Chapter 1
If you speed, it’s about three hours on I-80 from
We’d been in the middle of a huge fight when the phone rang. It
was Hortie Riley, my Aunt Zee’s best friend, her
voice thick with tears. Zee needed me. Glad was dead. Murdered.
In back of the radio station that she and Zee had run since 1967. Since I’d been a little girl.
Vince tugged at the seatbelt that strained against his wide girth.
He crossed his legs tightly and clasped his hands over his top knee. “How could
it be a hate crime?” he asked. “Everybody loved your aunts.”
I pressed my glasses into the top of my nose and gave myself a
lecture. Vince was my best friend. He had immediately offered to come with me.
He too loved Glad. “There was something spray painted above her body.” My voice
caught. “They spray painted dyke on the back wall of the station.” I
squeezed the steering wheel. Zee and Glad loved that station almost as much as
they loved each other. They’d been roommates in college and a team ever
since—in business and in life.
“What happened?” Vince whispered.
I’d asked Hortie the same thing. What
I’d really meant was How was she killed?
What did they do to her?
“What was she doing in back of the station?” Vince asked.
“She might have been checking the rain gauge.” I didn’t want to
believe that someone had lured her outside. Someone she knew. “Maybe she wanted
a smoke.”
The smell of cigarette smoke always made me think of Glad. When I
was a kid, she read me all sorts of fairy tales—my choice, not hers. I’d sit
next to her on the sofa, and she’d offer me books about Johnny Appleseed, Clara Barton, and Abraham Lincoln. Real
people, she’d urge. But I always insisted on a large Brothers Grimm that
belonged to my older sister. Glad would finally give in and rest the tome on
her lap. Her legs—long as Jack’s beanstalk—jutted way beyond
the book. I nestled underneath one of her arms, and the smell of cigarette
smoke whisked me away to the magical worlds of Thumbelina, Sleeping Beauty, and
Rapunzel.
Tears burned my eyes. I blinked them back and focused on the semis
streaming past on the other side of the interstate.
Once I asked Glad if I could grow my own hair as long as Rapunzel’s. She simply snorted the way she always did when
she thought someone was being ridiculous. I tried to imagine exactly how her
snort sounded, and a tear rolled down my cheek.
“Sure you don’t want me to drive?” Vince handed me a Kleenex.
“I’m fine.”
Vince stroked his goatee. He’s seldom at a loss for words, but
whenever he is, he rubs his chin. “We don’t have to talk about it any more,” he
said.
“There’s nothing else to say. Hortie
wasn’t very coherent. She needed to get back to Zee.” I wondered how my aunt
was holding up. What would she do without Glad?
Vince gave me another Kleenex. I blew my nose and scowled at the
red numbers on my car’s clock. It would be 2:00 a.m. before we made it to Zee’s. Before I could offer her any
comfort at all.
“Remember when I first met your aunts?” Vince asked.
I nodded. We’d both been in a university production of Romeo
and Juliet. He was Mercutio, and I was the nurse.
“Backstage after the show, Zee was so effusive,” Vince said. “I
was the best Mercutio she’d ever seen. So handsome in my costume. I should have had the lead.”
Vince turned up the air conditioning. “But Glad just smiled at me and said, Not bad.”
“That’s Glad in a nutshell,” I said. “She was hard to get to
know.”
“She loved you,” Vince said.
Did she? I thought of her strawberry blond hair glinting in the
sun, her arms outstretched, as she waited for me at the bottom of
That year, my mom
discovered me kissing Susie Sorenson. Dad remained blissfully oblivious to
everything except his precious patients, but Mother resolved to shape me into a
happy heterosexual. Unaware of the irony, she asked a nun—her second cousin
from
Zee was thrilled to add me to their household, but raising a
teenager was not on Glad’s top-ten list of cherished dreams. Glad seldom joined
in our Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly marathons, and she never went shopping or
hiking with us. When she and Zee thought I was asleep, they argued about me.
“Do you know you’re doing eighty-five?” Vince interrupted my
thoughts.
As I eased my foot off the gas, my headlights flashed on a white
semi with bold red and blue letters:
Wal-Mart
We Sell For Less
Always.
The discount
giant wanted to open a store on the south edge of Aldoburg,
and for the better part of a year, Zee and Glad had been campaigning against
it. The last time Zee visited me, we combed my station’s archives for anti
Wal-Mart programs even though I gently reminded her that KICI—and
I nibbled at a hangnail. “I should call Orchid,” I said.
Vince gave an exaggerated shudder.
Orchid is the kind of lesbian who gives the rest of us a bad name.
She hates men and feels superior to everyone who has ever slept with one. She
doesn’t trust women who shave their legs, and she believes that line-dancing is
patriarchal. She is also my boss and nemesis. I used to dream of becoming the
program director at the alternative radio station where I DJ. That dream ended
when guess-who got the position.
“She’ll probably be delighted by my absence,” I said. “Now she’ll
get to handle the GLBT reading series her own way.” I didn’t like the
bitterness in my voice, but it was a relief to fall into the routine of griping
about work. “She won’t admit it, but she vetoed my first proposal because she
doesn’t want any bisexual or transgender writers. And I know she vetoed my
second one because there were too many men.” I passed three cars and turned the
air conditioning down. “She’s trying to take the series away from me,” I said.
“Get this—she vetoed my most recent list—which included almost all
lesbians—because she doesn’t want any mystery writers. She says that mysteries
valorize violence. Give me a break.”