Beautiful Lies (18 page)

I knew it was a long shot, but at the same time I had a feeling I was going to find her. The universe conspires to reveal the truth and to make your path easy if you have the courage to follow the signs. And I was long on courage that day. Short on foresight, maybe, but long on courage.

When I got to Hackettstown, I pulled into the parking lot of 7-Eleven and started making calls.

The first two calls didn’t go well. Maybe it was our alienated, postmodern times, maybe it was all the previous telemarketers that had been fended off before my call. Or maybe the Cacciatores were just a very unfriendly clan.
Martino
Cacciatore suggested that I pull my head out of my ass and stop calling people who weren’t interested in my business. I’d interrupted the game show he’d been watching and now he’d never know what the correct price bid for the Caribbean cruise had been.
Margaret
Cacciatore was hard of hearing and after ten minutes of our yelling back and forth to each other, she issued an angry grunt and just hung up on me and didn’t pick up when I called back. I dialed the last number.

“Hello?” came the voice of an older woman.

“Hi. I’m looking for a Maria Cacciatore,” I said tentatively.

“I’m not interested,” she said, and the line went dead. I dialed the number again.

“Hello?” she said, her voice wary and annoyed.

“Ms. Cacciatore, I’m not a telemarketer.”

“I know, I know. I’ve won a sweepstakes for a free two-night stay in Orlando, right? I’m under no obligation to buy anything, right?”

“No, ma’am. I’m really not selling or offering anything.”

“Well,” she said grudgingly. “What do you want, then?”

“Are you Maria Cacciatore?” I said.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Look. What is it?”

“Did you know a Teresa Elizabeth Stone and her daughter, Jessie?”

There was a pause here and I thought maybe she’d hung up. Then I heard her breathing. “Yes,” she said finally. “A long time ago. Teresa…she died. May she rest in peace.”

“I know, Mrs. Cacciatore,” I said. “I have some questions for you about her. And about Christian Luna. Can you help me?”

“Who did you say you were?” She sounded upset, angry, as if I had forced her to recall something she would have been happier forgetting.

“My name is Ridley Jones. I’m a writer doing a story on missing children who were never found. I came across your name in an article published in the
New Jersey Record
back in 1972.” Okay, maybe I’m a better liar than I said. I was getting a lot of practice. Anyway, it was only a partial lie.

“What publication do you write for?” she asked. Good to know she had her wits about her.

“I’m a freelance writer, ma’am. I haven’t sold the article yet.”

She seemed to consider that for a moment. I figured she’d probably turn me down. But then she said, “You can come by the apartment if you want. I don’t like to talk on the phone.”

She told me how to get to her place and that I could come at four o’clock. “It was a long time ago,” she said before we hung up. “I don’t know how much I’ll remember.”

“Well, you just do your best, Ms. Cacciatore. That’s all anyone can ask.”

I had some time to kill and I could see the clerk at the 7-Eleven looking suspiciously at me out the window. I pulled out of the parking lot and drove until I found a Barnes & Noble. I figured it was only a matter of time. Has anyone done any research on that? On how many miles you can drive in any direction before running into a Barnes & Noble or a Starbucks or both? Anyway, I was glad for an iced chai and a comfortable leather chair to sit in while I waited, thumbing though a copy of that day’s
New York Times.

It was a few minutes before the uneasy feeling that had leaked into the periphery of my consciousness got my full attention. I felt eyes on me. I shifted in my seat but didn’t raise my gaze from the paper. After a second, I put the newsprint down and stretched, casually looking around. A man stood in the Mystery section to my left reading the back cover of a paperback. He was a stocky guy in sunglasses, as big and solid as a slab of slate, baseball cap over a shaved head, an olive bomber jacket and cleaned, pressed denims. He had on a pair of heavy black boots. He glanced up at me, saw me looking at him. Did he smile, just slightly? He returned the book to the shelf, turned his back, and walked away. There was something ugly about his face. There was a cold meanness to his aura.

It wasn’t just some creepy guy staring. The thing was, he looked familiar to me. I’d seen him before. Oh, shit, the thought seized me, was it the same man I saw on the train?

