Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [42]
“I think I must have missed part of the conversation,” said Gwen.
“You miss most of everything,” said Stacey, and in the know of that was the real heartbreak.
“Respect your mother,” I said. I knew she was right, though, and I knew what had been missed.
“I don’t want to be presumptuous…,” said Houser, and everybody at the table looked at him. For a moment I thought the attention would render him powerless to go on. Then he said, “…but maybe we can help. Five heads are better than two. And I’m trained in the analytical process.”
“What?” asked Gwen. “What’s going on?”
“Somebody got murdered, okay?” said Stacey. “It doesn’t concern you.”
Gwen’s fork stopped on the way to her mouth.
“Don’t worry, it happened a long time ago,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
Odd and I looked into our plates.
Houser nodded in Odd’s direction and said, “Him.”
The fork in Gwen’s hand started to shake. Pieces of mac ‘n cheese fell back to her plate. She laid down the fork and folded her hands in her lap.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand anything.”
I brought them all up to speed. I don’t know why. Maybe because arrangements would eventually have to be made, and we were a group now, whether we liked it or not.
I expected some skepticism. I would not have been surprised by derisive laughter. Instead, all three of them gave my news the most serious kind of attention. Not that any of them, or either of us, for that matter, knew any more about past lives than what we had seen on TV talk shows: middle-aged women claiming to have been Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette. Or phoney channelers talking in fake voices to ancient masters, for a fee. Or psychics who could make that long distance call for you to your dearly departed, if the price was right. I never saw a psychic yet who could tell you what the weather would be like two weeks down the road.
Nobody jumped on that end of it, though. It was the double-murder itself got to them. If Odd had an inside track, and it seemed very much that he did, then he had to go with it, take it to the end and bring down the son of a bitch who blew away those two kids. On that, there was consensus, with one possible hold-out, me.
Stacey, especially, got into it, identifying with Jeannie, and confirming from her own raging hormones that Odd was surely right in his belief that it was an older man, and that the motive was jealousy.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “If she hooked up with some other guy, she told somebody. You have to, you can’t keep a thing like that to yourself.”
“You told somebody…about us?” asked Houser
“Duh. I told Britney. I tell Britney everything.”
“I told you not to tell anyone. You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Anyone but Britney. You didn’t tell anybody?”
“No,” said Houser, “are you crazy?”
“Well…well… Britney saw me writing your name in my secret notebook and she made me tell.”
“You wrote my name?”
“A thousand times,” she said. “I loved you.”
Houser looked like a man contemplating suicide by mac ‘n cheese asphixiation.
“Odd,” I said, “you mentioned a secret notebook.”
“I did?”
“When we were talking to Karl Gutshall. You said he tried to break into your…into Jeannie’s locker and read her secret notebook.”
“I don’t remember that.”
Joan Osborne was singing…about God, of all things.
“Do all young girls keep secret notebooks?” Odd asked Stacey.
“For sure,” she said.
“I wish I’d known that,” said Houser.
“Did you?” asked Odd, of me. “Keep a secret notebook?”
I could still see it, after all these years, pink, full of swirls, in each swirl a dream, but those I did not remember, not the dreams, just the swirls, so many of them.
“Even I did,” said Gwen.
“Mom, please,” said Stacey.
“Well, I did. I’m not going to tell you what was in it. That’s for me to know and nobody to find out.”
“If she boinked the guy who killed her,” said Stacey, “she told someone. Word. And the name of the guy is written in her secret notebook. If that notebook is still around