Real Bad Things(43)
“Oh.” Jane stared out the window. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”
Time collapsed between them, and Georgia Lee was transported to the girl she’d been their last night together. Sad. And sorry. Willing to do anything to stop the world from rushing on without the two of them facing it together. Though Jane looked so far from the girl Georgia Lee had known, there were traces of her in that face. A face she’d spent hours looking at, dreaming of, touching, kissing. A surge of want came over Georgia Lee. Loss. There was so much about this new Jane that Georgia Lee wanted to know, and she despised Warren all over again. Imagine what their lives might have been like if Warren had slipped in and out of the house without caring about what anyone said or did. What might’ve happened with her and Jane?
Jane placed a foot on the ground. “Thank you for dinner. It was good to see you again,” she said before shutting the car door.
Biting down on her emotions, Georgia Lee offered her goodbye and waited for Jane to go inside. Once assured of her absence, she conducted a round of deep meditative breaths to clear her thoughts and steady her after an emotionally assaultive afternoon. Despite her growing uneasiness about where Benjamin’s focus might be headed, it couldn’t push beyond the other thoughts at the head of the line.
She hopped on to Instagram for a quick check, found the photo that had been taken at the pizza place (annoyance thick on Jane’s face next to the overly enthusiastic server’s), and scanned the caption and tags: #LezzieBorden #OMGyall #TrueCrimeCelebrity #TrueCrimeJunkie #MaudMurderMystery #ColdCase #Obsessed #OnlyInArkansas
Comments flooded the photo, littered with knife and black heart and skull emojis. Several women wrote HOT, followed by fire emojis, desires for conjugal visits, and promises to fight for Jane’s release. And #illbeyourbonnie.
Bonnie and Clyde. Those old rumors of an accomplice still swirled, no matter how many times Jane insisted she’d acted alone.
No mention of Georgia Lee.
She paused to collect herself, consider what she was about to do. Erase herself from Jane’s past life. Hush money. Her nerves prickled.
She’d find a way to help Jane. Some other way. It wouldn’t help Jane to be outed as her accomplice.
For now, she had to get the money to Diane. She couldn’t hand it over at Cloverleaf Liquors. Not with all the store cameras. And she didn’t have Diane’s number. After a moment of panic, she settled on hiding the envelope of cash under a broken pot near the trailer hitch and leaving a note on Diane’s car at the liquor store. Despite her better instincts and the fear of theft, she handled the problem and hoped for the best.
Finally, she navigated the car toward home. She didn’t get far before a flood of emotions overwhelmed her. She pulled the car as far into the ditch as possible without getting stuck, put it in park, switched on the hazards, placed her head on the steering wheel, and let all her tears come. She wept until her head ached and the fine membranes in her eyelids swelled and her lips and limbs felt bloated to unnatural proportions.
When she was a teenager, crying had been her reaction to pain, shock, happiness, anger, frustration, and other feelings she couldn’t name and that could not be controlled. She hated crying. Her mother had always told her crying was a good thing, though, like a flood that could erase all the bad. She knew her mother alluded to Noah, and that made Georgia Lee even angrier. The madder she got, the more she cried and the more her mother thought she was being helpful.
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose with a used tissue she found in her purse. She half expected to see blue lights flash from behind. When she clicked on the engine, the AC blasted her face, and a voice in a commercial on the radio screamed. She slammed the buttons on the dashboard and finally found the one that stopped the noise. Eventually, she calmed. Maybe the crying had dehydrated her. Maybe talking about the thing she’d not been able to talk about in years finally released built-up stress and tension. Perhaps that was all she needed to get through this, a good cleansing cry. She checked her mascara in the rearview mirror and tested her ability to smile as if nothing were the matter, as if everything were fine, as if her heart didn’t race at the turn her day had taken.
Jane Mooney.
She held two fingers to her neck, closed her eyes, and waited for her pulse to normalize.
Instead, her heartbeat spiked as a memory clawed to the forefront of her mind.
Thirteen
GEORGIA LEE
Georgia Lee heard Warren before she saw him. The yelling. The footsteps up the stairs.
“Whose car is that?” Warren yelled again. Georgia Lee had gone to the bathroom and watched from the hallway, afraid to step out of the shadow. She hated to be in the same room with Warren.
Jason sat straighter on the couch and turned down the volume on the TV. He’d told Georgia Lee that Warren had once threatened to take an axe to it when he came home and saw they were watching music videos that Angie had taped for Jane. God forbid they have a measure of fun in their lives.
They’d been having a good conversation. Talking about sports. She’d been trying to convince Jason to join the swim team. Get out of the house. For hating it so much, he never seemed to leave, like there was some force field that kept him trapped there. He’d said he wasn’t interested in wearing “tiny shorts.”
Jason pinned his gaze on Warren, startled like prey in those animal shows they sometimes watched.