Just Like Home(25)

“Sleep tight,” James murmured. “And Vera?”

Vera did not look at him. She didn’t want that can-opener feeling of his eyes on hers, his curiosity and his hunger biting into her. “What?”

His voice was horribly gentle. “If you notice anything out of the ordinary tonight, I hope you’ll tell me. You could be an integral part of my work here. You could really help me understand this place, if you just open your mind a little.”

She didn’t move until he was gone.

Once the screen door that led into the backyard banged shut behind him, Vera walked into the kitchen and held a clean dishrag under warm water for a few seconds. She stared out the back window as she ran the water, tracking Duvall across the yard. He left the door to the garden shed ajar.

Vera held her fingers under the tap to feel the warmth flowing over them. She wanted him to shut that garden shed door, but he didn’t. She’d just have to hope he stayed inside.

After much too long, she returned to her mother’s bedside and gently wiped her lips, her nose, her temples. Daphne didn’t stir.

“Maybe you won’t have to see it, Daphne,” she murmured. “James’s collection, I mean. The paintings. When they come out, maybe you won’t have to know.” She warmed as she said it, as she finally let herself give in to the dark fury that had been twisting between her teeth the whole evening. “Maybe you’ll be dead by then.”

She might as well have been talking to herself—Daphne was still and silent, and there was no reason to think she’d heard a word Vera had said. Still, a hot flush of wicked satisfaction burned through Vera, as sudden and forbidden as the first time she’d ever slipped her hand between her legs and felt a shock of recognition.

She’d never, ever spoken to her mother the way she’d been speaking to her tonight. It felt terrible. It felt wonderful.

Leaving her mother for the night, Vera went into her bedroom and sat in the center of her bed, her legs crossed under her. The as-yet-unfixed metal bedframe rattled. She could feel the pull of a familiar temptation. She was about to fall into a dangerous internet spiral, one where she’d be reading everything fresh and new that she could find about her father. About the man he had been. The things he had done.

And the things that he had said—to the police, to the court. To the man who’d written that awful book about their family.

Maybe, if she was very lucky, the things that he had said about his daughter. His daughter, who he had liked better than anyone else. His daughter, who he missed.

His daughter, who he just might have forgiven.

Vera pulled the too-long chain that hung around her neck until the key at the end of it slipped from inside her shirt. It was skin-warm and worn smooth from years and years of worry. She did not hold it or rub it for luck or put it in her mouth, the way she did when she was fourteen and alone in this bedroom with no hope of hearing a knock on the door or footsteps in the hall.

Having it out was enough.

She pulled her laptop open and typed in the first two letters of a search term that autofilled with predictive text. She could tell herself that she was getting better about looking her father up, but the algorithm knew the three words she typed in the most. It knew them by heart.

Francis Crowder Murders





CHAPTER NINE


Vera is eleven-and-a-quarter years old, with newly short hair that is just starting to darken from cornsilk to chestnut and an end-of-summer tan and legs that keep growing out from under her, and the police are at the door.

The police car is parked at the curb. The lights are not flashing.

Vera is holding her big math textbook. It’s large and heavy. She doesn’t like putting it into her backpack while she’s walking home from school, because the weight of it will make the straps hurt her shoulders, so she usually hugs it close to her chest. Now, taking in the scene on her front porch, she clutches it tight so that the edges of it dig into the soft skin of her inner arms.

Vera knows from watching television that there’s one very obvious reason for the police to be at her house. She peels her fingers away from the edge of her book, bracing it against her wrist to keep it from slipping out of her grasp.

She snaps her fingers four times fast and she hopes that nothing bad can happen to her now.

Vera stands at the edge of the lawn, looking between the police car and the policemen on her front porch. There are two of them. One is short and fat and white; the other one is tall and thin and Black. Their uniforms are dark blue and the weight of the fabric looks too heavy for the early-September heat. Each one is holding his regulation cap in his hands.

Vera’s mother is not holding a hat. She’s holding a dishtowel, and she’s twisting it between her fists, winding it into a tight creaking rope of fabric. From the end of the driveway, Vera can’t quite hear their conversation, but she knows that the dishtowel is bad. It means that her mother’s very worried or very angry or both.

Usually, when Vera’s mother has the dishtowel in her fists like that, Vera finds a reason to go directly to her bedroom and stay there until morning.

The lawn is brown from the too-dry summer that has just ended. It crunches under her shoes as she walks up to the front door. She thinks the noise of the grass underfoot is probably loud enough, but she pauses at the bottom of the porch steps just in case. She doesn’t want to get yelled at in front of the policemen. Her mother has told her several times not to sneak, as if it’s Vera’s fault that nobody pays attention to the sounds of her life.