Lippman, Laura (30 page)

“Your fault?”

“Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what…happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?”

“I think,” Kay said, picking her words with as much precision as possible, “that grief, tragedy, tends to magnify whatever is there, expose the fissures that are already there. Strong marriages get stronger. Weak ones suffer and, without help, may fall apart. In my experience.”

“Are you saying my parents didn’t have a good marriage before?” Her tone was fierce, straight from the schoolyard, the instinctive defense against even an implied insult against one’s parents.

“I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. I was speaking in generalities, Heather.”

Again the smile, the reward for using her name, for being the one who believed in her, perhaps even more than Gloria, whose dedication was billed hourly. “I thought everyone was dead. I just assumed everyone was dead. Except me.”

Kay trained her eyes on the gossamer skirts in the windows, the heartbreaking kind of girly-girl dresses that her own Grace had never wanted to wear.
I just assumed everyone was dead
. If they were, it would be much easier to carry the lie. But would someone tell a lie like this just to get out of being charged in a traffic accident? If that were the case, now that she knew the little boy was going to be okay, couldn’t she simply recant? She was so credible, yet the very fact that Kay was thinking along those lines might be the proof of how studied this all was.

Staring straight ahead, Kay could see Heather’s reflection in the plate-glass window of where the organ store had once been. Tears were coursing down her face, and she was shaking so hard that her teeth, her perfect, no-cavity teeth, were chattering uncontrollably.

“It began here,” she said. “In its own way, it began here.”

The business section of St. Simons—the “village,” according to a local who helped Kevin find his way there—was lousy with charm.

The main drag was lined with precious shops, the kind that specialized in selling useless things to people who shopped reflexively, as entertainment. It wasn’t the high-end, name-brand type of shopping you saw in the Hamptons, where Kevin had worked landscaping jobs as a teenager, but it was a big step up from Brunswick. He understood now why Penelope Jackson had lived on the mainland, how out-of-reach the real estate must be for the people who scooped the ice cream, poured the beers, sold the pink-and-green dresses that seemed to dominate the window displays.

He had timed his visit to Mullet Bay for the late-afternoon rush, before the dinner hour started in earnest. The bar-restaurant was a typical resort establishment, another variation on the American dream, Jimmy Buffett version. Parrots, tropical drinks, no-worries-mon. It was hard to figure out how a going-on-forty woman had fit in here, a young person’s joint where the waitstaff, male and female, wore shorts and polos. But the manager, a dark-eyed honey of a girl with glowing skin, cleared that up by explaining that Penelope was one of the line cooks.

“She was great,” she said with a peppy enthusiasm that seemed to be her default setting, pronouncing it “graaaa-ate.” The plastic bar pinned above her perfect left tit proclaimed her to be Heather, and the coincidence seemed a portent of…well,
something
. Then again, Heather was a pretty popular name. “Good worker, very reliable. Would fill in at the last minute, even bartended once or twice when the regular guy didn’t show. The bosses would have dearly loved to keep her.”

“Why’d she quit?”

“Well, she just needed a new start. After the fire and all.” Even in expressing genuine sadness, this Heather retained a kind of indomitable enthusiasm, as if her beauty, her fine young limbs, supplied her with a constant, humming joy of self. Infante imagined arranging those limbs around him, absorbing a little of that sunny self-regard.

“What about this woman?” He pulled out the photo of his would-be Heather. “She look familiar? You ever see anyone like this with Penelope?”

“No. But then—I didn’t really see anyone with her, not even her boyfriend. She spoke of him, and he came by once that I recall, but that was it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Older fellow, kind of sleazy. He said some things to me, but I didn’t tell Penelope. It was just beer talk.”

“She say where she was going when she left?”

“No, not to me. She gave notice, and we even had a little party for her at the end of her last shift. A cake and all. But, you know, she was kind of private. I think—” She hesitated, touchingly sincere in her desire not to gossip, which made Infante like her all the more. So many folks he interviewed reveled in the opportunity to slander others in the name of their civic duty, volunteering all sorts of extraneous and derogatory information.

