by M. R. Carey
Beth couldn’t keep from grinning, though she made sure her voice sounded innocently surprised. “Really? Where is he?”
“Well, we don’t know that yet. But someone was using his phone last week, pretending to be him.”
Beth had her next line all ready. It was going to be “Poor Jamie? Seriously? That bastard!” Now all that fake emotion was stuck in her throat like a chicken bone.
“Pretending?” she said instead as soon as she could actually speak. “I don’t understand.”
“Jamie Langdon came into the precinct to show us a message she’d received from Marc’s phone. Whoever sent it was trying very hard to convince her they were Marc. In fact they succeeded. She was sure it was from him, until she noticed something weird about the message itself. Whoever sent it must know your ex-husband very well because they got the tone exactly right. Except that he said he was sorry. Jamie said the more she thought about it, the less that sounded like him.”
Jesus, Beth thought, am I not allowed even a little bit of artistic license? She had imagined a Marc who had walked away from his entire life and then found there was a single splinter of functional conscience sticking in his skin. “He said sorry to me a lot,” she said in a carefully neutral tone. “Pretty much every time he beat me.”
“Yeah, I honestly wouldn’t have put a lot of store by what Ms. Langdon had to say on that score. But the fact is, we already had a subpoena on the phone number so the text was forwarded to us right after it went to her. Only we got all the GPS records along with it, and that was a lot more interesting than the message was, frankly.”
“In what way?” Beth asked.
“It was sent from right here in Pittsburgh. Whoever sent the text talked about being a long way away, but when they said it they were somewhere in Larimer. Probably within walking distance of your house. The phone mast the message pinged off is at the corner of Carver Street and Ashley.”
Beth had taken herself and her phone out into the street by this time. The bar room soundscape could easily have been the Cineplex food court, but she felt a little hunted just the same and decided to put a stop to it. She leaned against the wall outside, her head back against the cold stone, the October chill undoing all the good the booze had done. “It makes sense for Marc to lie about where he is,” she ventured. “He’s got to know there’s a search out for him.”
“It makes total sense,” Beebee agreed. “But our data monkeys had a little talk with the phone company and the signal history is really interesting too. As in, there isn’t any. Marc turned his phone on in this one place in Larimer, sent the message and turned it off again.”
“So …?”
“So that’s a really strange mix of smart and dumb. If it’s genuinely him then he’s been using a different phone over the past few weeks since he disappeared. Most likely a disposable. And obviously sending Jamie a message from that new phone would run the risk of revealing the number to us. But firing up the old phone tells us where he’s at in any case. So he’s being paranoid, but not nearly paranoid enough.”
Beth squeezed her eyes tight shut. Shit, shit, shit! “Yeah, but,” she said, “it’s only dumb if you think he really is living in Larimer. If he drove in from someplace else …” She let the thought tail off. She couldn’t afford to argue for a busted hypothesis. It just made her look like a suspect. “I guess you thought of that,” she said.
“Yeah, we did. Makes you wonder, though, if he wanted to give the impression he was still in town, why he’d go out of his way to say in the text that he wasn’t. But in any case, we’re not taking it for granted that the message was genuinely coming from Marc. And if it wasn’t, then it was someone leaning over backward to convince Jamie—or us, maybe—that Marc is still alive and well and living in Pennsylvania.”
“You think …?” Beth swallowed bile. “You think he’s not?”
“We don’t know what to think at this stage. But we’re morally certain he hasn’t been hanging out in Larimer. And we’re leaning toward the view that there might be a third party—maybe more than one—involved in his going off the radar.”
“Meaning …?”
“Meaning we’re looking at abduction and murder as possible scenarios as well as bail-jumping.”
“Right,” Beth said. “Okay.” And then, for the look of the thing, “Oh Jesus.” One domino after another, she thought in sour wonder. But that was the wrong metaphor. You try to fix a drip and you knock the pipes with your shoulder, making a worse leak than before. Now the basement’s flooding with water and you’ve got to do something, but you know that as soon as you move …
“I’m sorry if this has upset you, Liz. I know there was no love lost between the two of you, but it’s still a horrible thing to have to think about.”
“It is.”
“If you want a shoulder to cry on, or someone to get drunk with …?”
“I’ll be fine, Beebee. Thank you.”
“No problem. But I’m going to be paying you a visit anyway, so we’ll get to see each other. I’ll need to take statements from you and the kids.”
“The kids?” Beth repeated. “How come? Beebee, I’d like to keep them out of this.”
“I understand that, Liz, honest to God. But there’s ground that has to be covered. I need to ask them about the last time they saw Marc, how he seemed to them, if he said anything that might be pertinent to his disappearance. I’ll be careful not to say anything that will scare them. Well, Molly, I mean. Zac’s a big boy, right? He can handle this?”
“Let me …” Beth tried to pull her thoughts into some kind of shape. “Give me a little time to prepare them. Could you do that? They’re still adjusting to not having their dad in their lives anymore. I don’t want to pile any more on them, or not all at once.”
“I’ll be tactful, Liz. You know that, right?”
