The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (10 page)

Chapter 12

G
eorge called his supervisor at the office to let her know he was running late, then showered and shaved. It seemed surreal to him that it was a workday, a Monday, when he was expected to be at his desk, despite his sudden status as a murder suspect.

It was even more surreal to him when he arrived at his office on the third floor of a converted factory building halfway between the Back Bay and the North End. Darlene, at the front desk, greeted him by uttering a prolonged “Ughhh, huh?” It took George a few perplexing seconds to realize that she was referring to the Red Sox, who had dropped three in a row since Friday.

“Good thing it’s a long season,” George said as he made his way toward his office.

“Thank God,” she said to his retreating back.

The magazine had been shedding jobs for several years but hadn’t yet relocated to a smaller office, probably because the landlord, scared of the downtrending market, kept lowering rents and offering incentives for the magazine to stay. For this reason, George’s long amble to his south-facing office, passing bare desks and empty meeting rooms, had become increasingly bleak. He had begun work at the magazine less than a year after graduating from Mather College. It was his second postgraduate job; he’d worked at a chain bookstore during the stint in San Francisco when he was living with Rachel, his senior-year girlfriend. That arrangement had lasted only six months, ending when George came home early from work and found Rachel in bed with one of the bartenders from their favorite neighborhood dive.

He’d moved home. His mother had never been a particularly happy woman, but over the years she had become more and more verbal about the disappointments of her life; she felt as though she’d given up a career in the arts for a life as a wife and mother, and now she was left with nothing but an empty nest and a near-silent workaholic husband. She’d joined a potters’ group, and George wondered if she was having an affair with one of its members. George’s father, unlike his mother, had become noticeably quieter in his later years. He still worked hard, coming home exhausted and red-faced on a nightly basis, settling into his predictable nightly routine of one large drink, dinner, then reading in his study. Despite his father’s quiet, unreachable nature, George felt more at ease with him than with his mother. His father was a man who seemed comfortable in his own shoes.

During George’s two-month stay, his father had told him, after a rare second scotch and water, that he believed the key to happiness was to find one job and do it as well as possible. He said that his own father had told him the same thing. Be a builder and learn to hit a nail straight and you will never lack for happiness. George’s father also confessed that he feared and dreaded his retirement years. It was the most revealing conversation George ever had with his father, and it was a conversation he thought of often, especially after his father had a massive heart attack and died at the age of sixty-five just a few years later.

While home, George scoured the newspapers for job listings, then applied for, and accepted, a position as an administrative assistant in the accounts department of Boston’s most prestigious publication. “You were always excellent with numbers,” his father opined. His mother was impressed with the magazine’s stature in the literary world.

George moved to the city and found an apartment, one floor of a cheap triple-decker in Charlestown, to share with a pair of acquaintances from Mather College. George excelled at his job and was taken under the wing of the magazine’s business manager, Arthur Skoot, a man who had never married and who was, at the time of George’s arrival, the most senior member of the magazine’s staff. Arthur showed George how to do everything, quickly promoted him, and took him out for long semi-boozy lunches. George found the job both satisfying—putting out a magazine on time and on budget was akin to hitting that nail as straight as possible—and also stimulating; he enjoyed the idea of being part of a grand literary and intellectual tradition, even if his job was just to balance the ledger sheets.

The magazine paid for George to take night classes, and in a few years he received his CPA degree. The bump in salary allowed him to move out of Charleston and into the rent-controlled attic apartment he still occupied. It was the first time he had lived alone, and he found that he loved it. He kept the apartment exactly as he wanted, book-lined and dust-free. He began to date Irene, an assistant editor who seemed in no rush to either move in with George or get engaged. And in this way, George swam merrily through his twenties and into his early thirties. Although he thought less and less about Liana, he still kept an eye out for her, catching himself scanning crowds for her face or her walk, and he still had powerful and disquieting erotic dreams in which she loomed large and inescapable.

About a year after Arthur’s forced retirement, George was promoted to business manager. It was during a tumultuous time at the magazine: The Internet was exploding, and ownership had recently changed. The staff was downsized, and the magazine’s bent shifted dramatically from the literary to the political. Short stories were jettisoned from the monthly issues and ghettoized into a summer fiction issue. Poetry was eliminated. A feeling of doom swept the office. Irene got a plum job in the website division of the
Boston Globe,
but George stayed put, knowing that as long as the magazine stayed in business he’d have a job. He always kept the nails straight. Plus, George knew that the new ownership group, overseer of many profitable enterprises, was happy for the magazine to take a monthly loss, which it did in a staggering way.

