by P J Parrish
Joyce’s pale blue eyes grew distant. “It was April 9th. And it was hot and sticky, like summer was coming early that year. All the kids were out cruising. We were very busy, I remember.”
“Do you recall anything out of the ordinary?”
Joyce shook her head. “Kitty punched out at eleven, just like always. I waved to her as she walked toward the bus stop. She turned and waved back. That’s the last time I saw her.”
“She didn’t leave with anyone?”
Joyce shook her head slowly.
Louis pulled up a stool and sat down opposite the swivel chair. “How long did you know Kitty?” he asked.
Joyce was staring at something on the opposite wall. Louis followed her gaze, but all he saw was a bunch of tools hanging on a pegboard.
“Mrs. Novick?”
She looked back at him.
“How long did you know Kitty?”
“We met in sixth grade. I remember the first time I saw her.” For the first time, Joyce smiled. It transformed her, made her look younger. “Kitty was in the girl’s john ratting her hair and making spit curls. I was in awe of her. None of the other girls ratted their hair in sixth grade.”
“That’s when you became friends?” Louis prodded.
“Yeah, I lived a couple doors down so we walked to school together, slept over at each other’s houses. We were like sisters.”
She smiled as another memory came to her. “When we were thirteen, Kitty came up with this big plan to run away to London, because she was in love with Paul McCartney and I was in love with George. But she decided she couldn’t leave her father. We used to talk with English accents and make up false identities. Kitty wanted to be called Lady Kitrina Jaspers. I was Lady Joy Heartsfield. Joy . . . Kitty came up with that for me.”
Joyce’s smile lingered; she was still lost in the past. Louis waited, not wanting to interrupt.
“What was Kitty like?” Louis asked finally.
Joyce blinked, coming back. “Like? Oh, geez, she . . .” She shook her head, like she didn’t know how to answer.
“She loved to swim, especially at night,” Joyce said. “Once, when we were in eighth grade, she made me sneak out of the house and we rode our bikes over to the municipal pool. It was closed, but Kitty just climbed the fence. I was so scared we’d get caught. But Kitty wasn’t. I can still see her laughing and jumping off the high-dive board.”
Louis had a vision of the two girls giggling in the moonlit water.
“Kitty wasn’t afraid of anything,” Joyce went on. “But I was. That night at the pool, I was afraid to jump off the high board so I kind of scooted down and hung from it. I was hanging there, scared stiff and she was yelling up at me, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid, Joyce, just let go!’ ”
Joyce fell silent. The only sound was the wheeze of the air conditioner and the steady hum of the hair dryer.
“I never figured out what she saw in me,” she said. “She was so pretty and I was, well, I was kinda plain and a little chubby.” Joyce blushed slightly. “I figured I could just get her rejects.”
“Her father told me Kitty didn’t date.”
“That’s right,” Joyce said, nodding. “I haven’t seen Mr. Jagger since—” She hesitated. “I was going to say since the funeral, but he didn’t come. He spent a fortune on the coffin, mahogany with these beautiful brass handles. But then he was so upset, he couldn’t even come to see her.”
She looked at Louis. “How is he doing?”
Louis thought a moment before he answered. “Still confused.”
Joyce nodded slowly. “I should go see him. I always meant to afterward, but I got pregnant with Sean and we moved out here. Twenty years . . . goes by before you know it.”
Louis thought of Mobley’s words about the greasers, the “wild crowd” girls: They got pregnant.
Joyce glanced over at the girl under the dryer. “Excuse me a moment.” She went over, checked the dryer and came back.
Louis wasn’t sure how to phrase the question that was in his head. “Ray told me boys tried to come on to Kitty all the time. You never saw her go with anyone?”
“Ray would drive her home once in a while, but she never went with anyone else.”
“Was there any boy who was more aggressive than others?”
Joyce frowned. “Well, they all flirted with her, especially the football players. They’d cruise in after a game in their cool cars, all puffed up with themselves. Lonnie Albertson, Jeff, Tony Cipolli, Lance . . .”
