Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  She rolled her eyes. “It was not all my fault, though. You may somehow have found a way to be the head of this investigation, which I still don’t understand, but you cannot talk to me the way you did in front of other people. My team and the police. And you should have told me you were going to stay and talk to the press, or at least told me afterward. You said you were trying to protect me, but you need to understand that I neither need nor want your protection.”

  “Is this the apology?”

  “Yes. Because you are right. I did lash out. Because I felt like I messed up. Your yelling at me didn’t make it any better, or that whole thing acting like I couldn’t take care of myself, but everything you said was right. I was so focused on feeling bad that I wasn’t focusing on the job. Since Sam died my head has been a mess and I haven’t been as sharp as I should be, but now I am, or I’m going to be. I’m just going to push all this—” Looking up at him now, her cheeks were flushed. She bit her lip. “Sorry, I’m babbling.”

  “Is it my turn?”

  “Are you going to accept my apology?”

  “Yeah, I think so. To encourage you in the habit.” She narrowed her eyes but gestured with her hand for him to go ahead. He said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through after losing your brother, it sounds like you two were very close and you need to grieve and I respect that.”

  “No, I’m done. I’m fine now. I grieved yesterday and—”

  “That’s weird, I thought it was my turn.”

  “Right.”

  “It was unfair of me to talk to you the way I did, particularly while J.D. and the others were there. Although you started it.”

  “That’s different because—”

  He tilted his head to one side. She stopped talking.

  He said, “The stress of the race and of thinking about what could be going on for Rosalind. It got to me and I lost control. I never wanted to give the impression you couldn’t take care of yourself. That stunt with the press was wrong. I really was trying to get you out of there because you seemed so tense, but I could have done it a better way. A different way than putting myself in front of them.”

  “Yes, like you could have rammed into one of their cars. Created a diversion. Or you could have sent—”

  Benton stopped trying. Trying not to say what was really on his mind. “Let me ask you something, Ms. Page.”

  “If I know the definition of ‘your turn’?”

  “If, when this is all over, I could take you dancing.”

  Her jaw almost hung open. “You want to go dancing with me?”

  “Dinner too. Take you on a date.”

  He saw her mind working, trying to come up with reasons it wasn’t a good idea to let anyone be close to her. She said, “I don’t think that’s advisable. I mean, of course, I’m flattered and that’s very sweet of you—”

  “I’m not sweet.”

  “Right. But whatever you’re feeling, it’s just about the case. Your feelings will go away. So I really think—”

  “Two dates.”

  “What? Why two dates?”

  “Because I hope that will be enough.”

  “For what?”

  “Are you chicken?”

  Now her jaw really did drop. “No, I am not chicken to go on a date with you. I’m just trying to say—”

  The elevator doors opened and Benton held them until she stepped inside. He said, “Good. That’s settled. Good night, Ms. Page. See you at seven-thirty.” And he left.

  Imogen stood in the elevator for a second as the doors slid closed, totally stunned. Then she hit the number of her floor hard. She could not wait to get to her room and call Sam and tell him about her date with Easy-Bake Reggie and especially about Benton Arbor—who was not bad-looking, especially when he was tired, and much nicer than you would think and smarter too—asking her out, even if it was just because of the investigation. Benton Arbor.

  She was fumbling her plastic key in the lock on her room door when it hit her. Sam was dead. SAM WAS DEAD.

  She closed the door behind her and collapsed.

  For one instant, with Benton, her world had felt back in balance and she had forgotten, but it crashed down around her again with all the pain of a Band-Aid being ripped off a half-healed wound. The tingling excitement she’d felt turned to a chill that started in her arms and slithered through her entire body. Bleakness and loneliness. And failure. Sam was dead.

  She fell asleep clutching her knees to her chest in the corner of her room and sobbing for her brother and Marielle Wycliffe and Corrina Orville and all the others who had died, and worrying that she was not good enough to make it stop.

  CHAPTER 39

  He sat himself down at a table in the back corner where he could see the whole lounge in one glance and waited for the waitress to come over. It was fairly early by Vegas standards, so the place was less than half-full, just a handful of couples scattered at the small tables and pretty quiet. A good place to sit and figure some things out. He needed to clear his head from wondering what Benton and Imogen were doing in Boston. Wondering what was really going on with the investigation. Hoping that Imogen had taken his hint and was staying away from Benton, that she understood that getting involved with him would be a big mistake. Bad things happened when people made mistakes.

  The waitress came by and he ordered without thinking about it. Only when she gave him a funny look and said, “A Coke with cherry syrup in it?” did he realize what he said, asking for a cherry Coke, and that told him how he was really feeling. Sometimes he needed outside things like that to make what was going on inside clear to him. Too many years of repression, he’d bet Rosalind would say, and she would probably be right.

  He started thinking about Rosalind—was she awake, was she thinking about him, how many bad things could happen to her before time ran out—about all the things he planned to do with her. Experiences he wanted to share with her. Things from his past, to help her understand.

  He wondered what she would say if he told her about the cherry Coke, made it like a story, Hey, Ros, once there was this boy who drank cherry Coke. Forty-two of them, one each month his father was at the medium-security lockup. Should have been sixty months, but the man lied his way out, discharged on good behavior. Incredible.

