Dear Daughter (19 page)

My mother had still owned this land in 1992?
It can’t have been worth anything, then. She never met a nonportable asset she could wait to unload.

I sat down in the desk chair and spun in a circle. When I came to a stop I was facing one of the bookshelves. I squinted at the titles:
The Modern Prospector’s Handbook
.
Gold Diggers Atlas. Gold Mining in the 1980s
.

Kelley hadn’t been exaggerating, then. Eli definitely still had the bug.

I spun again. This time my gaze landed on the other bookshelf. Military thrillers, historical nonfiction, and biographies on the top shelves. And on the bottom shelves, a set of thick, black-leather photo albums. I pulled the first one out—a note fell to the floor.

Eli—

I know you said you didn’t want these, but trust me, one day you’ll be glad to have them.

All my love,

Cora

Seemed like Eli had cared for photos as much as my mother did.

I opened the book: Rue’s baby pictures.
Who cares?
Cora and Eli’s wedding
. Double who cares?
Eli and the man who must be his father—my grandfather. I stopped. I could see a hint of Eli in the man’s strong jaw, a hint of my mother in his firm mouth. But there was nothing of me.

Speaking of my mother, though, where was she?

I turned the pages faster and faster, the pictures flying by, and nowhere—not in one single picture—did I see any sign of Tessa.

Had Eli insisted on banishing all evidence of my mother’s existence?

The thought was uncomfortable, even though it was something I’d wished dozens of times before. So why did it feel so wrong now? Was I the only one allowed to hate my mother?

I decided not to think too long about that.

I removed any traces of my intrusion and left, pulling the door closed behind me. I walked to the other end of the hall, pausing when I caught a glimpse of something through Rue’s open door. I looked in. Like any good teenager, Rue had taped posters to her walls—there were singers, actors, bands I’d never heard of. A few of her posters, though, she’d had framed. These were landscapes. And I recognized them all.

Montreux. Appenzell. Zernez. Lucerne.

Her walls were covered with pictures of Switzerland.

Now, what were the chances that this was just what the kids were into these days?

TUESDAY 11/5/2013 2:30 PM PST BY TMZ STAFF

JANIE JENKINS

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

Last we knew, Jane Jenkins, 26, was staying in an unremarkable hotel in Sacramento, CA. Most outlets speculate that she flew from Sacramento to another domestic location . . . either on a private jet or under an assumed name. But TMZ believes that Jenkins left not by air, but by train.

We have received an anonymous tip from a Chicago woman who claims her father saw Jenkins with his own two eyes. He is reluctant to come forward, his daughter says, due to the fact that Jenkins threatened him if he went public with his information . . . which is as clear a sign as any that the woman he met was indeed Jane Jenkins. Her father, our source says, was on the Amtrak California Zephyr, which runs from Sacramento to Chicago.

We know that Noah Washington . . . Jenkins’s
extremely
devoted counsel . . . has flown frequently to Chicago in the past several months, purportedly to take depositions on a class-action lawsuit he is involved with there. Does this mean that Jenkins, too, is heading for the Upper Midwest? Only time will tell.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I didn’t have time to think too hard about what I had found in the Kanty house, not if I didn’t want to be caught poking around where I most definitely shouldn’t be. So I crept out the door, snuck the key under the bronze angel, and ran back to my room to change before heading to the potluck. As I stepped back outside, my phone vibrated. I pulled up the alerts.
Motherfucker
: TMZ had found the porter.

And, worse, Trace smelled blood.

We CANNOT ignore the fact that we have no confirmation that Jenkins took the train all the way to Chicago. We have no reason to think she would even go to Chicago. The fact that her scumbag lawyer was seen in that area should make it clear that she’s NOT heading in that direction. When she was last seen the train had just crossed the Colorado-Nebraska state line, and it would be foolish to discount the possibility that Jenkins detrained at one of the stops between Denver and Chicago. If we hope to find Jenkins it is ESSENTIAL that we focus on these thirteen stops. She will have had to rent a car, buy a car, call a taxi, or catch a bus. This is where we should be looking, readers.

