Dead In The Hamptons (22 page)

“Girl, you are in trouble,” Cindy said.

“Won’t they check the blood?” Jeannette asked in a small voice. “I couldn’t ask back there, because I didn’t tell them about the deer.”

“If they find traces, they’ll send them to the lab,” Cindy said. “It could take time, though.”

“Still,” I said. “If she didn’t kill Phil, they won’t find human blood on her car. So sooner or later she’ll be in the clear.”

Jeannette started crying again.

“They think I killed Oscar too. And I didn’t have any reason to kill Phil, but I did for Oscar.”

Jeannette sobbed. Her nose began to run. She swiped her sleeve along her upper lip without much impact.

“Box of tissues under your seat, Bruce,” Cindy said.

I found them and passed them back. Jeannette snatched two or three tissues out of the box and blew her nose, honking like a Canada goose.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to inflict all of this on you. But if they arrest me, everyone will know. I could lose my social work license.”

“Only if you’re convicted,” Cindy said. “And in that case, losing your license would be the least of your worries.”

“What happened with Oscar?” I asked.

“Now or before?”

“Whatever you want to tell us,” Cindy said.

Jeannette blew her nose again.

“If I tell you all of it, maybe I’ll feel better. You know, I’m not a therapist like a lot of social workers. I’ve done adoption work ever since I got out of school. I deal with people, but it’s not clinical. It’s concrete. When you do a home study, you don’t ask the prospective parents how they feel, you look at how they live.”

“How about the moms who are giving up their babies?”

“That’s why I got into adoption work in the first place,” Jeannette said. “Some of my colleagues see themselves as advocates for the adoptive parents and despise the birth moms. I hate that. They’re scared. A lot of them are too young to parent their babies, but it still takes guts to let them go. Even the crack babies. I’m in recovery myself. I know you don’t have to be a worthless person to get addicted or an evil one not to get help.”

“What about you and Oscar?”

“I’m getting there,” Jeannette said. “You know those shell necklaces we all wear?”

“Uh-huh. Oscar made them, right?”

“They had a meaning,” Jeannette said. “You got one for fucking Oscar. We all walked around with Oscar’s sexual abacus around our necks. He kept score.”

“The son of a bitch,” I said. For a change, it felt good to be me.

“A sexual compulsive,” Cindy said, “and not in recovery.”

“Yes, Mr. AA had a few character defects,” Jeannette said. “Not that I realized that. I was just another stupid codependent who thought sex could be a short cut to love and commitment. How many trips to the hardware store do we have to take before we get it that they don’t sell oranges?”

“You’re not alone,” Cindy said.

“Men aren’t immune from relationship addiction either,” I said.

We gave each other a sidelong glance. She wanted to hear more as much as I did. But now was not the time.

“Go on, Jeannette,” Cindy said.

“Not every man wants to sleep with a woman as fat as I am.”

“That must hurt.”

“Oh, it does. Even in the personal ads, do you know how many men stipulate that they want to meet a woman who’s thin? And when they ask for a picture, that’s not just so they can reject anyone who isn’t pretty, even if they’re not good-looking themselves. They want to make sure you’re not fat.”

“Some men think lush and voluptuous is beautiful,” Cindy said.

“Not the men I’ve met.”

“But you—”

“Don’t say it!” Jeannette snapped. “If you want to stab a fat woman to the heart, tell her, ‘You have such a pretty face’.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” I protested. I lied. Who knew?

She calmed down, her high color fading.

“Sorry. But everybody says it. We’re supposed to take it as a compliment, but they’re really saying, ‘You’re fat, and that’s unacceptable, and it’s all your own fault’.”

“How about Oscar?”

“He was a practiced seducer,” Jeannette said. “I was a pathetic, flattered, desperate fool. I thought he actually liked me until he’d fucked me twice, tossed me a necklace with two pretty little jingle shells on it, and walked away.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Clea’s necklace had a lot of shells,” Cindy said.

“So does Karen’s,” I said.

“I understand the alleged motive,” Cindy said. “Did you have an opportunity to kill Oscar?”

“I didn’t,” Jeannette said, “but I can’t prove it. I didn’t go home that night.”

