by William Baer
“Maybe that’s why,” she decided.
I was glad I wasn’t a woman in today’s world.
“Do you still see Rikki?”
“Of course, we meet every Thursday at the Mad Batter. Like the girls in the song.”
I wondered if I was starting to fall for her, which was perfectly ridiculous, so I changed the subject.
“Did you ever talk to Edward Colt?”
“No. We were supposed to meet on Wednesday, the day after he was killed.”
“Did the twins have any favorite teachers back in high school?”
“Sure, we were all in love with Mr. Sykes. The biology teacher.”
“Did he take a special interest in the twins?”
“I guess you could say that, but there was nothing weird about it. Everyone liked the twins.”
“Was there anyone who didn’t like the twins?”
“Not really.”
Then she remembered.
“Actually, Mrs. Rockingham never really liked the girls.”
“Rita’s mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was jealous. They were always competing with Rita.”
“And beating her?”
“And beating her. But Rita never seemed upset about it. I understand she’s now a lawyer and doing nicely.”
“What about Izzy?”
“She worked in a bunch of hair salons then vanished. I don’t know where she is. Nobody does.”
An obnoxious boat horn blasted obnoxiously, probably meaning that I better get my ass off the damned floating contraption or I’d end up in the state of Delaware.
When I stood up, she sat right where she was, maybe thinking about ten years ago, when she was a happy young girl with happy young friends until the recondite hideousness of life intruded itself into their lives and one of them got herself murdered.
Ronnie looked up at me, and I felt the hurt of her sadness.
“I think about her every single day.”
19
Field of Dreams
Friday, March 27th
46°
I walked into its comforting greenness. The perfect and trim greenness of the outfield. An American baseball field. One of the most beautiful places on earth.
What did Babe Ruth say?
Something like:
Baseball is the greatest game in the world.
It’s hard to argue. It’s especially hard to argue with a guy like Babe Ruth, even for someone who lived and breathed football his entire youth, even though I got pretty serious about center field every year when the new spring arrived.
Now I was standing, once again, in center field, thinking about Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Mike Trout. The young boys of spring were warming up over in left field, tossing the hardball around, kidding with each other, enjoying the magic of their late teens at the Lower Cape May Regional High School.
Which is quite a mouthful.
The head coach, dressed exactly like his kids in a Cape May Tigers uniform, with a black-and-blue cap, walked across the grass in my direction.
Ten years ago, Tommy Garrison was the “boyfriend.” Now he was a history teacher at the exact same high school where he’d once planned to take Nikki O’Brien to the junior prom until she ended up dead in a car trunk. He was pleasant looking in an ordinary kind of way, an ordinary “jockish” kind of way, solid, maybe a few pounds heavier than when he was a big-shot high school athlete.
He walked right up and shook my hand. But I was wrong. There was something unique about him. His eyes were a very peculiar green, oddly matching the spring greenness of the surrounding outfield.
“Rikki said I should talk to you.”
He was polite, doing his best to conceal his reluctance. I can’t say that I blamed him. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.
I didn’t see any reason to waste his time or mine.
“You never married?”
Like Ronnie, he was ringless.
He shrugged.
“I lost the one I loved.”
The guy, for his age, was an athletic specimen, but he was also an ocean of sadness.
“What about her sister? Was there really any difference between them?”
I wanted to see if he had a temper, but he took my unpleasantness in stride.
“Enough.”
“Tell me.”
But he couldn’t actually articulate it.
“No, I guess you’re right, there wasn’t much difference. But I fell for the one and not the other.”
“Could you tell them apart?”
“No,” he admitted. “Never.”
If nothing else, the guy seemed honest.
“She was out with another guy that night,” I said.
Meaning his girlfriend.
“So they say.”
“And you didn’t have much of an alibi.”
“I guess not. It was the middle of the night, and I was home asleep. I was eighteen years old.”
“How did you deal with it?”
“Not too well. I’m not ashamed to admit that Nikki’s death destroyed my life. I wanted to do what Rikki did and hide myself away from the world, but I didn’t. I pressed on. Like a zombie.”
“And now?”
“I suppose I’m coming around. At least, that’s what my mother says.”
He looked over at his baseball boys.
“I’ve got the kids, and my classes, and baseball. Beautiful baseball.”
“Would you like to kill whoever did it?”
He looked back at me directly. He was fine with the question.
“Definitely. Yes.”
He remembered and admitted:
“I used to dream about it. And daydream about it. I still do sometimes.”
“Who’s in the dream?”
“It’s pretty vague, but I know who it is.”
“Who is it?”
“Some kid named Billy.”
