Free Late Rain by Lynn Kostoff Page B

Bank and Trust and withdraw the last installment for the front money that would set everything in motion for Stanley’s death.
    All she had to do was not be her mother.
    Her mother had the looks but never knew what to do with them except try to live in them, and that she had done badly.
    Episodes , that’s what Corrine’s mother had called those times when she simply dropped out of sight and out of their life. She might disappear for an afternoon or a day or weekend. Maybe a week, sometimes a month and change. One day Corrine’s mother was there. Then she wasn’t. When she eventually returned, she always brought Corrine presents—lots of them. And usually had in tow a new boyfriend or husband. It was often difficult to tell the two apart.
    There was no pattern to her mother’s episodes. No early warning signs.
    Her mother had episodes, and she collected husbands and boyfriends, and then as a makeshift family, they moved around the country. Like the episodes, there was no clear pattern to the moves. Instead, an emotional vertigo and a vague whim that broke down or disappeared before it could become a real promise or plan.
    Corrine remembered standing in the bedroom of an apartment in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was July, and she was eleven. Her mother was sitting and facing her vanity mirror and brushing her hair. Corrine was behind her, looking over her mother’s shoulder, and she could still remember the crackle of the static electricity and how it lifted her mother’s hair with each stroke. Corrine remembered too looking into the mirror and meeting her mother’s gaze. Their eyes were interchangeable, exactly the same shape and shade of gray.
    I’m scared sometimes , her mother had said when Corrine had asked about her disappearances. Corrine had waited for her mother explain why or of what, but her mother went no further than that. Later, she took Corrine to the mall and bought her a thin gold bracelet with her initials engraved inside, and then they’d stopped at the food court and each had a chocolate sundae.
    A year later, her mother and new husband named Kelly had dropped Corrine off at Corrine’s grandparents’ house in Bradford, Indiana, a small town north of Gary.
    Her mother and Kelly drove off in a blue Thunderbird. It was the last time Corrine saw her.
    Corrine sat through one last red light and then took Queensland through old downtown Magnolia Beach past the town square that doubled as a small park with its gravel pathways, gazebo, granite war memorial, and central fountain surrounded by thick-trunked trees whose leaves appeared painted on the evening sky.
    Corrine drove through five blocks of cheek-to-jowl red and brown brick buildings, mostly two or three stories, caught in a stalemate between gentrification and neglect, boarded-up or empty storefronts alternating with trendy coffee shops and law offices and specialty boutiques.
    Queensland eventually T-boned with Atlantic Avenue, the north-south commercial strip that roughly paralleled the beach. Corrine took a right and drove three blocks. She pulled into the lot of the Maritime Bank and Trust.
    I get scared sometimes , Corrine’s mother had said.
    Corrine couldn’t afford that luxury.
    At the ATM, she withdrew the last installment of the front money she would pass on to Raychard Balen. Corrine had taken pains not to draw attention with her transactions, carefully spacing each out, everything a matter of time.
    She’d call Raychard Balen tomorrow morning and give him the final go-ahead.
    Then she could literally begin to number Stanley Tedros’s days, the phone call making it real again, Stanley Tedros’s death now clearly on the horizon, positioned and in place like the morning star, something not so much to wish upon anymore but to navigate by.

SEVENTEEN
    BEN DECOVIC responded to a domestic disturbance in northeast Magnolia Beach, a couple who’d taken their late-night argument from the kitchen out into their front yard where in addition to