Invisible

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Yes, you said that.” Marcy Alexander’s lips compressed as if she was determined not to let that fact affect her.

  “Shot in the chest and dumped in the river.”

  Mrs. Alexander reacted to that raw information with a convulsive swallow, but she shook her head again. I held out the photocopy of the young man’s picture.

  “How about him?”

  She gave the picture a disinterested glance, started to shake her head, and unexpectedly grabbed the photo instead.

  “That’s Ray!”

  “Ray?”

  “Ray Etheridge. Kendra’s fiancé.”

  I just looked at her, more bewildered than ever now.

  “Where did you get this?” Mrs. Alexander demanded.

  “It was in Kendra’s … the woman I knew as Kendra … in her apartment.”

  “You mean some woman was pretending to be my daughter and … and carrying on a relationship with Kendra’s fiancé too?” Outrage trembled in her voice.

  “I don’t know …”

  I was as shocked and stricken as she obviously was, and neither of us said anything. Mac put in a soft-voiced question directed to her.

  “Are you still in touch with him? Or know where we might contact him?”

  “They met at college, Arkansas State at Jonesboro. He was from Little Rock. He came home with Kendra on a few weekends and seemed nice, although we didn’t really know him well. He was always driving that car.” She pointed to the vehicle I now knew from Tiffany was a sixties-something Mustang. She frowned. “We didn’t keep in touch, but I heard once that he’d been in an accident.”

  “Maybe he’d have family in Little Rock?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t seem interested, as if her mind was still trapped in shock by Ray’s relationship to this unknown woman. “He hadn’t given Kendra a ring to make it a formal engagement, but they planned to get married after they graduated. But then Kendra was diagnosed with leukemia …” Mrs. Alexander’s hands plucked in nervous agitation at a seam on a patchwork quilt. “He seemed terribly broken up after Kendra died. I know he dropped out of college. But then to do something like this …”

  “I don’t know that he did anything,” I said hastily. “Without knowing why his photo was in her apartment—”

  “He went up to Missouri, I’m sure of that,” she said suddenly, as if she’d just remembered that fact. “To that city you said you were from.” She inspected me sharply, as if there was something suspicious about the connection.

  “He did?” I asked in that stupid way that’s more conversation filler than an expression of doubt.

  “What was he pulling? Setting some girl up with Kendra’s identity. What were they up to? Maybe he was even seeing this woman before Kendra died!”

  I wanted to say that couldn’t be. But I couldn’t, because I didn’t know, and I just stood there feeling helpless.

  “Kendra didn’t seem to be doing anything malicious with the identity,” I finally offered. But I didn’t know that for sure, did I? It now seemed likely that this guy, Ray Etheridge, had provided the girl I knew as Kendra with the birth date and Social Security information to make the fake identity possible.

  Mrs. Alexander shoved Ray Etheridge’s picture back in my hands. “I—I’m sorry, but I do find this all very upsetting—” She turned and rushed toward a rear door marked Restrooms.

  I looked after her, dismayed that I’d upset her. But also regretful that this obviously ended any possibility of further information from this source.

  22

  We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the flea market, riding the Ferris wheel, and sitting on grass at the far end of the park listening to the twang of the bluegrass festival. We missed the cow-chip throwing contest, which did not disappoint me greatly.

  It was all fun, but my mind kept jumping back to the encounter with Marcy Alexander and puzzling over what I’d learned from her. Had my Kendra had a relationship with the real Kendra’s fiancé? Yet the man she’d been seeing, the one who’d almost bowled Thea and me over, was definitely not the guy in the photo. And how did any of this tie in with murder?

  We ate fried catfish and French fries at a Moose Lodge stand and, finally, well-fed and tired, caught the wagon back to the industrial park. Most people had gotten their RVs set up by this time, so the industrial park was neither as hectic or dusty as before. A slender crescent moon hung in the western sky, but Mac said it would set by 10:00, so the sky would be dark by the time the meteor shower should be heaviest, between 2:00 a.m. and dawn.

  “And you’re staying here, right?” Mac said.

  “Is that offer of a shower still open?”

  “You’re telling me my charismatic company isn’t sufficient inducement?” he grumbled.

  Mac indeed had a bit of charisma, although I didn’t tell him so. “The thing is—” I couldn’t squelch a yawn. “I don’t think I can stay awake until 2:00.”

  “I figured we’d go to bed, and I’d set an alarm so we could get up at the best viewing time.”

  That sounded alarmingly cozy for two people who barely knew each other, but the reality turned out to be comfortably less intimate. Mac dug out clean sheets, and I made up the bed for me while he fixed the fold-out sofa for himself. And then … a shower! A hot, beautiful, needles-stinging-the-back shower. And sleep, on a mattress that hit just the right balance between soft and firm, with the sliding door closed.

  I heard the alarm when it went off in the living room. I jumped up and dressed in two minutes flat, ready for meteor watching.

  Although when I went out, I was suddenly self-conscious of my appearance. “Sorry, no makeup at 2:00 a.m.,” I muttered. And hair that looked as if I’d slept through a tornado.

  “I never noticed,” Mac returned gallantly.

