Once the book was finally turned in, Mom spent a week pacing and snapping at everyone (I was not excluded from said snappery), waiting for Fiona to call and say Regis didn’t write this book, it doesn’t sound a bit like him, I think you wrote it, Tia. But in the end it was fine. Either Fiona never guessed or didn’t care. Certainly the reviewers never guessed when the book was crashed into production and appeared in the fall of 2010.
Publishers Weekly: “Thomas saved the best for last!”
Kirkus Reviews: “Fans of sweet-savage historical fiction will once more be in bodice-ripping clover.”
Dwight Garner, in The New York Times: “The trudging, flavorless prose is typical Thomas: the rough equivalent of a heaping plate of food from an all-you-can-eat buffet in a dubious roadside restaurant.”
Mom didn’t care about the reviews; she cared about the huge advance and the refreshed royalties from the previous Roanoke volumes. She bitched mightily about only getting fifteen percent when she had written the whole thing, but got a small measure of revenge by dedicating it to herself. “Because I deserve it,” she said.
“I’m not so sure,” Liz said. “When you think about it, Tee, you were just the secretary. Maybe you should have dedicated it to Jamie.”
This earned Liz another of my mom’s cold looks, but I thought Liz had something there. Although when you really thought about it, I was also just the secretary. It was still Mr. Thomas’s book, dead or not.
16
Now check this out: I told you at least some of the reasons why I liked Liz, and there were probably a few more. I told you all the reasons I didn’t like Liz, and there were probably a few more of those, too. What I never considered until later (yup, there’s that word again) was the possibility that she didn’t like me. Why would I? I was used to being loved, almost blasé about it. I was loved by my mother and my teachers, especially Mrs. Wilcox, my third-grade teacher, who hugged me and said she’d miss me on the day school let out. I was loved by my best friends Frankie Ryder and Scott Abramowitz (although of course we didn’t talk or even think about it that way). And don’t forget Lily Rhinehart, who once put a big smackeroo on my mouth. She also gave me a Hallmark card before I changed schools. It had a sad-looking puppy on the front and inside it said I’LL MISS YOU EVERY DAY YOU’RE AWAY. She signed it with a little heart over the i in her name. Also x’s and o’s.
Liz at least liked me, at least for awhile, I’m sure of it. But that began to change after Cobblestone Cottage. That was when she started to see me as a freak of nature. I think—no, I know—that was when Liz started to be scared of me, and it’s hard to like what you’re scared of. Maybe impossible.
Although she thought nine was old enough for me to walk home from school by myself, Liz sometimes came for me instead of Mom if Liz was working what she called “the swing shift,” which started at four in the morning and ended at noon. It was a shift detectives tried to avoid, but Liz got it quite a bit. That was another thing that I never wondered about then, but later (there it is again, yeah yeah yeah, right right right) I realized that she wasn’t exactly liked by her bosses. Or trusted. It didn’t have anything to do with the relationship she had with my mother; when it came to sex, the NYPD was slowly moving into the 21st century. It wasn’t the drinking, either, because she wasn’t the only cop who liked to put it away. But certain people she worked with had begun to suspect that Liz was a dirty cop. And—spoiler alert!—they were right.
17
I need to tell you about two particular times Liz got me after school. On both occasions she was in her car—not the one we took out to Cobblestone Cottage, but the one she called her personal. The first time was in 2011, while she and Mom were still a thing. The second was in 2013, a year or so after they stopped being a thing. I’ll get to that, but first things first.
I came out of school that day in March with my backpack slung over just one shoulder (which was how the cool sixth-grade boys did it) and Liz was waiting for me at the curb in her Honda Civic. On the yellow part of the curb, as a matter of fact, which was for handicapped people, but she had her little POLICE OFFICER ON CALL sign for that…which, you could argue, should have told me something about her character even at the tender age of eleven.
I got in, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of stale cigarette smoke that not even the little pine tree air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror could hide. By then, thanks to The Secret of Roanoke, we had our own apartment and didn’t have to live in the agency anymore, so I was expecting a ride home, but Liz turned toward downtown instead.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Little field trip, Champ,” she said. “You’ll see.”
The field trip was to Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, final resting place of Duke Ellington, Herman Melville, and Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson, among others. I know about them because I looked it up, and later wrote a report about Woodlawn for school. Liz drove in from Webster Avenue and then just started cruising up and down the lanes. It was nice, but it was also a little scary.
“Do you know how many people are planted here?” she asked, and when I shook my head: “Three hundred thousand. Less than the population of Tampa, but not by much. I checked it out on Wikipedia.”
“Why are we here? Because it’s interesting, but I’ve got homework.” This wasn’t a lie, but I only had, like, a half-hour’s worth. It was a bright sunshiny day and she seemed normal enough—just Liz, my mom’s friend—but still, this was sort of a freaky field trip.
She totally ignored the homework gambit. “People are being buried here all the time. Look to your left.” She pointed and slowed from twenty-five or so to a bare creep. Where she was pointing, people were standing around a coffin placed over an open grave. Some kind of minister was standing at the head of the grave with an open book in his hand. I knew he wasn’t a rabbi, because he wasn’t wearing a beanie.
Liz stopped the car. Nobody at the service paid any attention. They were absorbed in whatever the minister was saying.
“You see dead people,” she said. “I accept that now. Hard not to, after what happened at Thomas’s place. Do you see any here?”
“No,” I said, more uneasy than ever. Not because of Liz, but because I’d just gotten the news that we were currently surrounded by 300,000 dead bodies. Even though I knew the dead went away after a few days—a week at most—I almost expected to see them standing beside their graves or right on top of them. Then maybe converging on us, like in a fucking zombie movie.
“Are you sure?”
I looked at the funeral (or graveside service, or whatever you call it). The minister must have started a prayer, because all the mourners had bowed their heads. All except one, that was. He was just standing there and looking unconcernedly up at the sky.
“That guy in the blue suit,” I said finally. “The one who’s not wearing a tie. He might be dead, but I can’t be sure. If there’s nothing wrong with them when they die, nothing that shows, they look pretty much like anyone else.”
“I don’t see a man without a tie,” she said.