Grief was not an emotion Rhea cared to entertain. It was a cockroach that waited until she turned out the lights, scampered in the dark.
In the light, she was all about blame.
Shelly’s fall had been an accident, but accidents have causes. The flimsy slab over a mammoth hole was negligent. She could sue the police department. The sinkhole by rights ought to have been filled long ago. She could sue the town. And why had the children been out there to begin with? Whose bad judgment had they followed? She still remembered the expression on Shelly’s face as she’d run from the crowd of chasing adults. She’d seemed so spooked.
Was it possible she’d been running from someone? Might her house contain a clue?
She searched the basement first. She passed the pile of bricks in the laundry room, which had once made up the front walk. She opened the closet full of empty wine bottles, added two more. Fruit flies buzzed, laying eggs in the wet slurry at the glassy bottoms.
Nothing.
She stalked the kitchen, slammed dirty plates into the sink where they broke like sand dollars. She tore down the toile drapes because they were ugly. Tacky. Twenty years old. Up the stairs, to her bedroom that she hated, which she shared with a man she only then realized she couldn’t stand. A man who wasn’t home. Because when important things happened, Fritz Schroeder was never there.
“Stay in your rooms!” she shouted along the hall. Doors shut quietly, no hands visible, as if dispossessed of authors.
She opened cabinets and closets in Shelly’s room, flinging out all that belonged to her bright, sensitive daughter. The pretty red winter coat; the homemade snow globe with a Sculpey snowman inside; the black knoll of shed braids sawed away with dull safety scissors; the horsehair brush, the goddamned brush.
She stripped the sheets so they floated, pregnant with old ghosts of the child who’d once slept beneath them. She turned the mattress. She shook every book, unleashing ticket stubs and class notes passed between schoolgirls, emblazoned with hearts, and even one from a boy—Dave Harrison—asking if she’d sneak out to meet him at midnight at 7-Eleven.
Shelly.
The bottom drawer of Shelly’s desk was locked. She used a hammer to smash it open. Inside was nothing. An emptiness. She yanked out the drawer, and then all the other drawers. She overturned the entire desk. Something that was stuck to the back tore away. A tin lockbox. Written across green-and-pink-snowflake-patterned masking tape it read: Pain Box.
She yanked. Couldn’t open it without the key. So she tapped it with the hammer. The frame bent. She stopped. There might be something fragile in there. Something just like Shelly. She took it, along with the other evidence, back down to the main floor. She hid the Pain Box in her office.
Then she slammed the brush and cut hair in the sink and poured lighter fluid all over, along with the broken dishes beneath. She hoisted the stepping stool and ripped out the ceiling fire alarm as it sounded, tearing batteries loose from their holsters. She poured more lighter fluid until the blaze was deep blue at its roots, the hair perfect, protein-scented kindling. She poured until the bristles turned to ash and the polyurethane melted and the compressed wood went to char. She did this until the sink itself was ruined.
A proper mess. Stinking and flamboyant. The char was the center, blue and orange and red flaming out, like entering a black hole. She followed with her eyes and with her mind, a kind of unburdening. She was spiriting Shelly to the safety of the other side, a game with time itself.
All the while, she thought: Someone else was to blame for all that was happening. She had not done this.
Thursday, July 22
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder.
What happened to you?
For the people of Maple Street, the scream and the slap that followed stayed fresh in their minds. I’m sorry, they remembered. Sorry for what?
A bright girl. Brittle, too, with rough, bully edges—in a family that large, there’s bound to be one of them. The people of Maple Street agreed she wasn’t a black sheep. She came from too good a family for that. Rhea paid too much attention, helped too much with homework, rallied too much for the PTA. Fritz was too well respected, devoted in his quiet way to supporting his family. No, this was just a phase Shelly would have outgrown by high school, all the more resilient for having expunged it from her system.
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder. Did you have a secret?
Nikita Kaur asked her son Sam to repeat every detail of the story, one more time.
He remembered something new: comments Shelly had made about Arlo Wilde. Nikita asked him to repeat these. She had her husband, Sai, listen. Sai, knowing that his son was both eager to please and easy to influence, said it was probably nothing. Still, Nikita had Sam repeat it to Cat Hestia, and then the Ponti men, who reacted with shocked outrage. It’s outlandish, Sally Walsh said, though when she went home and relayed the story to her wife, Margie, they agreed that it added up. Even if Julia’s story was true, and they’d been racing each other to the far edge of the park, Shelly was far too smart to use a dangerous slab for a shortcut. What if Julia was lying, to protect someone? Perhaps something had driven those girls. Perhaps… they’d been running from Arlo.