Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

You are, you know. My sun
. My
throat tight, I took a final look around my father’s house and
left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open
the envelope marked fourth clue. We had to be near the
end.
Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad
I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had
It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five
Pardon me if this is getting contrived!

---

A good time was had here right at sunny midday
Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.
So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,
And open the door for your big surprise.
My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant.
I reread it. I couldn’t even guess. Amy had stopped taking it
easy on me. I wasn’t going to finish the treasure hunt after
all.
I felt a surge of angst. What a fucking day. Boney was
out to get me, Noelle was insane, Shawna was pissed,
Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security company
was a bitch, and my wife had stumped me finally. It was
time to end this goddamn day. There was only one woman I
could stand to be around right now.
Go took one look at me – rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-
exhausted from my dad’s – and parked me on the couch,
announced she’d make some late dinner. Five minutes
later, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my
meal on an ancient TV tray. An old Dunne standby: grilled
cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …
‘It’s not Kool-Aid,’ Go said. ‘It’s beer. Kool-Aid
seemed a little too regressive.’
‘This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.’
‘You’re cooking tomorrow.’
‘Hope you like canned soup.’
She sat down on the couch next to me, stole a chip
from my plate, and asked, too casually: ‘Any thoughts on
why the cops would ask 
me
if Amy was still a size two?’
‘Jesus, they won’t fucking let that go,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t it freak you out? Like, they found her clothes
or something?’

---

‘They’d have asked me to identify them. Right?’
She thought about that a second, her face pinched.
‘That makes sense,’ she said. Her face remained pinched
until she caught me looking, then she smiled. ‘I taped the
ball game, wanna watch? You okay?’
‘I’m okay.’ I felt awful, my stomach greasy, my psyche
crackling. Maybe it was the clue I couldn’t figure out, but I
suddenly felt like I’d overlooked something. I’d made some
huge mistake, and my error would be disastrous. Maybe it
was my conscience, scratching back to the surface from its
secret oubliette.
Go pulled up the game and, for the next ten minutes,
remarked on the game only, and only between sips of her
beer. Go didn’t like grilled cheese; she was scooping
peanut butter out of the jar onto saltines. When a
commercial break came on, she paused and said, ‘If I had
a dick, I would fuck this peanut butter,’ deliberately spraying
cracker bits toward me.
‘I think if you had a dick, all sorts of bad things would
happen.’
She fast-forwarded through a nothing inning. Cards
trailing by five. When it was time for the next commercial
break, Go paused, said, ‘So I called to change my cell-
phone plan today, and the hold song was Lionel Richie –
do you ever listen to Lionel Richie? I like “Penny Lover,” but
the song wasn’t “Penny Lover,” but anyway, then a woman
came on the line, and she said the customer-service reps
are all based in Baton Rouge, which was strange because
she didn’t have an accent, but she said she grew up in New
Orleans, and it’s a little-known fact that – what do you call
someone from New Orleans, a New Orleansean? –

---

anyway, that they don’t have much of an accent. So she
said for my package, package A …’
Go and I had a game inspired by our mom, who had a
habit of telling such outrageously mundane, endless stories
that Go was positive she had to be secretly fucking with us.
For about ten years now, whenever Go and I hit a
conversation lull, one of us would break in with a story about
appliance repair or coupon fulfillment. Go had more
stamina than I did, though. Her stories could drone on,
seamlessly, forever – they went on so long that they
became genuinely annoying and then swung back around
to hilarious.
Go was moving on to a story about her refrigerator
light and showed no signs of faltering. Filled with a sudden,
heavy gratefulness, I leaned across the couch and kissed
her on the cheek.
‘What’s that for?’
‘Just, thanks.’ I felt my eyes get full with tears. I looked
away for a second to blink them off, and Go said, ‘So I
needed a triple-A battery, which, as it turns out, is different
from a 
transistor
battery, so I had to find the receipt to
return the transistor battery …’
We finished watching the game. Cards lost. When it
was over, Go switched the TV to mute. ‘You want to talk, or
you want more distraction? Whatever you need.’
‘You go on to bed, Go. I’m just going to flip around.
Probably sleep. I need to sleep.’
‘You want an Ambien?’ My twin was a staunch believer
in the easiest way. No relaxation tapes or whale noises for
her; pop a pill, get unconscious.
‘Nah.’

---

‘They’re in the medicine cabinet if you change your
mind. If there was ever a time for assisted sleep …’ She
hovered over me for just a few seconds, then, Go-like,
trotted down the hall, clearly not sleepy, and closed her
door, knowing the kindest thing was to leave me alone.
A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck
off. People love talking, and I have never been a huge
talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often
don’t reach my lips. 
She looks nice today
, I’d think, but
somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud. My mom
talked, my sister talked. I’d been raised to listen. So, sitting
on the couch by myself, not talking, felt decadent. I leafed
through one of Go’s magazines, flipped through TV
channels, finally alighting on an old black-and-white show,
men in fedoras scribbling notes while a pretty housewife
explained that her husband was away in Fresno, which
made the two cops look at each other significantly and nod.
I thought of Gilpin and Boney and my stomach lurched.
In my pocket, my disposable cell phone made a mini-
jackpot sound that meant I had a text:
im outside open the door

---