The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (8 page)

One thing gnawed at him, though, and he was trying hard not to think about it. At the Kowloon, Liana had asked him about Irene, about the pretty woman he’d been with Friday night at the bar. She’d said she looked interesting, and for the life of him George couldn’t think when Liana would have even seen Irene. Had Liana been watching them the whole night? And if so, why hadn’t she approached him? She’d already told him that she came to the bar in hopes of seeing him. Had she wanted him to see her first? Was it all calculated? And if so, why was it so important to have George return the money?

All these thoughts disappeared after he’d parked his car and walked down his alleyway to find Liana waiting for him under the dripping back awning. Without saying a word, they began kissing again. She squeezed both her arms around his lower back, causing a spasm of pain, which he ignored, to rocket through his body. “Upstairs,” he said in a hoarse voice.

In the small foyer, with Nora nudging at his ankles, George stripped Liana of all her clothes. Despite the heat of the night, her damp skin was cool and shivery. They moved to the couch. Liana stretched out while he tried to quickly shuck his clothes, their wetness squelching against his skin. Nora had followed them and was now meowing plaintively. George scooped her up, put her in his bedroom, and shut the door. He’d suffer her wrath later, but there were certain things that possessive female house cats should not have to witness.

George came back to the couch. Liana was so much as he had remembered her—her high round breasts tipped by large pink nipples, the shallow dimple of her navel, the extra swell at her hips, an almost imperceptible strawberry birthmark on her right thigh—that he was transported into the mind of the eighteen-year-old virgin who had first seen her naked. Nervous, he stood by her side for a moment, naked and trembling. She met his eye and with her left hand reached up and stroked him while sliding her other hand down between her own legs. Her dark pubic hair was cut shorter than he remembered. She pulled him on top of her and gently bit his ear. A nerve fluttered in his neck. George entered her in one deep slide that caused them both to gasp and arch their backs.

Chapter 9

T
he second time the doorbell chimed, George rolled over across his empty bed and sat up, bleary and confused. There was no sign of Liana. The only evidence that she had spent the night was the knotted disarray of the sheets and the humid smell of sex that still permeated the room. George’s watch said it was nine in the morning, and a brief stab of anxiety shot through him. It was a Monday and he needed to be at work. Was that someone from the office calling him? But it wasn’t a phone that was sounding. It was the doorbell.

George stood. Maybe Liana had risen early and gone to get breakfast. She must not have taken a key.

Pulling on his robe, he noticed a stack of bills on the center of his bureau. He instinctively touched them with his index finger—the top bill was a fifty—but left them where they were. The subject of the ten-thousand-dollar payment had not come up the previous evening, and George had not thought of it since Liana and he had arrived back at the apartment and their clothes had come off. The doorbell chimed again, and George’s stomach flipped a little in fear. The money on the bureau meant that Liana had left. Who was at the door? He walked across the living room, put his hand on the knob, and asked who was there.

“Police” came the muffled answer. A female voice.

George opened the door to a man and a woman. The woman quickly showed a badge that was clipped to her belt. It seemed a redundant gesture since these two, both in suit bottoms and button-up shirts, could only have been cops.

“George Foss?” the woman asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m Detective Sergeant Roberta James, and this is my partner Detective John O’Clair. Can we speak with you for a moment? Do you mind if we come in?”

Detective James was as tall as George, somewhere in her late thirties, with light brown skin and short, tightly curled hair. Her face was long with sharp cheekbones. Her partner, O’Clair, was younger but had graying hair. His face was a well-shaved rectangle, his neck overwhelmed by thyroid cartilage. He was bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.

“I’m sorry. Can I ask you what this is about?”

“I had some questions about your visit to see Mr. Gerald MacLean yesterday afternoon. You did visit Mr. MacLean yesterday afternoon?”

George hesitated half a second, considering the possibility of playing dumb, but it seemed both unnecessary and possibly foolish. “I did, but I don’t—”

“We’d just like to ask you some questions.”

“I’m confused. I barely know Gerry MacLean. I met him yesterday.
 
. . . Did he ask you to talk to me?”

“Why would he have asked us to talk with you?” Detective James asked the question with the expectant look of a child asking when she could open up a present.

