Real Bad Things(62)
She calmly removed her glasses and returned the phone to Billie. “At least give a woman some warning before you expose her to alternative lifestyles.” The girls didn’t say anything and tried not to look at the phone again. She stiffened her posture. “Is that all?”
Billie sucked in a breath. “Let’s Talk About Maud said that’s you in them photos.”
A frenzy of lies and excuses clamored for release.
“My sister’s gay,” Cassidy offered. Billie smacked her arm.
How could she lie? Again? Without another word, she walked to the back office, grabbed her purse, and headed to her car as quickly as she could without breaking into a full run.
As soon as she exited the pharmacy, reporters shoved near her and lights flashed in her face. There weren’t many. But three of them seemed like a lot, even if one only used the flash on her iPhone.
A reporter she didn’t recognize shoved a mic in her face. “Is it true?”
Her nerves crackled. She’d expected something bad, but not this.
“Is it true you’re the companion of Jane Mooney?” They couldn’t prove the girl in the photo was her.
“Are you in contact with her?”
As much as she wanted to run to her car and fly out of the parking lot, muscle memory—her old friend—kicked in. She’d handled outrage before.
She paused, told her body to stop shaking like a fool, faced the reporters, and put on her best smile. “My goodness. Give a girl some room to breathe.” She smoothed her smock and cursed that she’d forgotten to remove it. Maybe it’d give her that folksy look people sometimes liked in politicians. She was working class, like them. Not that she cared anymore.
They waited, mics held out, the lot of them vibrating with the frenetic energy that only small-town scandal could create. That special sauce of insularity that allowed people to say they knew so-and-so and they were this-close to the facts and the details. The glow of something bigger than them finally shining a light into their sad little lives. Whoever got up on a pedestal was sure to be knocked down. Only a matter of time, and here she was, up to bat.
“What’s this about?” She couldn’t lie. But she couldn’t admit to being the other girl from the photos either.
“Can you identify this woman?” James from KMSM—one of those men who called his wife Mother and didn’t seem to believe in birth control, not even the rhythm method—held a printout. Georgia Lee had never liked him. All he focused on was gossip, nothing of substance. Feeding the Let’s Talk About Maud cretins. He squirmed and tried not to look too close at what he shoved in her direction. She would never understand how someone in his profession could consume photos of crime scenes or show up at the house of someone who had died and decomposed on the toilet or from an overdose and be fine but become squeamish at a couple of girls kissing. The world made no sense sometimes. Defiance—something she’d not expected to feel—built in her. He’d probably never experienced in his whole life what Georgia Lee had experienced in one minute with Jane. Probably groused about two girls like the ones he saw in the photos with his buddies or his work colleagues but did deplorable things while staring at the pictures when alone. By God, if he’d come all this way to accuse her of something, then he darn well better accuse her of something specific.
She took the printout. “Which underage girl are you inquiring about?” At the phrase, James blanched. Good. For that’s what they had been.
His finger hovered in the white photo border, presumably trying to find a spot that didn’t alarm him now that she’d reminded him the girls had been minors.
He settled on the top of the first image, right outside the border, above Georgia Lee’s head. “Her.”
Georgia Lee tilted her head to the side. “The headless girl?”
He took great pains to keep his focus on Georgia Lee’s face, not her breasts or the swell of breast in the photo near Jane’s mouth and whether or not the two clothed breasts were a positive match.
“We know the identity of the other one,” he said.
“And who would that be?” If he wanted to draw this out, then she was going to make him squirm.
The unidentified reporter, a young woman Georgia Lee didn’t know, thrust the mic toward her. Maybe the high school? The U of A? Perhaps journalism wasn’t dead yet. “Were you friends with Jane Mooney, the dead man’s daughter?”
“Stepdaughter. I’d expect you to get your facts correct. According to everything that’s been published thus far, she was not his daughter.” The student journalist rolled her eyes. She told them she knew Jane from high school, as did the other students when Jane was thrust into the spotlight. Nothing but the truth.
Katrina from the Maud Register raised her pen. “You didn’t answer the question. Is that you?”
“Let me see,” she said and pulled on her reading glasses to examine the pictures once more.
Georgia Lee might as well have been the Headless Girl, some sideshow attraction for the citizens of Maud to laugh at and marvel at how she’d lost her head after an accident and had been kept alive, but not by science. By her own ingenuity and grit. That was what.
“I suppose it could be if you looked hard enough and wanted it to be me so you could get your story.”
The flashes nearly blinded her. She lifted a hand to block them. My God. She didn’t know which admission might be worse: being in the photos with Jane or being an accomplice to murder.