“Hello, Mrs. Smith,” I said, my voice neutral, my expression polite but distant. “You’re looking… well.”
“I can’t imagine what you’re doing here,” she said.
Since all pretense of courtesy was out the door, Mrs. Smith followed in its path. She pushed open the heavy screen door and stepped onto the porch, cringing at the sunlight as if it were a sworn enemy of her eternal youth. Despite her efforts, she looked older than her 55 years. Skinny legs, visible in a short skirt meant for a younger woman, played against flabby arms and a muffin-top waist—visible in a tight top meant for no one. Not bad for someone her age, but the denial of at least two decades of existence resulted in a visually disturbing contrast.
“Is everything alright with your mother?” she said. “Is there an emergency?”
Yes, because in a family crisis, the first person I’d turn to would be the woman who treated my father’s trial like an Easter Sunday fashion show, her flowery hat blocking the witness stand for all the unfortunates in the rear who couldn’t score a front-row seat.
“Just wondering if Smitty can come out to play,” I said, fighting my growing distaste for being close enough to this woman to smell her lemony perfume.
She tried to frown. Fail.
“Is he allowed out of his room?” I said. “Or is he grounded again?”
Mrs. Smith, former PTA President, quickly came to the realization that the Allison Fennimore on her porch wasn’t the same girl she’d known, the gentle one who’d won awards and initiated community projects at the 4H club.
“Why do you need to see John?”
That’s right. Smitty’s name was actually John. John Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s creative genes must have been firing on all cylinders the day he showed his non-descript mug to the world.
“Is he here?” I said. “I can come back later.”
Smitty’s wife and daughters bounded onto the porch, having almost worked up a sweat. The chubbier of the two girls grabbed Mrs. Smith’s hand, then swiped at her wet brow. “Whew! It’s a hot one, Même.”
Seriously? Mrs. Smith was having them use the French word for grandmother? She really needed to get over herself. Of course, with an exotic surname like Smith, it must have been difficult to avoid embracing one’s international heritage.
The Grande Dame gestured to her daughter-in-law. “Kendra, allow me to introduce Allison Fennimore.” She uttered my last name as if it were spy code, wanting to flick her brows up and down to be sure Kendra didn’t miss the undertone, but that forehead wasn’t going anywhere. Kendra looked the type to miss most things anyway. She wiped her right hand on her elastic-waist khaki shorts and extended it to me, a bright smile revealing overly large teeth that spanned nearly the full width of her pretty face.
“Hi, Allison,” she said. “Nice to meet you. You one of John’s friends? Here for the reunion?”
“Sort of,” I said, letting her take that to answer either question. “I went to school with Smitty.”
“You call our dad Smitty?” the thinner twin said with her hands on her hips. “He likes his grown-up friends to call him John.”
I turned to the girls as if finding them adorable. Their dirt-streaked faces stared up at me with the innocence of puppies waiting to be pet. “Well, I guess I never really grew up. And when I knew your dad, he was Smitty.” I gave a quick glance towards the original Mrs. Smith to make sure she knew the next comment was for her, then returned my attention to the girl. “It was always Bobby, Smitty, and Jasper. That’s how they were known. Your dad was part of a fearsome threesome.”
“How dare you?” Mrs. Smith blasted. “How dare you utter his name?”
She meant Bobby, but the twins wouldn’t know that.
“It’s okay, Même. Daddy still lets a couple people call him Smitty.”
“Yes,” Kendra said, a soothing hand on her mother-in-law’s flaccid, upper arm. “I don’t think John would mind too much. Let me go get him.”
Before Mrs. Smith could stop her, Kendra bounced into the house, merrily calling out her husband’s name and announcing that an old friend had come to call. I could hardly wait for the disappointment on his dull face.
Kendra returned with some sweet tea and store-bought cookies. She set them on the porch. Smitty followed her out, his dour expression letting me know that Kendra had shared the name of his visitor.
“Allison,” he said, extending a polite, practiced hand. “What a surprise.”
