Lippman, Laura (31 page)

“I have a book with me.
Jane Eyre
. I’ll be utterly content.”

“Jane Eyre, huh? I never could read her.”

Kay realized that Gloria had confused Brontë’s novel with the other Jane of nineteenth-century letters, Jane Austen. There probably wasn’t room for much in Gloria’s brain besides her clients, her work. Should Kay take her aside, tell her that they had visited the old mall? Would Heather volunteer this? Did it matter? Left alone, her eyes scanned blindly across the pages, following but not really absorbing Jane’s flight from Thornfield, the stiff proposal from St. John, the adorable, adoring sisters who turned out to be Jane’s cousins.

SHE WASN’T HAPPY to see a female detective in the room, although she tried to conceal her irritation and surprise.

“Are we waiting for Kevin?” she asked.

“Kevin?” the plump detective echoed. “Oh, Detective Infante.” As if she didn’t have the right to call him by his first name.
She doesn’t like me. She resents me for being so much thinner, even though she’s a lot younger. She’s protective of Kevin
. “Detective Infante had to go out of town. To
Georgia
.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Gloria shot her a look, but she was beyond caring what Gloria thought. She knew what she was doing and what she had to do.

“I don’t know.
Does
it mean something to you?”

“I’ve never lived there, if that’s where you’re going.”

“Where have you lived, over the last thirty years?”

“She’s going to take the Fifth on that,” Gloria said quickly.

“I’m not sure the Fifth is relevant, and we keep telling you that we can get your client before a grand jury, grant her immunity on anything she did as far as identity theft goes, but—okay.” Fake easygoing.

I know you, Detective. You’re one of the good girls, the kind who gets to be class secretary, or maybe vice president. The one who always has a big jock boyfriend and fusses with his collar at lunchtime, already a little wife at age sixteen. I know you. But I know what it’s like to be a real teenage bride, and you wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t like it at all.

“As we’ve said repeatedly, this isn’t about the legal side of things,” Gloria said. “It’s also the poking about, the prying. If Heather provides the details of her current identity, you’ll start talking to her coworkers and neighbors, right?”

“Possibly. We’ll definitely run it through all our databases.”

Who the fuck cares?

But Gloria said: “You think she’s a criminal?”

“No, no, not at all. We’re just having a hard time understanding why she never came forward until she was involved in a car accident and facing hit-and-run charges.”

She decided to challenge the detective head-on. “You don’t like me.”

“I just met you,” she said. “I don’t know you.”

“When is Kevin coming back? Shouldn’t he do the interview? Without him we’ll have to go over a bunch of stuff I’ve already covered.”

“You were the one who wanted to do this today. Well, here we are. Let’s do it.”

“Gary Gilmore’s final words—1977. Were you even born?”

“That very year,” Nancy Porter said. “And how old were you? Where were you that Gary Gilmore’s death made such an impact on you?”

“I was thirteen in Heather years. I was a different age on the outside.”

“‘Heather years’? You make it sound like dog years.”

“Trust me, Detective—I
aspired
to the life of a dog.”

5:45 P.M.

“Sunny told me that I could go to the mall with her, but I couldn’t hang around her. And then, maybe just because she said that, I wouldn’t leave her alone. I followed her to the movie
Escape to Witch Mountain
. When the previews began, she got up and went out. I thought she might have gone to the bathroom, but when the movie started and she still wasn’t back, I went out to the lobby to check for her.”

“Were you worried about her? Did you think something had happened?”

The subject—Willoughby was not ready to call her Heather yet, if only out of self-protection, wary of investing too much hope in this woman, this resolution—the subject thought carefully about the question. Willoughby could see that she was someone given to thinking before she spoke. Perhaps she was simply a cautious person, but his suspicion was that she liked the drama created by her pauses and hesitation. She knew she was playing for a larger audience than Nancy and Gloria.

