Cindey lit another cigarette, said, “I don’t know.”
I reached the length of the couch and placed the book on her lap. “You can just flip around until you find it.”
Cindey began to turn pages with all the affect of someone killing time over a magazine in a doctor’s office. She squinted at two or three pages, paused, passed the book back to me. “I’m not sure I’d recognize him.”
I stood the book on its spine and let it fall open, certain it would find her favorite page. Sure enough, it flopped open not on her page, nor on Miriam’s nor Julia’s, but on another. One portrait immediately caught my eye. A husky god of a man in his mid-twenties, better-than-average good-looking in a rough-hewn, heavy-boned sort of way, but it was the eyes that arrested me. They were simply dazzling, but at the same time disconcerting. Wide-set, dark for a blonde, and of an unusual shape. And he held them wide, as if he’d been caught in a candid shot, shooting a challenge of surprised curiosity into the camera. It was the sort of look one sees in the eyes of a man crazed with poetry who lives on the streets. Even in this tightly posed portrait, he held his shoulders forward, raw and animalistic, a hunter about to spring forward onto its prey. The name captioned beneath the photograph was Edward Jennings. No middle name. It read, “Camden, Maine; American Studies.”
I spun the book around until the page faced Cindey. “That him?” I asked dryly.
“Oh,” she said. “Hmm. Yes, I think so.”
I shivered on behalf of the fallen Miriam, uninformed girl from Pleasantville. Shivered again for myself. “Edward?”
“I suppose Chandler was a nickname. People called him that. ‘The Chandler.’”
I took a slip of paper out of my pocket and wrote down the name and town, and asked, between my teeth, “Did he rape a lot of the women at your college?”
Cindey stiffened, a subtle movement in one already so rigidly posed. “Rape? What rape?”
I looked up from my note taking. Cindey’s eyes had gone black with fury.
I said, “Come on, Miriam wrote about it in her journal. Your freshman year. Chandler took her to his digs and forced himself on her. You remember, it was in those pages that she taped shut. You—” I stopped myself, mentally slapped my own wrist. I had not come here to engage in warfare with this woman.
But it was too late. Cindey narrowed her tiny eyes. “That was no rape. There was no force. Miriam knew exactly what was going on!”
My mind raced as a jumble of feelings jammed in my chest. I groped for the words that could stem the heavy tide of her thinking, reached for some unassailable logic that could inform the sanctimonious Cindeys of the world, pierce their armor of denial and shake them into an instant of understanding. Very softly, I said, “Miriam was young. She was naive. She said no not yet. That should have been enough.”
“Oh, bullshit! Miriam wanted it.”
My voice rising again, I spat, “What’s that got to do with what he did? Wanting it and asking for it are two different things!”
“Well, she asked for it. Everybody knew about him. Did he have to drag her into that apartment? Hell, no; she walked in there on her own two feet! She’s the horniest woman I know.”
“The hell. She didn’t know him. They ran in entirely different crowds,” I said, and then, realizing that I was falling into the trap of arguing on Cindey’s terms rather than my own, I asserted, “He told her he was only taking her inside for a cup of tea. She said no not this time and that was her right. He took advantage of her innocence. Besides, nothing Miriam might have done justified what he did. Don’t you believe in holding men responsible for their actions?” And as I said all this, choosing my words with precision, I became aware that for a moment, Cindey had chosen words that suggested that to her, Miriam was still very much alive.
Cindey’s eyes went down to slits, a viper getting ready to spit. “I get so sick of women who want everybody to feel sorry for them after they’ve had their fun. They want to blame it on the man. They—”
“No, you’re the one who’s blaming. You’re blaming the victim.”
“Miriam was no victim! She flaunted her little proclivity. You should have seen the way she flirted! I mean, my God, you get her at a party and just one little drink, and—” Cindey broke off, sputtering, her mouth working like a fish on the bank. “The men fawned over her. It was disgusting!”
