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She waited for Baxter to pick up her bag and head out the door. Then she dialed a familiar number.
‘LIBRARY,’ a voice shouted impatiently.
In the background Harper could hear the normal Tuesday-night chaos at the bar – loud voices, guitars, clattering glasses, laughter.
‘Hey, Bonnie.’ Harper leaned back in her chair.
‘Harpelicious! Where are you? Why isn’t your gorgeous ass making my bar prettier right this very instant?’
Bonnie’s always husky voice was rougher than usual after a night of shouting to be heard above the din.
‘I’m still at work,’ Harper said. ‘I was thinking of coming down.’
‘Come. I’ll make you a mai tai. With extra cherries.’
Harper laughed. Mai tais had been her favorite drink when they were teenagers, sneaking into bars with fake IDs. She hadn’t knowingly consumed one in years.
All of a sudden it sounded wonderful.
‘I’m on my way.’
Chapter Five (#ulink_89f57778-d870-5104-aae9-c86c10baaaf6)
It was nearly one as Harper pulled her car into an empty spot beneath the wide-spreading branches of an oak tree in front of her house. Spanish moss hung so low it brushed the top of the car, soft as cat paws.
Miles wasn’t the only one who liked a muscle car. But while his was sleek and new, hers was a fifteen-year-old Camaro. It had 103,000 miles on the clock, but the engine purred. She wasn’t about to park it anywhere near a bar, especially in June. Summer tourists had begun pouring into town a few weeks ago, a river-over-the-banks flood of them, and they were all drunk on that intoxicating mixture of vacation, warm sun and three-for-one happy-hour specials.
She could walk from here.
She was preparing to climb out when she caught a good glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Her face was a freckled, shiny oval. Mascara had left a black smudge under one wide hazel eye. Her skin was blotchy beneath a tangle of auburn hair.
How long had she looked like that?
With a sigh, she slid back into her seat.
‘Great, Harper,’ she muttered, rummaging in her bag for a brush. ‘You fail at being a grown-up, again.’
She fixed her hair hurriedly and, in a burst of inspiration, applied a coating of the red MAC lipstick Bonnie had given to her for her birthday.
‘All I ask,’ Bonnie said at the time, ‘is that once in a while you actually wear it.’
When she was satisfied that she looked less of a mess, she got out of the car and stood for a moment, gazing up at the house across the street.
For the last five years she’d been renting the garden-level apartment in a converted two-story Victorian on East Jones Street not far from the art college. Her landlord was a jolly, self-made redneck named Billy Dupre. He mowed the lawn and fixed things when they broke and never raised her rent. In return, she kept an eye on the grad students who rented the upstairs apartment and did a bit of painting now and then.
It was a good arrangement.
The blue house had a high, peaked roof and a stained-glass attic window that glowed amber and green on a sunny day.
All the windows were dark tonight, save for one light which shone reassuringly in the entrance hall. The door was solid. She’d had the locks changed to a high-security brand shortly after moving in.
It was safe. She’d made sure of that.
Satisfied that all was well, she threw her bag over her shoulder and headed out on foot.
The houses lining Jones Street were not the grandest in town but they had their charms. During the day, their tall windows overlooked tourist buses and students carrying portfolio bags as they hustled to the art school. At night, though, it was a quiet lane, plucked from history. Cast-iron streetlights cast dancing shadows through the graceful arching oak tree branches.
The moon had disappeared now, and the clouds were thickening. It was still uncomfortably warm and the humidity hung in the air so thick she could almost see it.
As Harper turned left at the first corner the sky vibrated with a threatening, low rumble of thunder.
Nervously, she quickened her pace, casting a quick glance over her shoulder at the empty street behind her.
The shooting had thrown her off-kilter. A spiky remnant of adrenaline still coursed through her body. She kept having the same feeling she’d had at the shooting scene – the feeling she was being watched. But whenever she turned around, there was no one there.
By the time she reached busy Drayton Street she was glad of the lights.
Here, even at one in the morning, the atmosphere was buzzing. As usual, Eric’s 24-Hour Diner – with its vivid, 1950s neon sign promising: ‘Fresh burgers and frozen shakes’ – smelled tantalizingly of fried things.
