Fire and Rain (21 page)

JEFF STOPPED CARMEN AS
she was pulling out of the Sugarbush driveway the following morning. She didn’t notice him until he pounded on her right front fender to get her attention. She’d been imagining her next step in researching his life, and it jarred her to see him in the flesh. He had started to seem almost like fiction to her.

He came around to her side of the car and motioned for her to roll down the window.

“You’re putting people in danger,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The people you’re getting your information from. You’re putting them in jeopardy.”

“Why, Jeff?” She turned off the ignition and leaned her arm on the window sill. “Why would talking to me cause a problem for anyone, with the possible exception of you?”

He looked tired. He hadn’t shaved yet this morning; fine lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes. She tried not to feel sympathy for him.

“Just keep in mind that it could,” he said. “Although I suppose that wouldn’t make much difference to you.”

“If I honestly thought I was hurting innocent people, of course I would care.”

“Sure you would,” he said. “Where did you get that picture you showed on the news last night?”

She shook her head. “I can’t say, Jeff, but I learned a lot about your mother from the person who gave it to me. She sounds like a very impressive woman. I’d like to meet her.”

Jeff stared at her so hard she had to look away, out to the cottages.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll have to have the two of you over for dinner sometime.”

She ignored his sarcasm. “Where does she live?”

“Go to hell, Carmen.” He started to walk away from the car, but turned back after a few steps. “You’d let me stay here for free, now, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Just to have exclusive access to me?”

She smiled. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said, rolling up the window again. “Have a good day.”

As she pulled out of the driveway, she gritted her teeth in self-disgust. God, she could be a bitch! Had she always been this haughty, this self-righteous? And what if he was right? What if she was putting people in jeopardy in a way she didn’t yet understand? She wouldn’t want harm to come to either Barbara Roland or the elusive Beth Cabrio.

More likely, though, Jeff was merely attempting to throw her off the trail. He’s on the run from something, she reminded herself as she negotiated the curving road above the nearly empty reservoir. Law-abiding citizens don’t adopt an alias and move from town to town. They don’t use a motel as the address on their driver’s license. And they don’t con desperate people into believing they can do something that is clearly impossible.

PLAINFIELD, NEW JERSEY. FROM
her desk at
News Nine
, in the large, open room she shared with a dozen other
News Nine
peons, Carmen spoke with directory assistance. She was trying to track down any Cabrios living in that city. There were none. There were ten numbers under the name Watts, however, and she tried them all. No one knew of a Jefferson; no one recognized the name Beth Cabrio.

The Christmas card had only been
postmarked
Plainfield, Barbara Roland had said. Maybe Beth had gone out of her way to make certain the card was sent from a town other than the one in which she was living. Still, it was a place to start.

She called directory assistance once more and got the names of all the elementary and junior high schools in Plainfield. Over lunch, she pondered the list, trying to figure out what to do next. How old had Jeff been when he moved to Plainfield? Surely he’d only been in elementary school, but that particular list of schools was formidable, and she didn’t know how to begin to track down a student who might have attended one of them nearly thirty years earlier.

There were only two junior high schools, though, and she decided to tackle them in alphabetical order.

After lunch, she called the number for Hubbard Junior High. Summer school was in session, and the receptionist who answered the phone tried to persuade her to call back in September, but Carmen was persistent. She wanted to speak with the librarian, she said, and no, it didn’t matter if it was the “summer librarian.” The receptionist finally put her through.

The librarian, though, was no more agreeable. Carmen asked if she would mind looking through the yearbooks for the years Jeff might have attended Hubbard to see if the name Robert Blackwell appeared in any of them.

There was a long pause before the librarian responded to her request. “You’ve got to be joking,” she said finally. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time? It’s summer session and these kids are wild.”

Carmen spent a few futile minutes trying to persuade her. Finally the woman agreed to give her the names of the class presidents for the five-year stretch Carmen had targeted as the dates Jeff would most likely have attended the school.

