When No One Was Looking
Page 18
The chief sat behind his desk, leaning on his elbows and playing all the while with a stubby pencil. He gave Kathy a part laughing and part frowning expression, and then he raised both hands as if in despair over a crossword puzzle. “Honey, honey, honey,” he began.
“Oh, please, sir. It would mean everything to me for the rest of my life.”
“I know. I can see that. Just listen a minute, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Kathy answered.
“First of all,” he began, out of the side of his mouth as he lit a cigarette, “to begin with, honey, I saw you were real upset last night. Wanna make an apology that I probably went a little quick for you. Didn’t realize how keyed up you were. I had a tough day. You know? I wish there were more kids like you in this world, honey. That kind of came to me when I was driving home last night. They give you a snort of whiskey, by the way?”
“Oh, no,” Kathy answered. “I’d get sick if I just smelled that stuff.”
“Huh,” said the chief, grinning again and closing an eye against the smoke. “Just what I mean. I wish there were more kids like you. I get teen-age alcoholics down here I could tell you about ... I got two young kids myself. I hope someday, if either one of ’em gets in a jam, he has the honesty to behave like you. Tough. Won’t take half an answer.” He waited, one eye still closed.
“Thank you, Chief D’Amico,” said Kathy. “Now may we look at the tape?”
“Hold your horses, Kathy. The tape was sent back. But as I said, I admire your spunk. I guess that’s an old-fashioned word. I mean to say your spirit and your good conscience, Kathy. Now, if you like, I’ll go and call Channel Six and get the tape back, and we can sit here and watch Carl Yastrzemski take off his shoes and spit in the dirt, but I guarantee you it’s unnecessary. The girl’s parents are satisfied, Kathy, and so is your Mrs. Collins. I saw to that myself because I kind of thought you’d like me to. Everything is cleared up. We did a lab test on the clay, and nobody who went near the Newton Country Club had any connection with the pool house that day or any other day unless they wore gloves and walked on their hands.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kathy. “Lab test?”
“Honey—this fella, Molina?”
“Yes?”
“Okay. We got this fella Molina yelling it isn’t his fault. Right? He’s yelling about people, particularly this tennis coach, tracking up his pool house with tennis court clay. He shows us a sample, and sure enough, it’s red clay all right. Anybody could see that. Now what happens is this. Any time the police department investigates something, we do a routine lab test on whatever we pick up. I hardly bothered to look at the lab report, Kathy, because there was never a real case here. No pranks, no murders!” He arched his eyebrows over this word as if it were slightly smutty.
“You mean it was all a big hoax or something about the clay? Are you sure?”
“Kathy, do you know anything about investigations? About the D.A.’s work? About inquests?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Your ideas about crime—now I’m not making fun, here, Kathy, this goes for ninety-nine percent of the adult population. Most people’s ideas are straight out of Hawaii Five-O or what’s her name, the detective writer. Do you understand even if we had a bloody hand print here, the D.A. would never go near this with a ten-foot pole? If the state chose to prosecute every last two-bit accident case as a homicide, we’d be booked up into the next century. In this instance there wouldn’t have even been a preliminary inquest, Kathy, because you’ve got too many people running around the area dropping bathing caps and sunglasses all day long. Number two, you’ve got a motive about as farfetched as my Aunt Ethel taking a potshot at the President. Number three, you’ve got your mechanical failure. Any one of those things would be enough to get a judge to laugh it out of court in two minutes. Now, if you still want me to get those tapes, I will, because you’re a decent, honest kid, and I don’t want to see you running around feeling like a heel inside.”
“Well ... I guess not,” said Kathy. “I’m so happy, though. And you told Ruth’s mother and father? You really did? And you told Mrs. Collins?”
“Called them the minute the guy from the pool company came down, Kathy. The parents were real nice, by the way. My guess is they felt a little ashamed to have made such a fuss about it. Volunteered themselves to call your Mrs. Collins. So here’s a Xerox of the analysis if you want a souvenir.”
Kathy shook Chief D’Amico’s outstretched hand. “I’m so sorry to have bothered you,” she said. “But what does this mean?” she asked, pointing out a sentence on the report.
