In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Why should I?”

  “Because they think she worked—”

  “At a massage parlor. Maybe she did that, too. She was a tramp. Besides, the cops didn’t come here, and my father says don’t push your nose where it isn’t requested.”

  “Was April here the evening she disappeared?”

  She shook her head. “Never showed. I had to come in. The whole point of getting her the job was I don’t want to be here. Now I’m stuck covering for her.”

  “That isn’t exactly her fault. She was abducted.”

  “Like I believe that. I’m sure she freelanced, moonlighted—know what I mean? Guys cruise by and you get in the car. She probably made a bad choice that night, is all. My father says girls like her who act like nuns are really sluts.”

  “He’s a lousy kisser!” a woman’s voice said on the TV. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a wet, drooly kiss.” The audience squealed and shouted approval.

  “What’s going on here?” A man with the same rusty hair, flat features, and scowl as Ms. Star appeared in a doorway behind the counter. “What you blabbing about, Lacey?”

  Lacey Star. Somebody had a romantic-poetic bent, but surely not this man.

  “What you saying to these people about April?” he demanded.

  “Hello. We’re teachers, April’s teachers this summer. I’m Amanda Pepper and this is Sasha Berg. We were wondering…you are the…manager of this store? Mister….”

  “Star. Yeah, right, why? Manager and owner.”

  Star’s Café. April’s little joke, although I still didn’t understand why she simply hadn’t told the truth. This place was pathetic but not shameful.

  Mr. Star, I feared, was the man she worked for and intensely disliked, owner of the sweaty, roving hands. “April Truong worked for you?”

  “I’m not saying yes or no.”

  “Maybe not officially?” I asked quietly. “I’m her teacher, Mr. Star, not an IRS investigator.”

  “Maybe we had an arrangement, okay? Maybe it wasn’t on the books exactly, except I don’t feel like talking about it. If that was the case, of course.”

  “Of course. I understand she wasn’t here that evening at all.”

  He grimaced. “That’s how help is these days. No work ethic. What can you do?”

  “Do you have any idea who might have—”

  He shrugged beefy shoulders. “The point of having employees, ladies, is that you don’t have to do all the work. I come and go, you know? Didn’t really know the girl. Chilly number, anyway. Not a friendly type. Truth is, I was ready to let her go. Not good for business to have an icicle behind the counter.”

  His daughter was not exactly Miss Congeniality. But then, we both knew that this was not a store that specialized in customer relations. This was a semi-embarrassing last stop before the lonely rented-room kind of store.

  “April’s cold unless you’re somebody else’s boyfriend.” Lacey nearly spat the words out.

  “My daughter,” the man said. “Lover’s spat, you know? Pay no mind. Even though that chink girl was a tease, know what I mean?” He directed the family scowl toward his daughter.

  “Did April usually close up the store?”

  “Assuming she worked here at all, you mean? Because you can check my books. Strictly a ma and pa—”

  “And daughter,” Lacey said.

  “—operation. Period. Except my wife, she gets these spells and she can’t work.”

  “Until her hangover clears up,” lovely Lacey muttered.

  I felt pity for drunken Mrs. Star, who must have envisioned something better than what she wound up with in the form of a life, a job, a husband, and an optimistically named child.

  “Assuming, then,” I said. “Would you have an employee close the place at night?”

  He shook his head. “’Specially not one of them, and not a girl one of them not yet out of school. It isn’t so safe to be carrying money in this neighborhood late at night. She’s just a little thing. I come back,” he answered. “Every night. Place is a boulder I carry on my back.”

  “So you were here when she left each night. Did you walk her outside? Did you see where she went, what she did, who she was with? How did she usually get home?”

  “Whoa!” he said. “Who you think you are, lady? This isn’t your schoolroom, and you don’t get to quiz me. I didn’t commit no crime, and I don’t know the answers to that, anyway. She used to leave when we closed. I did the night deposit and things myself after. Nobody else, not even when my wife’s here. I didn’t want no outsider doing it or even watching. Not that I’m saying the kid wasn’t honest, but it’s hard to really, really tell with them shifty eyes they have, you know?”

