“I don’t know the identity of anyone who is in danger,” I said carefully. “I don’t know who killed Meredith.” That was absolutely true.
“You should tell me everything you know,” Chandler said, his voice so low and intent it was scary as a snake’s rattle.
My hands, resting on the worn gray and pink Formica of the table’s surface, clenched into hard fists. My heels dug into the wooden base of the booth, giving me launching power. A startled look crossed Chandler’s face, and he leaned away from me.
“What’s in your mind?” he asked sharply, and he brushed his empty plate to one side without taking his eyes off me, clearing his own deck for action.
For once, I was anxious to explain myself. But I couldn’t. I took a couple of deep breaths, made myself relax.
“You love this man,” he said.
I started to shake my head side to side: no. But I said, “Yes.”
“This is the one.”
I nodded, a jerky little up-and-down movement.
“And he doesn’t . . . he can handle . . . what happened to you?”
“He doesn’t mind the scars,” I said, my voice as light and smooth as the changing scenery of a dream.
Chandler turned red. His eyes left mine, focused on the pattern of the Formica.
“It’s OK,” I told him, just above a whisper.
“Does he . . . does he know how lucky he is?” Chandler asked, not able to think of any other way of asking me if Jack loved me back.
“I don’t know.”
“Lily, if you want me to have a serious talk with this joker, just say the word.” And he really meant it. I looked at Chandler with new eyes. This man would put himself through a humiliating conversation and not think twice about it.
“Will you make him go down on one knee and swear to forsake all others?” I was smiling a little, I couldn’t help it.
“Damn straight.”
This, too, he meant.
“What a great guy you are,” I said. All the aggression leaked out of me, as if I was a balloon with a pinhole. “You’ve been talking with Jack, haven’t you?”
“He’s an ex-cop, and no matter how his career ended,” and Chandler flushed uncomfortably since Jack had not exactly left the Memphis police force under creditable circumstances, “Jack Leeds was a good detective and made some good arrests. I called the Memphis cops, talked to a friend of mine there, as soon as I realized who he was.”
That was interesting. Chandler had known Jack was in town probably before I did—and had checked up on him.
“Fact is, the only thing this guy knew against Jack was that he’d hooked up with a shady cleaning lady,” Chandler said with a grin.
I grinned back. All the tension was gone, and we were old friends together. Without asking, Chandler paid for my milkshake and his meal, and I slid out of the booth and into my coat.
When he dropped me off at home, Chandler gave me a kiss on the cheek. We hadn’t said another word about Meredith Osborn, or Dr. LeMay, or Jack. I knew Chandler had backed off only because he owed me, on some level: The last time we’d been together had been a terrible evening for both of us. Whatever the reason, I was grateful. But I knew that if Chandler thought I was concealing something that would contribute to solving the murders that had taken place in the town he was sworn to protect, he would come down on me like a ton of bricks.
We might be old friends, but we were both weighted down with adult burdens.
JACK DIDN’T CALL.
That night I lay sleepless, my arms rigidly at my sides, watching the bars of moonlight striping the ceiling of my old room. It was the distillation of all the bad nights I’d had in the past seven years; except in my parents’ house, I could not resort to my usual methods of escape and relief. Finally I got up, sat in the little slipper chair in the corner of the room, and turned on the lamp.
I’d finished my biography. Luckily I’d brought some paperbacks with me from Varena’s, anticipating just such a night . . . not that I would have picked these books if I’d had much choice. The first was a book of advice on dealing with your stepchildren, and the second was a historical romance. Its cover featured a guy with an amazing physique. I stared at his bare, hairless chest with its immense pectorals, wondering if even my sensei’s musculature would match this man’s. I found it very unlikely that a sensible fighting man would wear his shirt halfway off his shoulders in that inconvenient and impractical way, and I thought it even sillier that his lady friend would choose to try to embrace him when he was leaning down from a horse. I calculated his weight, the angle of his upper body, and the pull she was exerting. I factored in the high wind blowing her hair out in a fan, and decided Lord Robert Dumaury was going to end up on the ground at Phillipetta Dunmore’s feet within seconds, probably dislocating his shoulder in the process . . . and that’s if he was lucky. I shook my head.
