Dark End of the Street

She clasped her hands over the heat of the flashlight, pushed herself to her feet, and walked back to the study where he died. She rolled back the twin doors and saw the fat, mahogany desk and chair that creaked when he would lean back and study cases.

She placed her hand on the desk, sitting flush next to the far wall, and reached to its corner, pulling as hard as she could. The desk barely budged and she tried harder. Finally, it squeaked on the wooden floor and she could see the square pattern he’d cut into the wall. She pulled back the desk a little more and used the crowbar to pop out the square.

Inside, she saw the face of the safe. The combination was easy, her parents’ anniversary. She wheeled through the numbers and cracked it open. Without even looking at the headings on the dozens of manila folders or the contents of the velvet-covered boxes, she slid them into the duffel bag.

She closed the safe, reinserted the square, and pushed the desk back flush with the wall.

She didn’t need the flashlight anymore. Dawn had arrived. A gray light burned through the curtains. A stale heat pulsed in the room.

She walked to the front hall and looked at the door to her parents’ bedroom. She knew that her mother had been there when the men – the police said it was more than one – had entered and emptied their guns into her father.

She’d almost made it to the door – maybe running to her husband – when a slug ripped into her shoulder and another into her temple. She’d been wearing that goddamned housecoat Abby hated so much. The ratty terry-cloth thing with ripped pockets.

Abby stared at the door and dropped her head. Her fine hair fell into her eyes and matted to her damp face.

The answers were in her bag now. She knew it. The local cops were idiots. They said it was a robbery. But he’d still had a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex on his wrist when they found him.

Abby shook her head at the thought, gripped the black bag tight to her chest, and sprinted to her car. The ghosts were too close.

From a clearing along the back highway, Perfect studied the girl’s face through a pair of small binoculars. She’d followed the girl all the way from Meridian where she’d stayed for the last couple of days in a run-down trucker’s motel. The girl, whose name was Abby, didn’t see Perfect, though.

Perfect had kept close to the shadows watching the girl’s movements, listening in on her phone conversations with her cousin – amazing what the manager of the motel could do – and sifting through the girl’s old truck while she was asleep. She found a photo album, a duffel bag of used clothes, and receipts from the last couple of months.

Abby. Hmm. Liked to spend daddy’s money. Banana Republic T-shirts. J. Crew underwear. A pair of Nike running shoes that probably cost a hundred and fifty bucks. Caswell-Massey lotion mixed in with tiny bottles of motel shampoo.

Perfect would have to straighten her hair, shear it at the jawline, maybe even lose the platinum. Girls like Abby didn’t know how to be sexy. They liked blending in. They liked wearing boys’ jeans and tattered baseball hats.

She watched Abby run to the truck with the same black bag in her hand. Was it weightier now? Sure it was, Perfect thought, reaching into her Navajo-print purse and pulling out a pack of Capris. She lit a match and sucked in some smoke as Abby’s truck disappeared from her rearview mirror.

There was time.

Perfect fussed with her hair, trying to imagine how it would look with a few inches trimmed away and a wash of brown color. She’d have to stop by one of the shops on Oxford Square and buy a roll-neck sweater, preferably gray, and a pair of jeans. Only slightly faded, of course. And was there a sporting goods store that sold really good shoes? She couldn’t remember.

Makeup? Almost none. Maybe a dull gloss on her lips, and, yeah, she’d have to remove the color from her nails and then cut them down a bit.

The sunlight bled over the far grassy hill and stretched its weight across the old farmhouse, a dilapidated barn with a tin roof, making the light shine hard in her eyes, and over the bumping green hills close to the highway.

What else did she have? What else did she know? Oh, yes, the cousin.

She remembered from the phone the way Abby’s cousin had this smoky confident voice that kept on asking her to come back to Oxford. At one point, she almost thought the cousin had her convinced, but Abby would start crying and say she didn’t want to talk to the police again or any of their family. Especially some pussy uncle. What did Abby say? She hated them all, or something like that.

There was something else she spotted in that old photo album about both the cousin and the mother. They had the damned most intense eyes Perfect had seen. Almost like they saw everything. Three hundred and sixty degrees. Kind of grabbed you right through the photo.

Kind of a weight or maybe a heft to what they saw. Sort of sleepy. Sort of intelligent. The eye thing. Yeah, she could do the eye thing.