“I lived in Memphis, after I graduated from college,” I said, knowing that would probably cue his memory. Someone had to have told him the story, since he’d been living here more than three years. My history was part of town folklore, just like Mrs. Fontenot shooting her equally married lover on the courthouse lawn in 1931.
“Memphis,” he repeated, suddenly looking a little uneasy.
“Yes, I worked for a big housecleaning service there as a scheduler and supervisor,” I said deliberately.
That flipped his memory switch. I saw his pleasant, bland face grow rigid, trying to restrain his dismay at his faux pas.
“Of course, that was years ago, now,” I said, easing him off the horns of the dilemma.
“Yes, a long time,” he said. He looked sorry for me for a minute, then said tactfully, “I haven’t had a chance to ask Dill where he and Varena plan to go on their honeymoon.”
I nodded dismissively and turned to Jack just at the instant he turned to me. Our eyes met, and he smiled that smile that altered his whole face, deep arcs appearing from his nose to his lips. Instead of the tough reserve of his defense-against-the-world face, he looked infectiously happy.
I leaned over so my lips almost touched his ear. “I have an early Christmas present for you,” I said very softly.
His eyes flared wide in surmise.
“You’ll like it very much,” I promised, breathing the words.
During the rest of the meal, whenever Jack wasn’t engaged in talking to Lou O’Shea or charming my mother, he was giving me little glances full of speculation.
We left soon after the dessert plates were cleared away. Jack seemed torn between talking to Dill and Varena and rushing me back to his hotel. I made it as difficult for him as I possibly could. As we stood making conversation with Dill, I held his hand and made circles on his palm with my thumb, very gently, very lightly.
After a few seconds, he dropped my hand to grip my arm almost painfully.
“Good-bye, Frieda, Gerald,” he said to my parents, after he’d thanked Dill for inviting him. My mother and father beamed happily at him. “I’ll be bringing Lily home later. We have some catching up to do.”
I could see my father’s mouth open to ask where this “catching up” would take place, and I saw my mother’s elbow connect with his ribs, a gentle reminder to my father that I was nearly thirty-two. So Dad kept his smile in place, but it was weaker.
Waving at everyone, smiling hard, we got out the door and hurried through the freezing air to scramble into Jack’s car. We had scarcely shut the doors when Jack put his fingers under my chin and turned my face to his. His mouth covered mine in a long, breathless kiss. His hands began reacquainting themselves with my topography.
“The others’ll be coming out in a minute,” I reminded him.
Jack said something really vile and turned on his engine. We drove to the motel in silence, Jack keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.
“This place is horrible,” he warned me, unlocking the door and pushing it open. He reached in past me to switch on a light.
I pulled the drapes shut all the way and turned to him, sliding out of my black jacket as I turned. He was wrapped around me before I had my arm out of the second sleeve. We undressed in stages, interrupted by the long making out that Jack loved. He was fumbling in his suitcase with one hand for those little square foil packages, when I said, “Christmas present.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I got an implant. You don’t have to use anything.”
“Oh, Lily,” he breathed, closing his eyes to savor the moment. He looked like a Boy Scout who’d just been given the ingredients for S’mores. I wondered when he would work out the other implications of my gift. Then Jack slid on top of me, and I quit caring.
We were wrapped in the bed together an hour later, having finally pulled down the spread and the blanket and the sheets. The sheets, at least, looked clean. One of Jack’s legs was thrown across mine, securing me.
“Why are you here?” I asked. This was when Jack liked to talk.
“Lily,” he said slowly, taking pleasure in saying it. “I was going to come to see you here. I did think you might need me, or at least that seeing me might help.” One long finger traced my spine as I lay facing him, my face tucked in the hollow of his neck. To my horror, I could feel my nose clog up and my eyes fill. I kept my face turned down. A tear trickled down my cheek, and since I was on my side it ran into the curve of one nostril and then underneath. So elegant.
“And then Roy called me. You remember Roy?”
I nodded, so he could feel my head move.