20
Campbell Funeral Home
Friday, March 27th
40°
I walked over to the coffin and looked down at the dead guy. He didn’t look like a Colt to me. If he was some kind of relative, he must have been a whole bunch of “removes” away.
But I doubted it.
The Edward Colt viewing was winding down, and the place was eerily empty except for Rikki, her father, and some silent-as-the-grave funeral guy lurking in a far corner.
I went over and checked the guest list. Eight names in three hours. That’s less than three an hour. Not much of a send-off into the great beyond, but, of course, the guy had only moved to Cape May a few months ago. None of the names, as far as I knew, were related to the Nikki case, and, aside from the two O’Brien’s, the only one I recognized was Dawson, who was probably hoping against hope that he could somehow prove that Eric Anderson, in a fit of jealous rage, had killed the guy in the wooden box who’d been dating his ex-wife.
I wasn’t buying it.
Rikki came over, dressed in black, in one of those “little black dresses,” looking perfectly beautiful. I tried not to notice what was impossible not to notice.
“Thanks for letting me out of my cage.”
She smiled.
After I killed her husband the other night, I told her old man not to let her out of the house.
“What about the wake?” he asked.
“All right.”
“What about the funeral?”
“No way.”
I thought I should say something about killing her husband.
“I’m sorry what happened happened.”
She appreciated it.
Actually, I wasn’t sorry at all, the bastard was abo
ut to blow my head off.
“You know,” she confided, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Eric, and about Eric and me, and I realize that I really didn’t know him at all.”
“It happens.”
She seemed baffled by the idea that you could marry someone, live with him (or her) for two months, and never really know them.
“It happens all the time,” I assured her.
She shifted the subject.
“I think you saved my life.”
“Could be. But I definitely saved mine.”
“I bet you do it all the time.”
“Yeah, every day of the week.”
My cell pinged.
We ignored it.
I thought I should say something nice.
“You shouldn’t wear that dress in here.”
“Why not?”
She was genuinely confused.
“You might wake up the dead.”
She looked at me.
Mischievously.
“You’re a very bad boy.”
“Thank you.”
“When do I get released back into the world?”
“Let’s talk about it later tonight.”
“Fine.”
I nodded at her old man, left the room, and found another unlit room. This one was stiffless, not that I cared. Then I checked out the latest report from the Insult-Grandma:
Thomas Garrison (age 27, high school teacher):
Tommy was Nikki’s boyfriend, which I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. He’d known the twins since grammar school, and he and Nikki started dating in their sophomore year. He was her first-and-only, and I think she was his first as well. He was quite the catch back then. Good-looking, popular, bright, from a well-adjusted family (dad: a local contractor; mom: a kindergarten teacher). He was also an all-county righty with a minor-league-level fastball, a decent curve, and a mean cutter. When Nikki was killed, he’d already had several college scholarship offers, including Rutgers, Lehigh, and Penn State.
After graduation, he went to Lehigh but never played ball. I’m not sure why. But he coached the pitchers on the team and majored in history (American). These days he teaches at Cape May High, and his teacher ratings are through the roof. He’s unmarried, and I’m sure all the little high school girls dream about him in bed at night.
I realize it’s not much of a report, but I’ve already decided that he didn’t commit the crime. He’s too much of a “nice” boy, the kind we’re incapable of procreating in North Jersey.
By the way, someone named Luca, who claims to be my progeny, said to “say hello to the beachboy,” who must be you.
Love, Nonna
To clear my mind, I checked out Roxs’s text-for-the-day, then reread her text from a month ago, realizing that I hadn’t thought about her all day long:
I’m standing in the moonlit Mount Moriah Cemetery looking down at the tombstone of the holder of aces and eights.
She’d stopped in Deadwood.
Of course, she did.
I remembered sitting with my princess in White Castle one day, and we talked about Wild Bill, and how he loved his Colt Navy Models, with ivory grips and engraved silver plating, who was, inexplicably, carrying a Smith & Wesson when Jack McCall burst into Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon on August 1, 1876, yelled, “Damn you! Take that!” and shot Wild Bill in the back, dead, with nothing but aces and eights in his “dead man’s hand.”
“I don’t want you playing no poker,” she decided.
“Fine.”
21
Atlantic Cape
Friday, March 27th
38°
How often did you dream about them naked?”
He was stunned.
Stunned in a way that only a pretentious college professor can be stunned. As if the detritus of a far distant world (the real world) had somehow invaded and contaminated his academic fantasyland.
I loved it.
I also loved being me. I know that sounds almost as self-absorbed as all the pretentious college professors of the world, but it’s true.