And for those of you who say I should let it go, that I should let her live in peace, I ask you AGAIN: if Janie Jenkins were really innocent, why would she be hiding? Face facts, people. I have a 180 IQ, and even I can’t see how anyone else could have done it.

A wave of dizziness washed over me. Maybe Trace had a point. So what if my mother had said she was from New York but was really from South Dakota? So what if she’d dated a bank robber? I still didn’t have any sign that someone in Ardelle might have wanted her dead—unless “she was mean to me in her diary” could be considered a strong motive.

But there had to be
something
, right? There had to be some reason why my mother had never told me anything about this place.

When I stepped down into the basement of First Lutheran I was blanketed by the rashy heat of too many bodies. I stripped off my coat, hat, and gloves and tossed them on a messy pile of outerwear that appeared to have been shed in a similar frenzy.

The room reeked of rubber soles and Right Guard; the floor was covered with that gray-flecked yellow linoleum that always looks like it’s been splattered with gravy no one bothered to clean up—which come to think of it is actually probably the point. At one end of the room was a stage with a single amplifier and a drum kit I eyed with trepidation. The stage was skirted in orange fabric; a few balloons floated halfheartedly on either side.

Fold-out tables were lined up in two uneven columns, each set with harvest-gold place mats and decorative cornucopias. A few people were already eating, but most were still crowding the buffet, a crush of mismatched Tupperware and tinfoil serving pans that had been set up at the opposite side of the room.

I searched the crowd for familiar faces as I walked in, trailing my fingers along the wall.

“Raffle ticket?”

I turned. Stanton was sitting at a table I hadn’t noticed even though it was directly in front of me, his left hand on the handle of an old-fashioned bingo-ball spinner. His hair was parted neatly on the side—his scalp showed a rosy flush from the heat, a becoming shade that most women would pay a small fortune to replicate on their cheeks—and his smile was wide. At his feet a cooler was stocked with off-brand soda and Capri Sun.

I pulled out my wallet. “How much are the tickets?”

“Don’t you want to know what the prize is?” he asked. “Apart from the tax deduction, that is.”

“I’m sure it’s for a good cause.”

He spun the bingo basket with a flourish. “That it is, Miss Parker. And in that spirit, the tickets are twenty dollars apiece.”

“Seriously?”

He looked to either side, then leaned forward with a conspiratorial heft of his eyebrows. He put a hand to one side of his mouth. “If you promise not to tell anybody, I’ll give you one for ten.”

I handed him a bill. “I guess I’ll take two, then.”

He tore three tickets off the sheet. “Here,” he said. “My treat. Can’t have a guest in our town feel anything less than welcome.”

I scribbled “Rebecca Parker” on the tickets—giving myself a mental thumbs-up for remembering my own name—and slid them across the table.

Next I went over to the buffet, loaded up a plate with something gray, and fought through the mess of chairs until I came to Peter. He was sitting at a table by himself, alternately looking through a heavy white binder and scribbling in his notebook.

I wondered what he’d found for me while I was gone.

He didn’t say anything when I set my plate and drink down. Guess it was my turn to break the ice.

“Have you tried the meatloaf?” I asked.

“I’m vegetarian,” he said.

“You know how you can tell if someone’s a vegetarian?”

“How?”

I took a beat. “They’ll tell you.”

He didn’t laugh.

I pushed the meat back and forth on my plate, fashioning two small hills on either side of a narrow valley.

“So,” I said, “did you find anything good in the archives?
I bet you’re already halfway to some scoop by now.”

He looked up finally, then slid the binder over to me, rapping a laminated article with his knuckle. “Here,” he said. “That bank robbery everyone seems not to want to talk about? It was never solved. The money was never recovered.”

“Fascinating,” I said. Next to the article was a mug shot of a man whose dark curly hair fell to his shoulders. “Is that the robber?” I asked, lacing my words with a maidenly tremble.