“Lance Mobley?” Louis asked. “Did Mobley come on to her?”
“Lance came on to to anything that breathed, even me once. I think he thought we were easy, you know, because we were from Edgewood.” Joyce’s eyes grew distant. “Lance Mobley . . . he was a good-looking boy. He’s sheriff now, isn’t he? I guess he did all right for himself.”
“Did any of these boys get angry when she rejected them?”
Joyce shook her head. Louis could tell she was miles—and decades—away from the dingy garage.
“Ray told me Kitty was saving herself for a rich guy,” Louis said. “So Kitty was . . .” He wasn’t sure how to make this sound anything but judgmental.
Joyce looked up abruptly. “Kitty was smart, she could’ve gone to college if she had some money. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
“So she wanted someone to take care of her,” Louis said.
“Don’t we all,” Joyce said softly.
She noticed Louis writing in his notebook. “Look, Kitty wasn’t a gold digger. She just wanted nice things. She wanted to go live in England someday, meet a guy with manners, like James Bond or something.”
Louis remembered the poster of Goldfinger on Kitty’s bedroom wall.
“Tell me more about Ray,” he said.
Joyce let out a sigh. “Poor Ray. He had such a crush on Kitty. It was kind of pathetic. We were mean to him. We teased him behind his back.” She hesitated. “I remember one of the other girls told us he copped a feel behind the grill. She was afraid to tell his Dad because she thought she’d get fired.”
She looked up at Louis. “Why are you asking me all these questions about Ray?”
Louis debated how much to tell her. “You said Ray had a crush on her. It might be helpful to me to know about anyone like that.”
“But why now? What’s the point? Kitty’s dead. Why are you bothering with this now?”
She was looking at him strangely, like she suddenly could read his mind, or like he was some weird voyeur, like poor old Ray Faulk.
“It might have some bearing on Jack Cade’s present case,” he said.
She stiffened at the name and something flashed over her face, like she had remembered something she had tried very hard to forget.
“I saw him once,” she said softly.
“Cade?”
Joyce nodded. Her eyes went to the girl who was sitting under the dryer, absorbed in her Cosmopolitan.
“When I was walking to school,” she said. “I was walking past this house, one of those pretty places over near the park.” She stopped, her eyes downcast. She was playing with the brush, rubbing the bristles over the palm of her hand.
“Was Kitty with you?”
Joyce nodded. “His truck was at the curb, an old beat-up red Ford with that landscaping sign on the door. He was pushing a lawn mower and he saw us walk by on the sidewalk.”
She stopped again. The air conditioner droned on.
“I looked up,” she said, “and I saw him watching us.”
She was gripping the brush, pushing the bristles into her palm. “He looked at me and . . . he touched himself.”
Louis looked up from his notebook. Her head was still down, the brush gripped in her hand. When she finally raised her head, her eyes were bright, her face red.
“Did Kitty see him, too?”
Joyce shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t say anything to her. It was too . . .” She hesitated. “I thought about it later, afte
r . . .” Her voice trailed off again.
There had been no mention of this in Ahnert’s report of his interview with Joyce. “You didn’t tell the police,” Louis said.
She shook her head slowly. “A detective came and talked to me, but I didn’t think about it until later, when I saw Jack Cade on television after he had been arrested.”
Louis’s pen was poised over the notebook as he looked at her stricken face.
“I never told anyone. I guess I was embarrassed,” Joyce said. “I should have, but I never did.”
“Mrs. Novick?”
They both turned to look at the girl, who had ducked out from under the dryer. “I’m done, I think, Mrs. Novick.”
Joyce looked at Louis, then got up to rescue her young customer. When the girl was sitting back in the swivel chair, Joyce turned back to Louis.
“I’ve got to finish this,” she said. “I got another one coming in five minutes. Winter Fest dance tonight at the high school. Big event.” She looked wistfully at the girl in the mirror.
