“I’ll handle whatever needs handling when I get past this family emergency later this afternoon.” She’s only guessing. She has no idea how long it will take to unravel a mystery. “I can do this job in my sleep.”
He scoffs so that she has to remove the phone from her ear. “Is that so?” he says.
“Yes, that is so. This job puts me to sleep, so that’s how I get most of the work done. Listen, I’m sorry. I really am. But I have to go. Right now.” She moves her finger to the red button at the bottom of the screen.
“Are you quitting?” He raises his voice.
“Oh no.” She hesitates. “Of course not. But do feel free to fire me, the county has a very nice severance package that I’ve had my eye on for some time.” And with that, she hangs up on her very steady job that she took four years ago to be a mom.
* * *
Darby has every intention of marching into the police station with a great deal of brass, but the thing about police stations, she learns quickly, is that they seem specifically designed to stamp out any remnant of self-assurance you may have when you walk through those doors. There’s so much gray—gray carpet, gray cubicles, gray ceiling tiles, and vinyl vestibules—it feels like a “mute” button for her eyes. “I need to talk to Detective Bright.” She leans over to speak to the uniformed lady sitting on a gray rolling chair behind a desk. “Right away,” she adds, not wanting to betray the version of herself who was so intent on marching.
The woman pushes a clipboard sign-in sheet toward Darby and rolls back from her desk a few feet. “Hey, is Bright in?” she asks the bullpen of mostly white-shirted officers. Darby wonders if there are different uniform colors for days in the office versus days spent outside of it.
“She’s at her cousin’s wedding this weekend.”
The woman rolls back in her direction and repeats the words that Darby had been able to hear perfectly well.
“Where’s that?” Darby asks.
The woman wears too much hair gel. Darby would get a headache if she wore her hair slicked back into a bun that tightly. “Tulsa,” says the woman.
“The whole weekend?” Darby forgets about the gray “mute” button.
“Think so. What’s it about? We can get someone else to help you.”
“The case of Erin Ollie. The murdered preschool teacher.” Darby sounds like a middle-aged Nancy Drew, which sounds sad.
“Oh yeah.” The woman lightly taps her fist on the desk. “Let me get Princep for you. Hang on.”
Darby wants to object. She’d like to say, Don’t you have anyone else available? But she can’t work out what reason she’d supply. She gets a bad feeling about Officer Princep—never trust a man that good-looking—and then she remembers Griff and feels guilty for judging him, for ever suspecting her poor husband of any wrongdoing. She’ll have to say sorry, but Darby’s not great at apologies. Either way, Officer Princep will have to do.
She’s asked to wait for him in a small meeting room where the air-conditioning vent blows directly down the back of her shirt. She scans the ceiling for any sign of a camera, but finds none. She wouldn’t mind being filmed. Film away! The only thing worth seeing in here is a scantily stocked vending machine that hums softly in the corner next to a watercooler. She rises and takes one of the cone cups, fills it up, and sucks the water straight down before Princep even arrives.
“What can I help you with, Mrs. Morton?” He looks older without the company of Detective Bright, probably closer to forty than she’d previously thought. That’s comforting. No ring on his finger, as she suspected. He has the blandly attractive face of a soap opera star, not an Oscar winner.
On the way over, she thought about how she would tell her story and decided that she wouldn’t oversell it. She’d stick to the facts, ask leading questions, let them draw the conclusions.
“Please,” she says, “call me Darby.”
He presses his lips together. “How’s your—” He points to her, not wanting to say butt, obviously. “Hip?”
Hurts. Hurts a lot. And the bandage keeps coming loose, after which the stitches stick to her pants, and she has a big ugly bruise that’s turning putrid green, but other than that— “Fine! Oh god, that was— I’m fine. Totally fine. Really.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Unable to hold it in any longer, Darby launches into the whole tale, pulling up the article and detailing the accident that led to the death of Oliver Nierling, who was the brother of Erin Ollie, who is actually Erin Nierling. Ta-da! When she finishes, she notices herself panting a little. She forgot to breathe. “Did you know about Ben’s involvement in Erin’s brother’s death?” she asks.
She momentarily deflated when she heard that Princep and Bright were aware of Erin’s true identity and that they’d run a background check on both of her names and come up with nothing, but then that would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?
He’s quiet for a long moment, studying her. “Actually, no.”
She exhales. “I didn’t think so. I just— I had a hunch. Don’t you think that’s weird? The Nierlings clearly believed that their son, Ollie, wasn’t really driving the boat, that he was on the straight and narrow, and the Sarpezzes had money.”
“He’s a pastor now, though?”
“Yes,” she explains patiently. “At the church connected to Little Academy. I understand it’s an easy thing to miss if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of the Little community. Erin’s family sued Ben’s for a lot of money. But unfortunately, the Nierling family attorneys were no match for the fancy whiteshoes of the Sarpezzes. I discovered that Erin’s family lost.” Darby is editorializing a bit because, in fact, she doesn’t know whether it’s unfortunate or not, but the feeling she got when she learned the end of the story was, without question, sorrow.
“That’s good work,” he says, and he does sound genuine.
Darby’s heart blips up. It’s all fitting together, or starting to. “What happens next?”
“We’ll look into it.” He rises from his chair.
Her mouth drops. “You’ll look into it?”
He holds out his hand for her and she doesn’t know whether he wants to help her out of her chair or simply shake hands. Neither seems appealing.
“Detective Bright gets back to the office on Monday. I’ll brief her and we’ll look into it.”
“Don’t you think you should call her?” Darby presses.
“She’s at her cousin’s wedding,” he says as if that settles it, as if Tulsa is the motherfucking Arctic Ocean. Off Darby’s look, he softens. “Darby, I understand why this is important to you and we’ll take every lead seriously, you have my word. But Lola’s footprints were found in the blood. We’re being as sensitive as possible because we’ve never dealt with a potential perpetrator this young before, but you may have to face the facts that your daughter needs help. She’s a minor. That’s key. A terrible, terrible thing happened and the family needs answers. But she will have a life after this.”