In Plain Sight

by Lorena McCourtney

  Sandy, just coming down the stairs with her gear bag, dropped it with a clunk. “They’re coming to my gymnastics meet?” She sounded as horrified as if she’d looked in the mirror and discovered a zit the size of a cherry on her nose. “Why?”

  “Because they like you, of course. And Dad’s interested in all kinds of youth activities and wants to—”

  “He wants publicity for his election campaign, that’s what he wants! But I don’t want him there.”

  Sandy’s statement sounded so hostile that I was taken aback. Skye looked startled, and I threw in a question to defuse what felt like a peculiarly explosive situation.

  “What about Baby?” I asked. “Who’ll be staying with Baby?”

  “A neighbor down the street,” Skye said with a distracted air. To Sandy she snapped, “It isn’t up to you to decide who comes to the meet and who doesn’t. Anybody who wants to can come. I think I’d better go back to the house and ride with them. Or maybe not come at all.”

  Sandy suddenly seemed to deflate. Her shoulders slumped. “No, don’t do that. I’m sorry. Just nerves, I guess.” She leaned over and picked up the gear bag holding her leotard, chalk, bottles of water, and other necessities.

  Skye had looked ready to storm out but instead, with an understanding and bigheartedness I had to admire, reached into the funky patchwork bag hanging from her shoulder and tossed Sandy a stick of gum. “Here. Chew this. It’ll relax you.”

  Sandy managed a smile. “Thanks.”

  The gymnastics studio in Fayetteville was several times as large as the little one in Woodston. Kids, preschool up to mid-teenage, many more girls than boys, were already on the floor warming up in a miniature circus of activity. We got Sandy registered, and she went to change into her leotard. Skye and I found places to sit on the tiers of benches lining two sides of the big room.

  It was hard to keep track of everything going on. Children flipping and spinning and tumbling. Parents milling around. A heavy thud punctuated the hum of voices and shuffling feet, and a coach ran out to check on a girl who’d crashed from the parallel bars. Excitement bristled like static electricity. Music blared from a far corner where a girl about Sandy’s age was practicing her floor exercise. She was good, especially on the aerial cartwheel, but with auntie pride, I decided Sandy was better.

  “Have you been to one of these meets before?” I asked Skye.

  “A couple, but not here.” Skye hesitated, as if uncertain of my reaction, before she said, “Dad and Tammi have never been to one. They’re really looking forward to it.”

  “That’s nice. I’m looking forward to meeting your father.”

  She leaned toward me, obviously relieved with my attitude. “He really does care, you know. About kids and the environment and the economy and everything.”

  Sandy came out dressed in her blue leotard spangled with silver stars. She carried her gear bag over to where Miss Cassidy, the coach, had a space set up for the Woodston group. Sandy found a spot on the floor and started warm-up exercises. Stretches and bends, skips, splits, bridges and rolls. She touched her head to her knees both sitting and standing and worked up to forward and backward flips.

  “I hope Sandy does well. She’s practiced so hard,” I said.

  “She’s really good. She might even take all-around in her age group.”

  A statement unfortunately not borne out as the day progressed. And it was a fairly slow progression, even though more than one competition was held at a time, as there were separate age-group competitions for each event. Sandy did okay on the vault, no major falls or errors, although she didn’t nail the landing the way I’d seen her do it before.

  Brad Ridenour and Tammi arrived just before 12:00, earlier than Skye expected them. Sandy was right about one thing, I decided as I spotted the photographer trailing along with them. Brad Ridenour definitely intended to use this as a photo op. Skye ran over to meet them and bring them to where we were sitting. Brad’s face was familiar to TV viewers, and he smiled and glad-handed everyone along the way. I saw Sandy glance his way once, but she turned her back and pretended to be absorbed in rubbing her ankle.

  “You’ve already met Tammi, of course,” Skye said to me, although she did it with a hand on Tammi’s arm, not as if she were bypassing the stepmother or downgrading her importance. I was pleased. Perhaps their relationship was improving.

