by Fred DeVecca
Sometimes I need things spelled out. “She couldn’t let him go?” I repeated.
Dierdra came to my rescue. “She was pregnant with his baby. She wanted him to marry her.”
Chapter Fifty
The Sound of an “A”
Pregnant by Mooney. Not by me, which I knew was not possible. Interesting information to have. Not that I hadn’t suspected as much.
Then they started chattering at me, or at one another. It was hard to tell which. But I was tuning it out now. And sorting it out. Or trying my best to.
The girl who was fished out of the river was pregnant with Mooney’s child. This was the girl we had seen in Lorenzo’s time-lapse stills, the ones where we later saw Mooney hovering too. The girl we had thought was Julie was actually Victoria, also known as Edith. Some blanks were beginning to be filled in.
I gradually tuned back into the conversation there in the girls’ dorm, unsure of exactly who was saying what, but slowly starting to hear it again.
“She should have had the abortion.”
“She was Catholic. Can you believe that?”
“I don’t know anybody over the age of twelve who’s Catholic, practicing anyway.”
“I thought she was Jewish.”
“She was a Buddhist. She meditated.”
“Everybody meditates, not just Buddhists.”
“Yeah, I know. But she was a Buddhist. She told me.”
“She should have just gone off and had the baby. Who cares?”
“She was like nineteen. You’re nineteen. Do you want a baby?”
“No way. But I wouldn’t get myself dead over it.”
“Get yourself dead? Don’t you think she had some help there?”
Someone else chimed in, “I do.”
“Me too. She wouldn’t jump.”
The conversation continued as if I were not there.
“She’s gotta take some of the blame. I wouldn’t have said a word. She was stupid.”
The rest of the women ganged up on whoever said this.
“What? Yeah, blame the victim. No one’s to blame but him. Come on—”
“How is that guy not in jail, anyway?”
“He’s careful. He looks like he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, but I tell you the guy’s brain never stops. He’s a better actor than any of us. Now he’s playing the pathetic drunk and he’s going to get off scot-free. From everything.”
“Jeez, I hate that bastard.”
“Oh, fuck you, Gloria. You were all over him the other night.”
“I was not—”
“Yes you were.”
“We all talk big now. And we all shut up when we see him.”
“Oh, fuck him, anyway.”
Everyone agreed with this coarsely expressed sentiment. There was a chorus of “fuck hims.”
It was not unlike the birdsongs I so cherished. Lovely, high-pitched tweeting, some at singsong cadence and quite pleasing in an odd way. The difference was that these young women actually had something to say. I was tempted to take out my phone and record it, but I did not.
As the morning progressed, some of them got more completely dressed and wandered outside, some pulled out cellphones and began chatting on them, and a couple got online on their laptops. I was once again sitting alone at the table with Dierdra; some kind of solidarity had developed between us.
“You don’t say much,” she said, sipping her coffee.
“Not much room for me to get a word in edgewise, with eight teenage females.”
“We’re not all teenagers. Flavia’s in her twenties, I think. Ambrosia is at least twenty. But we’re all over eighteen. Mooney’s real careful about that. He checks IDs.”
“At least he’s got that going for him,” I said. “It’s better than nothing, I guess.”
“He’s crazy but he’s not stupid. He doesn’t need that kind of trouble. He’s got enough trouble as it is.”
“It looks to me like he’s avoiding the real trouble. Like pregnant girlfriends. And murder raps.”
I finished my coffee. Dierdra shook my hand and then gave me a sweet, daughterly hug. She was a charming young woman.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s Mooney. He’s almost obsessive-compulsive about some things. Like redheaded girls whose names end in ‘A.’ He’s pretty diligent about it. And over eighteen. He’s careful about that. We’re all legal. And actors—they pretty much have to be in the movies. He likes that. I’ve almost never seen him go after a real civilian, a normal girl off the streets.”
“Almost never?” We were both standing now. I’d been about to leave but stopped.
She took our empty cups over to the sink. “Well, I’ve only ever heard about him screwing that up once. And at first he thought her name ended in ‘A’ too. Then he found out it didn’t. But that didn’t seem to faze him at all. I mean, he really wanted to fuck that girl. She wasn’t in movies, but he didn’t care. He was going to fuck her come hell or high water.”
“And did he?” I asked.
She turned to look at me, leaning against the sink. “Sure. He always gets what he wants.”
I didn’t quite get it, though. “He thought her name ended in ‘A,’ but it didn’t?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. She was regarding me with curiosity, wondering why I cared. “She was another perfect little redhead like the rest of us. It didn’t matter when he found out her name ended in ‘H,’ not ‘A.’ He just cared about how it sounded. As long as it sounded like an ‘A,’ he was satisfied.”
I was afraid to ask my next question, so I didn’t. I just looked at Dierdra, pleading with my eyes for her not to say what I knew she was going to say next.