Louis rose, putting his notebook away. She followed him out and stood by the door.
“Thank you for your time,” Louis said.
“Are you talking to others?” she asked.
“Others?”
“From the school or the drive-in, I mean.”
“Should I?”
She was chewing on her bottom lip. “What you said about Ray, about him having a crush on Kitty . . .”
“Go on.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “It made me remember Ronnie Cade.”
Louis felt something in his chest, like a sudden extra heartbeat.
“Ronnie used to come to the drive-in a lot in that old red truck,” Joyce said. “The guys laughed at him because the truck had that landscaping sign on it and dirt and bags of fertilizer and things in the back. Ronnie always smelled like that truck.”
“Did Kitty laugh at him?” Louis asked.
“No. But I remember he used to watch her and sometimes he used to stick around when we were closing and ask her to go for a ride.” Joyce’s eyes were steady on his. “Kitty turned him down.”
“Was he at the drive-in the night Kitty disappeared?”
“I don’t remember,” Joyce said. “It was awful busy that night.”
She was standing there, arms folded over her chest, staring at something off in the distance.
“Mrs. Novick!” The girl with the rollers in her hair was calling.
Joyce looked back at her. “They don’t know,” she said softly. “They don’t know how fast it all can change. One minute you’re singing along to the radio, then something happens and your whole life spins off in a different direction.”
Her eyes welled. “One minute you’re fifteen, the next minute your life is over. You know what I mean?”
But Louis didn’t hear her. His mind was racing, thinking about Ronnie Cade, Jack Cade and the broken connections between fathers and sons.
“I have to go,” he said quickly, starting away. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Novick.”
“It’s Joy,” she said.
But Louis was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
He drove like a madman, the Mustang racing as fast as his brain. He saw it now, saw it clearly. He saw the answer to the question that had gnawed at him from the first day he met Jack Cade.
Why did you take that plea bargain?
I figured it was the better deal. Blood is thicker than water, man.
The scrub land bordering the highway sped by in a blur. The drive from Immokalee back to Fort Myers would take about an hour. Too much time to think, too much time for his anger to boil.
God damn Ronnie Cade.
He had lied. Worse, he had run his own little con game. Conning him with that I lost my father for twenty years shit, conning him into believing his life was ruined because his father went to prison. His life had been saved, for chrissake.
Blood is thicker than water. Damn right it was, in ways that Ronnie Cade couldn’t begin to understand.
He cut across downtown and picked up 41 North. He was thinking about Joyce and Kitty swimming in the moonlight, thinking about how both their lives had ended twenty years ago, thinking about the man who in one instant, had changed everything for them.
It was near three by the time he made his way across the causeway to Sereno Key. He was trying to figure out how to approach this. He told himself to do it like a cop, put Ronnie on the defensive, confront him with evidence, play head games with him and get him to say something incriminating.
But he wasn’t a cop. And maybe for once that was good. He didn’t have to worry about privilege and Miranda. And the more he thought about Kitty and Ronnie, and the twisted branches of the Cade family tree, the more he was ready to throw procedure out the window and just beat the shit out of the pathetic asshole.
The sun was low in the sky when he pulled into J.C. Landscaping.
Louis shoved the Mustang into park and got out, looking around. The yard was deserted, the still, humid air heavy with the stink of fertilizer.
“Ronnie Cade!” Louis shouted.
Eric came around the back of the trailer.
“Eric! Where’s your father?”
“Around back.”
Louis started around the shed. Jack and Ronnie were working with potted palms, lifting them from small black pots into larger ones. Both were shirtless, their skin brown and wet. Ronnie looked at him, his hair matted against his forehead, his face smudged with dirt.
Louis was staring at both of them. Ronnie must have seen something in his face because he stepped toward him slowly, pulling off his gloves.
“You’ve found out something,” Ronnie said.
“I sure did,” Louis said.
Jack Cade reached in his back pocket for a cigarette. He watched Louis while he lit it, cupping his hand around it. “So say it,” he said.