I recalled Roy Costimiglia as a short, stout man with thinning gray hair, probably in his late fifties. You could pass him six times on the street and never remember you’d seen him before. Roy was the detective with whom Jack had served his two-year apprenticeship.
“Roy and I had talked over supper one night when Roy’s wife was out of town, so he knew I was seeing a woman who had originally come from Bartley. He called because he’d been given one more lead to run down in a case he’s had for four years.”
I surreptitiously wiped my face with a bit of sheet.
“What case is that?” My voice did not sound too wobbly.
“Summer Dawn Macklesby.” Jack’s voice was as bleak and grim as I’d ever heard it. “You remember the baby girl who was kidnapped?”
And I felt cold all over again.
“I read just a little of the update story in the paper.”
“So did a lot of people, and one of them reacted pretty strangely. The last paragraph of the article mentioned that Roy has been working for the Macklesby family for the past few years. Through Roy, the Macklesbys had run down every lead, checked every piece of information, every rumor, that’s come to them for the past four and a half years . . . ever since they felt the police had more or less given up on the case. The Macklesbys hoped there would be some response to the story, and that’s why they consented to do it. They’re really nice people. I’ve met them. Of course, they’ve kind of disintegrated since she’s been gone . . . the baby.”
Jack kissed my cheek, and his arms tightened around me. He knew I had been crying. He was not going to talk about it.
“What response was there to the story? A phone call?”
“This.” Jack sat up on the side of the bed. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out two pieces of paper. The first was a copy of the same article I’d seen in the newspaper, with the sad picture of the Macklesbys now and the old picture of the baby in her infant seat. The Macklesbys looked as though something had chewed them up and spit them out: Teresa Macklesby, especially, was haggard with eyes that had seen hell. Her husband, Simon’s, face was almost taut with restraint, and the hand that rested on his knee was clenched in a fist.
The second piece of paper was a picture from the local elementary school memory book, last year’s edition; “
The Bartley Banner
” was printed, with the date, across the top of the page, page 23. The picture at the top of the page, below the heading, was an enlarged black-and-white snapshot of three little girls playing on a slide. The one flying down, her long hair trailing behind her, was Eve Osborn. The girl waiting her turn at the top of the slide was Krista O’Shea, looking much happier than I’d seen her. The child climbing the ladder had turned to smile at the camera, and my breath caught in my throat.
The caption read, “These second graders enjoy the new playground equipment donated in March by Bartley Tractor and Tire Company and Choctaw County Welding.”
“This was paper-clipped to the article from the paper,” Jack said. “It was in a mailing envelope postmarked Bartley. Someone here in town thinks one of these little girls is Summer Dawn Macklesby.”
“Oh, no.”
His finger brushed the third child’s face. “Dill’s girl? Anna Kingery?”
I nodded, covered my own face with my hands.
“Sweetheart, I have to do this.”
“Why did you come instead of Roy?”
“Because Roy had a heart attack two days ago. He called me from his hospital bed.”
Chapter 4
“IS HE GOING TO BE OK?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. He was sad, and angry, too, though I wasn’t sure where the anger came in. Maybe his own helplessness. “All those years of eating wrong and not exercising . . . but the main thing is, he just has a bad heart.”
I sat up, too, and put my arms around Jack. For a moment he accepted the comfort. He rested his head on my shoulder, his arms encircling me. I’d taken the band off his ponytail, and his long black hair fell soft against my skin. But then he raised his head and looked at me, our faces inches apart.
“I have to do this, Lily. For Roy. He took me in and trained me. If it was anyone but him, any case but one involving a child, I’d turn it down since it concerns someone close to you . . . but this I have to do.” Even if Anna Kingery turned out to be Summer Dawn Macklesby, even if Varena’s life was ruined. I looked back at him, the pain in my heart so complicated I could not think how to express it.
“If he did that,” Jack said, so intent on me he had read my silent thoughts, “you couldn’t let her marry him anyway.”
