Leather Maiden

“Nothing really. She didn’t talk much about her life.”

  “If the guys liked her, how did the women feel?”

  “Jealous. They knew she was a force of nature though. If you’re getting at someone in the history department hating her enough to kidnap or kill her because she was a fox, I don’t think so.”

  “A woman looked that way could drive someone crazy, even if she didn’t know them. Might make them do things they might not normally do.”

  “So it’s her fault?” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t mean it that way. Of course, whoever did what they did to her, they made the choice. Just saying, if there was someone out there two ounces short a pound, a woman like that, it could be the thing to set them off…Is this bothering you, Jimmy?”

  He nodded. “She was a good kid. Just disappearing like that, it was painful. She’d been in a couple classes I taught. She had a great future. I was quite sick about it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No biggie. It’s what it is. No point in wishing things were different. She’s gone…You know what? I think I’d like a cup of coffee. How about you?”

  It wasn’t a clever change of subject, but it was successful enough. Jimmy was already up and moving out of the room when I said, “Dying for one.”

  When we passed through the living room on the way to the kitchen, we saw that Jazzy was asleep on the couch. Someone, Mom probably, had covered her with a blanket.

  Coming into the kitchen, Jimmy said, “Jazzy is out for the count.”

  Mom and Dad and Trixie were sitting at the table, already enjoying coffee. Mom said, “Keep it down. She’s exhausted. I bet she slept in that tree last night. Sometimes they lock her out.”

  “Why won’t someone do something?” Jimmy asked.

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” Dad said. “We haven’t even seen her mother or her latest shitass come out of the house in a couple days.”

  “Pete, don’t talk like that,” Mom said.

  Dad ignored her as usual. “Her mother stays inside most of the time, like she’s afraid of the light. I don’t think she works, unless it’s over the telephone. The new daddy, he has a van with something about upholstery work written on the side, so maybe he does upholstery at home. But my guess is he isn’t a working fool. And then there’s the former Daddy Greg, who I guess is just Greg now. He comes around now and then. No telling what Jazzy sees. That girl needs a better home life.”

  “Bless her heart,” Mom said. “Jazzy is a smart little thing. She can learn anything.”

  “She’s being wasted,” Dad said.

  Mom patted Dad’s hand. “I know, but all we can do is stay on Protective Services.”

  Jimmy and I went over to the cabinet for some coffee cups, got coffee from the coffeemaker and sat down at the table.

  “She’ll spend the night here,” Mom said. “And I bet her mother and her newest daddy won’t even miss her.”

  “Drunk bastards,” Dad said. “Or maybe it’s something else they’re hopped up on. Or maybe they aren’t hopped up on anything, it’s just the way they act. Hard to tell.”

  “Hopped up?” Jimmy said. “People still say that?”

  “I do,” said Dad.

  “How about twenty-three skidoo?” Jimmy said.

  “Or Oh you, kid,” I said.

  “Or the bee’s knees,” Trixie said.

  Dad grinned at us. “You’re asking for it, busters. And you too, young lady.”

  That night, after my brother and his wife left and everyone had gone to bed, I sat at my old desk and glanced through the file Mercury had put together for me. I found myself looking at Caroline’s picture over and over. I read through all the notes and filled my head with all the facts that were available. It was like planting seeds in my gray matter, trying to get them to take root and break through and bloom.

  I looked for clues as if I might find them: Colonel Mustard in the study with the wrench. That sort of thing. I thought of how terrible and surprising it might have been for her, attacked by someone she trusted most likely, since that’s the way it usually worked out.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thing to think about before bedtime, but I stayed with it, tried to figure a little of this and a little of that. There were no parents to talk to. No relatives she was really connected to. There was just the girl who said she hadn’t paid her movie rental bill, her library fine. The girl’s name was Ronnie Fisher and there was an address for her, but I didn’t see much in that. Still, I made a note to contact her. I finally went to bed. This time I didn’t dream.

  11

  A month went by, and for some reason, though it interested me the most, I couldn’t get up enough of a head of steam to write about Caroline Allison. I knew how I wanted to write about her, but for whatever reason I didn’t have enough gas in the tank. I think the business with Gabby had evaporated my fuel.

  There were people I ought to interview so I could get a larger picture of who she was and what might have happened to her, but I wasn’t up to it. I was having a hard enough time just learning to be me again, not waking up and thinking I was still in Iraq and that pretty soon I’d be on the streets with my rifle and my asshole clenched, hoping today wouldn’t be the day I got my head blown off.

  In the meantime I wrote columns on stem cell research, people who took the Bible literally, and even wrote one on gardening gleaned from Francine’s old notes. It was an easy thing to do, to use those notes, and I took advantage of it and got my column written quickly that week. It gave me more time to read through the research I had on Caroline, though what I had I had read a half-dozen times.

  Then, one morning, all the notes, all my thoughts came together and I wrote a kind of lest-we-forget piece with the best photo of her and a shot of her shoes and that sad sack of food lying on her car seat. I wrote reminding the community that she had lived here, was well known at the university, was thought to have tremendous promise, that she had disappeared, and all these months later, no one knew any more than the day she disappeared. It was also about the fact that not only was there no information on her disappearance, when you got right down to it there wasn’t much information on her before her disappearance. I thought it might be a two-part or three-part piece, the other two parts a little more investigative. It depended on the feedback I got.