I was spellbound, awash in the potent poison of Cindey’s envy, slowly losing my grip, uncertain now just whether black truly were white … . “I suppose you think she killed herself, too, that there never was a murderer, that all this hue and cry searching for the man who did it is just a wretched scheme to make some decent man look bad.”
Pause. “Exactly.” Cindey’s eyes flashed with the cold glint of victory.
I sat perfectly still, stunned, my scientist’s mind already taking this new theory and running with it, testing it, turning it this way and that to see if it might hold a grain of truth. What if Chandler was a dealer, and he supplied Miriam with the pure stuff, and in a fit of despair, she … and Cecelia watched her mother do it, stood by in horror as her mother gave her the ultimate rejection? … But everyone keeps saying there was a man in that house, and … I took one more long look into the eyes of the woman who sat across from me, and said, “I think it’s time for me to leave.”
Cindey followed me to the door. As I strode through it, she said, “Just don’t take those journals for gospel, you hear me? Miriam left a few things out.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
FROM a pay booth at a 7-Eleven store near an exit off of Interstate 70, I called the alumni office at Miriam’s college and asked to know the whereabouts of an Edward “Chandler” Jennings. I rationalized that I had a lead and had to follow it fast, before the trail grew cold.
The voice that answered the line at the alumni office gave me a very polite brush-off. The old alma mater, it seemed, did not give out personal information about its graduates, but it was regally certain all efforts would be made to forward a note to a graduate if I cared to send one in care of the office.
Round two, I called information for Camden, Maine. Several Jenningses listed, but no Edward. Which number did I want? I asked for two at random, had to call back for the third. One was an old coot who shouted at me to speak up three times and then slammed down the phone. The second was a young man with a nasal accent who informed me that he’d just moved to Maine from New Jersey to start a business making wooden toys, all natural wood with no toxic finishes, and developmentally correct. Hadn’t met any other Jenningses yet, but hey, the winters here were unbelievable!
Number three was pay dirt, of a sort. “Edward? You mean my cousin, maybe?” asked a baritone with a Down East drawl. “He scrammed out of here back in the sixties. En’t thought of him in decades. Kind of wild, as I recall, but he was a lot older than I was. Ay-yup. He was an only child, don’tcha know, got sent to all them nice preppy schools and so on. Ay-yup. His folks died years ago, left the house to him. He come back and tried to make a go of it here, don’tcha know, but I don’t recall it much. I think Ma had him over to dinner once, but I was out that evening somewheres or other. Had my mind on other things, girls and such. Never saw him to talk to or nothin’. My folks said you can’t come home again; that’s why I never left, y’see? Ay-yup, Cousin Edward sold the house and left—lock, stock, and Beemer.”
“A BMW, you say.”
“Gold, even. Ay-yup, puttin’ on airs.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Ay-yup.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Went overseas, I heard.”
“Overseas?”
“Ayuh, somewheres in South America. Workin’ in the oil fields.”
“Colombia?” I asked, making a wild try at a connection with Boomer Oil.
“Coulda been. Don’t know.”
“Would your folks know anything more?”
“Well, my pa’s dead, and if you can get sense out of my ma, you’d be doing better than anyone over
at the nursing home’s done in years.”
I thanked him and rang off. Stood there at the pay phone, with traffic whizzing by and a couple of zit-faced kids arguing over who got the chunk of cardboard with some athlete’s blurry fizz on it out of a packet of bubble gum. The wind started to pick up. I itched for that final connection that would make sense out of the picture. Colombia twice in one day, or at least South America and oil fields, and also Saratoga again and again, and old family ranches near Douglas. And people who knew one another in college somewhere else entirely.
I dialed information for Douglas and got the UPS station number and asked for Ginger Henley. “She’s on a delivery run, but could someone else help you?” asked a brusque-sounding voice.
“I want to ask her about some shipments up the Cold Springs Road,” I said.
