Desire Lines (24 page)

“You mean the thing with Brian?”

“No.”

She smiles uncertainly. “Then I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“You probably don’t.”

“Okay.” She puts her forehead in her hands and then bends her head, running her fingers through her hair.

“Listen, Kathryn,” he says gently. “There were things she didn’t want to think about, much less talk about—even with her best friend. Maybe she thought if she didn’t think about them, then they weren’t real.”

Kathryn shifts in her seat. “I’m surprised you feel you have such a strong grasp of who she was.”

He sighs. “I’m just trying to face some things I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—at the time. I think we were all that way. We didn’t want to spoil the picture of that beautiful lost girl on the front page of the paper. Star of the school play, National Honor Society, all that bullshit. Volunteer work at the nursing home. The photo they ran made her look like a blond angel. Disappearing like that only heightened the sense people had of her as vulnerable. And she was, I guess. I mean, obviously—where the hell is she? But something about her didn’t add up. I don’t think she was such an angel. Yes, she’d been through a lot, but I don’t think that’s any excuse for what she did to Brian that night at the prom—and how she treated Rachel.” He shakes his head. “I have the feeling that something else was going on. That she had this”—he hesitates, groping for words—“other life. Does that make any sense to you?

“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “When I talked to Rachel, it seemed like …” Her voice trails off. “She knew something. She wouldn’t tell me much.” A memory, shadowy and sharklike, moves through her brain.

“What do you want to know? I tell you everything,”
Jennifer had said
one afternoon as they were lying in her scrubby backyard on cheap reclining lawn chairs, trying to get a tan before the prom.

“You’ve gotten mighty secretive lately,” Kathryn said, trying to keep her voice light, “and I’ve had just about enough.”

“There’s nothing,” Jennifer insisted. “My life is an open book.”

“Don’t be coy with me, missy. That might work with some people.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything.”

“Ev-ery-thing,” Jennifer said slowly, wrinkling her nose. She closed her eyes and tilted her chin toward the sun. “That’s a pretty tall order. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Kathryn sat up and looked at her. “Cut the bullshit. What are you keeping from me?”

Jennifer laughed. “Oh, Kath,” she said, “you’re taking things way too seriously. I’m just teasing you.”

“I don’t think so.”

Sighing exaggeratedly, Jennifer sat up and adjusted her bikini top to keep it in place. “Okay, you really want to know? I’m sleeping with Dr. Smalley. I scooch down to the principal’s office between classes and we fuck on his desk.”

“Ugh, Jen. Don’t even joke.”

“I knew you couldn’t handle it,” she said with a shrug.

“I’ve always felt guilty that I didn’t tell anyone about this,” Jack is saying. “I probably should have brought it up with the police during the investigation. But it seemed irrelevant—only hurtful to Will and the rest of the family, and maybe to Jennifer, too, wherever she was. I didn’t see how telling it would shed light on anything.” He takes a bite of his burger and puts it down. “But I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I think I was wrong. So I’m going to tell you now.” There is a brief silence. “It’s about what happened to her father. How much do you know?”

“Well, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t an accident.”

“Yeah,” he says. “The insurance adjusters are probably the only ones who believed it was.”

“I know that their mother was having an affair and planned to leave him.”

“Did Jennifer ever talk to you about all of that?”

“Yeah. Mostly about how much she hated her mother for being so selfish—and feeling like she couldn’t ever say anything because her mother was so sick and frail half the time. After her father died, her mother went to bed and wouldn’t get up, and Jennifer was convinced it was an act. She didn’t trust anything her mother did, not after finding that letter from Ralph Cunliff that made it clear there was something going on between them. They were talking about running away together.”

“So you know, then. That Jennifer found the letter.”

Kathryn nods. “She read it to me over the phone. She’d been going through her mother’s bag, looking for cigarettes or something, and the letter was in an inside pocket.” She thinks back, trying to remember the moment of that call. Josh had answered the phone. He raised his eyebrows at her as he handed it over. “It’s Jen,” he mouthed. “She sounds
wacked.”
When Kathryn put the phone to her ear, she could hear Jennifer’s jagged breathing through her clogged nose, the raspy sounds of uncontrolled crying. “Jesus Christ, she’s such a fucking slut,” she sobbed when Kathryn said hello. “She’s just fucking unbelievable. I don’t even know why this surprises me. She never gave a shit about him or anybody else except herself; it’s not like this is out of character or anything. I can’t fucking believe I didn’t see it. Cunt.”

The word startled Kathryn; she’d never heard Jennifer use it before. But she wasn’t surprised at the story. She understood without being told whom Jennifer was talking about; her mother was the only person who evinced such rage.

“I hate her, I hate her, I HATE HER!” Jennifer said, her voice rising in a shriek. “She doesn’t give a shit what she does to this family! She doesn’t give a flying fuck!”

Josh made a face—ooh, I’m scared—across the table at Kathryn, and she threw an orange at him. He caught it and grinned.

“She’s not getting away with this.” Jennifer was sobbing. “There’s no fucking way.”

“What are you going to do?” Kathryn asked.

For a moment all she could hear was Jennifer’s labored breathing. Then she said, “I don’t know. Something.”

Kathryn heard a note in her voice she didn’t recognize, an intensity that made her afraid. “You want to come over, Jen? You could stay here tonight—or a couple of nights, if you want.”

“Thanks, but I can’t,” she said abruptly, stifling a sob. “I have to talk to Will.”

“Does he know about all this?”

