Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (28 page)

The mentions increase. Sebastian is talked about every few pages like he’s the only bright spot in her life. But that brightness can’t stand up to the sorrowing that came down when the mother was taken.

For the next year the girl writes only in black ink or dark lead pencil. After that, there comes another blank section where it can be guessed something else went wrong—something so bad she couldn’t write it down—like before, with the mother. But he’s mistaken. When she got around to it, she wrote it all down. Everything. And the gladness she wrote it with doesn’t go with what she wrote about. Not at all.

Hoop closes the diary, attempts to refasten the forced lock before dropping it into the rucksack along with the other items of high value. After turning off the light and sinking down into the pillows, he resigns himself to not sleeping a wink.

Stuck on trying to get history to repeat itself, Hoop spends every evening at the pub next door to the guest house. After nearly a week of this, he’s made nodding acquaintance with the two barmen who take turns at the job, but all they ever talk about is the weather and the places he ought to visit while he’s in Kent.

Fact is, he has visited a few of the places high on everyone’s list. That’s what’s on his mind now as he settles in at his usual table with what’s become his usual choice of after supper drink. He did go to the Leeds Castle they all talked up; he did go into the silly dog collar museum, and he did see that there is such a thing as black swans and that they leave slippery green droppings everywhere they walk.

The ancient trees on the castle grounds held the most interest, though. Some of the tremendous large ones—beech trees mainly—were said to be three and four hundred years old. And, if you put your store in what tour guides have to say, you could believe the gigantic yew trees in the neighborhood were even older than that. While his mind is on trees, he shouldn’t forget about the ones seen in the town of Sevenoaks that really did have seven oaks lined up along a lawn they called a cricket pitch. But the specimen trees at the great stately home called Chartwell were ranked lower in importance to the politician who used to live there. “Inspirational wartime leader,” they called him.

Hoop goes up to the bar counter for another half of Newcastle with a Bushmills on the side. The unplanned review of the week’s efforts picks up where it was left off the minute he returns to his seat.

At Canterbury, all the talk was about saints and kings and the important personage who got murdered there in the cathedral-church dating back to when calendar years had only three numbers. They say this Becket guy’s head was lopped clean off by the king’s men for disagreeing with the king. They also said pilgrims came there to tribute the murdered guy and this made Hoop wonder if they were the kind of pilgrims that brought the pox with them and stayed around to eat up all the game and steal the land. He’d like to have learned more about these pilgrims, but the book about them he looked into at the souvenir stand was written in a foreign kind of English.

He knocks back the Bushmills that he’s grown a taste for and ranks the Dover Castle as the best place visited for looking the most like a castle was imagined to look when the old uncle told white man stories about knights and ladies and evil marauders. The climb up to the roof of that castle was worth the unsteadiness brought on by the height; for the few minutes he staved off the feeling he was going to get sucked over the edge, he saw the white cliffs he’d heard about and saw something across the English Channel water that was either the country of France or a low-lying cloud—depending on what you wanted to believe.

But all this playacting the American tourist and going on escorted tours didn’t work out the way he thought it might. When he happened on the idea of saving himself miles and miles of aimless cycling by covering as much ground as possible by tour bus or van, he let himself think the guide people would tire of talking only about dead celebrities and showing how things used to be. But they didn’t. You’d think they’d be eager to point out how things are now, brag on how there are still some around that live like kings even if they weren’t born kings—and do their own killings, unlike the ancient kings he’s heard too much about.

Most of all, you’d think the other tourists that laid out good money for these tours would show curiosity about the big whoop-de-do rock star rumored by the tabloids to live in one the greatest stately homes in all of Kent with a regular forest of ancient trees protecting him from prying eyes. Didn’t everything—starting with Cliff Grant’s old clippings and ending with recent newspapers and magazines—say that Japs made up a goodly portion of Colin Elliot’s admirers? So wouldn’t you think the Japs that made up a goodly portion of these tour groups would’ve insisted on seeing where their idol lived?

