“Maybe they were from Fort Campbell,” Lyle said. “Don’t you get a lot of traffic from the base?”
“Yeah, but—” The bartender shrugged.
“Didn’t seem the type?” Tony said.
The bartender nodded.
Tony and Lyle parted ways back at the sheriff’s office at a little after eleven. Lyle promised that he would send a deputy by Nancy’s and the Salamander on a regular basis to check for the persons of interest, and Tony told him that he’d bring a sheath of flyers over: both the MISSING poster he and Susanna had already distributed around town and a poster with the sketch of the man whom, far as Tony could tell, Ronnie had last been seen with.
“What are you thinking, Mr. Joyce?” Lyle said finally. He was standing behind the open door of his cruiser, getting ready to climb in and drive home for the night, and the security light shining from the front of the office made his head of thick white hair glow. “Are you hopeful?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I think I have to be until I can’t be any longer.”
Lyle nodded and patted the roof of his car in a final way. “Well, let me know how I can help. I hope you got something you can use tonight.”
“I did,” Tony said. “I definitely did.”
The night was clear and cold, invigorating, and the air tasted of car exhaust and gravel dust. The Darvocet had worn off long ago, and the pain in his back had returned, but it was a clarifying pain, the kind that brightened lights and darkened shadows and sharpened the edges of everything. Tony started back to Roma feeling the kind of excitement he remembered best from his walks to home plate, the bat a pleasant, swinging weight bumping against his calf. He imagined how he would explain to Susanna the information he had gathered and the next steps he would have to take with it, and it was as if he were digging his cleat into the dirt, eyeing the pitcher, calculating the release of the ball and the way he would have to adjust his stance to meet it. His detective’s instincts weren’t yet as honed as that, and perhaps they never would be, but he had the sense that he had gathered all of the information he needed to take the next step, and the next, and the answers now were not just close but inevitable.
Chapter Sixteen
1.
The address Susanna had given him was in Glendale, a subdivision on the west side of town. In Tony’s childhood, it had been one of the newer, nicer developments, the kids who lived there all white and comfortably middle-class. Now, barely twenty years later, it was already on the decline. You could get more bedrooms and bigger garages out in the country, two-story family rooms with grand fireplaces, chandeliers. You could live on a cul-de-sac, on a “lane” or a “way” or a “boulevard” instead of a street. It was funny, driving now through Glendale, to imagine the time when this was close to the best Roma had to offer an average family. Tony remembered those rare days when he went home after school with a white friend, the little thrill of pride he’d felt at boarding Bus 10 instead of Bus 4, which went through the part of town that everyone thought of as the Black Bottoms. He remembered disembodied details from various visits, various houses: a basement rec room, a tree house with solid plank floors. Satellite television. A refrigerator stocked with Coca-Colas instead of a rinsed-out milk jug full of Kool-Aid. He remembered that Stephen Wilkerson had a color TV in his bedroom bigger and newer than the one that Tony and his family gathered around in their living room each night, and he remembered that Stephen’s mother would bring them popcorn in individual bowls while they played Atari. It had been a strange and wonderful treat in those days before microwave ovens: his own little bowl, his own drizzle of melted butter in zigs and zags across the top, and a bottle of soda to wash it down.
Susanna’s house might have been any one of those homes from his classmates’ childhoods. It was a single-story, sturdy redbrick ranch, saved from utter plainness by a small front porch with wrought-iron supports and a wrought-iron railing. Shrubbery, shorn squat and fat, made a procession across the length of the house, and the window boxes still held the skeletal remains of fall mums. Tony turned off the engine and popped the glove box. His back was a misery again. He uncapped the bottle of Darvocet and dry-swallowed two. A light came on at the front porch and the door opened.
A shadow figure waved. He waved back.