“Who the fuck knows what he knows. It’s unbelievable, the way he sticks up for her.” She blew her nose, and Kathryn held the receiver away from her ear. “This time she’s really done it. Even Will has to see what a piece of work she is.”

“Does she know you know?”

“She’s out. I don’t even want to think about where.”

“Come over,” Kathryn pleaded.
“Dallas
is on tonight. You’ll feel better.”

Jennifer wasn’t crying now. Her voice was steady and cold. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said. “Please—obviously—keep this to yourself.”

“Of course.”

“I—” She cleared her throat. “Thanks for being here for me.”

“Oh, Jen,” Kathryn said, wanting desperately to connect somehow, to break through the formality she could feel crystallizing like ice between them, “where else would I be?”

Now, with Jack, Kathryn turns the salt shaker upside down and watches a tiny white mound grow on the Formica. With her finger she pushes stray granules back into the pile. “As far as I know, she didn’t say anything to her mother,” she tells him. “At least not right away. Will said they should wait, figure out how they were going to handle it
before the whole thing blew up in their faces. But then it blew up anyway.”

“When their dad killed himself.”

There is a pause. Kathryn bites her lip. Jack pours milk into his tea and stirs it.

“Jennifer told him, didn’t she?” Kathryn asks.

“Yep.” He nods.

“How do you know?”

He lifts the cup to his mouth with both hands and takes a sip. “Will told me.”

Kathryn takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

“It would be easy to believe that Jennifer just snapped—after all, she and Will agreed they were going to wait awhile before they did anything,” Jack says. “But she didn’t wait; she called him that day at work, told him everything she knew. Will said it was almost like she was as angry at her father for being oblivious about it as she was at her mother for doing it. She wanted to push it in his face. She thought maybe thinking other people knew about it would finally make him mad enough to do something—make their mother accountable somehow, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a terrible miscalculation. He didn’t even confront their mother, for chrissakes. He just made sure his insurance papers were in order and his desk was neat at work and there weren’t too many loose ends she’d have to deal with. He paid all the bills that afternoon. And then as soon as it got dark he drove his car to Little City park and sat there drinking Dewar’s out of the bottle and getting his nerve up.”

“Did Will tell you all this?”

Jack’s mouth twitches into a smile. “No. There were three eyewitnesses, according to the police. A dropout named Jim Oulette was sitting on a swing in the playground smoking a joint and listening to his Walkman. Two little girls on Linden Street were having a sleepover in a pup tent, looking at the stars with a pair of binoculars. They all saw him sitting there in his car, drinking something out of a paper bag, and they
all heard him rev the engine at midnight and accelerate across the middle of the park, straight into that giant oak at the far corner.”

“Jesus.” She shakes her head.

“I only found out the details later, when I’d been working at the
News
for a few months and I got access to a reporter’s private file on the story. Of course, they didn’t print any of that. It was officially labeled an accident. So the wife got the insurance money and the kids were taken care of. I’m sure that’s why they didn’t push for an investigation. What was the point? The story was tragic enough.”

“And Linda got her white Lincoln.”

“And her new kitchen,” Jack says with an ironic smile. “And her new husband.”

The waitress comes over and stands by their table, scribbling on a pad. She rips off the sheet of paper and puts it between them, facedown. “More coffee, folks?”

Kathryn says, “Sure,” and Jack says, “No, thanks,” at the same time. He looks at his watch. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at the gym in fifteen minutes,” he says apologetically. “But I can stay a little longer.”

Kathryn looks up at the waitress. “I guess that’s all, then.”

“You can pay at the front,” she says, already turning away. After she leaves, Kathryn starts getting her things together. She can feel Jack’s eyes on her as she gathers her notebook and pens and rummages for her wallet. Then, gently, he says, “Are you surprised she didn’t tell you?”

She looks down at her paper placemat printed with a goofy grinning cartoon governor and the dessert menu, and folds a scalloped edge with her finger. “No,” she says. “I guess I knew, deep down. I knew there was more to that story. I was afraid to ask.” She feels her chest constrict and she sits back, then suddenly covers her face with her hands.

“Hey,” Jack says, leaning forward.

“It’s so sad. All of it,” she murmurs. “For her to tell him like that—and then to have to live with what he did. No wonder she swallowed all those pills. Now that I know, it makes a lot more sense.”

He nods slowly.

“Do you think it has anything to do with her disappearance?” she asks.

“I think it has to, somehow. Don’t you? Maybe only peripherally, but it’s got to be a factor or a clue.”

“But you don’t think she ran away.”

“I just can’t see that,” he says, shaking his head.

“So what do you think? That she went off and killed herself somewhere no one could ever find her? Or did her mother find out about it and murder her in a fit of rage?”

“I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I could be wrong, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Why would she kill her daughter over this? If that woman was in love with her husband, she had a funny way of showing it. She’s having an affair with some guy, her husband kills himself over it, and four months later she’s engaged? That’s a pretty short mourning period. I can’t imagine she’s too upset he’s gone.” He squints at the bill and reaches into his back pocket, pulling out a battered wallet. “This is on the paper,” he says as they slide out of the booth. “It’s the least we can do, since we’re paying you jack.”

“As it were.”

“As it were.” He grins.

At the front of the restaurant, she turns to face him. In the bright light of rainy midafternoon she can see fine lines around his eyes. All of a sudden she’s aware of finding him attractive in a way she never did in high school, when he was lanky and awkward and had skin like a baby.

“So are you going to have this story for me by Thursday?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He smiles and gently cuffs her shoulder, the way a bear might. “I knew you would.”