might start to get suspicious. But her choices were limited. She couldn’t rent a car, and she certainly couldn’t get in touch with any of her friends and ask for help. God knows what would happen to them if she did.
Steal a car? Right. She’d seen it in movies, but suspected it was even harder than it looked. That was not even close to an option.
Her only choice was to walk in.
Her suitcase was a problem, though. She needed someplace to stash it. Her best solution was the same hotel they’d stayed in the night before. So it was back to the Motel Monique, where she arranged for a second night in the same room. The clerk didn’t even question her this time. He simply took her money and handed over the key.
Suitcase dropped off, she and Iris headed back out. At a sporting goods store, she picked up a hooded pullover sweatshirt. It was black, and would hide most of her features when the hood was up. She then found a diner, and waited there until dark.
At 9:15 p.m. she called another taxi. This time instead of driving down her street, she had the driver drop her and Iris several blocks away. They walked, avoiding any direct eye contact with the few people they passed. When they reached her parents’ block, Marion slowed, eyeing everything in case there was someone waiting for her.
“No,” she said to herself as they neared the house, not hiding her frustration.
There were a dozen people out front again, and more candles. Another vigil. She wanted to be touched by the gesture, but all she could feel was anger at being denied access to the house yet again.
But when a few of the people began moving off, she realized the impromptu service was ending. She stopped one property away, and turned her head to Iris, to hide her face from those leaving the gathering.
A few of the people were talking as they walked by, and Marion was surprised to find she recognized one of the voices as a friend she hadn’t seen in over a year. She wanted to turn and call out to her, to feel the warmth and sympathy of her friend’s arms around her, but she remained where she was.
Once the steps began to recede, she chanced a look back toward her house. The only things left were a few dying candles. The crowd that had been there was gone.
Marion glanced up and down the street, making sure that there were no stragglers, then she started walking again.
As she got closer, she could hear the TV on in the Blair house. Mr. Blair was the only one who lived there anymore, his wife gone at least four years now. He’d been growing more and more deaf, and the volume of the TV had been getting increasingly louder every time Marion visited home. Her mother had joked that if they were watching the same channel, they could mute their own TV and still hear what was going on.
Marion slowed her pace as she moved in front of the house she had grown up in. When she reached the far corner of the property, she stopped again. She had noted the tape across the front entrance, but that was fine. The key she had worked on both the front and the back doors, and the latter was much preferable.
She glanced around again, saw no one at all, then took a deep breath.
“I need you to be quiet, okay?” she whispered needlessly to Iris. The child was one of the quietest she’d ever known.
Iris lifted her head up for a moment, then lay back against Marion’s shoulder.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Marion turned and walked rapidly down the side of the house to the backyard. She had expected to find more tape across the rear door, but there was none. She slipped the key into the lock and turned it. Five seconds later, she was standing in her mother’s kitchen.
She walked through the first floor, looking at everything but touching nothing. It was like she was in her parents’ house, but she wasn’t. The familiarity was all there. The pictures. The dining table where she used to do her homework. The couch in the living room where she’d caught her sister making out with Peter from down the street. But even surrounded by all these things, it felt empty.
In the living room, she hesitated at the base of the stairs before mounting them.
With a nod of self-confirmation, she climbed up to the second floor.
She didn’t know what she expected to feel, but numbness was a surprise. She looked in her sister’s room first. Someone had taken the time to put the duvet back in place. Not a perfectly made bed, but one that was hard to imagine had recently held her sister’s body.
She moved to her parents’ room. The duvet had been straightened here, too. Marion was about to turn and leave, when she spotted the picture on her mother’s dresser. It was a family photo from a cousin’s wedding two years earlier. It was the last formal photo the four of them had taken together. Marion walked over and leaned in for a closer look.
Her parents, happy and still very much in love. Her sister trying hard not to show the effects of her own deteriorating marriage. And Marion, proud of her parents, proud of her new job at the UN.
She reached out with her free hand and picked up the picture, knowing before she even touched it she wouldn’t be putting it back. It was coming with her.
She carried Iris and the picture back into the hallway and walked over to the room at the front of the house. Her room. Like the others, the door was open wide, it, too, having been checked once the first body had been found.
Like the others, her bed was also made. Only instead of looking like a rush job, someone had taken the time to make it look good. Her mother. And the sheets underneath the duvet would be clean, waiting for Marion to come home for a visit.
She slumped down onto her bed, and placed Iris beside her. The child’s mouth was turned down, and her eyes
