by Larry Crane
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I wander, but I do still get there.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Dear Hannah, October 3, 1971
You may not be reading this for a long time, Sweetie, when science has improved and it’ll be possible to know a lot of things we don’t know now. That’s comforting, but it’s still never pleasant thinking about doctors poking and probing around, and cutting people open. Scientists try to clear up misconceptions and lies with their instruments and their measurements, and that’s a good thing when they actually measure. But sometimes what a scientist says is based on what they see rather than what they measure, and it becomes a judgment call. And then, scientists become more like umpires. Remember when the umpire called you out at the plate in your softball game against Nadeau’s Floral? You argued that you were safe. But he was the boss, and what he saw was that you were tagged with the ball before your foot touched the plate. It’s not science, so it shouldn’t be so definite, so final, but it was. It could have determined the outcome of the game. Sometimes more than just a game.
Know that I love you and want you home with me more than words can say.
Love, Mom
Chapter 30
Gavin sat dressed in sweats at the wheel of the car in the parking lot in Weehawken. She couldn’t spend the whole day with Smith, or could she? This enterprise of hers is sucking at my last reserves of confidence. She’s grown into the audacity of the whole thing. I could use a shot of that impertinence myself. He saw Marcella in the mirror approaching the car.
“Hey good lookin’,” he said. “See anything different about me? Switched my jogging over here now. Got any carbs in your bag there? I’m loading, Marce. I’m up to eight miles.”
“Well, I have an apple,” Marcella said.
“You’re looking good.” She was looking better than good. She looked lean and fit and confident.
“You’re like a scarecrow,” she said. “You know you are. Are you eating anything at all?”
“Don’t have much time for sitting around in front of the tube any more. Got a hundred things popping. Tomorrow night I finish up my French course. Berlitz. La rue du Louvre est lugubre. It’s all in the lips. It’s for Marie-Galante. It’s an island in the Caribbean. French is their language.”
“There is no place like that. You mean Antigua?”
“Marie-Galante. Listen to this: ‘From the deck of your ketch, you watch a sleek outrigger canoe cut through the crystal-blue water, the sun glinting on the gentle swells and glistening on the muscles of the native oarsman. They are coming to bear you away to your private native bungalow on the beach. Only the friendly shouts of your welcoming party disturb the peace and quiet of the bay.’”
Gavin continued, “I’ve been thinking. I spend too much time doing nothing. Why not study, take some classes and stuff. Learn something. I’ll never write a book or a legal brief. Never know anyone as famous as Bill Buckley. But, who knows? The sky’s the limit. I bought tickets for Miami, Marce. Got a forty-foot sailboat and a crew to sail us to Marie-Galante. You want excitement, I’ll give it to you.”
“What’s the matter with you? We’ve never gone anywhere near the Caribbean. Suddenly, you have the travel bug,” Marcella said.
“We’re both stretched to the breaking point. We need a break.”
“A break. You never take a break. You know I can’t go away. I can’t even think about going away.”
When was the last time we spoke to each other in this frank, uncomplicated way? Somewhere along the line we stuck this filter over the top of what we talk about. ‘Oh my god, we need to be careful what we say lest we trample on some tender toes.’
“Come with me. Lounge on the deck. Dive in bare-ass. Snorkel around so I can ogle your fabulous butt. No golf. No nothing. Very uncomplicated. Tell me what you’re doing now,” he said.
“You know very well what I’m doing. Read tomorrow’s paper and you’ll see my work. It was approved last week. I’ll have one in every Sunday edition until the story gets stale or I do.”
“Wow. What’s it about?” All right, that was a stupid thing to say, he thought. What do you think it’s about? Come on.
“It’s a series. Pithy words on interesting reminders of what the case is all about.”
“The case. Busy girl.”
“I have to go. I have a deadline. I do my work upstairs.”
“Marce, let’s be truthful with each other. We talk all over the place. The truth is that you are fawning over—I’m guessing now—never having heard this from you or anything else on this subject from you on this matter—fawning over this scumbag jailbird so’s he’ll let you into his twisted brain.
“I don’t know for sure exactly what the fawning consists of—not being privy to your comings and goings, even though I am and have been your husband for over twenty years. I’ve never been able to make you trust me enough to risk revealing anything as important as this to me. Leave it to me to come up with my own version of things. You must think I’ll always see you in the most favorable light even with everything that has happened to us.”
Marcella replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Edgar Smith, I guess. I haven’t talked to you about him. But you are as responsible as I am for me going to see him. Maybe you didn’t believe I would actually do it. And now you’re wishing you had never suggested it.”
“The way I see it, you have decided to dissolve our marriage and to hook yourself up to this crazy slimeball jailbird from Trenton State Prison. And I’m the one who said go see him. I didn’t mean move in.”
“I guess I’m sorry,” Marcella said. “We think alike it seems. When you ran off to New York, I figured you had had enough of me. Plain and simple. You know very well that I have no intention of hooking up with Edgar Smith. I never have. But it may be good for us if he believes I do.”
“You think you can scuttle his campaign of lies right under his nose? And by doing that, you resurrect Vickie and accomplish the only positive thing you can for Hannah. It’s a screwy plan, but it may be the only chance we have to make something good happen. So, it’s good. Good, Marce.”
