The Scamp

by Jennifer Pashley

  Well, she said to me, let’s see the little shit-ass.

  June Carol’s mouth made a small O. Why don’t you wash your hands in the kitchen and then sit down, Carleen, she said, and I’ll bring her out to you. Would you like some coffee? she asked.

  Eli was gone. Working. It was me and June Carol, all day.

  My mother declined the coffee. June Carol brought out a receiving blanket, fresh from the laundry she did separate in gentle detergent for the baby. She laid it over my mother’s sweatshirt as a barrier.

  For the smoke, June Carol said to me, looking back over her shoulder. She went into the little bedroom to get Summer, came back out carrying her upright, and said, The baby shouldn’t be exposed to secondhand smoke.

  I’m not smoking, my mother said.

  But it’s on your clothes, she said.

  That’s not secondhand, my mother said. It’s secondhand if it’s coming out of my mouth. If I’m blowing it in her face, she said, which I’m not.

  Well, June Carol said. She stood while my mother sat on the couch with that receiving blanket over her chest. She didn’t look like she was about to hand over the baby.

  Let me see her, my mother said. She held her hands out and for a second I imagined them fighting over her, grabbing like two little girls with a doll.

  I reached and took her from June Carol, my own baby, who’d been fed by her grandmother. She was awake, in that state of wonder babies that age have. Before they can hold their heads steady or focus on anything far away. I held her the way I knew how, in the crook of my arm so her face looked up at mine. I said, Hey, Summer girl, to her, and watched her eyes, wondered what was going on in her head.

  I let my mother hold her, the way she did, out on her knees, with Summer’s head in the palm of her hand. She inspected her, turned her head slightly, looked at her hands. I wanted her to say something, that she looked like me, that she remembered me that small, that she loved holding me or taking me for walks or anything that made a connection.

  That’s one tiny tyrant, my mother said.

  June Carol stood at the kitchen sink, washing up the breakfast dishes.

  After, my mother wouldn’t come back to the house. She would see Summer only if I brought Summer over to her.

  It’s not your house, my mother said to me, but I think she meant She’s not even your baby. I could have walked out then, run away, and Summer would have been fine. Someone would have watched over her the right way. She would have been clean and well fed, fat even, dressed in white dresses with tiny bows in her hair. Learning to walk, to say her prayers at night. To say yes ma’am and no sir, and to paint her fingernails a delicate ladylike shell pink. How to match a pocketbook with her shoes, and not walk like a whore who’s digging in her purse for a cigarette.

  I come out of the shower clean and not wanting to put the same clothes back on. The jeans and the white tank top I’ve been wearing smell like sweat and musk and everything we’ve eaten, pancakes and burgers and fried potatoes. The jeans have worn themselves too big for me, baggy in the ass and loose around the waist. I hate putting them on. I hate putting the bra and tank top on more.

  I decide, right before I slide the jeans on, that I can no longer wear the underwear. I pull up the jeans with nothing between me and the denim.

  My hair is wet and unconditioned. There’s none of the stuff I use to make the curls smooth, to tame them. I squeeze them with a towel, and then make a fat braid that curves over my shoulder, a few curls springing out above my ear.

  Couper’s not in the hallway. Not waiting outside my door. I walk back out into the vast complex of fast food and stores. It’s like a shopping mall, except I’m the only woman, slick and clean smelling and not wearing underwear. I see guys everywhere, with beards and baseball caps, jeans and boots. Guys on cell phones, on computers, getting coffee or chicken or magazines or cigarettes. But no Couper.

  Anything I had, a little wallet on a wrist string with about forty dollars left, a cell phone without a charger, I left in the Scamp.

  I think all I have to do is pick up the pay phone, dial zero, and say I need to call my mother collect. You can still do that, right? I need to make a collect call.

  She’ll never accept the charges.

  I look down a hallway next to a line of vending machines, Coke, candy bars, ice cream. There’s a bank of metal booths, the plugs empty, the wall with just a shadow where the phones used to be.

  I think, I’m going to have to hitchhike.

