Where was Joyce?Why hadn’t she come to the station with him? Suddenly he desperately needed her there with him.
“Because the opposite of love isn’t hate,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s indifference. And it seems clear from your actions—calling regularly, lending money, hiring a lawyer for her, visiting her classes on campus—that you were anything but indifferent to Catriona Dell.”
“And if I hated her?” Simon asked.
“We both know you didn’t hate her,” Bechdel replied. “You don’t really hate anyone—it’s not your style.”
“Except one person,” Kirkpatrick tossed in, like it was an afterthought.
Myself, Simon silently finished for him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR LAURA
The vacuum was clogged. Laura tried to open the compartment with the sweeper bag, but the tab kept sticking and she couldn’t slip her thumb around it. She considered throwing the entire machine out the window, except none of the windows in the hotel opened.
She’d wanted to call off sick today, but without Terry’s income she would have serious trouble making rent and paying the electric bill when it came. They’d need another propane tank soon, it’d been so cold lately. So she was at work, the day after her brother died in a botched armed robbery and a week after the man she thought was her boyfriend was killed in the same hotel she was now considering relieving of one of their vacuums. And she’d woken up with morning sickness, except now it was well past two o’clock and she still felt nauseous.
She couldn’t believe she’d essentially passed out in the interview room with the two detectives yesterday. If they hadn’t known she was pregnant yet, they sure as hell did now. It had been nice talking about Dermot though. About all the good things he’d done, for Laura and for others. They’d only asked her once about the complaint Terry filed with the social service office against Dermot, and Laura had told them the truth. It was a year and a half ago. Terry was just being an asshole, complaining that Dermot was spending too much time checking up on Laura. This was before Terry had gotten clean, and Dermot hadn’t wanted Laura to be living on her own with a drunk and a druggie. It’d all blown over in the end, but not without Dermot having to go to sensitivity training and having a tense meeting with his boss.
Laura also told the police officers that Dermot had never done anything romantic with her until after she was eighteen and no longer under his supervision through social services.
That’d been true too.
Laura walked back into the room to switch the pillowcases and fluff them up for the next customer. A twenty-dollar bill was shoved underneath the television remote from the previous occupant and she grabbed at it greedily, shoving it into the pocket of her uniform pants and doing calculations in her head about whether she might be able to stop at the grocery store on her way home from work.
She looked at the clock on the bedside table and decided she had time to sit down for a minute. Her mind swam with thoughts, each one moving around in her head like a tadpole, and she couldn’t make sense of much beyond the fact that she needed to figure out how to fix the damn vacuum so she didn’t get fired.
Laura closed her eyes for a second and her hand went instinctively to her stomach, even though it looked flatter than usual. She needed to eat something.
Her phone buzzed with a message in her pocket. She knew it wouldn’t be Trina. Laura texted and called her several times yesterday, but Trina ignored each one. It was hard for Laura to admit she didn’t know Dermot well, but she remained certain she knew him better than Trina.
Her phone buzzed again, and Laura decided she might just have to look at it, but when she sat up to pull the phone out of her pocket there was a knock on the door behind her. She turned from the window overlooking the parking lot to see a man standing in the propped-open doorway of the room. His blond hair was slicked back in a stylish way, and he wore a suit. The nice kind, that fit him just so in the shoulders. Laura could almost smell the money coming off him—maybe it was the pregnancy—and she wondered why he was standing there, in this mediocre hotel in the middle of nowhere.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He stepped into the room. His voice was deep and had the smallest trace of an accent Laura didn’t recognize.
“I’m not scared.” Laura stood up, but her head swam and she had to reach out to the arm of the chair to steady herself. She prayed she wouldn’t be sick in front of this stranger. She really needed to eat something.
The hallway outside had gone quiet. Laura couldn’t hear any of the other cleaning women working. No radio on, no feet rustling on the carpet.
“Be careful.” The man came over and placed his hands gently on Laura’s arms and guided her back to the chair. “Are you all right?”
“Do you need help with something?” Laura asked, ignoring his question. She’d prefer to be alone right now. She closed her eyes for a minute, hoping the room would stay still.
“I stayed here last night,” he explained. “I think I left something in the bathroom.”
“I didn’t see anything when I cleaned in there,” Laura lied. She hadn’t cleaned the bathroom yet, but she was getting a strange feeling from the man and she wanted to encourage him to leave as quickly as possible. The stairwell door scraped open and closed somewhere down the hallway, but the footsteps disappeared into another wing of the hotel.
She was alone with him.
“It’s very tiny. You might have missed it.” He stood so close to her that she smelled his cologne, which, unlike his suit, was cheap. Laura didn’t wear perfume. Dermot always smelled like dryer sheets and ivory soap.
“Like I said, I didn’t see it. Maybe someone else turned it in at the front desk.”
“I’ll just go check.”
He went into the bathroom while Laura stood there. She heard him pull back the shower curtain and the dull plastic thud of moving the wastebasket and setting it back down. The noise stopped, and from the bathroom he called, “I found it!”
He reappeared from the bathroom holding a small silver tube. “My lucky lighter. I can’t make a sale without it.” He smiled.
Laura gave a wobbly smile back. Maybe the guy was just some salesman, traveling from one town to the next.
She felt so awful lately, and her life had basically imploded, that this small glimmer of happiness from a stranger made Laura want to be kind and normal, if only for a few seconds.
“What do you sell?” she asked.
“Oh, you know. Stuff.” He waved the question off with his hand, like he was saying no to the offer of more bread at a restaurant. “It’s boring. Not nearly as interesting as you.”
Laura gave an automatic smile, but then his response made its way through her foggy brain and his words registered. The smile stayed on her face like a mask. “What do you mean?”
He moved towards her, and the friendly swagger he had a second ago shifted into something venomous. “I know all about you, Laura.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know everything about you. I know you live in a trailer out off Rockland Road, I know your brother was a recovering addict, I know that your boyfriend died and then your brother died.” He glanced over at the door of the room, which was still open. There were voices, somewhere in the distance.
“Get away from me.” Laura took a step back.
“It seems like people who are close to you keep ending up dead.”
Her heart pounded. Laura thought her chest might burst into a thousand pieces. She couldn’t believe what a complete nightmare her life had become. Her mind couldn’t make sense of any of it.
“I haven’t hurt anyone.”
“Are you sure of that?” He was very close to her now. Close enough that he reached out and twirled a lock of her hair between his fingers. Laura’s entire body started to shake.
“Yes.” The word barely came out.
The man leaned in. As his cheap cologne wafted over her, nausea rose up Laura’s throat again. His breath warmed the outside of her ear, and Laura secretly hoped she might vomit on his shiny shoes. And then she hoped that she wouldn’t, because she was certain he might kill her just for that.
“Be careful, Laura. Stop looking in places where you don’t belong.”
He let go of her hair, and before Laura could do anything he was out the door and gone.
Laura stood in the same place for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few seconds. She reminded herself to breathe.
She pulled out her phone, not sure who she would even call.
The message that arrived earlier glowed on her screen.
