Mariah Stewart - Hard Truth

“Yes, but it is several acres away.” She was still staring at the car.

“You’re incredibly subtle.” He took his keys out of his pocket and opened the driver’s-side door.

“Great. I’ve been dying for a ride in this machine all week.” Lorna grinned, opened the passenger door, and got in.

“You should have said something. I’d have been happy to show ‘er off.” T.J. slid behind the wheel and started the engine. “You want the top up?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Just asking. Some women don’t like to have their hair blown around.”

“I’m not one of them.”

He turned the car around and stopped at the end of the drive.

“Which way?”

“Turn right,” Lorna told him. “Then right again in about a quarter of a mile.”

He accelerated slowly, then proceeded to the intersection, where he made a right at the stop sign. Lorna leaned her head back and closed her eyes, letting the breeze blow around her. She was smiling, and he found himself smiling, too.

“That was nice,” she told him when he pulled up in front of Billie’s house and cut the engine.

“Not much of a ride. We’ll take the long way home.”

“Yay.” She got out of the car and waited for T.J., then walked up the two steps leading to the front door. She was about to ring the bell when the door opened.

“Billie, this is T. J. Dawson, the private investigator I told you about,” Lorna said.

“Pleased to meet you.” Billie did not offer her hand, but appeared to be studying him. After a long moment, apparently approving of what she saw, she stepped aside and gestured for her visitors to come inside. “I don’t know what there is to investigate, but we can talk.”

She led them into the living room, which was furnished with an old blue sofa-the cushions of which were sagging slightly-one end table, a floor lamp that Lorna recognized as having come from her family’s attic, a chair with a makeshift slipcover, and a television set on top of a bookcase.

Billie must have caught Lorna’s glance at the lamp, because she said, “That lamp, your momma gave it to me. If you need it, or you want it, you can have it back.”

“No, no, I don’t need it,” Lorna assured her.

“Well, you ever feel you do, you just tell me.” Billie sat in the corner chair.

Lorna and T.J. sat side by side on the sofa.

“Billie, have you been hearing about all the bodies found in the back field?” Lorna asked.

“You tell me what that all means,” Billie visibly shivered, “ ’cause I never heard tell of such a thing. Bodies all through the woods, they’re saying on the news.” She looked from Lorna to T.J. and back again. “You don’t think they believe I had anything to do with all that, do you?”

“Billie, I honestly don’t know what anyone is thinking at this point,” Lorna told her. “But if they gave it serious thought, they’d figure out that you’re not a likely suspect. You’re not physically big enough, or strong enough, to have pulled it off. So I think that shouldn’t be a worry right now.”

“Well, it ain’t like I got nothing else on my mind.” She turned to T.J. “Lorna said you wanted to ask me some questions. You go right ahead. What do you want to talk about first?”

“Let’s talk about the night Jason disappeared,” T.J. said.

“Go ’head.”

“Do you remember where you had been that night before Jason came home?”

“I was right there at home. I’d worked until nine-thirty at the diner, then had to wait for almost forty minutes for Stella’s husband to come pick us up.” Billie turned to Lorna and said, “Stella Rusznick worked the same shift as me, and her husband picked her up every night. Nights when I didn’t have a ride, they’d drop me off. Most nights he was there by ten, but that night he was a little late. He’d stopped at Kelly’s Tavern on the way and had himself a few.”

Billie laughed hoarsely.

“I never knew how scared you could get when a drunk was behind the wheel. All the times I drove drunk, or rode with someone who was, I never was scared. Once I stopped drinking, though, whoa! Scared the bejesus outta me to be in that car with Stella’s husband. Never knew what sober people felt, driving with me, until I sobered up myself.”

“So you got home around ten after ten that night,” Lorna said.

“ ‘Round there. I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. Never drank it until I stopped- Well, anyway, I made tea and took it outside and I sat on the back steps. Looked out across that field, looked up into the sky. Wondered where my girl was.” Billie stopped and swallowed hard. “With Mellie gone, I had a lot of time to think, mostly about how bad a mother I’d been. Mother from hell, I’d say, and that would be the truth. I prayed every night that wherever she was, she might know how sorry I was for every time I hurt her. Every time I raised my voice when I didn’t have to. Every time I ignored her or made her feel like she didn’t matter. I sat there each night after she disappeared, wondering if she was still alive… wondering if she’d just gotten so tired of me being the way I was that maybe she simply up and ran off.”

The small house was still and silent as a tomb. Billie’s pain and guilt were palpable, her words so soft, both Lorna and T.J. had to lean forward to hear her.

“Hasn’t a night passed since that I haven’t wondered.” Billie’s gaze shifted and she stared out the window to her right. “Even now…”

“Where were you when Jason got home that night?” T.J. tried to steer the conversation back on topic.

“I was still there, out on the back steps. I heard the car pull up and I heard the door slam and I waited to see if he was going to come out, but he didn’t, so I went on into the kitchen.”

“Talk to me about that,” T.J. said. “About what happened when you went into the kitchen.”

“Well, it’s like I told Walker. I went inside and there he was, stumbling drunk. Pissed me off so bad, I could hardly see. I hadn’t had a drop since my girl disappeared, and there was my boy, drunk as a skunk at three in the morning. He’s there, looking for something to eat, and we have words. He’s fourteen years old and he’s shit-faced in my kitchen.”

“What did you say?” T.J. asked.

“What do you think I said?” Billie raised an eyebrow. “So he starts yelling at me, about the pot callin’ the kettle black. We stood around doing a lot of shouting, I remember that. He’s yelling at me, about me teaching him how to be a drunk, and I’m yelling at him to look at my life and learn from it. That I wanted better for him, that I may not have given him much in the past, but I was trying to give him something right then and there. Drinking like that ain’t no kind of life. I ruined myself and I ruined my children, but it could end with me, if he did better than what I had done. And then it just stopped.”

Her voice was thin, almost wistful, like a girl’s.

“The yelling just stopped. And I told him how sorry I was for the way things had been, for all I’d done to him and to Mellie.” Her eyes filled. “And he said, ‘That’s easy to say, now that she’s gone.’ ”

Billie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Well, that was like a slap in the face, but one I deserved-I did-and I told him that. I deserved to have him hate me and I wouldn’t have blamed him one damned bit if he did.”

“And then what?” Lorna asked.

“And then my big, strapping, drunk fourteen-year-old man-child put his head on my shoulder and he started to cry.” She nodded her head. “Just like that. Jason started to cry. Hadn’t cried since he was maybe three, four years old. And I put my arms around him and I rocked him, just like I did when he was a baby. At least, I rocked him best I could, him being so much taller than me and all. But it was okay, he was okay after that. And I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not too late, for me to be more of a mother, him to be more of a son.’ ”