He could almost feel angry, looking at this house, though it was a house he could himself afford now—he’d scanned the real estate listings in this neighborhood just a couple of weeks ago. He could feel angry about those nervous bus rides spent trying to hide his off-brand backpack between his legs, about his pathetic gratitude to have been invited, if only for a short time, into a white world. He could be angry at himself for his appreciation of Mrs. Wilkerson’s beauty, of how nice she always was to him, and how he had believed then, without a trace of guilt, that his life would be so much better if only he had a slim, yellow-haired mother who would serve him popcorn in a bowl, on a tray. A mother who stayed home and kept the house tidy, a father who went to work in a button-down shirt and tie, a light-filled house with waxed hardwood and linoleum floors. He could feel angry, but the Darvocet was already leveling him, and when he emerged from the car and scaled the porch’s front steps, the expression of pleasure on Susanna’s face was so genuine that he forgot for a moment the reason for his visit, much less those long-ago grievances.
“Are you sure it isn’t too late to stop by?” he asked. “I don’t want to disturb your family.”
“Of course not, come in,” she said, waving him forward. The house was very warm, and he let her help him out of his coat. “Dale’s in Louisville overnight for the state finals, and I went ahead and left Abby at my mother’s because I wasn’t sure when to expect you.” She motioned for him to take a seat on the sofa. “Can I get you something to drink?” She blushed. “I’m going to have a glass of wine myself.”
“Just water would be fine.”
She nodded quickly and went to the kitchen. The house was smaller than he remembered these houses being. Shabbier. There was a toy trunk propped against the wall, filled so far past the brim that the lid wouldn’t close. A doll wearing a shirt but no pants was lying on the floor by Tony’s feet. Its skin was bright pink, blond hair cut unevenly into a bubble, and its eyes, the kind that were supposed to close when it was reclined, were half-open. Tony nudged it onto its stomach with his toe.
“Ice?” Susanna called from the kitchen. He could hear the refrigerator door opening and closing.
“No, thank you,” he called back.
“Are you hungry? I was worried that you might just work through supper.”
“No, thank you,” he said again, though he thought about popcorn. “I managed to sneak in a bite at the dance hall.”
She returned with two glasses—his filled to the brim with water, hers with white wine. She handed him his drink and settled back into a rocker-recliner, tucking her bare feet under her hip. The bare feet were a surprise. An intimacy. He saw that she was dressed comfortably but neatly in fitted blue jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, her long hair carefully brushed and arranged around her shoulders. She had wanted to look nice for him, he realized. The hand bringing the glass of wine to her lips, which were shiny with gloss, was trembling slightly.
“What did you hear?” she said. Her voice was clear and just slightly too loud, the words carefully enunciated. She had, he suspected, started on her bottle of wine before his arrival.
Tony walked her through what his investigation had turned up that night—the fight at the Salamander, Ronnie’s appearance later in the evening at Nancy’s. He took out his notebook and showed Susanna the updated sketch of the man from the Fill-Up. “The bartender was more confident in her description than Mrs. Williams was, and they agreed on several of the particulars. So if you still want to post this drawing up around town tomorrow, I can do it. I’m not convinced it’s the right thing to do, but I’m willing.”
Susanna held the notebook and stared at the image for a long time. “I want to,” sh
e said softly.
“You need to remember that I’m not a trained sketch artist. This might turn out to be completely off base.”
“I have a feeling about it,” she said. She tapped the drawing with her fingernail. “This man is out there. He knows something.”
“Then we’ll use it,” Tony said. He felt, despite himself, a nervous thrill at the thought. This was the boldest action that he had taken in his position as Roma’s detective. He had not, so far, ever even unsheathed his weapon.
She closed the notebook and pressed her palm against the cover, as if keeping the man in it contained. “What happens next?”
“Tomorrow I start making some phone calls. I need to track down that Sonny guy from Fort Campbell, the one she smacked.”
“Even though she was seen with this other guy after him?”
“Yes,” Tony said. “She could have gone to Sonny sometime after that, or the witnesses might not have the timeline exactly right. It would be awfully coincidental if the fight at the Salamander had nothing to do with her disappearance.”
