The Scamp (15 page)

What's under this dress? he said, his hand on my thigh.

Why don't you stick your hand under there and find out? I said.

It was a long time till we slept.

So I'm buzzing-in-the-limbs tired in the morning when we drive out. My head cottony, and my eyes hot. Couper gets huge Styrofoam cups of coffee and we rumble out of town.

Goodbye, Summersville, I say, watching it in the side mirror. It feels wrong, though, saying it. Saying even that version of her name.

Off those back roads, it's hard to tell sometimes, what corner of what state we're in. It's field after field out there. Red or bleached-white concrete, plantation houses and dirt roads. Couper comes to a four corners where there's a 76 gas station and an old shopping plaza with a jeweler, a bank, and a yoga studio with a Grand Opening sign. Across, there's a pink cabin that says
MISS RUBY'S FORTUNES
, with a phone number and a star and a moon.

Couper rolls into the parking lot, which is gravel and dusty, and deep with holes.

Really? I say, turning sideways on the bench seat. This is how you conduct your research? At roadside fortune-tellers? Come on, I say.

This is just his day job, Couper says.

What's his night job? I say. Carnival barker? Couper laughs, but I keep going. It's such bullshit, I say. You could put a quarter in an arcade game and get a fortune.

But while he's looking at me, I think about the way he was early this morning, the groan he made, deep in my neck, holding on to my hips something fierce, the way he curved beside me after, both of us naked with nothing over us, just under the sky like that.

I'm glad you're with me, he said.

In the car, though, he snickers. He reaches into the back for an expanding file folder. I've been in touch with this guy for a while, he says.

Well good, I say. Maybe I'll ask him a few things about you.

We get out and, in the parking lot, a cloud of dust hovers about our knees. I put on shorts this morning and one of Couper's soft dark blue T-shirts, a V-neck that hangs low over my cleavage. I was off duty, or so I thought. I could save the dresses for another day.

What about me? Couper says.

I don't know, I say. I keep sleeping with you, I say, standing right up beside him on the steps. But I don't know a thing about you.

Sure you do, he says. Pay attention.

There's a jangle of bells on the door, and inside, a living room with old-fashioned furniture. The room is filled with things, pictures, statues, candles, flowers, beads. Old photos on the walls of ladies from the 1900s, in hats and bustles, pictures of the Virgin Mary, pictures of Indian kids in a circle, holding hands. There are strings of beads off every doorknob and hook and light fixture. Wooden beads, glass beads, plastic colored beads. There's incense burning that smells like burning leaves or dry grass. The rug is plush and red, and there's a big green velvet couch against the back wall.

The psychic is expecting Couper. He's tall and fat, round in the wrist and shoulders in a real queer way. He walks kind of belly out, like a fat woman would, and is wearing shorts and a polo and flip-flops.

He is not expecting me.

The midway was always lousy. It was dinky, with rattly rides that were unsafe, and a few games. The bumper cars were no good. No one from town would go on the roller coaster, a metal contraption that went up into the trees next to the lake, because everyone knew that Randy Hinkel and his brothers had worked on putting it up and they couldn't build a goddamn thing. When the cars went over the top hump of the hill, the whole thing shifted, breathing with movement like it would fall apart.

There was a haunted house that was just a cart moving through the dark on a track where loud buzzers
and screams startled us. As kids, we wanted monsters, weird green lighting, the touch of a creepy hand, or a bloody-mouthed vampire lurking in the corner. Probably, though, that lone cart on a path so dark you didn't know when it would turn, the loud buzz that seemed only to say you did it wrong, while you reeled through, blind—that was probably the scariest thing of all.

In the main building, painted to look like a circus big top, there was a bank of Skee-Ball lanes from the sixties, a few video games, and a counter where kids could trade tickets for things like bouncy balls or jelly bracelets.

And on the sidewalk between the big top and the haunted house, a purple shack that said
PSYCHIC
. They never committed to a name, like Miss Lydia, or a man named Vladimir. It just said
PSYCHIC
. I think they got whoever they could to sit in there. Probably, it was just someone's hippie aunt visiting from New York.