Now at his desk, George scanned his in-box for any looming emergencies, and when he didn’t find any, he went online to hunt for information about Gerald MacLean’s death. There wasn’t much, just a few stories reporting that MacLean had been found dead in his home in Newton and that the cause of death had not been disclosed. Anyone reading it would assume that the elderly MacLean had succumbed to a heart attack. One of the stories ran with a photograph, a corporate shot of MacLean in a light blue suit that was at least fifteen years old. The common description of MacLean, phrased almost identically in both stories, read, “Gerald MacLean, founder and president of MacLean’s Furniture, a wholesale outlet operation headquartered in Atlanta, had recently partnered with Paul Hull to form the Hull Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to cancer research. Mr. MacLean leaves behind a wife, Teresa MacLean née Rivera.”

No mention of murder. No mention of feeder funds and Ponzi schemes. No mention of offshore accounts. And no mention of gym bags full of cash.

George attempted to work. The magazine was hosting a summer conference—really more of a fund-raiser at which paying customers could come and hobnob with some of the magazine’s more famous writers—at a college in western Massachusetts. The college required that a certificate of insurance be added as a rider onto the magazine’s insurance for the duration of the conference, and George had become the go-between for a very fickle college administrator and a very lazy insurance agent. He began an email to the agent, explaining the exact phrasing that was needed in the certificate, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish it. His mind kept returning to the events of the weekend and how he might have fit into them. He could only assume that MacLean had been murdered for the money that had been returned. And if that was the case, then Liana would not have been involved in the murder. She’d had the money to start with; then she’d returned it. It was one mildly comforting thought.

Midmorning, George’s desk phone rang. It was Irene.

“Did you forget?” she asked.

“Apparently.”

“We’re supposed to be having lunch.”

“Right,” he said. George vaguely remembered making plans with Irene for a Monday lunch. “Where again?”

“That new place on Stuart Street. It’s got sort of a Mexican name.”

George waited for Irene outside the restaurant. The temperature had climbed back into the nineties, and no sign remained of the biblical deluge of rain that had pounded Boston the previous night. He read the menu framed outside the door. It was standard Tex-Mex mixed in with entrées such as pork belly tacos and cilantro margaritas. He felt starved all of a sudden; the hangover from the previous night of beers and bad Chinese food had been lurking at the edges of his consciousness all morning. He decided on the shredded-beef burrito and a large Diet Coke, maybe with some rum in it.

George spotted Irene from three blocks away. She was walking slowly and with her head down, her arms clamped tight to her sides. He’d joked with her that twenty years of Boston winters had permanently altered her physicality so that she always looked as though she were moving through subzero temperatures. She claimed that she always
was
cold, even in Boston’s humid summers, that the terrible winters had crept into her bones and stayed there all through the year. Watching her walk toward him made the bizarre events of the previous two and a half days seem even more unreal.
She is my real life,
George thought,
like it or not,
and she was coming toward him in all her average glory. Irene was only Irene. Bookish, sarcastic, hardworking, but so loyal that she wouldn’t even give up on an on-again off-again disappointment of a boyfriend. With Irene still a block away, George decided that he wouldn’t tell her the story of his weekend. Not today anyway. He wanted an hour of his previous life, to drink and eat with Irene and feel normal again.

But when Irene came up to George in the bright swimming air and raised her face to his, he could see a strip of white bandaging from the outside of her left eyebrow that went down about two inches along her face. The skin around her left eye was a pale bluish white, and the eye itself, a sliver of which was visible between her swollen lids, was completely red.

“What the fuck?” George said.

“I’ll tell you about it inside. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“No, tell me now. What happened?”

She shrugged and said, “I kind of got mugged.”

“What do you mean ‘kind of’?”

“Well, he didn’t take anything. Long story short, I was coming home last night at about eleven, and this man asked me for the time in front of my building. I looked at my watch, and when I looked up he punched me in the face.”

“Jesus,” George said.

“I know. That’s what I thought. I hit the pavement and thought I was a goner, but then he just took off. He didn’t even take my purse.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“I almost didn’t. It just didn’t seem real, but I thought better of it, and since he’d given me his name—”

“What do you mean he’d given you his name?”

“I don’t know if it was a real name, but after he punched me in the face and before he walked away, he very politely introduced himself.” Irene smiled, then winced a little when her bandage moved.

“What do you mean he introduced himself to you?”

“I was on the ground, expecting to get raped or shot in the head, and he looked down at me and said, ‘Nice to meet you. My name’s Donnie Jenks.’ And then he walked away.”

Chapter 13

O
ver the next ten minutes, George was shown several other photographs by Detective Chalfant. He studied them all. The Audrey Beck he was shown was not the Audrey Beck whom he had known at Mather College. Both girls had dark blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin. On the wide spectrum of human differentiation they would have been close to each other, but they were indisputably different girls. The nose of the girl in the picture—the real Audrey?—had a slight bump, the type of thing a richer girl might have eradicated with plastic surgery. Also, the pouty mouth was wrong, and the eyes were too close together.

