The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (7 page)

Chapter 8

G
eorge and Liana had agreed to meet at the Kowloon, a behemoth of a Chinese restaurant along a gaudy strip of restaurants in Saugus. George took 95 North to Route 1 and pulled into the parking lot a little after six. The asphalt felt soft under his feet, and he was hit by the smell of fryolators and MSG as he walked toward the two-story restaurant. Its front door was between two white Easter Island statues and below an even larger statue, carved in wood. The name of the restaurant shone bright red in the hazy evening, its enormous letters in a faux-Polynesian font.

George walked past the wishing fountain in the lobby, past the old Chinese lady who was trying to hustle him into one of the lesser rooms in the front, and on through into the main dining hall, a space the size of a football field and festooned in Tiki kitsch. It was early on a Sunday evening, but the place was already packed, the buzz of rum-fueled conversation competing with the pumped-in music. George went straight to the bar and sat on one of the low stools that gave him a good view of the main entrance. Liana had told him she’d be at the restaurant between five thirty and six thirty, and they’d agreed to meet at the bar. He’d picked the Kowloon because it was easy to spot along the sprawl of Route 1 and because it was always busy. He also liked their sweet-and-sour shrimp.

He ordered a Zombie from the bartender and waited for Liana. The bar was filling up. Two couples occupied one corner and shared two Scorpion bowls between them. Both of the men had large guts and wore Red Sox caps, and both of the women were leathery and rail-thin with big hair that would have looked cutting-edge in 1985.

His drink came, and the young female bartender, who stood slightly below him in the sunken bar area, said, “You want food too?”

George told her he was waiting for someone and sipped his drink. It wasn’t particularly good, but it had a lot of rum in it. He finished half of the concoction with his second sip. He watched the baseball highlights playing out on the suspended television—the Red Sox had blown a three-run lead, then lost in extra innings—but mainly he kept an eye toward the front and wondered if Liana would show at all, and what he would say to her when she did.

He intended to tell her about the two Donnie Jenkses, and how the small man with the gray grin was not in the employ of Gerald MacLean, or at least not according to MacLean. It had occurred to George during his drive from Newton to Saugus that either Liana or MacLean could be pulling the wool over his eyes and that he had no real reason to trust either of them. Did Liana need him for some other reason than just returning the money? He caught himself chewing on the inside of his cheek and made himself stop. He had done what he said he would do. The money had been delivered, and now he had to deliver MacLean’s message to Liana, if she even showed up.

What George wasn’t sure about was whether he should tell her the full story as MacLean had related it. He didn’t necessarily need, or want, to hear her repudiate MacLean’s version of events. Liana was capable of bad things. He knew this not because of any kind of intuition, but because of facts. He knew what she had done twenty years earlier, and would always wonder just how premeditated her actions had been. But if MacLean was telling the truth—and there was little reason to think he wasn’t—what Liana had done to MacLean
was
entirely premeditated. She’d gone after a man with money and a sick wife. And he’d fallen for her. It was clear from MacLean’s story that part of his downfall came from pure sexual obsession. George empathized. Ever since seeing Liana again two days earlier, he’d been swarmed with memories of their brief relationship. She had been his first sexual partner, and she had also been his best. They had learned everything together. It was as though they had been explorers who came upon undiscovered ruins in a jungle, their eyes the first to see a hidden city. Over the years he’d been back, with other explorers, with tourists, but it had never been the same. Nothing could match the feeling of discovery and compatibility that he had felt with Liana.

George finished his Zombie and ordered a Fog Cutter. He watched the bartender make it. Except for a different glass and some different fruit, it looked pretty much like the Zombie. He checked his watch, and as he did Liana came into the room, spotted him at the bar, and headed his way. She wore a green sleeveless dress, and she swung a small purse at her side as though it were a riding crop.

“How’d it go?” she asked, settling onto her stool and catching the bartender’s eye.

“Order your drink first, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

She ordered a vodka on the rocks. Her cheeks were flushed, as though she’d been racing to meet him. Her forehead shone.

“You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news of course.”

“The good news is that I met Donnie Jenks again, and he’s not going to hurt you. He looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly. The bad news is that he’s not the same guy who threatened me in New Essex.”

“What do you mean?” Liana plucked the lemon wedge from the glass’s rim, discarded it on the cocktail napkin, and took a swallow of her drink.

“When I arrived at the house, MacLean had me patted down by a very fat man with a small mustache. His name was Donnie Jenks. Whoever threatened you in Connecticut and followed you here is someone else.”

George studied Liana for her reaction. She swirled her drink, watching the ice cubes spin. There was a genuine look of confusion in her expression. “You think that Donnie Jenks, the little Donnie Jenks, is not working for MacLean?”

“I don’t know what to think. Could he be someone working independently? He found out about the money, pretended he was this Jenks in order to try and wrangle it out of you. You obviously foiled his plan by delivering the money directly back to MacLean.”

“It’s possible, but I think it’s much more likely that he actually is working for MacLean. It sounds just like something he’d do.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

“I mean that he’d never be open about hiring someone like the thug who threatened both of us. So he hired a legitimate private eye to look like he was working within the law, and then secretly hired a genuine money collector. That’s the way he operates. He wants to look like a good guy.”

“It still doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would this guy use the same name?”

“I don’t know.” She sipped her drink. “God, I’m tired of this. Did he agree at least to leave me alone?”

“That’s the other bad news. MacLean says he’s going to keep having Donald Jenks investigate you, that he’s going to discover who you really are—his words—unless you agree to meet him face-to-face.”

“Okay. Why?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t really go into it, but as you said, you got under his skin. He doesn’t want to let you off the hook.”

“But he took the money back?”

“He did.”

Liana sighed. “What else did MacLean say? Tell me everything.”