You had to pay five dollars for a reading, given to a guy who sat on a folding chair outside. Inside, there were two parts: an anteroom with jeweled mirrors and small bells hanging from the ceiling, and a back room, where the psychic sat at a table behind a velvet curtain. We went once. I was scared. I was terrified of her saying something awful and true, even though Khaki told me all they ever say is bullshit.

She's going to tell you something stupid, she said to me. Like,
You will see many places.
Or,
You will influence children
. She put on a fake European accent, deep and sexy, and I laughed.

She rolled her eyes. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the midway was busy with out-of-towners and their kids. We were off from school for four days; it was hot already. We padded down the pavement in flip-flops, her, almost sixteen, in white shorts that ended where her ass did. Me, twelve. I looked older in some ways, the worst ways, the kind that got extra looks from men. My body was enough to get leers on the midway. Guys who wanted you to go in the haunted house with them, or on the roller coaster, or who offered you a ride in their car to get you a pack of Four Loko at the gas station.

Khaki handed the guy outside the psychic's shack a ten-dollar bill. He sat on a metal chair in gray-blue mechanic pants and work boots, a white T-shirt. He slumped a little, with his arms folded over his belly. His hair, slicked back in ripples that were sandy gray.

Inside the door, I slipped my hand into hers. When the psychic moved the curtain aside, she said, What is this, a two-for-one deal? But she smiled at us. Come in, girls, she said.

She wore a long sleeveless dress and a band around her long red hair that went over her forehead like a crown. Strings of beads, a silver ring on every finger. She sat at a card table, on another folding chair. There was one chair on the customer side, and she had us sit one at a time.

I went first. She held my hand, palm up, traced her fingers over the skin like she was drawing off water.

Well, she said. She looked at my left hand and then my right. You have a long ways to go, she said. But it will be worth it.

I remember thinking,
Isn't that always the case? Like, isn't that just fucking life?

She turned my hand over, looked at the side, and at the heel, where the lines disappeared into my wrist.

You'll meet a stranger, she said.

Everyone you meet for the first time is a stranger, Khaki said. She had her arms folded over her chest, stood looking at a hanging string of copper bells, tied with different colored ribbons.

Well, the psychic said slowly, this one is different. She winked at me. This one's a man.

Khaki snorted. Don't get into a car with a strange man, Rainy, she said.

Why don't you sit down, she said to Khaki.

My hands were slender and long. I wore a thin-banded opal ring on my middle finger. My nails weren't painted, just long and shaped, rounded on the edges.

Not Khaki. She never wore her nails long, and her hands were like hard squares. Her palms were broad and her fingers short and strong. She had hands that looked like they could take you apart. Often, she had them balled into fists.

The psychic held them, palm up, the way she had with mine, and she traced over them lightly, the same way.

You're a hard worker, she said to Khaki.

You think? she said. Then, I'm just a girl with big hands.

I watched over Khaki's shoulder while the psychic traced triangles on her palm.

Maybe you should read me, she said to Khaki.

Maybe. Khaki took her hands away.

You're going to break a lot of hearts, she said.

That's my fortune? Thanks, Khaki said.

Outside, in the sun, the barker in front of the games was calling to us. One shot, he said, holding a basketball. One basket and you win, he said.

Why did she say that? I asked. That you should read her?

Khaki snorted. She put her white sunglasses back on, lit a cigarette. She's just a dyke who wants my big hands up her twat, she said.

I tried to laugh. How do you know? I said.

How do I know she wants me? Khaki said. Oh Rayelle.

No, I said, that she's . . .

A dyke? Oh Rayelle, she said again. I watched a clean straight line of smoke come out her nose. Her shoulders, square and brown in the sun. It takes one to know one, she said to me.

But she left with a man. She was the one who got in the car, not with a stranger, but with a man she knew, and left home.

And then, ten years later, I did the same.

Denis, Couper says, it's good to see you in person. Couper shakes hands with him, but Denis just looks at me.

This is my assistant, Couper says, Rayelle Reed.

