“Are you hurt?” Pearl asked. Her voice calm, softer now. It seemed to disappear in the heaviness of the air.
Another slow shake of her mousy head.
The door stood ajar, light casting a yellow rectangle onto the boards. Silence. The night held its chilly breath. Pearl climbed the steps to the porch, the wood creaking beneath her weight. Slowly. She paused at the top, trying to quiet her beating heart. Then she pushed inside.
There were two bodies, lying side by side, blood pooling. An unpleasant odor, something metallic and sharp in her nose. She took a step back, time freezing solid. Pop, faceup—a hole in his head, in his chest. He lay on his back, palms up. Eyes calm, mouth frozen in surprise, as if he died trying to believe what was happening.
Was it another nightmare? Would she wake up? Down, down the turret that bored into the earth, a shadow behind her. But no. The details were too sharp, the odors too strong.
“Pop,” she whispered. But he just stared back at her, knowing.
There was no justice in the system for a con. When the tables turned, when the mark got wise, when the bill for your deeds came due, there was no one to call. There was an order to the universe, and you could only run your scam for so long.
Beside him, a woman lay prone, the back of her head a messy pulp. Even so, Pearl recognized her. Pearl felt bile rise in her throat but she forced it back. Something about the thickness of the woman’s shoulders, her style of dress—tacky top and too-tight jeans. The dyed red of her hair. Bridget. The woman who’d rattled Pop in Phoenix.
Never leave them with nothing left to lose. Pop hadn’t taken his own advice. He’d hurt her and she’d hunted him down.
She stared, a siren in her head. Then, tears. They seemed to spring from her eyes of their own volition, not propelled by any feeling. Inside, she was quiet as a tomb.
Footsteps behind her. Soft, shuffling.
“I killed her,” said Gracie. It was just a whisper.
Pearl surveyed the scene. The gun Bridget clearly used to kill Pop lay near her hand, some kind of semiautomatic, she thought—but Pearl didn’t know anything about guns. Also on the ground, covered with blood and gore, a heavy jade bookend Pearl recognized from a set in the study. A Fu Lion, something Pop had taken from the bookstore. Stella had picked them up at an estate sale; Pearl remembered her elation at the find. Supposedly they protected their owners from harm. Another one of life’s little ironies.
“I hit her from behind,” Gracie said, voice more solid. “She just—crumbled. But I was too late. She’d already shot him. He died—so fast. We were just cooking dinner.”
Pearl could smell onions on the air.
She couldn’t find her voice, so she turned to look at the girl. Gracie was thinner, her features more angular. A kind of common prettiness had started to emerge. Her eyes were steely, revealing a strength that Pearl wouldn’t have imagined from their few encounters where she’d largely been weeping, puking, hunched into a fetal position.
“What do we do?” the girl asked. She gulped back a sob.
We? thought Pearl.
Yes, we, Pop would have said. She’s your sister. She’s all you have now.
The shock of it started to lift. There was a problem here to be solved and she was good at that. Her brain started to work again—calculate, strategize. A solution architect.
The property was isolated; chances were that no one heard the gunfire. Pop was a ghost. He barely existed. The only people who would ever come looking for him were already there. All good things.
She knelt down, hesitated a moment. Careful of the pooling blood, Pearl then started looking on the woman’s body for her phone, finding it in the back pocket of her jeans. A smartphone. She pressed the home button, quickly determined that it wasn’t password-protected.
Bridget. When Pop first found her, she’d been the perfect mark. No family, few friends. An isolated loner, desperate for connection.
“Where’s her car?” asked Pearl. She rose and walked to the door, checking what she could see of the long, isolated drive. Maybe she’d passed it, not seeing it in the dark. But no. There was no car other than her own. “How did she get here?”
Gracie lifted slim shoulders in a helpless shrug.
Pearl checked for a ride-sharing app on the phone and didn’t find one. That would be a wrinkle, if there was a record of Bridget coming here. Pearl would go through her phone, her email, her social media feeds. Then she’d use the phone to create a digital trail away from the house.
“Her car,” said Pearl. “It must be nearby. We have to find it.”
She looked up at Gracie, who was staring at her, eyes wide.
“And,” she went on, “we have to get rid of the bodies.”
“Bodies,” Gracie echoed. She got a little glassy, slipping away again.
“Gracie,” said Pearl, her voice sharp. The sound of her name seemed to wake the girl up. She stood a little taller, looking at Pearl as if awaiting instruction. Pearl went on.
“I’m going to need you to plug in and help me handle this. Pop wouldn’t want us to curl up and die here. He’d want us to work together.”
Something passed between them, a knowing. Pearl had no idea what Pop had done to Gracie, or how he came to take her and why. But he was right, they were sisters. Sisters of circumstance, bound now by this ugly moment in time, by Pop and whatever he had been to each of them, for each of them.
Gracie looked down at the bodies, and then back to Pearl. This was the moment. Was she going to pass out? Collapse? Start screaming? Run? This was the moment when Gracie would decide who she was. For Pearl, the moment had been in Pecos, years earlier when she became Anne. She chose Pop; she chose the life, even if she didn’t understand then what the consequences would be later. Because of all the things Pearl was, most of all she was a survivor. She chose the path that kept her fighting another day.
But what about Gracie, this mousy little girl that Pop had chosen to be her sister. At her core, what was she?
Seconds ticked by and Gracie looked around. The confusion dropped from her face and her jaw seemed to settle, eyes clear. In the moment, Pearl saw in Gracie what Pop must have seen. She was one of them.
“Okay,” Gracie said. She looked square at Pearl. “What do we need to do?”
THIRTY-FIVE
Cora
“Why didn’t you ever tell us about this, Mom?” asked Selena. Her eyes were dark with recrimination. “Don’t you think we had a right to know?”
Cora felt a lash of anger. Selena just wasn’t getting it. Her younger daughter was angry at Cora for a hundred things, had been since her teens. Cora was too strict, didn’t understand the “modern” world, worried too much about nothing. They were at loggerheads from age thirteen until she left for college. On the other hand, Selena had worshipped her father; his fall from grace was brutal for Selena. Marisol was always a momma’s girl, tender and attached. Even now, they were closer than Cora was with Selena. Not that she loved her younger any less. It was just a chemistry thing.
“No,” said Cora, sharper than she intended. “I didn’t think you had a right to know. It was your father’s responsibility to tell you what he’d done. If you’re going to recriminate anyone, let it be him.”