Free Living Dead Girl by Tod Goldberg Page A

AGO,” I say. “I think I spoke to Molly a month ago.”
    “Okay,” Sheriff Drew says, scribbling on a yellow legal pad, “let me understand something here. You moved to Los Angeles when?”
    “A few months after Katrina died,” I say.
    Sheriff Drew starts flipping through the pages of his pad, looking for something. “Okay, okay, lemme see here,” he says. “All right, then, what I have here is that your daughter passed away in September of 1997. Right?”
    “Yes.”
    Sheriff Drew looks up from his notes and stares at me in a way that isn’t quite pleasant. A stare that says he wants this moment in his life to end. “That was the one-hundred-degrees summer, wasn’t it? Thought fish were just gonna show up parboiled on the shore it got so damn hot.”
    “I don’t really recall,” I say, but a picture opens in my mind and unwinds like an alarm clock: a red sun and Katrina’s bleached white body, the clear painful sound of my own voice echoing in the forest. Birds fleeing the trees in a storm of black wings. The gnats darting in front of my eyes. Swarms of mosquitoes.
    I sit there staring at Sheriff Drew, my mind shivering with pictures from nearly three years ago, and I wonder if he can see it. If he can look into my eyes and see that there is a vacancy to me. But then he was there, too. Maybe Sheriff Drew understands that time can be like a buried tomb, that what’s preserved can be made wretched by memory, can crumble and change.
    “Has your relationship with Molly been amiable?” the sheriff asks, staring at his notepad again, “I mean since the separation, of course.”
    “Sometimes,” I say. “She wasn’t stable, I’m afraid. After Katrina died and I left, I don’t think we were ever all that pleasant to each other. Not mean, you know, but toxic. No good for each other, I guess. But when she was taking her medication it was better.”
    “What was she on?”
    “Zumax, Diorxel,” I say. “Whatever she could get to calm her down. It just depended.”
    “What about you?”
    “No,” I say. “Not anymore. I’m fine.”
    “You have a doctor in Los Angeles?”
    Dr. Plinkton, I almost say, but catch myself.
    “Not anymore,” I say. “I’m cleared to play ball.” Sheriff Drew forces a smile out and I realize that I’m being inappropriate, that my words are being scrutinized. “I’m really doing much better.”
    “Do you know who Molly’s doctor in town was?”
    “She used to see Dr. Barer, but he retired just before I moved, so whoever took his patients, I would think.”
    Sheriff Drew rubs at something on his neck and then exhales sluggishly, like he’s never been more tired. “Paul,” he says after a while, “I’m getting old, so take me through this in a slow fashion: You say you spoke to your wife about a month ago, right?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “And Bruce Duper told me outside that he and Molly spoke a little over ten days ago when she came in to get her mail. He mention that to you?”
    “He told me she came across every day or so for her mail,” I say. “So that seems likely.”
    “Then explain this to me, Paul,” he says. “How come Molly told Bruce that she’d gotten into a fight with you just a few days before she went missing?”
    “I don’t know what she could be talking about,” I say. “She doesn’t even have a phone out there anymore.”
    “No?”
    “Just the radio on the boat,” I say. “When I wanted to reach her I’d either write her a letter or call Bruce and have him get a message to her. She’d either call me from Bruce’s or she’d write me a letter. And I can guarantee that Bruce was never privy to our arguments.”
    “But you just said that, when you needed to contact her, you went through Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says. “Might he get a little from both ends? It certainly is possible that Bruce and Molly might have had a discussion or two, isn’t it?”
    “Why don’t you ask Bruce,” I say.
    “I will.” Sheriff Drew makes a note