by Lisa Unger
“Maggie,” he said, turning to her. “Anyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, the right motivations.”
She felt a rush of disbelief, an unsettling chill at his words. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?” he said. He sat down at Ricky’s desk and started going through his drawers. “Would you kill to protect Ricky? Of course you would.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Jones. To defend my son, yes, of course I would. What does that have to do with anything?”
“We’re talking about motivation. How do we really know what motivates people to do what they do? Why do people rape and kill? Why do people abduct young girls? Maybe they think their motivations are good and pure, like a mother defending her child.”
She tried to summon her patience. Something about the conversation reminded her of the helplessness she’d felt on the phone with Marshall earlier.
“The actions of a parent to defend her child are reactions to threats. Not a lack of impulse control or an appetite to be sated. Not the selfish actions of a sociopath or a psychopath. Are you saying that you think our son raped and killed Charlene? That he abducted her?” She could hear her own voice going shrill with anger and panic.
“The girl is missing. She’s gone. A witness says he saw her get into a green muscle car. But our son, who drives a car like that, claims to have no idea where Charlene is. I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.”
Maggie held his eyes, though she wanted to look away, wanted to run away from him and his craziness. She saw something working on his face, something she didn’t understand. She remembered the expression she’d seen at Britney’s house.
“What are we really talking about here, Jones? What is going on?”
He seemed to deflate in the chair. Then he put his head in his hands.
“When I got the call from Chuck about the witness who saw the car,” he said through his fingers, “I just felt sick.”
“What kind of car?” She had an awful thought, then. What if Ricky was lying? She knew he couldn’t hurt Charlene or anyone. But what if he did take her someplace? Helped her to run away?
“The guy didn’t know,” said Jones. “He claimed not to know much about cars.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. So we can’t assume that it’s Ricky. We can’t assume that, at best, he’s lying about knowing where she is or, at worst, he’s done something horrible. That’s way too big a leap. You know him, Jones. He’s our boy. Our baby.”
She came to kneel beside him. She controlled the part of her that wanted to throttle him, to get in her car and go after Ricky. You’re too hard, too unyielding, she wanted to yell. You drive him away. He was waiting for me to come home so that we could talk. What happens now is on your conscience. But in the war between her husband and her son, she’d always tried not to take sides, to comfort and mediate instead. She tried, even though she almost always failed.
“I don’t know him,” Jones said, looking up from his hands but not at her, at something past her. “I look at him with that hair, that nose ring, that tattoo. I don’t know him.”
“Then don’t look at those things. Just look at his face.”
“I can’t even talk to him. Every time I try, we just end up fighting.”
She shook her head. “You might try to come in softer, with less anger and more love.”
“I do love him,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. “You know that. He knows that. Earlier you said that I had no instinct to protect my son. Maggie, nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Then believe him.”
Jones released a long breath, took her hands. “But what if he really has done something awful? Let’s just say he has. I can protect him now, if he’s honest with me.”
“How do you think you can protect him?”
He stood up, and she sank back to her heels as he walked over to Ricky’s closet and opened the door, peered at the mass of clothes and shoes, boxes of books, games, towers of CDs.
“What are you doing?”
“I know how things happen,” he said. “I know how a moment can spiral out of control. How the consequences of one careless action can cost you everything.”
From where she sat on the floor, she watched Jones going through boxes on the floor of Ricky’s closet. Somewhere along the line they had stopped talking about Ricky and had started talking about Jones; she could see that, but she didn’t understand it all.
“What are we talking about, Jones? What’s going on?”
He gave a quick, dismissive shake of his head. “If there’s something here that incriminates Ricky, I need to find it now. You get that, right?” He turned around and looked at her again. “Because if someone else finds it, there’s nothing I can do.”
“And if you find something, then what? You’re planning on destroying evidence, covering up a crime?”
He didn’t answer her, moved over to the bed and lifted the mattress, peering underneath. He seemed disorganized, almost frantic.
“What are you looking for?” Her voice sounded desperate and pleading. Once upon a time this room had been a nursery, with clouds painted on baby blue walls, stars on the ceiling, plush animals on clean white shelves. She’d sit in the room and nurse her son and think that when it came to her baby and the room she’d made for him, she’d done everything right. She hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time.
“I’m looking for the truth about our son, Maggie. You’d do well to help while you still can.”
“You’re not making any sense. I get it about the car. I understand why that worried you. But what does anything you learned at the Murray residence have to do with Ricky? What has you so frantic?”
He started pacing the room, finally sat down at the computer and booted it up.
“I don’t know,” he said to the screen. She could see his face reflected there. “I don’t know how it all adds up.”
“So why do you think he had something to do with all of this?”
“Call it an instinct,” he said, getting up again, seeming to forget the computer and continuing his search of the closet.
Like the instinct you had that he was using drugs when you found a pack of cigarettes in his backpack? Maggie had been just barely able to prevent Jones from having Ricky secretly drug-tested by their family doctor. Like the instinct you have that he’s a loser who will amount to nothing, in spite of good grades and excellent test scores? She admired her husband and would be the first to admit that his instincts were, like her mother’s, rarely mistaken.
