The Deep End of the Ocean (36 page)

As if privy to her thoughts, Candy asked about Sam. “How’s he fitting in?”

“Pat thinks he’s going to be fine,” Beth told her. “But he’s still so…silent. We’re going to Madison next week, for the Fourth. It’ll be the first time he’s been there since…well, since. He seems worried about it. I’ve asked him what’s going on, but he just shrugs. I’m thinking of asking if Tom Kilgore will talk to him….”

“He’s got a lot on his mind.”

“Kerry thinks he’s a celebrity, like someone whose face would be on a cereal box instead of a milk carton. And she’s such a little chatterbox, asking him all the time how it feels to be kidnapped, asking him if he’ll sign Blythe’s soccer ball. But he doesn’t get mad at her. I think maybe he’s missed having brothers and sisters. He follows Vincent around all the time.”

“And how does Reese treat Sam?”

“He ignores him.”

Candy laughed. “Well, that’s normal, right?”

Was it? Wearily, Beth decided to accept that it was. She sometimes felt as though she were studying Vincent like a tropical disease, trying to read the variations in his generally impassive expressions as if they were mutations in an exotic strain. But there had not been a school incident in months, and weren’t all teenagers morose? At least the pierced-navel crew he’d started to hang with had been less in evidence of late, and Jordan had been showing up more often, probably drawn back by the sudden Cappadora celebrity.

Maybe, Beth thought, she was simply waiting for other shoes to drop that weren’t even hanging in the balance. If she could spend some time with Sam, some time alone, Beth thought, growing sleepy. Maybe we can take a day together, he and I. I can explain Vincent to him. Or something.

When she woke, it was dark, Tammy Wynette was still warbling, and they were in front of the gates of a cemetery called Saint John of the Cross, in White Bear Lake, just outside Minneapolis.

“Why…what are we here for?”

“I have this hunch,” Candy said. “Cecil was crazy, but she was a cradle Catholic, like you. And we know she lived less than two miles from here, in a rooming-house sort of place, after she left that guy Hill. I’m assuming she was still pregnant then.” Stiffly, Beth unfolded herself from the bucket seat and followed Candy up to the gatehouse of the cemetery. A light burned in a window. “And if you had a baby who died, maybe who you killed…I’m not saying she did, but wouldn’t you want that baby buried in consecrated ground? That would sort of be logical, wouldn’t it?”

She isn’t even talking to me, Beth thought. She’d doing what my grandmother Kerry used to call talking out loud. But it was Beth who spotted the sign on the gatehouse door, Will Return, and a clock face set at 9:00 a.m.

“It figures,” Candy fumed. “Don’t people visit their dead at night? So, what do we do, Beth? Wanta go get a room someplace and sleep? Wanta go to a disco and pick up guys?” She glanced sidelong at Beth. “Want to go to a show at the Guthrie? Want to go see Cecil’s landlady? Maybe that tipster, our anonymous concerned lady citizen, maybe it was someone who recognized Cecil from before. And knew her kid. Knew Ben wasn’t her kid. Huh? It’s possible.”

Candy started the car. “But that’s ridiculous,” she continued. “She said on the phone the kid was with an old lady, an old gray-haired lady in a big picture hat and sunglasses. Not Cecil. Well, maybe the landlady was a babysitter. Not Sarah Lockhart. Unless she was lying, she didn’t even know Ben existed that summer.”

“And she’s not scrawny. She’s plump. Not skinny like Cecil,” Beth said.

Candy dug through her bag to root out the copy of the earliest timeline for Cecil’s whereabouts during the first years after the kidnapping. The apartment complex in Minneapolis—the periodic long stints at her parents’ house. “Here,” she said finally. “The rooming house.”

She scanned the one-way street they were driving on, looking for the address. “F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in this suburb with Zelda,” Candy said suddenly.

Beth huffed, “I knew that.”

“What I meant is, this must be a mecca for the wild at heart.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

Apple Orchard Court was only a half-step down from the manicured suburban middle-density expanses that surrounded it; the houses were older, wooden gingerbread in good repair. Twice in three blocks, Beth saw signs for bed-and-breakfast inns. “We could stay at one of those,” she told Candy. “It’s probably cheaper.”

