“Who sent you?” he said.
I pictured his eyes darting around the room in search of conspirators. “Jasper? I’m not there. I’m in Lavitte, calling you.”
“For now,” he said.
“I would like to get together, though.” The breathing slowed, as if he were meditating. “I’m looking into a few details about the night Bobby was shot. Do you have time to talk to me?”
“Obviously. We’re talking.”
“I know.” I wondered if he did. “But I was hoping to meet in person.”
“Why are you bringing up that night? It can’t be a coincidence. Is there new evidence?”
“What can’t be a coincidence?” I asked.
“When the scientists on the OPERA team suggested that neutrinos travelled 0.002% faster than light, did you believe it?”
I suddenly remembered, with measured delight, how conversations between Jasper and others used to go. Challenging, playful, never straightforward. I was one of the few people who could decipher him. Outside of class, we barely acknowledged each other, but the walls of the chemistry lab offered a social safety net, where the quiet freshman geek, just coming into her looks, could talk to the oddball mastermind hanging onto the fringe of popularity. The oddball was testing to see if the geek was worthy of him continuing the conversation.
“Not for a nanosecond,” I answered.
“Do you believe it’s possible that anything will ever travel faster than light?”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that particles are out there right now travelling faster than light. But when they’re finally discovered, the news will be so five seconds ago.”
“Allison Fennimore.” I heard a smile. “Why do you want to talk about that night?”
I never claimed to be above playing the Alzheimer’s card, even if my mother wasn’t close to diagnosable. And Jasper could surely relate to a sick mother. He’d had one since the day his parents conspired his birth.
“For my mom’s sake,” I said. “She’s not doing well and she’d like some closure. I’m not trying to stir up trouble, just hoping for clarification. She wants a story, something she can die peacefully with.”
“You must have spoken to other people,” he said. “Tell me, Allison of the oval face, from whom have you sought information to fill the holes in your tale thus far?”
“Your old friend, Smitty, and Enzo Rodriguez, the boy who worked at my father’s garage.”
“So the ball is in motion,” he said. “I can’t remember the nuances of your character, or perhaps they weren’t developed in you at such a young age. Are you a Rube Goldberg type, or more of a Lord Baltimore? I surmise the latter. Plodding. Never clumsy. Unwavering. Maybe even unsentimental, having grown coarse over the years since.”
Did I have to be either? Although, to be honest, his last few words had summed me up quite nicely. A Rube Goldberg machine was a complicated, multifaceted machine designed to achieve a simple outcome. Like a mousetrap. And the mysterious Lord Baltimore, if I remembered from Kevin’s favorite movie, was the famous Indian tracker who’d pursued Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Bolivia. Why would Jasper assume I was devising a convoluted trap for him, or tracking him relentlessly? Was his paranoia in high gear or did he feel he deserved to be caught?
I remained silent, vaguely interested in the machinations of his mind and not wanting to send him off on an irreversible tangent. Back in chemistry class, he’d cleverly led the teacher from a conversation about protons to an argument in favor of holding the class outside the next day. He’d had us all in stitches with each twist of logic and we did indeed find ourselves in the warmth of sun the next morning slapping at an endless horde of gnats while the teacher rambled. But now, the mental illness squatting in Jasper’s gray matter seemed to have crowded out all the fun. A shame, really, as it had humanized the weirdo.
“Lord Baltimore all the way,” I finally said.
“It’s time,” he said.
“For what?”
“Hmm,” he said, tapping rhythmically in the background. “Words or ships, Allison J. Fennimore? Words or ships?”
The hypnotic tapping, and the use of my middle initial, focused the yearbook image in my head. I zoomed in on Jasper‘s bony finger thumping up and down on my young face, his nail like a fish hook, my ninth grade mouth refusing to take the bait. Let’s hope he chose the thousand words. Of explanation. My picture should be worth that, and I had no use for a thousand ships. And as these ideas sailed through my mind, I suddenly felt worried for Jasper. If he really did have words he wanted to share with me, they wouldn’t be futile. They’d carry some weight and their revelation might put him in danger.
