If I couldn’t use Connor’s phone, people would realize he’d gone missing. I’d been dumb enough to bring it to my house, so if the police started looking for him in earnest, they might access his phone’s location data and see it’d been here. I was going to be so screwed.
The horror of the day bore down on me. I barely managed to turn the shower on full blast to hide the sounds before I started sobbing uncontrollably. I collapsed onto the bathroom floor. I’d never cried like that in my life, hysterical, like an animal, plumes of snot and slobber dripping from my face. I kept seeing the severed finger, with its chipped orange polish. Baylee must’ve painted her nails the way all women do—in a burst of optimism and self-improvement. Never imagining what would soon occur. It was my fault.
Once I’d cried myself into a puddle, I crawled into the shower. Thewarm water brought me back to life, though it took twenty minutes for my teeth to stop clacking. As I toweled myself off, my exhaustion lifted, leaving me anxious as an eighties club kid riding the back half of a cheap 8-Ball. Dr. Google informed me this was a hypothermia side effect. I decided to ride the jittery wave and get to work.
I sat at my mother’s old desk, wolfing down a Hot Pocket while ordering a high-end fake pistol via overnight shipping. My general philosophy about firearms was that the best way to get shot was to own a gun, but if I ever encountered Ralphie and Errol again, I wanted to appear to have one on me. I worried my credit card would be declined but the payment went through.
Next I checked Connor’s phone again. A new voice memo from the Receiver had arrived while I was in the shower. The now-familiar, slightly distorted voice said, “Did you get the potato mashers and themashed potato recipe? You’re supposed to keep me posted. Let me know.”
Because I didn’t have voice recordings from Connor explaining the nuances of the situation, I sent one of him saying: “Success.” In the YouTube video he’d actually been saying: “Success—for white men—means keeping our trad wives at home and taking our power back.” Which was nonsense because Idaho Connor didn’t have a trad wife—or any wife!
With Errol—and Ralphie—out of the running, who did I have left by way of murder suspects? The anxiety humming through my veins whispered it could’ve been just me. Nobody else.
There must be someone who could explain what happened in the alley behind Huckleberry’s that night. Other than Salma Hayek, who seemed to not want to be found, there was only one person I hadn’t spoken to who might have seen how Connor ended up in my trunk—the mysterious former Pole Kisses student named Pumpkin Spice. And that was just great, because I had no idea who Pumpkin Spice could possibly be.
Connor’s phone buzzed. The mere sight of Ralphie’s name made my mind feel like it was flying off into fragments again. Hello, trauma, my new friend.
“Your skanks went off script,” Ralphie growled. “They didn’t take the special present we brought for you. But hopefully they told you we know you’re a rat. And we exterminate rats. We find your skanks, we’ll exterminate them too.”
I slid Connor’s phone into my purse, my shaking fingers brushing against the BuckSnort bottle cap. I pulled it out and spun it in my fingers. I could not for the life of me remember drinking BuckSnort out of a bottle. But I wanted so badly to have an alibi, to know where I’d been for those lost seven hours. I wanted to know how I’d ended up in the alley behind Huckleberry’s wearing Connor’s fashion-faux-pas vest.
My hypothermia-induced anxiety insisted I do something, anything, to fix this mess, to figure it out. So the next thing I knew, I’d pulled on jeans and a sweater, woken up the twins, helped them put winter coats over their pajamas, and loaded them—sleepy but compliant—into the Impala.
We blazed west on State Street, the charms of central Boise soon replaced by anonymous strip malls. Up ahead, the twins spotted the sign for Caffeina.
“Mommy, we went there once! Remember the hotty choc?” Phoebe cried.
“It had whipped cream!” Alice chimed in.
“And chocolate sprinkles!” Phoebe said. “Can we go there now?”
“Not tonight,” I murmured. The purists at Caffeina only sold espresso drinks, tea, and hot chocolate, that much I knew. I wrenched the wheel to roll into the parking lot of the strip mall across the street from Huckleberry’s. Caffeina. Library! (All Boise library signs have a charming exclamation point.) Spin Laundry. The Idahoan Diner, a sign advertising BuckSnort root beer in the front window. Bingo! When I’d left Huckleberry’s that night, I must’ve stumbled across the street to the Idahoan—the only place around that served BuckSnort.
“Mommy!” Alice whined as I hustled the girls into the cozy warmth of the diner. “Phoebe says I’m not pretty.”
You know you’re identical, right?“You’re both very pretty,” I said.When the hostess with the crusty lip piercing offered to seat us, I asked if they sold BuckSnort.
“Sure do!” She gestured at a soda dispenser.
“In bottles. Do you sell BuckSnort in bottles?” I demanded.
“It’s real good outta the dispenser,” she insisted. “We get the mix right. And we got an ice cream sundae looks like a loaded baked potato. It’s not as good as the one at the West Side Diner, but it’s still pretty good. We close in thirty minutes. You got time.”
I dropped into a mirror-lined booth, too deflated to refuse the twins a sundae. If the diner closed at ten o’clock, I hadn’t been hanging out there until four in the morning the night Connor was murdered. As the twins argued about which came first, God or dinosaurs, I pulled the BuckSnort bottle cap out of my purse and examined the tiny, baffling hole drilled through the middle.
Across the booth, the twins leaned together toward the mirror.
“I don’t know what people are always talking about,” Phoebe was saying.
“Me either. It makes no sense. Why are they always sayin’ it?” Alice mused.
“We don’t look alikeat all,” Phoebe said.
“Not even a little bit,” Alice concurred.
I started laughing—how was this the one thing they could agree on?
The sundae arrived, a true optical illusion. Vanilla ice cream shaped like a baked potato, rolled in cocoa powder and split down the middle, loaded with whipped cream (for sour cream), shredded coconut dyed yellow (for cheese), and green sprinkles (for chives). As the three of us stuffed our faces, an unexpected shimmer of gratitude rippled through me. Sugar molecules danced through my bloodstream, suffusing me with the gentle pleasure of being alive, in a warm room, with my girls. For a moment, I felt better, hopeful, even if I still had no idea how to get out of this mess.
