Break the Skin (30 page)

I pulled to the side of the road, and I could hear Rose screaming at Tweet to let her go. She couldn’t stand another minute with him. If he wanted Delilah Dade, she wasn’t going to stop him. She’d have a baby to worry over soon, and she wouldn’t have time to keep track of Tweet and whose bed he was in. Better to cut the cord right now and have it done, so she could get on with her life.

As much as I’d once held her to blame and wanted her gone, now that she was in misery, I couldn’t bear to see it. I pulled into their driveway and walked up onto the porch.

“Tell him,” Rose said to me. “Tell him you know all about that note. It’s plain what’s going on.”

I tried to get her to calm down. “It was just a note Delilah wrote. Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing in the world to Tweet.”

Rose stamped her foot. “I caught them. The two of them. Right here in my bed.” She gave a mighty yank on the backpack and it came free from Tweet’s hand. She stumbled backward, and I braced her, staggering a little with the weight. “You’re stupid, Tweet. You’re a stupid man, and I must’ve been an idiot to have ever wanted you.”

That was it, I thought, as I was telling the story to the officers. It was the idiocy of people so starved for love they didn’t have a thought in their heads of how easily their lives could spin out of control. That was the story of Lester and me, and Rose and Tweet, and Delilah. A story of want. A story of greed, but under it all a story of fear, which was the
same as love when push came to shove, and you found yourself shaking with the thought that you might never find that someone, that you’d always be alone in a world where everyone but you—you’d swear this to be true—was happy.

Tweet’s hands were pulling at his wild red hair like he was desperate to arrange those dreads just right. “Rose,” he said. “I swear … that woman … I didn’t … aw, hell …” I could see he was trying to put a sentence together, something that would bring him what he wanted at this time when everything was about to change. The problem, though—and I knew this as I found myself trying to do the same for the officers—was he didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew he wanted to go back to whatever ground he stood on before he and Delilah ended up in bed, so he wouldn’t have this unsettling feeling that everything was about to explode. A time before he felt the fear of being without Rose and their baby, who was soon to come. “You can’t leave me, Rose,” he finally said.

“You watch me.”

And with that, Tweet turned and stormed into the house, the screen door popping behind him with a violent slap.

Rose was trembling. I could feel her arms shaking, her chest heaving. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to hug her and rub her arms and tell her, “Shh, shh.” Tell her, “Here now, here.” Say, “Rose, oh, Rose.”

I didn’t turn away from her. At a time when it would have been so easy for me to tell her to grow up, things like this happened all the time with men—did she really think she could keep him?—I instead decided to be kind. On that morning, when she was hurting, I stood by her. I treated her with love. I held to the fact of that even as I told the officers the worst of it, the thing I’d kept to myself on account of it was too hard to say. I knew, once I did, there’d be no going back.

Rose said to me, “Let’s go, Laney. Let’s get out of here.” She reached out her hand and waited for me to take it.

That’s the moment that still haunts me, the moment when I started
to reach for her hand—in an instant, we’d be down the steps and into Mother’s car—but then I saw Lester’s truck turn down the New Hope Road, and that was enough to make me hesitate because I saw that someone was in the truck with him, and as he came closer, I saw that the other person was Delilah. The truck was slowing down, and I knew that soon Lester would pull in behind Mother’s Corolla, and he and Delilah might come up onto the porch, and then who knew what might happen.

“Come inside,” I said to Rose, hoping she hadn’t seen Delilah in Lester’s truck. “Let’s wash your face and get you something cool to drink and just let everything calm down for a while.”

“I’m not going in there,” Rose said, and then I knew she’d spotted Delilah and Lester because she said, “Oh, Jesus, Laney.”

Then she fainted.

I couldn’t hold her weight, but I was able to ease her down until she was sitting on the porch, her legs out in front of her, her head lolled over to the side.

Lester was making his way toward the porch.

“Go on back,” I told him. “Everything’s gone to hell with Rose and Tweet, and Delilah being here’s only going to make it worse.”