  Anyway, the column got done, and I was at my desk on a Tuesday morning, two days after it appeared, having managed not to get drunk and to think of Gabby only a few hundred times since I got up, showered, shaved and had my coffee. I brought some more coffee to work from the coffee shop and was still drinking it when Mrs. Timpson came out of her office, stopped at my desk and shifted her ample ass onto the corner of it, then shifted the teeth in her mouth.

  “Cason, you kind of got things stirring.”

  “The column on Caroline Allison?”

  “No. The one you did on Noah’s ark.”

  “Oh.”

  “Christians are all fired up.”

  “Aren’t they always? What did I do, misspell Noah?”

  “You suggested that it didn’t really happen.”

  “And you think it did?”

  “Do I look like an ignorant yahoo? No one in their right mind thinks some fella put, what was it you said, ‘thousands of species, times two’ on a goddamn boat and sailed it around for forty days and forty nights. But for some Christians, it’s like the best sex in the world to them. They can’t let it go. They like getting banged in the ass by the Noah story.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I understand that. Personally, I’m still mad about there not being any Santa Claus.”

  Timpson adjusted her teeth with her tongue. “Some of the people who put advertising in the paper are big Charlie Churches. We have to kiss their ass a little, right around the pucker hole.”

  “You’re telling me not to write about that sort of thing anymore?”

  “I’m not going to say that. But you followed it with stem cell research, and how we need it. Don??
?t put two ass kickers back to back. Space them out a bit. It’s all right to stir them up, but let’s don’t keep them stirred. Kick Jesus in the balls one week, then do some fluff piece or a profile, then come back for another kick. Give them time to heal. They get stirred enough, they’ll get deep-fried and sanctified all over our asses. I’m going to let Reverend Dinkins address your article in his Sunday column. He’ll take the fundamentalist view. It’ll be stupid, but it’ll make the church people happy.”

  “Isn’t he the one trying to keep them from building a school down in the old black section of town?”

  “He is at that, and so is Reverend Judence. Funny thing is, they both want the same thing, but not for the same reason, so they’re mad at each other.”

  “Dad told me about it.”

  “I know your dad. He’s not a bad-looking old man.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “Judence and Dinkins. They’re real pieces of work, those two, but they’ve been good for news, and when Judence comes to make his speech, that’ll be a hot news day for this little town.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a better idea to get some other preacher for the rebuttal? Someone screwed down a little tighter.”

  “Dinkins is the celebrity, kid,” she said. “That’s who we’ll go with. It’ll spike paper sales and show we aren’t godless heathens. Except for you.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let him go at it.”

  “I was going to. Oh, that column on the missing girl. Not bad.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “A little fluffy, so I figure you’re holding the good stuff back for a later column, or for a shot at a bigger article somewhere else.”

  I didn’t say anything to contradict her remark. She might be an asshole, but she was damn savvy.

  “Well, keep your powder dry,” she said.

  Mrs. Timpson got off my desk and went over to Oswald’s desk, most likely to discuss his writing of the sports, or perhaps to offer her insights into the running and football-tossing abilities of the colored.

  Belinda came over with a handful of mail. I knew some of it would be letters about my column. There might even be something nice in one of them. Mixed in with the mail was a FedEx envelope. There wasn’t any address on it. Not the newspaper’s address, not the sender’s. It just had my name written on it.

  I said, “How’d you get this?”

  “It was in front of the door when they opened up this morning.”

  “It didn’t really come from FedEx,” I said, and showed her the envelope.

  “I guess it’s a hand-delivered fan letter,” she said.

  “It didn’t quite make it to my hand, though, or anyone else’s. So I figure, since it’s a drop-off, it’s not all that positive.”

  “Maybe they were just shy.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I could use a fan letter.”

  She patted the letters and the package she had put on my desk. “All this for you, and me I’m lucky if I get anything other than a water bill. Of course, that might be because I’m not a reporter.”

  “You’ll get your shot.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  Belinda turned to go.

  “Belinda?”

  She stopped and looked back at me. “Maybe,” I said, “someday soon, we could go get a cup of coffee after work. If we’re feeling rowdy, a Diet Coke?”

  She gave me a slow, braces-shiny smile. “I’ll think it over,” she said.

  “Just a little conversation. Nothing serious.”

  “I guess we can swing that.”

  “Soon then?”

  She smiled at me again. I was beginning to really like that smile, grillwork and all. “I’d love that,” she said.

  “Great. Then we’ll call it a future plan.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  When she was back to her place, I felt a little self-satisfied. That was good, Cason, old boy, I thought. You’re moving on. Or at least you’re trying.

  I started in on the mail by opening the FedEx package. There was a DVD inside, enclosed in a plastic case. There was also a note written on cardboard with a black marker. It read: “YOU WILL WANT TO SEE THIS.”

