The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (15 page)

“Unless you can think of anything else you’re not telling us.” Detective James said and leaned back, putting both her hands on the arms of her chair. George noticed, for the first time, how sculpted and smooth her arms were. “I really don’t want to find out you’re still holding out on us. We won’t be so charitable.”

“I’m not. If I’ve forgotten something, it’s because I can barely think straight. I just want to go home and go to sleep.”

The detective stared at him with a look that managed to be both threatening and bored, then pushed herself up into a standing position. “Come with me. You’re free to go.”

A
patrol officer drove George home, since his Saab was sitting in a body shop on the other side of the river.

He sat in back, the cracked vinyl smelling of Pine-Sol and public bathrooms. The officer driving talked on his cell phone the entire time, arguing with his wife about whether his teenage daughter could go unchaperoned to some event. He couldn’t quite tell what side the officer was on, but he seemed to be losing the fight.
The world goes on,
George thought,
despite murders and million-dollar heists and idiots like me who get involved.

The officer pulled up to George’s building, told his wife to hold on a moment, and turned. “This okay? You want me to walk you in?”

George peered down his dark alleyway, wondering for a moment whether it was populated by the Bernie MacDonalds of the world. “I’m all right,” he said, and the officer released the security lock on the door. George thanked him and got out, too tired to care about who might be waiting for him on his back steps. There was no one. And there was no one in his apartment either, except for a very verbal and hungry cat. He fed Nora, drank several glasses of water, and climbed back into bed. His body felt inordinately heavy on the mattress, and his muscles ached. He imagined that when the shotgun blast blew a hole in the Saab, his entire body had violently tensed.

He shut his eyes but did not immediately fall asleep. Questions buzzed in his mind. He couldn’t figure out how he was still involved in what was happening. It was clear to him how he’d been initially used, but clearly something had transpired between Liana Decter and Bernie MacDonald to cause a rift. Otherwise, why was MacDonald still around? Did he think George had the diamonds?

George heard the barely perceptible meow as Nora leapt onto the foot of the bed. He could feel her start to settle herself into her usual position. He turned onto his stomach and began the slow descent into sleep. He thought of Liana, replaying moments from twenty-four hours earlier when she had been naked in this very bed. He could still recall her face, the way it had been reduced to a mask by the dawn light. The foggy notion of a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth. He cringed, remembering what he had asked her as they lay together, limbs entwined. “It was real, wasn’t it?” he asked. “What we had in college?”

The unreadable mask that was her face gave nothing away. “Shhh,” she had said, pulling him closer so that her lips were by his ear. She had run the tip of her tongue along the side of his neck.

Then he thought of Irene earlier that evening, how after they had both come she buried her head in his neck and they lay still, George inside of her, her breath warm against his collarbone.

The images fought against each other, then merged and intertwined as George tumbled into a disturbed and restless sleep.

Chapter 18

H
i, Audrey,” George said to Liana Decter on the phone. He was sitting in the motel room, still reeling from his encounter with the man from the muscle car, and he was sure that his voice must be trembling.

“So you thought I was dead?”

“What did you think I would think?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

George didn’t say anything, so she continued. “I guess Dale scared you pretty bad this afternoon. I’m sorry about that too.”

“He was pretty scary.”

“Yeah, that’s what he does. That’s his job. He’s gone back to Tampa, though, so I was thinking we could meet tonight. I’d like to explain.”

George let a second pass, then said, “Okay.”

“There’s a place called Palm’s Lounge, in Chinkapin.” She gave him the street address. “Do you think you could find it?”

They agreed to meet at 9:00
P.M.
, and before George could ask more questions she hung up. He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed. He could still follow through with his plan. Leave Florida. Call Detective Chalfant from the road and tell him everything. Never see Audrey, or whatever her name might be, again. But the phone call had changed all that. She wanted to see him, and there was no way that he was not going to go. He had come to Florida to look for the truth, and he was about to get it.

He showered, even though he had no clean clothes to dress in, then visited Dan Thompson and asked him for the car overnight. He was told he could keep it overnight so long as he checked back in at 8:00
A.M.
the following day.

It was early evening and still light, and because he was too anxious to remain in his motel room, he drove. He crossed the Dahoon River into Chinkapin, then took Cortez Avenue all the way to St. Anna’s Island. He parked by the beach. The Gulf was a deep metallic blue, and the lowering sun reddened the sky and spread dazzling white light across the sea. George walked down the beach and found an old wooden pier with a structure at the end. He walked the length of the pier, passing fishermen and elderly tourists. There was an outside bar at the end, with three empty weather-stripped stools. He ordered a bottle of Budweiser and was given it. He’d drunk in bars before—a few dives near his college were notorious for never carding local students—but he had never been served in a bar outside of that area. He drank the first beer fast, then ordered another, lit a cigarette, and drank the second one slowly, watching boats drift in and out of the receding light.