My heart was fluttering. I took my chai and left the store as quickly as I could without running. The baseball cap and the sunglasses made it hard to tell if it was the same guy. Back in the Jeep, I sat breathing hard and watched the door in my rearview mirror, wondering if he’d come out after me. For some reason, I remembered the conversation I’d had with Zelda about the man she told me had been looking for me. I also flashed on what Jake had said and even what the detective had implied, that someone might have trailed me to get to Christian Luna—and that they might still be following me. I pulled the Nokia from the pocket of my coat and called Zelda.

“FiverosescanIhelpyou,” she answered. Her voice was gruff and muffled, as always.

“It’s Ridley.”

“You want a slice?”

“No. Zelda, remember you said someone was looking for me the other day? What did he look like?” I heard the background noise of the restaurant, the
ka-ching!
of the register. I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror, watching the door.

“Akkch,” she said. “I can remember? WhatamIEinstein?”

“Zelda. It’s important.” I knew she could remember every detail about the guy if she wanted to. She just couldn’t be bothered. Talking was not her favorite thing to do.

“He looked like trouble. That’s what he looked like.”

“Was he a medium-sized older man, dark hair, dark eyes, base-ball cap?” I asked, hoping she’d say yes and I could go back to thinking it had been Christian Luna asking for me and forget about the B&N skinhead, chalk my fear up to paranoia.

“Nononono. That’s not him.” I waited for elaboration but none came. “Twelve fifty-five,” she said.
Ka-ching!
“Your change. Have a nice day.”

“Zelda,” I said.

She heaved a sigh. “Big guy. Bald—you know, shaved head. He was a punk, I’ll tell you that. Ridley, what kind of trouble are you in?”

My heart sank. “I don’t know,” I said.

“I don’t want any trouble in this building,” she said, her voice stern.

“Okay. Bye, Zelda.”

I ended the call and slunk down low in the driver’s seat, still watching the door. If he came out after me, then…I don’t know what. Then I was fucked, I guess. I caught sight of myself in the sideview mirrors because I didn’t have them set properly. I looked silly, wide-eyed like a spooked horse, hunched down, chewing on the end of my straw. “You’re paranoid,” I said to my reflection. But just as I was about to laugh at myself, I saw him come out of the double doors and gaze around the parking lot as if he was looking for something. I couldn’t tell if it was the guy from the train or not. They looked similar, but that didn’t mean anything. He turned and started walking away from the Jeep, disappeared into a crowd of people coming and going from the store. I pulled from my spot quickly while he wasn’t looking and left the lot. After driving around for a bit, with adrenaline making me shaky and distracted, I was satisfied that no one had followed me and I went to see Maria Cacciatore.

eighteen

I guess it was unrealistic of me, but I kept looking out for the Firebird while I was driving with a heart conflicted by hope and wariness. I fantasized ways that Jake could have tracked me. He could be following in another vehicle, not the Firebird, to protect me from whoever it was who might be following me. Maybe he had a way to track my credit-card usage; he’d know I rented a car, bought a cell phone in New Jersey, charged something at Barnes & Noble. PI’s could do things like that, couldn’t they? But, of course, that was just me being a dork.

I held a picture of Jake in my mind and the memory of our nights together washed over me. Whatever else he’d lied about or omitted, that had been true. There was no way to fake that kind of intimacy. Was there? Does it sound like I was kidding myself? Normally even the slightest hint of dishonesty and I walked. But in my new universe, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Everything was strangely
off
and the usual rules didn’t seem to apply any longer.

When I got to the address Maria had given me on the phone, I parked the car and looked uneasily in my rearview mirror for the subway/B&N psycho. I didn’t see anyone and I laughed a little at myself then. I was really becoming paranoid. There were millions of stocky guys with shaved heads walking around, and absolutely no reason for me to suspect that the man Zelda spoke to, the one I’d seen on the train, and the B&N freak were the same. In fact, it was downright preposterous. Right?

I walked along an exterior corridor exposed to the outside, looking at numbers on the doors. When I came to apartment four, I knocked. There was a long silence inside and I wondered if Maria Cacciatore had changed her mind. I knocked again.

“Hold on, for crying out loud,” a muffled voice called from inside. “I’m coming.”