“I hate the locks on regular houses,” Candy said. “Give me a Best Western anytime.” She inched the car forward and glided into the drive of a white two-story frame number with tiny topiary shrubs sculpted all along the massive front verandah. “This is it. This is where Cecil lived after she left Hubby Number Three.”

The old man who came to the door had no idea who Cecilia Lockhart was. “My brother’s the one you want. But he’s playing gin at the church tonight. And he won’t be home until after ten. They go late. But even then I don’t know if he could really help because Rosie ran most of that show.”

“Rosie?” Beth cried.

“Rosemary,” said the old man. “My sister-in-law. She ran the rentals. And there were a score of young women and men who lived here—some of the men you couldn’t tell if they were men or women, you take my meaning.”

Candy flipped her shield out then, and the old comedian settled right down. “You’re police,” he said.

“I am, and all the way from Chicago, and though I hate to bother you at this time of night, I have to ask, is Rosie home now? Rosemary?”

“Oh my, no,” the old man said earnestly. “That’s even more difficult. She’s ill. That’s why we’ve been batching it, Herb and me. My Lydia died in eighty-nine, and now with Rosie so ill…”

“Too ill to talk to me?”

“Well, she’s living up at the nursing home. Prairie View.”

“Where’s that?”

“Other side of town. By the new mall.”

“Do you think I could use your telephone? Call her and see if I might visit her?”

“Well, you could,” said the old man. “But that’s the thing. Rosie’s real sick.”

“Is she dying?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“She’s not right. She’s got this Alzheimer’s disease. She don’t remember anything except from the past.”

“This was in the past,” Candy said hopefully.

“I mean, real past, ma’am. From when she was a little girl in Sioux Falls.”

Candy nodded sharply and reached out to grab one of the old man’s gesticulating hands, to shove one of her business cards into it.

“Please tell your brother we’ll be at the downtown Best Western,” she said. “We’ll be there tonight, if he’d give us a call. We’ll come right over, no matter what time it is. This is extremely urgent business.”

“Oh my,” said the old man, glancing at Candy’s card. “I will do that.”

But at that moment, a huge, ornate old Lincoln Town Car pulled slowly up in front of the house, and an erect, smaller edition of the brother from Tampa, dapper in a seersucker sport coat, bounded out of the front seat and up the walk. Candy turned to face him. Yes, he said, he was Herbert Fox, and his wife, Rosemary, had indeed rented rooms to young people. Candy produced one of the glossy photos of Cecil in her heyday as an actor, and Herbert Fox studied it carefully.

“Well,” he said. “This looks a lot like her. Like a girl I remember for one reason. But she had red hair, you know.”

“Did Cecil have red hair?” Candy asked Beth.

“She had every color,” Beth said.

“A tiny little thing,” Herbert Fox went on. “Sick in bed a great deal. My wife was very fond of her. Mother-henned her a bit. And of course, you know, we didn’t realize when she moved in, but she was…expecting.”

“That’s the one, then,” Candy said. “Mr. Fox, did Cecilia have the baby while she lived here?”

“Well, yes she did…that is, not right here in the house, but I know that my wife drove her to the doctor when her time came,” said Herbert Fox. “And that was the funny part. She insisted Rosemary go back home and leave her there. And afterward, Rosemary went to Little Company of Mary, and they’d never heard of Cecilia…Hill. That was her name. Cecilia Hill. Apparently, it was a false alarm, and she didn’t have the baby that time. But she didn’t come back, either. Rosie was worried sick for a while. She was getting bad then, my Rosie, and every little thing really set her off. She’d go on about stuff for hours. Of course, we didn’t know at the time how serious what Rosie had was…”

“Mr. Fox,” Candy persisted. “Didn’t Cecilia…Hill come back for her things?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Are they still here?”

“No, no. There was no unpaid rent. So we just boxed up the clothes and things. The room was furnished. A year later, after Rosie was real sick, a lovely woman, an older lady, came and got the girl’s things. And this woman was very nice. She insisted on paying a month’s rent, just for our keeping the things.”

