“Excuse me?”
“When did you arrive in town from Philly?”
“You saw me at the funeral.”
“Yeah. Felt to me like you’d already been here for a while, though. For at least a couple of days.”
Nicola stared at her.
Mom said, “What do you mean?”
She thought about letting them know what Morasco had said, but decided not to bother. Mom would find out soon enough that Quentin Garrison probably hadn’t shot her and Dad and hadn’t shot himself unless he’d been forced. “Just thinking out loud,” Robin said, giving them both a smile, Nicola’s much smaller than the one she gave her mother. “I’ve got to head out. I’m needed at work.”
Once she got in her car, she called Eric—not because she was dying to talk to him, but because she had no one else to say it to who might even begin to understand. “I’m suspicious of Nicola.”
“Your mom’s friend? That’s crazy.”
You wouldn’t think it was crazy if you knew that she investigated you.
“Think about it, Eric,” she said. “Someone got my mom’s gun away from her, but they shot my dad first, not her. My dad’s wounds were almost instantly fatal. My mom was shot once in the abdomen. Now she’s fine.”
“You think she made sure your mom would survive her injuries. That she only shot her... why? To keep her from protecting your dad?”
“Why not?”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “But why would your mother’s old friend walk into her house and kill her husband?”
“I’m thinking my mom might be remembering things wrong. I’m thinking it might have been Nicola who had the argument with Dad.”
“Why?”
“It turns out Nicola was the one who got my mother the gun. Who taught her how to shoot. She’s an expert shooter. I’ve looked at old pictures of her, and beneath those muscles and that tan andthat gray hair... Nicola could be the associate of mom’s Quentin Garrison was talking about. Mom’s dear friend Nikki could be April Cooper.”
There was a long stretch of silence on the other end of the line. And then, “I don’t understand.”
“You should.”
“What? Why?”
“Because, Eric,” she said. “You know what it’s like to have secrets.”
Robin thought about her mother, all the things she never knew about her that she’d only just learned in the past few days: She had fought off an attacker. She owned a gun. She’d hired a PI to investigate Robin’s husband. Her closest friend may have been a mass murderer in the ’70s. She was a woman with important movie tokens and sexy teenage Polaroids, a past she never spoke about, and many, many secrets.
As she reached her stop, Robin remembered what Nicola had said about Renee.Your mother loves you. She would do anything for you. Isn’t that what’s important?
It was important. Of course, it was. But it wasn’t everything. There was also the truth.
Thirty-Nine
Summer
SUMMER STOOD OUTin Brittlebush. She stood out everywhere on the West Coast, with her bright red hair and pale skin, but here, in this tiny desert town where it looked as though sunblock had yet to be invented, people kept gaping at her, as though she were some alien species. It didn’t help either that most everyone who lived here looked at least sixty and seemed to have known each other since childhood. Summer couldn’t have blended in if she tried.
What Summer normally did when reporting small-town stories was to hang out in one of the local diners, order a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, bum a cigarette off the waitress during her break and get her talking. Summer didn’t even smoke, but she could fake it. And she could talk a good game if she did say so herself. By the end of the conversation, she could have that waitress feeling like her best friend, a Deep Throat–style whistle-blower, a freedom fighter who would go down in history, Quentin’s secret crush—whatever Summer needed her to feel like in order to get the info.
She was a little nervous about doing that here, though, in Brittlebush’s only diner—a place called Heidi’s that looked like Denny’s and IHOP had a baby, shoved it in a time machine, and sent it back to 1983. There were a few leathery old guys in here, sitting at the counter. One waitress, who, despite the perfectly good air-conditioning,looked dangerously overheated in her polyester uniform and didn’t move her face when she spoke, seemingly out of spite.
The booths were a sickly yellow and made of the type of vinyl you stuck to if you sat on it for too long, and everybody in here kept shooting her looks, as though they were daring her to say something stupid.