“I’m sorry. No reason. I guess I’m just confused as to why you’re here,” George said, knowing while he was saying it that he should just shut up and invite the officers in.

“We’re here because Gerald MacLean was murdered last night.”

She said nothing more, and George knew from the countless episodes of
Law & Order
he’d watched that both of the detectives were studying him for his immediate response to that information. He felt like an actor on the stage who had forgotten his lines. He half-smiled, a wave of inexplicable guilt passing through him. “Where?” he asked.

“Do you mind if we come into your house, Mr. Foss? Or, if you’d be more comfortable, we can go back to the station.”

“No, come on in,” he said and stepped aside, pulling his robe tighter around his naked frame. He felt exposed all of a sudden, and confused. As the two detectives moved into his living room he glanced through the half-open door into the bathroom, looking for signs of Liana.

The female detective named Roberta James saw him look around. She asked: “Is there someone else in here with you?”

“No,” George said, suddenly sure that that was the truth. Liana was long gone. Again.

Chapter 10

T
he bus terminal smelled of bacon grease and stale piss. When he reached the ticket seller, George was told there was a bus in an hour that would take him to DC, and from there he could board another bus that would go directly to Tampa. Audrey lived in Sweetgum, Florida, about an hour south of Tampa.

He sat toward the back, which turned out to be a mistake because the door to the toilet was partially busted and kept flying open and smacking closed again.

His head pulsed from an afternoon and evening spent drinking beer. He’d gotten up early and packed quietly, although there was little chance of waking Kevin, who was snoring like a bear hit with a tranquilizer dart. He’d left a note that said:

Taking off. Don’t worry.

I’ll call my parents this afternoon.

George pulled a sweater from his bag, folded it several times to use as a pillow, then drifted in and out of troubled sleep all the way to Washington. There was a twenty-minute wait before he had to catch the bus that would go all the way to Florida. He ate half a cheeseburger at McDonald’s, then went to a line of pay phones to call his parents, using the calling card they had given him back in September. His dad would be at work, and he was hoping his mom would be having lunch with one of her friends. No such luck—she picked up.

“George, what’s wrong? What do you need?”

His was not a family that checked in with one another very often. “Mom, remember I told you about that girl named Audrey Beck?”

“I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

He explained what had happened, eliciting a series of sighs from his mother. “What a waste,” she said, as though she had personally known Audrey and her prospects. “But what I’m most concerned about is you, darling. I don’t want this to affect your time at college. This should be a happy time for you.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. He couldn’t tell her that he was about to board an overnight bus to Tampa. If the school caught wind of his absence, they would have to notify his parents, but he’d deal with that if it happened.

“Mom, I’ll call you in a week. I’ll be fine.”

“I know you will, George.”

For the second leg of his journey, he sat toward the middle of the bus, eating his way through a bag of apples and watching the grim highways of the South go by. He hunted his memory for any signs that Audrey had been suicidal and could find none. He had gotten the sense that she was not entirely happy with her home situation, that it was a part of her life she chose not to speak of, but George hadn’t felt that she was deeply unhappy. What could possibly have happened to turn a well-adjusted college freshman into someone desperate enough to take her own life?

He tried to remember every detail of their final moments together. They had taken their last exams on a spit-sleety Thursday morning when half the school had already decamped to their parents’ homes. The dining hall that night was not even a quarter full. George and Audrey had eaten together, alone at a table for ten. What had they spoken of? George remembered that they had analyzed the beef Stroganoff on their plates, wondering if it was made up solely of leftovers before the kitchen closed up for over a month. He also remembered annoying Audrey a little by continuing to express his concern that she was planning on driving the entirety of the trip from New England to Florida in two twelve-hour days of driving. George was convinced that it was a dangerous idea, but Audrey insisted that she had done it on her way up and could do it again on her return. Plus, she didn’t have enough money for two nights at a motel. George had offered to pay and had even offered to help her with the driving down to Florida, knowing she would say no. In the end, after arguing for a while, Audrey ended the argument the way she always did, by saying, “You can worry all you want, but I’m going to do it.” And George had let it go.

