Can you imagine?”
Yes. I could. I did.
“Where would they get gems?” I asked. “I mean, judging from the house, those two women are barely getting by.”
“Don’t be fooled,” Doug said, starting to ring up the items in front of him. “It’s all a cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“I think it’s the middle boy, Tyler,” Doug said. “I don’t know how, but I think they’re hiding the money he wins in Vegas so he doesn’t have to pay taxes.”
Cheryl shook her head. “I think it’s the mother, what’s her name—”
“Vanessa?” I asked, perhaps a bit too eagerly, but Cheryl didn’t seem to notice. “But where is she? They never talk about her.”
“Oh, God, no.” Doug laughed. “No one talks about Vanessa. Ever. Savannah about slapped my head off a few years ago when I asked her.”
I paused a moment, grateful that Savannah had ignored me rather than slapped my head off.
“I told you that was no way to get her to go out with you.” Cheryl tsked her tongue and I got a little insight into that bitch comment. A beautiful woman like Savannah who wouldn’t date the riffraff—what else would the riffraff do but call her names?
Something detonated in my chest, sympathy and anger that there was no one around to defend these women against people bent on believing the worst of them.
I could do it.
But I wasn’t here to defend them, not any more than I had. I was here for answers and so far, Cheryl and Doug had been more help than all three O’Neill women combined.
“So where is Vanessa?” I asked.
“No one’s seen her in years,” Doug said.
“Oh,” Cheryl laughed. “Just because she ain’t been seen doesn’t mean she’s not around. Trouble, that one. Worse than all the others put together. Her and that husband of hers.”
My head spun. “Husband?”
“Richard someone or other. He and Vanessa got divorced long before the kids ended up in Bonne Terre.”
Richard Bonaive? Jesus, was it that simple?
There was a thump behind them, the old man in the red shirt reappeared and Cheryl vanished like a ghost.
“That will be two hundred twelve dollars and thirty-two cents,” Doug said. I blinked, stunned to see all of my stuff in bags and Doug smiling at me as if he hadn’t been saying the foulest things about Savannah moments ago.
“Hold on there, Doug. Add two bags of ready-mix,” the old man said, then turned to me. “You’ll have to go around back to get them.”
“No problem,” I said and took out my wallet.
“I got it from here, Doug, thanks,” the man said and Doug walked off. He said he was going to check on fishing rods, but the safe bet was Doug finding mommy and doing what they did best.
I put my money on the counter but the old guy ignored it, looking hard into my eyes.
“Don’t listen to my family,” he said. “Those O’Neill women are good people. Don’t deserve what’s been done to them.”
“What’s been done to them?”
“They been left, boy. Time and time again, they been left and that will make a person do some crazy things.”
The night had a texture to it, a lush throbbing weight that reminded me that there were a lot of living things out in all that blackness. Living things like snakes. Alligators. Big bugs that I wasn’t real fond of. And the only thing between me and them was the thin metal screen of the sleeping porch.
It hadn’t seemed quite as bad the past few nights, but I’d been falling asleep so hard and so deep it was as if I’d died.
Tonight, my head was spinning, trying to separate malicious gossip and rumor from what might possibly be the truth.
Vanessa and Richard married?
The gems, here?
Christ, it would make my life a whole lot easier. And, frankly, it explained why the kids were always breaking into the back courtyard. Why the greenhouse was destroyed and why suddenly someone was bold enough to try to get into the house.
Why they wanted a security camera in their garden.
Gems, thousands of dollars in a wall safe.
People did worse for less.
Like you, I thought, guilt eating at the edges of my mind.
I should have said something to Doug, a little something to keep his mouth shut about Savannah. But I hadn’t. I’d walked away and now I was going to use Doug’s gossip against them.
I’m worse than Doug.
I turned on the lamp. The white sheets on the narrow cot glowed, and other than some gardening pots in the corner of the room where