noticing. Until the night he did.
I went out through the garage, even though I wasn’t going to take my car. They were already chattering, wrapped up in the idea of the dive and each other. I checked my watch. Roux had left a good twenty minutes ago. By now she would have had time to change and leave. She was usually at the gym until after five. Or at least that was when Luca headed home.
I slipped out the garage’s side door, quick and quiet. I had less than an hour to break in and seek out Roux’s real and secret name. There was power in it, or she wouldn’t keep it hidden; I was going to find it.
I would find it even if I had to level the Sprite House to the ground.
14
On my way to Roux’s, I passed Tate’s good friend Lavonda out walking her big collie mix. We exchanged cool hellos. Inside, my stomach felt sour and hot, almost boiling, but long before I saw her, I was walking easy, hands swinging as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I didn’t even have to manufacture a smile for her; I had one ready-made, waiting for whoever needed it. She went right on by, though Lavonda could smell drama or distress from fifty paces. She lived for it, in fact, but she hadn’t smelled it coming off me.
I was getting better and better at this. I had always been good at it. My body had lied for me for years now, making itself regular and relaxed with Char. I’d even taught it to lie to me. The only difference was now I understood what I was doing.
I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
I didn’t see anyone outside when I got to the cul-de-sac, and the red car was gone. I let myself in with Luca’s key. Here was the same ugly den with its sad rental furniture, the Picasso still leaned on the mantel. The laptop sat open on the coffee table, but the screen was dark. Roux had claimed that it held only Luca’s games and schoolwork, but Roux lied. It might be chock-full of her secrets. I didn’t have the password, though, so I ignored it. There was already too much house and too little time. I had to think like Roux, then search smart instead of thorough.
I had seen criminals on television hide things inside toilet tanks, under area rugs, between mattresses and box springs. I’d seen multiple movies where bad guys in cheap hotels unscrewed the vents and hid fat wads of money or drugs or guns behind them. I’d seen that trick so much that my guess was Roux would never use it.
“Think, Amy,” I said aloud.
The house was Char’s, only backward, which meant I knew it intimately. I knew that the door in the foyer that looked like it would open on a coat closet was actually hiding the ill-placed furnace. I knew there was a small hatch up to the attic in the hallway outside the master. But these were places I might choose to hide things. I needed to think like Roux, not me.
I made myself stop and breathe. I had to pick a place and start. If it were me, I would want my secrets near me while I slept. It felt safer. Roux wasn’t all that interested in being safe, but she dripped sex and talked about it as if it were a craft. The bedroom was her power center. I went to it.
It was carpeted in a fuzzy shag so old that the color had become unnameable. Something between sludge and old oatmeal. There was a matchy-matchy pecan bedroom set straight out of the eighties, with large round bulbs on the legs of the dresser and the posts on the queen-size bed. The bed itself was a mess, five or six pillows tossed about, and the sheets frothed up like a heap of meringue. Either Roux was a restless sleeper or she’d had company. I touched the pile of bedding. It had not come with the house. The sheets and the duvet looked and felt like something from a five-star hotel.
I searched the dresser first. I doubted Roux would hide things in her panty drawer like a thirteen-year-old girl with a hot-pink diary, but she might tape something to the undersides of the drawers, or behind them. I checked every hidden surface, especially behind the mirror—a very Roux-like spot. I could imagine her here,