When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “I think so,” said Kathy. “I guess I was just confused because you said it was your best guess that the pump backed up. You weren’t sure.”

  “You’ve got a live one here,” the chief said to Kathy’s mother and father. “Now look, honey. When a plane goes down, do you think they know just exactly what went wrong with it? No! If they did, there wouldn’t be any more plane crashes, would there? When a plane goes down, Kathy, and two hundred people blow up, what has the FAA got? They’ve got a little black box with the pilot’s last words, ‘Roger, the wing’s falling off.’ ”

  “Kathy, Chief D’Amico is a busy man,” said her mother.

  “When I say our best guess, Kathy,” he continued, “what I mean is our best guess. You can’t run through an event of the past as if you had a movie of it. As if you had somebody there taking notes.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Kathy. “I do understand.”

  “Whew!” said the chief, and once again he looked around the room as if for allies in some elaborate joke. “If she doesn’t make it in tennis,” he said chuckling, “she’ll probably grow up to be a lady lawyer, and she’ll ruin my life! If not that, then a newspaper reporter, and she’ll ruin my life that way too. Only kidding, honey. I know you’ve had a tough week. Your mom and dad have told me all about it. You’re just a youngster, and sometimes it takes awhile to let things sink in. I’m just awful sorry there was any fuss in the first place. We do our job, but you can’t stop people talking. I’d give her a shot of bourbon,” he said with mock slyness, “except it’s illegal for me to suggest you corrupt a minor.”

  After many thanks and promises to buy tickets to the policemen’s ball, which her parents did every year any way, everyone said good-bye, and the chief was gone, out the screen door and into the evening light with his hat.

  The first to say that Kathy didn’t look really happy, or at least happy enough, was her mother.

  “I don’t know why, Mom,” Kathy answered. “I just don’t believe it.”

  “You mean you don’t trust what he says, or you’re just relieved and it hasn’t sunk in? Which one?” her mother asked.

  “Kathy smells a rat,” said Jody, who had been sitting in a far dark corner of the room all the while, only barely noticed by Kathy, as if she were some kind of spirit.

  “For once, Jody,” said Kathy’s father, “there is no rat.”

  “According to Peachy Malone—” Jody began.

  “I don’t want to hear what that dingbat or any other dingbat has to say,” Kathy’s father interrupted.

  “Peachy’d sell her mother’s wedding ring for a Hershey bar,” said Oliver.

  “She heard exactly what the man from the pool company said,” Jody went on, but her father cut her off.

  “Kathy,” he said, “it’s been a rough week for you, but it’s over. It’s gone. Do you understand that?”

  “I guess so, Dad,” said Kathy slowly.

  “What do you mean, you guess so?” Oliver put in.

  “I was just thinking, no matter what the police say, somebody who went to that Newton tournament was in the pool house. Otherwise Mr. Molina wouldn’t have found a footprint. That’s all. And I suppose I’m a little confused because all week long, or since I knew, anyway, that in their hearts everyone believed I did it, or that somebody, maybe even somebody who loves me ... I don’t know, Dad. I’ve been thinking so hard about that game at Fenway Park. I still wish I could remember something so that forever and ever nobody would think it was me.”

  “But nobody does, Kathy,” said Oliver. “You don’t have to. You could go to the chief of police with a ticket stub and scorecard and your picture taken with Carlton Fisk, and he wouldn’t care.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kathy. “It just seems everybody wants to hold their hands over my ears and eyes. Everything’s going to be all right. Just the way three doctors told us when Grandma had that stroke. Everything was going to be all right, but it wasn’t.”

  Oliver announced to the general company that he thought Kathy was right. “Hiding things from her,” he said, “as if she were an idiot. I’m going to fill in all the gaps,” he said.

  “Oliver!” warned Kathy’s mother.

  “What harm is it going to do now, Mrs. B.?” he asked.

  Kathy’s mother stood and went into the kitchen. “All right,” she said. “Have it your way. Somebody’s got to do the cooking around here,” she added. “Somebody’s got to make supper.”

