by Lisa Unger
“When was the last time Cole talked to his mother?”
“He said she called on his cell phone a couple of days before she was supposed to come, and everything seemed fine.”
“And you believe that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have a reason not to believe it.”
“So… what? Drugs?”
“Honestly, we don’t know. Kevin hadn’t had much to do with Cole or his mother. It was kind of sad, but she just didn’t want Kevin around.”
“Why was that?” asked Jones.
There was a quick darting of her eyes. “I don’t really know.”
But Jones could see that she did know. She knew exactly why.
She took a quick glance up at the ceiling again. Then, “Kevin said that there had been a lot of different men over the last few years. And most recently the guy Robin was involved with didn’t want Cole around. That’s why Cole came to spend the summer with us. Kevin just thinks she ran off with whoever that was.”
“How would he know that if there wasn’t much contact?” asked Jones.
“I’m not sure.” She shrugged and gave a little shake of her head.
“And what did Cole say?”
“I asked him when Kevin was at work. And he said his mother had had a few dates here and there, but nothing serious. If she’d told Kevin about a man who didn’t want Cole around, Cole had never met him. That’s kind of how Kevin made it sound, that Robin had confided in him. Which seems odd.” She released a breath, started twisting at her wedding band.
No pictures. That was it. There were no pictures on the walls, on the mantel, on any of the shelves… None of the expected perfect wedding shots and mall portraits of the kids. No vacation snapshots. Also not a speck of dust on any surface, not a crumb on the floor. In a house with three children? He and Maggie had one child, and their home was a veritable shrine to Ricky. When he was growing up, the place was always a mess-never dirty, but cluttered with all manner of stuff-toys, gear, costumes, tents, tricycles, all the paraphernalia of childhood.
“Mrs. Carr,” said Jones, “what is it that you’d like me to do?”
“I was wondering if you could help us find Cole’s mother.”
He started to shake his head, to say he didn’t do that type of work. But she misunderstood it as disapproval. She held up her palms.
“It’s not about wanting him to go. Don’t think that. It’s just that he’s so sad. So, so sad. His birthday was last week-no card, no call.” She didn’t bother to try to stop the tears this time, just let them fall. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue, dabbed her eyes and her nose.
“Mrs. Carr,” said Jones, “the chances are she’ll come back on her own, probably before the holidays.”
She looked down at the table, then back up at Jones. “The thing is, he’s a good boy. She has done a wonderful job raising him. She obviously loved him. I didn’t know her-Kevin never wanted us to meet. So I don’t know, maybe she is the type of woman who would abandon her son for some new guy. Or maybe she does have a substance-abuse problem. But maybe, maybe, something has happened to her. It doesn’t seem right. Does it?”
She was looking at him so earnestly now, had leaned forward in her seat. Mrs. Carr was a genuinely nice person; he could see it in her expression, even in the way she held her shoulders. He’d met all different kinds in his life as a cop. And some people were just bad news-vacant, conscienceless, malicious, virtually brimming with bad intent. The honest people, those who obeyed the law and did the right thing, were common enough. But the genuinely good people, the innocent people like Paula Carr, the ones who thought of others and put themselves last, that was a rare breed.
It reminded Jones of a question asked of him by a troubled boy. How do you know if you’re a good person or a bad person? He’d done a lot of thinking on that lately. And he wasn’t any closer to the answer. But he suspected that for most people there was no way to know until the end of the day. And maybe not even then. Maybe the answer was different in any given moment, from one time to the next. Who was keeping a tally? Who added up your score when the game was over? He didn’t even pretend to know.
“Am I wrong in thinking that you didn’t want anyone else in your family to know we were talking?” Jones asked.
He saw a flush rise up her neck. “No,” she said. “You’re not wrong.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, first of all, I don’t want Cole to feel he’s not welcome here. Also, I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up.” That was two. Usually there were three things, three reasons. And number three was the real reason.
“And Kevin…” She let the sentence trail with a shake of her head, as if she didn’t know how to finish. Then, “He just wouldn’t like it. Kevin cares about what he cares about, and that’s it. He wants Cole to stay here with us. And he doesn’t seem to care much about what happened to Robin.”
He cares about what he cares about, and that’s it. Jones turned the sentence over, listened to the words again in his head. Jones had never met Kevin Carr, but he was pretty sure if at some point they did meet, they weren’t going to get along.
“I’m not a private detective, Mrs. Carr.”
She cocked her head at him, widened her eyes. “I thought you were.”
“Who told you that?”
She pursed her lips, looked down a second. “I got your name from the Pedersens. They said you were a retired cop who did some private investigating now.”
He heard the baby murmur on the monitor in the kitchen.
“I am a retired detective, true,” he said. “But mainly I just look after people’s houses while they’re on vacation, feed pets, let in the repairman.”
But she didn’t hear the second part, or didn’t care to hear it.
“Then you could make some calls if you were so inclined? Like, you still know people, right? You could do that?”
