Mourning Gloria (7 page)

But the bottom-line truth was that Jessie didn’t think of any place as home. She and her twin sister Ginger had been Army brats. Their mom and dad had dragged them from one military post to another, until they used to joke that home was just a pillow on a bed, a closet for their clothes, and a shelf for their stuffed animals. Which had been okay, as long as she had Ginger, as long as they were a family.

But then the unthinkable had happened. Ginger and their mother and father had died when their Georgia house burned ten years before. Jessie had escaped because she was on an overnight school trip, and when she got home, everything and everyone she loved was gone. She had mourned inconsolably, writing interminable entries in her journal, crying over photographs of herself and Ginger and Mom and Dad in happy times.

But the happy times were all gone, vanished like the smoke from the killing fire. After a year, Jessie stopped writing in her journal, put the pictures away, and forced herself not to cry. It had been hard to stop grieving, but it had actually been a relief, she realized afterward. You couldn’t mourn forever, or blame yourself for being alive while all the people you loved were dead. You had to put the bad stuff behind you and get on with your life; that’s all there was to it. So she had tried. Unfortunately, all the willpower in the world couldn’t put an end to the fiery nightmares that woke her nearly every night, drenched in sweat and shaking with fear—the fear of being burned alive.

After the funeral, Jess had gone to live with her grandmother—her mother’s mother—in a small town outside of Monroe, Louisiana, where she had spent her last year of high school. That place was no longer home: Gram had died the previous summer and Jessie had sold the house to finance graduate school. There’d been no real homes in her college years, either, for she had moved from dorm to apartment and from one apartment to another, and finally to this house, which she rather liked because it was at the end of a dead-end street and had a large backyard where she and Amanda had planted a vegetable garden, although she was the one who took care of it. Unfortunately, there was Butch, who lived next door. She sighed. She might have to leave here, too, if the situation didn’t improve.

But Jessie really did love Pecan Springs, had loved it from the moment she had arrived as a CTSU freshman
.
She was naturally athletic, thin and agile, with an abundance of physical energy, and she had enthusiastically flung herself into all the outdoor activities she could find time for—tubing on the Pecan River, sailing on Lake Travis, swimming at Barton Springs in Austin, hiking in the Hill Country. And since she was hungry for what she thought of as real culture, she indulged herself in everything the eclectic university community had to offer—plays, music, ballet, foreign films. She even went to most of the football and basketball games (that first year, anyway), since sports were a huge part of the campus culture.

Turned out that she’d been hungry for real men, too—that is, for males who were older and more experienced than the local boys in that small Louisiana town. So she indulged herself in them, as well. Not promiscuously, of course, but with her usual intensity, her usual insatiable appetite for new adventures. And not for love or even for sex, either, although sex (in which Jessie indulged enthusiastically) was a bonus. She had gotten involved with a basketball player, and after that, with a graduate student from Nigeria, then with a Mexican national who worked at Mistletoe Creek Farm, and most recently, with a faculty member who had told her that he and his wife were separated and planning a divorce and that he was free.

But it turned out that the separation was only temporary and divorce wasn’t in the picture and the guy wasn’t as free as he’d said he was. Anyway, things got uncomfortable when somebody told his wife that her husband was sleeping with one of his graduate students and she threatened to leave him. The good thing about it was that his wife didn’t know who the graduate student was—at least, Jessie didn’t think so. She had broken off the relationship anyway. She didn’t consider herself a terribly moral person, but she was no home-wrecker.

Unfortunately, the guy couldn’t seem to get the message. She still had to see him at school and in a few other places, and he still called her, wanting them to get together “just to say good-bye.” That was out of the question, of course. As far as Jessie was concerned, when a relationship had to end, a clean, sharp break was the only way to do it. So she was moving on (the story of her life). In fact, she was thinking that maybe it was time to take a vow of chastity, at least for a while, and forget about guys. She could focus on her internship at the newspaper. She could pour herself into her work there, instead of being distracted by a relationship that could only cause her grief.

And Jessie loved to pour herself into things. She was an intense sort of person, very Type A, and when she got excited about something, she really got excited. Working in a newspaper definitely suited her, although Pecan Springs wasn’t very big and the
Enterprise
was a kind of slowmotion place. So far, her most significant assignment had been covering the recent city council meeting, the one where the council unloaded on the chief of police for overspending the overtime pay budget. She was on the lookout for a real story, where she could practice the investigative journalism skills she was supposed to be developing. And she’d have to start looking for a job before long. She needed a story that would separate her from the rest of the competition, make her stand out. Make editors look twice at her work, let them know that she was worth hiring.

Jessie parked her car in the drive, unlocked the back door, and went into the quiet kitchen, savoring the silence. No loud TV, no blaring music, no Amanda sprawled bulkily on the sofa or entertaining the (also bulky) boyfriend in her bedroom, their frenetic activity punctuated by the rhythmic banging of the bed against the wall. The silence was something to celebrate. Jessie went to the fridge, found the full bottle of cold Chablis she had left there (no Amanda to help herself), and poured a glass of wine to take out into the backyard, where she sat in the swing, looked up at the starry sky, and listened to the summer serenade of friendly crickets and cicadas.

