Trap Door (15 page)

“Later,” Ann told her comfortingly. “Go and talk to people, now, like we said you would. Just make conversation. It’ll look weird if you don’t.”

So that was the plan: social damage control. I wondered why either of them cared. But Jen obeyed her friend, her sun-streaked hair moving glossily on her shoulders as she turned away.

One of the teachers stepped to the front of the room and began reciting an earnest homily about “our friend Cory.” But Cory’s actual friends, a spray-can-huffing, video-game-addled bunch of knuckleheads if I ever saw any, stared as if a Martian had stood up and begun quacking incomprehensible syllables.

“Jennifer’s feeling tense,” Ann Radham said apologetically. “This has all been a shock.”

“I suppose.” I let skepticism creep into my tone. To shock Jen Henderson you’d need the large, economy-sized brickbat, I’d already decided.

Ann glanced at me. “Not everyone swims in the deep end of the pool,” she said, acknowledging my unspoken assessment. “But Jen’s a good kid. She just thinks everyone blames her now. For what happened to Cory.”

I thought about that while taking in Ann Radham’s remarkable costume: a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt and pearl-buttoned sweater, baggy painter’s pants whose multihued stains looked deliberately applied, and turquoise jelly shoes. Her earrings, peeping beneath spikes of that eye-catching purple hair, were Betty Boop figurines, and on her wedding finger was a Captain Marvel decoder ring.

My own slim jeans, white shirt, and penny loafers suddenly felt terminally dowdy, especially with the patching-compound hair decoration I wore. “Should they?” I asked. “Blame her?”

Ann made a disparaging face. “Of course not. That’s ridiculous. The criminal charges were all her father’s idea, that whole stalking thing. She just went along with it because he told her to—I mean, he
is
her dad. As for Cory killing himself… ”

Across the room one of the knuckleheads appeared at Jen’s side and began talking to her, probably on a dare. Smirking, he bounced on sneakered heels while his pals looked on, elbowing one another, massively entertained. After a moment of this Jen turned coldly away, which to his pals seemed the most hilarious thing of all.

“Cory was a strange ranger,” Ann said. “Jen just liked him for a while ’cause he thought she was so glamorous. Like a movie star, you know? And he thought she was smart.”

At my look she went on, “Yeah, maybe Jen’s no intellectual giant but just look at
his
friends. It’s like the cast of
Dumb and Dumber
over there.”

“You’ve got a point.” While I watched, Ellie tried her luck at talking to one of the boys: no dice. Maybe if her voice had come out of an Xbox or Game Boy, they’d have paid attention to it. But otherwise, as they say,
fuhgedaboutit
.

On the other hand here was Ann herself: smart, friendly, maybe willing to converse in a little more detail about Jennifer Henderson.

I broached the subject delicately. “Come on,” Ann replied, unfooled by my approach. “If you’re thinking she had anything to do with… ”

“To do with what?” Jen demanded, at my elbow suddenly. And without waiting for an answer, “I’m going to get the car, this is too boring. You can come or not,” she added rudely to Ann Radham, “but I’m out of here.”

Her good looks and long, athletic stride turned heads as she departed. “Do you know anything about the wife Cory’s supposed to have had?” I asked Ann. “Or a baby?”

The growl of a sports car engine sounded outside, followed by an imperious-sounding horn toot, sharp as a summons. Ann wadded her napkin into her styrofoam cup, ignoring my questions. “Got to go.”

“Duty calls, eh?” I said lightly, but putting an edge into it. One thing was already clear; Ann was second banana in this friendship.

If it was a friendship; something didn’t mesh about the pair. Ann paused, eyeing me. “Like I said before, Jen’s a nice girl. Going to college on a softball scholarship this fall; she wouldn’t have been keeping in touch with Cory anyway once she got there. She’s a pitcher, got a fifty-five-mile-an-hour fastball, if you can imagine.”

I could; as a physical specimen, Jen Henderson rocked.

“And I don’t know what you two are up to,” Ann went on, glancing over at Ellie, “but she’s a fun kid. And if you think there’s anything else going on, you are so on the wrong track.”

“Your loyalty is admirable.” But I must have looked unconvinced. Ann shook her head; the Betty Boop figurines danced.

“I’ll be at the Bayside later if you want to talk,” she said.

