Driving With the Top Down (14 page)

“I did see a box of old albums over there,” Colleen said. “Did you notice them?”

“You mean like photo albums?”

“No, records. Vinyl. I thought kids were all back into that these days.”

“Oh, yeah. My—Vince’s brother, this guy I know, he’s into that. But you have to have special equipment to listen to it.” She shrugged. “Why bother when you can just put on Spotify?”

“I agree,” Colleen said, thinking of the many times she’d moved in her younger days, hauling crate after crate of LPs from one place to the next and setting up her stereo with the nickel and two pennies taped to the needle so it played over the skips on her Duran Duran albums.

“Where’s that girl?” Tamara asked.

“Girl?”

“Woman, whatever.”

“Bitty?”

“Yeah. She was talking to some guy about guns.”

Colleen gave a laugh. “Bitty hates guns.”

“She didn’t seem to.”

“I’m sure she was just being polite.”

A sudden light came into Tamara’s eyes. “What if she wants to kill her husband?”

“What?”

Tam shrugged. “What if that’s what all this is about? She’s mad because he went away with the guys one time too many and now—
boom!—
she finds herself in some obscure town—”

“Raleigh, North Carolina, isn’t obscure.”

“—and she thinks she can buy some old gun at this place no one would ever associate with her, and bump off her husband with an untraceable gun.”

“Are you finished?”

“The question is, is he finished?” She raised both her eyebrows in a gesture that said,
Right? Seems possible.…

Colleen had to stifle a smile. At least the kid was imaginative. “I think Lew is safe from Bitty, at least for the time being. The untraceable gun isn’t bad, but the dissatisfied wife with a grudge is always the first suspect in a case like that. She’d be caught in an instant.”

“Not if she had an alibi.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s the alibi?”

“We are!”

“You’ve lost me.”

“When we bring her back home, she asks us to wait outside while she goes in to make sure, I don’t know, that the door’s unlocked or whatever, and then she shoots him, comes running out, screaming that her husband has been murdered and, ‘Quick, call the cops!’ and all that jazz, and she throws the gun into the trailer and the cops never suspect her because she’s been with us the whole time, which we can testify to, and then you and I drive away with the evidence.”

Colleen looked at her earnest, excited face for a moment, and saw that there really was kind of a creative soul behind all the blasé disaffected teenage cynicism she sometimes projected. “There are a few flaws in your logic.”

“Like what?”

“Like what does she think we’re going to do when we find the gun when we’re unloading?”

“She assumes you’re going to protect her.” Tamara raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you?”

“No way.”

“No? Your best friend?”

“My friend from college,” Colleen wasn’t sure why she felt so compelled to correct, “and, no, I’m not holding on to a murder weapon that could, presumably, then be pinned on me for someone who has already proven herself to be capable of murder.”

Tamara shook her head. “Some friend.” But there was a smile in her voice.

“I’m not doing it for family members either,” she added. “So don’t go counting on me ever being an alibi for you.”

Something crossed Tamara’s expression.

“Not that I expect you to cross the law,” Colleen hastened to add. She suspected Tamara had probably been accused of a lot of things in her young life, whether she’d done them or not. Not murder, of course. Tamara went to juvie for getting caught driving drunk with three ounces of weed in the car—not her car, maybe not her weed, who knew? Chris had shown zero patience with any of this, so there was no way for a fourth party to know the truth. She suspected Tamara was acutely aware of that herself, that her father would always leap to the worst conclusion. It was time the girl had someone she could count on, someone who would accept her for who she was instead of constantly being disappointed in her for who she wasn’t.

It was such a shame her father didn’t see that. Or care. Maybe he truly just didn’t care. Had Tamara’s mother? Colleen took a moment to imagine what it would be like if she died and Jay was left with no one who strongly advocated for him. The thought was too much to bear. She couldn’t stand it, so she pushed it away.

Bitty joined them, then, wordlessly.

“Did you get a gun?” Tamara asked right off the bat.

Bitty looked alarmed.

“She’s kidding,” Colleen said quickly, shooting a look at the girl. “She was just commenting on how little there is of interest to buy here.”