“Yeah, names like that can fool you. Take my name, for instance—some Dierdras end in ‘E,’ but mine ends in ‘A.’ Yeah, he spells it out for you. Makes it official for the credits. So I was cool either way.” She walked me to the door. “It was the same thing with that girl Sarah. He just had to have her, and by God, he did.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Almost Everything
It was still early, and Sarah was sitting at her kitchen table, sipping tea. Clara was already at work.
I would have thought I had a lot to fill Sarah in on, but now suspected she knew a lot more than I did. And possibly a hell of a lot more than I would have wanted her to know.
She had her laptop in front of her. Immersed in something, she hardly looked up. I poured myself tea and sat down across from her.
“Where have you been?” she finally asked me, giving me a quick glance.
“Gathering data. You?”
“The same. You get anything good?”
“Maybe. You?”
“No.”
Then she looked up and fixed me with a piercing stare. “Tell me what you found. From the look on your face it was pretty good.”
“Good is not the word.”
“What is the word?”
“Disturbing, maybe. Upsetting. Possibly totally hellacious.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Have you seen Mooney lately?”
“Not since he got out of the hospital.”
“You hate that bastard, don’t you?” I said.
“That’s too mild a word. I despise the fucker.”
“Your feelings toward him are very strong. Always have been.”
“You got that right, Frankie.”
I stopped. I could not go where I needed to go. She went back into her computer, and I went back to watching the steam rise off my tea. She was, for the time being, anyway, willing to let the upsetting and disturbing details of what I had learned drop.
But I wasn’t. I looked up from the steam and said, “Were you fucking him, Sarah?”
She didn’t even look up. “No,” she said. Then she looked up. “You gotta believe me, Frankie.”
Our eyes locked. “I do,” I said.
“Enough said about that?”
I thought this over. “No,�
� I said. “We need to talk.”
“So talk.”
“You know about the girls’ dorm?”
She did not look away. “I’ve been there.”
“You know about Mooney’s thing for redheads with names that end in ‘A’?
“You mean an ‘ah’ sound. Yeah, I know.”
“How do you know?” I was watching her for signs that she was lying, or at least fudging the truth. So far she didn’t falter.
“How do you think?”
“I’m afraid of what I’m thinking.”
She shook her head, patted my hand. “Don’t be afraid, Frankie. Nothing happened.”
“Well, something apparently happened.”
She nodded, tensed. “Yeah. He came on to me real strong. He got me up there one day when the other girls were out. And he tried his damnedest to fuck me. But it didn’t happen. Do you need to know any more than that?”
I wasn’t sure, so I kept asking. “When was this?”
“Right before they shot that one day. When Julie was sick.”
“You went up there? I can’t believe you actually went up there.” I felt my head start to ache and rubbed my temples.
“He was a big-time director and I was an eighteen-year-old girl.”
“I thought you were smarter than that.” The words emerged with a hint of a groan.
She sighed. “I did too.”
“And that was it?”
“That was it until he tried again. And again. And again. He’s a persistent bastard.”
I thought this over. “Sarah, I’m glad you didn’t fuck the sleazeball, but what’s really disturbing now is that you never told me about this. We’re supposed to be working together. What else haven’t you told me?”
She hesitated, looked away. “Nothing. Now you know everything.”
I didn’t like the hesitation, the averted eyes.
“Everything?”
“Well, practically everything.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Practically everything?”
“Yeah, almost everything.”
I did not speak. I just looked at her.
“Well, I guess there was one more thing. Julie was pregnant.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Shattered Glass
I didn’t react to Sarah’s statement. Not outwardly, anyway.
“You remember when she got sick?” Sarah asked me.
“Well, sure. How could I forget?”
“She lost it then. I was there. She miscarried.”
“She had doctors all over the place.”
“They weren’t there all the time. I was. Nobody else knew.”
“You guys took care of it yourselves?”
“Yeah, we did. She was my friend.”
What a thing for two very young women to have to handle themselves, I thought.
Who was the father? I didn’t think too hard on that one. I was pretty sure I knew.
But I was losing count. According to my calculations, that made two pregnant girls—that we knew of anyway—out of a total of eleven beautiful, small, slim, pale redheads. There was the original nine from the girls’ dorm, plus Julie, plus Sarah. One was dead, and one was very possibly also dead.
And one drunken, sleazy director holed up in a crumbling mansion just up the hill.
I needed to talk to somebody about this. I couldn’t talk to the dead girl. I couldn’t talk to the missing and possibly dead girl. So I decided to talk to the sleazy director.
I was losing count on a lot of things—dead girls, pregnant girls, missing girls, girls who ended up in the river. I was successful in keeping the count of sleazy directors, however. There was only one of them.
So I trudged up that damn Hill of Tears to Mooney’s.
I found him up and about—clean-shaven, hair short and well kempt, showered, pink cheeks, chipper. His house was sparkling clean—no pizza crusts, no puke on the carpets—and he was bouncing around like he had pleasant places to bounce to. He smiled when I walked in.
Was I in the right place?
I admired my surroundings. “You cleaned up,” I said.
