Chapter 6
Dana comes in out of breath, sees Drew and her grandparents in the kitchen and stops short for a moment.
“The police are interviewing everyone else,” she says to all of us. “But it’s our house it happened at. I mean, shouldn’t they be interviewing me?”
God help us. Sometimes she slides so easily into my mother’s marabou slippers. She’d be yelling “me first” on the line for the guillotine, asking, Why should I have to wait?
Drew says that’s why he’s here, and my mother humphs and announces she’s going out for a cigarette. She orders Drew not to interrogate Dana until she gets back. He loves to frustrate her by never rising to the bait, so he agrees without correcting her. Of course, once she’s out the door, he turns to Dana.
“Were you still out at nine-fifty?’ he asks her.
She looks at me before answering and I busy myself looking through cabinets and pretending not to listen.
“We were back at Bobbie’s,” she says. “Me and Kimmie and Kristen and a couple other girls.”
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“Bobbie didn’t hear us because we were in the basement,” Dana says.
Drew doesn’t say anything.
“And Kristen got there before us, I think,” Dana says. “It was raining really hard and we stopped in the garage for a while to dry off, so it might have been a little after that. And I had to go to the bathroom and–” she looks at me as if to ask if she has to answer Drew’s questions. I shrug back at her and remind her that she asked for it.
My mother comes back in and Drew gets off his stool and comes to sit at the kitchen table, signaling Dana to sit down in the seat beside him.
“Okay, let’s get started,” he says, like she hasn’t answered his question already. “Bearing in mind that lots of the others kids in the neighborhood have, as you mentioned, already been interviewed, you want to tell me where you were around . . .” I am about to interrupt him and tell him that my daughter already told him where she was and that Dana doesn’t lie when he says, “. . . ten o’clock?”
Dana doesn’t miss the change in time. Her voice is strong and confident. “I was in Bobbie’s basement. Next door. You know. And Kimmie and Kristen and some other kids were there, too. And we were watching Christina Aguilera on HBO. She had a Halloween special on, so I know it was ten o’clock, and it wasn’t on earlier, so it wasn’t like on Tivo or anything.”
She’s too relieved for my liking, and I’m going to want to know where she was and what she was doing between nine-fifty and ten, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to ask her in front of her grandparents and the police.
“And you were out in the rain pretty much before then?” Drew asks.
“You let her go out in the rain?” my mother says. “Well then don’t call me to stay with her when she’s got strep and you want to go off on some wild goose chase after some client or something.”
“Pretty much,” Dana says evasively.
“Okay,” he says, like they’ve both agreed not to pursue it. “So you’re outside in the rain. You see anything unusual? Anything . . .”
“It was Halloween,” Dana says. “I saw ghosts, skeletons, Bill and Hillary, hippies – and those were just the parents.”
She looks at me. “I had to come home to see a witch.”
My father tells her that’s no way to talk about her mother and I remind him that this year Alyssa went as Glinda the Good Witch and I went as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.
“You took Alyssa out in the rain, too?” my mother asks. “Pneumonia. You’re asking for pneumonia. And you with no husband.”
I explain to Drew how pneumonia is always better if you have a husband. “Everything’s better.”
“Except the sex,” my father mumbles and Drew tries to hide his smile.
“Your mom heard tires squeal shortly before the body turned up on the porch. You hear them?” Drew asks. “Being right next door and all?”
Dana’s eyes don’t meet Drew’s. She glances at me for a heartbeat and looks away.
“I guess,” she says softly. “I don’t remember.