For now, I needed to give him an answer that continued our game. “I choose words,” I said. “Verbal or written, as long as they’re true. A thousand should do.” I needed to close the deal by earning his respect, let him know I understood his reference to a picture being worth a thousand words, but that a face could launch a thousand ships. “After all, that little thumbnail sketch you’re looking at wasn’t from my best side, and the plaid shirt muted my eyes, wouldn’t you say? Worth only 850 ships at most. The words are a better bargain.”
A deep, calming breath voyaged through the phone line. “Excellent. But I never did count the words and can’t guarantee the quantity. It was long ago in human years. You have chosen well.”
“Thank you.” Human years?
“I shall take extra care to ensure you receive them. It is time, after all. When can you get here?”
Wow, he was agreeing to meet me. My stomach surprised me by wringing itself out. The sensation travelled to my brain in the form of quiet fear, the first of that emotion to surface since the beginning of this bizarre exploration. Ignoring it, I said, “I can drive up tomorrow morning.”
“No,” he said. “Busy. Possibly to your benefit. Possibly to your detriment. Two-thirty p.m. In the atrium. It’s public.”
Public? Did he think I was going to attack him? “I’ll be there. And Jasper, thank you. I really appreciate this.”
“I’ll recognize you,” he said in closing.
Not creepy at all.
Chapter 14
Bobby… sixteen years ago
Bobby wished he’d thought to buy some ice at Westerling’s. Heck, he’d picked up a cooler and beer but had forgotten to throw in a bag of ice. That awkward chick at the store should have thought of it, for Chrissakes. The beer had been cold going in but not enough to fight this heat. He yanked out a can, sucked it down and tossed it in the street. Hoisting the cooler back up on his shoulder, he noticed how the more he drank, the lighter it became. Simple subtraction. He took out another one. Math class finally paid off and he hadn’t even needed Jasper’s help. He cut through a final field of dried-out, cut corn stalks and spotted Shelby up ahead, sitting on the same rock, picking at her nails.
“Boo!” he said as he sneaked up on her.
She screamed, but used the opportunity to grab his arm and tell him what a stinker he was.
“Well?” she said as she stuck out her shiny, red tongue.
It took Bobby a moment to remember the lollipop. “Oh yeah,” he said, “it’s red all right. Looks good enough to eat.”
“Bobby!” She pushed him playfully with both her arms, but he didn’t budge. It was like a flea trying to move a brick.
He popped open a beer and held it out to her. “One for the walk?”
“Sure,” she said, hesitating only a moment before taking a gulp. “What about my bike?”
“Just leave it. We’ll come back for it later. Let’s cut through that strip of land where the Simcoxes ride their four-wheeler,” Bobby said. “Then round about the Bakers’ place. It’ll be a little longer walk, but it’s got more shade.”
“That’s real thoughtful of you, Bobby, thinking about my comfort like that.”
Bobby didn’t give a crap about her comfort, or that shade. It was a different shade that prompted the alternate route, a
nd he wanted to avoid it. The shade from Mr. Artie’s spook-ass eyes. They could make a guy feel guilty about something even if he was innocent. Which Bobby wasn’t. Yeah, he’d taken those tools, but he’d needed ‘em to work on his own car, and with all the money the Kettrick family had spent at Artie’s over the years, Bobby was owed a few stinkin’ tools. Maybe he’d return them sometime. They hadn’t done him any good. When he’d finally gotten down to it, he realized he didn’t know squat about the goings-on under the hood of any car. His dad wasn’t the type to hang out with his kid and teach him how rotors worked or what spark plugs did. His dad was more the type to steal a shipment of rotors and hook spark plugs to the balls of any dude who got in his way. Bobby had thought car junk would be intuitive or that Jasper or Smitty would have a clue, but Smitty’s dad was as useless as his and Jasper had gone into so much detail it had made Bobby’s head spin. So he and Smitty had used the tools to beat the living daylights out of an ugly, hobbled cat. Put it out of its misery and all that. And if Smitty had caused the cat’s injury in the first place with his B.B. gun, well, tough shit. That was the price of being a dumb-ass animal in a human’s world.
