George stood. “Either way is fine—”
“So what you’re saying is, Audrey never went to college at all?” This was from Mrs. Beck, her voice shrill, her wine slopping a little over the lip of the glass she still held. She directed the statement into the middle of the room so that it fell somewhere between George and the two policemen.
Chalfant held a hand up. “Now, Pat. Let’s not jump to any rash conclusions—”
“Rash conclusions?”
“—but, yes, it seems that there’s some confusion as to who was going to college under your daughter’s name. We’re going to clear this up and get to the bottom of whatever happened here. I’ll let you folks know as soon as I find out anything at all. That’s a promise.”
“Where would she have been if she hadn’t been going to college?”
“That’s what we’re going to try and find out.”
George followed the cruiser to a beige stucco police station. He smoked a cigarette along the way and tried to concentrate on driving. The palms of his hands were damp with sweat.
The detective led him to his own office, one of several that lined a long, nondescript hallway that reminded George of the allergist’s office he’d had to visit frequently as a kid.
Chalfant’s office was homey, with cluttered shelves of knickknacks and a wall crammed with tilted pictures, mostly of kids. George was offered a high-backed swivel chair, while Chalfant walked around his desk and perched on a wooden stool. “Keeps me from falling asleep on the job,” he said and winked at George. “The stool,” he added, then picked up the phone on his desk.
George said: “Did you know about this? Did you know about Audrey not being Audrey? I don’t mean to be pushy, but—”
Chalfant held up a finger and said into the phone: “Denise, honey, do me a favor, will ya? I’m going to need all the Sweetgum High School yearbooks for the past three years. . . . Yep. . . . No, starting with last year’s and then backward. . . . We have them here, right? . . . Might as well go four years back, then. Bring them here, will ya. ASAP. . . . Thanks, hon.”
Chalfant hung up the phone and placed the heels of his shoes on the lowest support of the stool. He looked less like a detective and more like a dyspeptic baseball manager in the middle of a losing season. “Let me tell you what we already know. I always find it easiest to disclose all the relevant facts. We know that the real Audrey Beck, the daughter of Sam and Patricia Beck, whom you just met, spent part, if not all, of last semester in West Palm Beach. She told her parents and most of her friends that she was going to school at Mather College. She packed her car full of sweaters and jeans and took off, heading north, but apparently at some point she turned around and headed east. According to Ian King—have you heard of him? No, I didn’t think so. According to Ian King, she spent the majority of the fall with him and other members of his band in a rented house. He’s in a group called Gator Bait, I don’t suppose . . .”
George shook his head.
“. . . No, of course you haven’t. I know all this because Ian King showed up here yesterday. He came to me because he thought Audrey Beck had been killed by a drug dealer named Sam Paris. Apparently, Gator Bait and Audrey Beck owe money for drugs. We weren’t surprised that Audrey Beck was a drug user because that showed up pretty clearly in the coroner’s report. We were surprised to hear she hadn’t spent the semester at school. We were getting all set to call Mather—oh hello, Denise, right on the desk, please.”
A pear-shaped, heavily made-up woman of at least fifty placed a stack of high school yearbooks on the desk.
“We were getting all set to call Mather, and then the Becks hear from you, a college boyfriend. You can imagine that we were very interested to hear your story.”
“You think someone else went in her place?”
“Seems that way, son, unless you think she was in two places at the same time.”
“The pictures I saw earlier, they were definitely not the Audrey Beck I knew.”
“Right, so what I was hoping you could do for me is flip through that stack of yearbooks. If someone went in Audrey’s place, pretending to be her, it makes sense that maybe it’s someone she knew from high school.”
“Okay.” George placed a hand on the padded fake-leather cover of the top yearbook. “I’ll do anything I can to help you, but you have to help me find the girl I’m looking for. She must still be alive, don’t you think?”
“I don’t want to speculate, son, but it’s one and the same what you said about the help. You help us, and we’ll help you. I have some things to do here in my office for a while. Here okay, or would you prefer I get you another room?”