  “I’m so excited about being here!” Tammi gushed. “All these children with so much talent and energy!” She obviously hadn’t run out of exclamation points. She was in buttercup-yellow today, a sleeveless linen dress that some saleswoman should have received at least forty lashes with a feather boa for selling her. Even in matching yellow and white high-heeled sandals, she barely came up to her husband’s shoulder.

  Then Skye introduced her father, her pride in him big enough to crown him king rather than merely elect him to some political office. We shook hands, his firm and personal, his eyes targeting mine with an expert politician intensity that said, “See? I’m noticing you personally. You’re important to me.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Malone. We’ve heard so much about you.”

  I wondered if that meant they’d heard of me from Skye or if I was simply notorious as “The Lady Who Found the Body.” In person, Brad Ridenour was even bigger and blonder and broader shouldered than he looked on TV. Not overweight but substantial. His smile dazzled, and the cleft in his chin blended masculinity with boyish charm. He had a definite presence, even a charisma, that would certainly serve him well in the political arena. The Big Brad, as Skye had once said he was called. Yes, indeed. The Big Brad wants your vote. You can trust the Big Brad.

  “It’s nice of both of you to come today,” I said.

  “Oh, we wouldn’t have missed it!” Tammi turned to the photographer. “Dick, we should get photos of Brad with some of the contestants! Skye, why don’t you get Sandy to come over?”

  “I don’t think—” I began. I knew Sandy was already upset and nervous, totally opposed to Brad and Tammi’s presence here, and being dragged into photographs wouldn’t help.

  But Skye was already running over to where Sandy was comforting one of the smaller girls who hadn’t done well on her floor exercise. Even from this distance I could see Sandy’s vehement shake of head. Skye captured a couple of other girls and brought them back with a mumbled explanation to Tammi about Sandy being too busy. The photographer posed Brad with the girls doing handstands together, feet touching.

  I thought that Sandy, in spite of her negative feelings about Brad, would surely do the polite thing and eventually come over to say hi, but she never did. The announcer kept talking about “amplitude” and “rotation” in relation to the contestants’ performances, which meant nothing to me, but it didn’t take an expert to tell how poorly Sandy was doing. Her performance went from bad to worse.

  She slipped and almost fell off the beam during the balance beam competition and bungled the landing as well. Her timing was off during the floor exercises, and she stepped out of bounds once. And her scores, of course, reflected the errors.

  I watched her chalk her hands before her turn at the uneven parallel bars. By that time Brad and Tammi had gone, and I hoped this would help Sandy do better. She was so strong and graceful that the bars were usually her best event. Not today. She actually missed her first jump to grab the bar to begin her routine, something I’d never seen her do. From there on, even this proud auntie had to admit her performance was mediocre. She did nail the landing, but by then it was too late.

  “I don’t understand,” Skye said as Sandy headed back toward the locker room, her head down. “She did just awful. She’s so much better than that.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I was determined to find out what was going on. Not while Skye was around, however, because it was as obvious as the cleft in Brad Ridenour’s chin that whatever was affecting Sandy had something to do with the Ridenour family.

  The ride home was silent, Skye’s a
nd my attempts to console Sandy shrugged off with a “It’s no big deal” response from her. I’d planned that we’d all go out for celebration pizza after the meet, but I didn’t even suggest it. Skye didn’t hang around after we got to the house. Sandy went upstairs as if she wanted to be alone, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. She hadn’t eaten anything but a couple of high-nutrition bars and sports drinks all day, so I made grilled tuna sandwiches and hot chocolate and marched upstairs with them.

  Her door was closed, and I braced the tray on one hip and knocked. Her answer was muffled. I decided to interpret it as “come in,” even though I was almost certain that wasn’t what she’d said.

  She was lying stomach-down on the bed, still in the sweats she’d worn home, her hair sticking out of the once-sleek knot like blonde porcupine quills.

  I thought maybe she’d been crying over the results of today’s competition, but her eyes were dry, her face unblotched. Even so, her face had a haggard look, as if she’d just received failing scores not only on a gymnastic performance but on life.

