The Next Time You See Me (41 page)

There was the click of a turning deadbolt, and the knob rattled. Tony stood very straight and folded his hands in front of him. He had thought it possible, even likely, that her husband would be home, but he hadn’t imagined Dale answering the door; nor had he once, forming this plan in his head, remembered Susanna’s child. But here they both were, husband and daughter, Dale holding the girl on his hip, though she was big enough that her legs dangled almost to his knees, and the little girl narrowing her eyes at Tony with what seemed to him righteous distrust. She was unmistakably Susanna’s: the same large eyes that were set just a bit too far apart, the same heart-shaped face and dwindling chin. Her brown hair was fine and limp and had been trimmed into a chin-length cap, and she was wearing thermal pajama pants that cuffed at the ankles and a stained T-shirt. He saw all of this in just a matter of seconds, but it felt to him like he couldn’t take his eyes off her, this person who had been, until this moment, theoretical and therefore unimportant to him. You couldn’t look at her without seeing evidence of love and effort and exasperation, a whole life behind the closed door of this house that he hadn’t really thought about, even when he was turning that pink-skinned baby doll over on its stomach with his foot.

Dale shifted and bounced, scooting Abby higher up on his hip, and stuck out his free hand. “Detective Joyce. I thought you’d probably come.”

“You did?”

Dale nodded. He took Abby by the armpits and lowered her to the floor. “Go play in the kitchen, Ab. I need to talk to this man for a minute.”

“Can I go get an oatmeal pie?”

“Yeah, go to the kitchen and eat an oatmeal pie.” He waved Tony over to the sofa. “Have a seat if you want. Susanna’s not here. She’s probably out looking for you, or maybe she went to her mother’s. We heard about the body.”

Tony shook his head with disbelief. “I’m so sorry. I came over as soon as I could.”

“Is it her? For sure?”

“Not for sure,” Tony said. “The lab is fingerprinting and comparing dental records tonight. There were a couple of clothing items in the bag, and we may need Susanna or her mother to come look at them tomorrow to see if they recognize them. But the lab tech told me that the state of—” He had been about to say
decomposition
. “The state of the body, given the condition we found it in, suggests it’s been there no more than a few weeks. At the most. And that’s consistent with when Ronnie went missing.”

Dale, hunched forward in his chair so that his elbows were resting on his knees, rubbed his palms together and nodded. “Hey,” he said suddenly, sitting upright. “She had a tattoo. Here.” He pointed to the nape of his neck. “Just under the collar, so you couldn’t see it unless she had a tank top on.”

“Susanna put it in the missing-person report,” Tony said. “A four-leaf clover, right?”

“Yeah.” Dale’s mouth contorted into a slanted smirk, and he sighed through his nostrils. “Yeah. Anyway, I thought it might be something to look for.”

“Well, there’s another thing.” Tony hesitated. It seemed to him, in talking to Dale this way, that he was shrugging off some of his responsibility, ceding it to Susanna’s husband. “The body was not . . .” Again, he searched for a word. “Intact.”

“Intact?” Dale looked over his shoulder at the kitchen, but Abby was still out of view. “What does that mean?”

Tony lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “There were three
garbage bags at the scene. I didn’t get a close look—I couldn’t. But it’s bad.”

“Dear Lord,” Dale said.

Tony felt an immense, guilty relief at unburdening himself of that secret. You had to love the person who told you a thing like that, because otherwise you would come to hate him. He didn’t want Susanna to hate him.

“I’ll tell her,” Dale said. He said it with force, as if to steel himself for the task, and Tony was struck by a wave of pity for him. He had known before the wrong of what he and Susanna had done, but he hadn’t truly felt it. Perhaps Dale was all of what Susanna had implied about him—self-centered, insensitive, more worried about what people thought of him than his wife’s feelings—but Tony didn’t think he was a bad man. He plainly loved her. Who had he been to come into this man’s own home and make a fool of him? If Tony had really wanted to be with Susanna, to love her, to take her away from this life, that would have been one thing. And maybe that was the story he had been telling himself these last few days. But he didn’t love her, he realized. What he wanted was to find her sister’s killer. For her, yes, and for Ronnie’s spirit, if such a thing existed, but also for himself. Because maybe he wasn’t through with all of those major league dreams, after all.

“I’m so sorry,” Tony said.