  The TV show was over, and a solemn newscaster promised the details of something horrific at eleven. It wouldn’t be April’s story anymore. That was old news.

  I wondered if the Star family ever permitted absolute silence. They didn’t glance at the TV, or seem to wonder what the catastrophe was that the newscaster dangled like bait for late-night. They played the voices like Muzak.

  “So that’s it, then,” Mr. Star continued, “unless you’re buying something. My employees—if I had any—would leave when I was ready to lock the door, around ten, give or take a minute.”

  Ten. She’d told me she worked until eleven, when her brother picked her up. Where had she spent that extra hour?

  And what did I have? A letch with an off-the-books employee who worked until ten, not eleven, and his daughter, who was convinced April had stolen her boyfriend, Woody, a boy who, back at school, denied even knowing April. Was there anyone among them telling even half the truth?

  Who was April Truong?

  Why had she lied about her job?

  Where had she gone after work each night?

  Where had she gone the whole night she was abducted? What was going on?

  Twelve

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT CAUSES IT, HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT, testosterone or playground taunts, but men seem to equate okayness with any number of ridiculous activities, and there is no talking them out of it. Why else would Mackenzie, his right leg still encased in plaster, consider cross-city crutch-walking the mark of a real man? He didn’t put it quite that way, but you could feel the unspoken laws that dictated this fixation. I found it a pretty stupid and exhausting gauntlet to run, or hobble, but then, I cannot comprehend most male rituals.

  He was already there when I brought home the bacon or, more accurately, the sausage, chicken, shrimp, ham, peas, artichoke hearts, and peppers. Some domestic spasm had convulsed me at Reading Terminal, making me desperately need these things. Plus saffron, those tiny threads of gold that cost more than the original and that I hitherto considered one of the world’s great hoaxes.

  “Are you crazy?” Sasha had asked. “What is this?”

  “I am suddenly dying, absolutely dying, for paella.”

  “That’s why God invented Spanish restaurants.”

  But I had to do it myself. Maybe it was the female equivalent of staggering cross-city in a cast. So, a bulging grocery bag clutched in one arm, I opened the door onto my little family, as it were. A portrait suitable for framing, and a welcome relief after the Stars’ idea of family.

  One good-looking tall man with curly salt-and-pepper hair slouched on my sofa, face still flushed from a long, hot lurch to my house. He wore a black T-shirt and cutoff jeans that revealed one splendidly muscled and operational leg and one grubby plaster log with toes stretched onto the coffee table. An enormous, purring dust bunny teetered on top of it.

  Mackenzie waved and smiled greetings. The cat was too preoccupied to notice me. His purr faded. It couldn’t be snuggly to sit on a leg cast. In fact, it looked tenuous and treacherous—little by little his hind legs lost ground, slipping over and down the side of the cast. Obviously, even though Macavity’s masculinity had been surgically reduced, this grim joy at the taking of new territory was a feline guy thing.

 
I balanced my shopping bag and leaned over to place a kiss on the man’s lips, and then heigh ho, it was off to the kitchen. The air conditioner wheezed and made the first floor bearable.

  Mackenzie slammed the book he’d been reading, startling the cat. It was a collection of painfully with-it short stories about people who understood the tragic futility of getting up in the morning and the need for highly styled shoes. And in spite of my contempt for them, they were so now, so there, so highly praised by critics who obviously also know the brand names of the right shoes, that they made me feel excluded and inferior. And bored.

  “Donate this book to charity,” Mackenzie said while I pulled edibles out of bags and onto the kitchen counter. “Yellow fever’s more interesting. Besides, as a homicide detective, I find it offensive when people imply that being alive is about as much fun as being dead.”