“This is a long way,” Shelby whined after ten minutes, rolling her head dramatically towards her much taller companion.
“Here. Have another beer,” Bobby said.
They sat on a split rail fence on the border of the Hesters’ foreclosed property and polished off another can each. In the few months since the Hesters had cleared out, teenagers had made the place their own. From bonfires to parties, more weed had been smoked at the Hester place than was growing in their neglected fields. And those reached chin-high.
Bobby poured the last third of his can onto a black and yellow garden spider suspended between two of the fence rails. It scurried away on its web.
“Now that spider didn’t do nothing to you,” Shelby said.
“That’s why teachers love me,” Bobby said. “I do things without even being asked.”
Shelby shook her head ‘cuz from what she’d heard, Bobby Kettrick mostly did things in class he wasn’t supposed to be doing in the first place.
When they continued on their way, Shelby grabbed Bobby’s hand. A bold move for a girl three grades behind him, but at a slight 95 pounds, two beers went a long way towards bringing the horny to the surface. By the time they reached the barn, Shelby’s tipsy brain would have been impressed if Bobby had pointed to a pile of cow manure and claimed he’d sculpted it into a mound of bullshit. But he actually offered more.
“You like Ferris wheels, Shelby?”
“’Course I do. No better place to make out than the top of a Ferris wheel.”
The way she said it made Bobby smirk. He could tell she’d never made out with anybody, ever, while suspended three stories in the air. Maybe today would be her lucky day.
“You’re gonna like this, then,” he said.
Bobby slid open the huge doors of the barn. Sounded like a slow train humming down the tracks. He pulled Shelby in and pointed to the apex of the ceiling, over forty feet up. Outside, the sun provided one last ray at just the right angle to pierce the barn’s skylight and show off Bobby’s achievement. A thick, splintery rope hung from a horizontal rafter high in the air. It dangled down about fifteen feet, an old tractor seat tied to its base. Another rope attached to a swivel bolt on underside of the seat so that a rider could twirl in circles and still be secured by the anchor rope, which linked the whole contraption to the third-floor loft.
“Oh my God,” Shelby said. “D’you make that? How’d you get up there and do that?”
“Wasn’t easy. Been working on it most of the day. Wasted a good two hours this afternoon trying to toss the rope in such a way that I could latch it to something and climb over. Finally, I just shinnied along one of them rafters up there and did it by hand.”
“You didn’t!”
“Heck yeah, I did. Ain’t nobody been on it yet.”
“Not even you?”
“Nope. Got it at just such an angle that you need a second person to pull you back on the loft when you lose your momentum.”
Shelby pawed at Bobby’s chest like a kitten seeking a nipple. “You think I could get a ride?”
Bobby stroked the side of her face. He knew how that simple gesture sent chills to the girls where it counted. “I might let you earn a ride.”
Shelby slapped at him friskily, then leaned in, letting his bulk absorb the weight of her body and compress her chest. The scent of her hair combined into an erotic combination of strawberries and sweat with a touch of lavender blended in. Shelby lingered there, her head bobbing back and forth in sync with his breaths. “So,” she said, “what does a girl have to do to earn a ride around here?”
Bobby smiled. This would be too easy. “Let’s go up.”
He pulled a lighter from his pocket, lit a lantern he’d left out earlier, and led the way.
As they climbed the first ladder, Bobby heard gunshots. Morons, he thought. Who the hell goes out shooting in the dark? Then again, maybe Artie’s Autos was getting robbed. He pictured Artie taking a bullet right between those nasty eyes.
Just hope he got my Chevy running first, Bobby thought.