She hung up the phone, frustrated. Now she had a list of names as well as a list of schools. Great. She dialed directory assistance again, searching for the numbers of the class officers and wondering how likely it was, that after twenty-some years, any of them would still live in their hometown.

But one of them did, it seemed. One woman who had blessedly not changed her name. President of her eighth grade class, Gail Evelyn Vidovich. The phone was listed under Gail E. Vidovich. Surely there couldn’t be two women by that name.

Carmen took the telephone number home with her and tried calling Gail Vidovich late in the evening, New Jersey time.

“Do I remember Robert Blackwell?” the former class president laughed into the phone. She had the same slightly gritty New Jersey accent as Susan Cabrio. “You could have called anybody who attended Hubbard Junior High while he was there and they’d remember Robbie. He was one of those kids you never forget.”

Carmen held the phone to her ear as she dug through her briefcase in search of the tape recorder and the suction cup device that would allow her to tape over the phone. She hadn’t been prepared for this. She hadn’t expected success. “Well,” she said, inserting a new tape into the recorder and sitting down at the kitchen table, “I’m researching his background for a story I’m working on out here in southern California, and—”

“Really? What’s the story about?” Gail was a manic speaker, quick and eager.

“I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet. It’s an exclusive, and so I have to keep it quiet right now, but I hope you’ll still be willing to tell me a little bit of what you remember about him.” She thought about her conversation with Jeff that morning, how she might be endangering the people she was interviewing. “Your name won’t be used in any way,” she added.

“This is so wild,” Gail said. “I was thinking about Robbie just the other day because—”

“Excuse me,” Carmen interrupted her. “Would you mind if I recorded our conversation?”

“Record it? Sure. Whatever.”

Carmen attached the small suction cup to the side of the phone receiver. “Okay,” she said. “Please go on.”

“I was thinking about him, because at work the other day—I work in a hair salon—this woman was talking about her fourteen-year-old son who had somehow rigged up the phones in their house so that long distance calls were being charged to a neighbor’s phone. It had been going on for months, and they just caught up to him. He’s in a ton of trouble.”

Carmen frowned, wondering what that could possibly have to do with Jeff. Perhaps Gail Vidovich had been breathing the chemicals in her hair salon for too long. “Why did that remind you of Jeff?” she asked.

“Jeff who?”

“I mean, Robert. Robbie. You said that reminded you of him.”

“Right. It’s exactly the kind of thing Robbie would have done.” Gail laughed again. “Do you know what he did once?”

“What?”

“He somehow got all the clocks in the school—I am not making this up, every one of them—running fast, so that our periods were only forty-five minutes long instead of fifty, and by the end of the day we got out at something like two-thirty instead of three.”

Carmen smiled. “You’re kidding.”

“No. And it took them two days to figure out what was going on. See what I mean about him being memorable?”

“I do. What happened to him when he got caught, though?”

“Hmm.” Gail paused. “I don’t remember that part. Probably not much. I’m sure the administrators thought he should be punished, but they were so amazed that he could do something like that, that it was hard for them to discipline him. I mean, how do you punish a thirteen-year-old kid for doing something no adult in the school could begin to figure out how to do?”

“I can see the problem,” Carmen said. She wondered how Beth Cabrio would have reacted to her son’s antics. “Did you ever happen to meet his mother?”

“His mother? No. I don’t think I met any of his family.”

“What else can you tell me about him?”

“Well, he was cute. A charmer. Kind of skinny and a little younger than most of us—if I remember, he skipped a grade—but all the girls thought he was adorable. And, obviously, he was very smart, probably the smartest kid in the school, but he didn’t necessarily get the best grades because he acted like a lot of the work was beneath him.” Gail paused for breath. “They were always pulling him out of class to make him take special tests, and the teachers made a fuss over him. When they’d hear about something he did, like the clocks, they’d try to look disapproving, but you could see they were laughing inside.”

“So, he got away with a lot.”