  He’d already set chairs outside, and we settled into them with eyes turned skyward. Lots of other people were out too, sitting or strolling. A few generators rumbled, but most were silent, lights out, televisions off. The night was warm, no need for jacket or blanket.

  The meteors were already shooting, some mere pinpoints of moving light, others streaking fireballs, some coming singly, others in fiery storms.

  “It’s hard to believe most of them are only about the size of a grain of sand, or at least that’s what the scientists say,” Mac said.

  “They all seem to be coming from one general area of the sky.”

  “It’s called the Perseid meteor shower, and that’s why, because they seem to come from the area of the Perseus constellation. Although they’re actually debris from a comet called the Swift-Tuttle. Technically, they’re meteors when they’re streaking across the sky, meteorites when they land on earth.”

  “You seem scientifically knowledgeable on the subject.”

  “Pre-research for my article.”

  Another burst of exploding stars, one streaking almost to the horizon. “Like celestial fireflies,” I murmured appreciatively, if not scientifically.

  “Hey, I like that. May I use it in my article?”

  “Consider it my contribution.”

  We sat and gazed in comfortable silence. Mac crossed his arms behind his head. I just slumped down in sloppy comfort, my head against the back of the webbed chair.

  “Does all this make you wonder about God?” Mac asked, his tone speculative. “How all this got here?”

  “I don’t wonder about God. And I know how all this got here. He created it. I can never look up at all the stars at night without being reminded of that.” Gazing across the universe always did that to me. It made this truth of God’s creation so obvious.

  Mac shot me a sideways glance. “You really think so?”

  “I don’t see any way to explain the sky or the stars or the earth or us without God.”

  “Maybe this—” his arm swept the skies, “was always here.”

  “But the experts who study these things say it came into being X number of years in the past.”

  �
��X number of years?”

  “Fill in the X with whatever the current theory is on age of the universe.”

  “But maybe creation didn’t start then. Maybe the ‘big bang’ they talk about happened then, and started this universe. But maybe some other universe was in existence before that and collapsed in on itself. Then the cycle started over again with another bang.”

  “And this just happens all by itself, like some cosmic Play-Doh exploding and collapsing over and over in an endless cycle?”

  “Well …”

  “There’s a biblical quotation—”

  Mac laughed. “There’s always a biblical quotation. But go ahead,” he added quickly. “I’m interested.”

  “I probably can’t quote it exactly, but it’s in Isaiah. ‘Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all this? He who brings out the starry host, and calls each one by name.’”

  “Specific enough, if you can trust in the Bible.”

  “I do. For you skeptics, there’s also the bumper sticker version. ‘God said bang, and it was so.’”

  He laughed again, and I was surprised that we could so obviously disagree on something so important and yet still feel comfortably companionable sitting here under stars both shooting and stationary.

  “You really don’t believe in God?” I ventured finally.

  “I wouldn’t say I absolutely don’t believe. But I can’t say I absolutely do believe, either. I suppose I’ve just never felt any great need for God.”

  “Not even when you were alone after your wife passed away?”

  “I didn’t figure God was going to give her back to me, no matter what I believed.”

  “Not in this life,” I agreed, “but …”

  “My wife was a believer,” he said, which rather surprised me. “I guess I’ve always thought …” He hesitated for a long moment before adding, with a self-conscious clearing of throat, “I always figured, if there really was anything to life after death, that she’d find a way to contact and convince me.”

  That concept startled me. A standard of judging the existence of God and eternal life that I’d never encountered before.

  “I suppose that puts me in the weirdo category?” Mac inquired.

  I didn’t comment on that. “Did you ever go to one of those people who claim to contact the dead?”

  “Those charlatans? No way!” he said vehemently, and that much, at least, was a relief. “I just figured if there was anything to it, she’d somehow contact me.”

  “How long ago did your wife pass away?”

  “About three and a half years.”

  “And after her death you decided to go on the road?”

  “Not right away, no. Our home was in southern California. We have three children, and there are eight grandchildren now. But they’re scattered from Montana to Florida, so I was there alone. I’d retired not long before Margarite died, and I threw myself into keeping busy with a vengeance. Painting the house, inside and out. Building a new fence. Yard work. Raising a huge garden. Taking classes. That’s where I learned photography.”

  “Very commendable.”

  “I photographed every flower in the yard. Every vegetable I grew. Every project I undertook.”

  “And?”

  “One evening I found myself taking a potato to my photography class. I was all excited because I thought it looked like Lincoln. I was even thinking maybe I should tell someone from TV or the newspaper. And then I suddenly felt as if I’d been whammed in the head with that potato. That was what my life had come to: I was seeing Lincoln in a potato. And I was excited about it.”

  “I saw Barbra Streisand’s profile in one of my tomatoes,” I admitted.

  He glanced at me, and we grinned at each other under the light of a flaming star. Two people unexpectedly united in a small conspiracy. “Did you ever tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I. But it tells you something about yourself, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “It embarrassed me. Even scared me a little. The creeping senility thing.”