  Oliver knelt on the floor directly in front of Kathy so that she looked down at his face. He took both her hands in his. Kathy was struck at how bony his knees seemed in his oversized chinos. His lock of unruly black hair fell over his eyes as usual and caught just under his large tortoiseshell glasses. “Let me tell you everything, Kathy,” he said. “Nobody wanted to tell you before because we thought it would make you upset.”

  “And you might lose a tennis game,” Jody piped up from the corner.

  “Shut up, Jody,” said Oliver wrathfully. “You’re the one who has the big mouth around here. You promised to shut it, and all you accomplished with your gossip and your Peachy Malone was to upset Kathy all over again. Didn’t you?” He wouldn’t let Jody’s opened mouth say a word. “Okay, Kathy, every single one of us was talked to by the cops. Did you know that?”

  Kathy shook her head. “You?” she said.

  “Yup. Very easy. No trips in the squad car to the station house. No fingerprinting, no mug shots ... Oliver was smiling, then he seemed to realize perhaps he shouldn’t be. Kathy had faced enough big smiles. “Me and Jody and your mom as well as Marty. They asked me a few questions while I was lifeguarding at the club. They came to the house while you weren’t here to talk to your mom and dad and Jody. Apparently they found out I put those tacks under my mom’s husband’s tires six years ago. They even knew about Jody hitting the nurse.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes, they did. But it was all very easy, Kathy. Even if somebody had gone down to where the chlorine was kept, they’d have had to do it in the dark while the cocktail party was going on. The pool was closed that night, they turned the lights off and closed the gate. I watched Molina lock up at nine. He vouched for me, by the way. He never lets his staff serve drinks without a shoeshine inspection first. Sure enough, he remembered that I was wearing my black cordovans. The druggist in Norwood said that yes, your mom had been there, and unless she flew, that’s an hour’s drive one way, so she was off the hook. Of course your dad was with Bobby at the clinic, and he didn’t even go to the Newton tournament anyway. The druggist was helpful. He remembered calling this house wondering if your mom had left. He got Jody, naturally, and Mrs. Diggins had called earlier, so there you are. Now you can’t find any holes in that, Kathy, so don’t you go worrying about people who love you. This is proven stuff, Kathy. It’s been checked out.”

  Except for me. I haven’t been checked out, Kathy thought, but she didn’t say so. Uncertainty must have still been in her eyes though, because Oliver looked at her sadly as if he hadn’t said enough, or hadn’t said it right.

  When the speculation over the dinner table became unbearable to Kathy, because she didn’t think she would be the New England fourteen-and-under champion within the next eight days, she pushed back her chair and announced she was going out.

  “I didn’t do my mile in the sand today,” she lied. “Have to keep my legs in shape.”

  “Your legs are in shape, Kathy,” said her mother. “It’s going to get dark. Not right after you’ve eaten ...

  “Marry Kathy,” said Jody to Oliver, “and you’ll have a lifetime of dishes to do. She’ll go jogging in ten feet of snow to get out of it.”

  As usual Jody had the last word, and as usual Kathy ran to the Redmonds’ house.

  As she jogged, slowly because she was still tired, she looked at the shadows from the trees on the houses and the lawns. There was a darkness in the still-bright sunshine. The houses on Ocean Drive seemed bigger and more imposing than u
sual. Julia’s mother, Kathy recalled, was always complaining about the cost of maintaining a house near the sea. The brass needed polishing every day because of the salt in the air. The spruce shrubs around the front of the house turned brown and died on the oceanward side and had to be replaced every year. The best paint peeled off the house quickly, and the grass grew crabbed in the sandy soil. One by one as she passed them by Kathy stared at the houses of the rich. Squirreled away in those many high-ceilinged bedrooms, dressing rooms, and sewing rooms were the two possessions belonging only to the people with very real money: servants and ghosts. Still Kathy did not think there was a better place on earth than Massachusetts on the sea, with the late summer’s light grown ripe like a peach on a windowsill.