So I plowed through the advice, learning more about being a new mother to a growing not-your-own child than I ever wanted to know. This paperback showed serious signs of being read and reread. I hoped it would be of more use to Varena than Ms. Dunmore’s adventures with Pectoral Man.
I would have given anything for a good thick biography.
I got halfway through the book before sleep overcame me. I was still in the chair, the lamp still on, when I woke at seven to the sounds of my family stirring.
I felt exhausted, almost too tired to move.
I did some push-ups, tried some leg lifts. But my muscles felt slack and weak, as if I were recovering from major surgery. Slowly, I pulled on my sweats. I’d committed my morning to cleaning Dill’s house. But instead of rising and getting into the bathroom, I sat back in the chair with my face covered by my hands.
Being involved in this child abduction felt so wrong, so bad, but for my family’s sake I couldn’t imagine what else I could do. With a sigh of sheer weariness, I hauled myself to my feet and opened the bedroom door to reenter my family’s life.
It was like dipping your toes into a quiet pond, only to have a whirlpool suck you under.
Since this was the day before the wedding, Mother and Varena had every hour mapped out. Mother had to go to the local seamstress’s house to pick up the dress she planned to wear tomorrow: It had required hemming. She had to drop in on the caterer to go over final arrangements for the reception. She and Varena had to take Anna to a friend’s birthday party, and then to pick up Anna’s flower girl dress, which was being shipped to the local Penney’s catalog store after some delay. (Due to a last-minute growth spurt, Anna’s fancy dress, bought months before, was now too tight in the shoulders, so Varena had had to scour catalogs for a quickly purchasable substitute.) Both Varena and my mother were determined that Anna should try the dress on instantly.
The list of errands grew longer and longer. I found myself tuning out after the first few items. Dill dropped Anna off to run errands with Varena and Mom, and Anna and I sat together at the kitchen table in the strange peace that lies at the eye of the storm.
“Is getting married always like this, Aunt Lily?” Anna asked wearily.
“No. You can just elope.”
“Elope? Like the animal?”
“It’s like an antelope only in that you run fast. When you elope, the man and woman who are getting married get in the car and drive somewhere and get married where nobody knows them. Then they come home and tell their families.”
“I think that’s what I’m gonna do,” Anna told me.
“No. Have a big wedding. Pay them back for all this,” I advised.
Anna grinned. “I’ll invite everyone in the whole town,” she said. “And Little Rock, too!”
“That’ll do it.” I nodded approvingly.
“Maybe in the whole world.”
“Even better.”
“Do you have a boyfriend, Aunt Lily?”
“Yes.”
“Does he write you notes?” Anna made a squeezed face, like she felt she was asking a stupid question, but she wanted to know the answer anyway.
“He calls me on the phone,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“Does he . . .” Anna was rummaging in her brain for other things grown-up boyfriends might do. “Does he send you flowers and candy?”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“What does he do to show you he likes you?”
Couldn’t share that with an eight-year-old. “He hugs me,” I told her.
“Ewwww. Does he kiss you?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Bobby Mitzer kissed me,” Anna said in a whisper.
“No kidding? Did you like it?”
“Ewwww.”
“Maybe he’s just not the right guy,” I said, and we smiled at each other.
Then Mom and Varena told Anna they had been ready to go for minutes and inquired why she was still sitting at the table as if we had all day.
“YOU CAN MANAGE at Dill’s by yourself, can’t you?” Varena asked anxiously. She’d returned from dropping Anna off at the party, complete with present. “You sure don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, hearing my voice come out flat and cold. I’d enjoyed talking to Anna, but now I felt exhausted again.
Mother eyed me sharply. “You didn’t sleep well,” she said. “Bad dreams again?” And she and Varena and my father stared at me with matching expressions of concern.
“I’m absolutely all right,” I said, trying to be civil, hating them thinking about the ordeal again. Was I being disgustingly self-pitying? It was just being
home.
