by Jane Haddam
“I know. You told me. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m positive I’m all right. I’ve got at least three kids who are going to end the term without handing in a single paper, but that’s par for the course. And I’m kind of in a hurry. I could call you back later.”
There was a long, dead pause on the line. It was the thing Penny hated most about cell phones. With a landline, when the other person wasn’t talking, you could still tell the line was open, that the call hadn’t gone south. On a cell phone, when nobody was talking, the line just sounded dead.
Penny moved her things around on the counter. She looked at the flyer again. Chester Ray Morton hadn’t been the kind of student who did nothing all term and then panicked about it during exam week. He’d come to every class.
“Mom?” George said.
“I’m still here,” Penny said.
“I talked to Aunt Jenna this morning,” George said.
Penny bit her lip. “Did you call her because you wanted to keep in touch? What? I thought you didn’t like the woman.”
“She called me.”
Penny wondered if it would be easier if she just dropped the phone into some water. But that wouldn’t do. That would only ruin the phone, and the phone was the one thing that made what she was doing possible.
“Well,” she said. “That must have been interesting. What did she want?”
There was another long silence again. Penny looked at the soap and the shampoo. She wanted to get on with it. She hated going to class without washing up. Besides, in her position, it was important to stay washed up. If you started to stink, you’d find yourself without any options at all.
“She wanted,” George said, “to tell me you were living in your car.”
“Did she?” Penny said.
“She said she saw you in the parking lot of the Walmart in Mattatuck and you had everything you owned in your car. She said she saw you changing your shirt.”
“I’ve never changed my shirt in a parking lot in my life,” Penny said. “And you know what your Aunt Jenna is like. I haven’t really talked to her since your Uncle Zach died, and that was four years ago. She wouldn’t know if I had all my stuff in my car to save her life. She wouldn’t know my stuff.”
“But she saw you at Walmart,” George said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, George, she saw me at Walmart. In the parking lot. I saw her, too. We said hello.”
“And that was all?”
“She stood around for awhile having one of those conversations. You know. What’s George doing. What’s Graham doing. Alison is going to be queen of the universe next week. That kind of thing.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all we ever say when we see each other. She didn’t like me when Zach was alive and she likes me even less now.”
“And you’re not living in your car?”
“I’m just fine. I’ve got two courses to teach here and one over at Pelham.”
“Pelham doesn’t pay anything.”
“Pelham doesn’t pay much, but it pays something. It doesn’t hurt.”
“You didn’t get a summer course.”
“No, I know I didn’t,” Penny said. “But the summer is over and we’ve started on fall term and I’m as booked up as I’m allowed to be. I’m fine.”
“If Graham and I find out you’re living in your car and you didn’t tell us you needed money, we’re both going to come out there and kill you. I mean it. There’s no reason for you to be teaching at all anymore if you don’t want to. We could support you. You could come out here and we could find a place big enough—”
“I’m not going to move out to California,” Penny said. “And would you stop? I’m fine. I really am. And I’m going to be late if I don’t get off this phone and do something. I really do have to get to class.”
There was yet another long dead silence on the phone. Penny took a deep breath and counted to ten.
“All right,” George said suddenly. “Call me when you’re done. I’m going to call Graham.”
“I really am all right,” Penny said.
But George had hung up. That did not bode well.
Penny looked down at the shirt and the shampoo and the soap. Then she put her old shirt on and swept everything else back into the totebag.
She’d have to come back up here after class and wash up then. She didn’t like the idea. She didn’t like being up in this part of the building in the middle of the night. There just wasn’t any help for it.
Maybe she’d postpone the idea of taking a night in a hotel. She was going to have to have enough money put by to get herself a place to stay when the weather got cold, because the weather got very cold in this part of New York state.
And it wasn’t that far until October.
6
Charlene Morton knew she couldn’t go out, not so close to night, not with half the family in the house. They watched her these days, her family did. They made sure she wasn’t carrying anything but the usual leaflets and flyers and posters. They made sure she wasn’t wandering around at odd hours that some judge might consider “harassment.”
Still, she could come out to the greenhouse, and she had. Part of that was to be by herself for a while, to be away from them and on her own. Part of it was to look at the flowering Judas tree. It was the hardest thing she had ever undertaken to grow. It was tall and its purple flowers looked like they were made of silk. She was proud of it, but worried about it, too. The dirt around the roots was chopped up and mounded here and there. She’d worked at it for half an hour and barely made it what she wanted it to be again.
Then she’d headed back to the house, because she knew they would be waiting for her. They were suspicious of her even when she was only tending to plants.
This was the truth of it—no matter how often Stew and Suzanne and the boys all said they cared about what happened to Chester, no matter how often they all said they wanted to bring him back home … well.
They all wanted a quiet life. That was what was going on. They wanted Chester back if it took no pain or suffering to get him back. If it meant lawsuits and stalking charges and nights in jail, that was something else again.
