by Jan Burke
“Really.”
“Looks kind of old, but cool,” he said, starting to move toward the jeep again.
“It’s all relative,” I said. “The age part, I mean. Look, Jason—”
“Jason!” a voice screeched from an upstairs window.
“Oh, shit!” he said, glancing back at the house, then running toward the Jeep.
“Who is that?” I asked, running to keep up.
“Jason!” the voice screeched again.
He yanked the back passenger door open and jumped into the Jeep. “Dude!” he said to Jack. “Get me out of here!”
“Don’t even turn the key, Jack,” I said. “We are not going anywhere until he tells me who the banshee is.”
“What’s a banshee?” Jason asked.
“I’ll explain that as soon as you tell me who this is that’s coming out the front door of the house,” I said, indicating a stylishly dressed, thin blond woman in her mid-fifties, whose noticeable efforts to turn back the hands of time hadn’t even bent its pinky.
“That,” Jason said grimly, “is Mrs. Sayre.”
45
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 14
Las Piernas
“Jason, are you trying to kill your father?” the new Mrs. Sayre called out.
Jason’s back went rigid.
Not noticing, she went on. “Do you know what he’d say if he knew you were getting into a Jeep with total strangers?” She stood back a little from us, eyeing Jack’s scarred face, leather outfit, earring, and tattoos with disapproval.
“They aren’t strangers,” Jason protested. “This is Irene Kelly, from the newspaper.”
“And what did he tell you about talking to reporters?” she asked. “Get out of that Jeep this instant! When your daddy gets home, you are going to get your smart little behind whipped!”
He reached toward his rear pocket, not to shield it, but to remove a slim black object. He flicked his wrist, and I saw that the object was a cell phone. A thirteen-year-old kid with a cell phone — in the Sayres’ upscale neighborhood, I supposed every kid who was old enough to read a keypad had one.
“We’ll see what my dad says,” Jason said, and pushed a button.
“Yes, we will!” his stepmother said, sure of her ground.
“Hi, it’s Jason,” he said into the phone. “May I please speak to my dad?”
“More manners when you’re talking to his secretary, I see,” Mrs. Sayre complained.
“You should know,” he sneered, causing her to turn red. In a more pleasant tone he said into the phone, “Hi, Dad, it’s Jason. Ms. Kelly came over to talk to me and You-Know-Who is causing problems.”
He looked toward me as he listened, his expression apprehensive, and then he smiled. He extended the phone toward his stepmother, who snatched it out of his hand.
“Giles, if you are going to undermine my authority with the boy every time I turn around—” She fell silent, and watched me. “And how on earth was I to know that? I see two strangers luring your son into a car, one of them looking like a Hell’s Angel—”
She listened again, her expression darkening. She held the phone away from her ear while Giles was still talking, and pushed the off button. She snapped the phone shut, tossed it none too carefully to Jason, who made a fumbling catch.
“Mrs. Sayre—” I said, the name sounding strange to me, but she had already pivoted on her heel and marched back toward the porch.
At the door, she turned and called out, “If you do plan to kidnap him, please don’t bother to send a ransom note.” She slammed the door shut.
“Now can we go?” Jason said.
“Jack Fremont, meet my impatient friend, Jason Sayre.”
“Hi — can we go?”
“Just where is it you’re so anxious to get to?” Jack asked.
“Anywhere! Just get me away from her,” he said.
Jack smiled at me and said, “Better get in, Irene. Buckle up, Jason.”
Jason leaned back with a sigh when we finally pulled away from the curb.
“The park okay?” Jack asked.
“Sure,” I said, then turned to Jason. “Is that all right with you?”
“Finally,” he said dramatically, “someone asks me what I want!”
“Well?”
“Yeah, I like the park.”
“When did your dad get married?” I asked.
“To Susan?”
“Is that your stepmother’s name?”
He nodded. “She wants everybody to call her Dixie, but that’s a crock — she isn’t even from the South. She’s lived with us since Gilly moved out. My dad was at her place before that.”
“So she’s not your father’s wife?”
“She is now. They got married just after you found my mother.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking away from me, down at his hands. “The day you came and told him about that killer, he called Susan up and told her it looked like they could finally get married.”
Dumbstruck, I looked over at Jack. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror, not at traffic, but at Jason.
“As long as they couldn’t find my mother, he had to wait seven years,” Jason went on, kicking out his feet as if straightening his legs, but the look on his face said he wished his Timberlands were connecting with someone.
“Oh,” I said, understanding dawning. “Because legally, your mother had not been declared dead?”
“Right. Susan thought my dad could have made the courts hurry it up, but Dad said it would be really bad for his business because people would be mad at him — because you had written all those stories and everything. So he had to wait to get his little hottie. Wait to get married to her, anyway. She wanted him to marry her the day after they said the body was my mom’s. He made her wait a week.”