He waited, playing it close to the vest, everything about him measured. He’d been the sanest of the Bobby/Smitty/Jasper trio, not that that was saying much. But if Jasper was high or if Bobby was off on one of his rants, Smitty had been the voice of reason on the few occasions any existed behind their teenage antics.
I took in the adult Smitty. Still plain. One of those guys who you’d identify immediately from his baby photo because he hadn’t changed. The type who could commit a crime and be described a dozen different ways by a dozen different eyewitnesses. I would have gone with weak chin, straight nose, brown hair, rectangular face, eyes either brown or green, and faded eyebrows. Average build. No distinguishing characteristics. Like a grocery clerk—no reason to look at him unless the credit card scanner isn’t working. I’m sure the officer taking that statement would have rolled his eyes, crumpled the notepaper, and tossed it over his shoulder. But behind Smitty’s ordinariness, wheels spun as they always had. Even in elementary school, he’d recognized Bobby’s potential. The looks, the athleticism, the balls, and the utter disregard for others. He knew it would be better to have Bobby as a friend than an enemy so he’d latched on early and well. Whether or not he’d actually liked Bobby, no one would ever know. Would they still have been friends today? Hard to tell from the generic man staring at me who meted out emotion so carefully.
Mrs. Smith grabbed Smitty’s elbow as she turned her physician-enhanced profile to me. “I’ll need your help with the oven in a few minutes. It’s been acting up again.”
Kendra’s confused expression indicated her mother-in-law might be losing it. “It was okay a little bit ago, Elise.”
Mrs. Smith shot a reprimanding glance at her daughter-in-law. Idiot. But Smitty’s curt nod to his mother indicated Message Received. The entire exchange was intended for my benefit: Keep it short.
Kendra, finally catching on to the tension, aimed her eyes in my direction with more scrutiny. Worried, maybe, that I was an old girlfriend, but too jittery to say anything. She pivoted back and forth before making a decision. With her hands knotting around each other, she announced enthusiastically, “Well, I’ll let you two catch up. Come on, girls, we have cookies to bake.” Then she frowned. “Although, I guess we’ll have to see what’s up with that oven.”
All of them, including Mrs. Smith, disappeared inside.
Smitty, seemingly delayed in noticing that we were alone, took a moment to scan the street for passersby—or anything more appealing than talking to me. Unrewarded with a decent distraction, he finally gestured to a set of green Adirondack chairs at the end of the porch where Kendra had set the refreshments. The splintering wood of the chairs had been painted over, rather than sanded. Smitty’s dad was either lowering his standards or had decided he no longer gave a shit. It would be nice if it was the latter, to know that some assholes matured into apathy.
We took our seats and I helped myself to a glass of tea. “Thanks for seeing me, Smitty. I remember when you’d be out here every summer sweating and painting this porch.”
Smitty looked like I’d just declared I saw him masturbating every Thursday through his bedroom window. He cleared his throat. “I’m curious about the purpose of your visit, Allison. I knew your brother a bit, but he was older than me, and I’m not sure you and I exchanged two words in high school. You were two years behind me, weren’t you?”
The implication being that I wasn’t here for any reunion.
“That’s right. I’m in town visiting my mom.”
“How is your mot
her?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of her deteriorating status. “Thanks for asking.”
“And Kevin?” he said. It wasn’t really courtesy. Smitty was getting the lay of the land, trying to figure out my angle.
I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but didn’t want to lie in case he knew Kevin’s status—it’s complicated—from the tangled web of on-line social networks.
“Kevin’s figuring things out,” I said. “Still working construction all over the place. You’re at the Pentagon, I hear.”
“That’s right,” said Smitty, who then shot air through his nose like a rocket lifting off. He whirled to me suddenly. “And you serve drinks in New York. And your dad shot my best friend. Let’s drop the pretense, Allison. What do you want?”
Just as suddenly, I remembered Smitty’s reputation. A two-headed snake, one head boring, the other infuriated. A short fuse on the former made the latter appear more often than he would have liked.