“Someone just got a saddle for seven dollars,” Tamara added.

“What?” Colleen could have used a saddle! Her profit on that would have been huge! “You guys occupy yourselves. If you want to bid on anything, you have to go register—otherwise, I don’t know, have coffee, eat doughnuts, complain about me, whatever, but I’m going to bid.”

Two hours later, after fiercely fighting the guilt instinct that had her thinking about cutting out early in order to quell the bored beasts, Colleen did have a saddle (twelve bucks, though, and it was English, not as nice as the ornate Western one that Tamara had pointed out earlier), as well as a large collection of molding scores (easily over a thousand bucks’ worth for twenty-two), a box of antique tools in excellent condition with some plumbing pieces they’d added in for free, and a huge plastic Tupperware box—just like one her grandmother had used to keep cookie cutters in—full of miscellaneous kitchen items and candles.

And, perhaps most important, she’d established that they were playing by her rules. This was her trip, her business, and she wasn’t going to let two sourpuss interlopers ruin it.

All that said, though, she was secretly glad for the company. Although there had been many tense moments, from the initial stony silences and awkward attempts at conversation with Tamara to the anxiety of waiting for Bitty’s hour-and-a-half trip to the CVS half a mile away—explained away by some far-fetched tall tale (ha) of a fight with a midget and a faulty gas pump—the truth was that the road got dark and lonely at night. It was one thing to picture herself singing along with the radio on a sunny, warm day, cruising through the Carolinas and stopping here and there for barbecue or shrimp and grits, but drop the temperature a few degrees, add some cool night rain, and put the top up, and the movie changed from a chick flick to a potential horror movie in the blink of an eye.

But at least she wasn’t alone when she stopped at an all-night truck stop for gas in some tiny unnamed town at 11
P.M
. on the way out of North Carolina, as she did tonight. At least someone would notice if she didn’t return from the grimy, sticky-floored bathroom with the vending machine in the stall offering colored and textured condoms as well as matchbook-sized “books” offering
SEXUAL POSITIONS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
and
KAMA SUTRA WAYS OF LOVE
.

Actually, for seventy-five cents, she’d been unable to resist buying the sexual positions from around the world one, which was how she knew they were the size of matchbooks. (She intended to give the book to Kevin as a gag gift, and its miniature size made the prospect all the funnier to her as she slipped it into her purse.)

So she’d grabbed some ginger ales plus two white wines in small containers that looked like juice boxes, so she and Bitty could make their old college concoction when they stopped for the night. She also grabbed a caffeine-free Coke for Tamara and an assortment of chocolate and candy, including Jolly Ranchers, a sticky candy she hated but that Jay had always had a strange fondness for, ever since some dentally irresponsible elementary teacher had given them out as an incentive for good work, so she figured Tamara might like the same.

And, in fact, she was right. That was the first thing Tamara went for.

“Your cousin likes those too,” Colleen commented, pulling the car onto the lone highway and clicking on her brights.

“Why didn’t he come?” Tamara asked, mouth full of sugar.

“He went to the Baseball Hall of Fame with his dad. Guy stuff. There was no way I could compete with that.”

“How old is he?” Bitty asked quietly.

“Thirteen. But you should see him—I swear he’s already over six feet tall. Practically a man.” She went on, talking more and more about his growth spurt at thirteen, his skills at baseball, his good manners, sense of humor, unfortunate love of video games, sloppiness, and everything else that came to mind, because once she started thinking about him, she missed everything about him, and home, and Kevin. Suddenly she felt like she was in another world, one where she didn’t quite belong.

She’d never believed much in astrology, but she was a Cancer, the sign associated with homebodies who got homesick easily, which described Colleen to a T.

“Sorry,” she said when she realized she’d long since lost her audience. “I don’t mean to be a bore. God, imagine how bad I’ll be when I have grandchildren. I’ll have one of those ridiculous ‘brag books’ that folds out like an accordion, and I’ll be showing total strangers my babies.” She gave a laugh, but she was the only one.

“I think it’s nice,” Tamara said, a response that surprised Colleen.