George told her the story from the beginning. He described the house and the young woman who let him in the front door, and more about DJ the private detective and how MacLean had him wait in a wood-paneled room that looked like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story. Then George retold MacLean’s story about his wives, even telling Liana the part about another employee spotting her looking through his file cabinets.

“Philip Chung,” she said. “No surprise there. Thing was, I actually
was
looking for the combination to the safe, but only because I wanted to put some files in there. Gerry would have given me that combination if I’d asked.”

“He said the same thing.”

George told her the rest of it, pretty much as it happened, except that he left out the part about the dyed hair and how MacLean had begun to believe he had been set up from the beginning. He knew Liana would deny it, and he didn’t want to hear the denial. He was worried he wouldn’t believe it.

“What did you think of him?” she asked.

“He seemed okay. Clearly not a man to mess with, but he didn’t seem like someone who would purposefully do harm to someone else. I think you should trust him, go see him and apologize. Then hopefully he’ll just let you continue to live your life.”

“What life is that?”

“Could you go back to Barbados?”

“I could, probably, but I’m not sure I want to.”

“There must be other places you could return to, other places where you established a life since . . . since I last saw you.”

She had been looking down at the dregs of her drink but lifted her eyes to meet his, and he saw a little flash of anger in them that quickly changed into something else. Sadness maybe, or regret.

“I’m so tired of restarting my life every three years. I’m not looking for pity, because I know that everything that has happened to me I caused, but I don’t even feel related anymore to the girl I was when we first met. I was trapped, and I did some awful things to get out of that trap, and now I have to be punished for the rest of my life.” She laughed a little, her eyes crinkling at the edges. “Okay, obviously I
am
looking for pity. Waah, waah. Poor me. You’re seeing me at my absolutely most maudlin, I promise. I’m just so fucking sick of being on the run. These days I constantly wonder what my life would have been like if I’d just turned myself in and gone to prison. Maybe I’d be out now, and my name would be mine.”

“You could turn yourself in now,” George said.

“I’ve thought about it. It’s just that I can’t stomach the thought of returning to Florida, and that is where the trial would be. I’ve never been back there, you know.”

“I wouldn’t think you had.”

They were quiet for a moment. George wanted to ask questions, wanted to find out exactly how much of what had happened in Florida was intentional and how much was a terrible accident. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He watched as Liana tipped her glass back and slid an ice cube into her mouth.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked. “I mean, tonight, right now. Do you want to order some food?”

“I’m strangely hungry,” she said. “Can we just sit here for a while and drink and order ridiculous appetizers and talk about something other than Gerry MacLean?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe you could tell me about your life.”

“It’s pretty dull stuff.”

“You could tell me about that pretty woman you were with at the bar last night. She looked interesting.”

“Irene.”

“She your girlfriend?”

“On and off. It’s complicated.” George eyed the bartender over and ordered another round plus one of the combo platters of grease-laden appetizers. While he ordered, Liana pushed her empty glass toward the back of the bar, straightened her back, and pushed her hair behind both ears. She turned and smiled.

They stayed for several hours, switching to Tsingtao beer and ordering only dishes that arrived lit on fire. George told her about the years since college, the work he did at the magazine, the starts and stops of his romantic life. He also told her about the final three years he’d spent at Mather. She remembered everyone. He told her what he knew about Emily and what had happened to all the guys on his floor from freshman year. He was surprised by how much he was able to remember about the minutiae of college life, and he was doubly surprised by how interested in it all Liana seemed to be. He supposed, for her, it was like hearing the story of the life she could have had if things had turned out differently.

When they finally left the windowless restaurant, it was dark and a steady summer rain was battering the outside world. Thunder stirred in the distance. “Where’s your car?” George asked.

“About a mile away. That direction.”

They ran across the parking lot, now half-empty, and Liana found her Volkswagen. George stood by while she unlocked her door, but before she opened it, she spun and threw herself into his arms and their mouths met. George emptied his mind of all earlier doubts and just concentrated on the feel of her, the wetness of their kisses, the rain soaking his head and his back, while his front, pressed against Liana, stayed warm and dry. He placed a hand on her cheek, and she pulled herself even closer, kissed his neck, and said, “Can we go back to your place?”

“Okay,” he said, because there was nothing else he could have said.

“I’m not starting anything.”

“I know,” George said.

She pulled away and got into the front seat of her car. “I’m soaked,” she said, pushing tangles of wet hair away from her face.

“Do you need to follow me in the car?”

“I can figure it out, I think. How long should it take?”

“Half an hour,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”

George walked back to his car. The rain had picked up, sparking whitely off the parked cars and turning the parking lot into a dark shallow lake. Women stood under the Kowloon’s awning waiting for their husbands to pick them up.

George tried not to think too much on the drive back toward his apartment. The rain continued its assault, and the Boston drivers, in deference to its power, kept to the speed limits. He fiddled with the radio, found a station on the far left of the dial that was playing Solomon Burke. He shifted wetly in his bucket seat and felt a painful twinge on his right side where he’d been hit in the kidney—when was it? It seemed months ago. Cars moved around the Saab, painting tunnels of light into the deluge, and one of them might have been Liana’s, on her way to his apartment. He wasn’t convinced she would really show up, but he wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t either. He wasn’t convinced of anything. Maybe MacLean had misread her, maybe all along she’d just wanted a new lease on life and the dyed hair had been a coincidence. She’d stolen his money, but only after he’d betrayed her, only after he’d stopped believing her. And after all, she’d given the money back. George suddenly remembered the money, the ten thousand that Liana had tried to give him earlier in the day. Did she still have it with her? It was a lot of money, and it would make a huge difference in George’s life, but thoughts of the money quickly dissolved into thoughts of Liana, the way they had just been kissing and the fact that she was coming back to his place.