She scooped up an armful of tabloids, deciding to think of them as homework, the future text of her life.
CHAPTER 30
“Do you think this will finish it?” Heather asked, staring out the car window. She had been humming under her breath since they got in the car, a hum that had risen to a high-pitched drone when Kay took the entrance to the Beltway. It wasn’t clear to Kay if she was aware of what she was doing.
“Finish it?”
“Will it be over, once I tell them everything?”
Kay was never glib, even about the smallest matters, and this question struck her as particularly grave. Will it be over? Gloria hadn’t bothered to provide that information when she called and asked Kay—told her, really, issuing orders as if Kay worked for her, as if she were the one who’d been doing all the favors and Kay was in her debt—to bring Heather to the Public Safety Building by 4:00 P.M. And now they were running late because Heather had fussed so over her clothes. She’d been as petulant as Grace dressing for school, and almost as impossible to satisfy. Ultimately, she settled on a pale blue button-down and a stretchy tweed skirt, which worked, in spite of itself, with her clunky black shoes, the only items of her own wardrobe that she was still willing to wear. All this bother seemed funny to Kay, because Heather didn’t give off the vibe of someone who thought about her appearance. A shame, really, because she was such a striking woman, blessed with things that only nature could bestow—high cheekbones, the kind of willowy frame that age never thickened, good skin.
“Nothing’s changed with the boy, if that’s what you mean. His condition’s improving steadily. Gloria seems confident there won’t be serious charges in connection with the collision.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about him.”
“Oh.” It bothered Kay, how seldom Heather thought of anyone but herself. But that would be the logical consequence of what had happened—assuming that Kay’s theories were right. Working from the scant details that Heather had meted out so far, Kay had decided that Stan Dunham had taken both girls but killed Sunny because, at fifteen, she was too old to interest him. He had kept Heather until she, too, ceased to be of use to a pedophile, then retained her for a few extra years until Heather was sufficiently traumatized to keep his secrets. How? Kay didn’t want to think about that. Clearly, he had turned her into his accomplice somehow, made her feel as if she were a criminal, too. Or simply left her so racked with fear that she would never consider telling anyone what had happened. Kay was not troubled, as the detectives seemed to be, by the fact that Heather had not tried to get away or tell anyone what was happening to her during those six or so years. Perhaps he told her that her parents were dead, or even that they’d arranged for him to take the girls. Children were so suggestible, so malleable. Even Heather’s continuing reluctance to tell the full story was logical to Kay. Her new identity, whatever it was, had been central to her survival. Why should she entrust anyone with it—particularly men and women who had worked in the same department as her abductor?
“Do you think they know anything new?” Heather asked.
“New?”
“Maybe they found my sister’s body. I told them where it was.”
“Even if they did—and I think that might have made the news, since it would be hard to excavate an old grave without drawing attention to it—it would take weeks to identify her remains.”
“Really? Wouldn’t this be a high-priority case, something they could rush through?” She seemed a little insulted not to be given the treatment she thought was her due.
“Only on television.” Through her work with the House of Ruth, the same channels in which she’d become acquainted with Gloria, Kay had gotten to know a forensic anthropologist from College Park, who was a rueful guide to the pedestrian restraints, mainly budgetary, that kept her from producing the miracles the public expected. “There are some things they can tell right away—”
“Like what?”
Kay realized she wasn’t sure. “Well, certain…um, damage to the body. Blunt-force trauma or gunshot. But also the gender, I think, the approximate age.”
“How do they do that?”
“I don’t know exactly. But, obviously, skeletons change in puberty. However, if your old dentist is still around, he’ll be able to ID your sister pretty quickly. I understand that dentists are very good at recognizing their own work.”
“John Martielli, D.D.S.,” Heather said, her voice almost dreamy. “His office was upstairs, above the drugstore. There were Highlights magazines, of course. Goofus and Gallant. If we didn’t have cavities—and we never had cavities—we were allowed to go around the corner and buy whatever we liked from the bakery, no matter how much white sugar it had in it.”
“You’ve never had a cavity?” Kay thought of her own poor, tortured mouth. Just this year she’d undergone the tedium of having every silver filling replaced, and now there were crowns aging out, the result of cracked teeth that Kay considered the legacy of her divorce. She had ground her teeth until two sheared off, the bits coming up with the granola bar she was eating at the time. The crowns had led to an infection and a root canal, and the dentist thought she might need additional surgery still. She knew that her dental woes weren’t her fault, but the problems in her mouth made her feel vaguely unclean, unhygienic.
“No. Even when I didn’t go to the dentist for years—because I didn’t have health insurance in my twenties—my teeth were perfect. Now I go every six months.” She bared her teeth, showing them off. Good teeth, great bone structure, a naturally slender frame, lovely skin—if Kay hadn’t known Heather’s story, she would have hated her a little.
“Could we stop?” Heather asked, holding her stomach as if she had a cramp.
“We’re running late as it is, but if you’re carsick or need something to eat—”
“I thought we could go to the mall.”
“The mall?”