  “Exactly. I thought there had to be something more to life than seeing dead presidents in my garden vegetables, even if Margarite was gone. So I bought this motor home, sold my house, and started making the rounds of the kids and grandchildren.”

  “Maybe, in a way, it’s nice that they’re scattered out. Gives you lots of traveling to do.”

  “I love my children and grandchildren. I enjoy visiting them. They’re great, each and every one of them. But it didn’t take me long to discover that a merry-go-round of visiting them wasn’t enough.”

  “The Lord fills a lot of empty spaces, if you’ll let him.”

  He skipped that comment. “So that was when I discovered the joy, and small cash benefits, of writing travel articles. Now here I am.” He smiled. “Watching Beef Boogie Bingo in Clancy, Arkansas. But I meet lots of interesting people, and there are always new places to go and new sights to see.”

  Two meteors streaked across the sky, almost as if running a race. I considered Mac’s on-the-road life. Was he on to something here, just cutting himself loose?

  “I ate some of the peach cobbler you brought to Magnolia’s barbecue,” he said. “It was very good.”

  The fact that he remembered it was peach told me he wasn’t just making polite small talk. “Thank you. I’m sorry I disappeared.” Since he already knew I was dabbling in murder investigation, I went ahead and explained to him about rushing over to Thea’s to look for Kendra’s photo. “I thought I’d get back in plenty of time to talk to you again. But when I finally found the photo I was astonished to see that the guests were gone and the lights out at Magnolia’s.”

  “So you went on home.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Silence, as if he were waiting for me to add something. When I didn’t, he said, “But you didn’t stay there. You left again.”

  “You saw?” I asked, surprised.

  “I heard a car in your driveway. I looked out. And a car was leaving. With the lights turned off.”

  “I didn’t want to wake anyone.”

  “Stealthy as you were being, I figured that.”

  Stealthy! I didn’t know what Mac was thinking, but I reluctantly realized it was time to explain my midnight jaunts. So I told him about overturned tombstones and my decision to stake out the cemetery and try to identify the vandals. “I’d been going there for quite a few nights, but it was on the very night of Magnolia’s barbecue that the vandals finally showed up. Though I didn’t really accomplish much because I fell in a ditch before I could get the license plate number on their pickup,” I had to admit.

  He picked up the chair and turned it to face me. “You’re telling me you were running out to this cemetery at midnight, hiding there all night, watching for vandals.” He shook his head, obviously flabbergasted as he added this to the list of my other peculiarities. Murder investigation. Sleeping in my car. Now midnight stakeouts in a cemetery. “And here I thought …”

  “Thought what?” I asked when he broke off.

  He squirmed in the chair as if he had just developed a bad itch. “It seemed logical. An attractive woman, a midnight rendezvous …”

  “A midnight rendezvous?” I repeated blankly. “With whom?”

  “That’s what I wondered. I never did see you come home.”

  The light came on in my head like a shooting star blazing across my mind. Now it was my turn to be flabbergasted. My mouth actually dropped open. “You mean you thought I … and some man …”

  “I asked Magnolia the next day if you were seeing someone, and she said no. So then I thought, if he was someone you were sneaking around to see …” Another squirm. Neither of us were watching the stars now.

  “So that’s why you asked me if I was here in Clancy with someone. You thought maybe I was sneaking off for an entire weekend rendezvous.”

  I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered. Someone thinking Ivy Malone wa
s involved in a secret relationship, carrying on a flaming rendezvous with some unknown man …

  I couldn’t help it. I started laughing.

  Mac straightened in the chair, and I could see I’d insulted his dignity. “Apparently I was wrong,” he said, his tone lofty.

  “Yes. You were wrong.”

  “I apologize.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed again at the preposterousness of it all. Finally Mac laughed too.

  “But it wasn’t a totally preposterous thought,” he insisted. “You are an attractive woman. You have sparkle and energy. You’re not afraid to try new things. You cook a fantastic cobbler. Why wouldn’t you be in a relationship?”

  23

  Mac was already up when I woke the next morning; he cooked scrambled eggs with diced ham for breakfast. Today I followed him around as he interviewed people for his article. Some were officials overseeing the event, others average people he stopped on the street to get their take on shooting stars, quilts, and Beef Boogie Bingo.

  Late afternoon, when he was checking the list of events on a poster to make certain he’d covered everything, I spotted the Community Worship Service scheduled for tomorrow morning in the park. “Oh, that sounds good. I think I’ll go.” Tentatively I added, “Maybe you’d like to come along?”

  “Actually, I’ll be moving on first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “You will?” I’m sure my surprise showed.

  “I can get everything I need for the article wrapped up today, and I promised my daughter that I’d be with them for my granddaughter’s eighth birthday on Tuesday. It’s going to take me at least two days to drive to Montana.”

  I didn’t know why the news gave me such a jolt. No reason for Mac to hang around. Moving on was what he did. And it wasn’t as if some big romance had developed between us. Although sitting under the stars together last night had felt a smidgen romantic.

  “I’ll be staying until Monday so I can see Kendra’s friend at the lawyer’s office,” I said. A little awkwardly I added, “There should be plenty of motel rooms available by tomorrow evening.”

  “That’s what I figured.”