  I put on water to parboil the sausage and dropped a mix of lettuce—pale green pronged leaves and purple ruffles—into the spinner. “There’s no Star’s Café,” I said. “There’s a hole-in-the-wall convenience store called Buddy’s, which closes at ten, not eleven the way she said. I feel sick-dizzy, like when I was little and I’d spin until the playground whirled. Only this time, I’m not trying to spin anything except lettuce.”

  I fantasized a Moment of Understanding, an epiphany wherein sensitive hero embraces troubled woman and promises they’ll make sense of everything together. And troubled woman believes him and is greatly comforted.

  I squelched the image. Even in fantasy, it required too many clumps and grunts and crutches and contortions, and then downright lying. There was no ready consolation in any of this, and nobody was going to make sense of its contradictions.

  Mackenzie contracted his brows. I was afraid he was going to tell me that I ought to grow up, stop being gullible. Wasn’t it painfully obvious that I had misread her and April was a liar, that she had a secret and dangerous life, and that I was a fool?

  He would probably be right, and I’d have to hate him for it.

  “I trust your instincts,” he said instead. “Someday I’ll regret admittin’ that to you, but the fact is, I do. Things that don’ seem to be what they should be probably aren’t what they seem—or don’ seem to be.”

  It took me a moment to almost decipher that. What I did get clearly is that we were both on the same side.

  “She must have had a good reason for creatin’ this confusion,” he added.

  We had just experienced a customized but genuine Moment of Understanding, and even without the clinch, it had been exquisite.

  Then I giggled, ruining the moment and displaying unbecoming behavior for Troubled Woman, even when relieved. But the laugh was on behalf of Macavity, whose rear had slid all the way down the side of the cast. He hung by two paws, legs and tail dangling while his front nails scritched tracks into the plaster in a desperate and futile attempt to regain his perch and dignity. He fell to the floor, turned his head, and viewed me balefully.

  Contrary to pop psychology, it is not always best to be completely open in every relationship. By carefully averting our eyes now and then, the cat and I have learned to coexist. I pretended I hadn’t seen him slide and splat.

  “Lowell says it’s connected,” I said. “He’s paranoid, but—”

  “Whoa! Who is this Lowell and what is connected? Thought we were talkin’ about April.”

  I explained the whats first. “We wound up outside Mother Bethel,” I said midway through this part of my tale. “And to my amazement, Sasha was there, photographing the doors because—”

  “Did you know that when everybody else fled and panicked during the yellow fever, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the two men who started alternative congregations, stayed in the city and nursed people?”

  Imagine, before this summer I’d not known that all roads lead to yellow fever.

  “Okay,” Mackenzie said after I’d glared awhile. “What about the doors and what about Lowell?”

  I completed the explanations of the whats, and then tried to explain Lowell, a much more difficult topic. “And somehow, because his aunt knows my mother,” I said, “he has acted from day one as if we have a longstanding and meaningful bond and a future.”

  “Awful,” Mackenzie said.

  “There’ve been times I’ve felt bad because I was rejected, but Lowell makes me feel rotten because I’m accepted. Welcomed with open arms. He’s alternately silly and scary. Either making really inept flirtatious noises or uttering dark warnings about evil.”

  “Th’ awfulness to which I alluded referred to your mother, although Lowell doesn’t sound like much. But she’s relentless, isn’t she?”

  “Like a hurricane.” I presented him with a glass of sangria and a plate of olives and sardines. “Tapas,” I explained. “Kind of. We’re having a theme dinner. Maybe I should find some classical guitar as background music.” Maybe I should run out and buy some, as I knew I didn’t have any.

  What the devil was happening to me?

  “You must really hate summer school. You’ve gone all of a sudden homey,” Mackenzie said. “You’ll be Philly’s answer to Martha Stewart soon, gildin’ pinecones and makin’ quilts.”

  I was stopped in my tracks, although there isn’t that much tracking that one can do in a minuscule living-dining-kitchen room. But I had suddenly understood what was going on. Mackenzie and I were engaged in an odd and surreptitious contest, two birds finding the best twigs and bits of fluff. We were doing parallel nesting, not living together, but preening, showing off to each other how exquisite a life we could design if we wanted to. He did margaritas and ratatouille and I did sangria and paella.