Chief D’Amico appeared to be bored, like a doctor with a very healthy but inquisitive patient. “Huh?” he asked, his hands in his pockets. “Oh, that? That’s your chemical formula for tennis court clay. See, it’s completely different from our sample. Our sample is some kind of sculptor’s clay. Right here.”
“Sculptor’s clay?”
“Yup. See. Called Plastilina. Imported from France. Comes in great big sacks—mixed or in powder form. Cheaper in powder form apparently. No mistaking it. Now you go get a good night’s sleep and go win it for old Plymouth. I’ll see if I can get your name inscribed on the Rock. Okay, champ?”
Kathy was not sure whether it was a long while or a very short while in which she stood astride her bicycle, gazing at a piece of a candy bar that was stuck in the gutter. People seemed inclined to bump into her and to stare at her. She did not know where to go. If only, she kept repeating to herself. If only. If only I hadn’t been so pigheaded as to pursue this down to the last stupid detail, then I wouldn’t know. If only Julia had not come over with Miss Greco’s head the night before Ruth died. If only I hadn’t gone running and seen Miss Greco’s footsteps covered with red clay dust. If only I’d gone in another direction. If only a hundred things.
“Miss, are you all right?” a woman asked.
“Yes, fine,” said Kathy automatically. The people on the street bobbed up and down before her dreamily. Kathy pulled her bicycle off the sidewalk and began to pedal it away in the first direction that occurred to her. She found herself heading toward the club and the sea.
Where are the very beginnings of things? she asked herself, hoping to find some relief in what logical processes she could manage. Where did this thing have a root? Was it because I, at least in Julia’s eyes, saved Julia’s life three years ago by dragging her and carrying her a mile when she fell out of that pine tree? Was it because I saved Julia’s dignity on the second day of school? Kathy thought not. Was it because she, Kathy, had “no protective coloring,” as Julia had put it, and because she needed so terribly much from Julia and Julia had chosen to freely give?
If only, Kathy began again, if only I hadn’t bothered to go down to the police station, then at least I wouldn’t know. I don’t want to know. Why wasn’t it enough for me to just know that I didn’t do it? She tried to picture life without tennis.
There would be school, of course, and friends and boys and movies and parties, she supposed. Jody’s life had no tennis or anything as consuming as tennis in it. Jody was happy. She, Kathy, had been sublimely content before it had occurred to her to pick up a tennis racket I can always go back to that, she told herself. You can never go back, said a quick voice in the back of her mind. Ruth is dead, in part because of you. As much as Julia never meant in her wildest dreams to end Ruth’s life, Julia has to live with what happened, and as much as your connection to it is as thin as a spider’s thread, it is part of your life too now.
The parking lot of the Plymouth Bath and Tennis Club was empty. Kathy dropped her bicycle on the stones. Although it was still August, the afternoon was cool. Seeing it was low tide, Kathy made her way slowly down the slippery jetty to her hiding place behind the pointed rock.
The pools of water that had collected there were not warm from the sun, and the seaweed in them was not spring green but nearly black. Kathy stood and peered over the top of the sheltering pointed rock
. There was no one there but her. The pool and the clubhouse were closed for the day. The tennis courts were gated and locked. No human soul was around for all the distance she could see.
She cleared her throat self-consciously, although she alone was there to laugh at herself. “God?” Kathy asked of the steely gray waves. “Shall I quit tennis? Do you want me to give it up? Because I will if you want me to—I’ll come back with every racket I own and throw them in the sea!”
God did not answer.
Julia did: “If you had done it, Kathy, you would have to live with it for the rest of your life. Like a big bleeding, weeping boil in the middle of your stomach for the rest of your days,” said Julia, “but you don’t.”
Rain was expected in southern New England. It began to fall in the distance, against the bright southern sky. It poured down over the Vineyard and the Cape like a great navy sheet, over the emerald green grass at Newport. Soon it would veer north and fall on Plymouth, on Kathy’s front yard, on Julia’s house, and in the swimming pool where Ruth had once been alive.