Liz didn’t answer, which Beebee seemed to take as an answer in itself. “I can wait a day or two,” she said, sounding a little hurt. “If you think it will help.”
“Thanks,” Beth said. “Thank you. I’d better go. It’s the end of my break.”
She hung up without any farewells, and almost threw the phone down in the gutter. Her muscles were twitching with the need to do something, anything, but there was nothing to do. And that was how she had messed up in the first place: by doing the wrong thing when all that was needed was to sit on her hands and wait.
Now the police were sniffing around again. They had followed the fake bait she had thrown out but in the wrong direction, all the way back to her door.
So what now? Beebee could talk to Zac until the cows creamed their pants, but it would be a bad idea to let her interview Molly. Molly loved her stories, and there were any number of ways in which the crazy story of that midnight jaunt to the garden plots might surface.
She had let herself get seduced into temporary fixes, when what she needed was an endgame.
Saturday night was the coldest night of the year so far, although obviously there was a lot worse to come. In the morning Fran opened her window to find that the bowl of milk she had left out on the ledge had formed a crust of ice overnight.
And it had not lured Jinx back.
She showered, brushed her teeth and dressed in a sort of trance, a fug of misery. It was hard even to move, and impossible to think. Inside her head she was wailing all the time. Come back! Come back and I won’t ask you any more questions, not as long as I live.
It did no good. Jinx didn’t answer, and wasn’t anywhere.
Fran had got more than she bargained for out of Bruno Picota: all the answers she could use, and then some. But the price had been too high and there was no way now to call off the deal or unlearn what she knew.
She had ridden all the way back from Grove City in silence. Dr. Trestle had handed her back into her dad’s care without a word, and after one look at her tear-stained face her dad had asked no questions about how the meeting had gone. Only hugged her and said, “Let’s go home, sweet
heart.”
She had texted Zac from the car. GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU. TALK SOON. She left it at that for now. The rest would be hard and she wasn’t nearly up to it yet.
Home didn’t feel like home when they finally arrived. Jinx took up no space at all when she was there, but her absence was vast and palpable.
Through Sunday Fran kept to her room, pretending to read. Her phone buzzed a few times during the day, but it was Zac every time and she still hadn’t thought of how to break the news to him. Your mom is not your mom, she’s an interloper from a parallel universe was going to be a big pill for him to swallow, and most likely would just make him lose his shit with her again. Especially since the only proof she could offer was the absence of an imaginary fox. Not exactly a smoking gun, however you looked at it.
Your mom is not your mom, and Jinx is me. A different me, from another world. But I don’t know how that happened, and I chased her away by asking her. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been in my life, and I don’t know if I can bear it.
Around three o’clock, with the afternoon and then the evening stretching ahead of her like a desert without any waterholes in it, she succumbed at last to the temptation she’d been feeling all day. She went onto YouTube, found The Knights of the Woodland Table and binged her way through it. For most of the time she was crying, but it still gave her some comfort to see Jinx on the screen. It made her seem a little bit closer. And it made it easier to think about what she had learned.
Why had she ever thought Jinx was imaginary?
Because it was easier than accepting that she was real. That Fran really was having conversations with a cartoon fox—or someone who had disguised herself as one. It was the difference between pretending you were eccentric and admitting you were crazy.
Next question: if Jinx was what Picota said she was, then how could Fran ever hope to make that right? Knowing what she now knew, what could she do?
How could they go back to being Freaky Fran and Lady J when really they were Schrödinger’s cat in its two most popular flavors?
She was still chasing her thoughts one by one down the same drain when her dad knocked on the door and poked his head in. “Hey, Frog,” he said.
“No frogs here,” she said. “I changed back into a tadpole.” It had been her old riposte from way back when her mom was still alive, and it made him smile as she had known it would. She wanted to deflect his concern for her, his transparent unhappiness. It was too much to deal with on top of her own.
But Gil didn’t leave. He came on into the room instead and sat on the edge of the bed. Fran was cross-legged on the mat, watching the cartoon on the screen of her laptop.
“I thought we could go out and watch a movie tonight,” Gil said. “If you were up for it. That superhero thing just opened.”
The outside world was the last place Fran wanted to be right now, but she could see what was behind the invitation and she didn’t want to crush his hopes by turning it down. “I’d like that,” she lied.
“Coolio.” He said that word with an attempt at brightness, but then his voice dropped a little—a warning sign that he was about to get serious. “Fran …”
“I’m okay, Dad.”
“I know that’s not true. But I think it will be soon. I wanted to say something to you about yesterday. Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but I’m going to say it anyway.”
Gil’s broad face creased with a kind of soft urgency. He rubbed a hand across his chin, then dropped it back into his lap. “It took a ton of courage to do what you did yesterday. More courage than you knew you had, I bet. And maybe it didn’t turn out the way you were hoping, but still it was an amazing thing to have done. And I think you’ll find that that old fear lifts off you now, not all at once but a little bit at a time. You put a crack in that wall, a big one, and it can’t stand up the way it did. You’ll see I’m right.”
“Okay,” Fran said. She didn’t want to say any more in case she started crying again. He must be able to see how red her eyes were, but he was pretending not to notice.
