Mourning Gloria (14 page)

I breathed out, appalled. Her family had burned to death? Her whole family? “Oh, God, Jessica—that’s awful! How terrible for you.”

“It was. It was unspeakable.” Her voice was flat, expressionless. “It took a long time, but I’m okay now. You can’t mourn forever.” She gave a little shrug. “You have to move on, you know. Get over it. Get on with your life.”

She was okay with it now? Somehow, I doubted that. It seemed to me like the kind of thing you’d never be okay with—that it would run like a sad, bitter current through every thought, every choice, every action. Some of the things I knew about Jessica were beginning to make a little more sense, now that I knew this. Her interest in this story was making sense, too. But it was worrisome. She had lost both her parents and her sister, her
twin
sister, in a fire—and now she was covering a story about another death by fire, the death of a young woman? It had to awaken all those awful memories.

“But doesn’t that make writing this story a lot more difficult for you?” I asked, perturbed. “Are you sure you should be covering it? Maybe it would be a good idea to let Mr. Hibler handle—”

She turned on me fiercely. “Of course it’s a good idea! I have been involved in a situation just like this one. I remember how it felt.” Her voice was sharp and intense. “Which makes me exactly the right person to be writing this story. In fact, nobody else could cover it the way I can.”

“Okay, okay.” I backpedaled. “I just don’t want you to get dragged into something that’s personally hard to handle. You have to stay objective.”

“Objectivity.” Her mouth tightened. “That’s what they teach you in journalism school, yes. But that doesn’t mean that I have to stick to a just-the-facts-ma’am approach. This is a human-interest story.” We reached the shop and she braked to a stop at the curb. “This is about the girl who died, China. I owe it to her to find out everything there is to know about her. Who she was, where she came from, what kind of person she was, what she was doing in that trailer, who killed her—”

“Whoa, Jessica,” I said firmly. The red flags were flapping all over the place now. “You’re a reporter, not a cop. Finding out who killed that woman is the sheriff’s job. He wouldn’t be very happy if you get in his way.”

“I know all that,” she said impatiently, and hit the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. Her face was grim. “And I sincerely hope the sheriff gets the sonuvabitch. Shooting that girl and leaving her to burn to death . . .” She shuddered.

“I hope they get him, too,” I said, “but—”

“So I’m going to find out everything I can about the killer, as well,” she went on, paying no attention to me. “I want to know why he did what he did, how he did it, what makes him tick . . .”

This was going too far. I opened my mouth to say so, but she barreled on.

“Have you ever read
In Cold Blood
, China? It’s a true crime—the first true crime novel, really. It was written in the 1950s by Truman Capote, about a family that was murdered in Kansas. Capote interviewed everybody who knew the victims. He got really close to the killers. That’s what I want to do. I intend to find out everything there is to know about the victim. Then I want to find out as much as I can about the guy who killed her. I want—”

I put up my hand, stopping her. There were two problems here, but I’d tackle the simpler one first. “A guy? What makes you think the killer was a man?”

She shot me a skeptical glance. “You really think a woman would do something like that? Shoot another woman and then burn her alive?”

Well, there was the prostitute in Florida, but that was beside the point. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just saying that you can’t jump to conclusions. There’s something else, too.” I tackled the other issue. “I know how Hark Hibler feels about keeping a story, any story, in perspective. If he were having this conversation with you, he would tell you to forget about using Truman Capote as a model. The way I remember it, Capote lost all objectivity on the Kansas murders. He wrote a very good book, a spellbinding book, but at a terrible cost to himself.”

“Thanks.” Jessica’s voice had a sharp edge. “I’ll remember about Capote. And I’ll keep your warning in mind the next time I see a conclusion I’d like to jump to.”

I sighed regretfully. I had alienated her, and I was sorry. But I wasn’t sorry I had spoken. Jessica was so passionate, so determined, so
young
. When I was her age, I had been every bit as determined as she was. I had felt things as fiercely as she was feeling this. In fact, that fierceness was one of the reasons I had gone into law in the first place. I wanted passionately to see justice done, to stand up for people who needed someone between them and the brutally dispassionate and sometimes unjust law. But I had learned—the hard way—that it was important to keep my distance. It’s dangerous to stand too close. You get scorched.

But Jessica was shifting impatiently in her seat, eager to get on with the things she’d planned for the afternoon, and I knew that nothing I could say would change her mind. I opened the car door. “Hey, thanks for the lunch. I enjoyed it.”

She gave me a frowning glance. “No, you didn’t. You gave your hamburger to the dog.”

“Just a couple of bites. But I guess I lost my appetite.” I smiled wryly. “You didn’t finish your soup, either.”

“I didn’t like the cilantro. And I lost my appetite, too—after I heard that the girl was still alive when you got there.”

Now I could finally say it. “I told you so,” I said. “About the cilantro, I mean. Bob
always
puts too much in. And you were the one who wanted to hear the story while we were eating. I told you it was horrible.”

“Yeah.” She laughed. “I guess we’re even, huh?”

“I guess we are.” Impulsively, I leaned over and gave her a hug. “Be careful, Girl Reporter. And keep me posted on your progress. Okay?”

