Leigh (14 page)

“No, Ted wants you to lie down—”

Pushing down every scrap of despair and pain that threatened to come bubbling up, Leigh stood up and headed for the bathroom
door. “I need a shower, to change clothes and have breakfast. Why don’t you order room service for us?”

“I’m going to head—”

“If you aren’t here when I get out of the shower, I’ll start looking for Mary Beth on my own.” With the closet open behind
her, she turned to face him, daring him.

“You are a spoiled little brat,” he said, sounding half mad, but half amused.

“Sticks and stones,” Leigh replied and then began gathering fresh clothing from hangers and her open suitcase. She needed
him, but she didn’t have to admit it.

“I’ll have to go down and order breakfast at the hotel restaurant,” Dane gave in with some grace. “I only get to use the phone
for official Bureau business.”

After a nod, Leigh went into the bathroom and locked the door…

Frank started a fresh page.

Dear Leigh,

I appreciate that you and Mary Beth have continued to write me even though our stands about this war are in conflict. I think
your point about a lack of will on the part of our leaders to win this war is completely valid. I’m sorry that Mary Beth thinks
I’m the one moral man in an army of baby-killers. In every army, there are a few baby-killers as well as many heroes who would
die rather than harm a civilian. We are handicapped by the nature of this war. We’re
fighting against guerrillas in the midst of people who are trying to make a living and simply stay alive. We aren’t fighting
on distant battlefields. We’re fighting in their villages, cities, rice paddies. Civilian casualties make me heartsick.

The wild card in all of this is of course Red China, who is backing the Viet Cong. I think this is what holds the brass back.
You and 1 talked of nuclear way-years ago. No one wants to make the Chinese declare war. Wouldn’t that draw in their allies,
the Soviets, and trigger an atomic war?”

Why was he writing all of this? Was this what he had to tell Leigh before she found it out from someone else?
She should hear it from me first.

He started a new page.

Leigh, there are things that have never been said between us that should have been said. Or at least, that is how I feel about
it…

After a nourishing breakfast, several cups of coffee, and two aspirin, and freshly showered and dressed in jeans, an NYU T-shirt,
and sandals, Leigh walked beside Dane on the way to nearby Grant Park. Feeling wonderfully human again, she glanced around
at the placid setting, contrasting it with last night’s carnage. The yellow barricades were back in place, and a few blue-uniformed
cops lounged near them. She cringed at the sight of them and hated it. Would she ever see a cop again and not feel afraid?

“Don’t you have Bureau stuff to do today?” she asked Dane, looking away, willing herself to look nonchalant.

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Your stepfather is important enough to the Bureau that if he wants an agent to help his daughter
look for her missing friend, then that becomes my assignment.”

From behind her round, blue-tinted wire-rim sunglasses, Leigh considered this. She’d never thought about her stepfather’s
career at the FBI except as his job. But that he was held in respect didn’t surprise her. And she was more than glad to have
Dane at her side as they entered the ravaged park. Trash collected around the base of tree trunks and around overturned trash
barrels. Transistor radios turned to WLS played loud rock and roll. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band,” came from a nearby
pup tent.

“Do you know where Mary Beth
and her old man”
Dane mimicked, mocking her friend’s terminology, “were camping?”

Ignoring the innuendo, Leigh nodded and led him to an area under tall oaks near the band shell. The bright summer day made
the night before feel like an imagined nightmare. The sun warmed her back and neck. In the distance, gulls screeched and sunlight
gleamed on the blue water of Lake Michigan. Nearer, Leigh averted her eyes from a nearly naked hippie, obviously passed out
in front of a rude pup tent.

Dane made a sound of disgust low in his throat. “How long has your friend been on drugs?”

Leigh tingled with fear. If Dane told her stepfather this undeniable fact about Mary Beth, her mother would freak out and
make her change roommates, maybe even schools. She almost opened her mouth to deny it. But then she decided Dane already knew
too much for evasion. “She started smoking marijuana in our sophomore year. I tried to talk her out of it.” She frowned, still
wondering what the attraction of marijuana had been to her friend. Was it just the allure of the forbidden?
Or was she trying to shock her parents into noticing more than her grade-point average?

“Does she drop acid?” Dane asked.

I hope not. “
I’m not sure.”

“Do I need to tell you that stuff’s dangerous?”

“
No.
A girl in my psych class last year had a bad trip and her parents had to come and take her away. She kept having flashbacks…”
Leigh shivered in spite of the summer heat.

“Are you using?”

Leigh nailed him with both eyes. “Are you kidding?”

“Just checking,” he said, deadpan. “I didn’t think so.”

Leigh punched him in the arm.

He grinned. “Your stepfather thinks you have a good head on your shoulders. Told me so more than once.”

The compliment warmed her and took the sting out of his insulting question.

“It’s too bad your friend doesn’t have one, too.”

Leigh looked over the array of tents, campers, and sleeping bags. A young female hippie was sitting under a tree near where
Mary Beth and Chance’s tent should have been. “Let’s ask her if she’s seen Mary Beth.”

Frank looked down at the second page he’d just written. For once, he’d poured out all he’d felt from the moment he’d met Leigh.
All of it was true, but he realized that all of it was impossible for him to say to Leigh. Though they’d only been together
a short while that August of 1963, he thought he had a pretty good bead on what she was, where she was coming from. Leigh
Sinclair was—or was in the process of becoming—a woman of substance, one worthy of praise. A woman like his grandmother Minnie
and her grandmother Chloe.

He crumpled the second page, wrote a friendly ending to
the first page, and signed it. Before he changed his mind, he sealed the letter and addressed it. The chips would just have
to fall where they may. If this world were different, it might have worked out for them.