  “I thought we’d have something to eat together,” I said. I looked for a clear place to set the tray. Every surface was covered with teenage stuff: clothes, books, CDs, her collection of teddy bears, old gymnastics awards, stray taco chips, old soft drink cans. I scooped a clear spot on the cedar chest at the foot of her bed for the tray.

  I could have predicted her response to the food, of course.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Okay, we can talk then. I know you were nervous, but something a whole lot more than nerves was wrong today. You performed like you’d never seen a set of parallel bars before. You had three left feet on the balance beam.”

  My honest assessment brought an unexpected smile from Sandy. “I was pretty awful, huh?”

  “I couldn’t have done much worse myself.”

  Sandy turned and sat cross-legged on the bed. I sat on the edge of it. We looked at each other.

  “It was nerves, I guess,” she said. After a long hesitation she added, “But not just about the gymnastics meet.”

  “So what is it, Sandy? I don’t understand.”

  She swallowed, but I could see something in her face that said that this time she was going to tell me. In all honesty, I expected to hear anything from a revelation of teenage pregnancy to a confession of drug use. I braced myself. Show me what to say, Lord. Show me how to help her.

  “I—I think I may know something,” she said.

  Not what I anticipated. “About what?” I returned blankly.

  “About Leslie Marcone’s murder.”

  26

  “Leslie’s murder?” I repeated, astonished. I cast around for some logical explanation. I remembered Camouflage Guy at the police station. Was he a student? “You heard something at school or from a friend?”

  “No. I—I saw something.” She twisted a loose thread on the teddy bear bedspread, her eyes turned downward.

  “You saw something,” I repeated, because the words seemed so disconnected from reality.

  “And then today when I saw Skye’s father at the meet, shaking hands and laughing like everything was just wonderful …”

  Sandy looked up, and I saw anger in the taut set of her jaw but bewilderment in her blue eyes. I moved closer to her on the quilt and took her hand, wanting to reassure her even though I was bewildered too. “What did you see, sweetie?”

  “It was last winter. Miss Cassidy and another woman from the studio took six of us to a gymnastics meet in Little Rock. We had two rooms at a motel, and we stayed there two nights, Friday and Saturday.”

  “I see,” I said, although I felt as if I were peering through a pea-soup fog and not really seeing anything at all.

  “Friday night was fine. Saturday I had the high score of the meet on the parallel bars.” Sandy motioned to a trophy on a chest of drawers in the corner, but it was an absentminded gesture, without pride in the success. But a powerful reminder of how differently she’d performed today.

  “And then … ?”

  “Saturday night after the meet we were all feeling hyper, giggling and acting silly. Our room was on the second floor of the motel, and I went downstairs to the machine in the hallway to get a 7Up. But the 7Up slot was empty and I remembered seeing a little store down the street, about a block away. I should have gone back and asked Miss Cassidy if I could run down there—” She stopped and swallowed. “But I thought it would take just a minute, so I didn’t.”

  Yes, she should have asked Miss Cassidy first. Not a smart move for a girl to be out alone on the street in a strange town. But I knew this wasn’t the time to chastise her. I was still puzzled about where she was going with this, but apprehension curdled in my stomach. Because somehow I knew it was going somewhere I didn’t want it to go.

  “Actually, the store turned out to be two blocks away. And I had to go by another motel before I got to it. I saw a light blue car stopped under a kind of carport thing by the registration office. Leslie Marcone came out of the office, and I was so surprised that I almost spoke to her. Even though she didn’t know me from a crack in the sidewalk, of course. But I was glad I didn’t, because she got in the car, and then I saw who else was in the car.”

  “Which was?”

  Sandy twisted the thread so tightly around her finger that the thread snapped. “Mr. Ridenour. Brad Ridenour. Skye’s father.”

  For a moment, even with the triple identification, I was blank. Skye’s father in Leslie Marcone’s car outside a motel in Little Rock? That didn’t make sense. And then it made too much sense. Ugly sense. Sandy spelled out the details as I sat there stunned.