From the most passionate and sensual depths of her guts Kathy howled, “Julia!” to the newly sprung east wind, but Julia was not there. Giving her up would be infinitely trickier than throwing a racket into the sea.
A Biography of Rosemary Wells
Rosemary Wells (b. 1942) is a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. Born in New York City, Wells was raised in New Jersey. She grew up in an artistic family; her mother was a ballet dancer and her father was an actor-playwright. “We had a houseful of wonderful books. Reading stories aloud was as much a part of my childhood as the air I breathed,” Wells recalls. “It was also the golden age of childhood, now much changed for my grandchildren.”
Her love of illustrating also began at an early age, and she started drawing at two years old. When she was older, Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She married Thomas Moore Wells in 1963, and the pair lived in Boston for two years while she worked as a book designer for Allyn & Bacon, a textbook publisher. The couple moved to New York in 1965, when Tom entered Columbia University for his graduate degree in architecture, and Wells went to work for the trade publisher Macmillan. Her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s A Song to Sing, O!, was published in 1968.
Since then, Wells has published more than 120 books, including 7 novels. In her picture books, she pairs her delightful illustrations with humorous, sincere, and psychologically adept themes. She was praised in Booklist as having “that rare ability to tell a funny story for very young children with domestic scenes of rising excitement and heartfelt emotion, and with not one word too many.” Kirkus Reviews touted her “unerring ability to hit just the right note to tickle small-fry funny bones.” The Christian Science Monitor called her “one of the most gifted picture-book illustrators in the United States.”
Among her bestselling picture book titles are Voyage to the Bunny Planet, Noisy Nora, and Read to Your Bunny. She is best known for the Max and Ruby series, which depicts the adventures of sibling bunnies. Many of her series also feature animal characters, including McDuff (illustrated by Susan Jeffers), Edward Almost Ready, Yoko, and the Mother Goose books edited by Iona Opie. In addition to her picture books, Wells has written several historical fiction and mystery/suspense novels for young adults.
In 2002, the Max and Ruby series was adapted as an animated television series, and has become a popular show for young children. Her picture book Timothy Goes to School was adapted for TV in 2000, and several of her other books have been produced as short films. Wells’s work has also been recommended on innumerable lists, including the New York Times annual Best Illustrated Books round-up and several American Library Association Notable Book lists. She has won countless awards, such as the Parents’ Choice Foundation Award and multiple School Library Journal Best Book of the Year awards.
In addition to being a prolific writer and illustrator, Wells is a keen advocate of literacy programs. She was a speaker for the national literacy initiative the “Read to Your Bunny” campaign.
Wells has two daughters: Victoria, who is now an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, and Marguerite, an organic farmer who teaches at Cornell University. She also has five granddaughters: Zoe, Eleanor, Frances, Phoebe, and Petra. The girls are sources of unending fun and inspiration for the never-ending stories that come out of the Wells studio.
Rosemary Wells at age three, in 1945.
Wells, at age four, poses for the camera.
Wells’s parents, James and Helen Warwick, in the early 1950s.
Wells’s father, James Warwick, a Hollywood screen actor, in a pith helmet in Inside the Lines, which premiered in 1930.
Wells’s mother, Helen Warwick, a dancer in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in 1925.
Wells horseback riding in Nevada in 1958.
Wells (right) and school friend at the US Open in Forest Hills, New York, with tennis star Alex Olmedo after he had just won his match.
Wells, at age twenty, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Wells’s husband, Tom Wells, an architect, in 1965.
Wells at age twenty-five.
In 2002, while on a research trip for her young adult novel Red Moon at Sharpsburg, Wells visited a Civil War reenactment at the Antietam battlefield.
Wells at a children’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, in October 1985.
Wells with her Westie, Sophie, in 1990.
Wells with her husband, Tom, and their two dogs, in 1991.
Wells in her studio in Greenwich, CT.
Wells’s four granddaughters with her daughter Victoria.
Wells with her granddaughter Frances Wells Arms in 2010.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1980 by Rosemary Wells
cover design by Kim Brown
978-1-4532-6595-6
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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