Oh boy, did I.

At the time,
the Bayside Café on Dyer Street was the place where Eastport’s young smart set would meet to eat, drink, and socialize. An old tube-tired Schwinn bike leaned against the wall outside and a poster on the door still listed the live music acts that had been scheduled for the previous Sunday evening.

To my surprise Ann Radham’s name was on the poster. As I entered she looked up from behind what appeared to be all the percussion instruments in the world, on the tiny stage tucked into one corner at the front of the café.

Ranged within reach were base, snare, and tenor drums, crash and suspended cymbals, maracas and gongs and what I thought might be a set of temple blocks, plus more I didn’t recognize.

“Jennifer get her drink?” I asked.

Ann nodded. “We went back to her place, she’s got a stash of those little bottles they give you on airplanes.”

At my raised eyebrows she added, “I never get asked my age, and I don’t drink anyway, so I save them for her.”

She picked up a pair of drumsticks and began tapping a rhythm out quietly while I glanced around, taking in the casual, post-lunch atmosphere and the smell of fresh-baked chocolate brownies, a specialty of the house.

“My bike outside?” she asked, and I indicated that the Schwinn was still there; no sports car for Ann, apparently. The perks of friendship didn’t extend quite that far.

The Bayside’s tables and chairs were all old-fashioned wooden kitchen sets, painted bright white and mostly occupied now by the café’s usual daytime crowd: laptop-carrying, alternative-music-listening young consumers in the eighteen-to-thirty-five range, Internet-savvy and fully aware that their tastes in everything from art to xerography now ran most of the economy.

Over the past couple of years Eastport had become a magnet for these young adults, their arrival mirroring the back-to-the-land movement here in the sixties, only with electronics. Just as pleased with themselves about it, too, but not in an unpleasant way. It seemed part of this group’s collective persona in fact, that they were all so darned nice; right now, for instance, a third of them were chatting amiably on cell phones, not a raised voice in the bunch.

It made me yearn a little for the good old days of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, if you want to know the truth. And speaking of famous musicians, Ann Radham finished a muted but powerful minute-and-a-half solo performance that if you closed your eyes, you’d have thought it was Buddy Rich.

I was blown away and said so. “Thanks. That and a buck fifty will get me a cup of coffee,” she replied, getting up from behind the drum kit.

She seemed at ease with me already, but why wouldn’t she be? Ann Radham might be quirky but she was also clearly the kind of girl who’d had a good, strong sense of herself by about age two, I estimated admiringly.

“Come on, I gotta eat something,” she declared, gesturing for me to follow her.

We crossed the well-lit room with its soft-drink bar, wide-screen TV tuned soundlessly to CNN, and open kitchen at the back. While she ordered I got coffee from the self-serve counter and took it to a table up front by the big window.

The place was decorated with movie posters from the forties and fifties, big living trees in tubs, and kitschy ceramic items: slinky panther planters, Smokey the Bear cookie jars,
Uncle Sam Wants You
mugs. In one corner stood a man-sized gorilla doll with a Red Sox cap on its head.

Ann received her order and looked around for me, hesitating for a moment as if she’d have preferred some other table. But she came over with her food: green salad, no dressing, a grapefruit soda. While she tucked into it hungrily, I asked a passing waiter to put it all on my check.

“Good salad?” I asked. She nodded, chewing. And after a sip of soda:

“Yeah. The sandwiches and cake at the memorial were pretty to look at. But my body’s screaming for vitamins.”

Mine was screaming to be stretched on a beach somewhere, no worries allowed; on my way here I’d detoured past Sam’s house, found it locked and the shades drawn, a bunch of mail uncollected from the box.

“Not that grapefruit soda’s going to supply any,” she added with a guilty grin. “But I love the stuff.”

Outside Sam’s place the Fiat sat scratched and mud-streaked, looking as if it hadn’t been moved in a while, windshield fogged from the inside.

“And a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine, et cetera,” Ann concluded, forking up more greenery.

The car not having been moved was good, though, under the circumstances. Probably he was still out for the count following yesterday’s binge, and after what had nearly happened to me on Sullivan Street, that was fine. I especially didn’t want him driving until I’d had a chance to talk to him.

