Confessions on the 7:45(84)

Pop was obviously losing his mind. The distance she’d achieved from him allowed her to see what he was more clearly. A con at best. Maybe something worse. Maybe her abductor. A killer. Stella’s murder—it remained unsolved all these years later. And where had Gracie come from? Who was she? Where was her mother?

When Pearl brought the car to a stop, she saw the girl sitting on the porch, a slouched rag doll against the railing. She was curled up over her knees, fetal. Pearl felt a dump of dread; she sat with it. Listening to the ticking engine of her car, she thought, I should go. Far from here. But she didn’t. Because she knew it wasn’t what he wanted her to do.

She exited and walked to Gracie, footfalls crunching on the drive.

“What’s happened?” she asked. Her voice rang back harsh; she sounded like Stella, who never had any patience for weakness. Pull yourself together, Pearl.

But the girl just shook her head, expression blank. Pearl moved in closer and saw that there was a dark skein of blood down the front of her shirt, on her hands, under her nails. Those pale blue eyes were staring at something a million miles away.

“Are you hurt?” Pearl asked. Her voice calm, softer now. It seemed to disappear in the heaviness of the air.

Another slow shake of her mousy head.

The door stood ajar, light casting a yellow rectangle onto the boards. Silence. The night held its chilly breath. Pearl climbed the steps to the porch, the wood creaking beneath her weight. Slowly. She paused at the top, trying to quiet her beating heart. Then she pushed inside.

There were two bodies, lying side by side, blood pooling. An unpleasant odor, something metallic and sharp in her nose. She took a step back, time freezing solid. Pop, faceup—a hole in his head, in his chest. He lay on his back, palms up. Eyes calm, mouth frozen in surprise, as if he died trying to believe what was happening.

Was it another nightmare? Would she wake up? Down, down the turret that bored into the earth, a shadow behind her. But no. The details were too sharp, the odors too strong.

“Pop,” she whispered. But he just stared back at her, knowing.

There was no justice in the system for a con. When the tables turned, when the mark got wise, when the bill for your deeds came due, there was no one to call. There was an order to the universe, and you could only run your scam for so long.

Beside him, a woman lay prone, the back of her head a messy pulp. Even so, Pearl recognized her. Pearl felt bile rise in her throat but she forced it back. Something about the thickness of the woman’s shoulders, her style of dress—tacky top and too-tight jeans. The dyed red of her hair. Bridget. The woman who’d rattled Pop in Phoenix.

Never leave them with nothing left to lose. Pop hadn’t taken his own advice. He’d hurt her and she’d hunted him down.

She stared, a siren in her head. Then, tears. They seemed to spring from her eyes of their own volition, not propelled by any feeling. Inside, she was quiet as a tomb.

Footsteps behind her. Soft, shuffling.

“I killed her,” said Gracie. It was just a whisper.

Pearl surveyed the scene. The gun Bridget clearly used to kill Pop lay near her hand, some kind of semiautomatic, she thought—but Pearl didn’t know anything about guns. Also on the ground, covered with blood and gore, a heavy jade bookend Pearl recognized from a set in the study. A Fu Lion, something Pop had taken from the bookstore. Stella had picked them up at an estate sale; Pearl remembered her elation at the find. Supposedly they protected their owners from harm. Another one of life’s little ironies.

“I hit her from behind,” Gracie said, voice more solid. “She just—crumbled. But I was too late. She’d already shot him. He died—so fast. We were just cooking dinner.”

Pearl could smell onions on the air.

She couldn’t find her voice, so she turned to look at the girl. Gracie was thinner, her features more angular. A kind of common prettiness had started to emerge. Her eyes were steely, revealing a strength that Pearl wouldn’t have imagined from their few encounters where she’d largely been weeping, puking, hunched into a fetal position.

“What do we do?” the girl asked. She gulped back a sob.

We? thought Pearl.

Yes, we, Pop would have said. She’s your sister. She’s all you have now.

The shock of it started to lift. There was a problem here to be solved and she was good at that. Her brain started to work again—calculate, strategize. A solution architect.

The property was isolated; chances were that no one heard the gunfire. Pop was a ghost. He barely existed. The only people who would ever come looking for him were already there. All good things.

She knelt down, hesitated a moment. Careful of the pooling blood, Pearl then started looking on the woman’s body for her phone, finding it in the back pocket of her jeans. A smartphone. She pressed the home button, quickly determined that it wasn’t password-protected.

Bridget. When Pop first found her, she’d been the perfect mark. No family, few friends. An isolated loner, desperate for connection.

“Where’s her car?” asked Pearl. She rose and walked to the door, checking what she could see of the long, isolated drive. Maybe she’d passed it, not seeing it in the dark. But no. There was no car other than her own. “How did she get here?”

Gracie lifted slim shoulders in a helpless shrug.

Pearl checked for a ride-sharing app on the phone and didn’t find one. That would be a wrinkle, if there was a record of Bridget coming here. Pearl would go through her phone, her email, her social media feeds. Then she’d use the phone to create a digital trail away from the house.