“She used to be his secretary?” I asked, remembering the comment that had made her blush.
“Yeah.”
We stopped at a corner market and bought some fresh fruit and a soda for Jason, bottled water for Jack and me. We drove to the large park that forms part of the eastern border of the city, found a shady spot, and began an impromptu picnic. Jason’s cell phone rang; he spoke briefly to a friend and hung up.
“I guess it beats two tin cans and a wire,” Jack said.
I laughed, but Jason asked what we were talking about, so we explained a little something about the olden days.
“And that really works?” he asked.
“We’ll set up a demonstration a little later,” Jack said.
He picked at the grass, then without looking up, said, “Did you find out something more about my mom?”
“Oh — no, I’m sorry. That’s not why I stopped by to see you.”
“It’s not?”
“No. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Oh.”
When he didn’t say anything more, I added, “I also wanted to apologize for not coming by sooner.”
He shrugged, frowned down at the piece of grass he was pulling on. “Why should you? You never even knew her.”
“But I know your family.”
He leveled a flat, cynical gaze at me. “Do you?”
I thought of today’s revelations. “Not very well, perhaps — but enough to know that what happened to your mom has been hard on everyone in the family.”
He laughed. “Hard on everyone? No way. I’m the only one who really loved her.”
“I don’t think that’s true—”
“Who then? My dad? Oh, pul-eeeze. He was getting it on with old Suze. He probably thinks my mom’s murder was the best thing that could have happened.”
“Jason, I’ve seen—”
“His tears? He’s a phony. And you know who’s a bigger phony? Gilly. Learned it from him — only she’s even better at it than he is. She even fooled you. She hated my mom. Hated her.” He shook his head. “They hated each other.”
“When she first met me, Gillian admitte
d that she had trouble with your mom, that there were arguments.”
“Trouble? Arguments?” he said angrily. “You think it was all some teenage thing?”
It had seemed exactly that way to me, and to everyone I had talked to at the time Julia Sayre disappeared.
“So why did Gillian hate her?” Jack asked.
“How should I know?” he said, but with less hostility than he had shown me. “She’s cold. She doesn’t care about anybody or anything.”
“For four years,” I said, “Gillian has been the one to call me, to ask if there has been any news of your mother. In that time, other people have gone missing, but no one took the trouble your sister took to find the person she loved.”
“Don’t say ‘loved,’ ” he snapped. “She didn’t love my mother. She hated her. She was mean to me. She’s mean to everyone. She’s a user. She even used you, and now you’re talking to me like that was something good. She just wanted attention. You gave it to her.”
“When’s the last time you talked to her?” I asked.
“Years ago. She moved out a long time ago.”
“Do you miss her?”
“No.”
“She hasn’t been back to visit you since she moved out?”
“No. It doesn’t matter. She’s still weird. I see her every now and then — I mean, you know, see her when she’s hanging out in different places. I saw her here once,” he said, vaguely pointing toward another part of the park. “Didn’t even say hello to me. Which is fine,” he added quickly. “I don’t want her to come anywhere near me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t realize that you were so angry with her. Or with me.”
And everyone else on the planet, I thought. But he said, “I’m not mad at you. Gilly fools people all the time. So does my dad.” He sighed. “I wish I didn’t live in Las Piernas.”
“Why not?”
“Everybody knows what happened to my mom. Kids at school, it’s like, the only thing they know about me. They either want to ask me about it — like, if it’s true my mom’s finger was cut off, shit like that — or they’re all freaked out about it. I can’t just be a normal person.”
“They’ve acted like that for four years?” Jack asked.
“No,” he acknowledged. “Just when it first happened. And now.”
“So they might get over this?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Maybe they’re just scared that the same thing might happen to their moms,” Jack said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I still hate living here.”
“Where would you like to live?” I asked.
“With Grandma,” he said. “I miss her. I wish I could go live with her.”
“Have you asked your dad if you could?” I asked.
“He says he would miss me too much. I think he’s just worried about what people will think.”
“Do you remember when Nick Parrish lived in the neighborhood?”
He shook his head. “I was little when he moved. Gilly remembers him. I think she used to go over there to see the lady or something.”
“The lady? His sister?”
“Yeah.” He hesitated, then said, “I knew it was Nick Parrish a long time ago. Before the cops knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t know his name,” Jason said, “but I had seen him.”
“When?”
“Before my mom was killed. He was staring at our house one time when Gilly was baby-sitting. I was kind of little then, too — well, a third-grader, is all — but it scared me.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“I told Gilly. She went out and looked for him. But by then there wasn’t anybody there.”
“You didn’t tell the police?”
“I didn’t get too good a look at him,” he admitted.
“What did you see?”
“I just saw this man in a car. But later, I figured it out — you know, when Gilly remembered he used to live on our street. It was too late,” he said sadly. “Besides, who’s going to believe a kid? It’s like Gilly said, no one would take a kid seriously.”
