Bad Moon On The Rise by Katy Munger Page A

I admitted.
    “ It was that boyfriend of
hers,” the woman said suddenly. “You talk to him?”
    “ What boyfriend?” I asked.
“What did he look like?”
    “ He was white,” she said.
“White and kind of tall and in good shape. I thought maybe he was a
cop.”
    “ He could walk?” I asked,
visions of Burly betraying me, of him somehow knowing about Tonya
and their son together flooding through me irrationally.
    The woman stared at me like I was
wearing a tank top in a snow storm. “Could he walk?” she
repeated.
    “ Never mind. When did you
see him?”
    “ Right before Tonya left
school.”
    “ Can you tell me about
that?” I asked. “Why did she leave school? Did you know she was
going to or did she just disappear?”
    The woman shrugged. “A little bit of
both.” She stared at me again, trying to decide if she liked me or
not. But I’ve learned that when people size me up like that, they
usually come down on the side of liking me, because, up close, I
look like them: like someone who’s never caught a break in her
life, like someone who is always barely one step ahead of the
landlord and maybe even the law.
    “ Look,” she said after a
moment. “I’ll be honest with you. We were good friends our first
semester. We shared an apartment with four other women, and we all
liked each other, but when we came back after the semester break…”
she hesitated. “I think maybe Tonya started selling drugs and I
wasn’t the only one living there who thought that.”
    “ You said there was no way
she’d have died from drugs.”
    “ I didn’t say she was
doing them, I said I thought she was selling them. Pills. I found a
lot of them once, she left them in the bathroom in a bag, and she
was getting a lot of people calling her day and night. I’d see her
meeting people I didn’t know for just a couple of minutes at a
time. And she had a lot of cash on her, a lot of cash. So I figured
it out pretty quick. I’ve been there. I grew up on the south side
of Greensboro. I know what’s going on. And I didn’t like it. I was
getting ready to call her on it and make her move out when she
disappeared.”
    “ Disappeared?”
    “ Pretty much. That
boyfriend of hers started showing up more and more her second
semester. I didn’t like it. Tonya was different around him.
Quiet.”
    “ What was his
name?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know.
Larry, Leonard. Something like that. He never stayed at the
apartment. He’d come by, she’d leave with him. She’d come back a
few days later, quieter than ever. Not saying much. She’d make up
time she missed out of class and go from there, until the next time
he showed up. I didn’t like him, so I stayed away from
him.”
    “ And she was with him when
she disappeared?”
    “ I don’t think so,” the
woman said. “I had a couple of roommates, they graduated last year,
who were there when she left for the last time. It was about a
month before the end of the semester. They said two guys came to
get her in a silver car, you know, like an official state car. They
figured they were cops. Tonya packed up her things and left with
them. Didn’t leave a note or anything. Never called. I owed her
money, too. But I never heard from her again.”
    “ No one knew where she’d
gone?” I asked.
    The woman shook her head and her beads
clacked to silence as she thought. “A rumor went around she’d been
arrested. I figured it was probably true. I was one of the few
people who knew she’d served time and that she had hated it. That
was why I was surprised when it looked like she was back to dealing
drugs. I just figured she’d violated her parole or something. That
she’d been caught selling and that was it. She was going back
in.”
    “ She wasn’t on parole,” I
said. “I’ve seen her official records. Tonya had competed her
parole by the time she enrolled here.”
    “ Then I don’t know what to
tell you,” the woman said. “One of my roommates said the men