“You were asleep,” Foster said without looking at her. “You were still upset.”
“Upset about what?” I asked.
“You need to take one of your pills and lie down. I’m gonna handle this.”
“What are you—” Her voice hooked me, and I turned. She was staring at me, a childlike, unspoken plea for help in her face. “What’s happening?”
Foster padded across the camper to her and took the tin of pills from her hand. He opened it, took her jaw in one hand, and pressed one of the pills between her lips. When I’d been growing up, I’d seen the neighbors give their dog her medicine the same way. He waited, and she swallowed, and he released, saying, “Go lie down.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, but they didn’t fall. She gave an unseeing look around the camper, her eyes passing over me as though I weren’t there, and then she made her way to the bunks at the back. She slipped off her clogs and her bare feet looked small and clean as she climbed onto the lower bunk. She had to wiggle around to pull the door shut after her. I thought about Keme sleeping in there too. All three of them packed into that weird little corner room.
Then Foster turned back toward me. I guess it says something about me that, over the last year, I’ve gotten used to the idea that somebody might want to kill me. My first thought was to check for weapons. He was standing in the kitchen, so knives seemed like a real possibility. But he didn’t open a drawer or rummage around inside a cabinet, and there wasn’t anything even close to a weapon out where I could see it.
Now that I thought about it, there wasn’tanythingout where I could see it. Everything in the camper looked like it had come with the camper. Heck, for that matter, everything except the cushions looked like it was bolted down. Where werethe knickknacks? Where was all the junk that accumulated in a shared living space? I tried to think back to the glimpse I’d gotten of the bunks—had there been blankets? I didn’t think so.
When Foster leaned against the kitchenette’s counter, my attention came back to him. “I don’t know what you think we’re going to say. He didn’t stay the night here. I’m not going to say he did. Whatever he got up to after he left here, that’s his responsibility.”
“Why did Keme go talk to JT?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he see that made him upset?”
Foster folded his arms across his chest and shrugged.
I tried to think about a clever way to ask the next question, and finally I said, “Where’d you get that bruise?”
“I slipped in the shower.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Did Keme hit you?” I asked.
“If he hit me, I’d kill that kid. I don’t put up with that kind of behavior.”
It was surreal, listening to this guy who couldn’t have been any older than me talk like he was some sort of father-knows-best stereotype from the Wally Cleaver era.
“Did Keme see you hurt September?”
For the first time, something like shock showed on Foster’s face. “I’ve never laid a finger on her.”
But I saw, in my mind, how he’d held her by the jaw, and how those slender, boyish fingers had forced the pill into her mouth.
I decided to try a new angle. “Why would Keme be angry with JT?”
“I told you I don’t know.”
“I know. I’m asking you to think. Take a guess.”
“Because JT’s the worst, man. His wife too.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re awful. They run this place like it’s their little kingdom. They’ve got all these rules. They’re always trying to bust someone. And they’ll charge you for anything they can. Petty stuff. One time, we had some friends over, and we didn’t clean up until the next morning, you know. That jagweed fined us for littering.” He shook his head and scoffed.
“That doesn’t sound like enough to want to murder someone.”