He reached into the bag of fruit and picked out an orange. He studied it in his hand, then hurled it hard against a tree trunk, where it landed with a pulpy thunk, then managed to cling to the tree for a few seconds before dropping to the ground. When I turned to look at Jason in surprise, he ducked his head, but not before I saw that his face was twisted up — in anger, but not anger alone.
“The other day, I threw something hard like that,” I said. “I thought it would make me feel better, but it didn’t, really.”
“What did you throw?” he asked, talking to his ankles.
“A computer monitor.”
He looked up, eyes damp but wide. “Get out!” he said admiringly. “A computer monitor?”
“Yes. Really stupid thing to do. Someone could have been seriously injured by what I did. I ended up feeling worse than I did before I threw it.”
“So why did you throw it?”
“I was angry. Angry and blaming myself for things that had gone wrong, I suppose.”
“Things that were your fault?”
“Some of them. Some were things that I really could have changed, could have done better. But a lot of it probably would have turned out the same way no matter what.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, I thought I should have figured out what Nick Parrish had planned up in the mountains.”
“How could you? Even the cops didn’t know. A bunch of them died.”
“Yes, and maybe that was my fault, because I suspected Nick Parrish of being up to no good. Sort of like you suspected the guy in the car of being up to no good.”
“But maybe if I had told my dad instead of Gilly . . .”
“Was your dad home?”
“No.”
“So maybe the man in the car would have been gone by the time your dad got home. Even if your dad had called the police that night, they would have said, ‘Is the man in the car doing anything?’ and if your dad said, ‘No,’ that would have been that. Maybe it wasn’t even Parrish out there that night.”
“Maybe,” he said, without conviction.
“It troubles you anyway, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I kept hoping that the thoughts that were troubling me would just go away. They didn’t. So now I’m trying to talk about them a little more. It’s hard.”
“Really hard,” he said, looking back at his shoes.
“Who do you talk to when you’re upset?”
He didn’t answer for a long time, but he finally said, “My grandmother, sometimes.”
“Maybe you should call her a little more often. Maybe talk to your dad about visiting her for a while.”
“Okay.”
We picked up our trash — including the smashed orange — and left the park. Before taking him home, Jack stopped at a hardware store to buy a length of wire. Next he drove us to an Italian restaurant where he was apparently well known. Although the dining room was empty at this late afternoon hour, we were welcomed back into the kitchen, where Jack talked the busy cook into giving him the other essentials for a tin can telephone. The cook even washed out the cans, and added supervision to Jason’s efforts to assemble the parts.
When it was finished, the cook urged Jason to take one end into the dining room while he held the other end in the kitchen. What they whispered back and forth, I’ll never know, but it caused a great deal of amusement on both sides.
With some difficulty, and only with promises to return soon, were we able to leave without eating a meal. Jason was quiet on the way home, and when we pulled up in front of the house, he said, “Don’t tell Gilly what I said about her, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, relieved to see some sign of brotherly affection in him after all.
Jack told him that he’d ask Giles if Jason could go with
him to the Italian restaurant some time.
“That would be fun,” he said, but he seemed subdued, perhaps not believing Jack would follow through.
He thanked us and said good-bye, taking the tin can phone with him. As he walked into the house, I saw him speaking into one end, while holding the other to his ear, absorbed in some private conversation with himself.
46
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 15
Las Piernas
Nicholas Parrish surveyed his new workroom with pride. A vast improvement over the last one.
Again, he had to give his little Moth credit. His Moth had seen that he was hampered in his work, and had suggested this alternative. This was infinitely more suitable to his needs. The workbench was larger, there was a sink nearby, and even — to his delight — a freezer.
The dwelling itself was more comfortable than his last, but that was of little matter to him. He was not a soft man, after all. Like any other artist, he was most concerned with the space in which he would do his creative work. He had spent several days getting this place shaped up to his satisfaction — emptying the freezer of its previous contents and so on — and now — voilà! Perhaps it was not a studio worthy of his masterpieces — Alas, could there ever be such a place? — but he would be able to carry on very well here.
He could not help feeling a sense of pride in the way things were going lately. Irene was actually seeing a shrink! Obviously, he had her on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Delightful! What good were shrinks when one’s terrors were real? She was terrified, all right! Just as he had promised.
Witness the woman’s reaction to those bones! It made him wish he had stayed around to see what had happened when she got the roses.
He frowned, remembering Jack Fremont’s arm around her. She was too free with her favors, to say the least. The woman was a real whore. Ben Sheridan, Jack Fremont, and God knows who else. Probably her own cousin.
He sat musing over what he might have to do in order to purify her of such defilement.
He stopped himself before the richness of those imaginings caused him to become overly excited. There was a great deal of work to do.
He studied his maps, mentally going over the routes he had already driven, considered once more all the possible hazards along the way.