“Girls—”
“I was seven and you were crying and all nervous!”
“Girls, for heaven’s sake,” I say. “Both of you were nervous before you got your ears pierced. Both of you were brave.”
Friday night in Elm Grove. It’s less than an hour’s drive from my crappy little studio apartment in Delavan. With all the double shifts I’ve pulled, I was owed an early day on Friday. I thought about staying home, but Macy wanted to get her ears pierced and wanted me there.
I pull Adam’s car onto Sunflower Drive and head toward the house.
A car, a sedan, is parked on the driveway. I slow the car enough to get a look at the license plate. A state logo, half of the words circling the top, the other half circling the bottom: Wisconsin Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General I keep driving.
“Um, Vicky, this is our house?”
“Hey, y’know what, I forgot, your daddy had a meeting,” I say, driving away from the house. “Let’s just go get dinner on our own and bring something home for him.”
“You want me to text him?” Mariah asks.
“No, no. I just forgot. He has a meeting. Don’t bother him.”
I grip the steering wheel and count to five.
I could run. I could. Right now, I could run. Rambo could get me a new identity. But I have the girls with me.
This isn’t happening.
101
Simon
Friday night. I am trapped in my house. Waiting, in case they come with a search warrant. Afraid to make a false move. Wondering about Vicky. Waiting some more. Flinching at every sound, jumping at every shadow. Wandering around my house with little sleep, trying to occupy myself with a blog piece on a new exigent-circumstances decision from an appeals court in Texas.
A car door closes nearby. I sit still at my desk and listen.
Footsteps coming up my walk. The porch light goes on, activated by the motion sensor.
The doorbell doesn’t ring. No knock on the door.
Who’s out there?
I go downstairs to the front door and open it. Standing there is Sergeant Jane Burke, expressionless, a bag slung over her shoulder.
I open the screen door. “Little late for a search warrant, isn’t it?”
“I’m not here to search your place,” she says, angling past me, walking through the foyer.
“I don’t believe I invited you in, Jane.”
“I’m not a vampire.”
“No, you’re a cop. Who doesn’t have the right to enter my house without consent or a warrant.”
She walks past the living room into my family room and plops down. “Simon, you can take your Fourth Amendment and shove it up your ass.”
I join her in the family room but don’t sit down. “Can I quote you on that?”
She takes a load off and reaches into the bag she’s carrying. “I brought you something,” she says.
Out of her bag she pulls a bottle of champagne and two plastic champagne flutes, tinted red, and places them on the coffee table.
The champagne is Laurent-Perrier, “ultra brut.” I never knew what that meant. Is that different than kinda, sorta brut? Is that one step up from really brut?
“What are we celebrating?” I ask.
She makes a face. “A bottle of that exact brand of champagne, with two cheap red plastic flutes just like those, were found at your father’s crime scene.”
“I don’t have the exact brand committed to memory,” I say, “but yes, I remember that he was hit over the head with—”
“Oh, Simon, Simon, Simon.” She shakes her head. “Tell me. What kind of a person keeps an empty bottle of champagne for years upon years, waiting for the right moment to exact revenge?”
“I don’t know, Jane—”
“A champagne bottle that your father and Lauren shared. Probably pissed you off but good. And the champagne flutes, too. You kept them for years, Simon, waiting for the right moment to go down to St. Louis to hit your father over the head with it before stabbing him.”
“The right time?” I ask. “The week of my final exams was that ‘right time’ I’d been waiting for?”
She wags a finger at me. “Had a nice talk with Lauren’s father, Al Lemoyne,” she says. “Lauren did come back, once, while she was living in Paris. For two weeks, to celebrate her parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary.”
“How nice,” I say.
“Yeah, how nice. Lauren’s parents were married May 18, 1975. So their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary was May 18, 2010.”