“Security Square?” Kay glanced at Heather. It was hard to make eye contact while driving, especially when one was trying to merge onto the Beltway, but she had learned from dealing with Grace that eye contact was overrated. She got more information out of her daughter when they were staring straight ahead, through the same windshield. The mall was one exit past where Heather had been picked up Tuesday night. “Is that where you were trying to go, all along?”
“Not consciously. But maybe I was. At any rate, I need to go there now, before I do this. Please, Kay? It’s not the worst thing in the world, being late.”
“I’m not as worried about the detectives as I am about Gloria. She doesn’t value anyone’s time but her own.”
“I’ll call her on your cell, explain we’re running behind.” Without waiting for Kay’s agreement, Heather grabbed the phone from the cup holder between the seats and used its received-calls log to find Gloria’s number and call her back. She manipulated the phone with ease, as comfortable with gadgetry as Seth or Grace. “Gloria? It’s Heather. We’re just getting on the road. Kay’s ex-husband was late picking up the kids, and we couldn’t very well leave them there, could we?” She didn’t give Gloria time to reply. “See you in a few.”
What a brilliant excuse, Kay thought. She pinned it on someone that no one knows, that no one would think to question.
It took a split second, but the larger implications of this observation seemed to vibrate beneath her tires as she merged onto the long, sweeping exit to Security Boulevard.
“I THOUGHT THINGS got smaller as you aged,” Heather said. “This seems larger. Did they expand it?”
They were standing in a corridor where, according to Heather, the movie theater, all two screens, had once been. For a Saturday the mall was severely underpopulated, and while it had some of the usual offerings—Old Navy, a chain music store, a Sears, and a Hecht’s—the other stores were unknown to Kay, and there was a general sense of abandonment. In one corner a former department store—Hoschild’s, Heather insisted—had been deconstructed, its walls torn a
way so that only its escalators remained. These now took shoppers to an Asian food court. There must be a big Asian population in the area, for the name Seoul Plaza had been affixed to the facade of the mall’s south end. Kay found the Seoul Plaza part vaguely hopeful, a sign of how things changed and adapted. It was exciting, on one level, that this section of Baltimore County needed such a specialty store. But she wasn’t much of a fan of malls in particular, and this one was so forlorn, so seedy and forgotten.
She wondered what it looked like to Heather.
“You could smell the Karmelkorn even here,” Heather was saying now. “It filled this central area. That’s where we were supposed to meet that day.”
Heather began to walk, head down, as if there were clues to follow. Upon reaching the mall’s atrium, she turned right. “The organ store was up here, near the bookstore. The sewing supplies—Singer, not Jo-Ann—were the other way, along with Harmony Hut. We were supposed to meet our father at the health food store, the GNC, at five-thirty. He bought brewer’s yeast there, and sesame candy. It was pretty here then. Full of people, festive.”
It was as if Heather were prepping, reviewing information for a test. But if she was Heather Bethany, why would she worry about having the right answers? And if she wasn’t, she must see that the mall was so changed that no one could check her memories of it, contradict her recollections?
“Mall security,” she said, stopping to inspect a glassed-in booth with uniformed men staring at a variety of screens, and Kay wondered if she was thinking that such men might have saved her, thirty years ago. “This is where Karmelkorn—No, no, no. I’m turned around. The new wing, with Hecht’s, threw me off. It’s not that the mall has gotten larger but that I was confused about the layout, transposed the two corridors.”
She began moving so fast that Kay almost had to jog to keep up with her. “The movie theaters would have been down here,” she said, skidding to a stop, then turning around, her pace picking right back up. “And if we go right here—yes, now it makes sense. The place where those escalators are, that wasn’t Hoschild’s but the J. C. Penney, which was still under construction that weekend. Here—this was the organ store, where Mr. Pincharelli worked on weekends.”
“Here” was now something called Kid-Go-Round, a store that apparently catered to children who needed the equivalent of prom clothes, for weddings and the like. Next door was a store called Touch of the Past, which Kay found eerie until she realized that it sold Negro League memorabilia, expensive jerseys for teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Atlanta Black Crackers.
“Mr. Pincharelli?” Kay asked.
“The music teacher at Rock Glen Junior High. Sunny had the biggest crush on him for a while.”
Heather stood transfixed, rocking slightly, humming again as she had in the car, hugging herself as if she were cold. “Look at those dresses,” she said. “Flower girls, junior attendants. Did you have that kind of wedding?”
“Not quite,” Kay said, smiling at the memory. “We married outdoors, in the backyard of a friend’s house on the Severn River, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the eighties,” she added with a note of apology. “And I was all of twenty-three.”
“I’m never going to marry, not for real.” Heather’s tone was not regretful or self-pitying, merely factual.
“Well, then at least you’ll never have to get divorced,” Kay said.
“My parents divorced, didn’t they? I didn’t get that at first. They split up. Do you think it’s my fault?”
“Your fault?”
“Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what…happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?”
