Dead Americans (3 page)

“Amanda didn’t have time for relationships.” Helen settled the plastic cup down on the table, a thin layer of liquid able to be seen staining the bottom through the bright light of the room. “She had music to write. Music to play. That’s all she cared about. I don’t even think she’d kissed a boy.”

“Sarah?”

She shrugged.

“Helen,” Williams said, “I need your help here.”

She nudged the plastic cup towards him, a signal. “Do you have children?”

“I have a son,” he replied. Southern Comfort slipped out in a wet line into the cup. “He lives with his mother in L.A..”

“Do you ever feel like he isn’t yours?”

Williams shook his head. “No.” Even though he hadn’t seen Samuel for six years, hadn’t spoken to him in five—if you could call speaking to a then three year old a conversation, he didn’t know—and though he told himself that it was for the best that he kept his distance, that he didn’t track down where they had moved a second time, not after the letter that told him about the new man, the new family, and that it would be a kindness if he didn’t confuse the boy, a kindness she was going to force upon him . . . no, not after all that, had he ever thought that his son wasn’t part of him.

“I look at that girl,” Helen said, drawing the cup to her slowly as if it were full of bitter pills. “I look at her and I can say I don’t know her, that she’s a stranger to me. That I feel nothing towards her. Isn’t that awful? It should be. It should be awful. It’s an awful thing to know. But I don’t feel bad about it—I just don’t feel anything about the girl. With Amanda it’s different, but with Sarah?”

“I’m not—”

“And it’s returned,” she continued, her voice a monotonous recital of thoughts she had had for years. “I’m nothing to Sarah. She said that to me, once. She told me that I wasn’t her mother, that I was nothing to her. I couldn’t even argue.” She looked up at him then, the confusion in her eyes seeking justification, salvation, or absolution. “I don’t even have a birth certificate for her. I lost it. What mother loses her daughter’s birth certificate? A mother who knows that she has had something that’s not right, that the daughter she gave birth to is not part of her, that—that it’s like she’s been forced on me, somehow. I don’t know. I just—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t even know if this is making sense to you.”

A little
, he thought,
a little to piece together motivation
, but you can’t tell a mother that. You lie to her about that. “How was her relationship with Amanda?”

“She loved her.”

“And the music?”

“Amanda was the music. Sarah loved it all.” She drank the Southern Comfort with one swift movement, the medicinal way. “Their world was music and each other, like they were born in it.”

“You ever hear them play?”

He couldn’t help it: the words slipped out, a mistake born out of curiosity, but when Helen Currie met his gaze, there was, in her pain and confusion, an acknowledgment of what he had heard on the way to his office.

“Yes,” she said, softly.

Dried Flowers played in Jacob’s Barn two weeks before the fire in the mosque.

Jacob’s—the Barn was habitually left out—was Red Grove’s nothing bar, a place that was a long, dirty passage between two restaurants, one serving cheap Italian food, and the other greasy pizza, also cheap. Williams had been to all three more than once, the pizza place more than twice and, if he were being honest, Jacob’s more than both put together. The inside of the latter was a long bar with old wooden stools lined up against it, cigarette troughs on the floor, and dead animals on the walls. Trophies hunted in catalogues. There was an old TV beneath a dusty bull’s head, and at the very end, a tiny stage next to an old jukebox. It was the kind of place that thrived because it had cheap drinks and, in Red Grove, cheap drinks brought in the men and women who couldn’t find steady work and the kids who weren’t legal and didn’t have the money, ID, or appreciation for the other two bars in town. Music also brought in the last group: Jacob’s was the only local place where a local band could get a spot on Friday night and show their stuff, guaranteed.

“Yeah, I remember Mandy. Fuck, but she was shit on stage.” Mike Carey, owner of Jacob’s, was a big white guy covered in coloured tattoos of snakes and skulls down his arms and across his chest, so thick and heavy a collage of blue, green, and red that not a hint of his white skin was exposed except on his hands and neck and face, where a greying, but still mostly brown beard, and long, balding hair hid most of the skin. “Kinda surprised me that they were so fucking awful, I have to say. She was so fucking intense on it. You should’ve seen this girl, Pete, she had nothing but music in her. I thought I was going to find the next big fucking thing.”

