Chapter 9

            He started to cry just steps from my mother’s door.

            “Mick,” I said, but didn’t have more words, so opted to squeeze his shoulder instead. My head was a jar full of fireflies, all sparking and buzzing. I was dizzy and started to feel sick.

            Mickey sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his face leaving a trail of tears and snot that he transferred with a swipe to the back of his jeans. “Why’d they do that, Duncan?”

            I wasn’t sure if he meant my parents or the people that trashed his house. I didn’t have an answer. Seeing my father, hearing his words, watching my mother’s sick display had robbed me of all of my sense. What I really wanted to know, though, was why Rhonda did it.

            She filled our heads with hope of getting out of Rushville, only to abandon us at a train station, holding the bag and cleaning up her damn mess – and what a fine mess it had turned into.

            I got in the car and when Mickey got in next to me, red cheeked and puffy, I felt even more alone. I could have lived with her doing this to me, but there was no good reason to get Mickey involved.

            I guess she couldn’t help herself. She liked being the porch light and having us be her hovering moths. We made her the center of our universe, and who was she to stop us?

            I started the car. It rumbled to life and I turned the knob of the radio to silence the announcer. Gripping the steering wheel, all I could do was sit there and stare out the window. As urgent as our situation was, needing to get to Mickey’s house, finding out who was behind it all before they got to us, all I could think about was Roni. She wasn’t who we thought she was. As much as I hated that my father could have been right, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was. We didn’t know her at all. I punched the center of the wheel and shook the ache away while Mickey watched doe-eyed.

            “Did Roni ever give you anything? Leave something at your house? Did she leave something that someone bad would have wanted?” I thought about her game, saying she left something at my place all that time ago and wondered if she’d done the same to him.

            “She never came over. Once or twice maybe, ever.”

            “Think Mickey. Did she leave anything?”

            He looked wounded. I was disgusted with them both, and I pulled away from the curb and headed to his house.

            “Where’s Mae?”

            “Aunt Mae?” He asked, still in some stupor I couldn’t figure out.

            “No. Mae West.”

            He looked confused.

            “Yes, Aunt Mae. Where is she?”

            “I. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. That’s weird, Duncan.” He fidgeted, “Oh man. I haven’t seen her. I don’t know where she is. Duncan. Holy shit. I don’t know. Oh man. Oh.”

            “Mick.”

            “Oh shit, man. Oh shit.”

            “Mick!”

            He grabbed his hair and pulled. Punched the dashboard and rocked in his seat saying “Oh shit” over and over.

            “That bitch. Look what she’s done to you.”

            He stopped. “Mae?”

            “No. Rhonda. This is all her fault.”

            He was stricken with terror then. I’d never said a bad word about Roni. Not when she dated that creep, Paul, not on the numerous occasions she stood us up unexplained and strolled in all innocent and apologetic, but obviously lying. Not even when she left us at the train station. I didn’t curse her name when her brother tried to blame me for her death, for the fire, or any of the other crap that had gone down in the last year.

            I pulled to a stoplight, two blocks from Mickey’s place and put the car in park. I leaned against the headrest and covered my eyes with my palms. My father’s words kept jingling in the jar like pennies saved. I didn’t know her at all, and now we were in this mess of shit.

            “Dunc.”

            I ignored him. I was dizzy and sick. I was hurt. Angry. Betrayed. Pissed. I rubbed my hands against my eyelids until my eyeballs ached and dug my fingers until I thought my scalp would bleed.

            “Dunc.” He said more seriously.

            I’d had it with him, too, my inherited responsibility then felt the sledgehammer of guilt for thinking it.

            Roni got herself mixed up with the wrong people and dragged us down with her. We meant nothing to her. I was ill thinking of my mom and dad together again, the things he said about Roni. How true it all sounded. I was in the middle of some sick moment of truth, some vile and disgusting snapshot of how screwed up our lives were because of her. Stuck in this truth where the man behind the curtain is revealed in our trashy small town version of Oz.

            “Duncan!”

            “For the love of Christ, Mickey! What?”

            “Look at the house.”

            I pulled my hands away and he pointed. “At the house,” he said again.

            Two cars in front of the house, a police car and a brown sedan.

            “What do we do?”

            “I have no idea.” I rolled the window down for air. I needed to think. Fireflies. The fireflies in my head. The penny-saved thoughts, all jingling and flashing, metallic and buzzing in my head. Porch light. Roni.

            “Well we can’t go there, I don’t think,” I said and closed my eyes to the unraveling world.

            “We have to.”

            “Ok. I know. Just give me a minute to think.”

            He squirmed in his seat then slumped down so he couldn’t be seen.

            He was hunched down in the foot well, too big for the space. He looked like an oversized pillow shoved into a too small pillow case. “What are you doing?”

            “Cop’s lookin’ this way.”

            “And you think hiding in the foot well makes my car disappear? Get up.”

            I rolled the car through the stop sign and two blocks up, pulled in behind the sedan.

            “When you get out, pretend you haven’t been here and have no idea what’s happening. Do you understand?”

            He nodded, and stepped out of the car, rubbing his hands on his thighs as he walked up to the officer.

            “What’s happening here?” he asked, cooler in tone than I had expected.

            “Do you live here?”

            “Yes, sir. Is something wrong?”

            I approached Mickey’s side, the officer looked at me and recognition crossed his face. “You’re Duncan Manning.”

            I nodded.

            The officer looked back at Mickey. “I’m Reggie Sullivan. Your house has been vandalized, young man.”

            “Is my aunt ok?” Mickey asked.

            “Your aunt?”

            “Yes, sir. I live with my aunt. This is her house. Is she ok?”

            “I haven’t seen her. We got a call from a neighbor. Was your aunt supposed to be here?”