“Thanks for turning my minestrone soup of a plan into something that makes sense to me. I wish I’d thought of it. You’re a good man. A bit of a flake at times. But, a lovely, kind flake of a man. No one but you could have put up with me all these years. I’m sorry, Gavin,” she said.
“Nobody’ll ever know you like I do, certainly not Smith.”
“Nobody.”
“Marce—”
“Good-bye, Gavin.”
“Listen. Who says you have to ever see this jerk-off again?”
“Who? Who says? I do. I do, Gavin.”
Dear Hannah, October 8, 1971
Things are changing so fast, Sweetie. Daddy’s being so much different, giving his thoughts over to things he never seemed to think about before. Anything is possible now, if we just stay on this path. Where are you, honey? Transmit it to me, and I’ll be there, quick as lightning.
You know, when my mother was small, it seemed that girls were expendable. Her father, my grandfather, got to thinking that it would be a good thing to take her to see his mother down in Indiana. His father had died, and his mother was lonely. ‘Why can’t I just take Libby down there and have her stay?’ he thought.
After all, what’s one less girl in our family of eight? So, my mother got shipped off at age four. It happened a lot. She cried all day at first. Then she got used to it. They dressed her up and she was happy down there. I don’t want you to get happy wherever you are. Transmit it to me, baby.
Love, Mom
Chapter 31
She knew it would be warm in Florida but was not prepared for the blast of hot air that crashed against her face as she left the terminal to get a rental car. She took Route 1 south from Orlando and soon was in the midst of older adobe-style buildings, new high-rise beach condominiums, along with palm and mangrove trees. The fres
h smell of the ocean washed over her as she pulled into the parking lot of Donald Hommell’s small condo off of Castaway Boulevard where he lived with his family. He suggested they go to a more private place to talk, and settled on Hummiston Park. They sat on the concrete bench beside the walkway and stared out across a wide expanse of white sand to the ocean.
When Brett and Celia were in high school and Hannah was a toddler, Gavin’s parents invited them down to Daytona Shores where they had just acquired a condo on about the fifteenth floor of one of those high rises. The air was so much different from back in Naperville. It all came back to her. That warm, moist breeze rising off the ocean. She saw the kids in their swimsuits in the elevator, Hannah clinging to Celia’s hand, and holding a sand bucket in the other. She was giggling and sparkling, her blonde hair falling down over her forehead in ringlets, the blush of sunburn just under her brown eyes. Marcella wanted to cry.
“Did you ever consider Edgar Smith a friend?” she asked Hommell.
“A friend? He only made friends with people who sucked up to him,” he replied. “We both hung out at Tony’s. So, I saw a lot of him. He was the king of bullshit. Everything he said was designed to show how much smarter he was than everyone else. I contradicted everything he said just to argue. A friend to me? No.”
“You were something of a smartass yourself.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Yes you were. You knew he borrowed your friend Gilroy’s car, a Mercury. You all had been gabbing about this shocking murder the previous night. You volunteer to give Smith and his wife and child a ride home in your car, and then you go and needle him with that remark about the cops tracing every Merc in the county. If it was meant as a joke, it wasn’t very funny.”
“Okay. You’re right. It wasn’t funny at all. It was mean, but not low-down mean. I was just playing around. It’s crazy, but I guess the high-and-mighty are good targets if you like knocking people off their pedestal.”
“You had no inkling that he was involved in the murder in any way at that point,” she said.
“All of us in the Tony’s Amoco crowd were thinking it had to be some vicious creep who was long gone to Canada or someplace by then. I was kidding around.”
“But then he got that look on his face when you said that about the cops. Did that get you thinking?”
“The murder was the biggest thing that ever hit the town. Everyone was buzzing about it. We all knew Vickie. Not in a bad way. A ton of people had seen me hanging out with her at Robbie’s Corral and Pellington’s, real teenybopper haunts. I was petrified at the thought of the cops picking me up for questioning, but I knew it had to happen if they were looking for suspects. The news was like a cold bucket of water in the face. I couldn’t get over that she had been lying out dead on the ground all night, cold as a mackerel. I had to go into this wiseass mode to gloss over how shook up I was. But, the idea that he killed her was the furthest thing from my mind. Even after I said that.”
Hommell stood up and went to the fence that lined the walkway above the beach. He leaned and put his elbows on the top rail. Marcella sat where she was. He had her sympathy. The murder had pretty much ruined his life for years afterward. People in town looked at him as if he had something to do with it even though he didn’t. In a way, it was a little like getting knocked off your own pedestal. Finally, he just had to get out of there and start over. She imagined that he regretted ever getting involved with the bunch of lunatics that hung out at Tony’s Amoco. She joined him at the fence.
“We don’t have to talk about this anymore if you don’t want to,” she said.
He looked her in the face and said: “I want to let somebody know the truth about me. Maybe you’re the one. I don’t ever want to bring it up again with my wife because I think it’ll just work away in the back of her mind—plant a kernel of doubt that could pop up at the worst time. It’s all buried between us now, and that’s how I want it. But it still helps to get it all out with someone.”