And for some reason he found himself nodding. Maybe because it was just that she was so young and pretty, so trusting of him. Or maybe Maggie was right about his not being able to resist a damsel in distress. And this one was most definitely in distress, whether over this or something else, he didn’t know. But there was something about Paula Carr that worried him. He wouldn’t say she had that skittish self-loathing that he’d seen in so many abused women, but there was something-something tense, something anxious.
“I can pay you, of course. I have my own money.” She stuck her chin out a little. “I wasn’t always just a mom.”
He gave her a smile, stopping short of reaching out to pat her hand, which is what he wanted to do. “Nothing wrong with being a mom. It’s the most important job in the world.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say.” There was more than a slight edge of bitterness to her words. Then she forced a smile. “Not that I don’t love being a mom.”
She seemed to drift inward a moment, got that long stare. He felt something inside him shift. He couldn’t leave here without helping her, or at least trying.
“So I’ll need a couple of things from you,” said Jones, against his better judgment. He reached into his pocket and took out a notepad he carried with him everywhere.
She brightened a bit. “You’ll do it?”
“I’ll make some calls. Really, that’s all I can do.”
He flipped open the cover of his notebook, turned through the pages: a list for Home Depot, a license-plate number for a suspicious vehicle he’d seen on his block a couple of times, things Maggie needed from the store.
“And your fee?” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jones, lifting a hand. He didn’t like it when people offered him money. It made him feel cheap. “If I incur expenses, you can pay me back. And I’ll check with you before I incur expenses.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cooper. Thank you so much.”
“I’m going to need a full name, last known address and telephone number, and a Social, if you have it. Last employer, any known assoc
iates. That should give us a good start.”
“Okay. I’ll write down what I have.” She got up quickly from the table and moved from the room.
“No promises, Mrs. Carr,” he called after her.
“I know,” she called back. “I know.”
And as he put on his coat in the sunny dining room, he thought how natural it all was, this kind of thing. He hadn’t realized how anxious he felt on the days that he had nothing to do, how the emptiness of the house and the list of mundane tasks weighed down upon him sometimes. For the first time in a year, maybe longer, he actually felt happy.
chapter eleven
About a mile from the school, down a winding rural road, there was an old graveyard surrounded by a low, crumbling stone wall. Jolie had taken Willow there before, and on that occasion they’d smoked a wrinkled half joint that Jolie had stolen from her brother’s jacket. Hazy and giggling, they’d walked among the crooked tombstones looking at the faded names and sad inscriptions:
ANNABELLE LENIK, BELOVED DAUGHTER,
BORN 1912, DIED 1914.
SHE SINGS WITH THE ANGELS.
SAMUEL ABRAMS, DEVOTED HUSBAND, FATHER AND SON,
BORN 1918, DIED 1948.
HE DID HIS DUTY WITH HONOR AND LOVE.
And so many more-inscriptions so worn as to be unreadable, grave sites just masses of weeds. At first Willow found it more sad than eerie, since on that first day it was sunny and hot. Toward the north end, there was an old clapboard house, sagging on its frame, windows boarded, door padlocked. A sign on the door warned that the building was condemned.
“It’s haunted,” Jolie had told her on their last visit.
“Of course it is,” said Willow.
“No, seriously. The night watchman killed himself there.”
“Okay.”
“Like, two years ago,” Jolie said. Willow waited for the mischievous grin to erupt on her face, but it didn’t. “They haven’t been able to get anyone else to work here. That’s why the place is such a mess.”
Jolie had kicked a beer can at her feet; it clattered against one of the tilting stones. And just then Willow felt a chill on her neck.
“He shot himself. And the people who tried to take the job after him? They kept seeing him, walking around the graveyard looking for the pieces of his brain.” She delivered the information with a grim seriousness.
“Give me a break,” Willow said. But the image took hold, and then Jolie was smiling like a maniac. Willow had released an uneasy laugh.
“Give me a break,” she’d said again. She’d wanted to leave then, her buzz abandoning her completely.
“It’s messed up, isn’t it?”
It turned out that Jolie hadn’t just been trying to scare Willow. When Willow had returned home that night, Willow searched the story on Google. And everything Jolie had said was true, even down to the fact that no one would work there now and the historic site was falling into disrepair due to late-night vandals. Every time Willow drove by the little graveyard with her mother since then, she held her breath. The dead want to steal the air from your lungs. Hadn’t someone told her that once?
Willow wasn’t thrilled to be visiting again. She hadn’t felt right about it the first time, even before Jolie’s grim story. All those lives, reduced to grassy patches that stoned teenagers stumbled over, laughed about. It seemed disrespectful, arrogant, something her mother would frown at-as if their lives would amount to more.
But Jolie liked it there. And so, on this day, when she huddled up on the steps of the old house, Willow sat next to her. She didn’t want Jolie to think she was afraid, a dork. Jolie formed harsh, cement judgments: Jayne was a slut; Chloe was an airhead; Ashley was a bitch. So far Jolie seemed to think Willow was fairly cool. Willow wanted to keep it that way.
Jolie produced a roach clip attached to the tail end of a joint and a lighter from her pocket. The air was just cold enough for Willow to feel it on her cheeks and nose, the tips of her fingers.