“It’s interesting that you ask that. The thing is, I
did
worry about Sunny. I know that sounds backwards, me being the younger one. But she was—I don’t know what the right word is. Naïve? I wouldn’t have had any words for it at the time. I just know I felt protective of her, and it worried me when she didn’t come back. It was unthinkable that she would buy a movie ticket and abandon the show.”

“She could have gone outside and asked for a refund.”

She furrowed her brow, as if considering this. “Yes. Yes. That never occurred to me. I was
eleven
. And besides, I found out right away why she left. She had sneaked into
Chinatown
, which was an R-rated movie. The way the lobby was set up—there were only two theaters—it wasn’t so easy to do that, and they watched for it. But if you used the bathroom on the other side—if you said the other one was full, or dirty—you could distract an usher and sneak in. We had done that before, to get two movies for the price of one, but not to see an R movie. It never occurred to me to try to see an R movie. I was a bit of a goody-goody.”

Sneaking into R-rated movies—did kids even have to do that anymore? And a movie such as
Chinatown
, what a disappointment that must have been if you were hoping for salacious kicks. Willoughby wondered if an eleven-year-old, back in 1975, could even grasp the big twist, the incest theme, much less follow the intricate land deal at the heart of the film.

“So I found her in the back row, watching
Chinatown
, and she got furious with me, told me to go away. Which attracted the usher’s attention, and we both got thrown out. She was really angry. Angry enough to scare me. Then she said that she was done with me, that she wouldn’t even buy me Karmelkorn as promised, and she didn’t want to see me again until our father picked us up at five-thirty.”

“So what did you do?”

“Walked around. Looked at things.”

“Did you see anyone, speak to anyone?”

“I didn’t speak to anyone, no.”

Willoughby made a notation on the legal pad they had provided him. This was key. If Pincharelli remembered Heather, she should remember him. It was one of the few things the music teacher had been forthcoming about, eventually. He’d seen Heather in the audience, watching him play.

Nancy Porter, bless her, caught it, too.

“You didn’t speak to anyone, okay. But did you see someone, anyone, that you knew?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Didn’t see anyone familiar. A neighbor, a friend of your parents’?”

“No.”

“So you just wandered around the mall, by yourself for three hours….”

“That’s what little girls do at malls, from time immemorial. They go to malls and walk around. Didn’t you, Detective?”

This earned a baleful look from Gloria, who was not enjoying her client’s combative attitude. Detective Porter smiled—a sunny, sincere smile, the kind of smile her subject had probably never been able to deliver in her entire life—and said, “Yeah, but for me it would have been White Marsh, and I hung out in the food court, near Mamma Ilardo’s pizza.”

“Nice name.”

“They made a good pizza.”

Nancy bent over her legal pad, writing furiously. All for show, Willoughby knew. All for show.

6:20 P.M.

“Tell me again what happened at the end of the day, when it was time for you to meet.”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.” Nancy took a swig from a bottle of water. She had offered the woman repeated chances to have a soda, take a bathroom break, but she always said no. Too bad, because if they could get her prints on a glass, they could run it through the system in minutes, see if they got a hit. Did she know that?

“It was almost five, and I had wandered back to the center, beneath the big green skylight, where the food was. Karmelkorn, Baskin-Robbins. I was thinking that Sunny might change her mind and buy me a treat after all. I decided if she didn’t buy me Karmelkorn, I’d tell our parents about the R-rated movie. One way or another, I would get what I wanted. Back then…back then I was very good at getting my way.”

“Back then?”

“You’d be surprised how years of sexual servitude break your will.”

Willoughby liked the way that the detective nodded, as if sympathetic, but didn’t let this information throw her off her stride.
Yeah, yeah, years of sexual servitude, that old thing
.

“It’s—what time is it, when you go to the Karmelkorn?”

“Almost five. I
told
you.”

“How did you know the time?”

“I had a Snoopy watch.” Recited in an oh-so-bored voice. “A yellow-faced watch on a wide leather band. It had belonged to Sunny, in fact, and she no longer wore it. I thought it was funny. But the way his arms moved, it was hard to ever know the exact time. So all I can say is, it was going on five.”