  I studied the package again, but didn’t come up with any new results. Anyone could get a FedEx envelope, just had to drive by one of the boxes where they kept the supplies. I read the note again, but it didn’t say anything different.

  I sat and tried to work for a while, but the DVD was bothering me, lying there on my desk unseen, calling to me like a siren. My guess was it was some Christian propaganda sent to me because of my column on Noah’s ark or stem cell research. I finally picked it up and left.

  12

  I had recently bought myself a police scanner for the car and had rented a little apartment not far from where Mom and Dad lived.

  I was on the bottom floor of a duplex. Nothing cute, nothing fancy. Just cheap rent. I pushed against the moisture-swollen door and made my way inside. It smelled as if a rat had died in the walls; it had held that smell for the entire week I had lived there. In the morning it was at its weakest, but as the day wore on and it became hot, Mr. Dead Rat, or so I assumed it was, heated up in the walls and gave off an odor that could grab you by the collar and toss you out the door. I remembered a story I had read by Mark Twain about a cheese that had stunk so bad that he gave it military promotions. It was the same with my dead rat. He was a private in the morning, but by the afternoon I had promoted him to general. It was almost that strong now, but not quite. He was at about a captain’s level.

  I put the DVD in the player and turned on my little TV and sat down in a comfortable chair with only a bit of the stuffing leaking out. At first I thought the DVD was blank, but suddenly it sputtered to life. And then my heart was in my mouth. There were two people in it. Nude. One of them, the woman, was immediately recognizable to me. It was Caroline Allison. On a bed. She looked like a movie star. A porn star. Her long brown legs moved sensuously over the man’s back, her heels rubbing his buttocks. The man’s face was turned away from me. He lifted up, supported himself above her on his hands so that he could thrust, and I could see the side of his face then, and that’s all I needed to see.

  I stood up from my chair without meaning to. The dead rat smell filled my nostrils. I felt dizzy. My stomach clenched like a fist. I walked around my chair, glanced at the television, watched as the man gently shifted and guided the woman into another position.

  I could see more than the side of his face now. A lot more than I wanted to see. And there was no mistake.

  I felt as if I couldn’t swallow. As if I couldn’t breathe.

  The man making love to Caroline Allison was my brother, Jimmy.

  I started to turn off the DVD, but couldn’t. I walked around my chair and watched the TV with glances. When the DVD finished and went black, I stood there with my hands on the back of my chair, leaning forward, looking at the dark screen, as if waiting for some sort of revelation.

  I went around and sat in my chair for a while. Finally I had enough strength to get up and turn off the set, eject the DVD. I robotically put the DVD back in its container, took it and slid it between two books in my bookcase, All the President’s Men and State of Denial. I went into the kitchen and got a bottled coffee out of the fridge and drank it. It could have been nectar of the gods or lye from under the sink, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  I took the FedEx package and put it in the trash. I took the note and read it again and put it between the two books with the DVD.

  I got my cell phone out of my pocket and called Jimmy’s cell. He didn’t answer. He would most likely be in class, or having office hours. I took a deep breath and went downstairs and got in my car and drove around town, and finally out to the spot where the town almost ended, headed to where the old Siegel house sat and parked down the hill from it. The hill was specked with gangly pines and all around it the grass was the color of sandpaper, but in front o
f the house, and on the right and left sides, was a thick carpet of crawling kudzu that wound its way up in twists and twirls and eventually became a huge emerald wad at the top. The wad would be the Siegel house, consumed by vines, lying gray and silent in the belly of the green.

  I drove around to the old clay road that led behind the houses. It was narrower than I remembered. Perhaps the grass had grown up closer on either side of the road. Maybe it was that old problem about being away for so long you remembered all things as bigger and wider and deeper and greater. Like lost love.

  Driving up the road, I bumped into some big holes where it had washed out, tooled to the top of the hill and parked behind the vine-covered house on a gravel rise where the kudzu had been unable to make purchase. But at the back of the house were the vines. They grew along the outside walls of the house, covering some of the back door and all the windows except for a rare wink of glass.

  I sat there for a long time and thought about Jimmy and Trixie. I had thought they had the perfect life. I wondered what in the world Jimmy had been thinking. Well, hell, I knew what he had been thinking. But why had he let it get the better of him? It was like me to let it get the better of me. I was the one who did stupid things, but not Jimmy. No wonder he was nervous the night I spoke to him about Caroline. No wonder he wanted to change the subject.

  My God, I thought. He couldn’t have had anything to do with her missing. He just couldn’t have. Jimmy wasn’t like that. He didn’t have it in him. But where had the DVD come from? Why had it been sent to me? And by whom? And had Jimmy known he was being filmed?

  A ton of questions fell down on top of me, but I didn’t receive so much as an ounce of answers.

  I sat up there on the hill with my window rolled down and the hot air not stirring even a little bit. I started the engine and rolled up the window and turned the air conditioner on full blast and sat there for a while longer. Then I put the car in gear and coasted back down the hill and out to the road. I drove slowly by the old railway station below, as if I thought Caroline’s car might still be parked there and the law had overlooked the fact she had just gone out for a walk, was about to show up again, eat her fast-food dinner, put on her shoes and drive away.