Girl One(30)

“Excuse me,” I called, and she paused, patient in the way of someone who dealt with lost tourists on a regular basis.

At the back of my mind, I knew I could lock my eyes against hers and tug the information right out of her. I wanted it so badly. I let my eyes rest against her unassuming gaze. Her eyes a watery green, ringed in liner—but I realized that I’d be doing this in broad daylight, out in front of everybody, making it real, and I pulled back at the last moment. “Sorry, but do you know where I can find Tonya Bower?”

“You’re in trouble, sweetie?” I nodded, bargaining with myself that it wasn’t exactly a lie. “Don’t you worry,” the woman said. “Cate can help you out.” The woman jerked her chin due north, downhill. “Use the back roads. There’s a sign saying Mill Creek Lane, but it’s hid by a tree branch, so look close. Go down Mill Creek, you’ll come across a yellow house with lots of thingies on the porch.” She made a cryptic fluttering gesture with her hands. “Cate’s usually around this time of day.” The woman leaned in. “Honey, take care of yourself. Whatever is going on, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.” A pointed look at my stomach.



* * *



The Bowers’ house was at the edges of Goulding, and it felt like we were in the middle of the forest, surrounded as we were by trees. The yellow house had a dozen wind chimes dangling from the porch, a glittering, clattering flock of them. The windows were shadowed by a deep-set porch. The lawn was profuse with wildflowers. I knocked on the Bowers’ front door, tense with anticipation, praying someone would answer. The day was stifled with humidity, but here, the noise of the wind chimes was a texture in the air itself, a layer of coolness.

No response. I tried again, and again. “Are we sure they’re home?” Tom asked.

I stepped off the porch, avoiding a flowerpot overrun with the tendrils of a climbing vine, and walked around the side of the house. Flowers and weeds brushed against my shins. A fence surrounded the backyard, wooden slats taller than me, some knocked crooked or slumped into each other. I stopped for a second, listening. A faint thread of noise, like a trapped insect.

“Can you wait here?” I asked Tom. The gate in the fence was locked. Grabbing the top of the slats, where the wood was sun-warmed and weather-softened, I hoisted myself up gracelessly, scrabbling over the top and dropping down to the ground below.

The backyard was beautiful. Just as abundantly overgrown as the front lawn, it was more organized, the chaos corralled into separate sections. Here, delicate pink hellebores, clustered close together: there, a smoke-purple cloud of rhododendron. The air was so perfumed that it nearly made me high. I followed that tinny, buzzing noise I’d heard. As I got closer, the sound resolved into music. A pulsing beat, the thin keen of a voice.

I nearly tripped over her. She knelt in the warm grass, wearing nothing but a pilled and faded bikini bottom, thick black hair parted and hanging down over her chest like a woman from a nineteenth century painting. Her naked back glimmered with sweat as she pulled weeds with a rigorous precision. She looked like she belonged at the Homestead. The only incongruity was the pair of headphones she wore, plastic arcing over her scalp, a big clunky bubble propped on either ear. She murmured along to the music, off-key.

I stood, not sure whether to approach now that I was in her backyard. I thought about touching her shoulder, but as I hesitated, she sat up straighter, the weeds falling from her hands. She reminded me of a deer, that alertness in her posture. Very slowly, she turned her head, saw my knees first—at eye-level with her—and then lifted her gaze, inch by inch, until she found my face. We stared at each other. Catherine, not Tonya. She was young, slightly younger than me.

“Shit.” She rose, yanking the earphones off. They dangled around her neck, a clumsy necklace, before sliding free to the grass. I heard the music more clearly now. AC/DC. “What are you doing here?” Catherine asked. “How did you get back here?” She shoved past me, yanked at the locked gate. “You climbed in here? What’s your problem, Morrow?”

“You know it’s me,” I said, oddly pleased.

Catherine grabbed a mismatched bikini top that had been hanging over a wheelbarrow handle, fastened it on. “You couldn’t have let me know you were coming?” She snatched at a men’s dress shirt in need of ironing, and slipped her arms through. As she buttoned quickly and carelessly, she left smudgy fingerprints on the white.

“I tried calling, Catherine. I couldn’t get through.”

“No, no, just call me Cate. What were you, raised at a cotillion? Calling people by their full names. Jesus. Anyway, how’d you get my number?” She redirected her anger effortlessly.

“Bonnie Clarkson. She said that you and your mother had been harassed by someone a while ago. A stranger. Bonnie said that I should talk to you, because—well—maybe that man was the same one who attacked Bonnie?” I was rambling. There was so much to tell her, and I was racing against the timer of her limited interest. “My mother is missing, and if you’ve been stalked, you might know something about my mother too—or maybe she came to find you.”

Catherine stepped forward now, quickly and gently touched my elbow. “Slow down, okay?” I relaxed. She wore a little pendant, a silvery lizard curved at the end of a leather cord. “That guy turned out to be just a standard asshole. Someone from around here who was pissed I’d helped his girlfriend behind his back. It had nothing to do with Bonnie.”