They had packed that night, separately in their own rooms, then spent the night in Audrey’s, before getting up and parting ways just after dawn. George remembered the damp, frigid air of early morning, the black ice on the sidewalk as he walked Audrey to her silver Ford Escort with the duct-taped bumper. She’d started the car and put the unreliable heater up to maximum, then come out to give him a final hug good-bye. “Be careful,” he’d told her, then, without meaning to, he’d added, “I love you.” The first time he had spoken those words.

“I love
you,
George,” she’d said without hesitating. “We’ll see each other soon.”

She had looked—George remembered—full of hope. Excited, almost as though her life had just gotten better and there was much more of it to come. Or was that simply what George had felt and he was transposing his own feelings onto Audrey? He kept picking away at the memories till he felt he couldn’t trust them anymore.

The bus continued its monotonous journey south. The bright blue skies and frigid temperatures of New England had turned into low cloud-cover and bursts of icy rain. Night came. George turned on his reading light and opened
Washington Square,
but the look of it, the feel of it, nauseated him. It would always be the book he was reading when he heard that Audrey was dead. He slid it into the netting on the back of the seat and never touched it again.

Somehow, despite his inability to either read or sleep, morning arrived, the bus driver announcing that they were still on 95 and had crossed over into Georgia. The hazy fields that bordered the highway were free of snow, and dull green leaves adorned the trees. George pressed the palm of his hand to the bus window: it was cool to the touch, not cold, and the spiderwebs of frost that had feathered the window the night before had turned to pinpricks of condensation.

At a rest stop, he bought a large coffee in a Styrofoam cup and two honey-glazed doughnuts. He was actually hungry for the first time since he’d heard the news about Audrey. Leaning against the bus and eating the doughnuts, watching a pale sun spread its warmth across the acre of asphalt that was nearly devoid of cars, he wondered what he would do when he reached Tampa. He was not old enough to rent a car, but he’d extracted a wad of cash from the machine at school, enough to hire a taxi to drive him to the cheapest motel in Sweetgum. From there he’d figure out what to do next. He could call Audrey’s parents, ask to meet them. Find out if there was going to be a funeral.
Find her friends and talk to them. What had happened to Audrey since she’d left school that would cause her to kill herself? Had she left a note? Was there a reason?

The bus driver flicked her Virginia Slim into a gutter, announced that their break was up. George followed her onto the bus.

T
ampa was warm, somewhere in the high sixties under a low white sky. The air smelled like tar and tidal water. One rust-eaten cab was parked outside of the bus station. The driver, a short-looking Latino man, had his elbow out the open window, his head resting on his arm. He looked half-asleep.

“How much to go to Sweetgum?” George asked.

“Why you want to go there?”

“How much would it cost?”

“I don’t know. Eighty bucks.”

“I’ll pay you a flat fee of sixty if you take me to a motel in Sweetgum.”

The cab driver looked at his watch. “Okay,” he said, and George got into the backseat with his bag. A slow trickle of sweat had begun high up between his shoulder blades. The cab crossed a terrifying bridge that rose high above Tampa Bay. There was cloud break in the distance, and the sun dotted the gray water with a pool of light. Once out of Tampa, the ocean disappeared, and the highway was edged by motel signs higher than the grand palms, pockets of chain restaurants, gas stations, and topless clubs.

Audrey had rarely talked of her life prior to college, but she had spoken about the town she grew up in.

“I’d like to visit,” George had said once.

She laughed. “There’s nothing to see. We’ve got a Waffle House and a pawnshop.”

“What did you like about it?”

“I liked leaving it. Small-town life and me. Like this.” She held her two index fingers three inches apart.

The cab driver took the first exit for Sweetgum and pulled into a motor court that advertised rooms for $29.99 a night. It was between a restaurant called Shoney’s and a used-car dealership. Above it loomed a billboard that advertised a place called Billy’s that was selling fireworks and oranges a quarter mile down the road.

“You wait here while I make sure they have rooms?”

The driver peered out the passenger-side window at the row of empty parking spaces in front of the vinyl-sided motel. “I think they’ll have a room,” he said. George paid his sixty dollars and walked across the lot to the front office. It was late afternoon, but still warm, and he realized he’d forgotten to pack a pair of shorts.