  In the Redmonds’ living room the light was gold. The gold word Steinway on the baby grand was readable from across the room, and the cherrywood bookcases and paneling appeared to have a vast depth beneath their polish, as if a person could poke a finger deep into the wood itself. Julia lay stretched out flat in the middle of the living-room rug.

  “Katherine,” said Julia’s mother, “I know you have something on your mind, but I’m not letting you stay up late with this night owl here. Your mother has called, and I made her a solemn promise. You,” she said in Julia’s direction, “are going to have to start rising before eleven. Lazy young thing! School begins in a couple of weeks. At nine o’clock, Kathy, I am driving you home. You are not trotting home...

  “Jogging, Mother,” Julia corrected.

  “You are not trotting home. I am going to drive you. Now don’t you girls eat up all the ice cream.” Mrs. Redmond let herself out of the living room carrying an armful of gladiolas. Once she looked back with amusement in her eye, as if she thought there was a real chance that her daughter and Kathy might be running a secret numbers racket.

  For a long moment both girls were silent, Julia still stretched full out on the sun-warmed rug and Kathy sitting with her legs pulled up under her chin, distractedly biting one knee. At the other end of the hall, at the curved end of the dining, room, were four stained-glass windows which Julia always called “stain glassed.” In that room, when they were about seven, Kathy and Julia had played a game called Pope and Nun, not because either of them was particularly religious but because of the pious invectives of Rose, who took both The Irish Echo and The Catholic News and read from them aloud over tea. Happily Julia and Kathy, dressed in red velvet curtains, had excommunicated each other in the blue, red, and yellow light of those windows.

  “What is it, kiddo?” Julia asked.

  Haltingly and disjointedly Kathy told her about Mr. Hammer and the algebra exam, about Jody and Peachy Malone and the chlorine and the red clay, about Marty and Chief D’Amico and how it felt to know everybody was trying to make things all right, to make things disappear, and then when they had disappeared, all those things, how that felt too. “It makes me think of my grandma,” Kathy explained. “You remember when she broke her hip, how it all healed up after a while, but she was still afraid to walk? Afraid to use that broken bone even if there was nothing wrong with it and it was stronger than before because of the steel pin? That’s sort of the way it is. I have a big tournament starting tomorrow morning, and it’s as if I’m afraid to ... to play.”

  “Oh, Kathy,” said Julia, groaning and rolling onto her stomach.

  “I know there’s nothing much you can do. I just wanted to come over and tell you.”

  Julia’s index finger traced a floral pattern in the rug beneath her. “You know I had a nightmare once,” she said. “There was a terrible thunderstorm in the middle of the night. This summer. The noise of it went right into my dream. I was sure the atomic bomb had been dropped. I woke up and I ran to the window to see the mushroom cloud over Boston. I was sure it was the end of the world, but it was just a crack of thunder. I remember standing at my window. Mom came in to close my window, but I wouldn’t let her. I just let the rain blow in on me and soak me because I was so glad there was no bomb. I think you’ve got to look at it that way, Kathy. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know,” said Kathy.

  “Well, what’s worrying you exactly?”

  “Well, one thing is Jody told me—just before dinner tonight when I went upstairs to wash my hands and change—Jody told me Peachy was listening the whole time the guy from the pool company was talking to the cops today. There was an argument because the guy from the company said that the valve had cracked when the pool was drained suddenly. He said the pool had to be drained over a long period the way they usually do at the end of the summer. Otherwise there’s too much pressure and something gives. But the cops said it couldn’t be proven either way, so they dropped the whole thing. The thing of it is, I know old Fred Molina. He’d never let a crack go unrepaired. He’s like a German soldier about everything.”

  “Kathy, even Fred Molina is human. He can make a mistake.”

  “Maybe,” said Kathy, wondering suddenly what Marty had meant by his “after-hours activities.”

  “I do notice, by the way, that it’s Jody who’s been the one to upset you both times in this whole business.”

  “God, everybody, even you, Julia, everybody’s talking about my getting upset as if I were a white rat with some rare disease.”

