Ring of Truth (21 page)

I pray he's right and not just trying to make himself feel better, too.

But now it's time to corner little Jenny Carmichael and find out if there's anything else she's hiding from the grown-ups. When she and her mother brought their surprises to me, that mischievous slip of a girl made a slip of the tongue and I think I'd better check it out. Besides, they deserve to be told what happened to the bag. If nothing else, it should reassure Anne that she was absolutely right to be afraid of it for her family's sake; although she may also judge that it was a mistake to turn it over to me.

To distract myself from the annoying traffic of Spring Break, I play old interview tapes from my research on Allison Tobias. If I can't do anything profound for Bennie, maybe I can do something small for Deborah by listening for hints about the details that interest her, the note and the cake that Lucy left. A less sympathetic mother I have never met, and Ben Tobias wasn't much better. In my book I tried to put them in the best light I could, because they've suffered enough without my adding gratuitous insults to their grievous injury.

I particularly remember how the landlord hated them.

When I interviewed the old man, he had become a renter himself. After the murder, he told me, the Tobiases sued him and his wife for failing to provide security adequate to protect their tenants. A jury awarded the parents a large verdict that forced the landlords to sell the Hibiscus Avenue house and their other properties and would have confiscated most of what they both earned for the rest of their lives. Rather than allow that, the couple—already in their sixties—retired and lived on their Social Security payments. The old man's wife died three years later, he told me, from “heart.”

“There's nothing special to remember about the night she was killed,” the old man tells me on the tape of that interview. “No screaming, no unusual commotion, nothing like that. The computer boys came home together real late like they always did. The other girls, they were always so quiet we hardly could hear them on the stairs. Oh, we heard Allison come in, all right. She was drunk, you know, and even quiet drunks are loud. We heard her laugh in the back hall and we figured that must have been when she met up with Stevie. I guess we were both asleep when she went upstairs, 'cause neither the wife nor me heard any of that. We felt just terrible that we helped that boy. Thought we was doing a good deed for a young man needed a fresh start. You don't never want to do a good deed,” he tells me, bitterly. “It'll come back on you real bad like it did on us.”

After that, I managed to locate one of Allie's friends who had gone drinking with her that night—Emily Rubeck Richards— later a teacher, married, with two kids.

“There isn't a day I don't think about it,” she says in that interview. It seemed to me that she still had the earnest appearance of the “good girl” she was in high school. A nervous temperament had turned her into a nonstop talker and she told me more than I needed, or could use, in the book. “Did you know Allie's dad made us leave the funeral? We went in the church with our parents, and Mrs. Tobias saw us and made him come over and tell us we weren't welcome. He said it would upset Mrs. Tobias too much for us to be there, since it was all our fault for taking Allison out and getting her drunk. It was terrible when he did that in front of everybody at the funeral. I think it was the worst moment of my life, except for when I heard Allie was dead. Gretch never has got over it, I don't think. It's kind of ruined her, but I never believed that, that it was all our fault. My parents felt real bad about Allie, but they were furious at Mr. and Mrs. Tobias for doing that to us. Gretch and I never forced Allie to go or to drink, and it wasn't us who wanted her to be all by herself. She wanted that. What were we supposed
to do, force her to let us stay there? We were just kids ourselves, doing what teenagers do. It's
not
our fault, it's that horrible Stevie Orbach's fault. But Mrs. Tobias was always a bitch, so I wasn't all that surprised when she treated us so rotten. Do you know, she used to ground Allie for
weeks
if she got in five minutes late? Weeks! She'd stand at the door and grab Allie and yell, ‘Get in here!’ She was a trip. We hardly ever went over there. He was nice enough, but kind of a wimp. Whatever Mrs. Tobias said, that was the law. After Allie died, I felt bad for Mr. and Mrs. Tobias—like you would for anybody—but that didn't give them the right to act so mean to Gretchen and me and to hurt our parents' feelings like that.”