“Must be the Department of Defense you work for, Smitty.”
His glower at least gave his face some character. “It’s hard enough coming back to this hole-in-the-wall dustbin my parents still live in,” he said. “It doesn’t help to rehash ancient history with you about the most miserable time in my life. And I can’t imagine you’re here for any other reason.”
“You can’t tell me you don’t think about the gaps in that evening’s events.”
“Oh my God.” He sat back in his chair, almost banging his head against the wood. “So you are here trying to exonerate your dad? Isn’t that a bit predictable?”
I flicked my eyebrows at him playfully. “Wouldn’t you be disappointed if I were only here to chat about the good times?”
“Unlike you, I don’t live that night over and over in my nightmares. I was only sixteen. I took the narrative as presented by the prosecution and didn’t question it. The same narrative your father was convicted upon, I might add.”
“By a jury of Lavitte residents who were more excited to be seen in the jury box than to think about the details of the case.”
“Jury of peers. That’s all any of us can ask for.”
“You didn’t see Bobby that entire day or night, at least according to your statement to the police.”
“What? Do you have the files or something?”
“Seems weird because he made a phone call from my father’s garage when he dropped his car off.”
“I didn’t know about that. Guess I was too preoccupied with him being dead.”
“Can’t imagine who he’d call if it wasn’t you or Jasper.”
“He had parents. He had other friends. How the hell would I know who he called? I was painting all day.”
“Yes. So your statement said.” I decided to toss in a wild fish, maybe get him a little hot under the collar. Besides, the cold blackness of his emotional mood ring was growing tedious. “So you were pretty close to Shelby Anderson, right?”
“No! What? What’s wrong with you? You didn’t get that from any statement. I didn’t even know her. She was a little kid as far as I was concerned. Thirteen, fourteen years old. I was close with Bobby, though, and whatever he did to your dad, he didn’t deserve to be assassinated.”
“Someone’s been marinating in the DC stew for a while, Smitty. Down here in li’l ol’ Lavitte, we just call it shot or killed.”
“By your dad!” He lurched up from his chair, leaving a few threads from his jeans on the splintering wood. “How can you be so glib?”
“Classic defense mechanisms,” I said. “Would think you’d recognize them.”
“You need to go,” he said. “Fact is, you never should’ve come back. Not like anyone in Lavitte was pining for your return.”
I sat back in my chair and took a bite of a cookie, sending an unequivocal signal that I planned to stay a while. “If you let me ask you a couple straightforward questions, I’ll leave you alone.”
He sighed as he weighed the pros and cons of dealing with me now or being ambushed later. The little gears in his brain toiled away as the smoke streamed from his pasty ears. He sat back down with a thud, the base of the chair scraping a greenish line into the white.
“Did you, Jasper, and Bobby ever break into my dad’s garage?”
He answered robotically. “Bobby did. One time. A couple weeks before the shooting. Jasper and I waited outside as lookouts while Bobby broke the window and stole some tools. I don’t know why. He never used them to fix anything.”
“So just the one time?”
“Just the one.”
“What was Bobby up to the night he was killed?”
“No idea. I never saw him that night. Or that day. Neither did Jasper.”
I hadn’t asked about Jasper. Why was he covering Jasper’s ass?
“Kind of unusual, right?” I said. “For you guys not to see each other on a Friday night in the summer? The three of you were joined at the hip, especially that August. Saw you all the time when I was riding my bike.”
He glanced toward the street. Even his profile looked like a common ad for those silhouette cutouts they offered at amusement parks. He watched a car go by, following it with his whole head until he reached me again.
“If I recall, Jasper had summer school that day ‘cuz he refused to do homework for the inane Miss Dawber, as he used to call her. Then he had to take care of his mom. I was here helping my dad. I remember how humid it was ‘cuz it seemed like the paint wouldn’t dry, let alone stick to the wood.”