  We scared me.

  “An’ here I thought I’d charmed your mama. I feel like a failure.”

  I didn’t bother to console him. What would charm or at least placate my mama was nothing less than a wedding ring, a mortgage, and two point three grandchildren, or whatever the national norm called for. And I wasn’t ready to suggest a single one of those factors.

  Still, this cooking thing was a step in that direction, wasn’t it? I chopped onions and sniffled, then browned and steamed and suddenly wondered why I hadn’t ever thought about spending my time doing this, instead of teaching. Not always have papers to mark, lessons to plan.

  I could shop for food, chop food, cook food, then clean up from the shopping, chopping, and cooking of the food.

  And on those nights when nobody murdered anybody in Philadelphia on Mackenzie’s watch, midway through that process we’d light candles and play appropriate background music and eat the food. And I wouldn’t have papers to mark.

  But on those nights when somebody did opt for murder, I’d do what? Go into a state of suspended animation? Learn to freeze and can and make TV dinners out of my day’s work? Resent Mackenzie’s day’s work and create humongous problems? Wonder what portion of my existence was actually mine?

  Now I remembered why I’d never considered it before. I was destined to be a once-in-a-while kind of homemaker. Not themes to meals, but themes to mark. “As soon as I get this into the oven, could you do me a favor and read something?” I asked. “A poem, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sure it isn’t the essay he was supposed to write, but I’m not sure what it is.” I browned the rice in a second pan, added the tomatoes and wine and the precious saffron threads. My enthusiasm was already waning, and this effort feeling like an excessive amount of labor for something that would disappear in a matter of moments.

  “What were you doin’ in Chinatown this afternoon, anyway?” he asked, apropos of exactly nothing. “Not on your way home, is it?”

  “Lowell wanted to walk me home, and I didn’t want him near here, so I pretended to be on my way to Sasha’s, and then, when he was finally gone, I thought I’d get Chinese takeout for us.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Then what is it you’re whipping up back there? Uncooked takeout?”

  “I thought takeout
. Then I was possessed by the Happy Homemaker Demon, and I couldn’t help myself. I needed an exorcist.”

  He shook his head for a little too long. I like verbal despair. The silent variety drives me up the wall with its chattering white noise, full of accusations. I was halfway up the wall when he finally spoke. “So,” he said, “somewhere between Chinese takeout and Spanish from scratch, you found a convenience store called Buddy’s.”

  “The trouble with official investigations is that you don’t know the players,” I said. “You get cynical about what people tell you. I say she’s a good girl—but even I know that’s what everybody says about people who turn out to have chopped people in their basements. ‘Oh, but he was such a good neighbor. Gave generously to every charity.’ So, of course, you discount such banality, but what if it were true in this case? What if a certain action, like any connection with a massage parlor, was sufficiently inconsistent with her personality as to make it impossible? What if that inconsistency were important?”

  He petted the cat, who had resigned himself to settling on lap, not cast, and he said nothing. His drink could have used a refill, but my domestic demons had gone off duty and I didn’t feel like waiting on anybody, even though I knew it was reprehensible being mean-spirited with the serve-himself challenged.

  “You don’t accept that, do you?” I said. “You think that sooner or later truth will out, even in officialdom. But I think that by then it could be too late. Other ideas would have been built on top of that missed idea.”

  “And I’m sayin’ your expertise is in the classroom, an’ I don’ make big suppositions about what tragic errors you could be perpetuatin’ there. Look, you need to show me somethin’ because you aren’t even sure if it’s poetry or not, but did I cast aspersions? Why do you always assume we all flunked Thinking 101?”

  “I don’t. But nobody questioned Buddy Star, and somebody should have.”

  “Why do I have the feeling you already did?”

  “He won’t cooperate. April didn’t officially exist at his place. She wasn’t on the books and he didn’t pay any benefits.”