“I think,” Kay said, picking her words with as much precision as possible, “that grief, tragedy, tends to magnify whatever is there, expose the fissures that are already there. Strong marriages get stronger. Weak ones suffer and, without help, may fall apart. In my experience.”
“Are you saying my parents didn’t have a good marriage before?” Her tone was fierce, straight from the schoolyard, the instinctive defense against even an implied insult against one’s parents.
“I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. I was speaking in generalities, Heather.”
Again the smile, the reward for using her name, for being the one who believed in her, perhaps even more than Gloria, whose dedication was billed hourly. “I thought everyone was dead. I just assumed everyone was dead. Except me.”
Kay trained her eyes on the gossamer skirts in the windows, the heartbreaking kind of girly-girl dresses that her own Grace had never wanted to wear. I just assumed everyone was dead. If they were, it would be much easier to carry the lie. But would someone tell a lie like this just to get out of being charged in a traffic accident? If that were the case, now that she knew the little boy was going to be okay, couldn’t she simply recant? She was so credible, yet the very fact that Kay was thinking along those lines might be the proof of how studied this all was.
Staring straight ahead, Kay could see Heather’s reflection in the plate-glass window of where the organ store had once been. Tears were coursing down her face, and she was shaking so hard that her teeth, her perfect, no-cavity teeth, were chattering uncontrollably.
“It began here,” she said. “In its own way, it began here.”
CHAPTER 31
The business section of St. Simons—the “village,” according to a local who helped Kevin find his way there—was lousy with charm.
The main drag was lined with precious shops, the kind that specialized in selling useless things to people who shopped reflexively, as entertainment. It wasn’t the high-end, name-brand type of shopping you saw in the Hamptons, where Kevin had worked landscaping jobs as a teenager, but it was a big step up from Brunswick. He understood now why Penelope Jackson had lived on the mainland, how out-of-reach the real estate must be for the people who scooped the ice cream, poured the beers, sold the pink-and-green dresses that seemed to dominate the window displays.
He had timed his visit to Mullet Bay for the late-afternoon rush, before the dinner hour started in earnest. The bar-restaurant was a typical resort establishment, another variation on the American dream, Jimmy Buffett version. Parrots, tropical drinks, no-worries-mon. It was hard to figure out how a going-on-forty woman had fit in here, a young person’s joint where the waitstaff, male and female, wore shorts and polos. But the manager, a dark-eyed honey of a girl with glowing skin, cleared that up by explaining that Penelope was one of the line cooks.
“She was great,” she said with a peppy enthusiasm that seemed to be her default setting, pronouncing it “graaaa-ate.” The plastic bar pinned above her perfect left tit proclaimed her to be Heather, and the coincidence seemed a portent of…well, something. Then again, Heather was a pretty popular name. “Good worker, very reliable. Would fill in at the last minute, even bartended once or twice when the regular guy didn’t show. The bosses would have dearly loved to keep her.”
“Why’d she quit?”
“Well, she just needed a new start. After the fire and all.” Even in expressing genuine sadness, this Heather retained a kind of indomitable enthusiasm, as if her beauty, her fine young limbs, supplied her with a constant, humming joy of self. Infante imagined arranging those limbs around him, absorbing a little of that sunny self-regard.
“What about this woman?” He pulled out the photo of his would-be Heather. “She look familiar? You ever see anyone like this with Penelope?”
“No. But then—I didn’t really see anyone with her, not even her boyfriend. She spoke of him, and he came by once that I recall, but that was it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Older fellow, kind of sleazy. He said some things to me, but I didn’t tell Penelope. It was just beer talk.”
“She say where she was going when she left?”
“No, not to me. She gave notice, and we even had a little party for her at the end of her last shift. A cake and all. But, you know, she was kind of private. I think—” She hesitated, touc
hingly sincere in her desire not to gossip, which made Infante like her all the more. So many folks he interviewed reveled in the opportunity to slander others in the name of their civic duty, volunteering all sorts of extraneous and derogatory information.
“Do you think she kept to herself because of her situation at home?”
An energetic, relieved nod. God, he wanted to fuck her. It would be like…like lying on a beach somewhere, only with the silkiest sand imaginable, warm and comforting, not the least bit gritty. There was nothing sour in this girl, no life taint. Her parents were probably still married, even still in love. She was breezing through school, popular with males and females alike. He could imagine birds alighting on her shoulders, as if she were some Disney cartoon princess.
“She came in once, with a bruise on her face? And all I did was look, just glance at her, and she got very upset. ‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. And I told her, ‘I didn’t say anything, Penelope, but if there’s something I can do,’ and she was, like, ‘No, no, no, Heather, you don’t understand, it’s not what you think, it was just an accident.’ And then…then—” The girl swallowed, a little nervous, and Infante fought to keep his attention on her words even as he was trying to figure out how to persuade her to come out to his rental car and climb on top of him. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it. I’ll come out on top.’ That was around Thanksgiving.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. We never spoke of it again. Was that…well, wrong of me? Should I have called someone, tried to make her get help? She was an adult, after all, older’n me. I didn’t see how I could help her.”
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