The VooDoo Lounge early in the morning was little more than a concrete expanse of roof dotted with red and black couches. The chairs were shaped like enormous hands. A staircase curved above the roof. Patrons could climb it for a better view of the Vegas strip below. There were a couple of cages for showgirls to dance in, but no one was in the lounge now except a janitor. He raised his eyebrows as Jule came in. “I just want to have a look,” Jule told him. “I’m harmless, I swear.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m mopping up.”
Jule went to the top of the staircase and gazed at the city. She thought of all the lives being led down there. People were buying toothpaste, having arguments, picking up eggs on the way home from work. They lived their lives surrounded by all that glitter and neon, happily assuming that small, cute women were harmless.
Three years ago, Julietta West Williams was fifteen. She’d been in an arcade—a big one, air-conditioned and shiny-new. She was racking up points on a war simulation. She was lost in it, shooting, when two boys she knew from school came up behind her and squeezed her boobs. One on each side.
Julietta elbowed one sharply in his soft stomach, then swung around and stomped hard on the other one’s foot. Then she kneed him in the groin.
It was the first time she’d ever hit anyone outside of her martial arts classes. The first time she’d needed to.
All right, she hadn’t needed to. She’d wanted to. She enjoyed it.
When that boy bent over, coughing, Jule turned and hit the first one in the face with the heel of her hand. His head flew back and she yanked the front of his T-shirt and yelled into his greasy ear, “I’m not yours to touch!”
She wanted to see fear on that boy’s face, and to see his friend crumpled over on a nearby bench. Those two boys had always been so cocky at school, afraid of nothing.
A pimple-face man who worked at the arcade came over and grabbed Julietta’s arm. “We can’t have fighting in here, miss. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
“Are you grabbing my arm?” she asked him. “ ’Cause I don’t want you to grab my arm.”
He dropped it fast.
He was afraid of her.
He was six inches taller than her and at least three years older. He was a grown man, and he was afraid of her.
It felt good.
Julietta left the arcade. She didn’t worry that the boys would follow her. She felt like she was in a movie. She hadn’t known she could take care of herself that way, hadn’t known that the strength she’d been building in the classes and in the weight room at the high school would pay off. She realized she had built armor for herself. Perhaps that was what she’d been intending to do.
She looked the same, looked just like anyone, but she saw the world differently after that. To be a physically powerful woman—it was something. You could go anywhere, do anything, if you were difficult to hurt.
—
A few floors down in the Rio hotel hallway, Jule found a maid who was pushing a cart. A forty-dollar tip and she had a room to sleep in until three-thirty. The check-in time was four p.m.
Another night of lifting wallets and another day of sleep and Jule was ready to buy an inconspicuous used car off a sleazy guy in a parking lot. She paid cash. She collected her luggage from the bus station and stashed her extra IDs deep under the felt that lined the hatchback.
She drove herself across the border to Mexico with Adelaide Belle Perry’s passport.
LAST WEEK OF FEBRUARY, 2017
LONDON
Three months before Jule arrived in Mexico, Forrest Smith-Martin was on Jule’s couch, eating baby carrots with his straight, glossy teeth. He had been staying at her London flat for five nights.
Forrest was Immie’s ex-boyfriend. He always acted like he didn’t believe a word Jule said. If she said she liked blueberries, he raised his eyebrows like he highly doubted it. If she said Immie had flitted off to Paris, he questioned her about where, precisely, Immie was staying. He made Jule feel illegitimate.
Pale and slim, Forrest belonged to the category of scrawny men who are uncomfortable when women are more muscular than they are. His joints seemed loosely attached, and the woven bracelet around his left wrist looked dirty. He had gone to Yale for world literature. He liked people to know he’d gone to Yale and often brought it up in conversation. He wore little spectacles, was developing a beard that never quite sprouted, and kept his long hair in a man bun on the top of his head. He was twenty-two and working on his novel.
Right now, he was reading a book translated from the French. Albert Camus. He pronounced it Camoo. He was draped on the couch, not just sitting, and wore a sweatshirt and his boxer shorts.
Forrest was in the flat because of Immie’s death. He said he wanted to sleep on the fold-out couch in the den, to be near Imogen’s things. More than once, Jule found him taking Immie’s clothes out of the closet and smelling them. A couple of times he hung them from the window frames. He found Imogen’s old books—early editions of Vanity Fair and other Victorian novels—and piled them next to his bed, as if he needed to see them before he fell asleep. Then he left the toilet seat up.
He and Jule had been handling Immie’s death from the London end. Gil and Patti were stuck in New York because of Gil’s health. The Sokoloffs had managed to keep the suicide out of all the papers. They said they didn’t want publicity, and there was no question of foul play, according to the police. Even though her body hadn’t been found, no one doubted what had happened. Immie had left that note in the bread box.
Everyone agreed she must have been depressed. People jumped into the Thames all the time, said the police. If a person weighted herself down before jumping, as Imogen had written she planned to do, there was no telling how long it might take before a body was found.
Now Jule sat next to Forrest and flipped on the TV. It was late-night BBC programming. The two of them had spent the day going through Immie’s kitchen, packing things as Patti had requested. It had been a long and emotional project.
“That girl looks like Immie,” Forrest said, pointing to an actress on the screen.
Jule shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Yes, she does,” said Forrest. “To me, she does.”
“Not up close,” Jule said. “She just has short hair. People think I look like Immie, too, from a distance.”
He looked at her steadily. “You don’t look like her, Jule,” he said. “Imogen was a million times prettier than you will ever be.”
Jule glared. “I didn’t know we were getting hostile tonight. I’m kinda tired. Can we just skip it, or are you really jonesing for an argument?”
Forrest leaned toward her, shutting his Camus. “Did Imogen lend you money?” he asked.
“No, she didn’t,” Jule answered truthfully.
“Did you want to sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Did she have a new boyfriend?”
“No.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“There are six hundred things I’m not telling you,” Jule said. “Because I’m a private person. And my friend just died. I’m sad and I’m trying to deal with it. Is that all right with you?”