“Here’s fine.”
George flipped through page after page of Sweetgum High School yearbooks to look for a girl with no name. He scanned portrait shot after portrait shot: girls with teased hair and shiny lips, girls in three-quarter profile looking back over a shoulder, girls with acne covered by thick makeup, girls who wore crosses around their necks and over their blouses, girls who were told by the photographer to lift their chins just a little bit higher, girls who looked like they were going places, and girls who looked like all the good times had already happened. All these girls were interspersed with dazed-looking senior boys, some handsome, most not, almost all with jock haircuts and expressionless eyes. George also studied the other photos, the black-and-whites of the clubs, the teams, the societies, the prom, all the group shots that might give him a glimpse of his own Audrey. He flipped through page after page till the tip of his finger felt dry and raw. He found many elements of her—her haircut on a girl named Mary Stephanopolis, her profile on a brunette doing a layout for the school newspaper, her curved hips and tapering legs on a member of the swim team—but none of them were her.
“Are there more for me to look at?” George asked a now-standing Detective Chalfant, who peered through bifocals at an opened manila folder in one hand.
“No. Quit. I’m worried about your eyes.” He came up behind George and unexpectedly placed a large hand on George’s left shoulder and squeezed. George, descended from a long line of unaffectionate men, found the gesture both disconcerting and almost unbearably comforting. “Tell me about this girl you knew. What was she like?”
George told his story and as he spoke he became aware of how ordinary and uninteresting their courtship and relationship had been. They had met at a party. He liked her. She liked him. It was a ritualized dance enacted by a million matriculating students across the globe. “I never suspected she wasn’t who she said she was,” he said. “She was cagey about her past, a little, but I thought she just didn’t like to talk about it. Not everyone does.”
“What did she like to talk about?”
“She asked me questions about me, my town, my parents. We talked about movies and books. We analyzed friends we had in common. She didn’t like Florida. She said it was ugly and provincial.”
“And your town wasn’t?”
“Apparently not. I come from a small, pretty wealthy place. I never thought much of it, but she liked to hear me tell stories.”
“What else was she interested in?”
“She was smart. She said she wanted to major in political science and minor in English lit. She planned to go to law school.”
“She got good grades?”
“All As.”
Detective Chalfant, who had worked his way back around his desk, placed one foot on his stool and began to tighten his shoelaces. “How long are you here for? In Sweetgum.”
“A while, I guess, now. Till I find out what happened.”
“Okay.” Chalfant slid a business card into George’s hand. “You’re at the motor court, right? We’ll be in touch.”
Outside, the blue sky had been checkerboarded by thin patterns of clouds, cotton balls pulled apart. There was a note under George’s windshield wiper—a piece of lined paper torn out of a notebook. All that was written on the sheet was a phone number, seven digits, scrawled in lavender i
nk.
He carefully folded the note and put it in his pocket. It didn’t look like Audrey’s handwriting, but he couldn’t be sure.
Driving back to the motel, slowed by the rush-hour traffic from an emptying tomato processing plant, he felt a sense of elation, not just because the girl he’d known was probably still alive, but also because he had become embroiled in something far more mysterious than he’d ever hoped to be involved in. The dull realities of Mather College and his suburban home were receding into a pedestrian, grayish past.
He pulled the Buick into the car dealership’s lot and left the car with Dan Thompson, who offered him, in succession, a cold beer and a similar deal the following day. George told Thompson that he’d more than likely be by again in the morning, and he declined the beer, not because he didn’t want it, but because he didn’t want to hang around the office that smelled of cigar smoke and Lysol any longer than he had to. He had a phone call to make.
George fiddled momentarily with the lock of his motel room door. It jammed a little, and he muttered a curse to himself, loud enough so that he didn’t immediately register the sound of the car door opening and shutting behind him. He did register something, the sense of an impending threat, but that was only in the quarter second or so before he was violently shoved forward onto the floor of his motel room.
