You Can't Catch Me(19)

She looks out the window. Some of the trees have grown up and obscured the view of the hill. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but . . . a couple of years back, when I moved here, she had me over to some Welcome Neighbor thing. I guess it’s a big deal when a new person moves to Wilmington. Anyway, most of the town turned up, but it wasn’t welcoming at all. It was like . . . You know those super friendly people who are kind of rotten underneath?”

“Sure,” I say. “I’ve met people like that.”

More techniques from Liam. Agree with whatever someone says when you’re interrogating them because it creates intimacy.

“They’re horrible,” I add. “Leanne was like that?”

“Yeah. She didn’t want to get to know me, not me me—none of them did. They wanted to know about me, to inspect me. And when I didn’t want to share, well, she turned kind of nasty.”

“What’d she do?” Liam asks in a gentle tone.

“This rumor started . . . God, it sounds so weird to even say it out loud, but it was this stupid thing about how I was a witch, or a Wiccan, running some secret coven up here. I found out about it at the library where I work. The kids would whisper when they saw me, and some of the younger ones even started crying during this reading exercise.” She shrugs. “I was reading Dr. Seuss.”

“You don’t look like a witch,” I say, smiling, trying to defuse the tension. She looks more like a bird. Thin, small, and jittery, as if she might take flight at any moment.

“Why do you think she did it?” Liam asks. He’s leaning forward, reducing the space between them. Another way to create intimacy.

“Who knows. To run me out of town, I guess, once she knew I wasn’t going to fund the new covered bridge over the river.”

“I feel like I’m missing a few pieces,” Liam says.

She blinks slowly. “Because I wouldn’t use the money to do it . . .”

“The money?”

“That I won. In the lottery.” She looks back and forth between our puzzled faces. “She didn’t tell you?”

I answer her, feigning ignorance. “She just said that you lived here and were a bit . . . private.”

“Oh. I assumed she’d told you the whole story. Her side of it, anyway.”

She looks into her water glass, clearly regretting her confidences. She puts it down.

“No, she didn’t say anything,” I say. “But don’t worry. You can trust us.”

“That’s what she said.”

She looks up. Her eyes are brimming with tears.

Liam leaves the couch and sits on the coffee table in front of her. He reaches out and takes her hands in his. She startles but doesn’t pull back.

“Are you talking about Jessica?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I call her Jessica Two,” I say, feeling a stab of jealousy.

She breaks Liam’s gaze to look at me. “Which would make me?”

“Jessica Three. Sorry, I know it’s probably annoying.”

She nods almost imperceptibly.

“Will you tell us how it happened?” Liam asks, bringing her focus back to him.

“Okay.”

Jessie tells us her story with Liam’s gentle prompting.

She was born in rural Illinois, but she was working as a teacher in a suburb outside Chicago when she won a million dollars in the state lottery. It was the one silly thing she did every week, she said, playing the lottery.

“It’s hopeful,” Liam says. “That’s why people play.”

“Is it?”

“It’s about fantasy. Dreaming. What could be if only money wasn’t a factor.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s right. Anyway, then I won.”

“That’s amazing,” I say.

“It wasn’t like I won the Powerball or anything, and with the taxes . . . But it meant that if I was careful, I could leave teaching, which I hated, and take a bit of time to figure out what I wanted to do next. I started looking for a place to buy up here because I’d visited the area once as a child, and it’s so close to the mountains. I always wanted to live in the mountains.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say, though I hate the Adirondacks.

“Yeah. And I got this house for almost nothing.”

“This house?” I say, looking around. The beam work alone must’ve cost a small fortune.

She follows my eyes around the room. The number 2008 is carved into a large beam above the exit to the patio, the year it was built, presumably. “I got it in a divorce. They had to get rid of it quickly. I was in the right place at the right time with a cash offer.”

“So, you moved here?”

“Yes, two years ago.”

“What happened then?” Liam asks.

“Besides being labeled a witch?”

Liam smiles and nods. She has trouble taking her eyes off him. I know what that feels like. “Besides that.”

“There was some press when I won. Local teacher wins the lottery, that sort of stuff. Then the letters started.”

“Letters?” I ask.

“Begging letters. All lottery winners get them, I’ve heard. Can you please donate to this charity? I’m down on my luck. I’m your long-lost cousin. That sort of thing. Mostly, I ignored them.”