Dear Daughter (11 page)

At
forty-Mississippi
Leo spoke up again. “So what brings you out this way,
Rebecca
?”

“The festival,
obviously
,” said Rue.

Leo ignored this. “How’d you hear about it, if you don’t mind my asking? Not too many people manage to, you know, and I’m sure Cora would love to know how her outreach is working.”

I caught myself pulling at the collar of my turtleneck. “Cora told me about it herself,” I said. “When I called to book a room.”

Rue’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “You mean you wanted to come here before you knew about the festival?”

I shoved a potato into my mouth, and I took my time chewing it. I took even longer swallowing it, but that wasn’t because I was thinking, it was because the potato had the texture of talcum powder. “I’m a historian,” I said once I’d choked the thing down. “I go where the history is.”

“But where did you come
from
?” Leo asked.

Kelley pulled her napkin from her face. “Geez Louise, Leo, this isn’t an interrogation.”

“At least he’s not talking about Pink Floyd,” Renee said.

Leo waved his fork at her. “You’re only insulting yourself, darlin’.”

Kelley caught my eye and shook her head, her finger moving in a looney-tunes circle next to her many-pierced ear. One of her earrings was a yellow smiley face. Another was a heart.

“Speaking of history,” Cora said, neatly changing the subject, “you’re looking at four fifths of the Ardelle Women’s Historical Society—the ‘women’s’ part, of course, is a bit outdated now, but Stanton refuses to let us change the name.”

“Wait, who’s the fifth member?” Renee asked.

“Nora Freeman,” Kelley said.

“I thought she quit?”

“She can’t quit. We have to have a Freeman on the board. Abiah wrote it into the charter.”

Stanton grunted. “Just about the only time my grandmother got something wrong.”

“But we get an annuity from her trust as long as we keep her on the membership roll,” Kelley pointed out.

Renee thought about this for a moment. “You mean she pays for our donuts?”

“Yes, she pays for our donuts.”

Renee raised her glass. “In that case: to Nora Freeman!” When no one else raised their glass, she rolled her eyes, swept her hair back with one hand, and downed the rest of her wine.

“I have to know,” Cora said to me, leaning forward. “Are you planning on writing something about Ardelle or Adeline? I’ve always thought it’s such a tragedy that we’re so underrepresented in the literature, and I’d love to ask you about—”

I’m not here for
you
to ask
me
questions, lady.

“Of course I hope to write something,” I said. “I just haven’t figured out quite what. I suppose you could call this a scouting expedition.”

Cora nodded eagerly. “There are some wonderful old letters written by Stanton’s grandmother—”

“I was thinking I might look into the town’s more recent history as well—”

Eli’s fork screeched across his plate. No one seemed surprised by the sound. I tucked his reaction away in the mental file I’d just marked “What the fuck is up with this dude Eli?”

“You know what you should do?” Cora said. “You should head over to Kelley’s. Ever since city hall had that termite problem, she’s been keeping most of the town archives in the back of the bookstore.”

“Don’t expect anything too sophisticated,” Kelley said. “It’s mostly just high school yearbooks and historical society newsletters and moldy copies of the
Daily Nugget
.”

“That’s a newspaper?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” Cora said. “It stopped publishing—when was it, honey, 1980-something?” When Eli didn’t answer immediately she poked him in the shoulder with her fork.

“Eighty-nine,” he said. He served himself another slice of ham. His third. My stomach twisted.

Speaking of, I was behind on my bites. I spooned up a bit of the hollandaise.

“Has your family lived here long, Eli?” I asked when I could speak again.

“His great-grandfather moved here in 1885,” Cora said. “Same as Stanton’s family.”

“Everyone had gold fever,” Stanton said.

“But the gold ran out, right? So why did everyone stay?”

“They thought the gold was going to come back.”

“Were they right?”

Stanton took a sip of his water. “That’s the thing about gold fever—there’s no cure, just remission.”

Eli reached for another piece of ham.

“Does anyone still live in Adeline?” I asked.

Kelley shook her head. “Not since the late eighties.”