Chapter 14
Lunch with Irene was interminable.
In the time it took to enter the restaurant, give his name to the hostess, and be seated by the disorienting glare of a window table, George had decided that there was no way he could tell Irene that the man who punched her in the face was actually sending a message to him. It would only alarm her, and he would be forced to tell her the whole story, which would only make it more dangerous for her. His plan was to survive a pleasant, run-of-the-mill meal, take the rest of the day off from work . . . and then what? If he could somehow find either Liana or the man who was pretending to be Donnie Jenks, maybe go back to the cottage in New Essex, then he could make sure that Irene was left out of it, whatever it was.
Despite a sudden loss of appetite, George ordered the shredded-beef burrito as he’d planned. Plus a rum and Coke. He managed to get about half his food down even though his stomach felt like it had shrunk to the size of a shriveled lemon. George asked questions, wanting to make sure that her assailant who had identified himself as Donnie Jenks was the small skinny man with the grayish teeth and not the portly employee of Gerald MacLean. Her description left no doubt. She had been assaulted by the same man George had met in New Essex. Irene seemed strangely calm, as though she had finally seen the dark side of city life and it wasn’t so bad after all. It was clear that the incident had already become a humorous anecdote that she would be telling at cocktail parties and in the office kitchen. The more she talked about it, the more George could feel pinpricks of sweat breaking out along his hairline.
“You don’t look so hot,” she said.
“I’m just worried about you.”
“Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever see him again. My guess is that he did to me exactly what he wanted to do. Punch me and introduce himself. I was lying there on the pavement, and my first thought was that I hoped he would just kill me and not rape me first, then kill me. Isn’t that terrible? And it wasn’t a panicky thought; it felt commonsensical. Let it be straight-up murder, because I don’t think I can handle being raped. I thought of you too. My mother first, of course, and then you, second. I just wondered what you would do when you heard that I was dead. Isn’t it strange? I had all these thoughts in about five seconds, and then he just ups and leaves. I feel like I’ve been granted extra time. What’s that you’re drinking? A rum and Coke? Maybe I’ll have a margarita.”
George looked around for their elusive waitress.
“Seriously, you don’t look so hot. When was the last time you went to see a doctor?”
“For a hangover? Never,” George said.
“Hungover on a Monday. I haven’t asked you anything about your weekend.”
“It’s all a blur. Hey, I actually don’t feel well. I think I ate some bad calamari at Teddy’s last night. Do you mind if we cut this lunch short?”
Back on the pavement, George was able to talk Irene out of walking with him back to his office. They hugged good-bye, and George held on a little longer than he normally did. Irene pulled back and looked at him quizzically. He kissed her gently on the side of her head, just above the dark blond fuzz of her eyebrow. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Even with the one eye.”
“Now I know you’re not feeling well.”
“No, I mean it. It’s scary what happened to you.”
“Call me later if you start to feel better. Okay? And call me if you don’t. Call me either way.”
He watched her walk away and felt a complicated surge of love and protectiveness. He knew that if he saw Donnie Jenks at that very moment he wouldn’t be scared of him, he would just be angry. When it had just been him on the chopping block, it was terrifying, but now that Irene had been brought into it, some vestige of gallantry was coursing through his veins.
George drove to New Essex. He didn’t know what else to do. There was no way to get in touch with Liana, and there was no way to track down Donnie Jenks. The only real information he had about either of them was that they were somehow connected to that run-down cottage along the shore. Donnie Jenks had been there, and Liana had at least claimed to be there, although George now took anything she had said with a very large grain of salt.
