Page 63 of Two Kinds of Stranger

She had remarried a year ago. There was an additional entry, with today’s date.

Restraining order. Christine White is not to be within one hundred yards of Arthur Cross. There was an arrest record for yesterday.

Logan leaned forward. He searched the internet for Arthur Cross.

And he read all that he could on this new, intriguing individual.

Mr. Cross had potential.

Logan left the Starbucks, dipped his head, using his hat to obscure his face as he passed the cop arguing with the tow-truck driver. Logan crossed the street and turned a corner, heading back to the lot where he had parked his rental car.

Cross would have to wait. Tonight, Logan had a date.

20

Elly

Elly picked through the items on her breakfast tray. Powdered eggs that tasted grainy. A yogurt from a brand she had never heard of before. She didn’t go near the fruit in a sealed plastic cup.

Suze took her roll.

She wasn’t hungry, and knew that if she did eat something there was every chance she would vomit it up within minutes. Her stomach was going crazy. As she sat at a table with Suze, she noticed blood on the table. Fresh blood. It came from the cuticles around her thumb. Elly had picked the flesh away from her nail.

Same thing had happened in high school.

Elly was smart, kind of geeky, not funny, and she didn’t think of herself as good-looking or cool. She guessed that none of her fellow high-school students did either. She had few friends. Kept to herself. Did her homework over lunch, alone, picking through a different meal from a plastic tray in her school cafeteria, with the same kind of anxiety ripping through her system, and the nail on her index finger unconsciously ripping through the skin on the left side of her thumbnail.

She remembered one particularly bad lunch in that old cafeteria. She had saved up for a new pair of boots. Black biker books, ankle length. With a silver buckle. She’d seen a picture of Katy Perry wearing the same boots on Facebook and desperately wanted to emulate one of her teen idols.

Only problem was Elly never wore anything with a heel. Vans and cheap Nikes had been staple footwear growing up. She remembered that morning, and the looks from the blond witches who hung around the staircase at the entrance, the jocks who gathered at the lockers in the hallway and the geeks too–everyone noticed her boots. And Elly never forgot that attention, because it was the first time she had ever felt even a modicum of self-confidence.

The confidence lasted until lunchtime, when she stumbled on the way to her table in the cafeteria, spilling half her lunch tray on the floor in front of the whole school. Everyone laughed.

Things were different back then. In the hell of high school, Elly could always come home to her parents. She was an only child, so she got a lot of love and attention from her parents automatically, but they were the kind of people who loved being parents. Family was a big thing in her home. Her mother, Susan, always described herself as a homemaker, even though she had her own pottery business, which she ran from the garage. Elly remembered long evenings in the garage during the summer, her mom at the potter’s wheel, clay in her hands and her foot depressing the pedal to spin the wheel in time to the music her father had playing in the house. Her dad, Stewart, owned a car-repair shop. They would sit on old car seats that Dad had brought home from a wreck and watch her mom, listening to Dad’s records from the eighties, sipping coffee and talking. She remembered that her parents worked with their hands and their hearts. A lot of love went into everything they did, be it making a fruit bowl or fixing a clutch–the oil and dirt engrained in her father’s hands and the clay residue that coated her mom’s fingernails–it was all evidence of the love they put into their work, and their family. Elly could never master pottery, and she was no good with a wrench either. Instead, when Elly was nervous, she picked at her cuticles until they bled.

She didn’t have clay dust, or oil on her hands–only dried blood. Perhaps her parents sensed her anxiety. Elly could tell her mom and dad anything. Even falling over in the canteen because of her stupid expensive boots. They had laughed when she told them the story, and their laughter took away her embarrassment and shame at the memory.

Falling over was part of life, her father had said.

You always get back up again.

She missed her parents a lot.

Now, more than ever.

Elly sat alone, again, at a table, in a max-security facility, and picked at the skin surrounding her nails until she felt the blood on her fingers.

Rosie’s wasn’t high school. It was much worse. She guessed she was still in shock about the murder of her husband and best friend, because, while she had cried for them, she was also crying for herself. She had no time to process what had happened to her. She couldn’t mourn her husband or her friend. Her emotions were already messed up, because these were the two people who had meant the most to her in the world, and they had betrayed her–and now they were dead. Somehow, it made the betrayal permanent.

It could now never be resolved. There was no reconciliation, no closure, no way of dealing with those emotions. Their deaths were a wound to Elly. One she knew would never heal.

Even now, sitting with Suze, watching her, Elly’s fear and anxiety was constant. Yet some part of her brain told her to pay attention to Suze. That this was important.

This was survival.

She noticed the way Suze hunched over her breakfast tray, never once looking at what she was eating–her eyes forward, scanning the room, scanning the faces of the other detainees,assessing threats, watching hushed conversations, calculating, eating and waiting for the first move.

‘You bleedin’,’ said Suze.