Darby looks over to Griff, who looks pale beside her. “No,” she replies. “Listen, I know you’re doing your jobs and you have to be thorough. But do you know what I think?” She believes it’s time to steer the conversation. “I think the odds are really good that Miss Ollie had an angry lover. A boyfriend, I mean. It’s always the boyfriend. You’re the police officers, I know—”
“Detective,” says Bright.
“So surely you of all people know this. Though I realize you didn’t know Miss Ollie personally like we did.”
Lola squirms out of her dad’s grip and, in her periphery, Darby can already feel the Lola Morton plane flying into turbulence.
“Erin Ollie,” says Detective Bright, “was gay.”
“Gay?” Darby stares at them slack-jawed. “Gay?”
“She didn’t have a boyfriend,” adds the detective. “She had a girlfriend.”
“Yes, I know what gay means, thank you.”
Miss Ollie was a lesbian? It feels strange that Darby had no idea, but then, why would she?
“We understand from friends and family that they were in a very committed relationship,” Princep’s saying. “They’d been living together for about three years and were talking about buying their first home.”
Darby is nodding along, but hardly listening until she realizes that everyone seems to be waiting for her response. “That’s great!” she exclaims.
“Great?” Bright repeats.
Darby rolls her eyes. “Not great. Obviously it’s very tragic. I’m just trying to communicate that I’m supportive. I’m sorry that I automatically assumed she was—you know—straight, that is very, I guess, heterocentric of me, but then it sounds like everyone is trying to leap to certain conclusions here. Like, just because she doesn’t have an abusive prick of a boyfriend or something convenient like that doesn’t mean you should be interrogating our children. In their homes.”
Princep motions with his hand to slow down, making him resemble a run-of-the-mill traffic cop. “We’re simply following up on a few pieces of the narrative, that’s all.”
“Well, I—” Her mouth twists. She feels a small, unpleasant gush in her underwear that reminds her, for a split second, of being in middle school. “Oh.” Now. Of all times, really? As if there’s such a thing as a convenient period, but its arrival does explain a few things.
She swallows, hating the feeling of blood soaking through to the shorts she’s wearing.
“Darbs?” Griff uses his concerned voice. The one he employed when she was in labor.
On the floor, Lola has been pedaling her legs, scrunching up the rug by digging her heels into it, back and forth, highly annoying, but low-priority behavior on their particular daughter’s seismic scale. Lola stops and stiffens.
“I was saying—” She restarts, only she doesn’t actually remember what she was saying. No further questions, is that something that real people say or just lawyers on TV?
Lola crawls over the inches of carpet to her ankles, peering up at her with big, concerned eyes. “Everything’s fine,” Darby assures her. “Just fine.”
“Mommy!” Lola paws at her ankle. “But Mommy!”
“Okay.” Detective Bright’s eyes dart between Darby and Griff. “Lola’s name came up in a number of the other interviews and she may have information that could be useful.”
“Mommy—”
“Don’t interrupt when grown-ups are talking,” Griff says.
Darby pushes Lola’s prying fingers off her thighs. “Surely this isn’t what they’re teaching in the academy.” Let it be stated for the record that it is difficult to muster the right amount of wherewithal and intimidation without a tampon. “If your best witnesses are four-year-olds—I, uh, I’ll go to the media. You want to be on the news for this?”
“We’re just doing our job,” Detective Bright replies, no fucks given.
“I didn’t think so.” Darby shifts her weight self-consciously.
“Mommy!” Lola’s chin is pressing into Darby’s hip. “I have something to tell you. Mom. Mom.”
“Hold on, Lola.”
Jack has reached his limits of independent play and he, too, has begun to whine, lying on the ground and arching his back. Bright and Princep are watching the kids without trying to seem like they’re watching them, like they’re the King’s Guard and won’t be distracted from their station.
“Have you tried asking Lola any more about that day—the day Erin was found?” Bright’s eyes flick to Lola. “Since she’s been home?”
“What exactly have you wanted us to ask her?”
“We wondered if she might have volunteered anything.” Princep shifts his feet, hip-width apart. “After we spoke. It might have triggered something, a memory.”
“Mom. Mom. Mommy!”
“Again: Like what?” Her temper is getting shorter. “She didn’t see anything. She doesn’t know any—” A blast of searing pain shoots out of Darby’s left buttock. “Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?” Darby feels herself bare her teeth, squinting her eyes shut tight. She latches on to Lola’s ponytail and yanks her daughter hard.
Griff, a man of action, few words, springs into it and she thinks, in a full body throb of love that feels as if it must be centered somewhere around the open wound on her ass, how perhaps all really is forgiven, or at least eventually will be, because she could not possibly be more attracted to him than she is in this very moment when he swoops, tucking Lola under his arm, absorbing the blows from her kicks silently, stoically, and carries her down the hall to their bedroom.
Darby is reasonably certain that only she—and not the two cops present—noticed the red outline of blood freshly wet around her daughter’s lips. In the meantime, Darby has been working to refashion her face into a look other than one of surprised agony, and in record time.
“Did she bite you?” Princep stares at the spot where Darby was indeed bitten, which is her ass, and so she stares back with fierce white-lady judgment.
“Barely a nip. Didn’t even break the skin.”
She presses her hand over the small tear in her gym shorts. Already she can feel it wet and leaking. Oh god. She feels like she’s oozing everywhere.
“I don’t think we have anything else to add,” she says stiffly. “At this moment. But we will definitely be sure to call if Lola thinks of anything useful.”
* * *
The Mortons pile into Griff’s SUV and Griff drives her to urgent care, where five stitches are sewn into the not-particularly-firm meat of her rear end.
On the way home, they stop at Walgreens for Neosporin and her prescribed wound care ointment. The cashier behind the counter is an older, gray-haired lady who peers over at Darby and her husband and children with a gleam in her eye, as if she’s in on a secret. “How precious.” She grins, showing her yellowed teeth. “They look just like you,” the woman says. “I have two grandchildren, both in middle school now. Gosh, I miss that stage. Enjoy it. It goes by so fast.”