Page 115 of Degradation
I frown at her. ‘You dark horse. You haven’t told me you have a boyfriend.’
‘I don’t,’ she smirks. ‘He just thinks he is and if he’s gonna let me borrow his Miata, he can think whatever he wants!’
I giggle as we speed down the driveway. After Shade’s fast driving, I’m much more used to riding in cars and I don’t find it nearly so frightening.
I open the folder as we drive. ‘How far is it?’ I ask as I scan the real report.
‘Ten minutes in this beauty,’ Lu replies.
She puts on some shades and cranks up the tunes, dancing in her seat while I look on and shake my head. I put mine on too and try to block out the music as my head begins to vaguely thud.
As she said, it doesn’t take long to find the stretch of road, and I feel something odd in my chest as I see tire marks that go off the road at the bend.
Lu parks at the side of the road, turns the music off, and glances at me with a grimace. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to treat this like a road trip, Daisy-bear.’
I wave a hand at her.
I get out of the car, bringing the reports with me and finding the original diagram. I turn it as I look at the scene, and it strikes me how normal it seems. It doesn’t look like someone died here. There aren’t any flowers, or little stuffed animals to mark the site. There’re just some skid marks on the road that lead down the embankment.
I follow them, hearing Lu behind me.
‘Show me the diagram?’ she asks.
I turn and hand it to her.
‘Okay, so the car went off here, down the bank,’ she walks a few steps. ‘It hit… this tree.’ She points at a scraggly evergreen with a thick trunk. ‘Then it flipped over, and your mom was thrown from it to…here.’ She stands a few feet away and points at the ground.
I look around the area, noticing the gouges out of the tree trunk and the sheared-off branches where the car hit it.
‘And the footprint?’
‘Here, not far from where they found her.’
I stand over the place where my mother died. ‘They stood over her,’ I say. ‘The other person.’ I frown as I catch sight of a small photo which I realize is a picture of the plaster cast that was made from the shoe print in the mud. I hadn’t noticed it because it’s clipped to the back of the file. I pull it off and stare at it.
‘I know who stood here,’ I say.
‘How?’ Lu asks.
‘The shoe print. It’s John’s.’
‘I don’t get it. How could you know that? All you can see is a little of the tread.’
I look at the photo again.
‘His nicest shoes look like that on the bottom. Always. He gets them imported from some shop in Vienna.’
‘Well, fuck.’ Lu breathes. ‘He’s only the most powerful man in Richmond, probably further.’
She’s quiet after that and I hear her moving around the area, muttering about where my mom’s left Jimmy Choo was found. Her purse. Her cell.
‘Why did you leave me there?’ I whisper to the air around me. ‘Why did you stop loving me? Was I so awful? So difficult?’
There are tears leaking out of my eyes.
A lot. They’re making my face cold. My headache is getting worse.
I turn abruptly and stumble back toward the car. Tearing open the door, I get in; Lu joins me without a word. We drive back to the KIP house in silence, the mood heavy and subdued.