            “I-I thought so.” A question rose in his voice, on the brink of panic. “Can I go inside?”

             Sullivan swung his arm wide toward the door; Mickey stepped forward, up the steps and into the open door.

            “So Duncan,” he said once we were alone, “you had a little arson problem a few days ago, and we got the call about a similar break-in at your house. I thought you were still in the hospital. We sent a squad car there to talk to you about your house.”

            I nodded to let him know I was aware of my own house.

            “Have you seen your place? It’s a real mess but it doesn’t look like anything is gone. You need to do an inventory if you haven’t yet.”

            All I could do was stare at him.

            “And your friend, here. Do you want to speculate what might be the cause here?”

            “I wish I knew.”

            Mickey came out.

            “Anything missing?” Sullivan asked.

            “Nothing that I can see.” He answered.

            Mickey walked to my left side and faced Sullivan. “So what do we do now?”

 Sullivan said. “With nothing missing and nothing broken, just messed up and thrown around, I don’t really know what we can do here. No door damage. The neighbor that called in,” he checked his notes, “a Mr. Parks said he just saw the door wide open, went to check if everything was okay, then called.”

            “What about Aunt Mae?”

            “If she doesn’t turn up in the next day or so, and after you’ve talked to her friends and any other relatives, call us at the station and file a missing person’s report.”

            “With this mess of crime surrounding you guys, eventually you’re going to need to tell us what motivation someone would have to target you. Think about that and call me if you think of anything.” He handed me a card with his name and number.

            I almost told him to question Cal Eastwood. It was on the tip of my tongue. I almost told him to investigate Tate and that shithole, Hive, but couldn’t. The only information I could give about either of them was a hunch and a prison tale from an ex-con. All I could think about was what my dad said about Roni, and some sick part of me wanted to find out for myself – a sick satisfaction in figuring out what she’d got us into and getting ourselves out of it. And I didn’t know what the motivation was. I had no idea what she’d led us into and before I went talking to cops about it, I had to know what it was.

            As the officer opened his car door, I yelled to him, “Do you know who this car belongs to?”

            He stopped and stepped back to me. “This car? It’s not familiar to you? Doesn’t normally park on this street?”

            “No it doesn’t.” Mickey answered.

            “Well let’s have a look.”

            He wrote down the plate number, peeked in the window and said if he came up with anything on it, he’d let Mickey know then reminded me to call if I thought of anything. I wanted to yell to him as he drove away, “Rhonda Eastwood. It’s all about Rhonda Eastwood. You find out who killed her and you’ll find out who’s doing this to us.” But the words didn’t come. They just buzzed around in my head – dizzy fireflies, trying to make light.

            After Sullivan drove away, Mickey went inside and waited at the threshold for me to follow. “Can you help me?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            Mickey grabbed trash bags from under the sink and we began to fill them with the debris spread around the house. We put cushions back on the couch and righted overturned tables and chairs.

            Two hours later, the house looked like it should again. Mickey went to his room to get a bag of things because he didn’t want to stay in the house alone. He said he’d come to my place and we could do the clean-up there. I waited in the kitchen for Mickey to come out.

            “Duncan! Come here.” His voice rose with excitement.

            He was crouched on the floor in his closet. “A box.” He’d excavated it from the floorboard. When we were younger, Mickey used to hide stuff, mostly a stash of magazines, a bottle of whiskey, and snapshots he didn’t want lying around for Mae to find under a loose floorboard in his closet. Most of the time he would forget stuff or lose something and only remembered it later. He’d dig in the floorboard and retrieve it. This was one of those times.

            My heart raced. “What’s in it, Mickey?”

            “Some pictures of us and Roni and”

            I cut him off. “I don’t want to see them. I’m too mad at her right now.”

            “Well you shouldn’t be. She was our friend. She loved us. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

            But she had and I knew it.

            “When I was getting my duffle bag from my closet, I got in the floor. I just remembered the box, and the stuff in it. So I got it. I got the box and knew you’d be so happy when I remembered it. Cuz I also have a book.”

            “A book? What book? Did she leave it there? Let me see it!”

            He pulled the dusty lid from the red Nike box and handed me a book, curled and rubber-banded into a tube and stretched it toward me. “Roni gave it to me and told me to keep it safe. It has a bunch of numbers in it and I didn’t know what it was. That was a long time ago. I stuffed it in the floor. I never even remembered I had anything in the floor this time. I thought it was empty, but figured I better look, cuz you’d be mad if I forgot, and there it was!”

            I pulled the rubber band from it and the book fell open. “It’s a ledger from the Hive. I don’t even know how to read this thing. Let’s take it to Larson at the store. He does ledger stuff all the time. He can help us.”

            Mick’s pride lit up his face and he reminded me again of the fireflies. The buzzing, dizzy feeling in my head. “You have my fireflies,” I said.

            “Your fireflies?”

            “Don’t you remember when we were little? All the fireflies in the neighborhood would be in your yard. They all followed you. It was the weirdest thing. We all chased fireflies, but they were all attracted to you. You didn’t have to chase them, they wanted to be by you. Remember?”

            “Uh huh.” He sat on the floor and started tying his shoe. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say, and he wasn’t really listening, but I kept talking.

            “Well all day today I’ve had fireflies scrambling in my head, making me dizzy and sort of sick. They wanted out because they wanted to be by you, and look, you’re all lit up. I think they found you again.”

            “What does that mean?’

            “I don’t really know. I just know I feel better, and you look more like you are supposed to look. You’re bright again.”

            He pushed himself off the floor and clapped my shoulder. He took the box from the bed and shoved it in his duffle, I think hopeful I would come around and want to see the pictures in the box. “You ready to go?”

            “Yep. Let’s go.”