  “I ducked behind a hedge by the entryway so I could watch. I suppose I shouldn’t have … but I did. Leslie parked the car in front of one of the motel rooms. She and Mr. Ridenour got out. She was wearing jeans and high-heeled boots and a black turtleneck, with her hair all swirly and loose around her shoulders. Very … sexy looking. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, just like he always does on TV. The Big Brad, you know.” She snarled the nickname with bitter contempt, as if she’d like to strangle him with the tie. “He opened the trunk and got out a couple of small suitcases. One gray, one green. She unlocked the door to the motel room and went inside. I could see him lean over and kiss her when he followed her in with the suitcases.”

  The details about clothing and suitcases told me how deeply the incriminating scene was branded into Sandy’s memory.

  “Then I … I forgot all about my 7Up and ran back to our motel.”

  Sandy may be only fourteen, but she is considerably more mature and knowledgeable than I was at fourteen, and she didn’t need diagrams to know what was going on. Brad Ridenour and Leslie Marcone at a motel in Little Rock. A clandestine affair.

  The curdling in my stomach expanded to an industrial-strength churning. With the churning came a sudden spotlight on past events. Leslie’s overnight absence from the house while I was working for her. Another out-of-town rendezvous with Brad? Her ill temper the next day. A lovers’ quarrel? Her stiff command that I never answer the phone. So I wouldn’t hear Brad’s distinctive voice? Even her peculiar system of sometimes answering the ring of the phone, sometimes not. Now I wished I’d paid more attention to those rings. Did they have some code worked out so she’d know when it was Brad calling and would pick up?

  Now I understood Sandy’s antagonism toward both Leslie Marcone and Brad Ridenour, and her recent avoidance of Skye as well. My heart ached for her as I realized how desperately she’d tried to figure out what to do with the unwanted knowledge of that clandestine relationship.

  “You didn’t tell Miss Cassidy or any of the girls what you’d seen?”

  “No.”

  “And you never said anything about it to Skye?”

  “No! I was afraid if she knew, if anyone knew, everything would just … fall apart for her.”

  I appreciated Sandy’s caring concern for her friend. Skye’s life had been unst
able enough without the added disillusionment of finding out what a sleazeball her father was. Or having the marriage to Tammi explode and take Skye with it.

  “Although I almost said something a couple of times, when she was going on and on about how wonderful her dad is, and I know he isn’t wonderful at all. It … it just makes me so mad that he cons everyone about what a great guy he is, and Skye just swallows every bit of it.”

  I remembered Sandy and Skye’s sharp exchange about Leslie too, Skye calling her beautiful and mysterious, Sandy countering that Leslie was a stuck-up snob. Knowing what she did, she’d undoubtedly wanted to say more, but for Skye’s sake she’d held back. I admired her willpower.

  I also felt a grim appreciation for her clear sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t put blame on one of them and excused the other. Both Leslie and Brad Ridenour were deeply in the wrong, and Sandy knew it.

  “It was awful enough when I just knew about Mr. Ridenour and Leslie and their affair,” Sandy went on. “But then after Leslie was murdered, and I realized he might have done it …”

  For a few moments I’d been so wrapped up in thoughts of Brad and Leslie’s relationship and its possible effect on Skye that I’d forgotten the connection with murder. A connection that sent snaky chills slithering along my spine.

  This implicated Brad Ridenour right up to that cleft in his chin. I could feel it as surely as if I’d seen him toss Leslie’s body in the lake. No wonder Sandy had seemed so strangely preoccupied and distracted ever since the murder. She’d had this slamming around inside her. No wonder she’d avoided any contact with Brad. And no wonder his presence at the gymnastics meet today had sent her into a tailspin.

  I realized she was watching me now, her expression unexpectedly hopeful, as if she thought perhaps I’d pat her hand and tell her she was imagining things or somehow make everything right. I tried.

  “An affair like this is … is unethical and immoral and awful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Skye’s father killed Leslie.”