Chapter 15
Allison… present
With a day to kill before meeting up with Jasper, I decided to take my mother into town. She didn’t venture in much anymore. The population had no doubt grown and memories had faded for many, but the deep roots of the community remained. With people like Mrs. Smith around to fertilize the gossip tree, Mom couldn’t hope to gain any degree of acceptance, let alone popularity. Heck, she’d settle for anonymity, but that was as likely as me reopening Artie’s Autos and expecting a thriving business. Usually, if Mom needed something, she’d drive to one of the new shopping centers in the bigger cities where she could walk without people shooting hateful glares in her direction, or order a sandwich without worrying someone had spat on it.
We passed my dad’s old garage on the way in. I would have avoided it, but the back roads were hell on shocks and Mom’s old car had enough problems. The ancient green and white Artie’s Autos sign no doubt lay rusting in a dump somewhere. It had taken the neighborhood kids only a week after the discovery of Shelby’s body to destroy it. Rocks had shattered the lights. Graffiti had covered the letters. Words like pervert and pedophile and killer had decorated the outside walls of the structure that had provided our livelihood. I remembered passing it on my bike a few times and thinking how pretty the word pedophile looked. I didn’t even know what it meant then, but I liked the way it went down and up, down and up, with the p, d, p, and l, painted to give a three-dimensional effect in alternating pink and orange hues. A psychiatrist would have had a nice label for my reaction, but I preferred to think I was finding the positive in a negative situation. About as negative as you could get.
Mom had tried to keep Artie’s Autos going for a while with Kevin and Enzo, but Enzo could barely walk in the place without feeling queasy and Kevin wanted to spend all his time working on a defense strategy for Dad. They’d helped her sell it to old Chester Givens a month later. Chester’s nephew, Graham, owned it now, but he’d stuck with the name Chester’s Autos, which now read Che--er’s Auto-, an irony not lost on this passerby. According to my mom, business was never as good for Chester and Graham as it had been for Dad, but there weren’t too many mechanics as gifted as Artie Fennimore had been.
“Sure is a different world today when they fix a car, isn’t it?” my mom said as the garage faded into my rear-view mirror. “They figure out what’s wrong by hooking the car up to a computer. Can you imagine? I don’t think half these guys would know a dipstick from a popsicle stick.”
“Remember the greasy uniforms you had to wash all the time?” I said.
She laughed. “One thing your father didn’t skimp on was the washing machine. I always told him to write it off as an expense for the garage, but he wasn’t very good at that stuff. Enzo probably would have
figured out to do that eventually. He had the head for business.”
“I ran into him, you know. He’s in town for his cousin’s wedding.”
“Really? How is he? I’d love to see him.”
“He’s huge,” I said. “Grew up and got all handsome. Runs a franchise of those oil-changing places.”
“Like Lube Auto?”
“Exactly like Lube Auto. That’s his company.”
“No!” my mother said. She shook her head in awe. “I never knew.”
I glanced at her to see if any resentment dampened her joy for the skinny Mexican kid she used to feed. Nope. She’d either forgiven him for serving up the jet fuel that skunked up my dad and brother’s brains that night or she’d never blamed him at all.
“You know, Mom, he’s the primary donor to that fund.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve often wondered about that.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned to look out the window, perhaps reminiscing about a time when she liked this place, when it was still her hometown.
“There were a thousand if-only’s that night,” she said. “If only they hadn’t stayed late to work. If only those customers’ cars hadn’t broken down. If only they’d left the guns locked up. If only it hadn’t been so hot. If only Bobby hadn’t stolen those tools. If only they’d come straight home. And then there’s one I hope Enzo doesn’t dwell on—if only he hadn’t broken out that horrid liquor.”
“I don’t see how he couldn’t dwell on it, Mom. He and I chatted about it a little.”
She whirled on me. “That night doesn’t have to be the focal point of every conversation, Allison.”
“Between us?”
“Between you and anyone. You can make small talk.”
“Small talk covers small things, Mom, like if you didn’t invite someone for barbecue and you run into them the next day. Or if gossip circles back around and you turn out to be the source. But small talk isn’t nearly stretchy enough to cover the mound of shit that was that night.”
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