WE WERE ALL SITTING AROUND the kitchen table.
Claire had put on some coffee and was thawing a Sara Lee cake from the freezer. “Maybe I could just put that on my head,” I said, rubbing my noggin where it had hit the post.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better,” I lied. Getting knocked unconscious wasn’t like on TV. As a kid, I’d watch private eye Joe Mannix get knocked out every week, wake up a few minutes later and carry on without taking so much as an aspirin. But there was a sizeable bump on the back of my head, and it pulsed with pain.
“Maybe you should go to the hospital,” Claire said. “There’s a small one in Groverton. You could go there. You might have a concussion, you know.”
“No, no,” I said. “I think I’m okay.” I paused. “You got any Tylenol?”
“We’ll have to watch you tonight,” Trixie said. “Wake you up every once in a while, make sure you’re okay.”
I gave her a tired look.
“You can’t drive back today, Zack,” she said. “It might not be safe, getting hit in the head and all.” She paused. “You’ll have to sleep here tonight.” She tried to say it neutrally, but her words seemed to carry some extra meaning.
“I hope the couch is okay,” Claire said. “Miranda’s in the guest room.”
“What?” I said, wondering if there was still someone here I’d not met yet. “Who’s Miranda?”
“That’s me, Zack,” said the woman I knew as Trixie. “We might be able to get you something more comfortable than the couch.” And I saw that twinkle in her eye, the one I’d seen shortly after I’d first met her, before I knew how she made her living two doors down from our house in Oakwood.
“So, what’s your real name?” I asked. “You’re Trixie, but you’re also Miranda, but I think you might also be Candace.”
Her eyebrows went up at the mention of the third name. “You’ve been asking around,” she said, impressed. “But my real name, the one I was born with, is Miranda.”
“Miranda,” I said softly. “What would you like me to call you?”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe it’ll be easier for you to just keep calling me Trixie.”
“Okay,” I said, “Trixie.”
Don Bennet, his green tractor hat sitting on the table next to his coffee cup, said, “Listen, I’m sorry about all this.”
“Sure.”
“You threw a real scare into us. We’ve always been afraid someone might figure out the connection, come looking for…Miranda, or Katie.” The little girl was in the next room, watching cartoons. “And now, knowing there’d been trouble, we were kind of on edge.”
I took a sip of my coffee. It was hot, and I blew on it. Quietly, I said, “Would you have done it, Don?”
“Hmmm?”
“Would you have killed me?”
He ran his hand over his mouth, and I could hear his rough palms going across his whiskers like sandpaper. “Yeah,” he said. “If I had to do it to protect Katie, yeah, I’d have done it.”
“You ever killed someone before?” I asked.
Don Bennet shook his head very slowly. “Shit, no.” The question surprised him. “I’m a machinist. Worked on the Ford line for a while, building vans. Now I work in Groverton, fix tractors.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I would hope I’d never have to do anything like that. But a man does what he has to do to protect his family.”
Trixie wanted to know how I’d found her. The gas station receipt, I said. From the center console of her GF300.
“Shit, that was pretty careless, wasn’t it?” she said, then, worried that Katie might have heard her obscenity, glanced over her shoulder into the living room, where the little girl was flipping the channels. I heard Bart Simpson crack wise.
“Put it back on six!” Claire shouted.
“It’s The Simpins,” Katie said.
“Your show’s on six!” She shook her head. “She’s not watching The Simpsons yet.”
Trixie, ignoring the exchange, said, “I was afraid I’d left some clue on the GPS thing. I’ve programmed the route to get up here before, but I always delete it from the trip record, to be safe.”
“I haven’t even used that thing,” I said. “I haven’t got a clue how it works.”
“Actually, I’m kind of surprised the cops let you take the car.”
“They didn’t, at first,” I said. “But once the forensics people were done with it, they gave it to me.”
Claire was serving the chocolate cake. It was still pretty frozen, and I had to force my fork in, but it was still good. I’d had no lunch, and despite the headache, was ready to eat.
“So,” I said with some formality, looking at Trixie, “maybe you’d like to tell me what’s going on. I mean, I’ve come all this way and all.”
She smiled at me, reached over and touched my hand. “Claire’s my sister,” she said. Claire, who’d gotten up to put some dishes in the sink, looked at Trixie over her shoulder. “And Don here is my brother-in-law. And”-she nodded toward the living room-“you’ve met Katie. My little girl.”
“You told me, a long time ago,” I said, “that you didn’t have any children.”
“I remember,” she said. “I guess, first of all, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. I wanted to protect her. And also, a large part of me doesn’t feel I deserve to be called a mother.”
Claire, sitting back down, said, “Miranda.”
“It’s true,” Trixie said. “If I were a good mother, a responsible mother, I wouldn’t have had to ask my sister, and her husband here, to raise her.” She gave Don a warm smile and he gave a tired shrug.
“Why are Claire and Don raising Katie?” I asked. “It’s not just because of, you know, your choice of occupation.”
“No,” Trixie said. “That’s not it.”
Everyone was suddenly very quiet. No one stirred coffee or cut cake. The only sound came from the TV in the other room.
“I could never guarantee that Katie would be safe, living with me,” Trixie said. “I’ve spent the last four years looking over my shoulder. The men, that man, coming after me, he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Katie to get at me.”
“Are we talking about Gary Merker?” I asked.
“He murdered Katie’s father,” she said. “And he’d like nothing more than to find me, kill me too. And Katie.”
“Why?”
Trixie opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out right away.
“Is it because of that massacre at the Kickstart?” I asked. “I’ve talked to the police in Canborough. I know about that night, when the three bikers were shot and killed. And how Merker, and his friend Leo Edgars, somehow managed not to get killed, saying they weren’t there at the time. How, after that, Merker bailed on his share of the drugs and prostitution, how he let the Comets run things, take over his share of the market. What happened, Trixie? Did Merker cut some sort of deal with the competition? Wipe out his buddies? Was that easier than trying to get them in on the deal, too? Did you see something? Are you a witness?”
Trixie listened in quiet amazement. She was taken aback at how much I knew, I could tell that by the look on her face.
“Is that why Merker’s after you? Because of what you know? And something you took from him?”
Trixie got up, walked over to the row of hangers by the back door, fished something out of a jacket, and came back to the table. It was a piece of paper, folded over. She unfolded it.
“This was the note that was left for me, in the basement, when we found Martin Benson.”
I remembered her finding it, how she wouldn’t let me see it.
“It’s not all as simple as it seems,” she said, pushing the note across the table to me.
It read:
Dearest Candy or should I say Trixie?
So sorry we missed you bitch. Ran into Mr. Benson instead, looking threw your house. He didn’t know where you are. He’d of told us if he’d know. Leo’s all freaked, and hungry, so we have to go. But we know where you live, right? We’ll be coming back. When we do you better have what you took from me or we’ll do you to bitch. I want all of it plus interest. Hows your little mini bitch? I bet shes a cutie. You’ll here from us soon.
It wasn’t signed, but given that its author had mentioned “Leo” in the letter, it might as well have been. And just because someone wasn’t a master criminal didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
Reading from the letter, I said, “‘I want all of it plus interest.’” I looked at Trixie. “What’s that all about?”
She took a long breath. “I ripped him off,” she said quietly. “To the tune of about half a million bucks.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You took five hundred thousand dollars off this guy?”
“Not all at once. A little bit at a time, so he wouldn’t notice. It was my going-away money.”
“Is that the only reason he’s after you?” I asked. “Just for the money? It doesn’t have anything to do with those three bikers getting shot?”
The Bennets exchanged glances.
“Oh, I think he’d like to talk to me about that too,” Trixie said.