For the first time, Gail hesitated. “Well, that makes him sound like a bad kid, and he wasn’t. He was a nice person, and even though he got all this attention for being smart, he didn’t have a swelled head.”

Naturally
, Carmen thought.
He was a saint
.

“You called him a ‘charmer,’” she said. “Was he someone who would use his charm to his own advantage?”

“Hmm. Not with girls, if that’s what you mean, but we were all pretty young then. As I said, though, he could charm the socks off adults. He was in my English class, and he really had no earthly interest in diagramming sentences, you know? It wasn’t his thing at all. But he could always convince the teacher to let him do something else, something on his own instead. I doubt anyone but Robbie would have gotten that special treatment.”

“Didn’t the other kids resent him for that?”

“Oh, no. He was different and everyone simply accepted it.”

An entire school full of saints.

“What was he like in high school?” Carmen asked.

“Actually, he didn’t go on to PHS—Plainfield High School—with the rest of us. Now that I think about it, I remember something about his mother dying and him moving away.”

“His mother died?” Carmen tightened her grip on the phone. An almost personal sense of loss swept over her. Her clear vision of the young, homeless Beth Cabrio, struggling to find a stable life for herself and her son filled her head. She cringed when she remembered asking Jeff about his mother that morning. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Do you know how she died?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but that seems right, and I don’t have the faintest notion how she died. All I know is that Robbie moved out of Plainfield.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know that either, but you know who might? Danny Grace.”

“Who’s that?” Carmen pulled her notepad from the briefcase and jotted down the name.

“Danny was Robbie’s best friend.”

“So he would know about his home life, too? That sort of thing?”

“Oh, sure. They were always over each other’s houses.”

“Does Danny still live in Plainfield?”

Gail laughed. “No. He got out long ago and never came back. He’s a lawyer now, somewhere in Maryland. Probably goes by Daniel. He was an idiot in high school, though. Straight D’s.”

The eighth grade class president was now a beautician, the class idiot, an attorney. So much for junior high school being a predictor of the future.

Carmen wished Dan Grace were anything but a lawyer. So far, everyone with whom she’d spoken had been easy to probe for information. A lawyer would give her story greater credibility, but he was bound to ask questions, bound to be suspicious. “Is there anyone else who might know about Robbie’s family?”

“Hmm. No one I can think of. Give Danny a call. Tell him I said ‘Hi, and how’re ya doing?’”

Carmen hung up the phone and turned off her recorder. She stared at the notepad, where she’d written Daniel Grace, atty, MD. Probably the Bar Association could put her in touch with him. She could call them in the morning. Maybe not, though. She had to remember not to move too quickly.

She rifled through her briefcase, setting aside a few nerve-wracking unpaid bills, until she found the memo Craig had slipped on her desk before she’d left the station that afternoon. She’d been on the phone at the time, and Craig had given her a wink and a thumbs-up sign before disappearing back into the hall, and she’d known that the memo contained good news.

She set it on her kitchen table to re-read it.
News Nine
‘s ratings had climbed yet another notch on the nights she was on. That was all it said. Very brief. Brief, and beautiful.

It was working, her slow methodical unraveling of Jeff’s story from the ground up. There was something incredibly satisfying in feeding him to her audience in bits and pieces, keeping his story alive, despite the fact that he hadn’t delivered a drop of rain. She was certain he never would. Nevertheless, she found herself reading the weather report each morning, praying for rain. Just a shower. Just a mist. Something to make people continue to think that Jeff Cabrio was worthy of their curiosity.

She pulled a sheet of stationery from her briefcase and wrote a quick letter to
News Nine
‘s general manager, Dennis Ketchum, requesting that her portion of
North County Report
be increased to five days a week. Her hand shook as she attached the letter to the memo detailing the new ratings. She slipped them both into an envelope, wondering if, in the morning, she would still possess the courage she’d need to deliver it to Dennis. No doubt, he had been among those wanting to get rid of her. Surely, he now realized that would have been a mistake.