“You okay?”
“Mmmhmm.” At the kitchen counter, she fiddled with the coffee maker to the point that I worried she’d rip it in half. “Why are there so many buttons on this thing? I just want plain ol’ black coffee. That shouldn’t be so difficult. It’s not rocket science. Or it shouldn’t be.”
Her finger jabbed viciously at another button and my eyebrows popped up briefly. Walking up behind her, I set one hand on her shoulder and leaned over her so that I could hit the correct one. The one that said brew.
“Well, if you’re going to be a showoff about it,” she mumbled.
I smothered my smile, even though she couldn’t see my face, and traced the line of her neck with my thumb. “Did you get some more clothes?”
“Mmmhmm. No one stole your car either.” Lucy turned, and I caged her against the counter with both arms. “Yay, right?”
“Mmmhmm.” At my mocking reproduction of her ambiguous sound, she narrowed her eyes and moved to duck under my arms. I was faster though, and I wrapped one hand around her waist and secured her to me. “Did you know that the number of cars stolen in Chicago, all seventy-seven outlying communities, has decreased thirty-nine percent since 2007?”
“No kiddin’. Good thing I can’t fit cars in my purse. That number would be a little different.”
“No it wouldn’t.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”
My eyes searched her face, took everything in. The defensiveness, the pervasive edge that was covering her since she got back. It all but made her skin vibrate. “Because you don’t steal things if the absence of that thing would hurt the person’s life.”
Lucy scoffed. “What about your watch?”
“That didn’t make my life worse. It didn’t hurt me on a day-to-day basis. And you never would’ve stolen it if you didn’t truly need it.” If I looked hard enough at her neck, I could imagine the marks from Ronald’s fingers. He’d been literally and metaphorically squeezing the life out of her, boxing her into a corner that she had no choice but to fight her way out of.
But she didn’t believe me. It was in her eyes. The hard set of her jaw. The way her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and didn’t reach out to touch me. When she’d left to go get clothes earlier, I took about fifteen minutes to pace the house. To imagine if she was leaving. If she was going to fill the tank of my car with gas and hit the road.
The panic from that thought had given me the first real pang of anxiety that I’d felt since the first night we got Ronald safely hidden in my freezer. I forgot how that flush of cold felt over my skin when I felt out of control of something genuinely important. Something that could make my life ugly and hard. But she didn’t leave. Lucy came back, even if she was jumpy.
“Lucy,” I said quietly. “You wouldn’t have taken it if you didn’t need it.”
She opened her mouth to answer when the door from the garage swung open.
“Bartholomew, Lucy,” my mom said in greeting. Lucy edged around me and we traded a worried look.
“Mother, please don’t call me that.”
She merely raised an eyebrow and gestured behind her to the garage. Wait. After she got back, Lucy had closed the garage door since we were going to start working on pulling up cement.
“Could you join me out here, please?”
“How did you get in there?” I asked instead of moving. “The door was locked.”
“I’ll explain when we’re there.”
Her face was pale, the skin around her lips tight, even if it was unlined. Lucy’s breathing picked up, and I rubbed a hand down her back. “Why can’t we talk in here?”
“Because you were hiding more than pizzas in that freezer, my darling son.” She lifted her chin. “Garage. Both of you.”
And then she made a military precise pivot on her heels, marching back out the door without checking to see if we were following. My heart dropped like a rock, to the bottom of my feet, and possibly through the floor into the basement. Shit.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Lucy whispered. “That’s it. I’m screwed.”
I grabbed her shoulders and bent to see her face, even though my own head was rioting with a million questions about what this meant. I didn’t think my mom would call the cops, but she was also fairly unstable when it came to me. Fairly being a loose translation for bat shit crazy.
“Take a deep breath, okay? Let’s just … see what she has to say.” My hands tightened when Lucy wouldn’t look at my face. “Hey. Look at me.”
“Xavier,” my mom yelled through the open door. Her tone made me swallow, because she never yelled.
Lucy pinched her eyes shut. “Let’s just get this over with.”
We walked out together, and I kept my hand on Lucy’s shoulder. To my surprise, Claude was standing with his hands clasped in front of him and holding a small tool that I recognized as a lock pick, his face stoic and eyes alert. The rims were off the freezer lid and it was popped open enough that we could all see Ronald’s hand.
My mother was quiet. Scarily quiet.
I felt like a child. Except worse, because this could end up with both me and Lucy in jail. Suddenly my mother wasn’t a ridiculous helicopter parent. She was the judge and jury we didn’t expect to be facing.
“Talk,” she said after another heavy beat of silence.
“It was me.” I kept my hand on Lucy when I spoke, and underneath my fingers, her body trembled. “He was not a good person. And when I walked into Lucy’s apartment, he was hurting her He was…,” I paused, trying to think of what meager, weak words could possible explain what it had felt like to see her like that, see her claw at his hands around her neck, see her almost lose consciousness. I held my mother’s eyes. “He would have killed her.”
When I didn’t continue, my mom raised an eyebrow. “And what? He hopped in the freezer because he was sorry?”
Lucy sucked in a breath, but stayed quiet, only giving me a quick, terrified glance.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” I told her in an even voice. “I hit him in the back of the head, too hard apparently. If we’d called the cops, Lucy would have gone to jail, even though it was me who did it.”
“And why would Lucy have gone to jail?” The way she asked it raised goose bumps on my skin, and Lucy’s trembling increased. It was the quietly spoken words. They were dangerous. They were a warning that we had absolutely no wiggle-room.