“So, the two of you never talk about it?”
“Never. Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t have more curiosity about it. If our places were reversed, I think I’d want to know every detail. I gave her the sketchiest glimpse of the whole thing just once. She locked it away in some secret vault of her own that she prefers to ignore.”
“Do you ever think that she’s not really ignoring it—that she’s thinking a lot about it late at night when she’s lying beside you in bed and you’re snoring away? Do you ever think she’s creating her own version that is inaccurate or just plain wrong, and that someday this wrong version of the truth is going to come back and bite you?”
“Of course. Some people can’t put up with something like that gnawing away in the back of their skull. That’s me,” Hommell said.
“Why don’t you just open it up again and tell it all from beginning to end. You’d know then at least that she didn’t have to wonder about anything or invent scenarios?”
“Why don’t you?” Hommell asked.
“I don’t know. If the details are so dangerous that they can’t be talked about, I don’t want to be the one to let the tiger out of its cage. Let’s talk about the lipstick thing,” she said.
“Yeah, that was so small, so nothing at the time, and then it gets blown all out of proportion.”
“What was it, either Smith or his wife spots this tube of lipstick on the floor of the car? You’re all in there together. One or the other of them says: ‘it’s probably Vickie’s.’”
“Yeah, and I flip it out the window.”
“Was that Smith getting your goat?”
“I never thought about it that way, but maybe it was. We were all just gabbing about it—that she was not just dead—but murdered. It was ghoulish humor, I guess.”
He visibly shrunk a little and looked away. He plucked a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, turned away from the sea breeze, and lit up. He sucked in hard on the cigarette, then blew the smoke into the air where the wind carried it off. At the trial, Selser had made a big deal of the lipstick episode.
Marcella watched Hommell. Fourteen years later, he seemed nervous just talking about it. As cool as this group of semi-friends were, they had to be feeling something far removed from joking around about a tube of lipstick. What if it were Vickie’s? It would be more than just a little incriminating. The police would certainly be interested. Yet, they passed it off as nothing of any importance. Well, not really. It came up again in the trial and not by accident. Somebody told the defense counsel all about it.
“You had gone out with Vickie a fair amount. They said she was your girlfriend.”
“I gave her a ride a lot. We lived in the same section of town. I don’t know what the hell I was doing there, for chrissakes—nothing but a bunch of kids goofing off. But, there I was, hanging out with high school kids.”
Here on the beach, it occurs to him how odd it is for old guys, ex-sailors and Marines, to be so involved with high school sophomore girls. The truth is—it’s the best he could do. Just say it—straight out in plain English—in ten words or less. ‘It’s the best I could do.’ The implication is that he’s no better than the worst of them. No better than Smith? If he had seen Vickie walking that night, would he have picked her up—driven her to the sandpit? Well, he didn’t and he didn’t. But that wasn’t enough. He never wanted people to even think for a second that he might have done that.
It’s understandable. What’s the worst belief someone could have about me? Marcella thought. That I’ve left Hannah behind, replaced her—that I go around like I do—martyr to my lost child—because it makes me feel better? Nobody is coarse enough to actually say that out loud, but a voice in my head does—and it’s a lie.
“Did you have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“Actually, no,” he said. “Why would I need a girlfriend? I had a bunch of buddies to play ball with.” With that, he shook his head, and sat on the back of the bench with his feet on the seat.
; “What did Edgar need from Vickie?” she asked.
“I don’t think he thought about it. I think he got going down a road and couldn’t turn around.”
“Have you ever thought how different it all would have turned out with a few minutes displaced one way or the other?” she asked.
“Don’t even go there,” he said. “It’s a bottomless pit of what-ifs.”
She felt like kicking off her shoes and taking a walk along the shore. The waves were small—just lapping at the sodden sand. But, it would give him a false message that neither of them needed. The conversation had descended into a recitation of all the regrets that surrounded the events he would never be free of.
“Why did he pick her up? He could have just gone on home to his wife, a couple of minutes away,” she said.
“Eddie had a way of making situations work for him,” Hommell said. “I’d given her a ride a couple times when I saw her walking home like that. She knew him. She knew me. She trusted both of us as friends who were not out to take advantage. He used that.”
“Did getting in the car do something for her?”
“Give her confidence a boost, you mean?”
“Yes, something like that,” she said. “Like, ‘look at this, he’s stopping for me.’”
“She may have needed a little of that,” he said.
“All that—all that neediness he saw and knew he could use was the reason to stop for her. Wasn’t it?”
“I think so. The son of a bitch.”
“You liked her.”
“Vickie was a nice kid,” he said. “That’s all. Just a nice kid.”
“Selser called you a psychopath. It caused a hullabaloo in the courtroom. Was it your father who called out from the back of the courtroom? Something like: ‘I don’t want him calling my son a psycho!’”
“It was very intense in there. I was scared. Smith laid it in my lap, all of it lies. But, there was this world of people who didn’t want to hear alibis and excuses. They were literally clawing for justice. It was unreal. I just wanted to get out before they dragged me out to the street and hung me from the nearest tree for nothing more than being a part of the story.”