For the first time it occurred to me that if I’d been able to stay longer after the attack, if I’d toughed it out, they might have become used to me again, and they would have seen my life as a continuation, not a broken line. But I’d felt compelled to leave, and their clearest, most recent memory of me was of a woman in horrible pain of both kinds, plagued by nightmares waking and sleeping.
“I’ll go clean now.” I pulled on my coat.
“Dill’s at work checking his inventory,” Varena said. “I don’t know how long he’ll be. We’ll be picking Anna up and taking her straight to Penney’s from the party. Then we’ll come back here.” I nodded and went to get my purse.
Mother and Varena were still fine-tuning their agenda when I walked out the door. My father was working a crossword puzzle, a half smile on his face as he caught snatches of their discussion. He didn’t loathe this wedding frenzy, as most men did or pretended to. He loved it. He was having a great time fussing about the cost of the reception, whether he needed to go to the church to borrow yet another table for the still-incoming gifts, whether Varena had written every single thank-you note promptly.
I touched Father’s shoulder as I went by, and he reached up and captured my hand. After a second, he patted it gently and let me go.
Dill owned an undistinguished three-bedroom, three-bath ranch-style in the newest section of Bartley. Varena had given me a key. It still felt strange to find a locked door in my little hometown. When I’d been growing up, no one had ever locked anything.
On the way to Dill’s, I’d seen another homeless person, this one a white woman. She was gray-haired but sturdy looking, pedaling an ancient bicycle laden down with an assortment of strange items bound together with nylon rope.
The night before, my parents’ friends had been talking about gang activity at the Bartley High School. Gangs! In the Arkansas Delta! In flat, remote, tiny, impoverished Bartley.
I guess in some corner of my mind, I’d expected Bartley would remain untouched by the currents of the world, would retain its small-town safety and assurance. Home had changed. I could go there again, but its character was permanently altered.
Abruptly, I was sick of myself and my problems. It was high time I got back to work.
I started, as I like to do, with a survey of the job to be done. Dill’s house, which looked freshly painted and carpeted, was fairly straight and fairly clean—but, like the Osborns’, it was showing signs of a few days of neglect. Varena wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of prolonged wedding fever.
I had no guide here to show me where everything was. I wondered if Anna would have been as interesting a helper as Eve had been the day before.
That recalled me to the purpose of my cleaning offer. Before anything or anyone could interrupt me, I searched Anna’s room for her memory book. As I searched, naturally I picked up her room, which was a real mess. I slung soiled clothes into the hamper, stacked school papers, tossed dolls into a clear Rubbermaid tub firmly labeled “Dolls and doll clothes.”
I found the memory book under her bed. Page 23 was missing.
I rocked back on my haunches, feeling as though an adversary had socked me in the stomach.
“No,” I said out loud, hearing the misery in my own voice.
After a few minutes trying to think, I stuck the book in the rack on Anna’s little desk and kept on cleaning. There was nothing else for me to do.
I had to face the fact that the page that had been sent to Roy Costimiglia and passed to Jack had almost certainly come from Anna’s book. But, I told myself, that didn’t have to mean Anna was Summer Dawn Macklesby.
The book being in Dill’s house perhaps raised the odds that someone besides Meredith Osborn might have mailed the page to Roy Costimiglia. At least, that was what I thought. But I wished I’d found the book anywhere but here.
If Anna was the abducted child, Dill could be suffering from the terrible dichotomy of wanting to square things with Summer’s family and wanting to keep his beloved daughter. What if his unstable wife had been the one to kidnap the Macklesby baby, and Dill had just now become aware of it? He’d raised Anna as his own for eight years.
And if Dill’s first wife had abducted Summer Dawn, what had happened to their biological baby?
As I paired Anna’s shoes and placed them on a rack in the closet, I saw a familiar blue cover peeking from behind a pair of rain boots. I frowned and squatted, reaching back in the closet and finally managing to slide a finger between the book and wall. I fished out the book and flipped it over to read the cover.