Blood Harmony
“I’ll leave the two of you to look at these then.” Mr. Pressy closed the accordion room separator to give the two women some privacy while they chose between the models.
“Our go-between is gone. You’re going to have to talk to me now,” Lorna Williams said as she stood next to her sister. The ride over had been as silent as the past ten years. She sniffled. “It stinks of lilies in here. We can’t have those. If we have them, Mom will never be able to work in her flowerbeds again.”
Trish reached out a hand and touched the cold metal, wrapping her fingers over the edge until they reached the white satin.
“It reminds me of the dress that girl he took to prom wore. Didn’t she think she was something? He was only being kind and she showed up like they were getting married.”
Trish nodded. “I remember. I wonder why it couldn’t work out between the two of them though. They were such good friends.”
Lorna looked at her sister with a raised brow. “Honestly, Trish?”
She shrugged. “I know what you think, but-”
“What I know. He told you things, but he didn’t tell you everything.”
Trish bristled. “The navy. We’ll just do this. The camo is tacky, I don’t care if he wore it half the time, he’s not going to heaven in it.”
“Dad’s not here and you won’t get any argument from me. The navy it is.”
They drove the twelve miles back to their parents’ place, down a winding gravel road that could have used some attention from the county, the only sound the rattle of an empty La Croix can against the pennies in the cupholder of Lorna’s aging Pontiac and Dolly Parton singing “Hard Candy Christmas” quietly in the background. Neither of them noticed they were both humming along.
When Trish opened the front door Lorna could smell the eggy mayonnaise wafting from the kitchen.
“What is she doing?” Lorna asked, the disgust in her voice clear.
“Ham salad.” Trish shook her head. “They’ve got so many hams in the freezer.”
They rounded the corner through the den and into the kitchen where the girls found their mother cubing ham, a bowl containing what must have been a gallon of mayonnaise sitting on the counter in front of her.
“Mom, this might be a little bit much.”
Their mother looked up, her glasses having slipped down to the end of her nose. Her hands were too dirty to push them up.
“There’ll be people coming by though,” she said.
Lorna though that yesterday her mother was fifty-six and today she was pushing seventy. This must be what happens when you live to see your baby die.
“Yes, and they’ll feed you. You don’t have to do this.”
Daphne Williams stood still, her face crumbling stone, her hands covered in ham grease. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Go take a bath,” Trish suggested. “We’ll finish this and get the kitchen cleaned up. Don’t worry about it. It’s late. You need to get some rest.”
Lorna took the reins at the sink, unwilling to go anywhere near the ham.
They worked in tandem, not speaking, their movements creating a soundtrack all its own that each would remember years later. The scrape of the chef’s knife across the cutting board, the garbage disposal, running water. The smell of ham and mayonnaise.
“We’ve got to write a list. What we have to do. We can’t let him get away with this.”
“You don’t know it was him,” Trish said.
Lorna wrung out a dish cloth and glared. “Can you stop for just a minute and forget that I’m ‘not from around here’ anymore? Our brother is dead. We both know who did it. The whole town does. And the sheriff isn’t doing anything because of who is involved.”
The door from the garage opened and their father shuffled in and around the corner to the bathroom. They waited for him to return to the garage and listened for his radio to come on before they continued their conversation.
“He’s not handling this well at all,” Lorna said.
“David is dead. What do you want him to do? Watch a ball game?”
“I mean…I’m worried.”
They continued with their work.
“We’ll have to find the evidence ourselves. If the sheriff isn’t going to take care of business then I don’t know what else to do.”
“Fine then. But we’ve got to wait for the snow to melt. Can you stick around that long, or do you have to get back?” Trish asked.
Lorna nodded. “We have to do it. We’re the only ones looking and we’ve got to stick together on it. There’s no way we can risk getting caught out on our own. The same thing might happen to us if we’re not together.”
Both of the girls stopped what they were doing when they heard the garage door rattle and their father’s pickup fire up and head out into the snowy night.
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this is my entry for week 9 of therealljidol. the topic is "blood harmony". this exists inside of a previously visited universe from lj idols past, but can be read without knowledge of that. however, if you want to know more about these people and the world they inhabit you can find out more about the characters here: david, the suspects, the sheriff. you can vote in the poll here. the rest of the idol entries can be found here.