Real Bad Things(47)
These days, the mound was protected by a barbed-wire fence due to conservation efforts and given the more appropriate name Caddo Mound. Without the shortcut, it took thirty minutes longer for Jane to arrive by foot from Diane’s trailer.
Inside Family Fun, the frenetic dings and robotic voices of arcade games clashed with the classic rock that blasted through the overhead speakers. Donkey Kong, Ms. PAC-MAN, Space Invaders—the same old games she’d fixed when kids came crying to her about eaten tokens. The carpet had been replaced. Used to be light red. Now it was straight up dark red to hide the stains. And a new addition had been placed smack in the middle of the room: a bar. The girl behind the counter barely looked old enough to serve alcohol.
“Can I help you?” she asked with a look that said she’d rather do anything but.
“Yeah. I’m looking for Angie Pham. Is she still around?”
Without losing a beat, the girl turned away and yelled, “Mom!”
Jane hadn’t expected a fruitful visit, not this easily or quickly. Not after searching for Angie online and finding nothing. Within minutes of entering Family Fun, Angie—allegedly—stood in front of her. The girl at the counter had called her Mom. But she looked nothing like Angie. Weird. But then no one recognized Jane either.
“Hey, how are you?” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’m fine,” the woman said, confused. “Who are you?”
“Jane.” She paused. “Angie?”
“No. I’m Kim.” The woman said it with a tight smile, clearly bothered by the interruption. Jane could tell where the girl inherited her disposition. “Angie’s my sister. We look nothing alike.”
“Oh Jesus. Sorry. I just assumed when she called you Mom that you were . . .” No point in continuing her embarrassment or apologies. The girl who had called out for her mom snickered and walked off with a dishrag and an empty glass.
Jane and Angie used to watch Kim pull on black-and-pink striped tights, adjust her neon accessories from Claire’s, and yank her bangs sky high to set them with a full can’s worth of aerosol hairspray after her shift in preparation for a night out in Maud Proper with her friends. The mall, movies, cruising, the works. Kim’s life was a Saturday night special at the drive-in to them. To Jane, she’d also been the desirable older woman, though she was only three years older.
“It’s Jane. I used to work here. I was friends with Angie.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. All her friends look the same.” Kim smiled curtly, but Jane could tell she had no idea who she was and only smiled to extract the thing Jane wanted so she could go back to what she’d been doing. She tried not to be disappointed that Kim didn’t remember her even though she and Angie had been nearly inseparable before Georgia Lee came along.
“Is she around?”
“No. But she usually drops by after her spin class.”
Angie had hated PE, absolutely abhorred it. They’d both gotten changed in the showers to avoid undressing in public—especially after they got shipped to Maud Proper their senior year and were surrounded by all those awful mean girls.
“Do you happen to know when that might be?”
Kim laughed in an exasperated way that sank Jane’s self-esteem. “I don’t keep up with her schedule.” She smiled again. “I’m sorry. I’m really busy right now. You’re welcome to buy a drink and wait.” Buy a drink.
Jane bought a cheap beer and a pretzel with cheese and navigated outside to a bench in the cordoned-off miniature golf area. A kid screamed about another kid cheating while she contemplated her conversations with Jason and then Georgia Lee and whether Benjamin was planning to arrest her anytime soon. Seemed to her he’d want to get it over with sooner rather than later, but that might just be the influence of crime shows.
She didn’t know what evidence they had, if suspicion and a confession and a dead body were enough, though it seemed like enough. Could they tell that a man had been murdered on the riverbank instead of getting busted up going through a dam? Could they still find fingerprints after all these years? Could they convince a jury without a reasonable doubt that they had been a bunch of scared, dumbass kids who overreacted and didn’t want to get caught?
She ripped off a curve of her pretzel. In happier days, she’d held out the other half to Angie. They’d dip their pretzel pieces into the melted cheese, hold them aloft, and tap them to toast. She wished Angie sat next to her now. She could use a friend.
But she’d lost that after what happened. Angie avoided her in the hallways at school. She didn’t answer the door. She wouldn’t come to the phone. When Jane stood in front of her, trying to force her to talk, she stared past her as if Jane were a ghost. Angie already hated Georgia Lee, and then Georgia Lee had kicked the hornet’s nest.
The warm dough and cheese melted onto Jane’s tongue, and the pretzel salt cracked between her teeth. Now, despite all that had gone wrong in the last few days, she found herself fully in Maud’s embrace, remembering good times that had come before the bad. The long walks with Angie to work. Long rides on the school bus. Saturday nights watching horror movies. Flipping through records at the mall.
She mopped the sides of the paper cheese container with her finger. Wallowing in the past felt productive in a therapeutic way. She ordered a second pretzel and proceeded to sweat through her shirt and wait.