Mother May I(88)

I parked on the road across from the main entrance and turned the car off, in spite of Mills’s puzzled glances. I told him we would go home soon. He texted his partner, and Maxwell parked behind me.

We waited. I don’t know what they were doing, but I was watching for Lexie Pine. After a while I turned the car on to crack my windows and let the pleasant air circulate. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Mills and I lived out of Robert’s diaper bag all day. I had protein bars and fresh diapers and formula and bottled water. I downloaded a light, sweet audiobook about misunderstandings at a wedding and played it to pass the time. Mills probably hated it. Around one, Maxwell had pizza and soft drinks delivered right to our cars. It was from some chain, thick with plastic-looking pepperoni and cheap, rubbery cheese. It tasted better than it looked.

Marshall called around two. Just to check on me, he said. I’d been texting with Trey on and off, but I hadn’t told my husband I was hanging around outside the school like a sex offender. I told Marshall, though.

“When I try to leave, or even look away from the building, I panic. It’s ridiculous. There’s an armed ex-marine in the car behind me who’ll be here all day. But apparently I think it’s my magic presence that keeps them safe.”

Mills sat beside me, stoic, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening.

“So don’t drive them tomorrow,” Marshall said. “Let Trey handle it.”

It was simple and pragmatic, and it worked. Tuesday I kissed them good-bye and let them go on to the school with their father and Maxwell. Mills stayed with me.

After that I couldn’t leave the house. Panic trilled up my spine at the very idea of stepping outside, being visible and exposed. I wanted walls around me and my son. I wanted more ex-soldiers, dotted around my yard like points on a compass.

I called the school office to make sure the girls had been checked in to the system at homeroom. I couldn’t let Robert out of my sight. I liked him best bound to me in his sling. I tried not to think about how Coral’s body had so recently been in place of mine, how my son had been tied to her, his flutter-fast heart beating beside hers.

The only thing that got me out the door was the arrival of the mail around eleven. I left Robert asleep in a bouncy chair by Mills and went to get it. I wanted to be the one to intercept Coral’s letter. By then I wasn’t waiting for it so much as I was resigned to it.

It wasn’t there, though. Not yet. Just a stack of junk.

I closed the mailbox, impatience and relief at war in me, and my cell phone rang. I juggled the pile of mail into one arm, then pulled it out of my back jeans pocket. It was Marshall.

He was mostly checking up on me, but he also had updates he’d gleaned from his sources about the ongoing investigation. Coral hadn’t used the detonator she’d had hidden under her afghan. That had been her backup. The explosion had been caused by a chemical timer.

“I told you she wasn’t bluffing,” I said, sitting down on one of the wrought-iron chairs on my front porch. “At the end she kept saying I was out of time, that it was too late to call Trey up. I didn’t understand.”

There was more. He remembered his promise that we would contact Kelly Wilkerson once this was all over. He now thought we shouldn’t. Kelly was no longer a person of interest; we’d told the police that Coral had taken Geoff, though no body had been found. I wondered what explanation her husband would offer. How well would it match Trey’s? He wouldn’t make himself the villain, surely. In his story would he follow Trey and Spence upstairs at all? We agreed there was no need to bother Kelly. She had grief enough, and whatever her husband’s story, I didn’t want to hear it.

Depressing topic, but I wanted to keep talking. Marshall had gotten Robert back. Listening to his voice, even as we discussed these awful things, was the safest I’d felt since we got home. But he needed to call Trey and update him, too. I let him go and went back inside to check on Robert, though I’d scarcely been away from him five minutes.

I went to the kitchen to sort out bills and put the junk mail in recycling, thinking. Coral had mailed her letter from in-state. It should come in the next day or two. I hadn’t told anyone about it. Not Trey, or the police, or Gabrielle, or even Leticia, who insisted that she was my lawyer and I should tell her everything. I hadn’t even told Marshall.

I had a decision to make first. Would I open it or burn it?

No story that Coral would tell could possibly match Trey’s. How could it, considering the source? Coral could know only what Lexie had shared with her. By all accounts Coral Lee Pine had been a strict and difficult parent. In the expurgated-for-Mother version, Lexie would not have confessed that she was the source for the drugs, or about the first threesome with Spence and Bonnie, or that she’d been the one to suggest another one with Trey. Nothing Lexie told her mother would mitigate what those three boys had done.

I hoped that I would burn it. The letter would not contain anything I could believe. Why give Coral’s version any space inside my head? Coral Lee Pine was a poisoner, and she had dripped enough darkness into me already. And yet I could still feel the cord of our strange connection. She’d written to me. I wanted to read it.

All this churning, and still the letter was only paper. Lexie was her mother’s flesh and blood, her will and fury. Until they found Lexie, I could not feel safe or believe that this was truly over. I wanted her caught, even if it meant she exposed my ugly role in Spence’s death. Marshall had told me to lie if that happened. Deny it. Accuse Lexie of protecting her mother’s memory or still trying to lash out at my family. It would be my word against hers, and I was a Cabbat. She was a junkie. My lie held more weight than her truth, but that echoed back against her history and my own in ways that sickened me. Nevertheless I had told him I would do it.