But the world is the way it is. Leigh will just have to find out the news from someone else.

Later that afternoon, Dane and Leigh sat outside at one of a few tables in front of a pub in Old Town, on the near north side.
Old Town was Chicago’s version of Greenwich Village. A mini-skirted waitress delivered Leigh’s Coke with a twist of lime and
Dane’s draft beer. Around them, heat radiated from the concrete, but the lake breeze was clean and refreshing. The waitress
lingered a bit too long next to Dane, eyeing him. A lick of irritation went up Leigh’s spine. Did the woman have to be that
obvious?

“Do you have any more ideas of where your friend might be?” Dane nodded to dismiss the waitress and turned to Leigh.

With her forefinger, Leigh stroked the condensation on the outside of her glass. She needed some caffeine. A grinding fatigue
weighed her down. Along with overwhelming guilt. “I think I want to fly out to San Francisco.”

“You believe she’s gone back to Berkeley with that guy?” Dane caught her reasoning without a missed beat. And it pleased Leigh.

She nodded. “That’s what I think.”

“Why do
you
have to go to California to find her? Doesn’t she have family?”

Leigh made eye contact with Dane, noting that he was giving her his undivided attention. “Her parents won’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?” His tone hardened.

Leigh felt for the first time that he was turning his sympathy toward Mary Beth. Two girls in tight shorts walked past, paused,
and gave Dane the eye. Leigh looked away, feeling the lick of irritation again. “Mary Beth’s parents have always been a puzzle
to me.”

Dane ignored the girls, and they walked away, giggling. “How so?”

Her own mother drove Leigh nuts at times, but at least she acted like a mother who was interested in her daughter. How to
explain Mary Beth’s parents to this hard man? “I know they love Mary Beth, so I would think that means they wouldn’t want
anything bad to happen to her. But they—”

“But they—what?” he prompted.

“But it’s like they don’t have any common sense. The only thing they have ever really been concerned with is whether or not
Mary Beth gets top grades. That’s why they sent her to the private girl’s school where we met—because it was the best in the
D.C. area. But they don’t seem to comprehend
anything else
that’s happening in her life.”

“And does she get top grades?” Dane asked, his eyes strayed to a group of hippies crowding around a nearby table that had
just burst into raucous laughter.

Leigh wondered if he were looking the hippies over for any particular suspects. “She did. But not this spring.”

“Smoking pot can cloud the mind.” He sipped his brew.

Leigh couldn’t disagree. She twirled the swizzle stick in her Coke. How had everything gone so terribly wrong? “I’d hoped,”
she murmured, “that the trip here might wake Mary Beth up, get her interested in more than…”

“More than drugs and a hippie boyfriend?” Dane finished for her.

Leigh took off her sunglasses and then twirled them with
one hand, trying to look unconcerned. Instead of helping Mary Beth, inviting her to the convention had backfired.
This is all my fault. Why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?

What if Mary Beth had been injured, but she and her boyfriend were too stoned to get proper medical care in time? What if
the violence yesterday had pushed Mary Beth into even more outrageous, more revolutionary… violent activities? Leigh could
understand that. Her outrage over the police brutality still rankled. Her sense of justice had been trampled, and she wanted
someone to pay.

“So when Mary Beth’s grades dropped,” Dane asked, “did her parents start putting on the pressure?”

One of the hippies nearby wolf-whistled at her. She hated those kind of unwanted overtures. It was embarrassing. She frowned
and leaned closer to Dane. “Some, but… they seemed to be pleased by her becoming a yippie, pleased that she was protesting
the war. They said that some things were more important than good grades.” Leigh looked up. “Mary Beth’s dad was a conscientious
objector in World War II, and both of them are members of the American Socialist Party.”

Dane nodded. “I get it. I wonder if they were pleased when they watched what was happening in Chicago last night. They probably
think the revolution has finally begun.”

Leigh shrugged. What they thought was of no importance. “I’m going to Berkeley and see if I can find her through Chance. School
starts in a few days and she needs to be there with me to start classes.”

“Why don’t you leave this to me?”

Leigh opened her mouth to retort.

Dane forestalled her with an upraised palm. “This is what I do for a living. Do you really think you can do it better than
I can?”

She worried her lower lip. “Maybe. People who know
Mary Beth or Chance would probably talk to me before they’d talk to—”

“An FBI pig?” he deadpanned.

That forced a smile from her. She took a cool, sweet-sharp draft of Coke.

“You said this is Chance’s senior year, too? Let me put out some feelers to see if he returns to Berkeley.” He caught her
eye. “I’ll deny this if you repeat it, but we have people on campus at Berkeley, and I’ll put the word out for them to look
for Chance.”

“I’m not surprised.” She swung her head and lifted her long hair off her perspiring nape. “And I won’t repeat it, either.”
She grinned suddenly. “I’d appreciate your help.”

The waitress sashayed back to them and asked Dane if he needed a refill. He shook his head. She gave him a flirty smile. He
ignored her. “Then leave it to me. For a while,” he replied.

Leigh gave the waitress a cool, superior look. “Okay, just for a while.” She realized that she might have to miss a few days
of school, but she had to find Mary Beth. She had an awful feeling that her friend was heading down a treacherous path to
disaster.

Dane rose and offered her a hand up. She took it, and as their hands touched, an unexpected charge raced up her arm. She ignored
it. Starting a flirtation with an FBI agent didn’t make sense right now. She had more important things on her mind.
I
’
ll give you a week, Dane, then I’m heading west.

C
hloe? Is that you?” Kitty McCaslin answered the phone from where she sat in bed in her townhouse. She leaned over to read
the late hour on her bedside clock, feeling both pleasure and surprise ripple through her.