“Maybe she was embarrassed,” Susanna said. “She has a lot of pride. If she felt humiliated, she might have run off.” She gulped her wine. “She has a melodramatic streak.”
“All the more reason to find Sonny Ferrell. Maybe she’s been in touch with him.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “What else?”
“Then I work on finding that guy.” Tony pointed to the notebook. “I think I’ll start by making a list of all of the factories in the area and cold-calling, see if I can’t turn up some information on this Sam guy and the group he came with. It might be a dead end, but it’s something to do.”
“And can I help?”
“You can hang posters,” he said. “I’ll put them together first thing tomorrow and bring a stack by here.”
“Tony, thank you.” She handed the notebook back to him. “Thank you for taking this seriously.”
“I don’t know what kind of man I’d be if I didn’t.”
The corner of her mouth twisted. “I do.”
Tony slurped back some of the water she’d brought him.
“Do you remember that drawing you made of me?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“I still have it,” she said. “Well, my husband does. He framed it and hung it in his office at the high school. I see it whenever I go by there.”
“It seems like a long time ago,” Tony said. It occurred to him that she had still been mostly a child then: narrow and petite with a round face, an almost birdlike quality to her wide-set eyes and heart-shaped face. Now she, like himself, was out of her brightest youth—face leaner, little creases around her eyes, thickness in the chest and hips where once there’d been none. The tiniest threads of gray in her dark hair. He had noticed them earlier in the bright sunlight, had thought to himself that another kind of woman would have plucked them. Maybe she believed, like Tony’s mother, that two gray hairs would grow in their place.
“You asked me out,” she said.
He smiled to mask his discomfort. “And you shot me down.”
She nodded hard, inhaling, and Tony wondered if she was on the edge of crying. “I was stupid,” she said in a rush. “I was—well, you know how it was then. I was a coward, Tony, and I’ve always regretted it.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said carefully. He watched as she swallowed the last of her wine, as if for courage. His arms and thighs were prickling with something that was perhaps arousal, because he could feel where this was heading, could see what Susanna meant to do. But maybe it was also simply awareness: of the wine and her bare feet, the absent husband and daughter, the dreary comforts of her home. An awareness that Susanna could never share or even understand, of his blackness and her whiteness, his presence in another man’s house with another man’s wife, an offense that he could have been killed for in the not-so-distant past, that could hurt him in ways he couldn’t quite calculate in the here and now. If he were to run for sheriff, say. Yet she was thinking only of herself, of her bad choices, of the roads that had led her back to Roma. He thought, perhaps cruelly, hardly consciously, that she was like this house—once so coveted, so beyond his reach, and now, in the earliest stages of her declination, on offer. Did he want her just because he could have her? Was that all it was?
If he had wanted to hurt her—or maybe himself—he would have asked her what became of that drawing she’d done of him. He wondered if she even knew. If she realized it mattered. But instead, when she leaned toward him, determined to take the chance she had once denied herself, he met her halfway and put his hands on her jaw the way that he knew women liked, the way that made a kiss seem like an act of love instead of lust. He didn’t know what he felt. It might have been love or it might have been anger, and the Darvocet dulled him so that he couldn’t track where one emotion left off and the other began. Her mouth tasted like the sour wine.
Chapter Seventeen
1.
On Sunday morning, when she normally would have been driving with Dale and Abby to church, Susanna was heading to her mother’s place to pick up Abby. It was cold but achingly bright, and the sunlight through the windshield was almost hot on Susanna’s nose and cheeks. She felt energized, a little jittery, like she could lace up her old sneakers and sprint around the block a few times or jump double Dutch, which she’d never had the speed or grace for as a girl. An image popped into her mind, absurd: Abby at one end of the ropes’ handles, Ronnie on the other, Susanna in the middle, legs pistoning, soles of her shoes smacking cement. All of the songs they had sung then were about babies. Fudge, fudge, call the judge. Mama’s gonna have a newborn baby. Wrap it up in tissue paper, send it down the elevator. And then the chant, everyone’s emotions intensifying as the stakes climbed: boy, girl, twins, triplets. Girl was better than boy, and triplets were best of all. Susanna had never gotten farther than “paper,” but Ronnie, when she still deigned to do it (and by the age of ten, she no longer did), was a jump-roping whiz, and her friends’ arms usually gave out before she did.
