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“I told Dozier, but he wouldn’t listen. He said it wasn’t enough—a lesser charge, no probable cause—and at that point I just felt like everyone had stopped trying, stopped caring, so I went to the store one night and confronted him myself.”
I still remember the look on his face: the wrinkles in his cheeks stretching when he saw me and smiled; his arms outstretched like hewas going in for a hug. And then: the terror. I couldn’t stop myself. As soon as I saw him, I couldn’t stop. The screaming, the thrashing. My fists flying and connecting with anything they could find until the other employees were able to shake off the shock and rush over, hold me back.
“It was public indecency,” I continue, my eyes still drilling into the wall. I can’t bring myself to look at Waylon and see the judgment there. “Apparently, he had stumbled behind some bar after too many drinks and peed in front of a cop. That was it.”
I’ll never forget his body on the floor, a trembling ball of limbs. Looking back, I don’t even know if I truly believed it was him. Maybe I did—maybe some small part of me had seen the way he looked at Mason, those stickers in his pockets, and assumed the worst—or maybe I was just looking for someone to blame. An outlet for the anger that had been roiling inside me.
It had been there so long, it was bound to boil over.
“Any mother would have done the same thing,” Waylon says at last, but it sounds like a courtesy. Like he can’t think of anything else to say.
“Yeah, well, he didn’t press charges, so the cops went easy on me, but they’ve never really wanted me around after that,” I continue. “Ben moved out shortly after. I guess it was his final straw.”
The house is uncomfortably quiet, and I start to chew on my nail to give my hands something to do. I feel a rip, a sharp sting. Taste blood on my tongue from where my cuticle tore.
“Why do you do this for a living?” I ask at last, an exasperated laugh escaping my lips. “How can you possibly stand it, listening to these stories over and over again? I always think about that, you know, when I go to those conventions. I ask myself how people couldpossiblyget enjoyment out of listening to a story like that. Like mine.”
“Oh, yeah,” Waylon says, pushing a loose strand of hair away from his forehead, embarrassed. “I got into it because, uh, because of my sister’s murder, actually.”
His words send a knife through my chest. I inhale, trying to breathe through that familiar, painful twisting.
My sister’s murder.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, it’s fine,” he says. “I get it. It’s a morbid career.”
“What happened to her?” I tread lightly, realizing now that after all of our encounters together—after our conversation on the airplane, our email exchanges, our meal at Framboise, and now this—I have never stopped to wonder what Waylon’s story is. I’ve been so used to being the one with a tale to tell, the one with a tragedy, that I’ve never even thought to ask. “Your sister?”
Waylon shrugs, shoots me a sad little smile.
“That’s the question,” he says. “The one case I’ve been working on since I was twenty-three years old.”
The sun is sinking quickly now, and I glance outside, watching the sky brighten into an unnatural orange one last time before the light is bound to disappear again. With that one single admission, I realize that, for the first time in three hundred and sixty-eight days, I’m not approaching the impending night with the same sense of dread that always comes when it’s time to buckle up, settle in. Ride out the long, lonely hours with nothing but my thoughts, my memories. My mind.
Instead, I feel hope.
I feel it, I really do. Just the faintest little glimmer, but it’s there. Because now I understand something crucial. I understand that Waylon and I may be more alike than I thought. Both of us are victims of the violence, spending our lives in the dark searching blindly for answers; both of us tainted by tragedy, defined by our loss, unable to do what everyone keeps telling me to do: just move past it, move on.
I understand that, unlike the others—unlike the detectives and the neighbors and the true crime enthusiasts—this isn’t just business for him. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t work.
For him, it’s personal.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THEN
Our air conditioner died this morning. It wasoverworked,Mom said. It’s too hot.
For some reason, that reminded me of the horse-drawn carriages we sometimes see downtown, the horses’ thick bodies pulling the weight of a dozen people in oversized wagons. The heat of the sun on their necks, muscles bulging. Bits in their mouths, and the smell of manure baking on the concrete. We had seen one collapse once, stumble in the middle of the street and fall to its knees. The tourists had screamed as the coachman jumped down, pried open its jaws, and poured a bottle of water down its throat as blood oozed from a gash in its leg and pooled between the cobblestones.
“Is it dead?” Margaret had asked, looking up at my mother. The horse’s belly was moving, but just barely: slow, heaving breaths that made its nostrils flare.
“No, it’s not dead,” she had said, turning us around, hands on our necks as she led us in the opposite direction. “It’s just too hot. It’s overworked. It’s… tired.”
Margaret and I are sitting back-to-back on the hardwood floor ofmy mother’s studio now, hair pulled into ponytails, though I can feel my baby curls escaping the grip of the elastic and gluing themselves to my forehead, stuck to my skin with sweat. Mom put us up here earlier, setting out an assortment of paints and blank canvases, entertainment that she knew could last for hours. The morning stretched by in a warm, slow rhythm, and I can tell by the shifting sun that it’s late afternoon now, another day gone.
“I’m hot,” Margaret says, fanning herself with her hand. I turn around and see a bead of sweat drip down her chest, disappearing down the neck of her nightgown. We’re each wearing one of my father’s old work shirts on top of our pajamas, backward, sleeves rolled up to our elbows to create makeshift smocks.