  Tell her about taking the bus out to the “facility,” sitting in the visiting room, letting his father give him a bear hug, push his hair around, punch him in the stomach to make sure he was in shape. The visit going okay until his dad started in with the game stuff, was he practicing, tell me about your averages, how’s the arm, tell the coach to call me.

  Sure, Dad.

  There was always a TV in the visiting room and it was all he could do not to watch it, stare at it whatever it was—beer ad, talk show, cartoon—anything better than having to watch his dad as he arranged his face for lying. Be out of here in a few months, Sergi tells me, his father would say. The appeal is going well, Sergi says we got them on a technicality. Always trying to sneak around the rules, bend them. Sergi, a lawyer who worked out of a storefront on Main Street that he shared with a shoe-shine guy. The shoe-shine guy always seemed to have more clients.

  Sure, Dad.

  If he was lucky the visits were quick and ended before his father started riding him for being uncommunicative, then for being sullen, finally started yelling at him, telling him he was an ungrateful bastard, didn’t he know he’d done it all for him, that he was in there, in prison, right now just so his son could—

  I never asked you to rob banks, Dad. I never wanted a father who was a criminal. What would Mom say?

  You have no right to talk about your mother.

  Say to Rosalind there, What could you do? The man had issues. Showing her that he was totally over it. Then tell her how after the visit, he’d walk a mile and a half to the ice-cream parlor across from the bus stop to clear his mind—maybe not tell her how he’d wish someone would come by, make a mean comment, so he could beat the shit out of th
em—and have a cherry Coke. He always wanted a sundae, but they cost three dollars more. Describe it to her, the old-time feel of the place, red vinyl booths, black-and-white linoleum checkerboard floor, long counter with round stools where he would sit and pretend he was someone else, not a kid who’d just visited his father, his only parent, in the medium-security prison down the road, but a kid from a fifties TV show with a father and mother and dog and paper route.

  Wasn’t it weird, he’d say to her, what you dreamed of being as a kid, compared to where you ended up? The way little things could change your whole destiny. All I ever wanted was a perfect family like that.

  Thinking about that, wondering what Rosalind would say, he gazed across the empty floor of the lounge and noticed Cal Harwood and Wrightly Waring pass by the entrance to the lounge, then saw Wrightly spot him.

  Damn.

  He watched Wrightly say something to Cal, probably, “Go on, I’ll catch up in a moment,” then walk unsteadily toward him, until he came to a stop against the table, braced himself against the edge, leaned forward, and said, “How can you just sit there at a time like this?”

  He smelled like a barrel of Jack Daniel’s.

  Wrightly now launching into how nervous he was, how upset, desperate, wanting to know what was going on, no one willing to tell him a thing. Sounding like a fly buzzing around, not shutting up. It made him wonder how Wrightly had lived as long as he had, being this annoying.

  He’d nod or say, “I don’t know,” or “You’re right,” but really he was still thinking about Rosalind, wondering how she would react to his story about the lonely boy and the cherry Coke who had dreamed of having someone who was his, someone who loved only him. If she would understand that she was the one he wanted to build his family with now. Imagining her smiling at the end of it and saying—

  Wrightly’s face was in his face. “Have you been listening to me? What I’ve been telling you?”

  Man, Wrightly’s neck looked like it was made to be wrung. He made himself keep his hands under the table and say, “Yes. You think the FBI is overlooking something.”

  “Not overlooking. I think there is a cover-up going on. Maybe Benton is covering this up, I think he hates Rosalind because she and I— I don’t know. There’s just too much that doesn’t make sense. There’s got to be more evidence out there, and someone has got to make them find it before—” Wrightly stopped and wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve, almost falling over, then looked up and said, “Dammit, why are you just sitting there staring at me? I thought you of all people would understand and be as worried as I am.”

  “Why me of all people?” He said it very quietly.

  Wrightly backed up. “Because you’re a friend of Rosalind’s. Ease up, that’s all I meant.”

  He gave Wrightly a long stare through his dark glasses and said, “You don’t know anything about me or the state of my thoughts. Rosalind is on my mind day and night.”

  Which was the truth.

  Then he stood up, dropped a twenty on the table, and said, “I’ve got to go. I’ll see what I can find out, but I don’t want you mentioning this to anyone. Not your concern. And nothing about me and Rosalind. Got it?”

  Wrightly nodded and slumped into the booth. “Sure, J.D., whatever you say.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Only 8 days left!!

  What Imogen remembered most about the Greenways from her last visit were Mrs. Greenway’s hands. For hours as they talked Cynthia Greenway would lean forward, staring at her own hands as they clenched and unclenched, as if she did not understand how they had gotten there.

  “Stop that, Cynthia,” Arthur Greenway would mutter every few minutes, every fewer minutes as the interviews wore on. “Dammit, Cynthia, you’re driving me crazy.”

  Cynthia’s hands would unclench for a moment, and Arthur would disappear into the fluorescent-lit kitchen. Imogen would be left sitting alone with Cynthia, who would try to smile and say, “You have to excuse Arthur. He is taking this very badly.” The same words every time.

