Girls' Night Out by Kate Flora

Girls' Night Out

    Getting a six-foot dead man into his SUV wasn’t easy for a small woman in stilettos and a pencil skirt. He flopped like a dead fish and seemed to have more limbs than an octopus. I now understood the true meaning of the term dead weight . But hard or not, I was sending Jay Hanrahan home and without the good time he’d planned on when he’d had the bartender dump that powder into my drink. Even with Georgia and Callie there to help, it was a challenge. We couldn’t just roll him or drag him; we had to use kid gloves. We needed to get him back to his own place intact and unbruised, put him in his jammies, and get him into bed.
    As we levered him into the front and fastened his seat belt, a truly ironic precaution under the circumstances, I thought about the crazy sequence of events that had brought us here. It wasn’t the sort of thing my book group usually did.

    ***

    â€œA Boston jury has just found local attorney Jay Hanrahan not guilty in a date rape case that’s grabbed headlines throughout the region. Complainant Ellen Corso…” The news announcer’s voice would have slid over me like background noise if I hadn’t caught Ellen’s name. Most of what passed for news here in Boston was disaster stories—shootings, stabbings, fires, and horrific accidents I’d never felt required much attention. But Ellen’s news did.
    Still holding the cake I’d taken from the oven, I turned to stare at the screen. Hanrahan stood behind a bank of mikes, the brick courthouse facade as a backdrop, smiling a disarming Catholic schoolboy smile. His pricey, bouffant John Edwards coiffeur was static in the breeze that fluttered the eager reporters’ clothes. His yellow patterned tie matched the useless silk square in his pocket. Predatory, unnaturally white teeth gleamed as he straightened his already straight tie and leaned into the microphone, JFK handsome but with cold eyes.
    â€œI’m relieved, of course,” he said, “but I always believed the jury would understand the situation. Ms. Corso and I had a few drinks followed by a pleasant, consensual sexual encounter. That’s all there was to it. Two adults having sex. It’s unfortunate she came to believe it was something else. I can only hope she is getting, or will get, the help she needs.”
    â€œYou’re the one who needs help, Hanrahan. You’re the one who had sex with her while she was drugged into unconsciousness.” I surprised myself by speaking aloud. Women living alone must be careful about this sort of thing—talking to themselves, their TVs, or their pets, dressing in clothes that make them look like bag ladies, exceeding the single daily glass of medicinal wine. These were the signs of loneliness and instability. Even at 38, with a comfortable income and cherishing my privacy, there were times I worried about myself. Just last week I’d woken with a painting so vivid in my mind that I’d dashed into the studio in my robe at 5:00 a.m. and was still wearing it at 1:00 when my UPS man rang the bell.
    As reporters swarmed Hanrahan with their questions, the camera shifted to a woman on the sidelines flanked by two cops and a fierce-looking iron-haired woman I assumed was her attorney. My friend Ellen. Hanrahan’s alleged date rape victim. Or, since the jury had just found him innocent, Hanrahan’s wrongful accuser.
    She wore the boxy black suit sexual assault victims wear to court to avoid any suggestion in the jury’s mind that they might have invited their attack—pleated below-the-knee skirt, double-breasted, square-shouldered jacket with no suggestion of a waist. Dowdy low-heeled pumps. No nail polish or jewelry except her wedding ring. Ellen’s delicate beauty was so completely obscured an observer of Hanrahan’s stripe might have thought it a mercy fuck.
    Curling tendrils of dark hair escaping from her severe bun blew across