“You didn’t get her to play first?”

“That’s not how Friday night works.” Carey placed a beer in front of Williams, asked for nothing in return. “You put your name down, you get up, you start. We get shit, we get fun, we get okay—we never get good, but that’s not the point. It’s a place to start, if you’re serious; a place to have some fun if you aren’t. It’s just something to do on a Friday night. Thought I was going to get more this time, though.”

Williams drank his beer and Carey kept talking, profanities lacing the details of a bad set.
A real bad set, yeah, no surprise
. Both men had known each other for a long time and were friends, which was why Williams drank for free, and why he overlooked the underage kids drinking when bands played (and when they didn’t). The last had never got him too troubled, anyhow: in Red Grove kids either stole their parents liquor, had older kids buy it to drink in empty paddocks, or drank in Jacob’s. Stop the last and there was still the other two. Stop the first and there was still the second, and there would always be the second. “What was the sister like?” he asked, eventually.

“The sister?”

“Yeah.” He paused, sucked on his false teeth, a habit just developing, then pulled out his notebook. “Sarah. That’s her name.”

“Right. Fuck. I blanked on that for a second.”

Me too.
Odd, but nothing worth worrying about. “Remember her though?”

“Yeah, she was the drummer.” Carey nodded at an elderly, heavily lined man who entered the otherwise empty bar. “She was an angry girl, that’s what she was. Her sister got on stage, had disks they wanted to sell; started off all right, since she was comfortable on stage. But five minutes into it and they were being booed and told to fuck off. They must’ve known it would happen. It happens once a month here, and I’d seen Mandy before, Sarah too, I reckon, but maybe I just only ever saw one and not the other. But Friday is Cheer or Boo night and once the booing started, it was Sarah who cracked it at the back and started abusing the audience.”

Half a glass left. Williams said, “That always works well.”

Carey laughed. “Just makes them boo more. Got so bad that Mandy ran the fuck off stage, leaving her sister up there. Sarah hung ‘round for a bit then gave everyone the finger and went after her.”

“You see them after?”

“Yeah, and that fucking surprised me.” He finished pouring a beer, placed it down in front of the old man, collected the money. “She—Mandy, she’d been crying, like you would, but when I found them out back, she still had that intensity. Still that
want
in her eyes. Kept telling me it was nothing but a minor setback. That she’d get it right soon. That I could expect to see her back, which is kinda admirable, in its own way, but seemed to me like she was ignoring the truth of the situation. Seemed she was kinda blind to it, y’know?”

Williams left shortly after that and on the street said, “Not making sense.” It wasn’t: according to Carey, Sarah had been standing at the back, nodding in agreement with Amanda, completely supportive. The anger that she had shown on the stage was simply not there, he said. Evaporated. Summer dams in a drought. Who knew? Certainly not him, and he half wished that Sarah would show up now, so he could talk to her and figure out how she went from that to killing her. Instead, as he stood under the clean, colourless light of Red Grove sun, Williams stared at the cafe across from him. In there, he knew, worked Emily, a girl who had just turned nineteen and who had gotten married on the same day to Robert Parson, a year older than her. He knew about it because it had made the paper, the lean white girl in her wedding gown making the front page because it was one of the few Red Grove weddings of nineteen year olds not to be done under the influence of pregnancy or religion. She would have been in the same year as Amanda and Sarah, would know the pair of them, might even know some of the latter girl’s friends. Worth the walk, anyway.

Inside the cafe, Williams introduced himself to Emily who, having caught her between the breakfast and lunch crowds, was sitting at one of the tables with a glass of juice and reading an old paperback thriller, her tiny strip of a name badge before her.

With smiles, offers of food, drink, all of which he turned down, Emily Parson told him what he had heard already about Amanda: about the obsession, about the want, and about her complete inability in relation to music and the way that surprised her the first time. She had even seen the set in Jacob’s, which, at this stage in her relationship with Amanda, was no surprise. Still, when she spoke of the dead girl, she did so fondly—“like she was a kid who didn’t know any better”—even if she knew nothing to tell him that would relate to her murder and the fire in the mosque.

