Nice Girls(60)

My stomach suddenly lurched.

“What are you talking about? What happened?” I asked loudly.

The old woman blinked.

“Haven’t you followed the news?” she asked.



I was jittery when I got home. Dad was already asleep in his armchair. A late-night comedy show blasted on the TV. In my room, I beelined for the laptop. The woman had mentioned a press conference from earlier in the afternoon.

I quickly found the livestream. Someone had recorded the video footage of it.

The livestream showed Leticia Jackson standing outside of her house. She was surrounded by a crowd of somber people, reporters, and cameras. In one arm, she held baby Demetrius, who was bundled up in snow pants, a jacket, and a knit hat. Little dots of cell phone cameras glowed around them.

I unmuted the video.

“—gone for months now,” said Leticia. Her voice was so soft that I had to raise the volume. “DeMaria died in horrible pain. She didn’t deserve any of it. If I could’ve helped her, I would have in a heartbeat. But God knows I can’t bring her back. I cannot change what happened. And yet . . . I feel angry.”

Heads nodded around her. Leticia took a breath, staring at the camera. A tear streaked down her cheek.

“I feel angry that my child was taken away from me by a monster. I feel angry that DeMaria will never see her baby grow up. Never see him go to college, never be at his wedding.” Demetrius sucked on his thumb, staring off camera. “I have so much anger for her, it’s scary. But you know what I’m really angry about?”

The crowd was so quiet that I could hear the wind in the background.

“I’m angry about all the lies I’ve been fed.”

Her eyes flashed at the camera, dark and bitter. I felt a shiver run through me, as if she had just seen me through the screen, hiding in the safety of my room. A coward.

“I’ve got reporters lying to me so they can get a good story,” said Leticia. I flinched as if she’d just slapped me. “I’ve got others who didn’t care. My story wasn’t interesting enough, so they dropped DeMaria like trash. She was only mentioned in the news a few times. No one ever talked about her again.

“Then I’ve got the police lying to me that they care about the case. That they’re ‘working on it.’ It’s taken them months to work on it. But no progress. But when Olivia Willand goes missing, we’ve got the damn national news, cable news covering her. We’ve got search parties and the FBI. When Olivia is found dead, not even a week goes by before they make an arrest on her case.”

Leticia paused, her head shaking slowly. She reminded me of Mr. Obermueller. She knew the impact of her words, and she was aware that people were paying attention.

“Olivia Willand died like my daughter did—cut apart like an animal. I wondered if it was the same killer. And I can’t help but think that her death could have been prevented. If someone had paid attention to DeMaria’s case, they could have caught her killer before he went after someone else. I blame this on the complete negligence of the Liberty Lake Police Department. Another girl had to die before they cared.

“And imagine my surprise when I learned about Olivia Willand’s killer. He was the same monster who knocked up my daughter.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

A flurry of images began to flash in my mind: the morning after the party, the bottle of pills, the lake, the cream-colored Bible, the nude photo, the pale arms in the sand, me as I rocked myself hoarse in the apartment.

The camera now zoomed into Demetrius’s face. He was unbothered by the news and the people around him. His big eyes were focused on his grandmother.

I had seen him before in person. I never saw the resemblance, but there was one feature that I recognized now: he had his father’s dimples.

If I had noticed it earlier, could I have saved Olivia in time?

“DeMaria got pregnant about two years ago,” continued Leticia, her voice bitter. “She’d just broken up with a boyfriend named Charles. But at a party in town, she met a handsome college football player. DeMaria showed me his picture and everything. Wouldn’t stop gushing about him. ‘He’s so handsome, Mama. Like a movie star.’ But when she told him she was pregnant, that boy said he had to finish school first. He said he’d finish his degree in Wisconsin and come back. ‘But he’s going to be a good father, Mama.’”

Leticia shook her head, as if she was reliving that conversation all over again.

“DeMaria was like fire. But when it came to this football player, she melted at his damn feet. And I knew his type,” said Leticia darkly. “He was not interested in a pretty little girl from our part of town. Dwayne Turner was not interested in taking care of DeMaria or the baby. Hell, he never even went to Wisconsin. He was living in this very same town while she was pregnant.

“After she gave birth, DeMaria asked for Dwayne to add himself to their son’s birth certificate. And you know what Dwayne did? He told her to leave him alone. He told her to focus on her ex-boyfriend instead. And he said that Demetrius wasn’t his.”

The camera angled itself down toward the baby. Demetrius was looking around silently.

I wanted the dark to swallow me whole. I had focused on the wrong things: his charming smile at Goodhue Groceries; the customers and the boss who’d loved him; the scenic apartment next to the lake.