What We Saw(34)

Relax.

You’re just stopping by to say hi to Stacey.

To check on her.

To see how she is.

I tell myself this as if it weren’t crazy, as if I did this every day. As if I have ever done this even once since seventh grade.

There’s a covered porch that stretches along the front of Stacey’s place, and a flag on a pole is bracketed to one of the upright supports that holds up the roof. It’s not an American flag, but one of those seasonal flags. It’s got spring flowers and a bunny on it. Hopeful. It won’t be Easter for another month or so, but it did feel like spring last weekend. There are lights shining through the curtains in the front windows, and I can hear someone talking. As I reach the door I make out the sounds of a competition reality show.

A plaque next to the lit doorbell button reads LORD, BLESS THIS MESS! and I smile. Whether it’s the Lord or Stacey’s mom, it’s working. This is the nicest place in the neighborhood.

Pressing the glowing orange button yields a classic ding-dong. I hear new voices over the sound of a pop star telling a contestant that she’s “got what it takes!” then everything goes quiet.

The door swings open a few inches, and LeeAnne Stallard peers out through the glass and screen of the closed storm door. Her hair is wet, and her tired eyes become bare flint the moment she sees me.

“Yes?”

“Hi!” I say it too brightly, like I’m selling something. “It’s Kate. Kate Weston?”

LeeAnne nods her head, slowly. “I know who you are, Kate.”

I blink at her, trapped in the high beams of her derision. She waits, daring me to speak again. I swallow hard.

“Is . . . Stacey . . . home?”

A short, sarcastic laugh escapes her lips. “Where else would she be?”

The children on bikes I saw earlier go clattering by behind me, shrieking and laughing. The Doberman next door sounds the alarm.

LeeAnne doesn’t move. She doesn’t open the screen door.

“Just wanted to come by and . . . check on her,” I say.

“Oh, did you?” It’s almost a sneer. I search for more words, LeeAnne’s steely eyes making my insides twist and squirm. Is she enjoying this?

“Do you think I could see her?”

“Stacey isn’t really taking visitors right now,” she says.

I nod, too quickly, too agreeably. Oh! Oh yes. Yes, of course. How silly of me. “Well, if she ever needs to . . .” My voice is shaking now, and I can’t finish the sentence.

“Needs to what?” LeeAnne is determined to make this painful.

“If she ever needs to . . . talk or anything, I just wanted her to know that I’m . . . around.”

LeeAnne shakes her head as her gaze sweeps up toward the ceiling of her trailer. Dear god, deliver us from these idiots. Then she swings the door closed with a thump. I hear the click of a deadbolt, the scratch of a chain.

Standing on the porch, afraid to move, I wish I could beam myself back to my bedroom. It feels as if moving even an inch on this redwood deck would open up a deep cavern beneath the Coral Creek Mobile Village and swallow us whole, pressing us into fossils, the wreckage of this moment left petrified for a future generation of Iowans to puzzle over. Then, I hear Stacey’s voice muffled through the wafer-thin walls of the trailer.

“Why did you even open the door?”

“I got rid of her.”

“She’s one of them, Mom.” Stacey sounds frantic, a thunderhead just before cloudburst. My feet move on their own, trying to outrun a storm. I race down the stairs as Stacey starts to sob. “She’s one of them.”

There are tears in my own eyes now, as I struggle to open the latch on the front gate. A light flashes on across the hard-packed gravel drive, and I can see the lever more clearly for a moment. I swing the gate open and closed before I hear a familiar voice.

“Are you a friend of the victim? Do you have time for a few questions?”

Sloane Keating strides toward me, the brightness I’d assumed was a neighbor’s motion sensor hovers behind her, a floodlight mounted to a camera, the glare hiding the face of the man operating it as both of them quickly close the distance between us.

My first instinct is to freeze. On TV or across a crowded gymnasium, Sloane Keating seems small, mostly hair and shoulder pads—somehow inconsequential.

In person, she is different altogether.

She is taller than I realized, and confident. She powers across the gravel in high heels without the slightest wobble, her blond hair free and flowing behind. She seems to float toward me surrounded by harsh white light, a trailer park Galadriel, her piercing eyes discerning the truth. There is something physical about the force of her presence, and I now understand a term I often see on those Entertainment! blogs with the pink logos.

This is star power.

I’m terrified she’ll pin me against Mrs. Stallard’s white plastic pickets if I don’t go now, but as I make a lateral move toward Dad’s truck, Sloane grunts a throaty “three o’clock” to her cameraman. Both of them pivot, and somehow he’s out in front of me now, Sloane coming in from behind, pelting me with questions:

Are you a friend of the victim’s?

Did you attend the party on Saturday night?

I curse myself for wearing my bright blue Buccaneer zip-up. I pull the sweatshirt tightly around me, my fists jammed in the pockets, my arms wrapping around my stomach. A fleece straitjacket somehow fits the crazed feeling of panic knotted in my chest, but offers no protection from the rapid fire of Sloane’s inquisition. The words LADY BUCCS emblazoned over the canary yellow soccer ball on my back burn like a brand. Sloane may be stabbing in the dark here, but I’m clearly a good guess.