“Don’t be sorry for me,” Dale said. “Be sorry for my wife.”

They stood and walked together to the front door, then shook hands again. Tony could see the little girl peeking around the door frame and wondered how he must have appeared to her. Big, dark. Bringing with him an air of sorrow.

“I’ll call tomorrow about having Susanna come by to identify those clothing items,” Tony said. He thought for an instant of mentioning Wyatt, then stopped himself. He still had that paranoid, almost superstitious feeling from before, and he wondered if anything short of getting a search warrant tomorrow would rid him of it. He figured that
he’d drive back by Wyatt’s house again on his way home; if he wasn’t there, Tony would perhaps try to find an inconspicuous parking spot and wait him out awhile, since he was still feeling a boost from the soda and caffeine pills. Seeing the truck in the drive wouldn’t completely ease his mind, but it was a start.

Chapter Thirty-One

1.

Sam Austen’s Dodge Ram stopped at a red light, then pulled out to the right without signaling. Wyatt did the same.

“I got two boxfuls of boys’ baby clothes, all of it in good condition. I’ve also got a crib with a good mattress and all the bedding, a stroller, and some other odds and ends. I’ll sell it all for a hundred dollars, but I can negotiate on just the furniture, too.”

“Sounds like a great deal, listeners. Amanda, are you sure you’ll never need that stuff again?”

“Lord, I hope not!”

Wyatt had always liked the Swap Meet. He never called in and bought anything, and he’d sure as heck never tried selling, though it had crossed his mind a few times that he might fetch a few dollars for his mother’s old serving ware, the stuff that had always seemed too impractical to him to actually use: the jade mixing bowl set, the sterling coffee urn, the crystal punch bowl with wispy little cups that hung from it on crystal hooks. He liked hearing what people wanted, what they were trying to get rid of. He liked imagining the dramas of their lives. Occasionally some desperate soul called in offering his television set or VCR, or something random and of little value such as a used vacuum cleaner, and you could tell in his voice that he needed
cash, any he could get his hands on. These calls inspired in Wyatt a coarse curiosity. Maybe they were about to get turned out of their house, he’d think, and he’d feel more content with the home he was driving to. Maybe they were addicted to drugs or drink, and he’d send up a little prayer of gratitude that he’d never taken to an addiction himself, not even cigarettes.

He knew, in the way that everyone at Price knew, that Sam still lived with his father and mother at their farm out on 68–80 heading toward Hopkinsville. Russell Austen was a magistrate, and he was a district manager for Valu-Ville, the regional chain of grocery stores, so the house was practically a mansion by local standards: built new in the eighties, two stories, a kind of hybrid in style between a German timber frame house and a horse barn. When Sam turned left going out of the factory, Wyatt knew he wasn’t going home—or not yet, at least. Wyatt, too, signaled left and followed him, not bothering to fall back and try for inconspicuousness. His only object was to keep Sam’s truck in his sights, and the consequences beyond that did not concern him. He had wondered since leaving home today if he could trust this sudden steadiness, this acute sense of purpose that had fallen on him after Johnny Burke’s phone call. If what had happened that night after Nancy’s proved anything, it was that Wyatt didn’t know himself, that maybe no man knew himself, and so the emotions of a moment were fragile, shifty, untrustworthy things. You could only ride them as long as they let you.

“Let’s get a couple more buyers on here before we wrap up for the day. Call me at 726-WRMA if there’s something you want, and who knows? Maybe one of our listeners will have it. What do you want, listeners?”

Left. Right. Right. The truck glided through a stop sign, and Wyatt also glided, unconcerned that his path might cross with that of another unsuspecting driver, or that a police officer parked just out of sight would notice him. He was invisible. Untouchable. The truck sped up to sixty in a thirty-five, and Wyatt pressed down on his own gas. An almost sleepy calm had fallen over him. It was only four o’clock, but the sky was already getting gray, the sun low and distant
and obscured by a haze of clouds. A single band of bright pink cut through them, visible in his mirrors. They were driving east now, back toward town. Sam had made a circle.

“It’s me again, Spencer. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

“Go ahead, Mrs. Miller. You never know.”

