Real Bad Things(88)

“Can I speak to Jason?” she asked.

He put down his pen, stood, and walked toward the door. He hesitated before leaving.

“I’d be okay with that,” he said. “But he told me he didn’t want to see you.”

Before she could process what he said or the weight of her emotions in response, a crashing noise came from down the hallway.

Benjamin raced out of the room. Jane followed.



Staplers and metal files and trays and everything else Diane could get her hands on crashed to the floor after she launched them at walls and people.

“We buried him!” she screamed. There were new lines on Diane’s face, darker circles under her eyes. Fury bubbling under her skin.

The officers looked to Jane as if she could control her. The best thing for the situation? Let her rail. She’d calm eventually. But who could blame her? The body buried under the headstone for Warren Ingram belonged to someone else, a man none of them knew. No one but Diane and Jane and Jason. A man passing through town. A man who had somehow ended up in the dam and gotten dislodged years later. How? No one could confirm that yet. But they knew who he was not, without a doubt, despite Diane’s protestations otherwise.

Other officers ran into the room. Soon, the older guard followed. They circled Diane, who grasped a pair of scissors and held them above her head. They all looked to Jane, as if gauging how they might look if they decided to engage her. Intent to harm a police officer—nay, a precinct—with a deadly weapon. That’d get Diane even more quiet time and a reprieve from the liquor store and the long hours of standing she loved to complain about than an assault charge on Jane. Anger puffed and reddened Diane’s skin.

“You said it was him. You said it was Warren.”

“You should’ve waited for the results before letting us bury that guy,” Jane said to Benjamin above the noise.

Benjamin shook his head, not taking his eyes off Diane. “I tried. Trust me.”

One officer, maybe the chief, moved closer to Diane, hands up in surrender. “We didn’t have reason to believe it was anyone else. Your daughter told us what she’d done and where she’d done it. Now, let’s be calm.”

“You be calm!” Diane pointed the scissors away from the officer and then at Jane. Jane flinched. “She confessed. And so did Georgia Lee.” She left Jason out of her complaints. Why? After learning that Jason had lied to her? And why would he protect Georgia Lee? Why would he tell Diane he had killed Warren?

The officer moved his hands, palms down as if pressing them to the floor. As if that would calm her. “We don’t have any—”

“They confessed!” Her breath came out her nose in gaspy spurts. Her words screeched into the room and bounced off the ceiling. No one moved, but no one seemed all that worried that she’d do something stupid, like stab them. Maybe they had dealt with her before. “They should burn. The two of them. Those fucking cunts.”

Jane refrained from reaching for Benjamin’s hand, an odd impulse. Maybe because that’s what she’d done with Jason when Diane railed and got violent, even though she couldn’t protect him from all that he had to see and hear from Diane.

She felt Benjamin’s hand on her shoulder. A wave of emotion washed over her.

“It’s almost over,” he said.

She clamped down on her insides screaming at her. Diane didn’t look well. Sound well. Her sentences slurred and stuttered beyond comprehension. Jane’s heart couldn’t help but reach out to her despite her deep urge to hate her, her desire to see her arrested. Biology, she supposed. Everyone talked about the bond of a mother’s love. But that wasn’t true. It was harder the other way around. Harder to separate and let go of the first person who knew her; the first to hurt her. She knew now that Jason could handle it far more than she could. He’d learned how to separate his feelings into something he could manage. He’d learned how to separate Good Mom from Bad Mom.

Finally, Diane threw the scissors onto the floor—and very nearly stabbed her foot in the process.

Officers rushed toward her, almost in a tackle formation. Smart.

Diane didn’t struggle.

A collective sigh went around the room, and all those tensed shoulders fell.

“Fuck you,” Diane said to the room, head raised high. Four guards held her and walked her toward the back of the station.

As she passed Benjamin and Jane, she spit at her. “Fuck you too.”

Jane wiped the spit from her face.

“Are you okay?” Benjamin asked.

She nodded. He said something about needing to do something or go somewhere and asked her not to leave, but she had to leave. She had to get out of there. Away from Diane. And Jason. She looked around her, not sure what to do or where to go when she heard the officers laughing.

They’d talk and laugh about this for days. Years. The feral woman who came at an officer with a pair of scissors. Jane hated that. Maybe she hated herself more for still thinking such a thing, especially after Diane had tried to stab her and if what Jane accused Diane of turned out to be true. In the comedown of her sedatives, she wasn’t even sure. It all sounded ludicrous now.

Maybe one day she’d be okay with the idea that her shit with Diane was complicated, as the kids said.

The officer who’d been on the other side of Diane’s scissors looked familiar. Too familiar. Clarity washed over her. He’d come out to the house the night Warren—or Diane, as it turned out—had hit her after someone had called the cops about a domestic disturbance. Now she could see: he’d made chief.