  I could get a ride with anyone here. What would happen? I might get home. I might end up in Florida. Or dead.

  I walk slowly past the vending machines, out into the open court where the tables and computer counters are. I think, The world is full of men over fifty. Men who are losing their hair, and growing their bellies.

  And then I see his square back, hunched slightly while he types on his laptop, which sits on a counter where you can plug in and charge, access the Internet.

  Good God, I say, and lean my cheek on his shoulder.

  There you are, he says, and turns, but he can’t see me the way I stand behind him.

  I didn’t know where to find you, I say.

  I look over his shoulder. He’s got Facebook open.

  What’s your cousin’s name? he says.

  She’s not on there, I say.

  Are you? he says. I couldn’t find you.

  I’m not.

  This amuses him. Why not? he says. You’re young.

  I squint at the profile picture of him, outside, leaning on the Gran Torino.

  There’s no Internet at my mom’s, I say. And I’m not going to the library to get on just so I can find out that a girl I didn’t even like in high school has put up seventeen new pictures of her cat.

  Couper laughs. There are a lot of cats, he says, scrolling.

  And I had been, but I don’t tell him that. I had an account and took it down after Summer. Deactivated. There was nothing to say, no picture, nothing that I felt like sharing.

  He has the cursor in the search bar. Humor me, he says. What’s her real name?

  Kathleen Reed, I say.

  He returns over a hundred. South Central High School. St. Mary’s School. Loyola University.

  Ha, no, I say.

  Not a college girl? he says.

  She didn’t finish tenth grade, I say.

  They’re all too old or too young. Too fat. Too brunette. Nothing clicks.

  Tenth grade, he says. When did she leave?

  He leaves the screen open on a list of Kathleen Reeds who aren’t her.

  That same summer, I say.

  After Holly Jasper? he says.

  Or right before? I say. When her dad died.

  Is that weird? Couper says. I hadn’t given the timing much thought.

  She wasn’t kidnapped, I say to him. I watched her leave. I wanted her to live with us, I say. She didn’t have parents anymore. I wanted a sister.

  He closes the window and then the computer. You’ve tried to find her, he says.

  I have. I keep thinking that someday, she’ll write to me, or something. I’ve always been in the same town. The same stupid trailer, even, except for those few months.

  What few months? Couper says.

  With the baby, I say. It’s hard to keep my face from clouding over, from gathering tight at the brow, sinking into a hard frown, puckering toward crying.

  He rubs my arm. I have some other resources, he says. We can try searching again, if you want.

  I want it more than anything. But I don’t tell him that. I nod. Because if I start talking, I’ll start crying. I’d thought it, after Summer, before Summer. When I found out I was pregnant, the person I wanted to tell was Khaki. The person I would have had in the room with me when she was born, Khaki. When Summer died, I wanted to lay my head on Khaki’s lap and let her stroke my hair and tell me it would be okay.

  I’d missed her for so long.

  Right now though, Couper says, I have to make an
appointment with the chief of police in Summersville.

  Summersville calls itself a city. On the outskirts, a textile mill, a huge looming complex of buildings billowing smoke. An entire system of machines cultivating, willowing, carding, spinning. The sight of it, so oversized and powerful, is threatening. It gives me a cold twinge in the pit of my stomach, the way a nuclear plant does.

  The town itself has that slow creep that Southern towns do. There’s nothing touristy, nothing to come visit except maybe family. It’s not small and it’s not big. It’s hot and dusty, a grid of streets with plain houses, a couple of churches, a Laundromat, a coffee shop, a diner. Big enough to have its own school, its own grocery store, and a small newspaper. There’s a creek that runs through the cemetery where they found the teenager. Alyssa.

  The police department is not at all what I expect. The station back in South Lake, just a concrete building with a few cubicles, a secretary, one small holding cell they use mostly for drunks. Couper invites me to go with him into the Summersville precinct, a grid of half walls, desks, and phones. The chief of police has an office in the back, with glass walls and blinds. And she’s a woman.

