Page 36 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
In her hands is a bundle of tiny bags, some filled with a familiar white powder, others unmarked pills.Drugs.Dean is dealing drugs. A lot of them, by the looks of things. A small voice in the back of Maggie’s mind reminds her that she already knew this. That she would have seen the truth if only she’d wanted to see it sooner. But she pushes it aside. She needs to do something. She’s sitting in her car mere yards away from where her employers live with enough drugs to send her to prison for a very long time.
Maggie shifts her car into drive; turns out of the familiar cul-de-sac. She can’t do this. She can’t bring this poison onto the block where Lila and Carter live, to the neighborhood where they visit the playground and go for ice cream.
Maggie drives down Main Street with its cafés, its florist shops and bakeries. She stops at a red light, and out of the corner of her eye, she watches a police car pull up silently beside her. Maggie feels her palms slick with sweat on the steering wheel, her heart thudding violently in her chest. She looks straight ahead, willing her eyes not to slide down to the package on the passenger seat beside her. She could be arrested. Her freedom, the little apartment, the sunny-yellow walls, had been so close, but now the image starts to melt before her eyes, a snowflake held in her palm.
After what feels like an eternity, the light turns green. The police cruiser pulls ahead of Maggie’s car, turns down a side street a little farther down the road. Maggie’s shoulders sag with relief, but she’s not out of the woods yet. She can’t take the risk of driving around with drugs in her car, and she can’t go home to Dean and tell him that she didn’t make the delivery. There’s no way out of this.
But maybe…Maggie turns off Main Street and drives through winding side roads until she no longer recognizes the street names. On a lonely stretch of pavement, she comes across an abandoned gas station and quickly pulls into the dark parking lot. Heart racing, she gets out and scans the area cautiously until she’s certain that no one is around, then she creeps through the deserted lot toward a long-forgotten dumpster rusting in the far corner. She stashes the drugs behind it, covers them with a mound of fallen leaves. She’ll tell Dean that she left the drugs exactly where he’d instructed. And if something goes wrong, she can always come back here and get them. Dean will never have to know.
Halloween Night
Transcript of interview with Tony Russo
October 31, 2024
Mr. Russo:Am I under arrest?
Detective Olsen:No, not at this time. We’ve brought you down here to ask you a few questions about an incident that happened up on Hawthorne Lane earlier this evening.
Mr. Russo:I heard about it, but I had nothing to do with all that.
Detective Olsen:See, the thing is, we found your fingerprints near the crime scene.
Mr. Russo:Well, yeah, I’m the gardener for the whole damn block. My fingerprints are probably all over the place.
Detective Olsen:Would that include on a beer bottle in the woods? Right next to a dead body? Does that fall within your job description?
Mr. Russo:Yeah. I mean, no. I—do I need a lawyer?
Detective Olsen:That’s entirely up to you, Mr. Russo. But as I said, at this point we’re just having a friendly little chat. It’s your decision if you’d like to make it something more than that.
Mr. Russo:Is this because of my prior…incident?
Detective Olsen:The thought did cross my mind. I find it very interesting that you were previously arrested in those very woods and now your fingerprints turn up a few feet from my victim.
Mr. Russo:No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. Look, sometimes I go out to those woods for a drink. My wife, she can be kind of a hard-ass. Always on me about how much I’m drinking. So sometimes, if I finish my work early, I go out there and have a cold beer by myself, just to unwind before going home. That’s how the whole thing with the…you know…happened.
Detective Olsen:You mean your arrest for indecent exposure? Wherein you exposed yourself to several minors?
Mr. Russo:That’s what I’m saying! It wasn’t like that! I was in the woods having a beer. I had to take a leak. It was dark. I thought I was alone. I had no idea those kids were going to come walking out of the woods. I’m not some kind of pervert. I wasn’t trying to show my junk to a bunch of teenage boys.
Detective Olsen:I see. And were you doing that earlier tonight? Having a beer in the woods by yourself?
Mr. Russo:No, I wasn’t anywhere near Hawthorne Lane tonight. I swear. I was at home with my wife and kids. You can ask her. The bottle you found, it must have been an old one.
Detective Olsen:Your wife, huh? Not generally the strongest alibi, in my experience. Are you telling me that if I ask around—and I will—no one is going to tell me that they saw you at the fall festival tonight?
Mr. Russo:No chance. I wasn’t there. And no one up there ever notices me anyway. I’m just the hired help. But listen, you’re way off base here. I’m not the one you should be looking at.
Detective Olsen:What does that mean exactly?
Mr. Russo:It means that if someone over there bit the dust, there are at least fifty good reasons why. Those people up there in those big, fancy houses, they got problems like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not all as pretty as it looks. Like I said, no one notices me, so I just go about my business. But I see things, you know? Stuff they’d probably rather I didn’t.
Detective Olsen:Like what?
Mr. Russo:Do you know Seth Warrington?
Detective Olsen:He’s one of the residents, right?
