Pieces of Her. Karin Slaughter
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to tear off the plastic and slam it into the nearest recycling bin. Her shoes thudded on the wooden planks. Hot rain drilled open her pores. She wasn’t wearing socks. A blister rubbed on her heel. Her shorts were bunched up. Her shirt was glued down. Her hair was like resin. She sucked in a great big gulp of wet air and coughed it back out.
The spray of blood coming from Betsy Barnard’s mouth.
Shelly already dead on the floor.
Laura with the knife in her hand.
Thwack.
Her mother’s face.
Her face.
Andy shook her head. Water flew like a dog sloughing off the sea. Her fingernails were cutting into her palms. She loosened her hands out of the tight fists they’d clawed into. She swiped hair away from her eyes. She imagined her thoughts receding like the low tide. She pulled air into her lungs. She ran harder, legs pumping, tendon and muscle working in tandem to keep her upright during what was nothing more than a series of controlled falls.
Something clicked inside of her head. Andy had never achieved a runner’s high, not even back when she kept to something like a schedule. She just got to a place where her body didn’t hurt so much that she wanted to stop, but her brain was occupied enough by that pain to keep her thoughts floating along the surface rather than diving down into the darkness.
Left foot. Right foot.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Left. Right. Left.
Breathe.
Tension slowly drained from her shoulders. Her jaw unclenched. The bear-teeth headache turned from a gnawing to a more manageable nibble. Andy’s thoughts started to wander. She listened to the rain, watched the drops fall in front of her face. What would it feel like to open her box of art supplies? To take out her pencil and sketchbook? To draw something like a puddle splattering up from her ruined sneakers? Andy visualized lines and light and shadows, the impact of her sneaker inside a puddle, the jerk of her shoestring caught mid-step.
Laura had almost died during her cancer treatments. It wasn’t just the toxic mixture of drugs, but the other problems that treatment brought with it. The infections. The C. difficile. Pneumonia. Double pneumonia. Staph infections. A collapsed lung.
And now they could add to the list: Jonah Helsinger. Detective Palazzolo. Needing Gordon to butt out of her life. Needing space from her only daughter.
They were going to survive Laura’s coldness the same way they had survived the cancer.
Gordon was right about time putting things in perspective. Andy knew all about waiting—for the surgeon to come out, for the films to be read for the biopsy to be cultured for the chemo and the antibiotics and the pain meds and the anti-nausea shot and the clean sheets and the fresh pillows and finally, blissfully, for the cautious smile on the doctor’s face when she had told Laura and Andy that the scan was clear.
All that Andy had to do now was wait for her mother to come back around. Laura would fight her way out of the dark place she was in until eventually, finally, in a month or six months or by Andy’s next birthday, she would be looking back at what had happened yesterday as if through a telescope rather than through a magnifying glass.
The boardwalk ran out sooner than Andy had expected. She jumped back onto the one-way road that skirted the beachfront mansions. The asphalt felt solid beneath her feet. The roar of the sea began to fade behind the giant houses. The shore along this stretch bent around the tip of the Isle. Her mother’s bungalow was another half mile away. Andy hadn’t meant to go back home. She started to turn around but then remembered—
Her bicycle.
Andy saw the bike hanging from the ceiling every time she went into the garage. The trip back to Gordon’s would be faster on two wheels. Considering the lightning, having a set of rubber tires between herself and the asphalt seemed like a good idea.
She slowed down to a jog, then a brisk walk. The intensity of the rain dialed back. Fat water drops slapped against the top of her head, made divots in her skin. Andy slowed her walk when she saw the faint glow of light from Laura’s office. The house was at least fifty yards away, but this time of year, all the McMansions in the vicinity were unoccupied. Belle Isle was mostly a snowbird town, a respite for Northerners during the harsh winter months. The other homeowners were chased away by the August heat.
Andy glanced into Laura’s office window as she walked down the driveway. Empty, at least as far as she could tell. She used the side entrance to the garage. The glass panes rattled in the door as she closed it. The shushing sound of the rain was amplified in the open space. Andy reached for the garage door opener to turn on the light, but caught herself at the last minute because the light only came on when the door rolled up and the rackety sound could wake the dead. Fortunately, the glow from Laura’s office reached through the glass in the side door. Andy had just enough light to squint by.
She walked to the back, leaving a Pig-Pen-like trail of rain puddles in her wake. Her bike hung upside down from two hooks Gordon had screwed into the ceiling. Andy’s shoulders screamed with pain as she tried to lift the Schwinn’s tires from the hooks. Once. Twice. Then the bike was falling and she almost toppled backward trying to turn it right side up before it hit the ground.
Which was why she hadn’t wanted to hang the fucking thing from the ceiling in the first place, Andy would never, ever say to her father.
One of the pedals had scraped her shin. Andy didn’t worry about the trickle of blood. She checked the tread, expecting dry rot, but found the tires were so new they still had the little alveoli poking out of the sides. Andy sensed her father’s handiwork. Over the summer, Gordon had repeatedly suggested they resume their weekend bike rides. It was just like him to make sure everything would be ready on the off-chance that Andy said yes.
She started to lift her leg, but stopped mid-air. There was a distinct, jangly noise from above. Andy cocked her head like a retriever. All she could make out was the white noise of the rain. She was trying to think of a Jacob Marley joke when the jangle happened again. She strained to listen, but there was nothing more than the constant shush of water falling.
Great. She was a proven coward. She literally did not know when to come in out of the rain, and now, apparently, she was paranoid.
Andy shook her head. She had to get moving again. She sat on the bike and wrapped her fingers around the handlebars.
Her heart jumped into her throat.
A man.
Standing outside the door. White. Beady eyes. Dark hoodie clinging to his face.
Andy froze.
He cupped his hands to the glass.
She should scream. She should be quiet. She should look for a weapon. She should walk the bike back. She should hide in the shadows.
The man leaned closer, peering into the garage. He looked left, then right, then straight ahead.
Andy flinched, drawing in her shoulders like she could fold herself into obscurity.
He was staring right at her.
She held her breath. Waited. Trembled. He could see her. She was certain that he could see her.
Slowly, his head turned away, scanning left, then right, again. He took one last look directly at Andy, then disappeared.
She opened her mouth. She drew in a thimbleful of air. She leaned over the handlebars and tried not to throw up.
The man at the hospital—the one in the Alabama hat. Had he followed them home? Had he been lying in wait until he thought the coast was clear?
No. Alabama had been tall and slim. The guy at the garage door, Hoodie, was stocky, muscle-bound, about Andy’s height but three times as wide.
The jangling noise had been Hoodie walking down the metal