Louis glanced at Eric, who was standing there, staring at all of them.
“Tell him to go inside,” Louis said.
Eric looked at Ronnie and Ronnie motioned toward the trailer. Louis waited until Eric was gone before he turned to Ronnie.
“Ever since I met your father,” Louis said, “I wondered about two things. Why he didn’t want to talk about Kitty Jagger and why he took the plea bargain if he didn’t kill her.”
Louis glanced at Cade. He hadn’t moved a muscle. “You want to tell him, Cade, or do you want me to?”
“I told you to leave it alone,” Cade said softly.
Ronnie moved toward his father. “What’s this all about?”
“He was protecting you, Ronnie,” Louis said.
“What?”
“Shut up, Kincaid,” Cade hissed.
Louis shook his head. “No, I’m not going to shut up.” He turned to Ronnie.
“You want to tell me what happened that night, Ronnie?”
“What night?”
“April 9, 1966. The night you asked Kitty to take a ride with you.”
Ronnie took a step backward. “What?”
“You cruised the drive-in with your father’s truck. You asked Kitty to take a ride with you. What did she say to you, Ronnie, when she turned you down. What did she say that made you snap?”
Ronnie was shaking, looking back and forth between Louis and his father. “I—”
Louis looked at Jack Cade. “You knew all about this, didn’t you? That’s why you took the goddamn plea, to protect him.”
Cade didn’t answer.
“Blood is thicker than water, that’s what you said,” Louis said. “You knew they could trace the semen sample to Ronnie if they looked. You knew it and you did it to protect him.”
“What is he talking about?” Ronnie said, his eyes frantic. “Dad, what the fuck is he talking about?”
Cade looked away.
“Dad?”
Louis hit Cade’s shoulder, spinning him around. “What happened, Cade?” Louis pressed. “What did Du
vall have on Ronnie?”
“I don’t know, he never said,” Cade said, his voice flat. “He just said that if I didn’t plead he’d offer up another suspect that had the same opportunity and same access to the truck and to the garden tool.”
“Jesus,” Ronnie said in a strangled voice. He turned away, hands over his face.
“What was I supposed to do, Ronnie?” Cade shouted. “What was I supposed to do? I found those panties in the truck! I knew you took it out to the drive-in the night before! I mean, what was I supposed to think? You never brought home any girls. You never even seemed interested in pussy! Christ, I figured you were a fucking virgin or something worse!”
Cade took a deep breath, but he didn’t even see the stricken look on his son’s face.
“And then I see on TV about the dead girl. What the fuck was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to think?!” Cade yelled.
“You should have asked me! Why didn’t you just ask me?” Ronnie yelled back.
“Fuck . . .” Cade jerked out of Louis’s grip.
“I didn’t kill her!” Ronnie shouted. “She was never in the truck! I swear! Why didn’t you just ask me?!”
Cade spun back to face Ronnie. “Because you’re my son! You hear me, you’re my son.” He stabbed a finger at his own chest. “Jack Cade’s son! You get it?”
Ronnie just stared at him.
“You got my blood in you,” Cade said.
Ronnie’s eyes darkened. His hands curled into fists at his sides.
“You want to hit me,” Cade said softly.
“That’s enough,” Louis said.
“Stay out of this, Kincaid,” Cade said. He took a step toward Ronnie. “You want to hit me. Go ahead.”
Ronnie’s eyes suddenly welled. “Twenty years,” he said. “Twenty years I’ve been living in your stink because I thought you killed Kitty. And now you tell me you did it for me?”
“We’ve both been living in it, son,” Cade said.
“Don’t call me that!” Ronnie shouted.
Suddenly, Ronnie’s fist shot out. Cade dodged and it clipped his chin. Lightening quick, Cade’s hand came up and smacked Ronnie hard on the face, sending him falling back against the shed.
“Stop!” Louis shouted, jumping in front of Cade. Cade was breathing hard, staring down at Ronnie. Ronnie was just lying there, holding his bleeding lip.