“Well, I’ve been looking for a long time for a baby doll like I had as a little girl. My sister and I both had one, and we lost them when our daddy moved us to Kentucky in 1935. I’ve always missed that baby doll. It was a Kewpie doll with a ceramic head and a soft body, looked like it was wearing onesie pajamas. It had a hood on and a long tassel coming off the top, like a sleep cap. I have been looking for a baby doll like that all my life.”

“Our regular listeners will know that Mrs. Miller has been calling in to Swap Meet for—how long is it?”

“Probably ten years.”

“Ten years! So if you know of a doll like that Kewpie, call in. I’ll take up a collection to pay for it if I have to.”

“It’s all I can think about now that my sister’s passed. I’d really like to have that baby doll.”

The Ram braked suddenly and whipped into the parking lot of an Advance Auto. Wyatt turned in, too, shifted to neutral, and set the key to “Accessories” so that the radio could still run. He’d heard Mrs. Miller many times, and he thought that she sounded like a good person. He sometimes went to the flea market on weekends—it was something to do—and he always looked at the dolls, hoping to see the Kewpie with the pajamas and the sleep cap, wishing that he could be the person to call in one day and tell her he’d found it, that he was making it a gift to her.

“I’ve never got over the loss of that doll. I miss it every day.”

He waited, not wanting to emerge before Sam did. Finally, the door on the Ram opened and Sam stepped out, looking furious at first and then, recognizing Wyatt, perplexed. Finally, something else settled on his face. He was trying for amusement, for the same shit-eating grin he usually wore when he was teasing Wyatt, but there
was a flicker of something else. Uneasiness. Perhaps even fear. Wyatt felt a surge of pleasure. He shut the radio off, pocketed his keys, and exited his truck cab. The lot was quiet, not secluded. There were two other cars, lights on in the building.

“Tubs,” Sam said. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

2.

That night—the night that ruined everything—Wyatt had sat at the kitchen table in Ronnie’s little house, eating from his paper basket of livers and gizzards methodically with both hands; every now and then he stopped to lick his fingers, hesitated, and wiped them on a napkin instead. Ronnie had gotten strangely quiet, all of her earlier playfulness dissipated, as if Wyatt had imagined it in the first place.
You brought me here,
Wyatt wanted to blurt out.
It was your idea.

“I’m going to pay you back that money,” he said for the third time. Maybe she was brooding over it. Maybe she hadn’t had it to give.

“Hon, it’s fine.” Her voice was flat. She popped a liver into her mouth and chewed, her eyes fixed on some point behind and to the left of him. He craned his neck blearily, thinking she might have turned on a television, but saw nothing. Just the paneled wall of her living room, the back of the couch. An old clock hung on the wall, its pendulum swinging jauntily.

“Thanks for bringing me here.” He had said this already, too.

She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, her foot jogging a little under the table. He could feel the vibration through the soles of his shoes. “Yep. It’s no problem.”

He finished the basket and sat back. “Well, I’ll probably regret that later.”

“It’s good for you,” Ronnie said with what felt to Wyatt like forced cheer, like a last surge of perfunctory politeness from an otherwise rude DMV or fast-food employee, but even forced cheer was better than none at all. “Grease soaks up the alcohol.”

He looked down at his empty container, embarrassed. He hadn’t even been hungry, really—just nervous, unsure of what to do with himself. The salt and grease roiled in his stomach. He imagined it as a shiny slick on an ocean of beer.

Ronnie yawned pointedly, and Wyatt felt the motion of the clock’s pendulum behind him. “You said you’d had a bad night,” he said in a rush, hoping to restore that little pocket of intimacy from before. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. She crooked a shoulder. “A fight, sort of.”

“With a friend? A boyfriend?”

“I smacked the closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend upside the head tonight.” She blurted this out with forced bravado, daring Wyatt to chastise her. But he laughed stupidly, playing along.

“Smacked him, huh?”

Ronnie finally met his gaze. Her eyes, so wide and round, glittered within their dark frames of mascara. “Yeah,” she said. “I did. Anyway,” she added, blinking rapidly, “we’ll probably make up. We always do.”

Wyatt leaned forward a little, put his hand on the tabletop. It was a plump, almost feminine hand, even after all of those years he worked in the winding room, the bones delicate, the skin milky. He hated his hands, had always felt that they gave away his weakness the way some people were betrayed by blushes or nervous tics. No wonder he was pushing sixty and alone. No wonder those boys from work had known they could make a fool of him.