But when it came to his own son, he was usually dead wrong. He seemed eager to believe the worst, was blind to all the good. What did it say about him? In her work, she often found that people who couldn’t connect with their children had trouble connecting with themselves, had a core of self-loathing. Was this true of her husband? she wondered as he continued ransacking Ricky’s room and she watched, helpless, clueless as to what to do. And if it was true, why had it taken her so long to confront it?
19
Wanda was dozing on the couch, and Charlie’s eyes were starting to ache in the glow of her computer screen. He’d been scrolling through a classic car site for hours, and all the cars were beginning to look the same. He’d never been a guy who knew about cars, though he had always wanted to be. Wanda, it turned out, was one of those guys. And it didn’t seem to bother her much that he didn’t know a fin from a fender. He’d seen a few barely suppressed smiles, but then her attention had started to wander, and eventually she’d drifted over to the couch, commenting from there until she fell asleep.
At this point he was pretty sure that the car he’d seen was a Chevelle. Or maybe it was a Pontiac GTO. Or maybe it was a Mustang. The truth was, it had been dark, he’d been a little sleepy, a little high on Wanda.
He stood and leaned back, listened to a series of cracks from his spine. The flowers he’d bought her ear
lier sat proud and purple in the vase at the center of the table. He didn’t know any more about flowers than he did about cars.
“Lilies!” Wanda had exclaimed. “They’re my favorite, Charlie. How did you know?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But when I looked at them, I thought of you.” It wasn’t a lie or a line. He’d never been good at that. It was the truth. He was rewarded with a tight embrace.
After dinner, he’d helped her clean the dishes. Not the kind of half-assed help his father used to offer his mother, that kind of befuddled, mystified carrying of a few dishes from the table to the kitchen only to quickly retire to the couch to watch football or the news. He’d helped her load the dishwasher, and then to wipe the table, put the place mats and cloth napkins in the laundry room.
Then, over a glass of wine, he’d told her. About the girl he saw last night. About Lily. When he mentioned her name, he saw Wanda’s eyes drift over to the flowers. He found himself reading her thoughts. Maybe that was why, on some subconscious level, he’d chosen them. But she didn’t say anything about it. Just listened and then offered the advice that had brought them to the station.
He looked at Wanda, who turned over in her sleep, putting her back to him. He moved to her, took the cozy throw blanket from the couch, and draped it over her slim body, admiring the rise of her hips, the dip of her ankle. She sighed in her deepening slumber.
He stepped out onto the porch. The light snow had stopped and not accumulated at all. The air was still and cold, the wind chimes silent. Empty planters hung, bereft until spring. There was an old ceramic cat by the door. On impulse, he lifted it and found a key. Without thinking, he pocketed it. He’d give it to her later and tell her he didn’t think it was safe, even in a safe town, to leave a key outside the door.
He looked out toward the street. Had it just been last night? He imagined the scene, watching her standing there with her punk hair and uncertain expression. Because that was what he saw on her face. It wasn’t fear, exactly, just uncertainty, as if she were doing something against her better judgment. Except this time, he called out to her, Hey, do you need any help? Maybe she would have said no, or flipped him the bird. But maybe she would have said yes. Maybe just that one sentence from him would have been enough to keep her from getting in the car.
He stepped onto the sidewalk. In the bay window of the red house across the street, the blue light of a television flickered. There was a heavy bass thump of music being played too loud somewhere. On the wire above him, a mourning dove cooed, low and inconsolable.
He walked across the street and stood approximately where the girl had stood and looked back at Wanda’s house. From where she’d been standing, she wouldn’t have been able to see him through the trees in Wanda’s yard. Across the street, an upstairs light glowed. Somewhere a car coughed to life, then roared off. The way the sound carried, he expected the car to approach and pass, but it never did.
What was she thinking as she stood here? Where is she now? He remembered asking himself those questions about Lily, standing like this in the place she was last seen. But it was the second question that hurt the most. Where is she now? His imaginings on the subject were grim and wild. Every year or so, he’d drop Lily’s mother an e-mail, ask how she was doing, really just wondering if there was any news of Lily. Even her skeletal remains would have offered some kind of relief after nearly two decades of dark wondering. She hadn’t answered his last message.
“She’s sick,” his mother had told him. “Cancer.”
“Cancer? That’s awful.”
“Is it any wonder?” she’d said, her voice nearly a whisper. “Grief like that can kill you, Charlie. A missing child? It’s an unimaginable horror.”
In the street, he noticed a slick, gleaming puddle. The fluid had a rainbow sheen to it. He felt a little jolt of excitement. The car he’d seen had idled there, and it had definitely not sounded healthy. He put his toe to the edge. The liquid was sticky, nearly dry. It was possible, wasn’t it, that it had leaked from the car he’d seen? Even though maybe a hundred cars had passed that way since last night. But it could be something. Was it enough to call that cop?