But not for long. She had been enjoying herself for only a few moments when she smelled Butch’s cigarette and heard the chink of his beer can hitting the fence on the other side of the straggly hedge. Her insides clenched and she felt the skin on her shoulders prickling with irritation and (she had to be honest here) apprehension. It was their creepy next-door neighbor, sitting on his back porch steps, not five yards away. Who rode a Harley as loud as a freight train and worked in a warehouse and always seemed to be holding a muttered conversation with himself. Whose weird friends dropped in at all hours of the night—or maybe they weren’t friends at all, but customers, like he was dealing, maybe. And who leered at Jessie through the hedge and had actually spied on her through her bedroom window, which was just across the driveway from his bedroom window, until she threatened him with the police if he ever did it again.

But then she forgot to close her blinds one evening and he did it again. Steaming, Jessie was picking up the phone to call the police and file a complaint when Amanda asked her not to. The problem was that Butch’s mother (who lived in San Antonio) owned both houses, the place Butch lived in and the one Jessica and Amanda were renting. Their lease had expired in May and they were on a month-to-month and Amanda was afraid that if they complained to the police about Butch’s peeping, his mother would throw them out. (Of course, that was easy for Amanda to say. Butch wasn’t peeping at her, either because her bedroom was on the opposite side of the house, or because she was fifty pounds overweight. Or maybe because her boyfriend was even bigger than Butch.

Jessie (by now almost as angry at Amanda as she was at Butch) had pointed out that sometimes window peeping escalated into stalking and other nasty stuff, and if anything, Butch’s mother ought to be glad that his problem was caught before it got him into serious trouble. Still, she had to admit that Amanda had a point about the month-to-month, and in the interests of good relations with her roommate and their landlady, she had reluctantly given in.

But last week, she had caught Butch peeping again, watching her through the hedge as she lay in her bikini on a beach towel on the grass. And tonight, she could hear him muttering to himself and smell that infernal cigarette. He wasn’t doing anything she could legitimately complain about, at least not at the moment. He was . . . well, he was just being Butch. He was
there
, damn it.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. The wind stirred, lifting the leaves, and the night sounds no longer seemed quite so comfortable and friendly. Jessie picked up her empty wineglass and went back inside, thinking angrily that life was too short for this kind of crap—for guys like Butch, watching her every move. She still had some of the money from the sale of Gram’s place. It wasn’t much, but enough for a couple of months’ rent in advance, and there was her share of the rent she and Amanda had paid in advance here, which she was supposed to get back when she moved out. And this time, she would find a place by herself, even if it cost more money. She had outgrown Amanda, definitely. Time for a clean break there.

But that would have to wait until tomorrow, or next week, or maybe even longer than that. Tonight, right this minute, Jessie was unsettlingly aware that Butch knew that Amanda was gone. She was all alone in the last house on a dead-end street, with a nutcase for a neighbor.

She shivered. Then, one after another, she went to each window, checked the lock, and drew the blind.

McQuaid and the kids and I live twelve miles west of town, just off Limekiln Road. If you make the drive in daylight, there’s plenty of entertaining scenery: hillsides pocked with clumps of yellow-blooming prickly pear cactus and white prickly poppy; rocky ridges clad with dark green juniper and lacy mesquite; high limestone bluffs; clear, shallow creeks. White-tailed deer graze with cattle; roadrunners dart after lizards among the rocks; buzzards perch on the tops of trees and utility poles, waiting for the next roadkill.

At night, though, unless there’s a bright moon, you can’t see a thing beyond the headlights of your vehicle. Along some stretches, rocky embankments fall steeply away into the blackness; along others, the trees close in like shadowy rows of sentinels. The road dips down, rises up, and twists and turns unexpectedly, like a snake slithering through a rock-strewn meadow. It’s treacherous when there’s ice on the road, and the low-water crossings can be deadly during rainstorms. (
Turn around, don’t drown
means just what it says.) In any season, the best way to stay out of trouble is to drive slow and be alert.

To give myself credit, I wasn’t driving fast and I’d had nothing to drink but a couple of glasses of iced tea. It was a warm evening, and I rolled the windows down to enjoy the cedar-scented air. There was no moon, and I was cruising along one of those snaky, up-down segments of road, just past the clanky old iron bridge over Cedar Creek, about seven or eight miles from town. I was watching for deer, which have a nasty habit of jumping out in front of you and causing much grief, for themselves and for you. A solid hit or even a swerve can cause you to lose control of the car and end up off the road or smashed against a tree. In fact, I was so focused on potential deer disasters that the first orange flickers off to my right and up the hill barely registered. But then the road went around a sharp curve and the trees opened up to a rocky hillside. I saw the flames and smelled the smoke at the same time and jammed on my brakes.

A single-wide house trailer was perched on the side of the steep hill, a couple of hundred yards off the road, mostly hidden behind a screen of trees. I had driven past the place twice a day, five or six days a week, noticing the trailer but not really seeing it. Back in late April or early May, it looked like the renters had moved out. Trash was piled in the garbage pickup area beside the mailbox and there was a new For Rent sign near the road, with a yellow Students OK banner posted across it. Sometime in the past week, though, the sign had come down. Maybe it was rented again.