“Yeah, his name’s Jared Vincent. He was arrested three days after the robbery.”

“So doesn’t that mean the case is closed?” I asked.

“To the police, it is. But I think he had an accomplice. If he’d had the money, he’d have turned it in. Gotten a reduced sentence.”

“You think she ratted him out?”

“The way I see it, they were in on it together. She betrayed him and made a break for it; he paid the price.”

That sounded as strong a motive for murder as I’d ever heard. I ran my finger down the margin of the text, trying to skim the words but having a hard time focusing on the letters.

“Is he still in jail?” I asked—meaning, of course, was he still in jail on July 14, 2003.

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to get someone at the police department to talk to me—I can’t find anything online. This place is Google poison.”

I felt something on the back of my neck, not so much a prickle as an abrasion. I looked over my shoulder and saw Leo staring at me from across the room. My lip curled.

Jane, focus.

I shook myself and turned back to Peter. “Was this guy Jared from Ardelle, too?” I asked. “Is that why no one will talk about it?”

“I can’t tell. I mean, yes, he was from Ardelle, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I can’t imagine they’d have any reason to protect him—sounds like a lot of people here used that bank. He might as well have been stealing straight from their pockets.”

“Is the bank here in town?”

“No,” he said. “It’s, um . . . hold on.” He pulled the binder back and spun it around to read it. He flipped to the next page, scanned it, then flipped to the page after that. “Says here it’s over in Custer. The Jenkins Savings and Loan.”

“Oh,” I said when my tongue finally unstuck itself from the roof of my mouth. “That’s a nice name.”

I stabbed at my meatloaf some more. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I should worry about Peter finding out that Tessa was also Marion Elsinger née Jenkins—my mother was better than that. She would have covered her tracks.

But I hadn’t expected that she might have tried to get cute.

“What about Tessa?” I asked. “Have you had any luck finding her?”

“Not even the slightest. There’s no trace of her—anywhere. And no way someone who’s innocent goes to that kind of trouble.” Thankfully, at that moment we were interrupted by a cacophony of teenagers. Rue—and a coterie of beefy boys and mediocre beauties. Your typical adolescent cohort. One of the boys snuck a hit from a silver flask and then elbowed his buddies triumphantly, just in case he hadn’t already been obvious enough. I was vaguely disappointed in Rue. I’d hoped she had vision.

A girl in stiletto-heeled Mary Janes that were probably from Payless poked Peter in the arm. “Yeah,” she said, “so we’re going to sit here, okay?”

The girl stood expectantly next to Peter’s chair. When he didn’t move, she sat down next to him with a huff. He gave her a stern, grown-up kind of look that didn’t quite hide the fact that he was looking down her shirt. Apparently even Peter could be distracted from his ambition.

The other kids scavenged chairs and squeezed in around the table; one of the boys elbowed me in the boob until I made room for Rue. It was only when she forced her chair in front of mine that I really got a good look at her.

At what she was wearing, rather.

“That’s a fancy dress for a potluck,” I said.

She showed absolutely no indication of having heard me.

“Donna Karan?”

The smile she turned on me had all the amiability of sulfuric acid flying at my face. “I’m surprised you recognized the brand.”

“I think I’ve seen this dress before. Maybe on the cover of a magazine?”

Or in the bedroom of an abandoned house.

I was about to say more, but we were beginning to attract attention—the blonde was giving me a full-on
what-the-fuck
kind of look. I turned away, slouching my shoulders and breathing through my mouth. In other circumstances I might have found my situation amusing. Me, Jane Jenkins, huddling on the outskirts of a group of adolescents even more tragically delusional than the ones I’d once known.
Kids
. They still thought they knew something the rest of us didn’t, the way every generation thinks they’re the ones who invented sex, the way every generation thinks they’re the ones who will be remembered. They still had
I’m-better-than-this
dreams,
one-day-we’ll-leave-this-all-behind
aspirations. What they didn’t understand is that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. No one ever leaves it all behind. The best you can hope for is to start off in the least horrible place. The rest of us just have to make do.