No One Will Miss Her(23)

“Why’s that?”

Johnson blinked, looking surprised, and Bird repeated the question. “Why’s that, I said? Your buddy was married to her for ten years. You never wanted to get to know her? Or you just didn’t like her?”

“I mean . . .” Johnson said, and trailed off. “I guess I never thought about the why. There wasn’t any one reason. Things with Lizzie, it was just, you know. It was how it was.”

Bird turned away. He’d heard that one a few times today: It was how it was. Why did the town still find Earl Ouellette faintly suspicious even when he’d lived here for decades, owned a business, married a local woman, fathered a child who’d grown up alongside their own? It was how it was. What made Lizzie such a unique combination of punching bag and pariah, a girl who everyone casually loathed from a distance without ever stopping to ask why? It was how it was. Copper Falls was a place where your role was assigned early and permanently; once people had decided who you were, they’d simply never allow you to be anyone else. Your label was what it was, for better or for worse.

For Lizzie, it had been worse. Bird had no doubt about that, even as he ran up against the community’s tendency toward close-mouthedness combined with the broader taboo against speaking ill of the dead. People talked around it, allowing the ugliness to squat unsaid in between the lines.

Poor Earl. Lizzie was always a challenge. He tried to keep her in line. Maybe if he’d been around more, but . . . well, she took after her mother. God rest her soul. Both of their souls. Billie was always in trouble, too. Always wild, with something to prove. She was little older than Lizzie when Earl came to town. If the Cleaves boy had just been a bit more careful, if you know what I mean, maybe none of this would have happened . . .

Bird grimaced, letting his gaze drift around the messy bedroom. The Cleaves boy. That was the other thing: Dwayne Cleaves was thirty years old and the prime suspect in the murder of his wife, but people couldn’t quite stop talking about him like he was some kind of hometown hero whose life had been unfairly derailed. So much promise, such a shame. He was going to play major-league baseball. Or maybe it was minor-league. A scholarship? Well, whatever. Point is, he had a shine on him. He could’ve made something of himself. He gave it all up. And for what? Some folks say she was never even pregnant.

The silence stretched on a beat too long, and Myles Johnson cleared his throat.

“I think they had a room upstairs, like an office,” he said. “You check that out yet?”

“Not yet. Lead the way.”

The men bumped against each other as they reached the back of the house and then turned to climb the narrow stairs beneath the sloping ceiling. It was warmer on the second floor, and brighter. Bird stepped onto the landing and nodded as he looked around: there was a sense of intention in this room that echoed the carefully decorated lake house. This upstairs space would have been where Lizzie spent her time, then, while Dwayne sprawled out with his beer and television on the story below. A low, narrow sofa was set against one wall, a potted plant in a stand beside it. There was a shelf at the other end filled with books, yellowed paperbacks mostly, and opposite the sofa was a small desk. The cheap laptop which had been sitting on top of it was missing, dutifully removed by the cops who’d visited the house that morning. The machine wasn’t password-protected and had already been examined and declared uninteresting, or at least unhelpful. Lizzie used it to manage the booking calendar at the lake house—the names of everyone who’d rented the place that summer was supposed to land in Bird’s inbox any minute—and to visit a handful of websites. The usual stuff, nothing scandalous: Facebook, Netflix, Pinterest. She’d been most active on the latter, curating little collections of “pins,” bookmarks, and images; Bird had never heard of the site, but whoever had reviewed the laptop (a woman, he guessed) called the collections “inspiration boards.” Lizzie kept them in half a dozen categories under various headings: interior design, makeup, landscape, style, crafts, and one eclectic board called “dreams.” Bird had scrolled that last one expecting to see some sort of frou-frou fairy-tale tableau: Cinderella ballgowns, diamond earrings, billion-dollar mansions, the French Riviera. But Lizzie Ouellette’s collection of “dreams” was banal, if not outright boring. A softly lit cabin in a snowy forest. A martini in a sweating crystal glass on a dark wood bar. Someone’s feet in a pair of sturdy leather boots. A set of fingernails painted cherry red. A woman standing with her back to the camera, silhouetted against a peachy sunset. Bird, recalling the images, felt a twinge of pity mixed with annoyance. You’d think someone who lived in such a small place, lived such a small life, would dare to dream a little bigger.

He turned back to Johnson.

“You said you didn’t spend much time in the house. I assume you didn’t come up here?”

Johnson looked around, shrugging. “Nope. First time I’ve seen it. It’s . . . nice.”

“Reminds me of the lake house,” Bird said, and the other man nodded.

“Yeah. Like, put together.” He shrugged again. “You asked why she didn’t hang out with us, right? But she had stuff like this; she had her own thing going on.”

“The way I heard it, she would’ve had to find something else to do. Isn’t that right? I heard that people gave Dwayne a hard time about marrying her. I heard that folks would invite him out, but not her.”