Bitty, in the backseat, said nothing. Colleen actually wondered if she’d bored her to sleep. But after a few minutes, she heard a sniffle from the back. Then another. Then Bitty made some joke about being allergic to South Carolina, and Colleen instructed Tamara to get a pack of tissues out of the glove box and hand them back to Bitty.

She offered Benadryl as well, since she always kept some in her purse in case anyone had an allergic reaction to anything (she’d been terrified of allergic reactions ever since hearing horror stories about bees and anaphylactic shock as a kid), but Bitty declined, and pretty soon her sniffles stopped and they turned up the radio and headed for the Bunker Inn in Florence, South Carolina.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tamara

The next B and B was kind of a shithole, in Tamara’s estimation: It was like someone’s house. No lock on the door, no private bathroom, just a small room in a hall of four, one of which was clearly the master suite and coincidentally where the “innkeepers” slept. The little soaps and shampoos in the hall bathroom (with childproofing on the cabinetry) didn’t match each other and looked like they’d been lifted from another hotel visit somewhere along the way … maybe sometime back. The conditioner was missing about a third of the little bottle, and the shampoo was crusted around the screw top. But who was Tamara to complain? She rarely stayed in hotels at all, and couldn’t remember ever going on something she could have called a “vacation”—most of her overnight stays had been in transit from one place to another, often in an emergency. So it wasn’t like she really cared enough to notice if it was a nice place or not, but she noticed Bitty’s nose had been turned up ever since they got there.

The funny thing was, she was clearly trying not to show it. Like, her determination to seem like she was just rolling with it became that much more conspicuous when they showed up at what Colleen’s notes had described as “a charming Colonial bed-and-breakfast with a tearoom and traditional English breakfast,” but which even Tamara could see looked like a regular suburban house with a table with teacups set up in the laundry room and the washer and dryer covered over with a quilt with a small rose print on it.

Very English. Ha.

The trip here hadn’t been all that rewarding either, so Colleen and Bitty—whom Tamara was thinking of as Bitchy—probably would have been happier at some glamorous spalike place where someone relieved them of their bags upon entry, and they had gotten lost between the last auction and there, running out of exit signs loaded with fast-food restaurants and gas stations, with bright hotel logos shining up from the trees off the side of the road. And here they ended up, Colleen announcing that “at least we’re somewhere,” and saying that if they were going to run out of gas, she’d rather do it with charged phones by daylight.

Tamara had asked if they could just use a car charger, but apparently, the cigarette lighter thing didn’t work in the old car.

They weren’t in the room longer than five minutes when the gravity of how gross the place was really hit home. Tamara walked into the bathroom and was nearly murdered by a
Jurassic Park
–worthy flying bug. She screamed bloody murder.

“What, what’s wrong?” said Colleen, jumping into Mom mode as Tamara fell backwards and covered her head with her arms.

“Pterodactyl,” she said with a muffled voice into her knees.

She looked up and saw the huge bug fly toward Colleen, who also squealed and ran away from it.

Bitty, however, watched it as a cat might watch a mouse—in a cartoon—and then jumped onto one of the ugly blue chairs to try to catch it.

Yeah, no—catch it. Not kill it. Not hurl a phone book at it or anything. But to catch the nasty thing.

With her bare. Freaking. Hands.

And she did, on her third try. She looked over her shoulder at the other two, her hands cupped around the thing—she could hear its nasty crunchy wings flapping against her bony fingers. “Could one of you wimps please get the door?”

Tamara was still frozen on the yellow tile floor, something that was probably far more dangerous thanks to germs than the huge bug, so Colleen rose from the bed and opened the door.

Bitty did the boy trick of acting like she was going to throw it in Colleen’s face, and then gave a big laugh when she shrieked.

She set it free, the way a Disney princess might let go of a bluebird.

“Holy crap,” Tamara said once the heavy door shut, leaving the three of them, thankfully no longer four, inside. “I can’t believe you just … caught that thing.”

Bitty walked over and washed her hands as daintily as if the scene had not happened at all. She laughed. “Why not?”

Tamara didn’t know how to say it, and instead glanced to Colleen, who was standing with her hands on her hips, looking warily about the room. “She can’t believe it because you come off like a total prissy pants.”