He polishes off the brown ale and stops this foolish summing up of his days before he can get regretful of the time and money spent with nothing to show for it. For a while, he just sits there with his glass as empty as his head. He pays middling attention to the other pub patrons and their predictions of a long dragged-out autumn after this lengthy wet spell they’re having and what all that may bode for the football season now underway. Nothing to be gained from that kind of talk, so he shoulders the ever-present rucksack and takes his leave while there’s still enough left of Saturday night to maybe coax a fresh idea into life.

Hoop walks to the town center to make up for having ridden in vans and buses three out of the past seven days, and because he’s not going far enough to warrant getting the bike out of storage. The High Street, when he reaches it, is only a starting point; from previous visits he knows he won’t find what he’s looking for here. But he knows he can’t be too far away from the kind of street they don’t brag up at the tourist office, the kind of street where sleazy goods and services are hawked to natives and tourists alike.

He goes in ever-widening circles before finding such a street. While it doesn’t begin to compare to the Times Square neighborhood and that neon-lit sleaze, it does provide a couple of outlets similar to the place Gibby Lester ran in the West Village.

The first place he enters has all the tourist junk he was hoping to find and then some. But most of the specialty books and magazines that aren’t about mating positions, are about the Princess Diana woman he can’t seem to get away from, or the Beatles, those other faces he’s tired of seeing on everything from coffee mugs to keychain dangles. On the way out of the store, he spots a display rack full of Rayce Vaughn souvenirs and has to frown for a minute over who Rayce Vaughn is. Or was. Once the connection’s made, he speeds up his exit before anyone can think he’d shell out for a keepsake of a dead doper.

Which doesn’t mean he won’t shell out for a keepsake of a live doper if he happens onto the exact right thing. The idea that was only a tickle when recalling how the Japs were crazed Colin Elliot worshippers as well as pushy tourists, and just a mild itch when remembering how Gibby Lester–type stores stock up for that kind of trade, is pricking at him now. It’s telling him he may already have looked at what he wants with a blind eye.

Inside the second store, he gets ready for a letdown because there aren’t even any Princess Diana picture books on display. He does another full circuit of the layout, just to be sure, and this invites the attention of a young female salesclerk wanting to know what he’s after.

Hoop figures he has ten seconds or less to come up with an answer that won’t make him look like a jackassed-fool—either too bashful to speak the name of a sex toy or too tongue-tied to admit he’s blundered into the wrong store. But when he opens his mouth the truth comes out; he hears himself ask for Colin Elliot souvenirs. “Something with pictures,” he says, thinking of the Rayce Vaughn picture book he shied away from in the last store.

The clerk unlocks a case piled high with Gibby Lester–type wares and brings out a medium-thick soft-cover book sealed in see-through wrapping. She makes a space for it next to a stack of packaged vibrators, but doesn’t allow him to touch the book and doesn’t offer to remove the plastic wrap so he can see what’s inside.

What he is allowed to see labels the book a wedding album. On the front cover, layered over a blurred and clouded picture of a wedding couple coming out of a small church, gold lettering says this is the authentic photographic record of the Elliot-Chandler Nuptials that took place on August 14, 1987 at a centuries-old church in Kent. In smaller print it says stunning highlights of the wedding breakfast are included, along with a list of the celebrity attendees.

But that’s all she’s letting him see for free. “Fifty quid,” she says. That stymies him for the time it takes to remember quid’s the same as pound, but pound’s not the same as dollar, so this once-in-a-lifetime souvenir she’s about to put back in the case will cost eighty-some American bucks if he agrees to buy it. Highway robbery, even if it does happen to include the value-added tax they like to stick everybody with.

“What’ll it be, then?” She rattles the keys to the case. “Haven’t got all day, have we?” She shifts a cud of chewing gum to the other side of her mouth and sends him a look that suggests he maybe doesn’t have that much money, and if he does, he’s too cheap to spread it around. He digs for his wallet, hands over the asked-for amount and lays claim to the book without waiting for a receipt or a bag to put it in.