Strangely, however, she did not speak of Sarah until he bought it up.

“Sarah?”

“Yeah,” Williams said. “Her sister.”

“Her twin, right.” Emily Parson shrugged, looked a little embarrassed. “I forgot. But I’m going to have to apologize, Sheriff, because I just don’t remember her at school. It was a shock to see her there; the whole time I just drew a blank, and I still do. So did all my friends. None of us could remember her from the school: it was as if she just appeared after we’d finished.”

It got strange, afterward.

With Emily Parson’s words lingering in his mind, Williams returned to his sparse, brightly lit office and began making phone calls. At Red Grove High, it was only Amanda who was remembered by the sad-voiced principal, Audrey Davids, and only Amanda who appeared in the files. It was an unremarkable file, lacking definition in studies and delinquency. In a year of sixty-seven, it was fair to say that Amanda Currie had been a ghost, forced to wait until after High School for colour and weight to be added to her so that she could be real. But at least she was a ghost: that trail of paper work was more that her sister had.

“If you could just walk through the door, Sarah,” Williams muttered, dropping the phone into its cradle after the call, “just right through my door, that’d be real helpful.”

Before Red Grove, Williams discovered as he picked his way like a vulture through the files he’d printed out, the Currie family had lived in Yermo. The father—Martin—hard worked on the military site there. Calls to the local High and Junior High Schools in Yermo did not find anyone who could remember Sarah, or find a listing for her on the roll, just as it had been for Red Grove, and when he called the military base, a sweet-sounding white girl told him that Sergeant Martin Currie, deceased for reasons she could not disclose, had one daughter, one wife.

“Through the door. Just right through the door. Come in and sit down. I’ll give you a drink.”

After that last frustrating call, Williams saluted the door with his plastic cup, refilled twice, and then picked up the photograph of Amanda and Sarah. It was evidence of a very tangible kind of her existence but, it appeared, he was one of the few people with it. Maybe she was a secret, then? An angry little secret kept hidden. That would go some way to explaining it: Sarah could have lived with an aunt—Helen had a sister, Martin a brother and sister—and, once the thought appeared, it bloomed inside his mind, growing so big and bright that all other avenues of thought were obscured by it. “Some mystery solver you are, just making this shit up,” he murmured as he dialed Helen Currie’s number, and waited while it rang.

“Hello?”

It was a man’s voice, deep, but familiar.

“Yeah, hi. This is Sheriff Pete Williams. I’m wondering if I could speak to Helen?”

“I’m sorry, Sheriff, but she’s asleep. I’d rather not wake her—it’s been hard, y’know?”

He sympathized, but still couldn’t pick the voice. “That’s fine. Who am I speaking with?”

“Robert Hicks.”

A big, fatty man, caught twice for speeding, once for drunk driving. “Hi, Rob. Think you might help me? I’m trying to track down who Sarah lived with before coming to Red Grove?”

“She lived in Yermo with Helen.”

“Didn’t live with aunt or nothing?”

“Kinda grief she gives, I wish she had, but no.”

After the phone clicked, a solitary piece of punctuation to end his theory, Williams picked up the photo again.

“Fuck me,” he said, finally, and tossed it across the room with a defeated flick.

He left it in the corner, a coloured, useless memory, and left the office to head home. The day was just about done, anyhow, but mostly he just couldn’t handle another moment sitting in that chair, calling people, hearing them tell him they didn’t know Sarah, and feeling his frustration grow. It was enough to make a man with a borderline drinking problem think he’d pushed himself across that line. Still, when he climbed into his sun-warmed truck and found the Dried Flowers album still on the passenger seat, he couldn’t resist opening it, just to double check that Sarah was still on the inside. She was, of course, and that frustrated him more. Maybe this frustration was what detectives in fiction felt? He’d never been a big reader, but the thought, now there, left him feeling as if he’d missed a way to solve his problem. He even had books that he could consult, bought by his wife before they left for L.A., and still unread. Their library, despite best intentions, had been a pristine one, and she had left it with him when she took his son and her new clothes, and he thought—“It isn’t going to help, idiot”—that they might provide a way for him to find his answer.