Emily and the old landlord helped me locate three of the tenants, so now I listen to their interviews, too, fast-forwarding over the extraneous parts. Finally, I go through the painful interview with the parents, but there's nothing on the tape for Deb, just a reiteration of how Lucy set the cake in its tin outside her daughter's door and how, later that night, she taped a note to the door of the house.

This seems like a ridiculously small bit of business to be paying Deborah to research, but I can feel myself getting caught up in it, too. I'm catching from her the bug of obsession that compels a writer to worry some little detail to death. Sometimes entire books can turn on just such a detail that opens the door to greater revelations. Not this time, though. These are just small, human touches to round off a chapter and lend it that verisimilitude that makes readers trust me. It won't hurt, however, to go to the trouble to get it right.

Susanna
13

The seven Carmichaels live in a sweet stucco house that would be roomy for three people but is noisy and crowded with all of them there at one time, which they are when I arrive. Anne's clever warning sign is still propped up on the front porch so it can be seen easily from the street. Herb's mowing the lawn, with two little boys trailing behind him, dragging lawn bags in his wake. Inside, I find three more red-haired children—with uncountable numbers of their buddies—and Anne, unloading more bags of groceries than I thought any person could buy at one time.

“Welcome to Bedlam,” she calls to me, from the kitchen to the front door.

I open the screen and go on in.

“What's everybody doing home on a Monday, Anne?”

“Spring break.”

That's right. I forget that our own children get a spring break, too; it just
seems
like it's only everybody else's kids who do. Herb's a teacher, so that explains his presence, too. When I start to tell her about the canvas bag—and George—she makes the children leave, and calls their father in to hear it.

“You can take the sign down now,” I tell them, at the end.

“My God,” Herb says, looking somberly at his wife. “It could have been one of us.”

“It could have been you, Herb,” she says. “If you'd tried to stop her.”

Like me, they're assuming it was Artemis McGregor.

“Mind if I talk to Jenny?” I ask them.

“Tell her what happened,” Herb says, looking grim. “Maybe this will scare a little sense and honesty into that girl.”

“No!” his wife objects. “She'll blame herself, Herb. Jenny will think that if she hadn't taken the bag and kept it a secret, that poor man might not have been killed. That's a terrible thing for a child to think.”

“But it's true.”

“She's just a child! Jenny didn't hurt anybody, Herb. That awful woman did, she's the one to blame. Not our Jenny.”

Herb may have a point in theory, but his wife's got the right idea, in my opinion. And there's no way I'm going to lay that burden of guilt on a ten-year-old. They can tell her what they agree to tell her, but I'm staying out of it.

I have a hard time getting Jenny off to myself, because wherever Jenny goes, a horde of other children follow. I don't want to arouse her parent's suspicions and get Jenny into even more trouble with the question I have to ask her. The only way I finally manage it is to exclaim, “Jenny! What have you got in your hair?” Then I grab her by an arm and pull her into the bathroom and lock the door behind us.

“What's in my hair?” she cries, racing to look in the mirror.

I confess there's nothing and sit down on the edge of the tub to talk to her.

“Jenny, when you were at my house, you said something funny.”

“What?”

“You meant to say ‘ring,’ but you said ‘rings.’ ”

She pulls her long red hair down over her face and picks
through it as if looking for cooties there. It's a very effective maneuver, since now I can't see her face.

“Jenny?” I reach over and brush her hair back. “Rings?”

“I don't know why I said that, I really don't.”

“But you remember saying it, do you? That's interesting. Why would you even remember that unless there was something to it? Look, I'm not mad at you, Jenny, honest, I'm not. And I won't try to get you in trouble, okay? It's just that I really need to know why you said ‘rings.’ It seemed like a funny kind of mistake.”

She scratches her head with both hands in a show of frantic thought.

“Are we locked in here forever unless I tell you?”

That sounds to me like something somebody would say when they're dying to confide or confess something and they're looking for any good excuse to do so.

“Yes,” I say, solemnly. “Forever. We'll die in here. We'll have water, so we'll last for a while. But no food. And you're going to get really tired of sleeping in the sink, because I'm taking the bathtub.”

She giggles.