  Then Arthur would come back, eyes glassier, reeking slightly more of Scotch, and the scene would begin again.

  Imogen had visited the Greenways five times to interview them about their daughter after she was killed, in the hopes of getting information that could help them catch the killer before he struck again. The last time she arrived, Cynthia Greenway opened the door by herself. She had a black eye.

  “You’ll have to excuse Arthur today,” she said with the same glued-on smile. “He—he had to go.”

  The woman had collapsed sobbing into her arms. Imogen had called child services and the welfare department and listened to Cynthia explain that Arthur had not meant to push her, that she hit her eye when she fell, that it had been an accident, just an accident, really. When Louisa’s minister came, a woman no older than herself, Imogen had left guiltily. Guilty for how glad she felt to leave. Guilty that she never wanted to go back. She realized now as she stood on the top step listening to Benton’s motor running on the street below and waited for the door to open that she was terrified of what she would find.

  Loverboy’s making a family, Benton had said, and she thought he was right. But he could just as easily have been trying to destroy one. How does a family recover from losing a loved one? How could a family recover from something like Loverboy?

  When Arthur Greenway opened the door she almost did not recognize him. Instead of asking her in, he stepped outside the house and closed the door behind him. She was looking at him, but his eyes seemed unable to find her.

  “Before you go in, Ms. Page, there is something I want to tell you. I—Cynthia and I—” He looked at her now. “Thank you for helping her. Last year. I just went crazy with all this. I’d never done anything like that to her before and—” He shook his head and his cheeks went red, but not from drinking. “I want you to know that I’m getting help now. We all are. But mostly I wanted to thank you. I don’t know what she would have done that day without you.”

  Imogen was stunned. Arthur Greenway blurred in front of her as her eyes filled with tears. She hoped like hell Benton was not watching. “You are welcome. I am so glad that—that you are working things out.”

  Arthur nodded. “Me too. What is a family for if not to help survive something like this? It’s the most important thing. I can’t believe I almost let it go.” He looked away politely as Imogen wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve. “Guess we’d better go inside. They are waiting for you.”

  “They” were Cynthia Greenway and the twins, Neil and Billy. They were all standing in the living room just off the foyer, motionless, when Imogen stepped in. Cynthia Greenway broke the tableau, rushed forward and hugged her.

  Imogen, only a little stiff, hugged her back. This was hardly the same woman she had met the previous summer.

  They put her in the seat of honor, opposite the couch. There was a dab of furniture polish between the molding and the glass inlay on the coffee table, and Imogen was sure they had cleaned the house for her arrival. She did not think anyone had ever done that for her before. She dragged her eyes from it and looked at the Greenways in front of her. Cynthia and Arthur were holding hands.

  Why did everything make her want to cry that morning?

  Cynthia spoke first. “I wanted to call you so many times. To tell you thank you. But—”

  Imogen shook her head. “You have nothing to thank me for. Whatever has happened, you two have done it.”

  “We four,” Arthur corrected, smiling at the twins sitting on the floor next to the coffee table. “Your office asked if the boys could be here and, anyway, they wanted to see you too. We let them stay out of school this morning.”

  Imogen was at a loss. She sat in the tall-backed guest-of-honor chair and wished she were anywhere else than at the center of this kind circle of people whose happiness she was going to shred by bringing up something they were better off forgetting.

  “You don’t have to be afraid to talk about Louisa,
” Billy, the twin nearest to her, said. “We talk about her all the time.”

  Arthur smiled at him. “It’s true. It’s the best way to keep her memory alive.”

  Imogen sought blindly for something in her emotional lexicon that made sense of this, of this desire to remember rather than lock away, push down, forget, pretend never happened. She had a strange, terrifying urge to tell them about Sam and how much she missed him and what joy he had brought to her life and how sometimes she had dreams, these dreams about him that were so real that when she woke up for an instant—

  Once that started, there was no end.

  She said, “Louisa would be proud of you for what you have done.”

  “Louisa would want us to help. That was what she believed in,” Cynthia said quietly. “Tell us how we can help you, Ms. Page.”

  Imogen plunged in. “I was wondering if Louisa brought home a stuffed animal, like the kind you win at a carnival, before she disappeared.”

  Arthur and Cynthia looked at each other, and Billy and Neil screwed up their faces in a pantomime of thinking.

  “No,” Arthur said finally, and Cynthia shook her head too. “I just packed up her things into boxes last month, and I would have remembered if there was anything like that.”

  Imogen tried not to show her disappointment on her face. She had known it was wrong to cling to that one thread, the one hope that Louisa too had been to a carnival and the Greenways had forgotten, somehow, to mention it earlier. She had known it was wrong, but she had done it anyway. “I know we went over her movements the week before she was taken several times when I was out in July, but would you mind if I asked again?”

  Four heads shook.

  Imogen reached into her bag and took out the pad of paper on which she’d made notes about Louisa’s activities. It had been summer vacation and Louisa had been baby-sitting her brothers during the day while their parents were at work, until they all went to sleep-away camp in July. She had earned five dollars per hour, which she had faithfully deposited in her college savings account every week.