Dear Daughter (33 page)

No.

I turned away. “It’s nothing important. I just don’t like liars.”

SGT. JOE SINCLAIR AND DETECTIVE QUENTIN HELY OF THE BEVERLY HILLS POLICE DEPARTMENT

INTERVIEW WITH Jane Jenkins (JJ) Case 2938-A

Quentin Hely: Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your mother?

Jane Jenkins: What? (inaudible) I’m sorry, can you repeat that?

QH: Did your mother have any enemies? Anyone who might have been angry at her?

JJ: Apart from me? No, that was a joke. I didn’t mean that. In fact, can we maybe pretend all of this is a joke? Can we all go home and have a good laugh and forget this ever happened?

QH: It’s not a joke to us.

JJ: I can see that.

QH: Are you admitting that you might have wanted to hurt your mother?

JJ: Of course not.

QH: You never thought about it?

JJ: No.

QH: You never threatened your mother?

JJ: No, that was my youth, charm, and beauty that did that.

QH: Please answer the question.

JJ: I never threatened my mother.

QH: We have witnesses who say that last night you told your mother that you wished she was dead.

JJ: I didn’t mean that.

QH: But you did say it?

JJ: I think I’d like to leave now.

QH: In that case, today’s date is July 15, 2003, at 2140 hours. Jane Jenkins, you have the right to remain silent when questioned. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning, if you wish. If you decide to answer any questions now, without an attorney present, you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney. Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you? Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?

JJ: I was afraid you were going to say that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Onscreen, Charlie Chaplin was eating a shoe. And I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.

You’d think I would’ve been at least a little bit into the movie. It was my first time in a real movie theater, after all. I mean, sure, I’d been to movie premieres and everything, but at those things no one ever sticks around to see the show. When I’d actually watched movies, I’d watched them as I did anything I took real pleasure in: alone.

I was hunched low in my seat, half overwhelmed by the smell of stale popcorn and mildewed velvet. Renee and Kelley were on either side of me, like guardian lions. Every so often one would lean over to talk to the other . . . and I would hunch lower and lower to avoid the sound—the intimate goddamned timbre—of their conversation. I thought about getting out my hat and pulling it over my ears, but it had one of those dumb giant pompoms on top, and I didn’t think the person behind me would appreciate the gesture.

Maybe if I slunk even lower—

“It’s not working,” Kelley whispered in my ear. “We can still see you.”

I swatted her away, but not so quickly that I couldn’t hear her low laugh. “Stop distracting me,” I said.

But I was already distracted.

Everyone around me was having a great fucking time. They were laughing and cheering, whispering to their neighbors, holding each other’s hands. They even seemed to like the popcorn. I didn’t understand how such contentment could coexist with such self-awareness. I had yet to meet anyone who loved Ardelle blindly. No one pretended it wasn’t small or isolated or decrepit or dull.

And yet, none of them seemed to want to leave.

Why had my mother been different? Had she left of her own accord or had she been driven out? Had she ever missed it?

Then I realized—to my surprise—that she had.

One summer—when I was fairly young, I think, probably seven or eight—my mother and I vacationed with a man named Rémy Pasquier, on an estate that sprawled along the coastline of Brittany like a cat who was sunning its belly. Rémy was infatuated with my mother and kept her close, and because the estate was so isolated, I was allowed to spend my days running through the fields of flowers and herbs his family had been harvesting for centuries. It was an arrangement that, I thought, suited us all. But then, in late July, Rémy left to attend to a last bit of business in Paris. When we sat down to lunch the next day, just after my mother finished her third glass of muscadet, she looked over at me. She frowned at first, but then I remembered to sit up straight, and that single worry line between her eyebrows smoothed over. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

“Together?” I asked.

“Why not?” she said.

So she drove us out to Pointe du Raz, slaloming from one side of the road to the other, occasionally dropping below fifteen kilometers an hour before speeding back up again. When she got out of the car she left her door open. It took me a few seconds to steady myself enough to be able to close mine.

We walked along the cliffs, my mother stumbling when she wasn’t throwing out her arms for balance. She skimmed her fingers along the wall surrounding the statue of the mother staring at her son (who was staring at the outstretched hand of a shipwrecked sailor), but she didn’t stop to look. We pressed on to the promontory, and there, finally, a stillness overtook her. We stood there together and listened to the ocean. We watched the sun set. We did all the things that normal tourists do. Then she grabbed at my arm with one hand and pointed out at the horizon with the other. “Look,” she said, speaking for the first time in hours. “It’s the end of the world.”

This, too, should have felt like something normal tourists do.

“No,” I said, because I still thought I knew everything. “It’s not. Across the ocean is America, and after America is Asia, and if we kept going, after a while we’d come right back here.”

My mother lifted her hand as if she was about to touch my hair, but she rerouted it to her own, picking the wind-blown pieces off her face and tucking them behind her ear. “It’s not so easy,” she said. “To come back.”

“Then let’s never leave,” I said.

She swayed in the breeze. “You would say that.”

I suppose she thought she knew everything, too.

I looked behind us, past the histrionic statue and past the precious little village, and on and on until I imagined I could see the spires of Quimper Cathedral in the distance. I’d seen a picture of it in a book once. I wondered if it looked the same up close.

It was dark when we finally left. By then my mother was barely able to shamble along beside me. Her chin kept dipping down to touch her chest; I had to tug her arm to startle her awake. I found a bristly-bearded souvenir seller who was just closing up shop and held up a wad of francs I’d taken from my mother’s purse.

“Can you take us home?” I asked in my Swiss-accented French.

“
Où est-ce que vous habitez?
” he asked.

Where do you live?