“I- I have a record,” Lucy spoke up before I could. “And I’m currently on probation.”
Judging by the frozen look on my mother’s face, she did not expect that. “You what?”
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Mrs. Lockwood. But X is telling the truth. I didn’t touch Ronald. B-but, X and I made this decision together. To hide him here before we could bury him. We wanted to make sure we were being smart.”
Claude cleared his throat and stepped next to my mother, who was slowly shaking her head. “What did you do to the scene?”
He spoke so infrequently that I almost forgot how deep and authoritative his voice was. “We uhh, we cleaned her floors with bleach. The counters too. There was plastic down in my car when we uhh … put him in the box to bring him here.”
My mom covered her mouth with her hand and made a sound close to a whimper.
Claude wasn’t fazed. “No one saw you leave with the box?”
Lucy shook her head and cleared her throat. “No. The building was quiet, and we came in and out when it was dark. He’s been,” she nodded toward the freezer, “right there since then.”
“Your clothes? The instrument you used when you hit him?”
The gravity of what we were discussing hit me like a lead weight. The last few days with Lucy had been a blissful sort of denial, my brain had been granted a reprieve from the dark reality of our situation. I rubbed at my chest absently when it tightened and my heart beat erratically behind my ribs.
“We bagged the clothes and threw them away. The uhh, the pan is in a bag in the house. Lucy never touched it though.” My mom’s eyes, which were bright with tears and disappointment. It felt like a hot wave over my body, a direct contrast to the anxiety I was feeling because of everything else. “Only me.”
“Why didn’t you clean it and dispose of it?” Claude asked.
“I thought we should keep some sort of irrefutable proof that it was me, not her.”
Beside me, Lucy’s breathing became thinner, like she was trying to breathe through a clamped-down straw.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” my mom muttered with a disdainful eye at Lucy. “There’s no need for dramatics.”
I turned Lucy to me and tried to meet her eyes. “Hey, hey, take a deep breath. It’s fine.” Over her bent head, I met Claude’s unreadable gaze. “They’re going to take care of everything.”
In response, he nodded. My mom did the slow blink eye roll.
“I’m certainly not letting my son go to jail, young lady.” She sniffed. “He doesn’t belong there.”
Well. There wasn’t a dark blot of subtext over that sentence at all. I didn’t belong there. But clearly she thought Lucy did. I swiped a hand over my mouth, even though I wanted to defend her to my mother.
Now wasn’t the time.
Lucy started laughing. Louder and louder, until she had to brace her hands on her knees. “Oh holy shit, I think I’m having a panic attack. Sure, let the driver take the body. I’m sure that’ll get taken care of.”
When I tried to help her stand up straight, Lucy batted my hands away. My teeth clenched together at her dismissal.
“What are you going to do with … him?” I asked Claude.
“I can’t listen to this,” Lucy muttered and she marched back into the house.
Claude and my mom watched her until the door slammed shut.
“As rough around the edges as she is, I guess I expected a tad more gratitude for what we’re about to do for the two of you.”
My hands braced on my hips as I stared them down. “Please explain what that is. We had a plan, and it would’ve worked.”
Clearing his throat, Claude stepped forward. “I’d rather not tell you the specifics. Mrs. Lockwood won’t know them either. It’s safer that way.”
“You realize that doesn’t comfort me much,” I told him.
“No offense intended, Xavier, it doesn’t matter if it comforts you.” It was the first time Claude had used my name. The fatherly tone surprised me, but I knew he was right. It would be better if both Lucy and I could honestly say that we had no idea where Ronald was. So I nodded. Claude gave a sharp jerk of his chin. “Thank you, sir. Believe me when I tell you that no one will ever find him.”
There was a slight chill in the air at his words, and I cut a glance at my mom, who didn’t look surprised in the slightest. After all of this, Lucy was right about Claude. He’d probably dissolve Ronald’s body in a vat of acid or something. Apparently he did have more skills than driving a car safely.
“Are you going to tell Dad?” I asked Mom.
She laughed. “No. And we’re keeping it that way. Do you honestly think I’d let this touch you? I’d never let a sewer rat ruin our family’s legacy. Claude was hired for more than one reason, Xavier, and cleaning up this type of mess is just one of them.”
Of course, to me, Ronald was the sewer rat. But in her eyes, there was so much disdain and annoyance, I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t speaking about Lucy.
“You should probably leave the room, Mr. Lockwood,” Claude said quietly. “If you’ll give me the keys to your car, I’ll move it out of the garage so that I can use your mother’s car.”
Lucy had tucked them in my front pocket when she got home, so I dug my hand in to fish them out and handed them carefully to Claude. He was wearing black leather gloves that made my stomach churn unpleasantly. Maybe I’d been smart not to work in my family’s business, if this was the kind of cleanup that was necessary.
I turned to go when my mom called my name again. “Make sure she won’t talk.”
Without looking at her over my shoulder, I took a deep breath, trying to keep my snappish response from leaving my mouth. Don’t talk about her like she’s stupid, I wanted to say. Instead, I simply nodded.
“I trust her, Mom. She won’t.”
As I opened the door into the house, I heard her whisper under her breath, “I hope you’re right for her sake.”
The prickle over my skin was foreboding, but when I saw Lucy waiting for me in the kitchen with a fierce expression on her face, I couldn’t pinpoint which direction it was coming from.