“The artist.” She gestured at a rendition of the Boise Depot woven out of shredded grocery bags.
Hope was the most dangerous emotion, but I couldn’t guard against it now. I turned to the twins. “Hey, will you two go see which T-shirts they have in a medium?”
As Phoebe and Alice scampered off to investigate the T-shirt rack, I leaned in toward the gangly blond. “So you were here?” I asked. “Two Sundays ago?”
“Unfortunately.”
Adrenaline shot through me. “Somebody Ambiened my drink before I came in here.”
“Ambien!” she said. “That makes sense. You passed out on that couch at about nine thirty.” She pointed to a purple velour couch that’d seen better days. “It was slow in here so I just let you sleep. You woke up at like four.”
“I didn’t go anywhere? From nine thirty to four? I was right there?” Though I’d been at an all-time nadir five minutes ago, sunshine shot through me now.
“In plain sight.”
“Thank you, sweet St. Lucille Ball.” My knees felt like they mightbuckle. I’d been sleeping here all night, in plain view. I had an alibi! An alibi! It was a joyful mantra. It wasn’t like I went around with vials of Botox and a syringe in my purse. Still, without knowing where I’d been all night, I hadn’t been able to chase away the niggling worry I’d been involved. But now that worry dissolved. I had an alibi!
“You were making me anxious,” the barista continued. “I kept thinking like, what if you were my mom, you know?”
“I’m way too young and fresh to be your mom,” I said.
“She’s forty-three,” the barista said. “How old are you?”
“Never mind.”
“Once you woke up, you were staggering around. When I followed you to the bathroom, I saw you rip a chunk off ofBuckSnort, Idaho.”
It made sense. Even sober, I was always appalled by truly bad coffee shop art. “Did you see where I went?” I said. “When I left?”
The twins had pressed their shoulders together so they looked conjoined and sidled up to an old woman eating an oversized blueberry muffin. Ten bucks they were asking for a handout. Normally I would’ve intervened, but I was grateful they were distracted.
“I made you call an Uber,” the barista was saying. “You were so messed up I waited outside with you—because I’m analtruist. But I had to run in to help a customer. When I came out you were heading down the alley behind Huckleberry’s. I kept thinking: If my mom was in such a bad state, I’d want someone to look out for her, you know?”
Oh my god, enough about your mom.
“So I went to the end of the alley and yelled that your Uber was here,” the barista continued. “The weirdest thing was, when you staggered back out you were wearing a vest you hadn’t had on before.”
“A teal vest?”
“Yep.”
“Hot damn!” I said, my heart exploding into a hundred cavorting Jack Russell puppies. “How long? How long was I in the alley?”
“I don’t know? Two minutes? Three minutes?”
A drugged-up Connor had probably stripped off his vest before deciding to take an ill-fated dump in the trunk of my car. Only after Connor was dead in that same trunk and Miranda long gone had I wandered down the alley in my drunken and Ambiened state, picked up his abandoned vest, put it on, banged on the back alley door of Huckleberry’s, and talked to the dishwasher. (I hadn’t been in the alley nearly long enough to do all thatandmurder Idaho Connorandstuff him in my trunk). My alibi now made total sense! Which didn’t change the fact that hiding the (now-missing!) body in my yard might come back to bite me in the ass. And I couldn’t exactly confess all to the police without leaving Miranda and poor Tater Tot out to dry. Still, relief—that I had an alibi, that my conscience was clear—bathed every single cell in my body.
“Amazing!” I said. “Seriously, you’ve saved my life.”
I happily handed over my last eighty bucks from the Therapy Jar to pay for damages to the ugly bottle cap art. In exchange, I requested the gangly blond’s full name and number.
“That night got crazy,” I explained. “And there is a teeny-tiny chance law enforcement will need to talk to you.”
Forty-Two
To celebrate the joyful news that I for sure wasn’t a murderer, I herded the twins to the Library! to pick out a few books. As Phoebe sank into a bean bag chair to giggle overNarwhal and Jellyand Alice lay on the kid’s rug devouringAmelia Bedelia, I collapsed into an adult-sized chair nearby and took a moment to consider all I’d learned in the last hour.
The low-low of reading about Mickey Larynx’s comeback followed by the high-high of discovering an alibi for the night Connor died had been twin electrical shocks to my system. They’d caused the record needle of my brain to bounce out of its familiar groove. I could suddenly see beyond my recent predicament to a more bird’s-eye view of my life. If Mickey Larynx could rise from the ashes, why couldn’t I? Was my career really over? Or had I taken myself out of the game? If I’d had a thicker skin and a more resilient creative well, I might not have let getting dumped by my manager—and deeply heckled by one crowd—stop me.