“But not so long ago that most of the houses aren’t still reasonably intact,” Cora said. “Like the old house Eli grew up in—it’s just like this one, did you know? The two towns are basically mirror images of each other.” As she warmed to the subject, her voice took on the confident singsong of a practiced salesman. “Adeline is such a unique site, you’ll see that for yourself, I’m sure. It’s charming, it’s historic, it’s—”

“In ruins,” said Renee.

Cora dropped her fork on her plate. “It doesn’t matter how it looks now. It just matters how it’ll look when I’m done with it.”

Renee huffed. “But Cora, the cost of restoration alone—”

“And there’s hardly anything left—” Kelley said.

“You really think we can compete with Deadwood?” Leo asked.

“That place is just too fucking creepy, if you ask me.”

We fell silent and looked at Rue. She was pushing a limp spear of asparagus from one side of her plate to the other.

“Language, honey,” Cora said, weakly.

“What? It is.”

I sighed and tuned them all out, tapping my knife and fork against my plate so at least it would sound like I was eating. But really I was spiraling. I’d suffered through an entire dinner, and all I’d managed to do so far was collect a few scanty observations. Adeline was creepy. Cora was perky. Eli liked to eat. But so what? None of them was Tessa—and my gut told me that until I found Tessa I couldn’t go any further. I simply didn’t have enough information. I mean, I couldn’t exactly just bust out with, like, “Yeah, hi, I know we just met and all, but did any of you by any chance kill my mom? Chilly Hitchcock blonde? Real pretty? Boobs out to here? Hey, no worries if you did—seriously, I thought about it plenty of times myself. It’ll be something we have in common!”

But I was never going to find Tessa if I just waited for the information to fall into my lap. So where did I go from here? If she’d had something to do with my mother’s murder, I had to be discreet. Otherwise she would hear I was looking for her, and I might scare her off. My only lead would vanish.

The cop
. I could ask the cop. Maybe I could even get away with asking a blunt question or two. After all, he was the only person in town I had any leverage on.

Too bad he was also the only person in town who had any leverage on me.

I set down my fork. I folded my napkin. And I let the conversation at the table wash over me while I thought about how best to approach Leo—and steadfastly refused to consider the possibility that the real reason I might not find Tessa was because she didn’t actually exist.

MONDAY 11/4/2013 8:30 PM PST BY TMZ STAFF

JANIE JENKINS

CAT AND MOUSE

Jane Jenkins, the notorious ex-party girl who was convicted of the brutal murder of her mother . . . and who has been feverishly sought by the press . . . spent the first weeks after her release in a hotel in Sacramento, California, TMZ has learned.

We’re told the California Executive Suites hosted a guest who never left her room and who requested that housekeeping services be suspended for the length of her stay. After this guest checked out, the housekeeping staff found a suspiciously clean room . . . and a pile of $20 bills—$400 in total—on the nightstand.

The suite showed no signs of having been occupied, but when a curious housekeeper (who has requested anonymity) searched more thoroughly, she discovered a crumpled piece of paper under a chair cushion with the number of a local cab company. TMZ called the number and confirmed that the company received a request from a guest at the hotel named “Zelda Zonk,” an alias famously used by Marilyn Monroe. But when the driver arrived at the designated pickup time, no one was there to meet him.

Multiple sources report that a man bearing a resemblance to Janie’s lawyer was seen entering and leaving the building several times, and further TMZ investigations have revealed that at 3:40 a.m. on October 17th, a guest at the hotel used the hotel’s business center to book a flight departing on November 2nd from Sacramento to Anchorage, Alaska . . . but sources at the airline report the ticket was never used.

Is Janie trying to throw us off the scent? Or did something come between her and that flight? The murder of Janie’s mother isn’t the only mystery here.

CHAPTER TEN

Kelley cornered me while everyone was busy clearing the table.

“Come have a drink with us after,” she said.

I stole a glance at Leo. Cora was trying to say something to him, but he was watching me. And listening. I thought back to my earliest etiquette classes. It had been a long time since I’d bothered caring about whether or not my nos were polite.

“I appreciate the invitation,” I said, “but I’m not sure if it’s a—”

“It’s a fucking great idea,” Renee said as she walked by with an armful of glasses.

