know.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this,” Gloria said, pulling her purse closer to her body, taking some comfort in its weight.

“So Jacky brings Beth Howard home, where he does what he does. I won’t go into detail—I’m sure you’ve seen the news. You know what he was doing.”

“I didn’t know.” She stopped, cleared her throat. Something is stuck there, hot and heavy, but she’d rather choke to death before asking these men for a drink. “I didn’t know anything.”

“Paulie, you mind getting Mrs. Seever something to wet her whistle?”

The young one ducked out, came right back with a can of Coke. Gloria took it, cupped her hands around the aluminum, but didn’t drink. The can was warm.

“Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Ms. Howard’s dead, and I’m pretty sure everyone agrees that your husband had something to do with it.” She hadn’t thought it possible, but Detective Loren grinned, his lips stretching so far it looked like the top half of his head was ready to topple right off. “Ms. Howard was a kindergarten teacher, by the way. When she went missing, every kid in her class wrote us a letter, because they loved her so much. It was real touching, wasn’t it, Paulie?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with me,” she said stiffly.

“Wait, I have a point. So after Jacky was done with Ms. Howard, do you know what he did?”

“I need to go now.”

But that bastard cop, with his mean eyes, he wasn’t going to let her go until she heard everything he had to say.

“Jacky slid that girl under your bed. You spent eight hours sleeping six inches above a young woman your husband had killed.” A bead of sweat ran down Loren’s forehead, into his eye, and he swiped it away absently. She realized he was enjoying this, watching her squirm. He’d be able to tell all his buddies about it later over beers, she could practically hear them laughing at her expense. “Jacky liked keeping his victims close, even when he was done with them. Damn. Maybe if you’d given it up a little more—if you would’ve occasionally bent over and took one for the team, he wouldn’t be where he is now.”

She didn’t say anything. She could feel a migraine coming on, a screaming-bad one, she’d spend the next ten hours in bed with a damp washcloth draped over her eyes. She considered taking the Coke and throwing it right in Loren’s face, bounce it off his forehead. She wanted to hurt him for blaming all this on her, make him bleed.

“You can certainly go into the house and collect your things,” Detective Loren said. “But there’s no fucking way you can live there anymore.”

So here she is, on a Tuesday, usually her grocery day, pulling into the driveway as if this is still her home, the keys jangling loosely in her palm and she walks to the front door. There’s a car parked at the curb, the engine idling so the air conditioner keeps chugging away—it’s warm for March—keeping the two men inside out of the heat. The one in the passenger seat raises his hand, and she nods in return, although she’d much rather flip him the bird. They’re cops. There are always cops here now, keeping watch over the house until it’s torn down, which is a waste, she thinks, because why not let the bums and delinquents have a turn before it’s all razed to the ground? She’s heard that people have tried to break in, because they want to write ugly things on the walls in spray paint and kick holes in the doors, or they want to steal something, a morbid piece of Jacky Seever to show off to their friends.

She unlocks the front door, goes inside. She was last here the week before, with two young men and a moving truck, and they’d carried out everything she’d pointed at, loaded it up to take away, even though they were nervous, they’d heard all the stories about the house, and the crawl space was still exposed although the cops had nailed a tarp over the open hole and roped it off. She had them box up her photographs, and the set of Christmas china with the scalloped edges and the sprig of holly imprinted in the centers. All the furniture in the guest bedroom, the nice wicker set with the lace coverlet. She’d slept in that bed sometimes, when Jacky’s snoring got too loud, or when her insomnia was particularly bad and she didn’t want to keep Jacky up, and it was nicer than the stuff in the master bedroom, more comfortable.

“The police confirmed that a few of your neighbors complained of a bad smell coming from your house on several occasions. Is that true?” That was one of the questions from that newspaper reporter, she couldn’t remember her name, who had showed up two months before. Gloria had tried to close her door on the girl when she’d said she was from the Post, but then the girl had said she thought Jacky was innocent, that he was being raked over the coals for no good reason. That was why Gloria had let her into the apartment, had set her down in the tiny living room and served her coffee and cookies, the crispy butter kind in the blue tin.