Out on the street, he heads for the nearest place he can sit down in relative privacy and see if fifty pounds bought anything of use. The place he’s closing in on is called a tandoori—whatever that is—but he can see from a distance that it provides booths to sit in and isn’t very busy right now.

He’s hit with a smothering spice smell when he goes inside. Not bad enough to turn him away, just enough to put his mouth on warning. He’s welcomed like he’s one of them—them being the other kind of Indians, the ones that come from hot countries—and shown to a booth in the near-empty restaurant, where they want him to read a menu before he’s even had a chance to rip the plastic covering off the book.

To buy some time alone, he orders a beer. They recommend an India Pale Ale and when they bring it they recommend the Chicken Tikka and the Sag Panir and an order of Naan. He’s not hungry, but he gives the nod to their recommendations, again to buy time alone. With that bother out of the way, he slits through the plastic with a thumbnail and opens the book with hopes that are hard to tamp down.

The first few pages are made up of what he’s learned are stock photos. Several of the rock star he’s seen before in other publications; the ones of the lawyerwoman are known, too. Sappy-sweet drawings of hearts, flowers, and naked winged babies wielding bows and arrows link these likenesses together. Following that display, a page of large curlicued printing reads that the bridal pair enjoyed a whirlwind courtship and fairytale wedding without explaining overmuch about either event. What is a whirlwind courtship, anyway? Does that mean the lovers met during a cyclone? And what’s a fairytale wedding, after all? Does that mean the couple got married in the presence of dwarfs, doomed children, trolls, witches, gold-spinning ogres, and longhaired maidens?

He’s close to making himself laugh through his mounting disappointment. Instead, he takes a long pull on the bottle of ale they brought him and gets back to flipping through pages that begin to look like the biggest waste of money so far.

When he gets to pictures showing a man and woman done up in wedding finery, they could be of anyone; they’re taken from so far away that features can’t be made out or settings identified for sure. The picture from the front cover is repeated here in full color and without artsy blurring and shading, but the bridal couple still have their heads down with faces hidden and there’s still no sign anywhere that says the name of the church.

He’s losing interest fast when he gets to the celebrity guest list. That has about as much meaning as would a list made up of the fairytale characters he mused on a minute ago. Same can be said of the menu for the wedding breakfast that was served late in the afternoon and made up of every kind of food except breakfast food. Who cares?

And who cares who was in the wedding party, what they wore and what kind of flower petals were sprinkled for the bride to walk on? And who would name their children Cassiopeia, Calliope, and Chrysanthemum?

Hoop scoffs aloud and turns pages that seem more and more made-up as he comes to one remarking the adoption of the Elliot boys—Audrey’s boys—by the lawyerwoman and that raises his hackles because those boys weren’t hers to take. But that may be just talk because there are no pictures of the boys—long-distance, stock, or otherwise—to bear this out.

The vintage Rolls Royce shown in the next picture doesn’t prove anything either. Like most of the other pictures, this one was taken from so far away the “flying woman” hood ornament can only be imagined and there’s no telling who’s riding inside. There’s nothing to say he didn’t once see this same picture in a classic car magazine.

He’s ready to call it quits and absorb the loss when he comes to a two-page spread showing a whole troop of fancy-dressed people waiting their turn to board buses big as Greyhound Scenic Cruisers and way nicer—the bus equivalent of a customized Conquista.

What are these pictures doing here? Didn’t the bilkers have enough faked wedding pictures to fill up a book? He swigs down the rest of the India Pale Ale and leafs through the remaining pages of this mockery. He’s not at all surprised to see more pictures of buses, this time strung out along the shoulder of a narrow, tree-lined road, and on the last four pages, pictures of hot-air balloons that are almost as out of place in a wedding album as buses.