Before I could answer, my mother’s eyes rolled open. “
N’importe où,
” she said.

Anywhere
.

•   •   •

The next thing I knew, the lights were up and Kelley was shaking my shoulder.

“What—”

“You fell asleep,” she said.

“Oh.” I tried to rub my eyes, but I forgot that I was wearing glasses and I smashed the frames into my face instead.

Kelley smiled. “We’ll be out in the lobby,” she said. “Come find us when you’re ready.”

I might never be ready.

A few other members of the audience lingered in the theater, exchanging greetings, speculating on the food that was to come. I was the only one who was by herself. A couple looked over at me and whispered to each other. I turned awkwardly away and reached for my phone to give myself something to—

Crap
. I’d forgotten; I’d killed it. No more sneering insinuations from Trace. No more news alerts. No more texts from Noah. I was flying blind.

I huffed hot breath onto my glasses and wiped the fingerprints off the lenses. That, at least, I could do.

The crowd in the lobby was concentrated near the concession stand, where a peach-fuzzed usher was serving bottled beer and wine in those fancy plastic cups that are shaped like real glasses. I spotted Eli, who had been waylaid by Peter and was looking none too happy about it. I took a step toward them before remembering Jared’s warning. No, I wouldn’t confront Eli yet. Not until I knew more.

A movement across the room caught my eye. Mitch was leaving the room with another of those pussy-eating grins on his face.
Oh, god, not again
. I searched the room for a fall of red-gold hair. Something putrid churned in my stomach. I went over to Cora and tugged on her sleeve. “Have you seen Rue?” I asked.

Cora looked around. “That’s funny, I haven’t. She was supposed to be—”

I was already peeling myself away. “Thanks,” I said.

I went through the door I’d seen Mitch slip through and found myself in a dank hallway. A tangle of pipes ran overhead, clanking wildly under the strain of what I suspected was their busiest day of the year; something sticky coated the floor. At the end of the hall, I found a small door. Next to it was a wheeled yellow bucket and a mop. A utility closet.

I pulled the door open.

The first thing I saw was Mitch’s back—I recognized the salmon-pink polo—being gripped by a pair of dainty, white-knuckled hands. I felt my gorge rise. Then the hands pulled Mitch forward and a face fake with pleasure appeared over his left shoulder.

My sigh of relief was the only honest sound in the room.

The woman in the closet wasn’t Rue. It was Crystal.

Mitch’s head turned. “Well, well, if it isn’t the little busybody.” He was so drunk he was swaying, pulling Crystal awkwardly along with him like they were middle-schoolers at a dance. He tilted his chin down to sneak what he thought would be a surreptitious look at my breasts. When he saw none, his brow crumpled, and his face spun through a fortune-wheel of expressions before settling on
oh why the fuck not
. “Care to join us?” he asked.

My relief curdled into disgust.

Would you still have asked if you knew I might be your daughter?
I wondered.

But no—I didn’t think I actually wanted the answer to that question.

“I think your wife’s looking for you,” is what I finally said.

Not the bravest of choices, perhaps, but at least it got him out of my sight.

Crystal stepped out of the darkened corner where she’d been hiding. Her face was resigned as she buttoned up her blouse. “Was his wife really looking for him?”

“I’m guessing his wife stopped looking for him a long time ago.”

She pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

My lungs perked up for a moment, and I seriously considered bumming one, but then I saw what she was smoking. Kool Super Longs. I repressed a shudder.

“I don’t see how any of this is your business,” she said after a moment.

“It’s not,” I said. “I just can’t help interfering. I think it’s some sort of a, like, sisterhood thing? I don’t know, it’s kind of a new feeling. But that guy’s a scumbag.”

Crystal fidgeted with a ring on her right hand. “It’s not like he has it easy,” she said. “His father picked out his career, his house, his wife. Mitch could use a little comfort, a little warmth.”

I surprised myself by putting my hand on her arm. “I don’t think he’s lacking for companionship, Crystal.”

She pulled away. “Don’t feel bad for me,” she said. “I know I’m being stupid. And I don’t buy his bullshit anyway. It just—makes things easier.”

“You can do better.”

“That’s just something women say to each other to fill the silence. And why should I listen to what you say, anyway? You don’t even know me.”

“I don’t.” I played with the bristles of the broom. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, right? I mean, after all, that sure didn’t stop you from saying all sorts of things about Tessa Kanty.”

She barked out a laugh. “So
you’re
the one who told Renee. She read me the riot act tonight. Renee’s good people, but she never would hear a bad word against anyone she’s related to.” She took a breath. “So are you a reporter, too?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why do you care so much?”

“If you’d prefer, I’m happy to go talk to Mitch’s wife instead.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Fine. I guess I like you better than that Peter guy anyway. He looks at me like I’m a piggy bank. Go ahead. Ask away.”

“Do you hate Tessa because she slept with your baby daddy?”

She put a hand on her chest. “God, you go straight for the jugular don’t you?”

I pointed to my throat. “The jugular’s up here, actually. And yeah.”

Crystal chewed on her lip. “According to
Darren
, she cornered him at the bar, dragged him out back, and had her wicked way with him. I believed him at first.” She looked away. “But I figured out soon enough that Darren never had to be dragged anywhere no matter who the girl was.”

“Sound like anyone else you know?”

“Look, just because I know something is stupid doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Next question: You told me Tessa was pregnant—you’re absolutely sure about that?”

“I caught her puking her guts out in the bathroom at MacLean’s one day. She begged me not to tell anyone, but. . . .” Her voice went soft. “Just a few months later, I got pregnant, too. Sometimes I think that was karma. Not that I’d ever wish I didn’t have my Kenzie.”