could be looking at up to ten years. And I understand her girl is only just thirteen. Isn’t that the most terrible thing?”
“It is,” Jude said. “Just about.”
“Would you believe all of this happened—Jessica Price’s car accident, dead dog, photos—on the same day your daddy died in Louisiana?”
Again Jude did not reply—silence felt safer.
Nan went on, “Following her lawyer’s advice, Jessica Price has been exercising her legal right to remain silent ever since her arrest. Which makes sense for her. And is also a lucky break for whoever else was there. You know —with the dog.”
Jude held the receiver to his ear. Nan was silent for so long he began to wonder if they’d been cut off.
At last, just to find out if she was still on the line, he said, “That all?”
“One other thing,” Nan said. Her tone was perfectly bland. “A carpenter doing work down the street said he saw a suspicious pair in a black car lurking around earlier in the day. He said the driver was the spitting image of the lead singer of Metallica.”
Jude had to laugh.
56
On the second weekend of November, the Dodge Charger pulled out of a churchyard on a red clay dirt road in Georgia, cans rattling from the back. Bammy stuck her fingers in her mouth and blew rude whistles.
57
One fall they went to Fiji. The fall after, they visited Greece. Next October they went to Hawaii, spent ten hours a day on a beach of crushed black sand. Naples, the year following, was even better. They went for a week and stayed for a month.
In the autumn of their fifth anniversary, they didn’t go anywhere. Jude had bought puppies and didn’t want to leave them. One day, when it was chilly and wet, Jude walked with the new dogs down the driveway to collect the mail. As he was tugging the envelopes out of the box, just beyond the front gate, a pale pickup blasted by on the highway, throwing cold spray at his back, and when he turned to watch it go, he saw Anna staring at him from across the road. He felt a sharp twinge in the chest, which quickly abated, leaving him panting.
She pushed a yellow strand of hair back from her eyes, and he saw then that she was shorter, more athletically built than Anna, just a girl, eighteen at best. She lifted one hand in a tentative wave. He gestured for her to cross the road.
“Hi, Mr. Coyne,” she said.
“Reese, isn’t it?” he said.
She nodded. She didn’t have a hat, and her hair was wet. Her denim jacket was soaked through. The puppies leaped at her, and she twisted away from them, laughing.
“Jimmy,” Jude said. “Robert. Get down. Sorry. They’re an uncouth bunch, and I haven’t taught them their manners yet. Will you come in?” She was shivering just slightly. “You’re getting drenched. You’ll catch your death.”
“Is that catching?” Reese asked.
“Yeah,” Jude said. “There’s a wicked case going around. Sooner or later everyone gets it.”
He led her back to the house and into the darkened kitchen. He was just asking her how she’d made her way out to his place when Marybeth called down from the staircase and asked who was there.
“Reese Price,” Jude said back. “From Testament. In Florida. Jessica Price’s girl?”
For a moment there was no sound from the top of the stairs. Then Marybeth padded down the steps, stopped close to the bottom. Jude found the lights by the door, flipped them on.
In the sudden snap of brightness that followed, Marybeth and Reese regarded each other without speaking. Marybeth’s face was composed, hard to read. Her eyes searched. Reese looked from Marybeth’s face, to her neck, to the silvery white crescent of scar tissue around her throat. Reese pulled her arms out of the sleeves of her coat and hugged herself beneath it. Water dripped off her and puddled around her feet.
“Jesus Christ, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Go and get her a towel.”
Jude fetched a towel from the downstairs bathroom. When he returned to the kitchen with it, the kettle was on the stove and Reese was sitting at the center island, telling Marybeth about the Russian exchange students who had given her a ride from New York City and who kept talking about their visit to the Entire Steak Buildink.
Marybeth made her hot cocoa and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich while Jude sat with Reese at the counter. Marybeth was relaxed and sisterly and laughed easily at Reese’s stories, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to play host to a girl who had shot off a piece of her husband’s hand.
The women did most of the talking. Reese was on her way to Buffalo, where she was going to meet up with friends and see 50 Cent and Eminem. Afterward they were traveling on to Niagara. One of the friends had put money down on an old houseboat. They were going to live in it, half a dozen of them. The boat needed work. They were planning to fix it up and sell it. Reese was in charge of painting it. She had a really cool idea for a mural she wanted to paint on the side. She had already done sketches. She took a sketchbook from her backpack and showed them some of her work. Her illustrations were unpracticed but eye-catching, pictures of nude ladies and eyeless old men and guitars, arranged in complicated interlocking patterns. If they couldn’t sell the boat, they were going to start a business in it, either pizza or tattoos. Reese knew a lot about tattoos and had practiced on herself. She lifted her shirt to show them a tattoo of a pale, slender snake making a circle around her bellybutton, eating its own tail.
Jude interrupted to ask her how she was getting to Buffalo. She said she ran out of bus money back at Penn Station and figured she’d hitch the rest of the way.
“Do you know it’s three hundred miles?” he asked.
Reese stared at him, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You look at a map and this state doesn’t seem so gosh-darn big. Are you sure it’s three hundred miles?”
Marybeth took her empty plate and set it in the sink. “Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone in your family? You can use our phone.”
“No, ma’am.”
Marybeth smiled a little at this, and Jude wondered if anyone had ever called her “ma’am” before.
“What about your mother?” Marybeth asked.
“She’s in jail. I hope she doesn’t ever get out,” Reese said, and she looked into her cocoa. She began to play with a long yellow strand of her hair, curling it around and around her finger, a thing Jude had seen Anna do a thousand times. She said, “I don’t even like to think about her. I’d rather pretend she was dead or something. I wouldn’t wish her on anyone. She’s a curse, is what she is. If I thought someday I was going to be a mother like her, I’d have myself sterilized right now.”
When she finished her cocoa, Jude put on a rain slicker and told Reese to come on, he would take her to the bus station.
For a while they rode without speaking, the radio off, no sound but the rain tapping on the glass and the Charger’s wipers beating back and forth. He looked over at her once and saw she had the seat cranked back and her eyes closed. She had taken off her denim jacket and spread it over herself like a blanket. He believed she was sleeping.
But in a while she opened one eye and squinted at him. “You really cared about Aunt Anna, didn’t you?”
He nodded. The wipers went
Reese said, “There’s things my momma did she shouldn’t have done. Some things I’d give my left arm to forget. Sometimes I think my Aunt Anna found out about some of what my momma was doing—my momma and old Craddock, her stepfather—and that’s why she killed herself. Because she couldn’t live anymore with what she knew, but she couldn’t talk about it either. I know she was already real unhappy. I think maybe some bad stuff happened to her, too, when she was little. Some of the same stuff happened to me.” She was looking at him directly now.