She hugged me back, then held me at arm’s length. “You’re not just saying that, China? You really want to know what I find out?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “I really want to know.” I really didn’t, since I had already come as close to this story as I cared to get, and I had the scorched eyebrows to prove it. But it might be a good idea to keep tabs on Jessica. I didn’t want her to lose her eyebrows, too—or worse.

“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll phone you. And we’ll have lunch together later in the week. How’s that?”

“Good. Next time, we’ll do it here, on me.” I got out and closed the door. “Sandwiches and soup. Easy on the cilantro.”

She waggled her fingers at me. “Maybe no cilantro at all,” she said, and drove off.

I stood on the sidewalk, watching her turn the corner. Now, after it’s all over, I wonder: if I’d had any idea what was going to happen, would I have let her go? But how could I have stopped her? She knew what she wanted to do; she knew what she was looking for. She wouldn’t have listened.

But I didn’t know what was going to happen, and neither did she. So we each went our ways, blindly, into the future.

Caitlin had spent the day with her friend Alice, who lives across the street from the Pecan Springs Library, where the kids’ summer reading program meets every Monday. At four that afternoon, I drove to Alice’s to pick Caitie up for her violin lesson. She was ready when I got there, cute as a button in her favorite yellow bib overalls and red-and-yellow-striped T-shirt, sitting on the front porch steps with Alice, her violin case and a bag of library books beside her. As we drove to CTSU, she chattered happily about the summer reading program (she had won a candy bar for reading twelve books last week, five more than anybody else), about Alice (her mom was getting a divorce because her dad didn’t love them anymore), and about Alice’s cute kitty (all white, like a baby bunny, with one black spot on his nose).

I listened, making appreciative mom-noises at appropriate points in the narrative and wondering how Howard would feel if a kitten moved in with us. In the past, he has expressed some very definite opinions about cats. I was also thinking that Caitie had changed a great deal in the past few months. She was on her way to being a happy little girl again. If her father could see her at this moment, he would definitely approve.

CTSU is a year-round campus, which means that parking is just as hard to find in June and July and August as it is during the rest of the year. I drove up Anderson and made a right at the top of the hill, stopping at the kiosk where a pleasant-faced uniformed guard used to check your parking sticker to make sure that you weren’t wanted for any major crimes (unpaid library fines or parking tickets) and let you in or kept you out, accordingly. But the campus went high-tech last year, and while the kiosk is still there, the guard has been replaced by an electronic card-reader gizmo. Since McQuaid teaches on the campus, I have a card. I stuck it into the reader, various clickings and cluckings ensued, and the gate went up. I don’t know why, but this always amazes me. I drove through quickly, before the gizmo could change its electronic mind and drop the gate on top of my car.

After some diligent searching, we got lucky and found an empty space behind the Music Education Building, where graduate students—as part of their training as teachers—use the practice rooms to give private lessons. Caitie grabbed her violin case, gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and ran into the building. I staked out a spot on the grass in the shade of a large live oak, overlooking the pretty little river that flows through the middle of campus. I had a book in my bag—Kinsey Millhone’s latest mystery—and the place I’d picked out was close enough to the open window of the practice room so that I could listen as I read. Caitie was playing the Pachelbel Canon with her teacher Brenda on the piano. She had made a few mistakes the day before, but today she nailed it, at least to my untrained ear. I thought it was lovely, although that was probably a mother’s pride.

But between listening to Caitie and thinking about my talk with Jessica, I didn’t get much reading done. The longer I thought about what Jessica had told me about losing her family in that house fire, the more it bothered me. The story about the trailer fire was sure to stir up her feelings about the deaths of her sister and parents, and I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to get involved any more deeply than she already was. But she wasn’t going to listen to me, obviously. The only way I could stop her was to call Hark and give him a heads-up. If I did that, though, it would look like I didn’t trust Jessica to handle whatever came up, which might jeopardize her work at the newspaper. It was one of those damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situations.

I was still thinking about this when Caitie finished her lesson and came out to where I was sitting, Brenda with her. “Alice’s mom gave me some bread for the ducks on the river,” she informed me. “Okay if I go feed them?”

“I’m sure they’d appreciate that,” I said with a grin. “Ducks can never get too much bread.” She put her violin case on the grass beside me, took out a plastic bag, and skipped off.

Brenda plopped down on the grass beside me. She’s a heavyset girl with brownish, disheveled hair and owlish plastic-rimmed glasses, in the last term of her master’s program. The week before, she told me that she has a job lined up in Corsicana, her hometown. Come September, she’ll be teaching music in the high school there.

“Could we have a conversation about Caitlin?” she asked in a serious tone.

“Is she doing okay?” I was trying not to be anxious. “I mean, she sounds fine to me. And she practices a lot. A couple of hours a day during the summer.” I paused. Maybe she was overdoing it. I sometimes have the idea that Caitie is hiding inside the music, using it as a place to go when she doesn’t want to be a part of the family. Using music instead of words, as a way to express her feelings. “Maybe we should encourage her not to—”

“She’s doing very, very well,” Brenda broke in. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “But I’ve asked Dr. Trevor to take her for lessons for the rest of the summer, instead of me. I told Caitlin about it this afternoon.”