  “Well, Jeez Louise, Kathy. What do you want me to say?”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “Well, I do think it’s Jody’s fault. She’s so very jealous of you.”

  “Jody’s just ... very moral.”

  Julia made an impolite noise at this and snorted, “Moral shmoral. Look at Peachy Malone, who’s been gossiping with her. Peachy’s about as reliable as Rose. Jody’s a nice kid, Kathy, but she’s jealous of you, and she also always, always has to get her two cents in. She’d make a great jury member. She’s the type who’d deadlock the whole thing for three weeks in the motel until everybody else goes stark raving nuts. I’ll tell you one thing. People like this pool company guy are liars. Just like the electric company creeps at the nuclear plant. They’re forever saying nothing’s their fault.”

  “I didn’t think of it that way,” Kathy admitted.

  “The thing is over, Kathy. Put it out of your mind.”

  “I would if I could do one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If I could think of one single happening that would prove to everybody that I was out at Fenway Park that night, then it would be over for me. Unless I do, I feel sort of as if I have a terrible mark against me. Look how they went after Marty and Oliver and Mom and even Jody, who, by the way, was decent enough to cover for me. Asking them police questions. Did they do it to me? No. Because I’m the precious little golden talent. I hate the word talent.”

  “First of all that’s completely untrue. You were in Florida when this whole thing came to light. By the time you got home, the thing had blown over. It has nothing to do with precious golden talent, which, by the way, you happen to have.”

  Kathy still gnawed at her knee. “Talent,” she said. “People who can draw and write and play music have talent.”

  “What’s wrong with playing tennis?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. It just requires ... it takes everything out of me. Everything, after a match. Before a match.”

  “So does giving a concert.”

  “Yes, and I can’t get up on the stage, Julia. I just think in the back of everybody’s mind is going to be a little question. Did she do it or didn’t she? I was even considering giving the whole thing up and never playing tennis again.”

  Julia got up slowly and went over to a window seat. The sun had set, and the light was dying on the grass outside. Julia had always been too fastidious to swear. Kathy was numbed by the string of words she heard Julia whisper.

  “Julia!” she began, but Julia cut her off.

  “Look, Kathy,” she said. “You have to look at this thing a whole new way. You have to imagine something here. Then nothing that anyone thinks will b
e important anymore. Please try and imagine one thing.”

  Kathy bit her knee hard. “What?” she asked.

  “If you had done it, kiddo, you’d know it, wouldn’t you?”

  I guess so.

  “Even if nobody else in the world knew, you’d know it. Even if Mr. Molina had never come up with his sponge full of red clay, or if Ruth’s parents had never made a fuss, you’d still know it, wouldn’t you, and you’d have to live with it for the rest of your life.”

  “I ... I guess I would.”

  “It would sit there inside you, like some incurable ulcer, like a big bleeding, weeping boil in the middle of your stomach for the rest of your days, but you don’t have to live with it, Kathy, because you didn’t do it!”

  Kathy felt her spine sag after a stunned second or two. “You know,” she said, “everyone else has said what sounds right, the right thing to say, but you’re the only one who’s said what is right. I never thought of that. I wish ...

  After a long silence Julia asked, “What?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I could say how much I thank you.”

  “Yankee!” said Julia from the darkness across the room. There was a great sadness in her voice that Kathy could not place.

  9

  RAIN HAD BEEN PREDICTED for southern New England, but the day broke clear and bright as crystal over Newport, Rhode Island.

  Kathy’s mother read aloud from her notes on the yellow lined pad. “A nice girl,” she said, “so forth and so on. She was Rhode Island champion in twelve and under. Very consistent serve but not too powerful. No nerves. Remember that. Now—”

  “Look!” Kathy interrupted, standing dead still in the long dark archway that led to the courts. Framed perfectly by the blackened bricks was the brilliant grass in the morning sun. Kathy drew a sudden sharp breath and felt her eyes widen. So like my first look at the field in Fenway Park, she thought.