Was I having déjà vu? Smitty had quoted almost directly from the statement he’d given the police sixteen years ago. Had it been so drilled into him that it had seared his brain? He went to it now like an old muscle memory reflex.
“What about that night?” I asked. “After summer school and while the paint was drying?”
Smitty’s eyes glazed over. “I didn’t see Bobby. His car had broken down so he couldn’t get up to his usual hijinks. Don’t know where he was. Jasper and I hung out, walked around town and the high school track some. We ended the night at Jasper’s trailer, watched some TV, and then I went home. His mom will vouch for that.”
The mechanical recitation, as if he were a time-traveler reading a teleprompter, creeped me out, especially that last bit about Jasper’s sickly mom. He spoke as if she were still alive.
“His mom died,” I said. “Six years ago.”
Smitty shook his head, a necessary adjustment when stepping out of a time capsule. “What? Yeah, I mean, she vouched for it back then. How would I know she died anyway?”
“The obit was printed here. Your mom seems to keep up with that sort of thing. Didn’t she tell you?”
“I don’t remember.” He swiveled his head to watch another car go by, unduly fascinated by the mundane.
“You and Jasper don’t stay in touch then?”
“We don’t stay in touch.” His answer came back at me with no conscious thought behind it.
“Do you honestly believe my dad killed Bobby?”
“Yes.” Smitty leveled a hard, deliberate stare in my direction, the kind you give a mugger if he’s threatening your family and you’re deciding which limb to break first. “Tied him up and shot him like a common hog. He should’ve just let him go. If he’d…”
Smitty pressed his lips together hard, his whole face taut.
“If he’d what?”
“If he’d let him go.”
“No, you were going to—”
“Do you have anything else, Allison?”
“Where do you theorize Bobby was before he got shot? No one’s ever said and you must have an idea.”
“Tied up in your Dad’s garage, begging for his life. Could’ve been there the whole night for all anyone knows.”
The thought of it almost made me laugh. My dad’s violence had come in occasional, emotional bursts, usually over the powerless. A lot like his own dad had treated his mom, from what I’d garnered as a nosey k
id eavesdropping on my parents’ occasional hushed conversations. The idea of my small father lording power over the 6’2” Bobby Kettrick, and methodically doling out threats before capping it all off with a bullet to the heart… it was like expecting the Unabomber to do something spontaneous.
“Do you even realize,” I said, “that half of what you’re spouting off is the same, memorized statements you gave to the police sixteen years ago?”
“Who do you think you are?” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “You come to my house and insult me? You? The offspring of a psycho who tore this town apart. Whose brother is an imprisoned drunk, whose mother can’t remember what year it is, and who’s made nothing of herself except dressing like a slut behind a bar for tips.”
So Smitty was better informed than he’d let on, his earlier questions nothing but tests. But even his tirades came out in a near monotone. Go ahead, Smitty, get it out. Maybe something useful will fall from your thin-lipped mouth.
“I’ll tell you what,” he continued in what passed as a highly emotional state for him, “even if your dad didn’t do everything they accused him of, he deserved what he got. And everyone in this town knows it. You and your family are the only clueless ones left. Why don’t you take your mom and get out?”
“What do you mean that my dad may not have done everything they accused him of? Are you talking about Shelby?”
Smitty closed his eyes and tried to calm himself with an uncomfortably long, yoga-type breath. When he rejoined the conscious, he gazed out to the street. No passing car this time. He settled for a hawk making a beeline for the cluster of oaks in the distance. It circled back, its target safe, and landed on the roof of the restaurant across the street.
“Obviously, nothing’s going to get you to leave.” He stood up. “I’m going inside now. I’d appreciate it if you’re not here when my family comes out.”
“Because there was no possible reason my dad would have killed Shelby Anderson, was there?”
Smitty leaned down on the arm of my chair and spoke through a clenched jaw. “I couldn’t get inside your dad’s head if I wanted to. Maybe he had the hots for her. Maybe he liked ‘em young. He ever try anything with you?”
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