Jolie offered a shrug of apology. “This is all I could get off of him.” Meaning her brother.
Willow didn’t care. It took hardly anything for her to get high. Jolie lit up and drew a deep drag, then handed it off to Willow. All she tasted was burning paper, feeling the heat of it on her lips. But she held the smoke in, anyway-only a total dork couldn’t hold it in. She felt the burn at the back of her throat. Instead of the warm feeling she wanted, she just started to feel nauseated and remembered that she’d had hardly any lunch. She and Jolie leaned against each other, and through the haze of smoke she saw a dark form moving up the street.
“That’s him,” Jolie said.
“Who?”
“The guy I wanted you to meet. Cole. He’s a friend of my brother’s.”
Willow watched his slow, rangy approach. It made her think of the way wolves walked, long and easy but full of intent. As he approached, she listened to the song of a chickadee somewhere in the trees above her. Among the chattering, indistinct cries of the other birds, it sounded almost human, someone looking for attention.
“You like him?” Willow asked.
“Nah, not like that. Too young for me.”
Willow knew that Jolie went out with older boys, some of them from other towns. Or so she said. She had a look about her, like she already knew things she shouldn’t know. That she’d done things a girl her age shouldn’t have done. And Willow thought maybe there was something sad about that, even though it made Jolie seem cool and worldly. Her eyes are old, Willow’s mother had said. And even though Willow wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, she sort of got the idea.
“I thought maybe you would like him,” Jolie said. Her tone was wistful, a note off, as though she were giving something she wasn’t sure she wanted to give.
“Why?”
Jolie didn’t answer right away, looked down at her slim calves, stretching them out in front of her. She had a long run up the side of her black tights. Then, “Just a vibe I had.”
Willow looked into Jolie’s eyes, impossibly green in the afternoon sun. They both started laughing for no reason either of them could name.
“He’s really nice,” Jolie managed between peals of laughter. “Nice like you.” The you came out in a strangled howl.
Willow doubled over, holding in her pee by crossing her legs. Was it okay to be nice? she wondered even in her hysteria. Was that a good thing? And was she, in fact, nice?
“What’s so funny?”
He was a dark smudge against the sun, a shadow. Willow lifted her hand to block the light behind him. And she felt something, a seizing on her insides. If she had made up a boy, from her imagination designed someone who would most appeal to her-and she had done this, so she should know-Willow couldn’t have created anyone more beautiful than Cole. She felt all her laughter dry up as she stared at him, and he returned her gaze with a shy smile.
“Are you guys stoned?” he asked.
Jolie pulled herself together long enough to sound indignant. “No,” she said. “Of course not.” Then she started laughing again.
Cole looked up at the sky. “I’m going to tell your brother that you’ve been stealing his weed.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Willow could tell by the way Jolie grinned at him and he grinned back that he was already under her spell, dazzled by her very particular kind of magic. When his hazel eyes drifted back to Willow, she wished she were prettier, cooler, a tough chick like Jolie. But she wasn’t. She was just Willow.
“Hey,” he said. He offered his hand, which she thought was kind of dorky and also sweet. Well mannered, her mother would say. “I’m Cole.”
She took his hand and found herself noticing the silver sky, and the gold-orange of the falling leaves, and how hard and dead the ground looked already, even though it wasn’t really winter yet, as she glanced around everywhere but into his face.
“I’m Willow.”
“That’s a nice name.”
She started to say something ab
out how it was a family name, maybe her grandmother’s, who was a famous dancer in the forties. But that wasn’t true. So she clamped her mouth shut against the lie. Dr. Cooper, the shrink she’d been seeing since she moved to The Hollows, had advised, When you feel that urge to say something that’s not true, just try to be silent, observe the feelings that make you want to do this. And remember that you don’t have to be anything other than who you are. That’s enough.
“Thanks.” The silence that followed felt awkward. She wanted to fill it. “My mom named me after a character in a movie she loved.” That was true. And so boring.
He nodded carefully. “Cool.”
He dug his hands into his pockets, hunched up his shoulders. “So what do you guys want to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Jolie. “Willow doesn’t have much time.”
If Willow didn’t know better, she’d think that Jolie wanted her to go. Willow pulled her cell phone from her pocket, looked at the time. There was still an hour.
“When I cut yesterday,” Willow said, “I went home through the woods. I saw someone out there, digging a hole in the ground.”
“You did?” said Jolie. She narrowed her eyes at Willow, gave her a little nudge. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
She enjoyed the way they were both looking at her with keen interest as she spun the tale for them.
“My mom said he’s a caver,” she said. “There’s another word for it, too.”
“A spelunker?” said Cole.
“Right,” said Willow. “That’s it. He told my mother that there’s an abandoned mine that might have a body in it. That’s what he was looking for.”
“I told you about the mines,” said Jolie. Something in her tone was triumphant and resentful.
“So where was he digging?” asked Cole. “Do you remember?”
She wanted to take them there, to show them something and have it be amazing. But she didn’t know if she had time to go there and get back for the late bus. If she was late getting home or had to call her mom, she didn’t even want to know what was going to happen.