“Who to? You got a tracking number?”
“Well, I don’t believe this shipment would have gone in by your carrier.”
“Oh …” said the voice.
“More like, did you notice who did deliver, or from where? I’m talking about a number of sacks of powdered bentonite, sent out to that new tin shed Po Bradley has, and like maybe the same shipper came and got them back again. It wasn’t anyone from Casper—I know that already.”
I heard a thoughtful humming. “You call back later,” she said. “I’ll ask.”
For old time’s sake, Sergeant Ortega and I picked up burritos at Chubby’s, a place out on Thirty-eighth Street, and took them over to his mother’s house to eat. Mrs. Ortega fussed all around us in her cramped kitchen, smiling her welcome, bringing us chips and salsa and cold cervezas to go with our spicy treats. Still telling myself I was going to quit the investigation, I spilled the whole story about Miriam’s frustrating marriage and her strange affair with the disappearing Chandler. “So there you have it,” I concluded, after the second half of my burrito had long since gone cold on my plate. I can usually best a Chubby’s burrito no sweat, but this evening my stomach was too tense, no match for carnitas and salsa picante. “I’m asked to help the child through her grief and I get all balled up in the life of the mother.”
Carlos closed his eyes in meditation. “I’ve never been married myself. I don’t understand these things.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” I said, but in part, I was lying. I’d never been married, but I was raised on the same stew of confused thoughts and values that Miriam had been, and even though I had entered college fifteen years or more later, after date rape and a handful of related ills had been given a name and officially struck down by the laws of the land, I had still learned what little I knew about love and sex the hard way. And just because the national so-called consciousness had been raised, and no was supposed forevermore to mean no, didn’t mean that girls and even women had quit having hopeful fantasies about whatever charming prince they had just met at the dance. Or at the grocery store. Or at the office. Or that said amoral prince had quit taking advantage of hope, fantasy, and ignorance.
So here I was hiding the sore truth about my own bits of bad luck from my dear friend Carlos Ortega, blithely pretending I was interested in Miriam’s story only from an intellectual standpoint. “So I’m wondering what this guy Chandler did for a living, when he wasn’t busy seducing suburban housewives. And I’m wondering what kind of a game Cindey Howard is playing with me.”
Carlos opened his eyes and looked at me. “Why?”
I smiled. Yes, Carlos Ortega, old war caballo that he was, was just as caught up in this maze of questions as I was. “Well, my take is that she had some kind of an agenda in giving me those journals in the first place. More than just getting them out of her closet, I mean. And then today, she was playing real coy, but if she didn’t have any further interest in the matter, why get me up to her house? It’s like she was trying to reel me in to ask her something. And she checked that yearbook over pretty carefully before she let me see it, then acted like she didn’t know Chandler’s real name or what page he was on. My guess at the time was that she was checking to make sure he hadn’t written anything embarrassing on it.”
“Had he?”
“No. Nothing at all. But the book flops open to that page.”
“Hm. And she thinks Miriam committed suicide.”
“So she says.”
Ortega took another pull on his beer. “So tell me this: was this Cindey a good friend to Miriam Menken?”
“Not hardly.”
“Why do you think not?”
“The old green-eyed devil.”
Very soberly, he said, “Ah, tiene celos.”
“¿Qué?”
Ortega looked up and twisted his lips wryly. “La mujer es en celos,” he said, lifting his index finger with a flourish.
My Spanish was getting too rusty. “Huh?”
Ortega shook his head in apology and made a circular gesture with one hand, a kind of “keep talking” prompt.
I said, “Well, see, here’s this unattractive middle-aged woman who’s obviously not ready to give up on attracting people, witness the ensembles and the posturing. Her husband’s a pig—sorry, there’s no kinder word, and I mean no offense in terms of the other uses of that epithet—who contemplates using the investors’ money to drill guaranteed dusters, and likes to go off for weekends with the kind of boys who like to leave their wives at home. I may not know much about marriage, but it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what it must feel like to have that guy keep your dance card full. If I was married to him, big house or no, I’d be looking around myself and seeing greener grass on the other side of every fence I had.”