He came up the steps. I could tell he was in a state. “She started talking crazy after you left Walmart. Says she’s had it with waiting for Tweet to leave Rose. Says it’s time to settle this for good.” He was talking so fast I could barely follow it all, something about cutting the battery cables in her Malibu so she couldn’t drive out here. Then she threatened to tell the police about the plan to kill Rose. “She said she’d tell them it was me who meant to do it, all because Tweet told me to stay away from the band. Laney, I didn’t know what to do. Maybe you can talk some sense into her.”

Delilah opened the door and got out of the truck. “Quick,” I told Lester. “Get Rose inside the house.”

He stooped, got Rose under the arms, and struggled to lift her to
her feet. I gave him a hand. The jostling was enough to bring her back around, and she said, “What’s going on?”

“Lester’s going to take you inside, Rose,” I said, and she let him lead her into the house.

I went down the steps and across the grass to intercept Delilah. “What are you doing here?”

She had her purse hanging from her shoulder by its strap, and she sort of swung it to get me out of the way. “I’ve come for Tweet.”

I held my ground. “You don’t have any business inside that house. Not now.”

“Oh, I’ve been in that house.”

“I know you have. Rose knows it, too.”

Delilah gave me a smirk. “You think you know everything, don’t you?” It came to me then that maybe she’d been lying all along. Maybe she’d made up the story of what Rose said about Poke and me at the clinic that day. Delilah wanted to turn everything to suit her. Maybe she’d ransacked her trailer and painted those inverted pentagrams on Lester’s house herself, so we’d start to believe that Rose was evil. “Now, let me by,” Delilah said.

I put my hands out to grab her arms, but she took me by the shoulders and shoved me so hard that I ended up sprawled across the grass. “Tweet,” she called out. I heard her moving. Before I could get to my feet, I heard the screen door slap against its frame, and I knew she was inside.

So they were in the house, Rose and Tweet and Delilah and Lester, and I was in the yard, listening to the voices as they rose and clamored inside. I wanted to pretend it was just noise from a television turned up too loud, and for a few seconds I was able to do that on account of I couldn’t make out the words that they were saying. Their voices were all mixed up and hard to distinguish.

Then I heard Rose say, “You get out of my house. You, too, Lester Stipp.”

I could hear everything as clear as day then, like I was inside that house.

“Rose, I want to make sure you’re all right,” Lester said.

“Tweet,” Delilah called. “Tweet, baby.”

“Delilah?” Tweet said. “Jesus, what a mess.”

I knew I had to go in there. I had to try to talk some sense and get everyone to calm down. I started across the yard. I heard a door slam somewhere inside the house and then Delilah’s voice shouting, “Come out here and face this.”

Then I heard the first shot.

It rattled the windowpanes. I put my hand to my throat. I told myself to move, to open that door and go inside the house, but the echo of that shot was still in my ears, and I stood there not wanting to accept the fact of it.

Tweet said, his voice higher-pitched than normal, “You’re out of your head.” Then there was the noise of feet scrabbling over the hardwood floor and the thud of a body hitting a wall.

“That’s when I heard the second shot,” I told the officers. “That’s what I never told.”

They wanted to know why.

“Because we were guilty,” I said. “We’d had that plan.”

The big-bellied officer stood up, placed his hands flat on the table, and leaned over it so his face was only inches from mine. “Who did the killing?” he asked.

“Lester said it was Delilah. She had that .38 in her purse.”

He’d stepped out onto the porch, and he’d said, “Jesus, Laney.”

I could hear Delilah inside the house moaning and sobbing, saying, “Oh, Tweet. Tweet, baby. Wake up.”

It surprised me how calm I felt. How quiet everything was in the aftermath of those two shots. The morning already too hot. Not a breeze anywhere. The sun burning down.

“We can’t go to the police,” Lester had said. “You know it’ll come out what we were planning to do, and then what’ll it look like?”

“Like we came here this morning to do it. Like we were Delilah’s accomplices.”

“That’s right. Now, here’s what we’ve got to do to make sure the cops don’t get on our trail.”

Lester was going to get Delilah out of there, and I was going to go about my business. “Pretend none of this happened,” he told me, as if there were any chance of that. I was to go home. Change my clothes. Eat some breakfast. Say good morning to Mother. Just like this was any other morning.

“What about the gun?” I asked Lester.