Charlene had heard Kenny leave for school, but she hadn’t gone out to the hall to say good-bye. Kenny didn’t want to be in school, and he didn’t want to join the business, either. He wanted what Chester used to want, a place of his own and a life of his own. Charlene was not completely stupid. She knew that was a natural thing for young men. They always wanted to be off somewhere.
But still.
Charlene was sitting at the big round table in the kitchen. She had poured herself a cup of coffee an hour ago. Now it sat, cold and only halfdrunk, near her elbow. There was a stack of the latest flyers in the middle of the table. There was a stack of the latest posters right next to it. The posters were not real posters, the way they had been when Chester first went missing. These were just ordinary pieces of typing paper with the picture and information printed on them by the printer Mark had downstairs. There wasn’t as much energy as there used to be in the search for Chester Ray Morton.
Of course, it had been twelve years. Twelve years was a long time.
The kitchen door swung open. Charlene looked up. It was Stew standing in the doorway. Charlene wondered what had happened to Mark.
“Kenny got off to school,” Stew said.
Charlene nodded. She put her hand up to touch Chester’s face in the picture on the poster. It was the same as the picture on the flyer. She’d brought those flyers all the way up to the third floor of Frasier Hall today. She didn’t even know if anybody ever went to the third floor of Frasier Hall. At least the bathrooms were clean.
Stew came in and sat down on the other side of the table. He looked old. Charlene thought she probably looked older. She couldn’t really see herself in the mirror anymore.
“I think we’ve got to at least consider the possibility that
our boys are not cut out for school,” Stew said.
Charlene took her hand away from the posters. She didn’t like touching them. They didn’t feel like Chester’s skin. Nothing felt like Chester’s skin.
“I’ve got to clean the house this week,” she said. “We’ve got to send the curtains out. The ones in the living room.”
“If you want.”
“I don’t want it to look like we live like pigs when we’re on television.”
“We don’t look like we live like pigs.”
“I wonder if it would have made a difference. If there had been television shows like this back when Chester was first missing. Maybe if we’d gotten on one of them, we’d have him back by now.”
Stew got up. He checked the water in the electric percolator.
“Even if we just got his body back, he’d be back,” Charlene said. “You think I expect him to come walking alive through the front door. Well, I don’t. Chester is dead. I know he’s dead. He’s been dead all this time. And she killed him.”
Stew was filling the percolator with water. He had his back to her. The water was running in the sink. “Don’t start that again,” he said.
“There’s no ‘again’ about it,” Charlene said. “She killed him. You know that as well as I do. Killed him and hid the body somewhere, just like she had her own baby killed.”
Stew turned the water off. He brought the electric percolator pot back to the stand and began fiddling with it. He put in a fresh filter. He put in new coffee grounds. The silence went on and on and on. Charlene didn’t care.
Then Stew said, finally, “You don’t know any of that. And don’t start in on me, Charlene. I know all your arguments. I know everything you’re going to say.”
“I took flyers out there this morning,” Charlene said. “She’ll have taken them down before she left for work. I’ve got to be more careful than that. I couldn’t help it this morning, though. I couldn’t go later. I had things to do.”
Stew sat down at the table again. “You shouldn’t have gone at all. The judge said—”
“The judge was overruled by the federal district court,” Charlene said. “I’ve got a free speech right to put my posters up, even in that little bitch’s neighborhood. I can’t go into her house without being arrested and I can’t talk to her and I can’t call her on the phone, but I can put my posters up. Because she killed him, Stew. You know she killed him.”
“I don’t know. And you don’t know she killed a baby, either,” he said. “There’s no evidence—”
“There’s no evidence because nobody went looking for evidence,” Charlene said. “There are tests you can take for that, tests that can tell if you’ve ever been pregnant. There are tests that can tell if you’ve had an abortion, too, at least if you take them close to when you get the abortion. But she never took any of those tests. They never made her take any tests. They just ‘talked’ to her a few times and let her go on her way.”
“There’s no evidence—”
“Chester brought that girl to this house not four days before he died,” Charlene said. “And she looked pregnant enough to me. She looked enormous—”
“But—”
“I know all that,” Charlene said. “All those people she worked with, saying she never looked pregnant a day in her life, saying she never told them she was pregnant. Well, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was hiding it. Maybe she was getting ready to kill Chester even then. But she was pregnant the day she got here, and you know it.”
Stew rubbed his face with his hands. “Maybe we just saw what we wanted to see,” he said. “Maybe we were both so anxious to find a way out of the situation we’d caused that we took any lifeline we could get—”
“Chester wouldn’t come to me and say his girlfriend was pregnant if it wasn’t so,” Charlene said. “She was pregnant. And then, four days later, Chester is gone and so is the baby. She’s flat as a board and saying she was never pregnant in the first place.”
“I don’t think they let them have abortions that late,” Stew said. “She was supposed to be, what, almost due? I don’t think—”
“Oh, you can find an abortionist to kill a baby at any stage of the game, believe me. I know what goes on. I’ll bet he got on to her. I’ll bet he decided to ditch her, and she wanted to get back at him.”
