Louella looked smug. “I knew you’d like her.”
I didn’t like the way they talked about me like I was a Christmas present and Roy Lester got to do the unwrapping. As if he’d read my thoughts, Roy stood and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s take our party upstairs.” His words were slurred, but I knew what he meant.
“No, no, no.” Mr. Hearst jumped up and grabbed Roy’s arm. “The party’s just starting, isn’t that right, Maryanne?”
Relief almost knocked me over. “It’s Minerva,” I said, but I didn’t care what he called me, as long as he kept Roy downstairs.
“Of course. Here—” He signaled to the pretty maid. “Bring Roy here one of his specials.”
“Sure, Billy-boy,” Roy said, easy enough to convince. “One for the old road.” Roy danced me around the room as the gramophone rasped, the needle stuck on the groove, singing along, his breath hot and moist in my ear, “‘All I want is just one kiss, and I have to have one kiss.’”
One kiss? And then... what?
I remember we went outside, Roy swaying—lurching—around the courtyard with me in his arms. I felt woozy; the courtyardspun. That’s when everything started to run together. Roy dragging me up a stairway, laughing like it was a lark. I guess it was to him. But what happened after?
A familiar shame burned through me.
Had I been what they call “a good sport”? Had we . . ? Don’t be a dope, Mina, what do you think we did, play gin rummy? My stomach turned, from a hangover or what I’d done with Roy, I didn’t know.
I tried to breathe, to think. How had I come to this? Small steps, small strokes taking me into deeper and deeper water until I couldn’t turn back. Now, here I was... drowning.
I pried my eyes open. Hard light slashed through dark velvet curtains and glinted off of dozens of lifeless eyes. Antelope, zebra, a huge pig with enormous tusks—all staring at me reproachfully. Roy Lester’s trophy room. The silence—the deep, exhausted morning silence—was broken by the low buzz of a fly, bouncing against a window, caught between the heavy velvet drapes and the glass, relentlessly trying to escape.
I’d done what I needed to do. I’d done what Louella had asked, and then some. She owed me, and from here on out, I’d go straight. Follow the rules. I’d sign on with Lester at Cosmo and make all I needed in a few months. Then go home. I’d be home in time for spring thunderstorms, June bugs, the bright green of sprouting corn.
That’s what I’d do, I told myself. No one would know.
I sat up, gingerly holding my head.
First I noticed the smell—sharp and metallic—like the chicken house on slaughtering day. Then I saw the body.
On the floor in the middle of the room. And... blood, soaking the pale carpet.
I scrambled back, tumbling off the far side of the bed, my knees sinking into thick carpet. I crawled backwards until my back hit the wall. Took a breath. Had I imagined it? I inched around the side of the bed and covered my mouth to stop a scream.
Roy lay on his back, his pale face mottled with blue veins, his mouth sagged open. Those eyes that had charmed women in countless films stared at the ceiling, as glassy as the animals on the wall. I choked. A knife—covered with blood—with a wicked long blade lay beside him.
He was dead. Dead. Roy Lester, America’s Hero, was dead.
A rushing sound filled my ears, a drumming in my throat, behind my eyes. The room spun around me. “Think. Think, Minnie.” My whisper was queer-sounding in the silent room.
Finally, my brain starting ticking. I couldn’t do anything for him now. I needed to get far away, as fast as I could. Out of the house. Home. I’d say I left him alive, late at night. My dress. Shoes. Where were they? I scrambled around the bed. Saw only blood and Roy. There. Green silk in a puddle by the door. I pulled it on. I couldn’t be in this room—with him—another second.
Oh, Max, you were right.Don’t come crying to me when it goes to the dogs, Mina.You were right and I was wrong. I admit it. Please help me. Please help me, Max. Get me out of this horrid fix I got myself into.
CHAPTER 2
MINA
“You’ll find your way,” Mama always said. How was she to know how lost I’d get?
When I was a kid, before Mama died, I was my papa’s shadow. I helped with the milking. In the fields, I talked to Papa as he tinkered with the tractor. Whatever Papa did, that’s what I wanted to do, and I loved seeing him smile when I did something just right. “Hard work and determination,” he’d tell Mama, “that’s my Minnie.”
School was something different altogether.
At school, I was good at only one thing. Pretending. Pretending I was following along even when my mind was far from my McGuffey Reader. Pretending I hadn’t been looking out the window instead of diagramming sentences. Pretending my pencil needed sharpening again, just because I couldn’t sit still for another minute.
Most of all, pretending it didn’t bother me when my teachers said, “She sure isn’t anything like Penny.”