As Harper threaded her way through the crowds, the first fat drops of what looked to be a fearsome storm began to fall.
Half-running, she turned off the main drag. She could hear The Library before she reached it – music and laughter poured out the open door through the crowd of smokers. Harper inhaled the spicy scent of clove cigarettes as she hurried inside.
‘Hey, Harper,’ the bouncer said. ‘Back from another successful night fighting crime?’
Well over six feet tall, he had a scraggly beard, a huge beer belly and the unlikely nickname of Junior. Harper had once seen him haul three men out of the bar at the same time, without breaking a sweat.
‘It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,’ she said, holding up her fist for him to bump.
When he smiled, Junior revealed an array of teeth so mismatched he might have stolen them from other people.
‘Bonnie’s waiting for you. Said something about a tequila sunrise.’
‘Mai-tai,’ she corrected him, raising her voice to be heard above the cacophony as she headed into the crowded, dimly lit bar.
As the name implied, the bar was tucked inside a former library. The space was all wrong for a bar – the old reading rooms were small and inevitably overcrowded, but somehow it worked.
Harper liked the place, not only because Bonnie was a bartender here, but also because there was almost no chance of running into anyone she worked with. It attracted a twenty-something crowd who sat around smoking fake cigarettes and arguing loudly about Nietzsche and politics. The cops wouldn’t be caught dead in here, while the reporters favored Rosie Malone’s, an Irish pub near the river where local politicians tended to hang out.
The Library was Harper’s place.
She liked that the walls still held the original built-in bookcases, stacked with paperbacks, and that there was a ‘take a book, leave a book’ policy. The only rule was displayed on a sign by the door, which read: ‘NO PORN PLEASE, WE’RE CHILDREN’.
The main bar had been placed where the librarian’s desk had once stood, in the middle of the largest room. Harper weaved through the crowd toward it.
The air was steamy and smelled of sweat and spilled beer and the rain blowing in through the open door.
Bonnie was easy enough to spot – she’d recently added magenta streaks to her long, blonde hair, and she glimmered in the dimness like a beacon.
The shocks of color perfectly suited her leopard-print miniskirt and cowboy boots. But then, with that figure, she could get away with wearing anything.
The two of them had been friends since childhood. Their relationship had always been more that of sisters than friends.
Like Harper’s mother, Bonnie was an artist. Since there was no money in that, she bartended four nights a week and also taught a few classes at the local art school – making, from all of her jobs, just about enough for rent on a cheap apartment in a dodgy neighborhood.
When Harper walked up, she was pouring five tequila shots at once and talking a mile a minute. A goateed guy in a neat, button-down shirt was waiting for his drinks and wistfully watching her every move.
When Bonnie finally paused for breath, Harper leaned over the bar and pointed at the shots.
‘Thanks, but I’m not that thirsty.’
Whooping, Bonnie shoved the shots at the startled goatee guy and launched herself over the bar, pulling Harper into a full-body hug.
‘I can’t believe you came. You hate going out in tourist season.’
‘The lure of a tropical cocktail never fails,’ Harper told her.
‘If that’s true, I’ll make you a mai tai every night.’ Bonnie’s eyes scanned her face. ‘How’s it going? Nice lipstick, by the way.’
‘It’s been a weird night.’ Harper shrugged off the question. ‘And this is your lipstick.’
‘Knew it. I have amazing taste. You should let me choose your shoes.’ Jumping back onto the bar, Bonnie swung her legs around and leapt down, landing neatly in front of a long row of glittering bottles. ‘Stay there. I’m going to get you that drink and you can tell me about your weirdness.’
Just then, though, a group of laughing drinkers shoved their way to the bar, credit cards clutched in their hands.
Bonnie shot Harper an exasperated look. ‘First, I have to get rid of all these fucking people.’
In no hurry, Harper pulled up a bar stool and settled in.
Despite the volume and the chaos, being here made her calmer. Bonnie was the only person in the world who knew everything about her, and Harper could never fool her about one damn thing. Tonight, she needed someone who could see through her.
