Page 19 of Murder Road

I’ve lived here all my life,” Rose said as she walked ahead of me into the kitchen. “I know everyone here. Robbie, he was from Grosse Pointe. He moved here in ’79. He was police down there, so he was experienced by the time he came to Coldlake Falls. His parents still live down in Detroit. Both of my parents are dead—my mother died five years ago, my father the year after that. Throat cancer, both of them. You ever heard of two married people dying of throat cancer?”

Now that I had her talking, it seemed like she wasn’t planning to stop. She reached into a cupboard and pulled out a bag of chips, then a bowl. She opened the chips and poured them into the bowl, then took a container of creamy onion dip out of the fridge. Still talking, she grabbed a chip and dipped it.

“People in this town hate me,” she said. “You want some chips and dip?”

I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down, rubbing the last of the grogginess from my face. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“You’re too pretty for this place.” Rose ate another chip as she imparted this information. “That isn’t a compliment. You have nice hair and a nice face, that body. People aren’t going to like you. You should get ready to deal with that up front.”

I frowned. I was still wearing the cutoff jean shorts and navy-and-white striped shirt I’d put on this morning, and I had no makeup on. “This is just how I look.”

“Too bad for you, then.” Rose sounded like she was sorry for me. “People think pretty girls get the best of everything, but in my opinion they get the worst of it.” She motioned to the large picture of Princess Diana on the living room wall, the portrait of her standing next to her husband. “People think Princess Diana has it easy because she’s beautiful, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t. She has it harder than anyone.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I honestly was nothing like Princess Diana. Still, Rose was looking so reverently at the photo that I gave her a moment of silence, like you do when someone is praying. “You really are a big fan of hers,” I said at last, when Rose was quiet for too long.

Rose blinked at me. “She’s the greatest person in the world,” she said sincerely. “Robbie never liked that photo because he doesn’t like Charles—he says Charles is a stuck-up prig. But he let me put it up because he knew it’s important to me. I’m not stupid. I know I’m not like Diana, that I’m not beautiful like her. Like you. At least no one really notices me. You have a job back home?”

I looked away from the photo on the wall. “I work at a bowling alley.”

“Huh.” Rose thought this over as she ate more chips, the gooey white dip dripping off the edges as she lifted them to her mouth. “That’s not too bad, I guess. At least you’re not a ball-busting career woman.”

I laughed at that, thinking about the desultory way I’d crisscrossed the country since I was twelve, how I’d ended up in Ann Arbor with nowhere else to go. “I am definitely not a career woman.”

“People wouldn’t like it, that’s all. I’m a career woman myself, of sorts, running this place. But like I said, people already don’t like me. If you were a lawyer or something, Quentin would hate you even more than he does already.”

If I were a lawyer, Eddie and I would be home by now. Which only made what Rose said more true. I didn’t want to talk about Quentin, his cold eyes, or his warm-up suit. “Did you know a girl named Katharine O’Connor?” I asked.

Rose’s jaw paused in her chewing, then started again. “What do you know about Katharine O’Connor?”

“I saw part of a silk flower with her name on it. An old one. By the side of the road on Atticus Line when the police took us there this morning.”

Rose nodded. “She wasn’t from around here. The cops think she got picked up hitchhiking. She was strangled and left at the side of the road. That was a few years ago, when Robbie was still alive. They never found who killed her.”

“Someone picked her up, then strangled her, and never got caught?”

“Yes.” Rose swirled a chip into the onion dip. “It happens on that road. Maybe you heard. Hitchhikers aren’t safe there. The kids at Hunter Beach know that, but sometimes one of them comes along who doesn’t know, maybe, or thinks the danger doesn’t apply to them.”

“If Katharine wasn’t from around here, then who left the flowers?” I asked.

“The Hunter Beach kids, probably. She was one of them. Now, tell me what happened last night.”

I told her. I’d already told the police the same thing, over and over. I told her about Rhonda Jean, the blood, the stab wounds. I paused, thinking about the truck. Eddie wouldn’t want me to talk about the truck and the girl he’d seen in the back.

But I must have given something away in my expression, because Rose peered at me from behind her huge glasses. “There’s something you’re not telling the police,” she said.

I shook my head. I was tempted to grab a chip and dip it, just to keep myself from talking, but the sight of the gooey dip, now with crumbs in it, turned my stomach.

“Robbie said that no one ever tells the police the truth,” Rose said. “Even innocent people. You could have Mother Teresa, or even Princess Diana, and you put a cop in front of her and she’ll tell a lie. Robbie said that the key to police work was making people tell you all of the things they don’t want you to know.”

I licked my dry lips—talking to Rose was a lot like being questioned by the police, but weirder—and hedged. The truck bothered me. The girl Eddie had seen bothered me. I’d been keeping it in for too long. “We think someone may have been following us, that’s all.”

“On the road?”

“We aren’t sure, so we didn’t say anything.” It was just enough of a lie. I couldn’t tell on Eddie, that he wasn’t sure what he’d seen. That he saw things sometimes. Rose kept staring at me, probably waiting for me to say more, but I stayed quiet.

Still, Rose waited. The clock ticked on the wall over the mantel in the living room. Charles and Diana gazed down on both of us, unseeing.

The front door opened and Eddie walked in. He was soaked in sweat from his run, his hair wet and his shirt sticking to his chest and back. He closed the door behind him and paused, looking from me to Rose and back again.

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