“He’s got a lot on his mind.”
“Kerry thinks he’s a celebrity, like someone whose face would be on a cereal box instead of a milk carton. And she’s such a little chatterbox, asking him all the time how it feels to be kidnapped, asking him if he’ll sign Blythe’s soccer ball. But he doesn’t get mad at her. I think maybe he’s missed having brothers and sisters. He follows Vincent around all the time.”
“And how does Reese treat Sam?”
“He ignores him.”
Candy laughed. “Well, that’s normal, right?”
Was it? Wearily, Beth decided to accept that it was. She sometimes felt as though she were studying Vincent like a tropical disease, trying to read the variations in his generally impassive expressions as if they were mutations in an exotic strain. But there had not been a school incident in months, and weren’t all teenagers morose? At least the pierced-navel crew he’d started to hang with had been less in evidence of late, and Jordan had been showing up more often, probably drawn back by the sudden Cappadora celebrity.
Maybe, Beth thought, she was simply waiting for other shoes to drop that weren’t even hanging in the balance. If she could spend some time with Sam, some time alone, Beth thought, growing sleepy. Maybe we can take a day together, he and I. I can explain Vincent to him. Or something.
When she woke, it was dark, Tammy Wynette was still warbling, and they were in front of the gates of a cemetery called Saint John of the Cross, in White Bear Lake, just outside Minneapolis.
“Why…what are we here for?”
“I have this hunch,” Candy said. “Cecil was crazy, but she was a cradle Catholic, like you. And we know she lived less than two miles from here, in a rooming-house sort of place, after she left that guy Hill. I’m assuming she was still pregnant then.” Stiffly, Beth unfolded herself from the bucket seat and followed Candy up to the gatehouse of the cemetery. A light burned in a window. “And if you had a baby who died, maybe who you killed…I’m not saying she did, but wouldn’t you want that baby buried in consecrated ground? That would sort of be logical, wouldn’t it?”
She isn’t even talking to me, Beth thought. She’d doing what my grandmother Kerry used to call talking out loud. But it was Beth who spotted the sign on the gatehouse door, Will Return, and a clock face set at 9:00 a.m.
“It figures,” Candy fumed. “Don’t people visit their dead at night? So, what do we do, Beth? Wanta go get a room someplace and sleep? Wanta go to a disco and pick up guys?” She glanced sidelong at Beth. “Want to go to a show at the Guthrie? Want to go see Cecil’s landlady? Maybe that tipster, our anonymous concerned lady citizen, maybe it was someone who recognized Cecil from before. And knew her kid. Knew Ben wasn’t her kid. Huh? It’s possible.”
Candy started the car. “But that’s ridiculous,” she continued. “She said on the phone the kid was with an old lady, an old gray-haired lady in a big picture hat and sunglasses. Not Cecil. Well, maybe the landlady was a babysitter. Not Sarah Lockhart. Unless she was lying, she didn’t even know Ben existed that summer.”
“And she’s not scrawny. She’s plump. Not skinny like Cecil,” Beth said.
Candy dug through her bag to root out the copy of the earliest timeline for Cecil’s whereabouts during the first years after the kidnapping. The apartment complex in Minneapolis—the periodic long stints at her parents’ house. “Here,” she said finally. “The rooming house.”
She scanned the one-way street they were driving on, looking for the address. “F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in this suburb with Zelda,” Candy said suddenly.
Beth huffed, “I knew that.”
“What I meant is, this must be a mecca for the wild at heart.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Apple Orchard Court was only a half-step down from the manicured suburban middle-density expanses that surrounded it; the houses were older, wooden gingerbread in good repair. Twice in three blocks, Beth saw signs for bed-and-breakfast inns. “We could stay at one of those,” she told Candy. “It’s probably cheaper.”
“I hate the locks on regular houses,” Candy said. “Give me a Best Western anytime.” She inched the car forward and glided into the drive of a white two-story frame number with tiny topiary shrubs sculpted all along the massive front verandah. “This is it. This is where Cecil lived after she left Hubby Number Three.”