Susanna’s mother still lived in the house where Susanna grew up, a subdivision over past Harper Hill. It was a ranch house with a gable roof and a picture window; a fine crack, running diagonally across the window, had been held together for years with three bands of electrical tape. The shell of the house was brick, a yellowish color that Susanna’s father had called Piss Poor when he was still alive to complain. That was the home’s most decadent touch. There was an oil-stained carport—empty now, because Susanna’s mother didn’t drive. This was the reason Susanna depended on her mother to keep Abby only when she was in a tight spot or in situations when Susanna knew she could come over at a moment’s notice.
She pulled into the carport, turned off the engine. She looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and put the backs of her hands up against her pink cheeks to cool them. She had been waiting all morning to feel guilty, to feel sad, to feel like a bad person, but there was only this energy, vibrating so strongly through her that her leg kept jogging. Sitting under the roof of her mother’s carport, pulling her handbag out from the backseat, she thought suddenly of that first kiss of the previous night, Tony’s hands on her jaw and his thumb grazing her pearl earring, the coarse brush of his goatee on her chin. There had been the slightest bitter edge to the taste of his tongue, as if he had swallowed an aspirin, but it wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, and it was just the sort of detail that made the kiss real for her now, the kiss and what followed. Clutching her purse, she needled herself, put things in the worst possible light, allowed for no mercy: I’m picking up my daughter and thinking about the man I cheated on her father with. I betrayed the father of my child. I betrayed Dale. But she couldn’t make herself feel sorry, truly sorry in her heart. At the very least, she needed to stay smart and stop getting lost in her thoughts like this, as her eighteen-year-old self, drunk on first love, had done. If she couldn’t be sorry, she could be smart.
She
went in through the side door without knocking. “I’m here,” she called. She passed through the kitchen to the living room, where she found her mother and Abby in her mother’s big recliner, a blanket spread across both their laps. Abby, watching some kind of Japanese cartoon, waved absently. She was still in her pajamas. Susanna’s mother blinked as if she might have been sleeping.
“Morning, sweet pea,” her mother said. Susanna bent down to kiss her cheek, then grasped Abby’s chin and turned her daughter’s face away from the screen. Abby’s eyes pulled to the right, to the sight of some kind of warrior transforming into a dragon.
“I’m going to smooch on you,” Susanna said, and Abby giggled in a polite but distracted way. Well, Susanna could understand distraction. This morning more than most.
“Thanks for keeping her all night,” Susanna said. “It was a big help. We were able to get the drawing up all over town this morning.”
“Did you bring one for me to see?”
“Yeah.” Susanna pulled a folded-up sheet of paper from her purse and spread it smooth on the arm of the recliner. Her mother put on her glasses and peered at it around Abby’s shoulder.
“He looks practically my age,” she said. “Lord, Lord. I don’t know about that girl.”
Susanna, hunched down beside the chair, shifted uncomfortably. “Tony turned up a lot of information last night. A bartender at Nancy’s said that the guy”—she tapped her finger on the drawing—“was in really bad shape. Some people he came with pranked him and left the bill, and then they split on him. It sounds like Ronnie was trying to help him out.” She didn’t see any reason to mention the fight Ronnie got into at the Salamander.
“That was always Ronnie,” her mother said. “Mean as a snake to anybody who tried to help her and sweet as pie to the no-accounts.” She peered at the finer print on the page. “You put the part about the dance hall on here? Just what I need is people all over town knowing my daughter goes to that place.”
The Next Time You See Me Page 20