“Not me. I hired a girl.”
I looked at him. “You cleaned up,” I clarified.
He smiled. He smiled. “Yeah, I did.”
I was still standing by the door. He stood in the center of the room. “What’s up, Mooney?”
“Me, I’m up.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Why? How?”
“It was time. Or I was going to die.”
“That doesn’t stop a lot of people. I didn’t think it was going to stop you.”
He shrugged. “Me neither.”
“Seriously, man, what happened?”
It was then that I saw the bottle of Jameson in his hand. He brought it to his mouth and took a big chug.
“Time to move on, Raven. I’m moving on.”
“Where? How?”
“Right here. Sheer will power.”
I pointed at the bottle. “You’re still drinking.”
“You surprise me, Raven. I thought you knew about drinkers. I’m on a toot and it’s going to last a while. But it can’t last if I die. I’ve rejoined the living so I can keep drinking.”
“That’s fucked up, Mooney.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Would it be better if I dropped dead?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe’s not good enough for me.”
“It’s your life, Mooney.”
“You want a drink?” He held out the bottle.
“Fuck you, Mooney.”
I had come to ask him about fucking redheads whose names end in ‘A’ and about trying to fuck Sarah. But the dude knew how to throw curveballs. What was the point of asking this guy anything at all?
“Yeah. Fuck me. Fuck you. Fuck everything. Fuck VelCro too. Forget her,” he said. “She’s history. She’s gone.”
“Easy for you to say.”
This pissed him off. “Easy! Did you see what happened to me? I almost died.”
“I note the ‘almost,’ Mooney. I hope we can someday apply that word to our dear Juliana’s death.”
“So do I,” he replied, and I thought for a minute he was sincere.
Then I heard a crash from the bedroom. Glass shattering, followed by an “oh, shit.”
A tiny, slim, gorgeous, redheaded young woman came out of the room.
“Shit, Nickie. I dropped that picture. It broke.”
She looked at me. Was it Petunia, Layla, Ambrosia?
She extended a hand for me to shake.
“We haven’t really met. I’m Gloria.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
The Lost Verse
I shook her hand. “Frank,” I said.
“I know,” she replied.
Then, while I was digesting this latest development, yet another piled upon us.
Another tiny, slim, pretty redhead walked in. Not from the bedroom, but from the outside—Sarah.
“I figured I’d find you here,” she said. “After I checked the West End, the Blue Rock, Mocha Maya’s, and the girls’ dorm, anyway.”
“You didn’t check my house?”
“You’re never there.”
This hurt. I love my house. Sarah was right, though. I was never there anymore. Poor Marlowe must feel abandoned. At least I checked in on him occasionally and took him for walks and threw sticks. But not nearly enough.
“What’s up?” I asked her. Something had to be up for her to track me down like that. Something relatively big.
“This is up.” She held out a postcard.
I couldn’t quite see it from where I stood, so I moved closer. She handed it to me.
It was a nighttime party scene of New Orleans, streets lit up, revelers holding drinks, neon signs, a mule-drawn tourist carriage, and an orange banner curling across the top, proclaiming, “BOURBON STREET!”
It was postmarked “New Orleans, LA.” The message was only these words, handwritt
en:
Her flamed mane in the heather
Did blithely take his stare
Young Johnny was enchanted
By the moisten of her hair
But as he reached to touch her
Aqua became sod
And the sweet faint maiden
Ascended into God
I read it aloud.
“I knew you’d be the only one who got what the hell it means,” said Sarah. “So, what the hell does it mean?”
I recited it again, silently. Then once more. By memory this time. Then I put the music to it in my head and sang it aloud, the way it was supposed to be heard.
“It’s a verse from a song,” I said, when I had finished singing.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. Sounds like one of those dead-baby dead-dog songs. Dead-young-girl song.”
“The girl in that song is not dead.”
“No? Sounds like it to me.”
“Believe me. I know that verse inside out.”
“Okay. You’re the expert here. Can you tell me what it is?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a lost verse from ‘The Nutting Girl.’ ”
She looked at Mooney, then back at me. Mooney’s expression was unreadable. Carefully schooled to reveal nothing. Gloria was staring at him, waiting for her cue.
“That’s what you call Julie,” Sarah said.
“Yep.”
She grabbed the postcard and tapped it with her finger. “What is ‘flamed mane’?”
“What else? Red hair.”
“ ‘Moistened’? What’s up with that?”
“I don’t know. That’s the way I wrote it. I don’t know what it means.”
“You wrote it?”
I nodded. She seemed to accept this without question.
“ ‘Aqua became sod’?”
“Water becomes earth. Fluid becomes solid. Amorphous becomes firm. Unknown becomes known. Spirit becomes flesh.”
“ ‘And ascended unto God’? That sounds an awful lot like death.”
“It’s ‘into’ not ‘unto.’ There’s a difference. And I didn’t mean it to mean death.”
She rattled the postcard at me. “You wrote this?”