Girl One(56)

Quickly adjusting to this unexpected luck, I moved over to the door. Everything here was gray, greasy, stuck behind layers and layers of windows and doors, a sturdy labyrinth of defenses. As I waited to be admitted into the next circle of this strange afterlife, I shook my shoulders back, swallowed the taste of sour anxiety that was drying out my mouth, and prepared to meet Ricky Peters.

It had been Isabelle’s idea. She was already proving useful: she’d brought along a wallet stuffed with money, replenishing our dwindling funds. Even more valuable, she’d suggested that I pose as her to gain access to the prison. Patricia had apparently visited Ricky over the years, and she’d included Isabelle on the approved visitors list just in case her daughter ever wanted to meet the man. (“I didn’t,” she’d said, “he has creepy eyes.”)

I had to know. The question of whether Ricky had killed Bellanger was the center around which my biggest questions rotated. Who was following us; where my mother had gone; what, exactly, my mother had done. Who she really was.

The plastic chair was punitively uncomfortable. A thick plastic window in front of me was framed by small lips of brick on either side, a comical illusion of privacy. To my left, a woman in a red raincoat, even though the day was sunny: to my right, an older man who looked like he’d been pulled from the dryer still damp. They were probably wife-of, father-of.

The prisoners began shuffling in, wearing baggy jumpsuits. A disturbingly peppy shade of orange. I kept scanning each face. I’d only seen Ricky in photographs. I tried to age him mentally. Gray the hair, add crow’s-feet. I was so busy searching that it was a surprise when somebody was sitting down on the other side of the glass, picking up the black phone receiver, clearing his throat. The push of his Adam’s apple: he was speaking. I couldn’t hear anything.

Fascinated by him, struck by the weirdness of the moment, I couldn’t even make myself pick up the phone on my side of the partition. A clutter of laughter, tears, low voices had risen around us. Ricky Peters was nobody special. I could’ve passed him on the street without looking twice. He was that bland. He must’ve blended right into the stream of prisoners’ faces passing me by. Once I examined him closely through the fingerprint-smudged window, I could see traces of the man from the photos. Weak chin, the wide-set eyes. The mole on one side of his neck. Above all else: the look of contempt on his face, the way it radiated outward, crawled over me.

Snapping out of it, I reached for the phone. The plastic was gritty and slippery at once. His voice was waiting for me. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a visitor,” he said. A clipped voice, almost mannerly, but with something sticky lurking underneath.

“I’m Isabelle Bishop,” I said. “Patricia’s girl.”

“Isabelle,” he repeated. His eyes drifted freely up and down the length of my body, assessing, and I resisted the urge to cover myself up, as if my clothes had suddenly melted away. “Your mother used to come and see me sometimes. A nice enough lady. She mostly wanted to reminisce about Margaret Morrow.”

“I’m here about Margaret too. She’s missing.”

“Is that right, Josephine?” Ricky asked, and winked. “I don’t know anything about your mother.”

I swallowed hard, embarrassed by the weariness in his voice, like he was bored of humoring a young child. Of course he knew who I was. This man who’d devoted himself to our undoing. Such a powerful force that even after Bellanger was dead and Ricky was behind bars, their rivalry—the push between good and evil, God and science—had shaped my whole life and my place in the world.

“The peculiar thing about seeing you girls,” Ricky said, “is how much you resemble your mothers at the same age. I could swear you were Margaret, coming to deliver me that look she always gave me.” He pointed, his face breaking open with a brief delight that turned him younger. “Exactly that one.”

My mother had been resurrected on my face just a second ago and I hadn’t even known.

“It does a man good, as a matter of fact, seeing the same faces reappearing like this. It makes me feel twenty years younger to look at you.” His eyes moved to my breasts.

This time, I did grab for the front of my T-shirt, instinctively trying to cover myself. “You’ve aged more than twenty years, yourself,” I snapped back.

Ricky gave a small nod, amused.

“Did you send somebody after my mother?” I asked, knowing I was losing my cool, not fighting it. “Did you tell somebody to set that fire? Do you know where she is?”

“Such a chatterbox. Any other questions, while you’re at it? The meaning of the universe, perhaps?”

“Just those three.”

“The answer to all three is the same thing: no.”

I leaned forward until the damp man and the raincoated woman on either side of me were hidden from view. Ricky leaned in too; without the glass we might’ve looked like we were about to kiss. “Patricia Bishop told me that you shouldn’t be in here,” I said, so low that nobody could overhear. “She said that you weren’t the one to start the fire.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “So she came around.”

“You were found guilty.”

“That I was,” he agreed. “I’m sure it’s been easier on you all, knowing that I’m locked up in here. Everyone’s happy. Of course, sometimes I worry for you girls.”