He called the office and said he felt lousy and had gone home. He put the air conditioner on high and sports radio on low. It felt good to drive, the mindless routine allowing him time to think. It was obvious that the money George had returned to MacLean was somehow directly or indirectly connected to his murder. But none of it made any sense. It was possible that little Donnie Jenks had somehow found out that George was returning the money and that he went to the house and killed MacLean to get it. But he’d had opportunities to take the money before. From Liana. According to her, he’d come right up to her at Mohegan Sun. He could have taken it then. George considered the possibility that Liana and Donnie had been working together, but that made even less sense. If they had been, then they could have just split the money. Why go to the trouble of returning it to MacLean and then killing him for it? There could be a third party involved, someone he didn’t even know, maybe someone who was working at the house and saw the suitcase full of money and decided to take it. The real Donnie Jenks? A murderous nurse in charge of the ailing wife? The niece who had let him into the house?
He cruised slowly through downtown New Essex. Tourists were out in full force, mostly retirees ambling from gift shop to ice cream stand to gift shop. George saw several men slumped on sidewalk benches, waiting for their wives to finish shopping. They had the sagging, unmoving quality of men who expected nothing momentous to ever happen to them again.
Beach Road was quiet till he reached the old stone church, where cars were double-parked along the already narrow road. He eased by, caught a glimpse of a gleaming black hearse and dark-suited men standing at the church’s entrance.
He found Captain Sawyer Lane and turned onto it. The ruts in the dirt road seemed deeper, and some were still half-filled with the previous night’s rain. Shafts of light penetrated the pine canopy, and in them George could see swirling clouds of the tiny bugs that pollute New England’s marshland in summertime. There were no cars in front of the cottage when he pulled up, but everything else looked the same. He parked his car and went up the front steps, knocked on a rotting door, its paint long worn away. He peered through a grimy side window, the inside of which was thickly covered with a spiderweb. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but when they did, he could see that the cottage was essentially an abandoned property. The walls were blackened by mold, and the only piece of furniture he could make out was an upholstered couch with yellow stuffing oozing from its seams. He heard a sound behind him a
nd quickly turned, but it was just the click of his car engine cooling down.
George went around to the back of the cottage, where the rotted pier listed in the marshy water. Roped to the sturdiest section of the pier was a fiberglass boat with an outboard motor. The boat, no more than twelve or fourteen feet long, didn’t look particularly new or expensive, but it still stood out in its neglected surroundings. He tried to remember if he’d seen it the first time he’d been to the house. He remembered seeing the pier but couldn’t recall a boat.
He turned back toward the house. There had once been a screened-in porch, but half of the screen had been pulled off, and one side of the porch had sunk down to the ground. White bloated mushrooms sprouted on the two-by-fours.
The porch door was latched, but he pushed on it, and the latch gave way in its rotted wood. The door from the porch to the cottage’s interior was open but harder to move. It had come off its top hinge, and its bottom corner had dug into the floor. He kicked it, and it swung inward, ripping wood away from its frame. The smell of acrid dust billowed into George’s face. He took a step inside but decided to go no further. The floor was covered with Styrofoam ceiling tiles that over time had molded and dropped onto the cracked and blistered linoleum. The couch that he had seen from the other window looked even worse from this new angle. It was clear that it had been hollowed out by wild animals. Yellow curds of stuffing were scattered everywhere.
He turned around and went back out to his car. He might not know a lot of things about Liana Decter, but he did know that she would never have spent a night in this cottage.
He drove to the end of the lane, passing the only other property, a brown deckhouse that was almost invisible in the piney darkness. He was about to pull back onto Beach Road when he shifted the Saab into reverse instead and backed up to the driveway of the deckhouse. A recently painted mailbox had the number 22 on it, and above the mailbox was a plastic box for the Boston Herald, its lettering faded to the point of being almost unreadable. He drove the short distance down the driveway, scrubby weeds scraping at the underside of his car, and pulled up in front of a garage. The house was bigger than it had looked from the lane. It had a stone foundation, a barely sloping shingled roof, and boxy floor-to-ceiling windows that were as dark as the stained siding. It was impossible to tell if anyone was home, but the low hedges around the front steps had been trimmed recently, and as George got out of the car he thought he could detect movement in one of the narrow windows that ran the length of the front door.
The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Page 11