It took me a moment to get it.

“You went home with someone else?”

“Not home. Into the dunes with a guy I didn’t know who turned out to be a smirking self-centered chubby chaser. To him, I was just a soft pillow-top mattress for him to sink into and congratulate himself on giving a loser a thrill.”

“But where did you spend the night?”

“On the beach,” Jeannette said. “I’d let Stephanie take the car because I thought he was taking me to his house. I guess I could have walked home when he dumped me. I could do four miles if I were desperate. But I was feeling so vulnerable. I didn’t want to move. With my luck, I’d get hit by a drunk driver or raped by some guy in a pickup truck on those lonely roads. So I stayed put. We’d taken a throw from Oscar’s house to lie on, and I grabbed it when I stalked away, so I was a little damp but not cold.”

“You were on the beach when Oscar got killed,” I said. “I bet the cops got excited about that.”

“I don’t know when he got killed,” she said. “I told them and told them that. We had walked quite a way down the beach, you know, fooling around and holding hands the way you do when your hormones are all fired up and you don’t know yet that the guy is a jerk.”

I sank down in my seat in as close as I could get to fetal position without removing the seatbelt.

“Men!” Cindy said. “So you didn’t see or hear anything.”

“No, and even if I’d known the asshole’s name and where he lived, even if he’d still been with me when it happened, why would he bother to give me an alibi? All he has to do to stay out of it is deny the whole thing.”

“They will look for him,” Cindy said, “going on whatever information you could give them.”

“I hope so. They said they would. But even if they find him, it may not help.”

“You do have the deck stacked against you,” Cindy said. “They’ve got you for motive and opportunity on Oscar and opportunity on Phil. I suppose they also think you killed Clea. If someone tells them what the necklaces meant, they’ll know she had no trouble keeping Oscar, who’d dumped you almost immediately. You could have killed her out of jealousy, or she could have taunted you or given you a hard time in some other way.”

Maybe Jeannette had killed them, I thought. Cindy’s hypotheses were plausible.

Jeannette sat up straight with such a convulsive movement that the box of tissues on her lap fell to the floor.

“I would never have killed Clea!” she cried. “She was my daughter!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Barbara said. “Clea was adopted, and Jeannette was her birth mother?”

“Uh-huh.”

We lay on the beach with the sun beating down. To be accurate, I lay on a towel with my arm over my eyes. Barbara had been lying beside me, her towel spread neatly over the sand bed she’d made for herself with a hump at the head for a pillow and a scooped-out depression for her butt. But she sat bolt upright when I passed on Jeannette’s revelation.

“How did they find each other? They didn’t just happen to wind up in the same group house in the Hamptons and somehow figure out that they were related, did they?”

“God isn’t quite that anonymous.”

Program people love the saying that a coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. They see a Higher Power in everything that happens. All these dead bodies suggested HP had a bad day here and there.

“They found each other on one of those websites,” I said.

“They were both looking? Sometimes the mother doesn’t want to be found, and sometimes the child is too mad about being abandoned to look for her.”

“They must have been,” I said. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been listed. I thought the whole point was to give the children control over what happens.”

“It is,” Barbara said. “How old was Clea? Twenty-four or twenty-five, maybe? I think open adoptions started in the early or mid-eighties, so that would make it about right for neither of them to start out with any information about the adoption, without necessarily believing that never the twain shall meet. And Jeannette worked in adoptions, so she’d have known how to go about it. I guess that’s why she went into that field, huh?”

“That’s what she said. When she had Clea, she was very young. She grew up in a small town upstate where they treated what they still called ‘unwed mothers’ like criminals.”

“Not sinners?”

“That too. The father was black.”

“Oy vey. So that was where she got that gorgeous ginger snap complexion, and the ringlets didn’t come from an expensive hair salon.”

“Yeah, well, her family didn’t see it quite that way.”

“Did they have a relationship?”

“No, it was a one-night stand. She met him at a party. The nearest city had a university, and she said the high school girls used to dress up to look older and crash their mixers. She spent nine months not only being regarded as a tramp but knowing the baby was going to come out what her family called ‘colored.’ They were some kind of fundamentalists. Abortion was not an option.”

