Page 62 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Parallel, maybe. Not perfect.”

The piano bench, weakened by years of disuse, creaks as I sit down on it. I bump the keys with my elbow and drown Josiah out with the strident melody. “You don’t think it’s too perfect? One sister tries and fails to kill her mother, and then thirteen years later, the other one tries and succeeds?” My sigh does nothing to relieve tension. My body is a screw tightened one twist too far. “I think she’s not in her right mind. Even if she did, it was an accident. I don’t think she’s a murderer.”

“Is it just a feeling?”

“I did time with a couple murderers. You can tell. There’s a void in their eyes.”

One reporter asks how thin the search for my mother has stretched the department and if a budget raise should be considered in the next election. When I look at Connor, his face is tight with disappointment. Clearly I have given him the wrong answer. He never liked Harmony, always suspected something was wrong with her.

“Do I have a void in my eyes?” I ask, long after the moment passes. I angle my face toward him so he can examine my soul, appraise it like a jeweler does a precious gem.

“No.”

“You didn’t even look.”

He dismisses my question as a childish distraction. “I know what your eyes look like, Providence.”

Cold, flat, dark. Like a snake. I imagine them transforming again.

Another reporter speaks. “How closely did your department look into the oldest daughter, given her history of violence?”

“We are confident Providence was not involved in her mother’s death.” When the reporter starts to talk again, Josiah cuts him off. “No, no, let me be more clear. We definitively ruled her out very early in the investigation. I’d like to remind everyonethat regardless of the past, now she’s a young woman grieving the loss of her mother. I hope you all keep her in your prayers, same way you do with the rest of the Byrd family.”

The exoneration borders on theatrical. It is his good deed for the day, announcing my innocence to the world and reminding them of my humanity.

I want to be grateful, but I’m not that big of a person.

CHAPTER

18

August 19th

9:40PM

THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONSbuzz through my head, loud and hideous like June bugs. Why won’t Harmony tell the police where the car is? Does she know where it is at all? Who was the first to suspect that my mother was missing? How long did they take to report her absence to the police? And where, where,whereare the shoes? I can’t get them out of my mind. A dozen cops combed the woods for hours, but somehow the shoes eluded them.

Killers like to keep trophies—locks of hair, severed body parts, mouthfuls of teeth. A pair of cheap shoes wouldn’t be the sexiest souvenir, lower risk but also lower reward, but it might scratch the same itch.

When I tell Sara we need to search my father’s liquor store, a devilish smile splits across her face. She grabs her keys from the coffee table, swings open the front door, and gestures grandly to the threshold. “After you, my lady.”

So here we are, parked in the parking lot of the abandoned post office, steeling ourselves for the crime we are about to commit—or, more accurately,Iam steeling myself. Sara jitters with anticipation like a prize racehorse at the starting gate. She assures me we have nothing to worry about: this is Annesville, after all. The liquor stores here get broken into every other week.

“There’s witnesses everywhere,” I say. Lining the sidewalks are the local drunks, the homeless people with nowhere else to go.

“I have cash. We give them twenty bucks, they won’t say shit—and besides, do you really think they want the cops to show up?”

“Fuck, this was a bad idea.”

To my surprise, Sara nods. “I haven’t felt this much adrenaline since the last time I stole a car. I forgot how addictive it is.”

I committed a crime of passion, but Sara committed crimes of adrenaline—crimes, plural, because she had stolen more than a dozen cars before she was finally caught. She targeted junkers and jalopies, cars that wouldn’t exceed the value threshold for her crime to escalate from a misdemeanor to a felony. The first time she fucked up was her first time stealing a car on the Nebraska side of the state line. Dirty and beat-up on the outside, nothing to write home about, the Volvo boasted thousands of dollars in custom engine modifications. The owner used it to street race down in Scottsbluff. Class IIA felony, same as me. Our sentences were identical.

Hot air billows through the car when she opens her door. Unlike the last few nights, there has been no relief from the heat after sunset today. I steal the claw clip from Sara’s cupholder and twist my hair into a pathetic excuse for a bun to keep it off my damp neck.

“And you’re sure we can just waltz right in? The door won’t be locked?”

“I know where he keeps the spare key,” I say as we start walking.

---