“I don’t suppose you have a picture of your girlfriend? Not
with
you, I know, but back at your motel, or at college?” Chalfant asked.

“I don’t have any pictures of her at all. I thought of that already, after I heard she’d died.”

“And you’re sure this isn’t her?”

“I’m sure. Positive.” Still baffled by what had transpired in the course of a quarter of an hour, George kept registering little bursts of comprehension and hope. If his girlfriend wasn’t Audrey Beck, then she was still alive. He wanted to ask this of the detective, to confirm what seemed to be happening, but he was acutely aware of the grieving family of the real Audrey Beck around him. The father continued to pace, shaking his head and sighing to himself.

“What’s going on?” The voice, a new one, came from the front door. All the heads in the room swiveled. A teenage boy had entered the living room, a tallish blond kid with braces, wearing a Florida Gators T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts.

“Nothing, Billy,” said Mr. Beck.

George thought to himself:
This is the brother, but she never mentioned she had one. She said she was an only child.
He turned to look at Detective Chalfant, who said, to the room in general, “Let’s wrap up here. George, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come down to the station so we can get an official statement from you. There’s no reason to bother the Becks any longer. George, you’ll follow us in your car, unless you’d prefer to ride with Officer Wilson and myself.”

George stood. “Either way is fine—”

“So what you’re saying is, Audrey never went to college at all?” This was from Mrs. Beck, her voice shrill, her wine slopping a little over the lip of the glass she still held. She directed the statement into the middle of the room so that it fell somewhere between George and the two policemen.

Chalfant held a hand up. “Now, Pat. Let’s not jump to any rash conclusions—”

“Rash conclusions?”

“—but, yes, it seems that there’s some confusion as to who was going to college under your daughter’s name. We’re going to clear this up and get to the bottom of whatever happened here. I’ll let you folks know as soon as I find out anything at all. That’s a promise.”

“Where would she have been if she hadn’t been going to college?”

“That’s what we’re going to try and find out.”

George followed the cruiser to a beige stucco police station. He smoked a cigarette along the way and tried to concentrate on driving. The palms of his hands were damp with sweat.

The detective led him to his own office, one of several that lined a long, nondescript hallway that reminded George of the allergist’s office he’d had to visit frequently as a kid.

Chalfant’s office was homey, with cluttered shelves of knickknacks and a wall crammed with tilted pictures, mostly of kids. George was offered a high-backed swivel chair, while Chalfant walked around his desk and perched on a wooden stool. “Keeps me from falling asleep on the job,” he said and winked at George. “The stool,” he added, then picked up the phone on his desk.

George said: “Did you know about this? Did you know about Audrey not being Audrey? I don’t mean to be pushy, but—”

Chalfant held up a finger and said into the phone: “Denise, honey, do me a favor, will ya? I’m going to need all the Sweetgum High School yearbooks for the past three years. . . . Yep. . . . No, starting with last year’s and then backward. . . . We have them here, right? . . .  Might as well go four years back, then. Bring them here, will ya. ASAP. . . . Thanks, hon.”

Chalfant hung up the phone and placed the heels of his shoes on the lowest support of the stool. He looked less like a detective and more like a dyspeptic baseball manager in the middle of a losing season. “Let me tell you what we already know. I always find it easiest to disclose all the relevant facts. We know that the real Audrey Beck, the daughter of Sam and Patricia Beck, whom you just met, spent part, if not all, of last semester in West Palm Beach. She told her parents and most of her friends that she was going to school at Mather College. She packed her car full of sweaters and jeans and took off, heading north, but apparently at some point she turned around and headed east. According to Ian King—have you heard of him? No, I didn’t think so. According to Ian King, she spent the majority of the fall with him and other members of his band in a rented house. He’s in a group called Gator Bait, I don’t suppose . . .”

George shook his head.

“. . . No, of course you haven’t. I know all this because Ian King showed up here yesterday. He came to me because he thought Audrey Beck had been killed by a drug dealer named Sam Paris. Apparently, Gator Bait and Audrey Beck owe money for drugs. We weren’t surprised that Audrey Beck was a drug user because that showed up pretty clearly in the coroner’s report. We
were
surprised to hear she hadn’t spent the semester at school. We were getting all set to call Mather—oh hello, Denise, right on the desk, please.”

A pear-shaped, heavily made-up woman of at least fifty placed a stack of high school yearbooks on the desk.

“We were getting all set to call Mather, and then the Becks hear from you, a college boyfriend. You can imagine that we were very interested to hear your story.”