“Oh, God, poor Jeannette,” Barbara said. “So she gave the baby up right away?”

“Yeah, and felt like shit about it.” I sat up to catch the cool breeze that blew steadily off the ocean. It was hot down there at sand level.

“So how did they connect?” Barbara pulled her hair up off her neck and slapped on some sun block. “And how did they get to Oscar’s?”

“They emailed first and then talked on the phone. Then they decided to spend some time together and see if they wanted to take it any further. They thought shares in a group house would be a safe way to get to know each other.”

Barbara shuddered and hugged her knees.

“It wasn’t safe for Clea.”

“It wasn’t so hot for Jeannette, either. She slept with Oscar, hoping for romance, and guess what?”

“It turned out to be another one-night stand.”

“Two.”

“But who’s counting?”

“Oscar was.” I told her about the necklaces. “It gets worse.”

“Let me guess,” Barbara said. “Clea hopped into bed with Oscar.”

“Bingo. They screwed like bunnies for the rest of the summer. Many shells on the necklace.”

“What a perfect way for the abandoned child to get even with the biological mom. So how on earth did they end up sharing a house again?”

“Jeannette moved to Lewis and Karen’s house last summer, and Clea went back to Oscar’s, though by that time they’d both moved on.”

“Jeannette still felt ambivalent, though, I bet,” Barbara said. “She must have yearned for the daughter she’d hoped Clea would be, or she wouldn’t have come back at all.”

She smoothed out the sand adjacent to her towel with a wide sweep of her hand and started drawing patterns in it with one finger.

“You know, Clea’s motive for taking up with Oscar might not have been revenge,” she said. “She and Oscar were both sexual compulsives.”

“Yeah, they wanted another fix,” I said. “And to hell with anyone who stood in their way.”

Barbara cocked her head.

“Would you care to make an ‘I’ statement about your feelings?”

“No thanks.” My twinge of regret for past behavior wasn’t worth sharing. I stood up and shook out my legs.

Barbara held out a hand. I reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “The water looks great.” She tugged at my hand, and we made our way toward the ocean. The jade expanse sent breakers, not big enough to be threatening, ashore at a steady pace. “So what else did she tell you?”

“How hurt she was.”

“At the betrayal,” Barbara said. “Oscar rejected her sexually, and Clea rejected her too.”

“She knew she couldn’t expect Clea to love an unknown mother. But she still felt stabbed to the heart.”

“Would she have killed her, though?” Barbara splashed into the water up to her knees. She scooped some up and splashed it over her arms.

I inched a few cautious toes past the leading edge of a wave. Long Island beach veterans called August water warm. I found that debatable.

“I don’t know. She said Clea was cruel.”

“I wonder if she played the weight card,” Barbara said. “‘I’m nothing like you, mom, you’re fat and I’m thin, so don’t try to claim me after throwing me away when I was born’.”

“They had the same eyes,” I said.

“Clea had amazing green eyes,” she said. “They were part of her beauty.”

“Jeannette has green eyes too. They’re just like Clea’s, but I never noticed.”

“Me neither. That’s sad.”

“Yeah. She said to me and Cindy, ‘Who notices a fat woman’s eyes?’”

After our swim, we raced each other back to where we’d left our towels. We didn’t have a lot of gear. Barbara had parked the car at the Dedhampton lot, but then we’d walked, at her insistence, down to the deserted stretch of beach in front of Oscar’s.

“I wonder where the gang at Oscar’s is,” Barbara said, glancing up at the house.

“I suppose we should call it Corky’s now.”

The house looked more than ever like a ship, its hull made of weathered cedar, riding high against the burning blue sky. The deck appeared empty, but as we watched, a figurehead appeared on the prow: Corky, topless as a mermaid, emerged from the house. She stood leaning against the wall by the door. In lieu of a scaly tail, she wore a flimsy blue and green wrap around her hips. The sea colored cloth fluttered in the wind.

“I wonder if she’s wearing so much as a thong under that pareo,” Barbara said. “Should we hail her?”

“Wait,” I said.

A man stepped through the dark doorway. He wore a striped towel around his waist. Corky turned and pressed herself against his chest. His arms closed around her waist.