The two of them had met on Bonnie’s sixth birthday. Bonnie’s family had been living on Harper’s street for a few weeks by then. She’d seen the new little girl next door many times, with her long, covetable blonde hair, roaring up and down the sidewalk on her tricycle, a handful of brothers in tow. It was impossible to miss her.
Although their modest, post-war bungalows were nearly identical, Bonnie’s noisy, crowded house was the opposite of Harper’s. Harper was an only child. Not in a tragic, poor me, lonely kid way. More in the indulged, loved way.
Her mother was a painter and art teacher. Her father was a lawyer who traveled a lot for work. Her memories of her childhood were a blurry watercolor blend of jazz flowing from the speakers, and color – color everywhere. The kitchen was lemon yellow, the sofa was cherry-red. Harper’s room was aquamarine, and her mother’s vibrant oil paintings covered the walls.
On sunny days, her mother set up her easel in the kitchen, where light poured in through wrap-around windows. When Harper was young, she’d often set up a tiny easel for her, too, so they could paint side by side.
The day of Bonnie’s birthday party, Harper was sitting quietly on the back porch with a coloring book when, on the other side of the fence, Bonnie appeared holding a can of Silly String.
Setting down her crayons, Harper watched as, with careful deliberation, Bonnie made her way across the grass to the wire fence. Her bright pink dress and white-blonde hair gave her a jaunty, elfish appearance. Harper expected her to say hello. To ask what she was coloring. Instead, without warning or provocation, she’d pointed the nozzle at Harper and covered her in sticky pink threads.
Harper had stared at her in disbelief.
‘Why did you do that?’
Scratching her shoulder, Bonnie considered this.
‘Because you look lonely,’ she pronounced after a second. ‘And because I thought it would be funny. Come to my party.’
Harper, who had already clocked the balloons tied to the front fence and the BONNIE IS SIX sign on the door, and who had watched other children arrive for the event, played it cool.
‘I didn’t know it was your birthday,’ she lied.
‘It is,’ Bonnie assured her. ‘But I hate my cousins. And my brothers are assholes. I want you to be there instead.’
Harper didn’t flinch at the obscenity.
‘Why? You don’t know me.’
Bonnie gazed at her with a look of beatific confidence.
‘I like your hair. Go ask your mom if you can come over and I promise I won’t spray you anymore.’
Inexplicably satisfied by this explanation, Harper had removed the Silly String from her clothes and gone into the kitchen to seek permission from her mother, who waved an approving paintbrush from behind her easel.
‘Have fun, honey,’ she’d said, eyes still on the canvas. She was painting a field of daisies in the sunshine – each petal so real you could almost touch the cool silk of it. ‘Be sure and say thank you to Mrs Larson.’
From that day forward, for reasons Harper never fully understood, she and Bonnie were inseparable.
Their friendship had endured the trials of primary school and the grim anarchy of middle school. It had survived first boyfriends, Bonnie’s parents’ divorce, the pain of the Larson family moving away from the house next door. And worse.
Much worse.
Bonnie was the one reminder of Harper’s childhood that she allowed in her life. The only one who’d known her before.
The only one who understood.
Harper waited patiently until the bar gradually emptied out. At around two o’clock, Bonnie handed her the third unfathomably pink cocktail of the night, topped with a tiny paper umbrella and four maraschino cherries impaled on a long toothpick.
‘Carlo’s taking over for a while,’ she said, waving a beer bottle at the muscular, dark-haired guy behind the bar. ‘Let’s go talk.’
Feeling much better about everything by now, Harper held her drink up to the light to admire its atomic shades.
‘This is my very favorite drink.’
‘There’s so much fruit juice and rum in that baby, it’s diabetes in a glass.’ Bonnie stretched her arms above her head with a groan. ‘Man, this has been a long night. I’ve got to get a real job.’
At this hour, only the most determined drinkers remained, wrestling their demons one glass at a time. The music had been turned down and the air felt cooler.
They found one of the side rooms completely empty. It was largely dominated by a pool table.
Motioning for Harper to join her, Bonnie lifted herself up onto the green felt top.
‘Get up here and tell me what’s going on.’
Harper climbed up next to her, less gracefully. Bonnie had put a lot of rum in those drinks.