Denis says hello, but doesn't shake my hand. He looks at me, looks away, looks at Couper, at the floor, anywhere he doesn't have to look dead on at me. Then finally he stands directly in front of Couper, his hand on Couper's elbow.

Likewise, he says to Couper. He flicks an eyebrow, flirty.

They sit on the couch with a glass coffee table in front of them and I watch while Couper lays out pictures and a blank sheet of paper, one at a time, like he's the one telling fortunes with cards.

I'm down to eight girls, Couper says. Holly. Alyssa. Jessa. Florida. Caitlin. Denise. Elizabeth. Haylee.

Plus this one, Couper says, and then glances at me before he lays down a picture of Khaki.

And there she is, her face, after all this time. She's a kid, maybe fifteen, probably the last school picture taken. The background, hot pink and striped. Her hair, with bangs that year, angled across her forehead, the tips of her hair to a point above her collarbone.

Where did you find that? I say.

On file at the school, he says.

Jesus
, I think. Who knows what else he's found. She's not, I say, and Couper shushes me.

She's not dead
, I think. She can't be. I could kick him for shushing me.

Haylee, Denis says, moving one picture out, has not been found yet?

Right, Couper says.

Haylee, a round-faced kid with pigtails, in a flowered tank top and a jean skirt. Like many of them, the picture is grainy, cropped, and zoomed in from some other shot, the features in the face lost in a bad reproduction.

Holly, from the posters in town, a picture in her own front yard in South Lake, holding the handlebars of her bike.

Alyssa, before and after.

Jessa, with the baby.

Florida, a sheet of paper with only the word typed in the middle.

Caitlin, a big-boned blonde, standing beside a pickup truck.

Denise, with a butch haircut and a leather jacket.

Elizabeth, from her college ID card. Small with light brown hair to her shoulders, wearing a smile that is shy, the kind of look that hides everything else.

The ruling for Florida, Couper says, is suicide. He rubs the back of his head. It was a stretch, he admits, including her. I thought it might fit the pattern of the others.

It's not the same, Denis says. He slides the piece of paper around to the front. The feeling I get from her, he says, isn't like the others. It's a different violence, a different sadness. Deeper, farther away. Neither does this one, he says, and takes out Khaki's photo. These, he says, moving Caitlin's picture forward, are immediate. Swift. Crushing. He pushes Haylee, still undiscovered, to the end of the line.

The others? Denis asks, That you took out?

Recently solved, Couper says, and isolated.

How many did you start with? I ask.

Twelve, Couper says.

Who is this? Denis says about Khaki.

Kathleen Reed, Couper answers. She left South Lake around the same time Holly disappeared, Couper says. Not exactly a runaway, but close.

Related? Denis says. He holds the picture up, peering into her face.

We're cousins, I say.

I look at Couper, who doesn't return my look, even though I'm boring into his head with my stare. I refuse to believe any of it. I don't believe Denis can possibly discern anything from just her picture.

They didn't find all of Florida, Couper says.

Are there pictures? Denis says.

You don't want to see the pictures. Her legs were gone, Couper says. The body, in the ocean for days. But there was no sign of trauma to the neck or the skull the way the others showed.

Haylee is still living, Denis says, pointing. He doesn't ask. He declares.

She's only fifteen, Couper says. Her sister made the call.

How do you know any of this is related? I say. Maybe she's just a runaway. Maybe she doesn't want to be found.

She is a runaway, Couper says. There's no evidence that she was taken. She ran from her sister's house.
Florida, he says, moving the paper, was also a runaway, according to her mother.

You think there's a man preying on runaway girls, I say.

Couper shrugs. It's not unlikely.

Holly Jasper wasn't a runaway, I say.

Nobody knows that.

She was nine years old, I say. And Jessa was twenty-six.

Are you saying grown women never run away? Couper says. He moves another picture. Caitlin was twenty-five, he says. Also with a baby.

Denis appears to labor with his breathing, out of breath like he's just come up the stairs, but he's sitting. I'm sorry to interrupt, Denis says. He holds his hands up, his eyes closed. He looks like he's giving a blessing.