“Okay then. A movie followed by pizza. With maybe a beer for me and a chocolate shake for you.”
“And cookie dough for dessert,” Fran suggested.
“You drive a hard bargain, Frog, but that could be arranged.” He ruffled her hair and left. She unpaused the cartoon and—of course!—started crying again.
“Oh, pull yourself together!” she muttered aloud. She didn’t watch to the end of the season. She already knew how it ended, with the serpent knight Lady Subtle betraying her oath and tricking everyone so they thought Queen Yuleia was evil. With the Woodland Table falling apart and all the good knights ready to fight each other instead of the bad guy.
Just like real life. And who the hell needed any more of that?
She got out her math homework, which was due in on Monday. She stared at the equations with unfocused eyes for the better part of an hour before giving it up and taking a walk around the block. Maybe Jinx was nearby. She never wandered far, except when she sneaked away to her secret den.
Pittsburgh was beautiful in the fall, but the best of fall was over now. The trees were no longer in their party dresses, but naked. And when they were naked they were thin and angular and spiky and altogether sad to look at. Just like me, Fran thought glumly. The wind poked at her like a bony finger.
But there was the movie to look forward to. Or rather, not the movie so much as her dad’s attention and kindness and concern for her, which was comforting. It might make her forget, for a couple of hours, the scariness of not knowing where Jinx was or what to do about Liz Kendall.
Without meaning to, she had been walking west all this time. Toward Homewood. She stopped when she came to the bridge. Beyond lay the Perry Friendly. Just the thought of that place made her shudder as though someone had walked over her grave.
Someone did, she thought. And it was me.
Cursing herself for an idiot, she turned around and went home.
When she got there, Gil was in his coat and looking for his car keys. “Thought you were going to stand me up, Frog,” he chided her.
“I lost track of time,” Fran said. “Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. Just jump in the car. We need to go give our thirty dollars to Marvel Comics and another twenty or so to Big Popcorn.”
He was working hard to make her smile, and he kept on doing it all the way to the Cineplex. Calling out to every in-joke they’d ever shared and keeping up both halves of the conversation because Fran wasn’t able to hit the ball back to him more than a couple of times.
They bought a ridiculously huge bucket of popcorn and two rain barrels full of Coke and went inside. “You’ll have to tell me who everybody is,” Gil insisted. “I don’t know the Mighty Thor from the Pillsbury Doughboy.” He was inviting Fran to indulge in one of her favorite vices, which was to give lectures on how the Marvel Cinematic Universe was different from the comics. She let herself go, and forgot to be unhappy for a while.
But the Coke took its toll, and she had to sneak out of the theater during a second act lull so she could hit the bathroom. Then on her way back she got lost and turned around somehow and ended up in the wrong auditorium—one that was being cleaned up between performances. A woman in Cineplex livery was threading her way between the rows, collecting popcorn cartons, cups and discarded ticket stubs and dumping them in a bulging white trash bag.
“Excuse me,” Fran said, moving to intercept the woman at the end of a row. “Do you know which screen—?”
The woman turned to face her and the rest of the sentence slipped all the way back down her throat as she saw who it was.
“Oh hey, Francine,” Liz Kendall said in a voice that was way sweeter than popcorn. “We’ve missed you, sweetheart. What’s doing?”
Fran clenched her fist and drew back her arm. She did it without even thinking about it. Her body did these things, and her mind gave its approval a few milliseconds later. Goodbye, clenched fist. We
all wish you well on your ultra-short journey to—
The impact jarred her arm all the way to the shoulder. It even jolted her neck, like being in a car that braked too quickly and threw you forward, then back again.
“Well now,” Liz Kendall said, smiling through the blood that was welling up from her split lip. “We know where we stand.”
Fran backed away in a hurry, as much from her own unexpected violence as from the woman she had just assaulted.
“I know what you are!” she blurted. “And I know what you did! All of it!”
“No, you don’t.” Liz made no move to retaliate. She just set down her trash bag as if she was acknowledging that they might be here for a while. She sounded almost bored. “You don’t know a damn thing. If you did, you wouldn’t have hit me in an empty room where it’s just the two of us and I can kick the crap out of you without anyone being the wiser.”
Fran realized too late that she had retreated toward the rear of the theater rather than toward the exits. Liz was between her and the door. But there was a whole maze of seats she could flee through if she had to, and she would probably be more agile in those narrow spaces than a grown woman. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, trying to sound like she believed that. “You touch me and I’ll scream, Ms. Kendall. Really loud.”
She was standing on the balls of her feet, ready to bolt the moment Liz made a move toward her. But Liz didn’t. She sat down instead. And she laughed, a long, throaty chuckle, as though all of this was a rich joke at someone else’s expense.
“It’s Beth, honey,” she said. “And I’m not going to hurt you. But we should definitely talk, don’t you think?”
Fran measured the distance to the door. She was almost certain she could run past Ms. Kendall before she got to her feet again. But she didn’t try yet, just in case. If she waited long enough, maybe someone else would come in and she’d be safe.
Wait a second. Beth?
Was she admitting …?