“Do you think she kept to herself because of her situation at home?”

An energetic, relieved nod. God, he wanted to fuck her. It would be like…like lying on a beach somewhere, only with the silkiest sand imaginable, warm and comforting, not the least bit gritty. There was nothing sour in this girl, no life taint. Her parents were probably still married, even still in love. She was breezing through school, popular with males and females alike. He could imagine birds alighting on her shoulders, as if she were some Disney cartoon princess.

“She came in once, with a bruise on her face? And all I did was look, just glance at her, and she got very upset. ‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. And I told her, ‘I didn’t say anything, Penelope, but if there’s something I can do,’ and she was, like, ‘No, no, no, Heather, you don’t understand, it’s not what you think, it was just an accident.’ And then…then—” The girl swallowed, a little nervous, and Infante fought to keep his attention on her words even as he was trying to figure out how to persuade her to come out to his rental car and climb on top of him. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it. I’ll come out on top.’ That was around Thanksgiving.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. We never spoke of it again. Was that…well, wrong of me? Should I have called someone, tried to make her get help? She was an adult, after all, older’n me. I didn’t see how I could help her.”

“You did just fine,” Infante said, seizing the opportunity to pat her forearm. The moment stretched out, not at all awkward.

“Can I get you something? Food, a drink?” Her voice was a little lower, almost husky.

“I probably shouldn’t. I have to drive back to the airport in an hour or so, catch a flight home to Baltimore.”

He caught her stealing a glance at his left hand. “There are lots of flights out of Jacksonville. You could probably go first thing in the morning, and it wouldn’t make much difference. Home at nine, either way, just A.M. or P.M. What’s the diff?”

“I already checked out of my motel.”

“Oh, well, accommodations could be made, most likely. People are real friendly here. And it’s fun, St. Simons. You’ve hardly seen any of it, I bet.”

He considered it. Of course he did. Here was a beautiful young woman, all but promising she would fuck him when her shift ended. He could sit at the bar, drink beer, let the anticipation build as he watched her twitch back and forth in those khaki shorts. She’d probably comp his bar bill, or at least sneak him a few under the table. And what was the difference—the
diff
—Saturday night versus Sunday morning? Nancy was doing the interview today, starting just about now, by his calculations. He had been cut out, through no fault of his own. Okay, through nobody’s fault, but definitely through no fault of his own. Under the circumstances—and the circumstances were beginning to form in his mind, an accident on the causeway, nothing big, nothing that would make the news, but enough of a hassle to trap him on the island until after the last Baltimore-bound plane left Jacksonville, and who could prove it didn’t happen?—no one would care if Infante came home tomorrow. It wasn’t like you needed to be an exceptional detective to do an airport pickup. Let someone else baby-sit the mom when she arrived, shuttle her to the Sheraton and keep her company. Heck, Lenhardt would probably enjoy hearing about his southern-belle adventure.
Did you get a good meal on the department? No, but I got good pussy
!

He brushed her wrist with his fingertips, feeling all that warmth, the vitality of her youth, the strength that came from never having had anything really bad happen to you. Kevin had no use for actual virgins, but he liked this particular kind of innocence, born of the belief that some guarantee had been made, that life would always be a smooth, creamy ride. Maybe it would be for this Heather. Maybe everyone she loved would die in his or her sleep, at appropriate ages. Maybe she would never sit at a kitchen table with her husband, weeping over the bills they couldn’t quite cover or arguing about the various disappointments he had banked. Maybe she would have children who brought her nothing but pride and joy. Maybe. Someone had to have a life like that, right? His line of work didn’t specialize in them, but they had to exist.

He slid his hand from her wrist, shook her soft little paw, and said good-bye, taking care to let her know, through his voice and expression, how much he regretted not staying.

“Oh,” she said, surprised, clearly a girl who was used to getting her way.

“Maybe another time,” he said, meaning,
Tomorrow, next week, I’ll probably go home with another young woman I meet in a bar. But tonight I’m going to return my rental car and be a team player
.

