year of sobriety, but I don’t see how being lonely and miserable helps you stay clean.”
For the past few days, I had fantasized about this moment, but now I felt like things were moving too fast, and I needed to slow them down. Instead of sitting down beside her, I perched myself on the rickety wooden chair at the desk.
“What made you stop using?” I asked.
“Randall did. I used to think I liked bad boys, but there’s a difference between bad and evil. Randall was evil.”
My bottle was empty. “What do you mean?”
“Did you hear about that girl who died last year?”
“Trinity Raye,” I said.
“Randall sold her the heroin that killed her. She was just seventeen years old. Prester kept crying and crying when he told me she’d died. You don’t know him, but he’s wicked softhearted.”
Jamie got up and poured herself another Diet Coke. She brought me a second Bud. I opened this one without hesitating.
“When that girl OD’d,” she said, “I realized it could have been me. I thought about Lucas and Tammi and even Prester, and I wondered what would happen to them if I died. Who would take care of my family? And then I realized that it was a stupid question, because I hadn’t been taking care of them either, not for a long time. I was too busy drinking and drugging, trying to escape from how shitty my life was. Lucas started having these weird nightmares about a white owl, and Tammi seemed to be getting worse and worse. I tried to quit a few times last year, but it didn’t work, and then one day it finally did. I still don’t know what happened. My sponsor, Gloria, thinks it was my Higher Power telling me I’d finally had enough.”
“Maybe she’s right,” I said.
“I’d like to think so.” She put a hand on the back of her neck, pushing up her hair and massaging the skin underneath. “Gloria says I’m stuck on step two. She tells me to ‘let go, and let God,’ but I don’t know. When your parents die in a car crash and your sister gets paralyzed and brain-damaged, and you’re already on welfare with a kid, and now you have to take care of your sister, too, instead of opening your own real estate business like you’d always hoped-it’s hard to feel like there’s a lot of love in the universe. Having your brother get all deformed and accused of murder doesn’t help any, either.”
I felt the familiar urge to help her. “Prester hasn’t been arrested yet. That means the state police are still considering other suspects. You’re sure you don’t know who they met on the Heath?”
“Randall had a lot of enemies.” Her eyes glittered. “Maybe I can talk with Prester and get him to tell me who they met. He’ll confide in me. But not if there’s a cop in that room. Maybe you can help get that deputy out of there so I can have a private conversation.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, but in my imagination I was plotting how I might be able to make it happen.
Her cheeks flushed. “Didn’t you hear what I said before? Prester wouldn’t hurt another person, especially Randall.”
“We don’t know what happened out there,” I said. “Prester himself might not even remember.”
“What do you mean?”
“The symptoms of hypothermia include confusion and altered judgment. It’s possible Prester held Randall’s face in the snow without being aware of what he was doing. In his incoherent state, he might have even thought he was helping him breathe.”
“That’s not what happened.” Her eyes had grown wet again. “I’m sure that’s not what happened. You’re a cop. Can’t you convince them that Prester is innocent?”
“Jamie, it’s not that simple,” I said.
“Can’t you do something? Can’t you do anything?”
“I’m just a game warden.”
The words didn’t come out the way I’d intended; it sounded shameful, as if I were apologizing for my job instead of making a point about where my authority ended. What I’d meant was that I had no business involving myself in another homicide investigation-as both Rivard and the sheriff had reminded me. But any pretense I had entertained of being a responsible officer of the law had disappeared the moment I let this lovely woman into my motel room.
Jamie raised both hands to her face and began to sob. She bent over so that the hair hid her humiliation. I watched her for a while, and then I got up and moved to the bed and sat down beside her. I placed my hand against her spine, resting it between her shoulder blades.
As soon as I did, she wrapped her arms around my chest.
“It’s all right,” I said.
One of her hands found the side of my face. She looked up at me with tears streaking her makeup and her lips parted. I bent my head down and kissed her. Her other hand came up, and she gripped my head between both hands. She opened and closed her lips while she held me with real force, and then she thrust her tongue into my mouth. I could taste the sugar water she’d been drinking.
“Wait,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Yes, it does.”
“I need to be with someone. Everything’s so fucked up, and I’m so lonely. You’re lonely, too. I know you are.”
I nodded my head, unable to say the word.
“You don’t have to be.” She framed my face again with her hands and lifted her mouth to kiss me.
Then her hand worked its way up under my T-shirt and she gripped my chest hair with such force that I stopped kissing her. We stared at each other without speaking and then her hand dropped to my crotch. She undid the zipper of my jeans and pushed me back on the bed.
With one hand, I ran my fingers through her chestnut hair, smelling the musky-sweet perfume rising from the warmth of her neck. I found myself whispering her name, the sound of it adding to my arousal, until I was afraid I might lose all control in her mouth. Before I could let go, she stopped and rose to her feet.
She unbuttoned her jeans and dropped them to the floor. She had a tattoo on her hip-a butterfly with blue wings.
“I don’t have a condom,” I said.
She laughed and went to the bureau and removed a foil packet from inside her purse.
She planned for this to happen, I thought.
She straddled me on the bed. Leaning forward, she guided me inside her. With her turtleneck still on, she began moving back and forth, rocking her hips with a rhythm that suggested she was hearing a sensuous song in her head and was keeping time with the music. We went on like that for a long time, and then she reached over her shoulders and pulled her top off. She unhooked her bra and lifted my hands to her round breasts. She bent forward to mash her lips against mine, her tongue darting, and that was how we both came, the first time.
Hours later, as we lay side by side on the damp sheet, she guided my hand to her hip and used my index finger to trace the outline of her tattoo. “I got this butterfly the day my divorce came through,” she said.
“To celebrate?”
“No, it was more like ‘Screw you, Mitch. Here’s something you’re never going to see.’ It was like a new beginning for me. That’s why I got a butterfly.”
She had other tattoos: a ring of thorns around her ankle, a Chinese symbol at the base of one wrist. She said she’d gotten them to mark important events in her life, which was what Sarah had also said when she surprised me after graduation with a delicate bird-wing design spreading across the small of her back. I had pretended to be pleased, but in secret I was heartbroken because something that I had loved in its natural state now had an unnatural mark on it.
With Jamie, these images were part of who she was. Even though I didn’t find them attractive, her tattoos told stories of personal significance about which I was curious.
“I got this when my folks died.” She pressed a red nail against the Chinese character. “It means ‘wisdom,’ because what happened seemed pretty random, and I was going to need wisdom to handle everything that was coming to me.”