“So what’s a hipster, anyway?” I asked Ann, not wanting to go at her too directly right off the bat.

She shook her head. “Who knows? Twenty-to-thirtyish, urban, with a certain… um, shared sensibility. Certain clubs, certain music… anti-fashion clothes, usually.” She indicated her own garb, peered at me through the horn-rims.

“Overly self-aware, for sure,” she went on. “But the bottom line is that if you’re a hipster you can do pretty much whatever the rest of the world does, as long as you just kind of stay a little emotionally separated from doing it
while
you’re doing it.”

She tipped her head thoughtfully. “Like, these friends of mine were in one of those chain-restaurant steak houses the other week. The kind that once you’re inside, you could be anywhere?”

I nodded to show I understood. We didn’t have much of that kind of thing in downeast Maine; there wasn’t enough population density here to make it profitable. When Ellie and I went to Bangor for shopping or whatever, we ate at an Olive Garden or an Outback Steakhouse just for the novelty value.

“So they had steaks there,” Ann went on. “And the food was fine. I mean it has to be, right? That’s the whole idea. But to them, all they talked about was what it meant to the culture, these, like, identical feeding troughs all over the country, all exactly alike.” She devoured a pepper strip. “But when hipsters get old enough to be really running things, in like twenty years?
Then
look out. They think they’re all about the individual, but what that really means is figuring out how to sell stuff that way.”

A chunk of pickled artichoke heart followed the pepper strip. “Pretty soon there’ll be a microchip under your skin, put there at birth, it knows what kind of TV you want to watch. Not what you say you do, but what you really do, deep down. Knows,” she added, “what commercials to put on.”

“Knows your secrets,” I said, smiling as she shook her head at herself.

“Sorry,” she said ruefully. “I tend to go off on tangents.”

I didn’t think so. More like a nice try at conversational misdirection, followed by the confession of a small personal flaw to make it seem as if the change of subject wasn’t deliberate. I turned the talk back to my original purpose.

“Is that how you met Jen? In a club?” Because otherwise the pair of young women seemed to have come from different worlds.

“Mm-hmm,” she replied reluctantly. Ann still didn’t want to talk about her friend; she’d only agreed to meet me here because she’d realized that I would be persistent.

“She’d come down to the city on weekends from that fancy prep school she went to, we’d see each other around at different places,” she recalled. “Got to be pals after a while. Jen’s dad doesn’t know about that, though, her partying in town. Thought she sat in the dorm on weekends, I guess, studying and painting her toenails.”

Uh-huh. Sure he did. “Your music pay the bills?” I asked. I could play the game, too: back off, circle around, come back again a little later. “Because if what I’ve heard about that is right, it doesn’t usually.”

My chair rocked unsteadily as Ann nodded, chewing a mouthful of baby spinach. “You heard correct. I play with a group, a lot of gigs in lower Manhattan. You know, bars, basement social clubs, that kind of venue. Mostly downtown. At the start it was just open mikes; now they pay us. Well,” she amended, “usually they do. More than they used to. But it’s still not very much money.”

I bent down to examine the wooden chair legs. The crosspiece between the front two ones had popped out of its hole, and when I put it back in again it still moved loosely.

“What do your folks think about that?” I asked, sitting up. “I mean the not much money. And… the lifestyle. I mean, it can be kind of tough downtown late at night.”

Her gaze met mine. “They think I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself,” she replied, her voice briefly steely. I got the sense that there had been a certain amount of family controversy associated with her independence.

And now it was over because she’d won, which didn’t surprise me. “But no big disasters have happened to me,” she went on, “so they know now I’m doing all right.”

Again that sense of an obstacle overcome, something battled if not into submission then at least to a truce. “They’re in Virginia, where I grew up. My parents are, that is. My dad’s retired from government work,” she added before I could ask. “Mom too.”

Again nicely done; throw in extra, unasked-for information. Makes you seem forthcoming. “You go to school there?” I asked casually. “College or whatever, maybe music school? In Virginia?”

But even as I spoke I knew I was going too fast. Something new moved in her eyes at the flurry of questions, a flicker of shadow she wasn’t quick enough to hide.

Some little item of her past that she didn’t want to talk about, I guessed, thinking
Join the club
. Her cell phone’s ringer thweeped, saving her from having to answer.