On the way out of town, he stopped at a barbecue joint in Brunswick and bought Lenhardt a T-shirt, a muscle-bound pig modeling his biceps: NO ONE CAN BEAT OUR MEAT. Even with that pit stop for a pulled-pork sandwich, he got to the Jacksonville airport so early that he managed to get standby on a flight that would get him into BWI almost an hour earlier than his original flight, a nonstop that would take almost half the time of his original one.

“You want a better chair?”

“No, no.” Willoughby was embarrassed by the offer, by the sergeant’s very solicitousness. He was neither old enough nor distinguished enough to warrant so much attention.

“Because I can get you something better than that.”

“I’m okay.”

“I mean, over a few hours you’re going to feel that one.”

“Sergeant,” he said, intending to sound dignified and stoic, but achieving only cranky. “Sergeant, I’m fine.”

The building was a different one from the one where he had worked the bulk of his career, and he found himself grateful for that. He had not come here to stroll down memory lane. He was the ref, the linesman, here to rule what was fair or foul. A manila envelope, slightly dusty, sat at his feet, waiting for its moment. It was going on 4:30 P.M., an interesting time to begin a long interview. It was a drowsy time of day, when blood sugar dipped and people began thinking about dinner, maybe cocktails if they went that way. Earlier, Willoughby had watched the pretty detective eat an apple and several slices of cheese, washed down with a bottle of water.

“Protein,” she explained when she realized he was observing her. “It doesn’t give you a burst of energy, but it sustains you over the long haul.”

He wished he had a daughter. A son would have been nice, too, but a daughter cares for her parents in old age, while sons tend to get sucked into their wives’ families, or so he’d always heard. If he had a daughter, he would still have a daughter. And grandchildren. It wasn’t that he was lonely. Until a few days ago, he’d been pretty happy with his life. He had his health, golf, his golf buddies, and if he wanted to keep company with a woman, there were several at Edenwald who’d be thrilled to volunteer. Twice a month he met some old friends, Gilman boys, at the Starbucks on York Road, the one where the old Citgo station had been, and they talked about politics and old times. They called themselves “ROMEO”—retired old men eating out—and the conversation was damn lively. The sad truth was, Evelyn had been so sick and so frail for so long that he couldn’t really miss her. Or, more correctly, he’d been missing her for years, through the last decade of her life, and it was easier to miss her now that she was truly gone.

It was funny about Evelyn—she didn’t like him to talk about the Bethany girls. Other cases, even ones that were far more gruesome in the details, didn’t bother her so much. In fact, she liked how he played it both ways. His life as a cop had brought him real cachet in their social circles, even made him sexier, and Evelyn had reveled in the fact, all her friends jockeying around him, vying for his attention, plying him with questions about his work. But not the Bethany girls, never the Bethany girls. He’d assumed that the subject was too heartbreaking for her. Denied children, she could not bear to hear about another infertile couple who had gained them, almost magically, then saw them taken. Now, for the first time, he wondered if the real problem was that he never solved it. Had Evelyn been disappointed in him?

“YOU’RE LATE,” Gloria snapped at Kay, taking Heather by the elbow.

“Heather told you what happened,” Kay said, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t lying, simply declining to contradict Heather’s lie, another hair split in a growing series of split hairs, a whole headful of them. But when she tried to follow them into the elevator, Gloria stopped her.

“You can’t come up, Kay. Well, you could come up, but you’ll be left in some empty office or conference room.”

“Oh—I knew that,” she said, her second lie in less than a minute, but this one merely a cover for her embarrassment.

“It’s going to be a while, Kay. Hours. I assumed that I would drive Heather home.”

“But it’s so far out of your way. You live up here, and I’m over on the southwest side.”

“Kay…”

She should go home, Kay told herself. She was getting too close to Heather as it was, crossing all sorts of lines. The mere fact that Heather was in her home—well, technically not in her home, but on her property—could result in a reprimand, threats against her license. She was losing her way. But, having gone this far, she was not willing to go back.