The old man who came to the door had no idea who Cecilia Lockhart was. “My brother’s the one you want. But he’s playing gin at the church tonight. And he won’t be home until after ten. They go late. But even then I don’t know if he could really help because Rosie ran most of that show.”
“Rosie?” Beth cried.
“Rosemary,” said the old man. “My sister-in-law. She ran the rentals. And there were a score of young women and men who lived here—some of the men you couldn’t tell if they were men or women, you take my meaning.”
Candy flipped her shield out then, and the old comedian settled right down. “You’re police,” he said.
“I am, and all the way from Chicago, and though I hate to bother you at this time of night, I have to ask, is Rosie home now? Rosemary?”
“Oh my, no,” the old man said earnestly. “That’s even more difficult. She’s ill. That’s why we’ve been batching it, Herb and me. My Lydia died in eighty-nine, and now with Rosie so ill…”
“Too ill to talk to me?”
“Well, she’s living up at the nursing home. Prairie View.”
“Where’s that?”
“Other side of town. By the new mall.”
“Do you think I could use your telephone? Call her and see if I might visit her?”
“Well, you could,” said the old man. “But that’s the thing. Rosie’s real sick.”
“Is she dying?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“She’s not right. She’s got this Alzheimer’s disease. She don’t remember anything except from the past.”
“This was in the past,” Candy said hopefully.
“I mean, real past, ma’am. From when she was a little girl in Sioux Falls.”
Candy nodded sharply and reached out to grab one of the old man’s gesticulating hands, to shove one of her business cards into it.
“Please tell your brother we’ll be at the downtown Best Western,” she said. “We’ll be there tonight, if he’d give us a call. We’ll come right over, no matter what time it is. This is extremely urgent business.”
“Oh my,” said the old man, glancing at Candy’s card. “I will do that.”
But at that moment, a huge, ornate old Lincoln Town Car pulled slowly up in front of the house, and an erect, smaller edition of the brother from Tampa, dapper in a seersucker sport coat, bounded out of the front seat and up the walk. Candy turned to face him. Yes, he said, he was Herbert Fox, and his wife, Rosemary, had indeed rented rooms to young people. Candy produced one of the glossy photos of Cecil in her heyday as an actor, and Herbert Fox studied it carefully.
“Well,” he said. “This looks a lot like her. Like a girl I remember for one reason. But she had red hair, you know.”
“Did Cecil have red hair?” Candy asked Beth.
“She had every color,” Beth said.
“A tiny little thing,” Herbert Fox went on. “Sick in bed a great deal. My wife was very fond of her. Mother-henned her a bit. And of course, you know, we didn’t realize when she moved in, but she was…expecting.”
“That’s the one, then,” Candy said. “Mr. Fox, did Cecilia have the baby while she lived here?”
“Well, yes she did…that is, not right here in the house, but I know that my wife drove her to the doctor when her time came,” said Herbert Fox. “And that was the funny part. She insisted Rosemary go back home and leave her there. And afterward, Rosemary went to Little Company of Mary, and they’d never heard of Cecilia…Hill. That was her name. Cecilia Hill. Apparently, it was a false alarm, and she didn’t have the baby that time. But she didn’t come back,
either. Rosie was worried sick for a while. She was getting bad then, my Rosie, and every little thing really set her off. She’d go on about stuff for hours. Of course, we didn’t know at the time how serious what Rosie had was…”
“Mr. Fox,” Candy persisted. “Didn’t Cecilia…Hill come back for her things?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Are they still here?”
“No, no. There was no unpaid rent. So we just boxed up the clothes and things. The room was furnished. A year later, after Rosie was real sick, a lovely woman, an older lady, came and got the girl’s things. And this woman was very nice. She insisted on paying a month’s rent, just for our keeping the things.”
“And did she ask about Cecilia’s baby? About the false alarm? Did she tell you about her grandchild?”
“Oh dear, no. She was a very quiet, polite lady.”
“And did you tell her about what happened that night?”