“Charlie?”
Wanda had come out after him. Just the way she looked beneath the amber glow of the streetlamp, so pretty even disheveled from sleep, even with a little worried frown on her forehead, made him think he was going to ask her to marry him.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked him.
“Look,” he said. He pointed to the liquid in the road.
“Hmm,” she answered. She bent down to squint at it. “Transmission fluid.”
“The engine of that car sounded pretty bad.”
“And to leak that much fluid in one spot, it would have had to idle here awhile. Not just any passing car would dump that much. The stop sign on Hydrangea is a good twenty feet away.”
“So what does it mean, when a car is leaking that much transmission fluid?”
“Well,” she said. She put a hand to her chin. “It means that it didn’t get very far.”
“We should call that cop,” he said. He kept his eyes on the stain on the road. “Do you think we should?”
“Definitely,” she said with a nod. “Yes.”
“It’s kind of late.” He glanced at his watch, a cheap Timex with a black leather band and roman numerals he’d bought at a drugstore nearly ten years ago. If some future version of himself (an out-of-shape pest control technician, no less) had appeared the day he bought it and told him that he’d still be wearing it almost a decade later, he’d have laughed in his own face.
When he looked back at Wanda, she said, “I don’t think people are getting much sleep when a girl is missing.”
He’d be embarrassed if he called that cop and then he said something like, “That could have come from any car in the last twenty-four hours.” He’d look like one of those buffs, guys who watched so much crime television that they thought they knew as much as detectives. Or worse, he’d look like someone guilty, someone who was trying to insert himself as a helpful person into the investigation in order to exert some control. He knew how it felt to be under suspicion.
“What?” Wanda said. She placed a hand on his arm and gave a little rub. “What are you thinking?”
“I just don’t want them to get the wrong idea about me, you know?”
“Why would they?” she said.
He issued a breath and sank to the curb. “There was a time, after Lily went missing, that suspicion fell on me.”
She sat beside him. “Really?”
“They did a locker search at school and found this notebook I kept. I had written her all these poems and love letters, things I’d never given her. We were friends; that was it. I knew that. But it didn’t keep me from dreaming.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, where a dull ache had settled.
“For a while, not for long, they had questions for me, for my family. They searched my room at home and found a scarf of hers. Something she’d left at my house. I kept it, even though I knew she was looking for it, slept with it in my pillowcase because it smelled of her. They thought I was obsessed with her, that maybe I’d hurt her because she didn’t love me, or whatever. Even though I was cleared, that suspicion followed me. I left town for college up here and never went back, except to visit my parents every so often.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie. That’s awful,” she said. She stared at the ground between her feet.
Too much baggage. He was dumping too much on her, too soon. They hadn’t even been together forty-eight hours. God, what was wrong with him? He was too embarrassed to even apologize for being such a mess.
“I still think we need to call,” she said. “It could be relevant. Better to be wrong and embarrassed than right and…” She let the sentence trail with a sad shake of her head. Then she stood up quickly, and he thought she was going to walk away from him. Instead, she held out her hand. When he took it, she pretended to use a
ll her strength to haul him to his feet.
“Come on, cowboy. Let’s call,” she said, tugging him toward the house. He remembered how he’d felt last night over dinner, how he’d realized that she thought he was something special, and how he’d desperately wanted to be that for her. He would be that. He knew he could be.
Inside, he called the detective. He got voice mail and left a message, telling him about the stain on the road and how he’d narrowed it down to three possible car models. Wanda watched him from the couch, seemed to have something on her mind.
“That story,” she said when he came to join her on the couch.
“What story?” he asked, although he knew what she was talking about.
“About Lily. You should write about it.”
He settled back and looked into her eyes. He thought, Wanda, will you marry me? She’d say no, of course. Charlie, it’s too soon. I’ve been hurt before. Not without a ring. Something like that. But one day, she was going to say yes.
He said instead, “Wanda, I’ve been trying to write that story for twenty years.”
She made an affirming noise, as though she knew all about waiting for something.
“I have a feeling the time is now.”
“Are you satisfied, Jones? I mean, what did you think you were going to find-a bloody shirt, a smoking gun?”
No answer. He’d stopped talking about twenty minutes ago, which was probably a blessing. They’d arrived at that place in their argument where every word they uttered was designed to hurt and inflame. They were in the garage now. Jones was riffling through the garbage can, which simultaneously angered and disgusted her.
The tsunami in her chest made her think of the time after Ricky was born, when she thought she might ask Jones to leave. Parenthood was a crucible. The pressures revealed truths, resurrected buried childhood memories, unearthed hidden aspects of the personality. She’d seen it in her practice-couples changed so much by their new roles as parents that they were no longer compatible. She’d been afraid it was true for them. That dark place in Jones that she’d always found so intriguing was no longer attractive. In fact, it was repellent. The mother in her identified it as a threat. Sometimes, she actively hated him.