This input was annoying, given that Emmylou wouldn’t be the one caring for the dog. “Last thing I need is to be responsible for another creature,” I managed, trying to keep my tone light. “Mind hanging with the kids for a few? I’m desperate for a shower.”
“Sure thing, toots.”
Behind the locked bathroom door, hot water blasting, I sobbed silently as I rubbed my skin raw with lavender salt scrub, my favorite witchy remedy for clearing energy. Normal single motherhood was hard. But this... all this was too hard.
Back in the living room, my hair wrapped in a towel, undereye masks slapped on to hide the fact that I’d been crying, I sank down next to Emmylou on the couch. She was still talking with the twins about the dog.
“You should definitely take him to the dog park.” Emmylou said. “Single men galore! And in ten days, it’ll feel almost like spring!”
A sense of foreboding descended, and not just because Emmylou was being bossy. “What do you mean, ‘it’ll feel like spring?’”
“I just saw the extended forecast,” Emmylou said. “A week from Saturday, highs will be nearly seventy! And it’ll stay warm for days!” The clock was now officially ticking. I had ten days to get the corpse out of my yard, before it started to rot.
Nineteen
Phoebe always insisted on having the top bunk, but she now wanted Alice’s bottom bunk so she could be closer to Little Sister. This caused a normally docile Alice to lose her ever-loving mind. Phoebe retaliated by biting Alice again—and this time I could see teeth marks! After a half hour of calming Alice down and talking to Phoebe about the importance of respecting other people’s bodies (by not chomping on them), I had the girls snuggled on the floor in sleeping bags with Little Sister between them. Suddenly Alice pulled on her Betty White face mask.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Alice said, sniffling audibly.
“I can hear you crying,” I said.
“Don’t tell her,” Phoebe hissed.
“I can hear you, Phoebe,” I said.
“We did something really bad,” Alice confessed, letting out another sad, wet snuffle and pulling off the mask.
The twins talked over each other as the story tumbled out. When Miranda and I were in the kitchen, Little Sister had grabbed Miranda’s purse strap with his teeth and pulled the whole thing off the couch. Lipstick and hand sanitizer and Kleenex and keys and an unzipped wallet spilling credit cards had all fallen out onto the rug. Not wanting to get Little Sister in trouble, the twins had shoved everything back into the purse and set it on the couch. But after Miranda left, Phoebe had noticed Miranda’s driver’s license under the coffee table. Instead of telling me about it right away, they’d hidden it.
“And the pretty lady—she’s really bad at sex!” Alice reported.
I’d given the twins the-birds-and-the-bees talk, but clearly something had been misconstrued. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“She got an F!” Alice and Phoebe shouted in unison.
“I really thought she’d get an A,” Phoebe said. “Or at least a B.”
“I’m so confused,” I said.
Alice pulled Miranda’s driver’s license from between the pages of her current favorite book,Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible. “See!” she said, pointing.
Under Miranda’s name and address, the license read:
Hgt: 5' 05"
Sex: F
Eyes: Blue
I laughed, relieved. After explaining to the girls that “Sex: F” meant that Miranda was female, not a bad lay, I assured them I wasn’t mad at them and encouraged them to share discoveries such as Miranda’s lost-and-found license with me as soon as possible. Then I rubbed their backs until they fell asleep and retreated to my room, carrying the Betty White mask with me. (I’d told Alice plenty of times it wasn’t safe to sleep with it on, but still I worried.) Wanting to avoid giving Miranda the impression that my kids were thieving mini-delinquents, I decided to drop her license in her mailbox when she wasn’t home. For now, I’d slip it into my own wallet for safekeeping. As I reached into the side pocket of my purse, my fingers brushed against the BuckSnort bottle cap and I wondered again if it was a random bit of trash or a clue to where I’d been Sunday night.
Grateful for the quiet, I plunked down in my mom’s Eames chair dupe and spun Connor’s phone in my fingers, trying to think. Layna had said there was no way we could get the Valley County Sheriff’s Department all the way out to Burgdorf. Which was a moot point because Ralphiethe Lizard wouldn’t let Baylee go to Burgdorf unless he heard Connor sayin his own voicethat he’d be there.
Which was impossible, of course.
Feeling frustrated, I decided to do the thing I always did when I needed answers. I opened my laptop and hit up Dr.Google. My first search was for “Connor Johnson Boise.” It didn’t turn up much at first—just social media pages with a couple hundred followers each and not many posts. Connor didn’t follow anyone named Ralphie, Errol, or Harlan, either. Next I searched “Connor Johnson Idaho.” Lo and behold, up popped a YouTube channel calledIdaho Connor the Patriotwith a headshot that was definitely the dead guy. There were only nine videos. All posted a year ago, in January. Connor must have made a short-lived New Year’s Resolution to become an influential YouTuber.