“Jenny, please tell me.”

I can see that this is a struggle for her. She agonizes over it for a few moments and then she says, “I can't. I promised. I have to talk to Nikki first.”

Great. Now how am I going to arrange that? Nikki's mom wants nothing to do with this little terror.

“Okay,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “Let's go over there.”

“Really?” Her eyes widen, and she looks half scared, half thrilled. “Right now? I get to go see Nikki?”

“If your mom says we can.”

“Are you going to tell her why?”

“No, that's our secret, yours and mine.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

I have no idea, but I unlock the bathroom door anyway.

Three children are waiting outside. “What'd you have in your hair, Jen?”

We make our escape with a truth, since I wouldn't want to be setting too horrible an example for the kid. “I need to see Nikki today,” I tell Anne Carmichael. “And I'd like to take Jenny in the car with me to see if they'll let the girls see each other. Maybe if I'm there, her parents will loosen up a little bit.”

Anne seems glad of the idea, but she's afraid of Jenny getting hurt.

“I won't, Mom, I promise.”

Anne gives me a stern look as though to say,
“You
promise.”

It turns out to be easier than I have any right to deserve.

The Modestos aren't meanies, after all; at least, they're not mean enough to make Jenny sit out in the car and not come into their house. Mrs. Modesto even gives her a little hug, and says, “You look so grown-up!” I think I detect a note of hope in her voice. I tell her that I'm collecting a little more information for my book, which is true, and I promise not to upset the girls by making them relive the worst moments of that horrifying day.

“May I talk to them by themselves?” I ask her.

“Let's go to my room!” Nikki offers.

The girls are shy around each other for about ten seconds. Then intense giggling, hugging, and chattering breaks out. They happily lead me to Nikki's cubbyhole of a bedroom while they catch up on each other's toys, friends, lives. I feel happy just being around these two cutie-pies. Best friends reunited, it's great. Maybe if I had kids I wouldn't have done this, wouldn't have sabotaged Nikki's parents like this. But my excuse is that I don't know any better, so I get to play God for a day.

Jenny introduces the topic of our visit by busily whispering in Nikki's ear. “Psst, psst, psst,” is all I hear as they madly whisper back and forth. Nikki, it seems, needs a bit of persuading.

“Okay,” she says, at last, looking at me. “But you got to promise not to tell, Ms. Lightfoot, you've really really got to promise, and you've got to really mean it, because I'd be in really really big trouble if my mom finds out.”

“Me, too,” Jenny asserts.

There's sure a lot of promising going on today.

“Cross my heart,” I tell them, and demonstrate it.

“It's in my backpack,” Nikki says, wide-eyed and still whispering. “Do you want to see them now?”

Them?

“Please.”

“Okay, but close your eyes first.”

I obey, and as my eyes are closed I hear excited whisperings and the rasp of a zipper opening. Then I feel something soft plopped into my lap.

“You can open your eyes now,” Nikki says.

I do that, and then I look down and see a black velvet pouch bag.

“May I open it?”

“Yes!” They giggle and squeal and jump up and down in anticipation.

I stick two fingers down in the bag and push the sides of it back and then I turn it upside down, dumping the contents into my lap.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper.

The girls are besides themselves with delight at my reaction.

There are seven wedding and engagement rings in my lap.

There are two sets of women's engagement and wedding rings and three that look like wedding bands for a man. With the one that the crime scene unit found on the day of the murder and the one that Jenny gave me earlier, that makes nine rings found at the scene of a murder. I might have expected many things, but never this, not even after Jenny's telltale slip of the tongue.

“Where were they?” I ask the girls, letting them see how impressed I am.

“In the tower,” Jenny answers proudly. Then it sinks in that they're not going to get to keep them. “Are you going to take them?”

“I have to, girls. They may be evidence in a murder case.”

They nod, sadly understanding. But their material loss is greatly ameliorated by the fact that each has got her best friend back.

“Nikki,” I say, “I thought you didn't go up into the tower.”

“Oh, I didn't! Jenny gave them to me.”