In another life I would’ve flicked a cigarette at Kelley’s feet and walked away, no matter how nice she might be. But in this life, I just said, “Um, okay?”

“We can scrounge up something to eat, too,” Kelley said before turning back to the table and gathering up the dirty forks and knives with a grin that made her look even less like her brother. There was such buoyancy in her expression—it made me think of the bounce of a little girl’s corkscrew curls as she skipped down a garden path.

Leo’s face, on the other hand, was tight and controlled. If he wanted to smile he probably filed the appropriate paperwork ahead of time. In triplicate. I almost couldn’t believe they were related.

But then, I of all people should know that blood ties don’t always show on the surface.

Across the table, Leo was reaching for my glass—

I moved to intercept him. “I’ll get that,” I said.

A deliberate I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know twitch of his lips. “Oh, it’s no problem,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want it to get lost on the way to the dishwasher.” I grabbed the glass, along with my cutlery and plate, and started toward the kitchen.

He leaned in and whispered in my ear: “If you’re trying to put me off, you’re doing a pretty bad job of it.”

I turned back and took my napkin, too, for good measure.

•   •   •

Ten minutes later I was walking down Main Street with Kelley and Renee, sidestepping potholes and hugging myself against the cold. It couldn’t have been much more than twenty degrees out, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. Renee was wearing a puffy thing of ruthless practicality; Kelley’s coat was a patchwork of black-and-white tweeds and safety pins that shouldn’t have kept a fire warm, but she seemed perfectly cozy nevertheless. I felt like the runt of the litter left out on a cliff to die.

I looked to the south, to the house on the hill.

“Who lives there?” I asked.

“Stanton, obviously,” Renee said.

“Nice place,” I said.

“If you like that sort of thing.”

I rubbed my hands together and forced myself to keep moving.

Kelley’s hand wrapped around my wrist and tugged me forward so I was sheltered between them. “Not used to the cold?” she asked.

“It’s been a while.”

Renee sniffed. “If you think it’s cold now, just wait until tomorrow.”

I pulled my hand free and stuffed it in my pocket, hoping I didn’t look as awkward as I felt. For someone who had spent ten years in a women’s prison, I sure was uncomfortable around women. But, then, I hadn’t exactly grown up with them: My mother had never been comfortable with women either, and apart from the occasional maid or cook, our staff was always exclusively male. From time to time one of my stepfathers would remark upon the matter, typically with more than a hint of jealousy. My mother would always respond with something along the lines of, “It’s not that I prefer men, darling. I simply know what to expect with them.”

When she said this, she was usually looking at me.

We stopped in front of a building that, had its windows not been painted over, would have looked like one of those chain restaurants that advertise all-you-can-eat bread sticks. This was the Coyote Hole, the only place worth drinking at in Ardelle, or so Kelley and Renee told me. Apparently it had for many years been an underperforming restaurant even by Ardelle’s standards, but when the owner passed away she left the place to her nephew, a man named Tanner Boyce. He managed to reverse the Coyote Hole’s fortunes in short order by installing half a dozen TVs and shelling out for satellite sports coverage.

“Don’t get too close to Tanner,” Renee told me. “He’s catching.”

Inside it was hot and damp and vaguely morose, like a locker room after a loss. Athletic accouterments aside, Tanner hadn’t done much to convert the Coyote Hole from family restaurant to twenty-one-and-up bar. The booths along the west wall were still upholstered in red vinyl; the tables were still covered in gingham-patterned plastic. There was a stack of high chairs and booster seats in one corner, and just to the right of the door was a small arcade with skee-ball, Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, and a vending machine shaped like a chicken.

“Margie used to give the kids a token at the end of the meal,” Kelley said as we passed. “You’d put the token in there and the chicken would give you a prize in a plastic egg.”

“Tanner uses it as a condom dispenser,” said Renee.

We moved through the pool players and dart throwers and squeezed ourselves up against the bar, which was littered with chartreuse popcorn. Renee grabbed a handful from a red plastic basket. She let out a sound of pleasure. “God, after eating at Cora’s this stuff is like ambrosia.”