What You Don't Know(30)
“And this latest victim, it’s Carrie Simms,” Black says, quickly. Like he wants to get the words out fast, get the bad taste out of his mouth.
“Carrie Simms.” Hoskins’s heart, it takes a turn in his chest again, quick and slippery, then stills.
“Simms, Hoskins. The girl that got away from Seever.”
“I know who she is. Are you sure it’s not suicide?” Hoskins asks. It’s all he can think, women like Simms sometimes didn’t recover well from trauma, and she was already fucked up, even before Seever got a hold of her. Seven years was a long time to wait to kill yourself, but you could never know what people would do, or how long they would wait to do it. Sometimes a human was nothing more than a ticking time bomb, and sometimes it took time to detonate.
“It’s not suicide.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s what I said,” Black says. “I’ll text you the address. Loren’s already out there.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t think I’d let you molder down there for the next twenty years, did you?” Black says. “You didn’t think you’d be done with this forever?”
GLORIA
There’s a peach tree in her backyard, stunted and small. It never bears any fruit, because the climate in Denver isn’t right for it—the summers are too short and never get hot enough, the winters are far too cold. The soil is too sandy and rocky. She sometimes wonders who planted the tree to begin with, what hopeful person flipped through a Burpee catalog and ran their finger along the slick pages and stopped on a peach tree, already imagining the taste of the fruit, the way the juice would explode from the flesh at the first bite and run down their arm, dripping all the way to their elbow. And then that tree came in a brown box, the roots wrapped up in a burlap sack, and it was planted in the backyard, in the sunniest corner, but it only grew a little every year, twisting and bending like an old man, and nothing ever bloomed on those scrawny twigs. And there it still is, right outside the dining-room window, bare branches shaking in the wind. She’s thought about having it cut down, clearing that spot and having a concrete pad poured, where she could put out some nice lawn furniture in the summer, but she never seems to get around to it. It’s not as if her schedule is crammed full, but she forgets the tree, doesn’t think about it again until a time like this, when the cold is creeping in through the cracks around the windows and the peaks of the mountains are covered in snow.
She’s been in this house for the last seven years, creeping around like a mouse, hoping that no one in the neighborhood would recognize her, make the connection, and so far she’s been lucky. It would be easier to pick up and move to another town where Jacky wasn’t much more than a story on the evening news, a city where people didn’t accuse her of being some kind of dragon lady, and she’d tried to move, rented a house in California after Jacky was sentenced, drove out caravan-style behind the moving truck, through the mountains and desert and into a part of California that was so green it made her eyes hurt. The house she’d rented had a pool shaped like a kidney bean in the back, and the privacy fence was covered in a creeping bush that blossomed in great clouds of pink. It was all so quaint and normal, and no one recognized her; she never once heard someone mention Jacky’s name—Jacky’s case was national news, she still sometimes saw it mentioned, even so many miles away, but it wasn’t as bad, and California had plenty of its own problems.
There was an elementary school down the street from her house in California, and in the afternoons Gloria would slowly walk past the chain-link fence and watch the kids playing, shouting and jumping, fighting. Their screams would give her a headache but she walked by anyway because it reminded her of Jacky, who’d always liked kids so much, especially the little ones in diapers, while she’d never had a knack for it. She still remembers the year Jacky dressed up as Santa Claus and went around to all their diners, carrying bags full of candy and toys for the kids, and how they’d shrieked when they saw him, sometimes in terror, but even then they’d refused to leave. And she’d come along, dressed as Mrs. Claus, but only because Jacky had insisted, and when he got an idea in his head there wasn’t any use arguing with him about it, he would never give in. And later at home, while Jacky was in the shower, singing Christmas carols in his off-key tenor, she’d looked through the handful of Polaroids deemed rejects because all the parents had passed on them, and saw that while Jacky was grinning like a kid in every one of them, her own mouth was screwed up so tight she might’ve been sucking air through a tiny straw. That was the difference between her and Jacky, though. He was always trying to be Mr. Good Times, always wanted to make everyone happy. Not that she didn’t want people to be happy, but she didn’t have the enthusiasm her husband did.
She was in California five weeks when she decided to leave, to move back to Denver. California was too much. Of everything. The stores were always too crowded, the lines at the gas pumps were always too long. The sun was too bright. It was too warm, and what a waste that was, since half her wardrobe was for winter. And there were so many different people everywhere she looked, men booming in Spanish and tiny women with black hair and slanted eyes, and plenty of blacks, more blacks than she’d ever seen in her life, playing basketball on the streets and braiding one another’s hair and laughing, big whooping laughs that bounced off the walls and came back to her ears again. A gay couple lived in the house across the street, two black men who were very kind, but she couldn’t even speak to them about the weather without imagining what they did in bed, how they enjoyed each other, so she tried to be extra careful about when she went out, not wanting to get caught in an extended conversation at the mailbox.