I heard a toilet flush, then water running, then heavy footfalls on the floor. The door swung open and a frowning round woman in a bright blue muumuu and matching turban stood before me.

“Ms. Cacciatore?”

She looked at my face and her frown dropped, was replaced by a look of awe. “Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, stepping back from me.

I looked behind me to see what she had seen, but when I turned back around, she was still staring at me.

“I’m glad you called me first,” she said. “You would have given me a heart attack.”

She stepped aside and I walked in. She didn’t take her eyes off of me.

“I don’t understand,” I said, though I think I knew exactly what she was talking about.

“You must know,” she said. “You look just like her. You’re her very image.”

When she closed the door, the room went almost completely dark. The windows were covered by red velvet curtains and the light that came in through them painted the room the color of blood. On every surface there were pillar candles in glass holders painted with the saints—you know, the kind you find in every bodega in the city. In the corner of the room sat a table covered by a dark cloth. It looked red, too. Everything in the room did, even my own hands. There was a chair on either side of the table, a stack of tarot cards, and another candle on top. Wind chimes hung from the ceiling but were silent in the still heat of the room. Somewhere musky incense burned; I could feel my sinuses swelling from the intense aroma.

“You want me to put that incense out? It bothers some of my clients.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said, still looking around me, taking in the space. “Ms. Cacciatore—”

“Call me Madame Maria, dear. Everyone does. Or just Madame for short.”

“Oookaay,” I said slowly.

“So,” she said, sitting down on the couch with a heavy sigh. Her muumuu flowed around her. She repositioned her turban. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light and I could see that she hadn’t stopped looking at me. “Why did you lie to me, Jessie? Why would you lie to an old lady who used to change your diapers?” She patted the couch beside her and I sat down.

“I didn’t lie. Not about my name. I’m not Jessie. My name is Ridley Jones.”

She nodded. “You came to find out about your mother. You want to know what happened to her.” She said this as if she had been consulting an oracle, though I’d told her as much already.

“I came to find out about Teresa Elizabeth Stone,” I said stubbornly. It’s difficult when people think you’re someone other than who you are. They call you by a name you don’t own, refer to parents you’ve never met. They’re certain of their information, as certain as you are of yours. And it makes your head foggy. It’s confusing. There was still no hard proof that I was Jessie Stone, and frankly, even if I had been, I was no longer. I was Ridley Jones. That was my identity and I intended to hold on to that.

“Okay,” she said, her tone motherly, knowing. “Ridley. Okay. Tell me what’s going on.”

I looked around me. “Don’t you know,
Madame
?”

“Hey, give me a break,” she said with a smile. “An old lady needs to earn a living. Anyway, I just read the cards. People need guidance in this world, someone to talk to about their problems, someone to tell them it’s going to be all right. Isn’t that why
you
came?”

I didn’t answer Maria, tossed around the idea of getting up and leaving. But there was something about the old lady that I liked, in spite of (or maybe because of) her pseudo-mysticism. She had a strong face, lined with wrinkles and heavy with sagging skin around her jawline and eyes. Her body looked soft and welcoming, as if a lot of people had found comfort in her arms. I felt safe in her weird little space. So I told her my story. Unlike I had with Detective Salvo, I omitted nothing. As you can see, it didn’t take much to get me to spill my guts. I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets.

She released a heavy sigh when I’d finished. “You need a cup of tea.”

She got up and went to the efficiency kitchen that was just across from the couch. She ran tap water into a cup, put a teabag in, and stuck it in the microwave. She came back over as the microwave hummed and placed a hand on the side of my face.

“You must feel like your head is going to explode, Ridley.” Her sympathy made me want to cry but I kept myself together. I really appreciated her making a point to say “Ridley” instead of “Jessie.”

The microwave beeped and she retrieved the cup, put in a little milk and honey, and brought it to me. “Your mother—sorry, I mean Teresa—was a good girl,” said Maria, sitting back down. “She just made the mistake of getting involved with that loser Christian Luna. I could tell from the minute I met him that he was going to be no good for her. But that was her karma, always involved with the wrong man. Some were rich, some were poor, some were handsome, some were homely. But they all had one thing in common—they were wrong for her.” She looked over at me, as if she was afraid her statement had hurt me. I shook my head, indicating that it was fine, that she should say what she felt.

“Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Christian Luna,” she said thoughtfully, with a small smile. She reached out and touched my face again. “Without him, maybe there wouldn’t have been any Jessie. And that baby was the
love
of Teresa’s life. The sun rose and set with that little girl.” She stopped for a second and put her hand to her chest. “Anyway, now you say he’s dead. And I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

“He said he didn’t kill Teresa. Do you believe that?”

“I never believed that he had killed her. I know it
looked
like he did. I mean, he’d been there that night, yelling and screaming.
Everybody
was sure he’d been the one. Especially with him disappearing and Jessie being kidnapped like that. But Christian Luna was a coward. It takes guts to kill a woman and steal her child. And he never wanted the responsibility of caring for Jessie. Not really. Why would he take her?”

“Yeah, but a crime like that is about control, isn’t it? You want what you can’t have just because someone says it’s not yours anymore.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But I didn’t see it in him. He would yell and scream, maybe slap Teresa around a little. He broke Jessie’s arm, but that was an accident. That’s a different personality than someone who murders the mother of his child.” She shook her head. “No. I never believed it was him.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know this: Jessie wasn’t the only child in the area to go missing that year.”

I looked at her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “There were at least three others that I heard of in the news over the next few months. More over the years.”

“Were the parents murdered?” I asked.

She squinted into the distance. “I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”

“So what happened?” I asked, sitting up. “I mean, the media must have been all over it.”

“Not really. It’s not like today. Back then you didn’t really hear stories like that. The idea of pedophiles abducting children, serial-type crimes…people didn’t really know that much about it, didn’t
want
to know. Plus, these were all poor children from the projects, low-income housing. It’s not as though they were rich kids stolen from their homes.”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure what else to say. The information was hitting me hard for a number of reasons. First of all, it gave a certain credibility to Christian Luna’s story, and if he’d been telling the truth about not killing Teresa, then he might have been telling the truth about me. Second, if Jessie was one of a number of local children abducted, and I
was
actually Jessie, what were the implications of that? How did I get from there to here?

Suddenly the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling started to jangle. There were several sets of them, all of them giving off different octaves of tones. The sound was at once eerie and alarming. Madame Maria jumped up from the couch.

“Don’t worry,” she said loudly, moving behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the space. “I have a fan set on a timer to go off every hour. It lets me know when a session is over.” She disappeared for a second and the fan, mounted in a corner on the ceiling, slowed. The sound of the chimes grew gentler. I was feeling edgy, jumpy, so I got up to leave. I took a business card out of my pocket and handed it to Madame Maria.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she took it and put it in her muumuu.

“For what?”

“For everything you’ve been through. It doesn’t seem fair.” She looked sad, older than she had when I arrived.

I shrugged. “Life’s not fair,” I said. But those weren’t my words. They were my mother’s. It was something I’d heard her say countless times over the years. I did, in fact, believe life was fair. Well, not fair exactly, but balanced. Yin and yang. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Bitter and sweet. One did not exist without the other. When life is bad, you know it’s going to get better. When life is good, you know it’s going to go bad. If that’s not fair, I don’t know what is.

She nodded. “Hey, you want a reading before you go?”

“No, thanks,” I said with a smile. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the cards held for me. “Call me, okay? If you think of anything else.”

She nodded again and looked like she wanted to say something. I waited. “You know,” she said tentatively. “Teresa used to take Jessie to the clinic on Drew Street. They took her insurance and she liked the doctor there. They might still have her records. Little Angels, it was called. It’s still there.”

I looked at her blankly.

“If you ever want to know for sure. I mean, maybe they have dental records or fingerprints.”

She meant if I wanted to know for sure if I was Jessie or not—because both of Jessie’s parents were dead and she thought there would be no other way for me to find out. She reached up for me then, took me into her arms, and embraced me. Her arms were as warm and as soft as I imagined they would be.

“Thanks,” I said as I stepped back and turned to walk away.

“Be careful, Jessie,” she said softly as she closed the door. I think she didn’t mean me to hear. I wished I hadn’t.