Karin Slaughter - Faithless

He asked, “You okay?”

Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. “Allergies,” she told him.

“Yeah.”

Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn’t wring them again. “How’d you hurt your leg, exactly?”

“Car accident,” he told her, then smiled again. “Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.”

“That’s all it takes.”

“Yeah,” he said, then, “Mister Jingles died last year.”

His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. “I’m sorry.”

The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.

Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. “When Mom told me about Sibyl…” His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.

He said, “I just couldn’t believe it.”

“I guess she told you about me, too.”

He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. “She was upset.”

Lena didn’t try to hide her sarcasm. “I bet.”

“No, really,” Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. “My aunt Shelby- you remember her?” Lena nodded. “She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.”

“I didn’t know,” Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg’s mother, they hadn’t exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.

“If I had known…” Greg began, but didn’t finish.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. “I was really upset to hear it.”

“It was pretty upsetting,” Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, “What?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. “You used to not say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like feelings.”

She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. “What things did I used to say?”

He mulled it over. “‘That’s life’?” he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. “‘Tough shit’?”

She knew he was right, but she couldn’t begin to know how to explain it. “People change.”

“ Nan says you’re seeing somebody.”

“Yeah, well” was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.

He said, “ Nan looks good.”

“She’s had a hard time.”

“I couldn’t believe y’all were living together.”

“She’s a good person. I didn’t really see that before.” Hell, she didn’t see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.

For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, “What CD?”

“Huh?”

“Your accident.” She pointed to his leg. “What CD were you looking for?”

“Heart,” he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.

“Bebe Le Strange?” she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn’t scrub a toilet without hearing “Even It Up” in her head.

“It was the new one,” he told her.

“New one?”

“They came out with a new one about a year ago.”

“That Lovemonger stuff?”

“No,” he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. “Kick-ass stuff. Back-to-the-seventies Heart stuff. I can’t believe you don’t know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.”

She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn’t even know where her old CDs were.

“Lee?”

She had missed something he’d said. “Sorry, what?”

“I need to go,” he told her. “Mama’s waiting.”

Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.

He said, “Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. “You, too.”

She realized she was still holding the daisies, and she leaned down to put them on Sibyl’s grave. When she looked back up, Greg was limping toward the parking lot. She kept staring, willing him to turn around. He didn’t.

Jeffrey leaned against the tile, letting the hot water from the shower blast his skin. He had bathed last night, but nothing could get rid of the feeling that he was covered in dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt from a grave. Opening that second box, smelling the musty scent of decay, had been almost as bad as finding Abby. The second box changed everything. One more girl was out there, one more family, one more death. At least he hoped it was just one girl. The lab wouldn’t be able to come back with DNA until the end of the week. Between that and analyzing the letter Sara had been sent, the tests were costing him half his budget for the rest of the year, but Jeffrey didn’t care. He would get another job down at the Texaco pumping gas if he had to. Meanwhile, some Georgia state representative was in Washington right now enjoying a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.

He forced himself to get out of the shower, still feeling like he needed another hour under the hot water. Sara had obviously come in at some point and put a cup of coffee on the shelf over the sink, but he hadn’t heard her. Last night, he had called her from the scene, giving her the bare details of the find. After that, Jeffrey had driven what little evidence they found in the box to Macon himself, then gone back to the station and reviewed every note he had on the case. He made lists ten pages long of who he should talk to, what leads they should follow. By then, it was midnight, and he had found himself trying to decide whether or not to go to Sara’s or his own home. He even drove by his house, too late remembering that the girls had already moved in. Around one in the morning, the lights were still on and he could hear music from the street as a party raged inside. He had been too tired to go in and tell them to turn it off.

Jeffrey slipped on a pair of jeans and walked into the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee. Sara was at the couch, folding the blanket he had used last night.

He said, “I didn’t want to wake you,” and she nodded. He knew she didn’t believe him, just like he knew that he was telling the truth. Like it or not, his nights had been spent alone for most of the last few years, and he hadn’t known how to bring what he had found out there in the woods home to Sara. Even after what had happened in the kitchen two nights ago, getting in bed with her, climbing in between the fresh sheets, would have felt like a violation.

He saw her empty mug on the counter and asked, “You want some more coffee?”