“Oh, Tally,” I said helplessly, my eyes misting over.
If Mother had followed her first instinct, Tally would still be Olivia and we would have grown up together like sisters. Life would have been so different for her. No baby at fifteen. College. A settled life instead of gypsying from town to town. Different for me, too, maybe. She would have been there for both of us when Mother was dying. And she was just enough older that she might have kept me between the ditches instead of taking it off road, straight through the underbrush.
We faced each other across that wide, wide river of might-have-beens and she gave me a wry smile.
“If wishes were horses,” I sighed.
“Yeah,” she said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you a beer, okay?”
At her trailer, she pulled a couple of long necks from the refrigerator. “Want a glass?”
I shook my head and we went back outside. Her trailer and Polly’s were at right angles with only a few feet between the back ends. Several lawn chairs were there between the two doors, which were about fifteen feet apart, and a charcoal grill stood off to the side. We could hear the murmur of girlish voices inside the other trailer, and Tally went over, stuck her head inside, and called, “You guys all right?”
I gathered that Kay was tearful still, but no longer hysterical.
“Where’s Sam?” Tally asked.
The girl who’d been working the Guesser earlier in the evening—Eve, daughter of the spurned cook—came to the doorway. “He was so zonked that we thought maybe it was better not to wake him up. Just let him sleep. He doesn’t need to see Polly like that anyhow.”
She stepped out onto the grass and gave me a neutral nod as Tally introduced us. She had long dark hair that reached below her waist. At the Guesser earlier, she’d had it tied back. Now it fell like a dark lustrous veil across her shoulders and down her back.
“Candy and Tasha and Kay are in there really freaking,” she told Tally. “First Braz and now Polly. What’s happening here, Tal? Somebody picking us off one by one?”
“Of course not,” Tally said briskly, pulling keys from her pocket. “Look, why don’t you take the girls and go find a grocery store? Get some fresh fruits and salad greens?”
Eve frowned.
“They were saying earlier that they wanted to do laundry. Maybe you can find them a Laundromat?”
“Okay,” said Eve. “I’ve got laundry, too. Might as well be doing that as sitting in there scaring ourselves to death.”
She reached for the keys just as Deputy Mayleen Richards rounded the front of the trailer.
“Mrs. Ames? Can you tell me which trailer was Polly Viscardi’s?”
“This one,” Eve told her, pointing to the other trailer.
“And you’re one of her roommates?”
“Yes, but we already told those other officers we didn’t see anything.”
The other three young women had come to the door by now. They ranged in age from late teens to very early twenties. All four of them wore sneakers, shorts, and T-shirts. With six people sharing one trailer, there couldn’t be much space for extra clothes.
Richards took down their names, but when she asked to see Ms. Viscardi’s quarters, they tried to talk her out of it.
“Her boyfriend’s in there asleep,” said Tasha protectively. She was a tall coltish girl, all arms and legs with a long face and small dark eyes. “He was driving all day and half of last night. He doesn’t even know Polly’s dead yet. Do you have to wake him right now?”
“It’ll have to be done sooner or later,” the deputy told her, “but I can start with you-all. Which of you saw Ms. Viscardi last?”
It turned out that they couldn’t be sure. Certainly not today.
“She was already up and out by the time I woke up around nine-thirty,” said Candy, who was probably the oldest, but also the smallest, maybe five-two with blond braids pinned up across the top of her head. “We thought she was still asleep, didn’t we?”
The other girls nodded.
“Her door was closed,” said Kay, the baby of the group, “but when I peeked in around noon, the room was empty.”
“Had the bed been slept in?” Richards asked.
“We couldn’t tell,” said Candy. “Polly never made the bed except when she put fresh sheets on. But she didn’t make coffee, either. Usually the first person up starts it. The pot was still sitting on the drain board when I got up.
“I didn’t see her on the lot today,” Tally said.
“What about last night, then?” said Richards.
“She was here.” Tally gestured to a nearby lawn chair. “Sam had gone to pick up some plush and—”
“Plush?”
“Stuffed toys for prizes. We drew a bigger crowd this weekend than we expected so Sam drove down to Florida