  I’d been picturing a man. A middle-aged guy with a comb-over maybe. She’s tall and has brown hair that’s to her shoulders and unbound. She looks like a runner. Lean and strong. There are plants in the office, and pictures of kids and dogs. When Couper walks in, her face warms and she smiles and shakes his hand with both hands. She looks at me, the way I lag behind in hesitation, and then Couper introduces me as his intern.

  Well, Mr. Gale, she says, I’m happy to have you take a look.

  That’s excellent, he says. I can’t make any promises. But you never know when something might fall into place.

  We haven’t had a fresh pair of eyes in quite some time, she says. The nameplate on her desk says CHIEF OF POLICE, DAWN L. POWERS. Chief Powers.

  How long ago did they happen? I ask. My voice sounds small in there, the room echoey.

  It’s been nearly five years, she says and walks around the side of her desk. Come with me, she says, I’ll show you the file room.

  It’s a cold back room with beige metal shelves that are crushed together and wheel apart with a crank. Chief Powers has an office assistant come in with us, a young man in a short-sleeved dress shirt, with a trim waist and soft-soled shoes that don’t make a sound.

  Anything you need copies of, Chief Powers tells Couper, just hand to Kyle, and he’ll make you a duplicate. And thank you, she says to him.

  Thank you, he says.

  She is almost out of the room before she says Nice to meet you to me.

  His preliminary research takes forever. Couper sifts through boxes of interview transcripts, half reading, setting aside what he might need, putting others back. The room is like a refrigerator, and even Kyle doesn’t stay. He works on his own filing for a bit, and then goes to a desk outside the room, where I think it must be warmer, and not lit like the inside of a morgue, and makes phone calls, and sits at a desktop computer.

  Okay, Couper says. He has a stack that’s an inch thick. I can read these at home, he says.

  You haven’t been reading them? I say. It feels like it’s been hours.

  Just making sure I have the right things, he says. He hands the stack to Kyle, who doesn’t get to it right away. Couper lays out some photos.

  More of the mother, Jessa, with her complete family, both children, the husband. Then some of her husband’s car, the garage, their backyard, taken by police photographers, with numbered markers.

  And the teenager, her face and her full body naked to the elements. Evidence of footsteps through the leaves in the back part of the cemetery, but nothing on the path in the main part, where the roads are paved instead of dirt or gravel.

  How long before they found her? I ask.

  Two days, Couper says.

  Her face in the close-up is already puffed with bloat, her skin pale and marbled with blue markings.

  She looks beaten, I say.

  That’s just the decay, Couper says. It’s the beginning of the body breaking down, under the skin. There were no signs of trauma other than to the neck. He says this with his eyes on another document, not looking at me. I wonder if he remembers that he’s talking to a mother. A mother whose daughter died.

  I push the photo away and look up at the grid in the ceiling. If I’m not careful, all I see is Summer’s face with the life gone out of it. Her sleeping baby face, lips like a rose, cheeks pale. If I don’t stop, I think about her body, breaking down, marbling itself in decay. About what is left of her now, if it’s just a small curve of bones, or only dust.

  What’s her mother in jail for? I say.

  Larceny, Couper says. She was stealing from the company she worked for.

  Is she still in?

  Yes.

  Jesus, how much did she steal?

  Hundreds of thousands, Couper says.

  For what?

  What do you think? he says. What do you need that kind of money for?

  Drugs, I say. I mean, unless you’re buying up property. Or hookers.

  Yeah, he says. He laughs a little, quietly though, and even then it echoes some in that metal room. When Kyle comes back with a packet of paper for Couper, Couper puts his hand on my goose-bumped arm and says, Let’s get you out of here.

  The closest campground is twelve miles outside of town, on a road called Dry Fork. The campground is full of fishermen, the sites dotted along a creek. When the guy shows us our site, he says he has a slot only because there was a cancellation. And when Couper sees it, between a willow tree and an elm, with the land sloping down to a wide and lazy creek, he says, It’s perfect.

