August 26, 2018
13
Andy sat at a booth in the back of a McDonald’s outside of Big Rock, Illinois. She had been so happy to be out of Mike’s truck after two and a half monotonous days of driving that she’d treated herself to a milkshake. Worrying about her cholesterol and lack of exercise was a problem for Future Andy.
Present Andy had enough problems already. She was no longer an amoeba, but there were some obsessive tendencies that she had to accept were baked into her DNA. She had spent the first day of the trip freaking out over all of the mistakes she had made and was probably still making: that she had never checked the cooler in the Reliant for a GPS tracker, that she had left the unregistered revolver in the glove box for Mike to find, that she had possibly broken his testicles and actually stolen his wallet and was committing a felony by taking a stolen vehicle across multiple state lines.
This was the really important one: had Mike heard Paula tell Andy to look for Clara Bellamy in Illinois, or had he been too concerned that his nuts were imploding?
Future Andy would find out eventually.
She chewed the straw on her milkshake. She watched the screensaver bounce around the laptop screen. She would have to save her neurosis about Mike for when she was trying to fall asleep and needed something to torment herself over. For now, she had to figure out what the hell had landed Paula Kunde in prison for twenty years and why she so clearly held a grudge against Laura.
Andy had so far been stymied in her computer searches. Three nights spent in three different motels with the laptop propped open on her belly had resulted in nothing more than an angry red rectangle of skin on her stomach.
The easiest route to finding shit on people was always Facebook. The night Andy had left Austin, she’d created a fake account in the name of Stefan Salvatore and used the Texas Longhorns’ logo as her profile photo. Unsurprisingly, Paula Kunde was not on the social media site. ProfRatings.com let Andy use her Facebook credentials to log in as a user. She went onto Paula’s review page with its cumulative half-star rating. She sent dozens of private messages to Paula’s most vocal critics, the texts all saying the same thing:
DUDE!!! Kunde in FEDERAL PEN 20 yrs?!?!?! MUST HAVE DEETS!!! Bitch won’t change my grade!!!
Andy hadn’t heard back much more than Fuck that fucking bitch I hope you kill her, but she knew that eventually, someone would get bored and do the kind of deep dive that took knowing the number off your parents’ credit card.
A toddler screamed on the other side of the McDonald’s.
Andy watched his mother carry him toward the bathroom. She wondered if she had ever been to this McDonald’s with her mother. Laura hadn’t just pulled Chicago, Illinois, out of her ass for Jerry Randall’s birth and death place.
Right?
Andy slurped the last of the milkshake. Now was not the time to dive into the silly string of her mother’s lies. She studied the scrap of paper at her elbow. The second that Andy was safe enough outside of Austin, she had pulled over to the side of the road and scribbled down everything she could remember about her conversation with Paula Kunde.
—Twenty years in Danbury?
—QuellCorp?
—Knew Hoodie, but not Mike?
—31 years—interesting math?
—Laura full of the worst type of bullshit?
—Shotgun? What made her change her mind—Clara Bellamy???
Andy had started with the easiest searches first. The Danbury Federal Penitentiary’s records were accessible through the BOP.gov inmate locator, but Paula Kunde was not listed on the site. Nor was she listed on the UC-Berkeley, Stanford or West Connecticut University alumni pages. The obvious explanation was that Paula had at some point gotten married and, patriarchal constructs aside, changed her last name.
I know how marriage works.
Andy had already checked marriage and divorce records in Austin, then in surrounding counties, then done the same in Western Connecticut and Berkeley County and Palo Alto, then Andy had decided that she was wasting her time because Paula could’ve flown to Vegas and gotten hitched and actually, why did Andy believe that a shotgun-wielding lunatic had told her the truth about being in prison in the first place?
Snitchand two dimes were basically in every prison show ever. All it took was saying them with attitude, which Paula Kunde had plenty of.
Regardless, the BOP search was a dead end.
Andy tapped her fingers on the table as she studied the list. She tried to think back to the conversation inside of Paula’s kitchen. There had been a definite before and after. Before, meaning when Paula was talking to her, and after, meaning when she’d gone to fetch her shotgun and told Andy to get the hell out.
Andy couldn’t think of what she’d said wrong. They had been talking about Laura, and how she was full of bullshit—the worst type of bullshit—
And then Paula had told Andy to wait and then threatened to shoot her.
Andy could only shake her head, because it still didn’t make sense.