Kate still suspects everyone. Ray, who, on his knees, begged Kate for forgiveness on the front lawn in front of the neighbors a month after the murders; Bill MacPherson, who delivered the twice-monthly supply of napkins, cups, and bowls to the shop that were ignited to start the fire; the girls’ previous high school band director, who kissed Zadie in the instrument closet when she was in tenth grade. Even two homeless men, Truck and Trailer, who shuffled in single-file tandem along Barton Spring Road, so that one seemed to tow the other. She knows this makes no sense. But she can’t help herself. The mind reels. She remembered her mother saying that. Kate pictured a broken projector spooling film to the floor. But her mind did reel. Flung at her all its confused, spent images, its nonsense. Spooled out hypotheses until there was nothing but conspiracy and blame. It’s in this way that she continues to avoid the brutally quiet, small words spoken at her door that night.
Kate has planned out the whole thing. How when it comes time, she will write a victim’s statement and read it at the trial. Slowly. To the jury. To her daughters’ murderers. Rather than bear witness to her loss, she will curse the murderers’ fathers and mothers, their wives and children. She will utter heinous prayers. May their children plunge out of upper-story windows. May their fathers be rent limb from limb. May their mothers’ eyes be gouged out. May their penises be severed and inserted into their own gaping mouths.
She will offer no mercy.
Were her daughters offered mercy?
No understanding.
What was there to understand?
She will bring down their houses.
Then, a few days before the sentencing phase, she’ll get one of the security guards she’s been working on during the trial to let her into the courthouse after hours. She will tell him she left her cell phone behind. After she recovers the phone from beneath a courtroom seat cushion, she’ll ask to use the nearest ladies’ room, which is approximately twenty-seven steps and one left turn from the courtroom door. In the restroom’s second stall, there’s a plumbing access panel just behind the toilet. She knows all about these from the ice cream shop, its bad plumbing. She’ll need the Phillips-head screwdriver in her purse to take it off. She’ll remove from her purse and place among the pipes the light brown calfskin pouch she’s sewn together from the upper portions of the girls’ cowgirl boots. It’s a bit of a patchwork, it’s true. She’s hidden the seams as best she can. The raised patterned leather—small spiraling plant shapes, whorls—looks like the topography of a map. The rise and fall of the land. Inside the pouch, a .380 handgun borrowed from her former brother-in-law, the same caliber used to kill her daughters.
Her wrath will be cunning, swift, terrible.
13
NEXT TO HER bed, Rosa keeps a plastic blue crate full of photos, interviews, notes, and news clippings about the murders that tell her nothing. A string of false confessions, some interviews that she’d done early on with Detective Robeson, witnesses in the shop earlier that day. Most remembered nothing except a small fire breaking out near the waffle irons. Later, a few recalled a fight in the parking lot. A disgruntled boyfriend of one of the girls, one said. Skate punks, said another. Homeless guys. Dropouts. The guy with the art car. A young man in a long overcoat. Squaring the circle, she thinks, looking at the crate. Where had she heard that?
And now, six weeks before the fifth anniversary of the killings, she has a feature story, possibly even the cover. The city was going to raze the ice cream shop, which had been condemned since the murders. People were angry, unsure of what to do. Until now, except for their yearly plea on the news channels, the girls’ families had turned down interviews. Victims’ families, Rosa knew, always had their own agendas and timetables. Parents who’d lost children were the most difficult. They went along with interviews to put pressure on the police or potential suspects. Sometimes they wanted to warn others or band them together for a cause, or to simply express their anger at God. Often their grief was complicated by a perplexed sense of failure. What could we have done differently? If only I’d been there. Though it was never clear what they might have done to change it. Even years after, the future for many of them—beyond what it might reveal about the past—was a void.
She’d sit with these mothers and fathers on their sofas, framed photos of their children clustered on the coffee table, illustrating what was obvious to everyone but them: that their loved ones never aged. That their children gestated unchanged inside them.
14