  Now we’re here, I say to him, in my own camp chair beside the water. Before, you were in South Lake, I say.

  Yep, he says. He holds the papers that Kyle gave him, bound with a black metal binder clip.

  What if you were supposed to meet someone in Summersville instead of South Lake? I say.

  I already met you, Couper says without looking up.

  But what if I’m the wrong person?

  He lets the papers sag onto his chest and looks at me over his glasses.

  You’re not, he says.

  Jessa’s husband, Kevin, still lives in the same house, a brick Cape Cod on a side street on the edge of the village, where there are no sidewalks. The streets, curved and quiet. The yards, fenced and treed with flowering bushes, azaleas, camellias, and roses. The kind of street you can stand at the top of and see all the houses aligned in a perfect array, an arch of suburbia, like the curve of the world. The Loys’ house has a white door, white shutters, and a white clapboard porch built off the back of it. In the backyard, a wooden swing set with yellow plastic swings, a clubhouse, a blue plastic slide.

  Before, Couper took me to Walmart. You need some better clothes, he told me. The police chief looked at you funny, he said.

  My mother threw out my nicer clothes, I said.

  But I didn’t disagree. I also thought the police chief’s aloofness toward me was because she didn’t like my jeans, or didn’t trust my face, or both.

  Sometimes, I think people can see Summer’s scar on me, that I light up with a neon aura that says DEAD BABY. One hundred and fifty pounds of damage coming your way.

  We bought three summer dresses and a sweater to go over them. A pair of sandals, a package of underwear, a razor, and bras. It was hard to find one at Walmart that fit me, that wasn’t ugly and sold in a box. But I found two in the right size. One of them was camo. Couper kind of smirked at that one.

  And so, I show up at Kevin Loy’s house in a deep-pink silky knit dress that has white hibiscus flowers, a scoop neck, and little cap sleeves. It falls to my knees. If nothing else, I look more like an assistant and less like a hitchhiker. Even if my insides say runaway.

  Couper gives me a legal pad and tells me to take notes. I’ve never seen him take notes, but I think the two of us sitting there, waiting f
or details from a possibly still grieving husband is probably too much, so he gives me something to do. I write down the time, 1:15 PM, and the date, June 12.

  Kevin’s on his lunch break. The older daughter, in junior high. The baby, in kindergarten.

  He won’t look Couper in the eye.

  I know that it’s still very difficult, Couper says, and I appreciate your time. Chief Powers, Couper starts, and Kevin cuts him off.

  Didn’t do enough, he says. Did she hire you?

  No, Couper says.

  I look around the room. There are two loud clocks, out of sync with each other. Pictures of fruit in the kitchen, where we sit at an oak table. Grapes and apples and pears. Kitchen curtains with a pattern of wheat. A painting of a vineyard that says, I am the Vine and You are the Branches. Where we’d come in, the front door held a plaque that read, As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord.

  I’m just getting to the point, Kevin says, where I’m moving past it. Since there’s no answer, he says, no lead, no nothing. What choice do I have?

  He’s pinkish, the way Jessa is in the pictures. Gingery, but hardhanded, muscled in a long, ropy way. He wears khakis and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

  I understand, Couper says. Where do you think she is? he says.

  Where do I think she is? Kevin says. Where do you think she is? I thought you were here to solve this.

  Couper sits, quiet, and just watches him. He waits until Kevin repeats it.

  Where do I think she is.

  Yes, Couper says.

  Kevin huffs and pushes his chair away from the table. Unbelievable, he says. There was no reason to suspect me, he says, and then he points one hard finger down at the table and thumps. They questioned the shit out of me, he says. And I was the victim. I was the one who . . .

  That’s not what I’m asking you, Couper says. He leans back in the chair, his chest broad and open. I scribble some equivalent of their conversation on the legal pad.

  Kevin waits.

  I’m asking you where you think she is, he says again, and then adds, in your heart, Kevin. What do you think happened to her? I’m not here to accuse you, Couper says. I’m trying to put together a life for Jessa, to trace some pattern, something that may point to where she is.