Free Skies of Ash by Rachel Howzell Hall

front.”
    “Didn’t get to come back and finish her tea,” Colin added, his voice tight, his flashlight trained on the mug.
    Next to the planning calendar sat a daily planner opened to December 10. In neat print, someone (Juliet?) had written “APPT @IMG @ 2:30,” and on December 11, “FUP w/Dr. K @10.”
    I flipped to the past week: on Thursday, December 6, she’d had an appointment with Dr. Kulkanis at ten o’clock. A business card from the obstetrician-gynecologist had been stuck in the journal’s crease. Three appointments, just days apart.
    Sarah Oliver had mentioned Juliet being sick. And Juliet was supposed to visit her doctor this morning. A baby doctor.
    How many women died each year after visiting baby doctors and then sharing the news with their significant others? Too many.
    I took the journal and the calendar and then opened the top drawer—pens, pads, clips. In the large bottom drawer, I found letters bundled together with strands of raffia.
    As I browsed through the envelopes, Colin drifted over to the bookcase.
    I found nothing obvious in the first couple of letters—notes from friends and from her mother—but I took them all anyway. I stepped over to the coffee table: a
Self
magazine with Heidi Klum on the cover. A pen and two slips of paper. I shone light onto the words of the first note, written in neat cursive.
    Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Our life is a lie. It will be over soon and what we are will no longer be.
    Hunh.
    Then, I read the second note. “Found something.” My stomach clenched as I took pictures of both documents.
    Colin stood beside me and read the first note under his breath. “Suicide?”
    I shrugged. “Read note number two.”
    His eyes skipped across the page. “Shit.”
    “Yeah.”
    “May not mean anything.”
    “You just said
may not
.”
    He gazed at me, glanced at the notes, then pulled two evidence bags from his pocket.
    Those notes weren’t teeth lost in carpet, banged-in walls, or pools of blood on bathroom linoleum. Nothing hard like that. But the family’s pathology—secrets and fear and betrayal—were starting to poke out and stink.

11
    THE DRIZZLE HAD STEPPED UP ITS GAME, AND NOW, THIN RAIN, THE KIND THAT destroyed hair and made driving more dangerous than skydiving, fell from those Hollywood clouds. Colin and I left Juliet Chatman’s Away Place as the fire company loaded equipment back onto the engines and as two patrol officers wrapped new stretches of yellow tape across the front yard. Pepe and Luke had beat it back to the station with boxes of evidence crowding their cars’ trunks and cabins. At Ruby Emmett’s brick bungalow across the street, a group of neighbors huddled on the lawn.
    Colin smiled. “Looks like everybody’s home. Be a shame to leave right now.”
    “It would.” I winked at him. “Ready, partner?”
    “Always, partner.”
    “No mention of the gun or the suitcases or the 911 call.”
    “Got it.”
    Interviews are usually conducted in isolation—you and the witness in a locked room, knee to knee. But after finding that second note on the coffee table, I wanted the women of Don Mateo Drive in one room, clucking like pissed-off hens. A dangerous game? Certainly. But the potential payoff…
    All group discussion came to a halt as Colin and I approached.
    “Evenin’,” Colin drawled.
    No one responded.
    Delia Moss, the playwright, clutched an iPad to her chest. A chubby, balding white guy stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. Round Ruby put her hands on her hips as Nora the real estate agent readjusted the plastic bonnet that protected her weave from the rain. A hatchet-faced black man and Ben Oliver smirked at me.
    “I know it’s dinnertime,” I said, “but we’d like to talk to anyone who’s willing.” I smiled and nodded at Ben Oliver.
    He didn’t smile back.
    My face warmed, and my jaw tightened so much it creaked.
    “I’m tired of all this pokin’ around,” Ruby said. “Y’all, the reporters,