I nodded, still trying to accommodate this sharp pang. For all the years we’d spent apart, for all our estrangement, Varena was my sister, and we were the only people in the world who shared, who would remember, our common family life.
“This has to be resolved before the wedding,” I said.
“Two days? Three?”
I actually had to think. “Three.”
“Shit,” Jack said.
“What do you have?” I pulled away from him, and his head began to lower to my breasts, as if drawn by a magnet. I grabbed his ears. “Jack, we have to finish talking.”
“Then you’ll have to cover up.” He got his bathrobe out of the tiny closet and tossed it to me. It was the one he carried when he traveled, a thin, red, silky one, and I belted it around me.
“That’s not much better,” he said after a thorough look. “But it’ll have to do.” He pulled on a T-shirt and some Jockeys. He set his briefcase on the bed, and because it was cold in that bleak motel room, we both crawled back under the covers, sitting with our backs propped against the wall.
Jack put on his reading glasses, little half-lens ones that made him even sexier. I didn’t know how long he’d used them, but he’d only recently begun wearing them in front of me. This was the first time I hadn’t appreciated the effect.
“First, to find out who the little girls were, Roy hired Aunt Betty.”
“Who?”
“You haven’t met Aunt Betty yet. She’s another PI, lives in Little Rock. She’s amazing. In her fifties, hair dyed a medium brown, looks respectable to the core. She looks like everybody’s Aunt Betty. Her real name is Elizabeth Fry. People tell her the most amazing things, because she looks like . . . well, their aunt! And damn, that woman can listen!”
“Why’d Roy send her instead of you?”
“Well, surprise, but in some situations I don’t blend in like Aunt Betty does. I was good for the Shakespeare job since I look just like someone who’d work in a sporting goods store, but I don’t look like I could go around a small town asking for the names of little girls and get away with it. Right?”
I tried not to laugh. That was certainly true.
“So that’s the kind of job Aunt Betty’s perfect for. She found out who prints the most school memory books in the state, went to them, told them she was from a private school and she was looking for a printer. The guy gave her all kinds of samples to show her parents committee.”
Jack seemed to want me to acknowledge Aunt Betty’s cleverness, so I nodded.
“Then,” he continued, “Betty comes down to Bartley, goes in to see the elementary school principal, shows her all the samples of memory books she has, and tells the principal she works for a printing company that can give them a competitive bid on the next memory book.”
“And?”
“Then she asks to see this year’s Bartley memory book, notices the slide picture, asks the principal who the photographer was, maybe her company might be able to use him for extra work. Betty figured the shot was good enough to justify the lie.”
I shook my head. Betty must be persuasive and totally respectable and nonthreatening. I’d known the elementary school principal, Beryl Trotter, for fifteen years, and she was not a fool.
“How does it help, having the whole book?” I asked.
“If worst had come to worst, we would have looked at all the faces in the class section until we had them matched, so we could get their names. Or Betty would have called on the man who took the picture and coasted the conversation along until he told her who the girls were. But, as it happened, Mrs. Trotter asked Betty to have a cup of coffee, and Betty found out everything from Mrs. Trotter.”
“The names of the girls? Their parents? Everything?”
“Yep.”
This was a little frightening.
“So, once we had the names of the parents, we were able to do some background on the O’Sheas, since he’s a minister and they have several professional directories that give little biographies. Dill, too, because the pharmacists have a state association. Chock full of information. The Osborns were harder. Aunt Betty had to go to Makepeace Furniture, pretend she’d just moved in and was shopping for a new table. It was risky. But she managed to talk to Emory, find out a few things about him, and get out without having to give a local address or mention any local relatives whom he could check up on.”
“So then you knew the names of the girls and their parents, and some facts about their parents.”
“Yep. Then we got busy on the computers, and then I started traveling.”
I felt overwhelmed. I’d never talked to Jack in any depth about what he did. I’d never fully realized that one of the qualifications for a successful private detective is the ability to lie convincingly and at the drop of a hat. I pulled away from Jack a little. He took some papers from his briefcase.