“And did she ask about Cecilia’s baby? About the false alarm? Did she tell you about her grandchild?”

“Oh dear, no. She was a very quiet, polite lady.”

“And did you tell her about what happened that night?”

“Well, she was the girl’s mother, wasn’t she? She’d know all about a girl’s…delicate things, wouldn’t she? I didn’t think it was my business to meddle, and poor Rosie was way past understanding, so even if I’d found anything out, I couldn’t have told her. Doesn’t pay to be nosy just for the sake of it.”

“And did you tell the police about this, when they interviewed you about Cecilia?”

The old man was honestly stunned.

“Police?” he whispered. “What? Did that little girl come to some harm?”

“No. No, she’s…alive and well. But you haven’t talked with police about Cecilia Hill? Cecilia Hill or Cecilia Karras?”

“Not before you.”

Candy sighed. Gently, she took Herb Fox’s limp hand and thanked him, and courteously began to explain the basic facts of Ben’s abduction; but the old man suddenly looked drained of breath. “If you don’t need anything else,” he said, “I think I’ll just turn in, officer.”

“That’s just fine, Mr. Fox. You’ve been more than helpful. Don’t spend any more time worrying about this. It’s all over.”

In the car, she turned to Beth. Her face, already drawn, was further bleached by a shard of late moonlight through the front window. “You’re thinking, aren’t you, why didn’t they ever talk with Herb Fox? And I’m thinking the same thing.” Beth opened her mouth and Candy held up a warning hand. “But Bethie, wait. At the same time that I’m thinking why didn’t they ever talk to Fox, I’m thinking, why should they have? There was no reason to think Cecilia had a child. We weren’t trying to find a kidnapper, we already had her in custody. We already had good witnesses to her movements since the kidnapping. All this,” she waved at the neat hedge around the rooming house, “happened before Ben was even born, years before the reunion.”

Beth turned away, and Candy said, to her back, “You can call that sloppy work. I might even agree with you. But people don’t know what they don’t know.”

“Police do,” Beth said.

“Police especially don’t,” Candy murmured. “They’ve been in so many forests they sometimes don’t see a tree unless it falls on them.”

“What if,” Beth asked, struggling with tears, “what if she did it before? What if she tried it before? And did she kill her baby?”

“Do you have an idea of how we could find that out, Beth? Because if you do, I’d like to hear it. We’ll go to those cemeteries in the morning. Or to the coroner and look for a death certificate, in case it wasn’t a late-term miscarriage after all.”

“The cemetery,” Beth said abruptly.

Candy gave her a measuring look. “Okay,” she said.

“And maybe I can think of someone else we might ask,” Candy mused aloud. “But really, to say that your old pal Cecil wasn’t much for enduring relationships is really an understatement, huh?”

“She wasn’t my old pal,” Beth shot back, thinking then, unbidden, just one enduring relationship. Just one.

“I’m sorry,” Candy said then. “I’m just tired. I’m so tired I feel like I’m a hundred.”

“Me, too,” Beth sighed.

“And I, for one, could use several drinks.”

Beth said meekly, “Me, too.”

By the time they checked in at the hotel, there was only a double room left—“a first-floor corner,” said the young man at the counter.

“Nothing on the third floor? I can’t imagine every room—what do you have here, two hundred?—” Candy began.

“We’ll take that,” Beth told him exasperatedly.

“It’s a very nice room,” he huffed. “It’s just that the twirlers are in town, and everything else….”

For the balance of the night, Beth and Candy, each lying gritty and fully clothed on her own queen-sized bed, listened to the stampede of high-school drum majorettes as they squealed and rampaged up and down the halls. At midnight, Candy sent down for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of Bloody Marys. She drank two, leaving most of her burger. Beth nibbled, but finally gave up and simply drank, too.

“I hate loose ends,” she told Beth. “And I’m celebrating yet another month of perfectly planned sex with perfectly timed ovulation and perfectly awful results.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth said.