The motel took cash up front for two nights. He filled out the card, leaving the information for the car blank.

“No car?” asked the desk clerk, a yellow-skinned old lady with a black tooth.

“No car,” George said. “What’s the best way to get around Sweetgum?”

“With a car.”

“You think I might be able to rent one? I’m not twenty-five.”

“That how old you have to be to rent a car?” She laughed. “Try Dan next door. He might lend you one of his tin cans for cash. How old are you anyway?”

“I’m eighteen,” he said.

“Well, that’s about how old you look too.”

His room had beige carpet, a shiny floral bedspread, and poorly papered walls. The front window that overlooked the parking lot and exit ramp was darkened by a grimy venetian blind; the back window was propped open and fitted with an air conditioner, currently turned off. George threw his bag onto the bed, stripped, and showered.

I’m in Audrey’s town,
he thought as the water battered at the back of his neck.
Maybe it’s all been a mistake, and she is here, still alive, recovering in a hospital.
That thought had been hiding at the back of his mind, a secret hope. As he toweled off, the steam fading from the mirror, he took a look at himself, at the plain brown hair that curled out like wings when it got too long, an unexceptional face, a nose maybe a little too big, a dimple in the chin that made up for it. His eyes were a light brown, the color of grocery bags. It was a face that Audrey had stared into as recently as a few weeks ago. What had she been thinking? And where were those thoughts now? He tried to feel her presence, but could not.

He dressed in a pair of Levis and a dark green polo shirt with horizontal yellow stripes. The top drawer of the bedside table contained a Gideon Bible and a telephone book. There were two Becks listed in Sweetgum: a C. Beck, and a Sam and Patricia Beck. He guessed Sam and Patricia, lit a cigarette, and dialed their number. A man answered.

“Mr. Beck?”

“Who’s this?”

“Hi, it’s George Foss. I was a close friend of your daughter’s. At Mather. I don’t know if she mentioned me
. . .
 ?”

“Maybe to my wife. . . . I don’t really know.”

“I was so sorry to hear what happened.”

“Yep.”

“I was wondering
. . .
 I’ve come down to Florida. . . . I was wondering if I could come and talk with you and your wife?”

“Jesus Christ. Hold on a moment.”

He heard Audrey’s father yell out, “It’s some boyfriend. He wants to come here.”

George took a deep breath through his nostrils, then nervously yawned.

“Honey, who’s this?” It was a woman’s voice, on the line after a click.

“George Foss. I knew your daughter at Mather.”

He heard another click, probably Mr. Beck hanging up his end. He pictured Mrs. Beck in her bedroom, a framed picture of Audrey in her lap.

“George, honey, did you come all the way from Connecticut? That’s so sweet.” She sounded drunk, slurring a little bit on the word “sweet.”

“I was wondering if there was going to be a funeral of some kind? Unless I’m too late. . . .”

He heard a sigh from the other end of the line, or else it was the sound of cigarette smoke being exhaled. “There’ll be a funeral. There will be. But we want to bury our little girl, and right now they tell us they can’t do that. . . . Oh God.” Her voice had started to
quiver a little on
“funeral” and had snapped outright on “little girl.”

“I’m sorry,” George said. “I probably shouldn’t have called.”

There was no immediate answer, and he was considering simply hanging up the telephone when Mr. Beck’s voice came back on:

“Who’s there?”

“It’s still me. George Foss.”

“Goddammit. What was it you wanted?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t really know. I was hoping to attend her funeral, maybe to see someone who might have some insight into what happened, to try and understand.” His words were making sounds but not much else, so he changed tack. “I’ve brought flowers. I was hoping I could bring them by?”

“Sometime tomorrow maybe,” Mr. Beck said, after another pause.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll come by.”

George ended the call and fell back on the bed, exhausted, temples pulsing, shoulders bunched and knotted. He was also hungry, having eaten nothing since two apples at lunchtime. He considered going next door to Shoney’s, eating a hamburger, drinking a glass of milk. But the more he considered the effort that would take, the more tired he got. Exhaustion trumped hunger, and he slid beneath the prickly sheets, pulled the spare pillow against his chest, and fell into a long hole of dreamless sleep.