path charted that I could not imagine, but I knew it started with Boyce and led to me incriminating myself. She’d needed that tape. A child witness, twenty-five years later, was not enough for policemen or lawyers, and therefore it was not enough to scare me.
I’d stayed calm, unshocked, and then our talk about Luca had derailed her off that path. She hadn’t been able to get to me, so she had upped the stakes, pretending to be Lolly. That had been a risk. A gamble. She hadn’t done the research.
Maybe she was bad at her job, but I didn’t think so. If she were, I would have seen her before now. She’d saved me in her pocket for a rainy day, which meant that up until now she’d had a lot of success, a lot of sunshine. Now here she was, in this house that smelled musty and foul, and I knew it must be raining hard indeed.
“I don’t think you are fine either way,” I told her. “Otherwise you would have done the research. About Lolly. You were in a hurry, so you skipped steps and came at me before you were completely ready. Look at this place. Not your usual digs, I’d guess. You need me. You need my money as much as I need you to keep your mouth shut.”
Her face had gone to stone. It told me nothing. I gave her the same face back. The quiet game again, but this time I decided I would age out and die, right here on her floor, before I lost. I would not lose, and this knowledge was a wild, red pleasure. The silence stretched, and there was a clock somewhere in the room, I realized. It had been ticking this whole time, but now I was aware of the sound, each second being marked as it slipped past us. In the end she broke it.
“What the fuck are you?” she asked. She tilted her head to the side with birdlike curiosity, maybe even reptilian. My heart sped up, just a little, as if it had decided to race the ticktock sound. “I came armed for small-town-wifey-with-a-past. I know the species. Not a hard target. But you? You’re like me. You’re all folded up and secret down inside, like you’re made of fucking origami.”
The door banged open. I jumped, but she didn’t. Luca came in, toting five or six plastic bags from Publix, one-handed.
“They didn’t have cashew milk, so I got almond?” Luca said, and then he saw me. “Oh, hey.”
“Almond is fine,” Roux said, and now her smile was genuine. She loved her kid.
“Hey, Luca,” I said. My voice was shaking. Just a little, but I could hear it. I hoped she couldn’t. I bent over the stroller, fixing Oliver’s blanket, though he’d only push that exact same foot out again within a minute.
“Whatcha doing here, Ms. Whey?” he asked.
I had no answer, but Roux stepped in, smooth, her voice bright and cheery. “Working out your scuba lessons.”
That was interesting. Did Luca not know what his mom did for a living?
Luca brightened, and he looked back and forth between us, “For real?” Then a faint shadow of worry crossed his face. He turned to me, “Is it expensive?”
So he knew about the money trouble. He was a bright kid, and I doubted this house looked like their real home, wherever that was. I wondered if he knew how his mother planned to recoup their losses. I didn’t think so. He’d have to be a better player than his mother, to eat my blondies and chat about my pictures, all the while knowing I was one of her hapless victims.
“You let me worry about that,” Roux told him. “Go put the groceries away and let us work out a schedule for your lessons.”
“Cool,” he said. “That’s so freakin’ awesome.” He disappeared into the kitchen. We could both hear him in there, banging around in her carb-free fridge.
I went to the stroller. “I need to think,” I told her, soft, insistent.
“No you don’t,” she said.
“I do,” I said. Exactly how broke were they? She had the Picasso sketch, and she could sell the car. That would get her, what? Maybe fifty, sixty thousand? That was a lot of cash, but maybe not to her. And not next to a quarter mil. I thought I had some wiggle room. A little. So I pushed it. “I’m not impulsive, Roux. You give me time or you go to the cops