When you’re me, nobody looks at you and wonders if you’re politically correct. If you’re polite. If you’re sensitive. On the contrary, they fully anticipate the contrary. They expect me (maybe even want me) to say whatever the hell I want to say, in whatever the hell way I want to say it, and they fully accept it. They tolerate it. They don’t sweat it. They know that there’s absolutely no way that the “problem” can be rectified. I’m like the bad little boy that everyone’s given up on, and whenever little wiseass Johnny gets into trouble, they all shrug, or sigh, or say, “Oh, well, that’s Johnny for you,” or, “Oh, well, isn’t little Johnny just impossible!” or, maybe just, “Oh, well,” and then everyone presses on.
His Bio 101 class had just been dismissed, and the room was empty, except for the two of us. I was standing in front of his desk, and I had the distinct feeling that he was wishing that anyone else on the planet was standing in front of him.
Ten years ago, Aaron Sykes was the “cool” high school teacher, popular, energetic, and funny. He even made biology interesting, and all the kids loved him. Including Nikki, Rikki, Tommy, Ronnie, etc. Now he was looking like a forty-two-year-old loser adjunct at Atlantic Cape Community College in Mays Landing, forty-two miles north of Cape May, with a stupid-looking thick brown beard and nothing much on top.
Divorced and kidless.
“Never,” he said, referring to my “naked” question.
He seemed thoughtful.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the guy really did have some substance. Maybe he was even capable of telling the truth.
“Explain it to me.”
He thought about it. Back to ten years ago, when he had the world on a string.
“Did you ever do any teaching?” he wondered.
“Do I look like I’ve ever done any teaching?”
He thought that over, too.
“When you teach young kids—”
He clarified.
“When you teach young girls, you can’t help certain natural attractions. No normal male could resist some kind of an attraction, some kind of allurement or endearment, to the likes of Nicole and Erica O’Brien. We all know that students have ‘crushes’ on their teachers, well, Mr. Colt, it works the other way too. But I wouldn’t call it a ‘crush’ exactly.”
“What would you call it?”
He shrugged.
“Something like: ‘I wish I was ten years younger.’”
“Did you ever pretend that you were?”
“Never. Not with them, and not with anyone. But I’m not going to stand here and pretend that I wasn’t fascinated by the both of them.”
I looked at him hard.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Why not? I’ve developed an affinity for the truth over the years. So why not tell you? Besides, I had absolutely nothing to do with whatever happened to Nikki. I wished nothing but the very best for both her and her sister.”
“Was there anyone back then who didn’t wish them the very best? Anyone you were suspicious of?”
“I always thought that there was something ‘off’ about their friend, Rita.”
“Rockingham?”
“Yes.”
“In what way?”
He shrugged again.
“I don’t know. Maybe she had a crush on one of them. Maybe both of them. I don’t know.”
That was something I hadn’t considered.
I asked a few more questions, then I shook the guy’s hand. I was hopeful that his new relationship with the truth would be a lasting one.
When I found an empty classroom, I switched on the light and got right to the Nonna’s new report. The one I was waiting for:
William “Bil
ly” Kelly (murderer?):
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
Billy grew up in Packanack Lake, Wayne, New Jersey, raised by his unmarried aunt, Rosaline Kelly. I’m not sure what happened to his parents. After grammar school (get this!), he went to DePaul (just like you and Luca) and played on the football team (running back). You guys missed him by a year. I guess he was a serious student since he got himself into Hopkins before he vanished ten years ago. His Aunt Rosaline is now dead.
Tomorrow, I’ll check with his teachers and get a hold of his DMV photo. Etc.
This is getting intriguing, Jackie. Maybe I’ll come down there with some sunblock and solve this thing, and you can sit here at my desk and look things up and answer the phone.
Love, Nonna
It was intriguing.
Who was this guy?
And where the hell was he?
22
Oceanview Lodge
Friday, March 27th
36°
I like photographs.
Especially the kind you can hold in your hand.
Especially crime-scene photos and crime-related photos.
I was sitting on the couch in O’Brien’s living room, looking at a handful of photos in the second category. Photos of his daughters, photos with their father, photos with their friends.
Mostly pictures of the Bobbseys.
In their twin bassinets, in their matching toddler outfits, in their Holy Communion whites and veils, in an wide assortment of studio model-shots from when they were around ten, each more lovely, more adorable, than the last.
Etc.
In a bunch of the other shots, Ronnie was with them, smiling as always, and I spotted both Rita and Izzy in a few of the others. All pretty young girls, all looking happy to be alive, at the Cape May beach, at the New Jersey shore.