“Well, she was the girl’s mother, wasn’t she? She’d know all about a girl’s…delicate things, wouldn’t she? I didn’t think it was my business to meddle, and poor Rosie was way past understanding, so even if I’d found anything out, I couldn’t have told her. Doesn’t pay to be nosy just for the sake of it.”
“And did you tell the police about this, when they interviewed you about Cecilia?”
The old man was honestly stunned.
“Police?” he whispered. “What? Did that little girl come to some harm?”
“No. No, she’s…alive and well. But you haven’t talked with police about Cecilia Hill? Cecilia Hill or Cecilia Karras?”
“Not before you.”
Candy sighed. Gently, she took Herb Fox’s limp hand and thanked him, and courteously began to explain the basic facts of Ben’s abduction; but the old man suddenly looked drained of breath. “If you don’t need anything else,” he said, “I think I’ll just turn in, officer.”
“That’s just fine, Mr. Fox. You’ve been more than helpful. Don’t spend any more time worrying about this. It’s all over.”
In the car, she turned to Beth. Her face, already drawn, was further bleached by a shard of late moonlight through the front window. “You’re thinking, aren’t you, why didn’t they ever talk with Herb Fox? And I’m thinking the same thing.” Beth opened her mouth and Candy held up a warning hand. “But Bethie, wait. At the same time that I’m thinking why didn’t they ever talk to Fox, I’m thinking, why should they have? There was no reason to think Cecilia had a child. We weren’t trying to find a kidnapper, we already had her in custody. We already had good witnesses to her movements since the kidnapping. All this,” she waved at the neat hedge around the rooming house, “happened before Ben was even born, years before the reunion.”
Beth turned away, and Candy said, to her back, “You can call that sloppy work. I might even agree with you. But people don’t know what they don’t know.”
“Police do,” Beth said.
“Police especially don’t,” Candy murmured. “They’ve been in so many forests they sometimes don’t see a tree unless it falls on them.”
“What if,” Beth asked, struggling with tears, “what if she did it before? What if she tried it before? And did she kill her baby?”
“Do you have an idea of how we could find that out, Beth? Because if you do, I’d like to hear it. We’ll go to those cemeteries in the morning. Or to the coroner and look for a death certificate, in case it wasn’t a late-term miscarriage after all.”
“The cemetery,” Beth said abruptly.
Candy gave her a measuring look. “Okay,” she said.
“And maybe I can think of someone else we might ask,” Candy mused aloud. “But really, to say that your old pal Cecil wasn’t much for enduring relationships is really an understatement, huh?”
“She wasn’t my old pal,” Beth shot back, thinking then, unbidden, just one enduring relationship. Just one.
“I’m sorry,” Candy said then. “I’m just tired. I’m so tired I feel like I’m a hundred.”
“Me, too,” Beth sighed.
“And I, for one, could use several drinks.”
Beth said meekly, “Me, too.”
By the time they checked in at the hotel, there was only a double room left—“a first-floor corner,” said the young man at the counter.
“Nothing on the third floor? I can’t imagine every room—what do you have here, two hundred?—” Candy began.
“We’ll take that,” Beth told him exasperatedly.
“It’s a very nice room,” he huffed. “It’s just that the twirlers are in town, and everything else….”
For the balance of the night, Beth and Candy, each lying gritty and fully clothed on her own queen-sized bed, listened to the stampede of high-school drum majorettes as they squealed and rampaged up and down the halls. At midnight, Candy sent down for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of Bloody Marys. She drank two, leaving most of her burger. Beth nibbled, but finally gave up and simply drank, too.
“I hate loose ends,” she told Beth. “And I’m celebrating yet another month of perfectly planned sex with perfectly timed ovulation and perfectly awful results.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said.
“Me, too.” Candy flipped the card listing the pay-per-view attractions. “Most women spend most of their lives trying not to get pregnant. I never used any of the high-tech kinds of birth control in my life. Naturally, I thought I’d be an instant fertility goddess. I was thinking maybe we’d get two kids in before I ran out of steam.” She slugged her Bloody Mary and turned her attention to the program card. “Want to watch Arnold? A sensitive Japanese flick about doomed love among serfs? At least now I can drink for the next week. Before my next appointment with Dr. Clomid. Now, here’s a possibility. Vixens After Dark—how about that, Beth? See how the other half lives?”