“Chester wouldn’t ditch his own child.”
“He wouldn’t ditch the child, but he’d ditch the mother if he ever found out what she was. It’s the only explanation that fits, Stew. She thought it was going to make everything all peachy keen, a baby, we’d never turn away from a baby, and it wouldn’t matter that we didn’t like her. Chester could marry her and he was the oldest. He’d get the business. And then he found out what she was and he walked out on her, and she got mad. And she killed him. And then she killed the baby out of spite.”
“Charlene,” Stew said.
“She killed him,” Charlene said. “And that’s all there is to it.”
Stew got up. The percolator was making odd noises. It was probably finished, or something. Charlene had never gotten the hang of how to use it. She looked down at her hands. Her fingernails were cracked. She hadn’t put polish on in years. If Chester were still alive, he’d come back to find her an old woman.
But Chester was not alive.
Charlene got up from the table.
“I’m going to watch television,” she said, even though she never watched television, and Stew knew it.
Stew was getting a coffee cup down from the cabinet. “There’s no evidence,” he said, for at least the third time. “You can’t go calling people murderers when there’s no evidence.”
“You can call a murderer a murderer no matter what kind of evidence there is,” she said.
Then she marched through the swinging double doors and away from him, and from the posters and the flyers and the endless reality of the last twelve years.
7
Althy Michaelman didn’t give a rat’s ass about … well, about anything, really. It was just that the goddamned empty trailer bothered her.
It didn’t bother her all the time. Sometimes she had enough of a buzz on to forget all about it, sort of, unless she heard a noise over there. Then she got spooked, because of course the trailer was empty. The trailer had been empty for years, ever since Chester Fucking Morton had disappeared. Althy wasn’t surprised he’d disappeared. He was the kind of person who disappeared. He was a fucking-A idiot.
Tonight, there was not enough of anything in the house to really get buzzed on, and Althy didn’t like the idea of going out and stealing it. There was no advantage to stealing from liquor stores. They had cameras, and most of the ones around here knew who she was, anyway. The whole point of drinking instead of doing all the other stuff she used to do was that she couldn’t go to prison for just having it around. Robbing a fucking-A liquor store therefore made no sense.
Therefore.
Althy thought it was funny as hell that she’d thought of a word like “therefore.” Haydee would love that, if she ever heard it. Haydee wasn’t even home. There was a fucking tragedy, there was. Haydee over there at the junior college, what was anybody supposed to think? The girl was a fucking-A idiot, and always had been.
And besides, who did she think she was?
The trailer over there was absolutely quiet. It was absolutely empty. Every once in a while, that crazy woman, Chester Morton’s mother, came to look it over, but that was it. Althy thought it had to be nice, having enough money to rent something you weren’t even going to use. Just rent it and leave it there. Leave it empty. Then every couple of months, kids would break in and the police would be out here and how was that good for anything?
Althy was lying on the bed in the bedroom at the back of the trailer, the one that spanned the whole width. The bed was full of dirty clothes and the floor was full of dirty clothes, too. You had to take clothes down the street all the way to Colonial Plaza to get to the laundromat. It was too long a
walk carrying a bag of shit like that, and besides Althy didn’t like Colonial Plaza anymore. It used to be a real shopping center. Now half the stores were empty and the place felt like there were vampires in it. Althy had seen a movie with vampires in it on TV. That was before they’d shut the cable off.
This time.
Althy sat up. Mike was somewhere around. Haydee was over at the college, going to class with that woman she couldn’t stop talking about. Penelope London. What kind of a name was that? She was a snob. All the teachers Althy had ever met were snobs. You could tell the woman was a snob with a name like that.
Althy’s head hurt. It was getting dark. It was always getting dark. Haydee had money in this trailer somewhere. It was a lot of money. Haydee squirreled away money in coffee cans and weird places trying to make it so that nobody could find it, but what sense did that make? If you had money, you spent it. Especially when there were things you needed. Althy didn’t understand why she let Haydee live here anymore at all.
Besides, the money should be going to the rent on the trailer. It should be. Haydee threw in a little every month, but it wasn’t enough. She had room and board here. That was going to cost you. She couldn’t just stuff all her money away in coffee cans and expect it to be there when she went back to it.
Althy steadied herself against the side of the bed and got to her feet. She was swaying a little. This was the worst hangover she could remember in months. Everything glowed, and everything shimmered. She steadied herself against the dresser, next, and then against the wall. She pushed herself out into the narrow hall. Everything in this trailer was narrow. It was a single wide. There was that. No fancy double wides with cathedral ceilings and gourmet kitchens in this trailer park. It was just single wides and cinder block.
Althy inched down the hall and looked inside. Mike must have been here first. The room had been completely destroyed. There were clothes everywhere. There were books everywhere. That was something else about Haydee. She was neat. She kept all her things in special places. Maybe Mike had found the money.