“That’s fine. I just have some questions. My name is—”
“Yeah, I know.” She sighed at the phone, then set it aside. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I barely knew Lizzie.”
“Funny, everyone says you were her closest friend in town,” Bird said.
The woman looked at her feet. “If that’s true, it’s sad,” she said. Then she shook her head. “Fuck. It’s probably true.”
The thing you needed to understand, Jennifer said, was that Lizzie didn’t make it easy. Yes, folks were shitty to her. Her dad, too. Earl Ouellette had come to town as a young man to work at the logging outfit, married a local girl, and taken over her father’s junkyard all within a span of ten years or so—which made him inherently untrustworthy, as far as a certain set of local diehards were concerned. It didn’t matter that this had been four decades ago, give or take; no matter how long you stayed, or how many roots you put down, they didn’t run deep enough to impress the families who’d been here for five generations. And as for your kids—
“You ever hear that saying? ‘Just because a cat gives birth inside an oven, that doesn’t mean the kittens come out biscuits’？” Jennifer said, smiling wryly.
Bird nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard it.”
“Then you know how it went. It didn’t matter that Lizzie was born here. She was still an outsider, as far as folks were concerned who cared about that stuff.”
And she made an easy scapegoat, Jennifer said. Not just because of her dad, or that trash heap where they lived, or the fact that Earl Ouellette sometimes hunted squirrels for stew meat—something that might have been normal wherever it was that he came from, but folks around here frowned upon it, and he didn’t even have the decency to act ashamed. It was Lizzie herself. Earl was complacent in the face of the town’s disapproval, but Lizzie, she gave it back to them. And it just kept on and on that way, until the loathing was all anyone remembered, until people hated her—much, much more than they’d ever hated her daddy. It ran dark and deep like a river between her and everyone else. Unbridgeable.
“But you were friends,” Bird said.
Jennifer shrugged. “We weren’t, really. But we didn’t have bad blood. If I saw her out, I’d say hi, she’d say hi. I didn’t always get along with Lizzie, but I guess . . . I kind of felt sorry for her. Dwayne was always showing up to stuff without her, barbecues or whatever, like we were still in high school and the guys would bust his balls if he brought her out. I mean, they were married. It was messed up. So I’d invite her sometimes.”
Bird thought of the picture of Lizzie squinting into the sun with a can of beer. Had that been Jennifer’s doing? A pity invite to hang out in somebody’s yard?
“When did you last see her?” he asked.
“Hard to say. I ran into her at Hannaford—it was a while back. Beginning of summer, maybe? We didn’t talk very long. She was keeping busy, with work and then the house. The lake place. You saw it?” Bird nodded; she did, too, smiling a little. “She made it nice. She was good at that stuff. I was happy for her.”
“I hear not everyone was.”
Jennifer shook her head. “People are ridiculous. I mean, honestly, it’s pure jealousy. Nobody wants to rent at a discount to their wife’s second cousin Charlie. They’d all like to do what Lizzie did, tell Cousin Charlie to screw off and put it on Airbnb, get some city people with deep pockets to rent it out. That one couple, I can’t remember the name, but they were loaded. They took Lizzie’s place for a full month last year, and then again this summer. The woman pulled up here in her big black SUV once, asking if I could tone her.”
“Did you?”
“Nah, I would have had to special order it,” she said. “She had unique hair.”
“Unique?”
“Color treated. You know what balayage is?”
“Bally-what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Anyway, I guess it started out rose gold or something, but the water up here was messing with it—between the lake and the sun she was getting real brassy. Honestly, it looked like shit. I told her the best I could do was take her back to her natural color.”
“How’d that go over?”
Jennifer snorted. Bird laughed in spite of himself.
“Anyway, that was the last I saw her. Too bad. I could’ve probably charged her triple.”
Bird cast a glance around the space. Like Lizzie, Jennifer had an eye for decorating—products lined up neatly along the wall, a potted plant offering a pop of green beside them. It wasn’t bad for what it was, but it was still a hair salon in a trailer.