“And where was the Karmelkorn?”

“I couldn’t tell you in terms of north or south, if that’s what you want. Security Square was shaped like a plus sign, only one end was much longer than the other. The Karmelkorn would have been on the short, stumpy end that faced where the J. C. Penney was going in, but hadn’t opened yet. It was a great place to sit. Even if you weren’t eating, the smell was so rich and buttery.”

“So you were sitting?”

“Yes, on the edge of a fountain. It wasn’t a wishing fountain, but people had thrown coins in. I remember wondering what would happen if I fished them out, if I would get in trouble.”

“But you were a goody-goody, you said.”

“Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that’s what defines us. We’re always
thinking
about the things we don’t dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.”

“Was Sunny a goody-goody?”

“No, she was something worse.”

“What was that?”

“Someone who wanted to be bad and didn’t know how.”

7:10 P.M.

Jane Eyre
finished—Reader, I married him, he was blind, what other choice did he have?—Kay realized she was without a book. She probably had one in the trunk of her car, but she wasn’t sure they would buzz her back into the building if she left. She could ask someone, but she felt that strange adolescent self-consciousness that she had never quite lost. She studied the notices pinned to the bulletin board, the pamphlets. DARE—Drug Awareness Education. No, wait, that didn’t add up: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. An infelicitous name, all to create an acronym that didn’t work, in Kay’s opinion. It was too close to Drug Abuse
Resists
Education.

The impromptu trip to the mall still bothered her. Should she tell someone? To whom did she owe her loyalty, if anyone? Should she leave? But all that waited for her was an empty house on a Saturday night.

7:35 P.M.

“You want a soda?”

“No.”

“Because I do. I’ll be right back, okay? I’m just going to get a soda. Gloria?”

“I’m fine.”

Left alone, the lawyer said to her client, “They’re listening to us, just so you know. If we want to speak privately, however, all you have to do is ask.”

“I know. I’m fine.”

7:55 P.M.

“So where were we?”

“
You
were getting a soda.”

“No, I mean when I left. Where were you, in the story? Oh, yeah, on the edge of the fountain, thinking about the coins.”

“A man tapped me on the shoulder—”

“Show me.”

“Show you?”

Nancy perched on the table between them. “I’m you. Did he come up from behind you? Which side? Show me.”

She approached Nancy from behind, flicking her left shoulder with a little more vehemence than a tap would require.

“So you turn and you see this guy—what did he look like?”

“He was just an old guy to me. Very short hair, gray and brown. Ordinary-looking. He was in his fifties, but I’d only find that out later. At the time the only thing I thought was, He’s old.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He asked if I was Heather Bethany. He knew my name.”

“And did that seem strange to you?”

“No. I was a kid. Grown-ups were always knowing things about me that I didn’t know how they knew them. Grown-ups were like gods. Back then.”

“Did you know him?”

“No, but he showed me his badge, right away, told me he was a police officer.”

“What did the badge look like?”

“I don’t know. A badge. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he had a badge, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt anything he said.”

“Which was?”

“‘Your sister’s been hurt. Come with me.’ So I went. I followed him down a corridor, where the restrooms were. There was an exit back there, marked ‘For Emergencies Only,’ but it was an emergency, so it made sense to me that we were going that way, rather than the usual entrances.”

“Did an alarm sound?”

“An alarm?”

“You walk out doors marked Emergency Exit Only, an alarm usually sounds.”

“I don’t remember one. Maybe he disabled it. Maybe there wasn’t one. I don’t know.”

“The corridor was…where?”

“Between the center atrium and Sears. It was where the restrooms were, and also where they did the surveys.”

“Surveys?”

“Consumer stuff. Sunny told me about it. You could get, like, five dollars for answering questions. But you had to be at least fifteen, so I never got to do it.”

8:40 P.M.

Infante slipped into the room where Willoughby and Lenhardt were watching the interrogation.

“You’re supposed to be at the airport, waiting for the mom,” Lenhardt said to him, but not in a mean, ballbusting way, not to Willoughby’s ears.