Chapter 5

I waited five days to go back to the funeral home.

Not to the front. Not to the viewing parlor. To the laundry.

I knew Rae did the Sunday linens and the Monday aprons. I knew she came in after the last viewing, around midnight, because Deborah hated the sound of the machines during services. I knew she kept Milo’s plastic dinosaur in her jacket pocket, because I had seen her touch it when she was scared.

At 1 AM on October 29, I let myself in through the back door with the code Deborah had never bothered to change. The laundry smelled like bleach and cold water and the ghost of old flowers. One fluorescent light buzzed over the folding table.

Rae was standing at the sink with her hands in a bucket of bloody altar cloth. She had not turned on the overhead light. She was working by the glow of the vending machine in the hall.

She heard me and spun around.

“You can’t be here.”

“I’m not recording,” I said. I held up both hands. My phone was on the table, face down. “I just want to hear it.”

Her eyes went to the hallway. Then to the ceiling corner. The laundry had no camera. She knew that. She had probably checked a hundred times.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Rae. I’m not going to say your name. I’m not going to tell the sheriff you were there. I just need to know what I already know.”

Her face crumpled. She was twenty-seven, but she looked younger in the bad light, her short hair uneven at the nape, her cheek still faintly bruised from Caleb’s hand. She pressed her wrist against her mouth.

“She pushed you,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“She told me to come in. She grabbed my hands. She put the cloth in them. She said it exactly like she told me.” Rae’s voice was shaking so hard the words came out in pieces. “She said, ‘Say it exactly like I told you.’”

“She fell. I was just trying to help her.”

Rae flinched at the words. “Yes.”

“Did you see her in the hallway?”

Rae looked at me then. Her gray-green eyes were red-rimmed, hollow. “She was standing right behind him,” she said. “When Caleb opened the door. She was standing right behind him, and she was smiling.”

The laundry machine kicked on. I jumped. Rae did not.

“She told me if I said anything, she’d take Milo,” she said. “She already has him. She has his room. She has his clothes. She has his daycare. She has his insurance card. I can’t get him back unless I do what she says.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You’re from Tennessee. You have a husband who still loves you. I have nothing.”

“You have your son.”

“Not if I talk.”

I stood there with my hand on my belly and understood exactly what Deborah had done. She had not just written a sentence for Rae. She had built a cage with Milo inside it.

“I won’t use your name,” I said. “I promise. But I need you to know that I’m not going to stop.”

Rae wiped her nose on her sleeve. “She deleted the clips.”

“I have one frame.”

“One frame won’t prove it.”

“It proves she was in the room.” Rae shook her head. “It proves she was in the room after. She’ll say she came in when she heard the crash.”

“Then I need something else.”

“There isn’t anything else.”

“There’s you.”

Rae stared at me. Then she took the dinosaur from her pocket and held it so hard her knuckles went white. “If I say it in front of her, she’ll destroy me.”

“She’s destroying you now.”

Rae did not answer. She turned back to the sink and lifted the altar cloth out of the water. The water ran pink. She wrung it out with both hands and laid it over the edge of the basin.

“Sunday,” she said. “The family supper. She’ll make me come. She always makes me come.”

“Will you say it?”

“I don’t know.”

She walked out through the back door. I stood alone in the laundry with the smell of bleach and blood and the low spin of the machine, and I thought about a smile in a hallway.