Carlos nearly choked on his burrito trying not to laugh.
“And she called Miriam a flirt,” I said. “That could mean anything from she was a flirt to ‘Pig, I wanted Chandler myself,’ to maybe Miriam was the object of some of Freddie’s prurient grunting.”
“But Mrs. Howard stays with Mr. Howard.”
“She’s the type who would,” I found myself saying. “The old-fashioned chickenhearted female who takes crap from her husband for fifty years and dances on his grave, if she doesn’t die first from gargling all that bile.”
“Why not leave him?”
“She hasn’t got the guts. And she probably thinks she couldn’t hold her head up in church if she did.”
“You think she goes to church?”
“Let’s say the country club. Yeah, that’s more to the point: she’s into power, or being married to power, and Fred’s got it.”
“What kind?”
“Well, he’s regional vice president of an oil company,” I said, immediately seeing the flaws in my reasoning. Certainly, Fred Howard had power over a lot of people right here in Denver, but life in the oil patch had been one long litany of hard times for the last decade and a half, with people losing their shirts or their companies left and right. Even now, as things were beginning to look a little more hopeful again, Boomer Oil had been bought out by foreign investors, and at best, Fred’s upward mobility had just been capped. Things like that had a way of eating at little piggies like Fred Howard who counted their self-worth by their material worth and position. For the nth time, I wondered just what kind of business he was doing with the men I’d seen in his office that day. Surely not something he wanted the Dutch to know about, or he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to place his calls himself. I shared my thoughts with Sergeant Ortega, and finished off by saying, “But maybe he was doing some other kind of business on company time.”
Ortega smiled tiredly, got up from the table, and gave his mama a hug. When he turned to me, he said, “For you to wonder, Em, because you’re dropping this, remember? Come on, I’ll take you to your truck.”
That night, I slept relatively soundly, having convinced myself, however briefly, that I had given up the chase.
First thing Wednesday morning, I suited up and got back on the turnpike from Boulder to Denver, but this time, I made an intermediate stop. Jeffco Airport, the place where I’d be
en taking flying lessons, was a quick detour to the south.
Driving straight to the flying club that kept a line of Cessnas and Piper aircraft gassed up and ready for rental, I reactivated my membership and stopped off to see my instructor, Peggy Jones. Peggy was a thin, wiry little woman who reminded me of a pretzel. She wasn’t shaped like one, just made of the same ingredients: equal parts salt and crust. “Oh, you’re here,” she said, not getting up from the overstuffed chair where I found her lounging. “You ever gonna finish your ticket?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “I got a little money finally, and I want to knock off my cross-countries.”
“Pshaw,” said Peggy. “I can’t see you flyin’ nowhere. There’s rust on your wings so thick, you look like you’re wearing a fur coat. I ain’t signing your logbook less you do a little dual first.”
“Then I expect we’ll have to do something about that.” I grinned. “You got time this afternoon?”
Peggy stared out the window in mock resignation. “Oh, I s‘pose so. Call it two o’clock.”
“Done.”
My next stop was the office of candidate shrink number four, one Jane Hooker, M.S.W. I thought the name had promise, but my hopes were not rewarded.
“I’ll tell you straight, your friend needs strong guidelines and someone to teach her some discipline,” she declared, knitting her grizzled eyebrows ferociously. “I’d be doing her no favor if I kept her in here month after month, letting her sulk. Life is tough, yes, and it deals you some terrible blows, but then you move on.” She took a drag on her cigarette, blew it out through her nostrils.
“Well, but what about this memory blockage, or whatever you call it?”
“Yes, some people block things out for years, but then, others don’t, so what makes the difference?”
Only Flesh and Bones Page 17