An hour and a half later, but still an hour and a half before his scheduled meeting with Liana, George parked the Buick in the gravel lot of Palm’s Lounge. It was at the intersection of two flat empty roads, an old farmhouse with a painted palm tree fading on its side and a neon beer sign above its door. He’d bought a cheeseburger to go from a fast-food joint and eaten it in the car. There were only two other vehicles in the lot besides his, both trucks. He was relieved to note the absence of muscle cars.

The inside of Palm’s Lounge was the size of a train car, harshly lit toward the front with a hanging fluorescent light and barely lit toward the back. There was one employee and one customer, each drinking a mixed cocktail at the dark end of the bar. The employee was a fifty-year-old man with a thick mustache and thinning hair on top; his customer was a woman about the same age wearing a short-brimmed straw cowboy hat.

George walked to the middle of the bar and rested an elbow on it. As the bartender made his way toward him he asked for a Bud.

The bartender got the beer and took George’s two dollars. “The jukebox is busted. If you want to play a song, it don’t cost nothing,” the bartender said.

George walked with his beer to an old jukebox in the back, with its line of forty-fives stacked horizontally behind the curving glass. The names of the songs were on little cards, some typed and some handwritten, and most were country songs. George selected a bunch, randomly picking them, based on little more than name recognition. Hank Williams, for instance, rang a bell. So did Patsy Cline.

He brought his beer to a table in the far back corner and waited.

S
he came through the door at one minute past nine. Since he’d been waiting, a short man in a vinyl jacket had come in, sat next to the woman with the straw cowboy hat, and ordered a Jack and Coke. One other couple had entered, an obese man with a skinny tattooed wife. They’d ordered two whiskey sours, brought them to a table near the front, drunk them wordlessly, and left.

Audrey/Liana stepped through the front door, letting it swing closed behind her. She was in the full blaze of the overhead lighting, and George watched her gaze unseeing for a moment toward the back of the bar. She wore a pair of black cotton pants, the kind waiters and waitresses sometimes wear, and a short-sleeved blouse in green, her favorite color. She looked as he’d remembered her: small-shouldered, a little wide at the hips, exotic-eyed, startling. She spotted him.

He remained seated as she walked out of the glare of the doorway lighting and into the dim interior, taking a quick sideways glance toward the bar, then putting a hand on his shoulder, leaning in slightly. She smelled the same—like cinnamon gum—and he realized it was something about her he’d forgotten in just a few weeks.

“Did he card you for that?” she asked, indicating the beer.

“No. I don’t think you need to worry about it.”

“You want another?”

“I’ll get it,” George said. “You sit. You want a beer, or something else?”

“A beer’ll be fine.”

She sat at the table while he went to the bartender for two more beers.

When he returned, she had placed her hands flat on the table surface, expectantly, like a child waiting to be fed. George had seen her do such a thing before. Despite her forged identity, Liana was the Audrey he had known. Half-drunk, he wanted to reach across to her and clasp his hands around her shoulders. He wanted to kiss her.

“I can’t believe you came all the way down here,” she said after sipping the rising foam off the neck of the bottle.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to start a sentence with ‘I can’t believe’ in it before I do.”

She smiled. “That’s fair.”

“I thought you were dead. Do you have any—”

“Look, stop. I feel terrible about that. Let me take a moment to explain and maybe you’ll understand. You saw where I live today, so you know I don’t come from much money, not enough to go to college with. I don’t really want to go into all the details, but I live with just my father. He’s old for a dad, nearly seventy. He wrote for television about thirty years ago, in California. He says he wrote a
Twilight Zone,
but I don’t know about that. Now all he likes to do is drink beer, smoke pot, and gamble. God, this sounds like . . . poor me, eh? Anyway, long story short, no mother around forever, old horrible father who’s constantly in debt, and plain me, who thinks maybe she can go to MCC for a two-year degree after high school. If she’s lucky.”

“Then you met Audrey Beck. Because of speech and debate.”

She took a chest-filling breath. “Right. You figured all this out, Detective Foss. I became friends with Audrey, acquaintances really. We would talk to each other at forensics meets. She told me she liked my earrings. I told her I liked her jeans, et cetera. She also told me how her parents were making her go to college, though all she wanted to do was go to this beach house her boyfriend and his band were renting. I told her I’d kill to go to college, but there wasn’t any money. And I told her how my dad probably wouldn’t notice if I moved my boyfriend into my own bedroom at home. And then we hatched a plan. No, that’s not true exactly. We hatched a fantasy, both saying how great it would be if we could just switch places. If I had her parents, I could go to college and everyone would be happy. If she had my dad, then she could go live with her boyfriend on the beach. This was back in May. Then we both graduated from high school, and I didn’t hear from her till August.”