The big-bellied officer stopped me there. “The .38,” he said. “The one Grandpa found hidden in the boy’s room.”

I nodded. “Lester gave it to me to get rid of.”

I walked into Rose and Tweet’s house that day, and I saw Rose on the bedroom floor, sort of wedged in between the wall and the bed. I saw her naked foot first. Her flip-flop had fallen off. Her toenails were painted orange. She was on her side, one arm reaching under the bed like she was trying to fish something out, and I imagined she’d been trying to hide from Delilah. I knew right away that Rose was dead. Her face was no longer a face, and her blood was on the hardwood floor, the front of the night table, and the chenille spread where her arm had lifted it so she could try to crawl under the bed.

Tweet was in the bathroom. He was wearing his Tweety Bird boxer shorts. He was on his knees, his torso folded over the edge of the bathtub.

Delilah was kneeling beside him. “Tweet, baby.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “Tweet.”

I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I held that .38—the gun that had killed Rose and Tweet—and its weight felt so strange to me. My whole life felt strange at that point. I knew I was moving—I was putting
the pistol up under my shirt to hide it; I was starting toward the door—but it seemed like someone else doing these things. The .38 was hot against my bare stomach, but I kept it there, too afraid to move it, not wanting to bring it out and look at it again.

Lester grabbed me by the arm. “Go out the back,” he said. “Make sure no one’s headed toward this house. Jesus, those shots were loud. Be careful, Laney. Don’t let anyone see you get in your car.”

Rose and Tweet’s house was so far out the New Hope Road toward the highway, it was possible that no one had heard the shots. The one most likely to have heard them was Mr. Hambrick, and without his hearing aids, he was deaf as a post. Mother’s house was on the other side of the cornfield, a good hundred yards away, and I hoped she’d had the radio playing, as she often did when she was getting ready for work, and hadn’t heard a thing. Still, I took care. I did what Lester told me. I went out the back door, and I peeked around the corner of the house. No traffic on the New Hope Road. No one come running up from town. All quiet at Mr. Hambrick’s. I hurried out to my car.

I drove around town for a while, just trying to get my head straight. I drove past Jess and Libby Raymond’s, and I met Bernard Goad’s truck coming from the other direction. My first thought was he’d somehow heard the shots and was coming to investigate, but then I saw that the truck was going so slowly it was almost standing still. Mr. Goad didn’t take notice of me. He was bent over the wheel, staring at the Raymond house with an anxious look on his face.

Ida Henline was watering flowers up by her house with a hose. She had on a bright red muumuu, and she was letting the water run over her petunias while she looked off in the distance at something I couldn’t fathom.

Luther Gibson was on his porch, tearing open an envelope. Rayanne Fines was putting up the red flag on her mailbox.

All those people going about their business, not knowing a thing about what I was up to.

I thought about driving out to the park and heaving the .38 into the lake. Then I saw my mother coming down the sidewalk. She waved her arms for me to stop. The .38 was still under my shirt, lying covered in my lap. I rolled down my window, and Mother said, “What are you doing? I need my car.”

“Just driving,” I said.

“Mr. Hambrick wants you to clean his house today. Have you forgot that?”

Mother got into the car, and I headed toward the house, praying she wouldn’t notice the lump in my lap and ask what I had under my shirt. Thank God she was too busy fussing about being late to work. She didn’t realize that anything was out of the ordinary.

At the house, I got out of the Corolla, fumbling to keep the gun from falling, and she slid over behind the wheel. “See you this evening,” she said.

Then she backed out onto the street and headed toward the highway.

I stood there awhile, clutching the .38 under my shirt, letting my heart slow down and my breath come more easily.

Then Mr. Hambrick came down the street in his pickup truck—the old white GMC, with the letters spelled out across the grille. I prayed he’d keep going, but he pulled up even with me and stopped. He leaned over and shouted out the window.

“You seen Poke?”

I said no, but in such a small voice Mr. Hambrick couldn’t hear.

He curled his hand around his ear and said, “What’s that?”

“I haven’t seen him,” I said, and this time he heard me.

“Door’s open to the house so you can clean.” He put the truck back in gear. “I’ve got to find that boy.”