“You think someone else went in her place?”

“Seems that way, son, unless you think she was in two places at the same time.”

“The pictures I saw earlier, they were definitely not the Audrey Beck I knew.”

“Right, so what I was hoping you could do for me is flip through that stack of yearbooks. If someone went in Audrey’s place, pretending to be her, it makes sense that maybe it’s someone she knew from high school.”

“Okay.” George placed a hand on the padded fake-leather cover of the top yearbook. “I’ll do anything I can to help you, but you have to help me find the girl I’m looking for. She must still be alive, don’t you think?”

“I don’t want to speculate, son, but it’s one and the same what you said about the help. You help us, and we’ll help you. I have some things to do here in my office for a while. Here okay, or would you prefer I get you another room?”

“Here’s fine.”

George flipped through page after page of Sweetgum High School yearbooks to look for a girl with no name. He scanned portrait shot after portrait shot: girls with teased hair and shiny lips, girls in three-quarter profile looking back over a shoulder, girls with acne covered by thick makeup, girls who wore crosses around their necks and over their blouses, girls who were told by the photographer to lift their chins just a little bit higher, girls who looked like they were going places, and girls who looked like all the good times had already happened. All these girls were interspersed with dazed-looking senior boys, some handsome, most not, almost all with jock haircuts and expressionless eyes. George also studied the other photos, the black-and-whites of the clubs, the teams, the societies, the prom, all the group shots that might give him a glimpse of his own Audrey. He flipped through page after page till the tip of his finger felt dry and raw. He found many elements of her—her haircut on a girl named Mary Stephanopolis, her profile on a brunette doing a layout for the school newspaper, her curved hips and tapering legs on a member of the swim team—but none of them were her.

“Are there more for me to look at?” George asked a now-standing Detective Chalfant, who peered through bifocals at an opened manila folder in one hand.

“No. Quit. I’m worried about your eyes.” He came up behind George and unexpectedly placed a large hand on George’s left shoulder and squeezed. George, descended from a long line of unaffectionate men, found the gesture both disconcerting and almost unbearably comforting. “Tell me about this girl you knew. What was she like?”

George told his story and as he spoke he became aware of how ordinary and uninteresting their courtship and relationship had been. They had met at a party. He liked her. She liked him. It was a ritualized dance enacted by a million matriculating students across the globe. “I never suspected she wasn’t who she said she was,” he said. “She was cagey about her past, a little, but I thought she just didn’t like to talk about it. Not everyone does.”

“What did she like to talk about?”

“She asked me questions about me, my town, my parents. We talked about movies and books. We analyzed friends we had in common. She didn’t like Florida. She said it was ugly and provincial.”

“And your town wasn’t?”

“Apparently not. I come from a small, pretty wealthy place. I never thought much of it, but she liked to hear me tell stories.”

“What else was she interested in?”

“She was smart. She said she wanted to major in political science and minor in English lit. She planned to go to law school.”

“She got good grades?”

“All As.”

Detective Chalfant, who had worked his way back around his desk, placed one foot on his stool and began to tighten his shoelaces. “How long are you here for? In Sweetgum.”

“A while, I guess, now. Till I find out what happened.”

“Okay.” Chalfant slid a business card into George’s hand. “You’re at the motor court, right? We’ll be in touch.”

O
utside, the blue sky had been checkerboarded by thin patterns of clouds, cotton balls pulled apart. There was a note under George’s windshield wiper—a piece of lined paper torn out of a notebook. All that was written on the sheet was a phone number, seven digits, scrawled in lavender ink.

He carefully folded the note and put it in his pocket. It didn’t look like Audrey’s handwriting, but he couldn’t be sure.

Driving back to the motel, slowed by the rush-hour traffic from an emptying tomato processing plant, he felt a sense of elation, not just because the girl he’d known was probably still alive, but also because he had become embroiled in something far more mysterious than he’d ever hoped to be involved in. The dull realities of Mather College and his suburban home were receding into a pedestrian, grayish past.

He pulled the Buick into the car dealership’s lot and left the car with Dan Thompson, who offered him, in succession, a cold beer and a similar deal the following day. George told Thompson that he’d more than likely be by again in the morning, and he declined the beer, not because he didn’t want it, but because he didn’t want to hang around the office that smelled of cigar smoke and Lysol any longer than he had to. He had a phone call to make.

George fiddled momentarily with the lock of his motel room door. It jammed a little, and he muttered a curse to himself, loud enough so that he didn’t immediately register the sound of the car door opening and shutting behind him. He did register something, the sense of an impending threat, but that was only in the quarter second or so before he was violently shoved forward onto the floor of his motel room.