“What were you doing all summer? What were your plans?”

“I was working as a hostess at a restaurant called the Riverview, like I’d done the past two years. I’d signed up for classes at community college. It sucked, but what could I do? Then Audrey called me. She told me she’d decided not to go to college. She was going to West Palm Beach instead, and when she didn’t show up at school her parents would find out everything. And then she said that I should go in her place. I had my own car. I could tell my dad I had decided to take off—he wouldn’t care anyway—and I could drive all the way up to Connecticut, matriculate as Audrey Beck, and no one would know. She’d arrange a time to call her parents every week, pretend like she was in school. If
I
got a call from her parents, I’d pretend to be a roommate and take a message and then relay it back to Audrey in Florida. It seemed plausible. . . . I mean, it
was
plausible. We did it, and it worked.” Liana clenched her teeth and looked directly at George. “And I think it would’ve gone on working—”

“But Audrey died.”

“Right. Audrey died. So I died.” One of Liana’s eyes glittered in the light from the jukebox. Patsy Cline sang something about walking after midnight.

“What happened?”

“You mean with Audrey?”

“Yeah.”

“She called me when I got back to Florida. She was back in Sweetgum. We met. Here actually. She was a mess. No surprise, her boyfriend turned out to be an asshole. She said that all he was into was drugs and getting laid. She said he tried to talk her into having sex with the whole band. I guess the final straw was that there were drug dealers after them for money. It sounded like a nightmare. She asked me about Mather College, and I told her what it was like. I didn’t lie, I told her I’d had this great semester, and I told her about you. I could tell she thought she’d made this giant mistake, which I guess she had. I think she was still doing drugs that night—she seemed like she was on something when she came here to meet me—and then she got drunk. Anyway, she told me she wanted to switch back our lives. She wanted to go to college for the second semester.”

“Did she think no one would notice?”

“I know, but she wasn’t thinking. I told her that it wasn’t possible, that she couldn’t just show up there, telling people she was the real Audrey Beck. I told her that I would stop going in her place if that was what she really wanted and that she could transfer to another school. That’s how we left it. She was upset. I think she actually thought she could just jump back into the life she had traded away. It’s not like we looked exactly alike or anything.”

“You don’t.”

“And that was it. She drove home, and so did I. That was the night she died.”

“So you think she killed herself?”

“She was real drunk, so I think she might’ve just pulled into her garage and passed out. I didn’t hear about it till two days later. Obviously, I’d already decided not to go back to Mather. I was planning on calling you and Emily. Then she died, and I didn’t know what to do.”

“Jesus,” George said and lit a cigarette. His beer was already gone and his head was swimming a little, but something about her story was not making sense. “How did you feel when she told you she wanted her name back? You must’ve been planning on coming back to school.”

“Well, I was, but still, I always knew it was temporary. Being Audrey was temporary. I had become this different person, this person I’d rather have been—you know, in school, doing well, with a boyfriend, a boyfriend like you—but it was like I had a secret disease, or there was this clock inside of me, ticking like a heart, and at any moment an alarm would go off and Audrey Beck would no longer exist. She’d die and I’d have to go back to being Liana Decter. God, it’s like a dream now, that whole semester.”

“It must have been strange.”

“And good. It was a good time, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe you could come back somehow. As yourself. You were doing really well there.”

Liana laughed. “You think they’d just forgive me for faking my identity? You think Audrey’s parents would forgive me? They paid for a stranger to go to college.”

“Her parents know now that Audrey didn’t actually go to Mather. I mean, everyone knows, the police as well.”

“Yeah, I heard that. I thought that would probably come out. I wasn’t positive—”

“But thanks to me—”

“But thanks to you, and your unswerving devotion.” She reached out and put a hand on his cheek. They were silent for a moment. The beer and her closeness had dissolved any sense of reality from where George was, and from what they had been talking about.

“I miss you. I missed you,” George said.

“I miss you too.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Okay.”

“My lips are kind of beat-up.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. It’s okay.”

They kissed, gently, in the dark corner of the bar, an up-tempo rockabilly song replacing the Patsy Cline number.

Y
ou haven’t told me the whole story,” George said.

“I know. But first tell me what it was like at school. How did people react?”

He told her about the two days he’d spent at Mather, about finding out from Emily, about the makeshift wake at Barnard Hall, about his meeting with the dean, about how Kevin nearly kicked his ass. Liana listened intently, her lips slightly parted, eyes wider than usual. “It’s like being allowed to see your own funeral,” she said. “It’s kind of fascinating in a morbid way.”