“I’m afraid I’ve always been a failure as a vixen.” Beth smiled.
“You are the original one-man woman,” Candy agreed.
“No,” Beth protested. “I had my adventure period.” Candy made a face. “No, for real. Before Pat, when I was in college.”
“I thought you got together in college.”
“Not the minute I got to college. What I mostly did was try to pick out guys to sleep with who looked like they understood the big mystery. And it took me a long time to figure out that they were probably thinking the same thing about me. I didn’t really appreciate sex until I was probably thirty, you know?”
“All the wasted years,” Candy said, leaning back on her elbows. Beth realized both of them were more than a little drunk.
“What about you?” Beth asked then, noticing the belligerent edge in her voice. “You say you’re this big romantic, but the way you talk, you’ve spent most of your life trying to convince the boys that your pistol was as big as theirs.”
“And don’t think I don’t regret it,” Candy said. “I’ve had maybe two serious lovers in my life, not counting Chris.”
“Which you don’t exactly count.”
“Beth, come on.”
“I’m sorry about that, too.”
“You are. You’re a very sorry person.” But Candy smiled. “Two serious lovers, and then the whole gamut of stuff you think you’re supposed to do because you’re a free-to-be-lesbian-feminist chick…which is mostly just boring.”
“Is it?” Beth asked. “Is it boring?” She wondered if she was seriously drunk. “I mean, I’ve always wondered, and I’ve never asked you…I just assumed that it would be better between women, the sex part, because you would know what the person wanted….”
“And be really sensitive and tender, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Actually, I hate to let you down, Bethie, but there are just as many selfish and demanding gay women as there are straight men.”
Candy smiled, a sort of private smile that made Beth feel, suddenly, very alone. “You know,” Candy said. “It’s not awful with Chris at all. It’s nicer than I thought it w
ould be, and I was determined to grit my teeth and bear it even if it wasn’t nice.”
“But you still…you’ve had other relationships anyway, right? I mean, you couldn’t just…”
“I’m married, Beth,” Candy said.
“I just meant…”
“Is it a marriage of convenience, a rather more goal-directed marriage than most? Sure it is. Or maybe it isn’t. I mean, shit, don’t half the people in the world marry people they’re not exactly madly in love with because they want security, or children, or whatever? We just didn’t pretend about it. And so why would I have cheated on him?”
“Well, Chris knows that you…”
“Do you cheat on Pat?”
Beth hesitated. “Of course not,” she said.
Candy sighed. “I’m being hard on you, probably because I’m such a bitch today. I know exactly what you mean, and probably, Chris truly wouldn’t even consider it a huge, huge deal. He’s a man of the world, as he often reminds me. He’s very proud of how PC he is about my past.” She grinned. “It would be me that I was letting down, Beth. It’s just a cheesy thing to do, in my opinion.” She looked hard at Beth, who made a show of stirring the celery stalk in her tall glass. “Don’t you think it is? Don’t you think it’s sort of the ultimate in dull, predictable behavior?”
She knows, thought Beth. I always knew she knew, but now I’m sure.
“I don’t know,” Beth stammered, trying to recover. “There could be reasons that people—not me, maybe, but…don’t you ever think that maybe the great love of your life is still out there?” And maybe, she thought but didn’t say, you met him once and gave him up, because while he was sweet and sexy and basic you were afraid you wouldn’t be able to discuss Russian novels together?
Candy said then, sighing, “I guess. What do they call it? That ‘lifelong passionate conversation.’ But I’m never going to have that. Probably. Chris and I…it’s not like that.” She raised herself up on one elbow. “You know, Bethie, there were times, at the start, when I thought that you and Pat would split. What you went through…”
Eighty percent of us divorce, Beth thought, eighty percent. But Candy was continuing. “But later, I saw that you and Pat could weather anything. You can tell when people have…what you have.”