ABC Amber LIT Converter (16 page)

“Let’s get you another one, okay?”

Rhonda settled Laura Lee in on the couch under the afghan, with a plastic tumbler full of sangria. “Can I ask you something?” Rhonda asked. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“How intriguing. Ask away, love.”

“Did you and Daniel have an affair?”

Laura Lee smiled. “Who on earth told you that? Oh never mind, it’s not important. It’s ancient history. And for the record, yes: we were fucking like rabbits.”

Rhonda cringed.

“You’re not shocked, are you?”

“No. Not at all. I was just wondering if you might know where he went?”

“Honey, if I’d known that, I would have hightailed it after him. I wasin love . God, he was a wreck. But what a goddamnhandsome wreck.” Laura Lee sighed grandly. “I truly don’t know what happened. He was in so much goddamn trouble that summer. He
oweda lot of money to people. And he and Clem had some horrible blowup.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, Ronnie. He never told me. He was a broken man. I think that at the very end, I was the only thing he felt he really had. But evidently that wasn’t enough. Ain’t that just the story of my goddamn life?”

RHONDA DROVE BACKto Pat’s only to find she’d be working the phones alone. Pat and Warren had gone up to Burlington to hand out flyers and Pat was going to be the guest on a cable access show. Jim was in the garage and a greasy kid named Carl was running the register. Carl, Rhonda remembered, was the one who’d been working last Thursday, when someone picked Ernie up from school in Laura Lee’s VW.

Pat’s Mini Mart was dead. No phone calls, no one stopping in for gas. Rhonda was trying to figure out how to check the e-mail from the Find Ernie Web site on the laptop when Carl sauntered over, hitched up his voluminous jeans, and went to work opening a stick of beef jerky he’d helped himself to.

“Not much action, huh?” he said. Rhonda shook her head.

“Carl, I saw that you were working last Thursday.”

“Was I?”

“Your name’s on the schedule.”

He studied the beef jerky in his hand. “Guess I was here, then.” His eyes were red and glassy—he was wasted.

“Pat and Peter were working,” she reminded him. “Laura Lee’s Volkswagen was in the shop.”

He nodded. “Shit, that car was always in the shop. But,” he jabbed his beef jerky at her and narrowed his eyes shrewdly, “I know the exact day you’re talking about, ’cause that cop Crowley asked me about it.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, he wanted to know if I saw Peter take off in the VW.”

“And did you?”

He contemplated the beef jerky again. “Nah. I didn’t see shit. I was here by myself and we were slammed. Some Little League bus stopped off with like six hundred kids all paying for their fucking soda and candy bars separately with their little piles of change. Jee-sus.”

“Where was Pat?”

“Search me,” he shrugged.

“And Peter was in the garage?”

“Guess so. He comes and goes. I don’t always see him leaving and I can’t tell when he’s back there.” He ripped at the plastic on the beef jerky with his teeth. “It’s bullshit about Peter getting canned,” he said, spitting a corner of wrapper onto the floor.

“Yep,” she agreed. “It sure is.”

“And the cops riding his ass like they are…it’s not right. He didn’t take that girl.” He took a bite of the jerky and chewed hard.

“I know,” Rhonda said.

“Yeah, I know it, too,” he said, mouth full. “I know it for afact . I saw him that afternoon and it wasn’t a little girl he had with him.”

“You mean you saw him hiking?”

“Hiking? Not hardly. I saw him pulling into the Inn and Out Motel around three. He was driving his truck and he had this real hot girl with him. Dark hair, makeup. She looked like a model. It sure as shit wasn’t Tock. So I went to him a few days later, offered to go to the cops, tell them what I saw. Give him an alibi, you know? And you know what he said? It wasn’t him!” Carl put on a prissy, uptight voice: “You must be mistaken.” He shook his head.

“But there wasn’t no mistake. Now, if he wants to fuck around on Tock, more power to the dude, I could really give a shit, right?
But in the meantime, everyone thinks he did the crime of the fucking century, and he’s cool with that? Dude really wants to keep a secret.”

A customer came in then, went straight to the counter for cigarettes, and Carl went back to work, beef jerky stuck in his mouth like a cigar, leaving Rhonda dumbstruck.

THE INN AND OUTMotel was up on a hill overlooking the highway and had only a dozen rooms, one of them with an efficiency kitchen. The remains of the continental breakfast were spread out on a low table against the back wall of the small lobby, not looking terribly continental: a few doughnuts drawing flies, the dregs of a pot of coffee, and a couple of black-spotted bananas. The girl behind the desk looked about sixteen—seventeen, tops. The tips of her auburn hair were dyed black and she had a pierced nose. She was staring at the computer screen, clicking away with the mouse and muttering to herself. The girl didn’t look up when Rhonda cleared her throat.

“If you’re looking for room, we’re full up,” the girl said. As an afterthought, she added, “Sorry.”

“No, actually, I was hoping you could help me out with something,” Rhonda said.

The girl repressed a sigh, gave a few final clicks of the mouse, and turned to Rhonda.

“What?” she asked.

“See, a friend of mine was staying here a couple weeks back. An old girlfriend. We lost touch after high school…”

Rhonda improvised while the girl looked on, bored and unimpressed by her story. Her eyes kept going back to the computer screen.

“We were best friends in school, you know?”

The girl nodded.

“Then she goes off, goes to college, gets married, and we lose touch. She looked me up when she was back in town on June 5. We went out for drinks, talked about old times, old boyfriends, the crazy shit we used to do, you know?”

She had the girl’s attention now.

“But here’s the thing: she wrote down her name and address, but we were out drinking and I lost it. I could kick myself in the ass. I don’t even remember her married name. It kills me to think I’ve lost her all over again. Do you think you could just check and tell me what she goes by now?”

The girl nodded, hit some keys on the computer. “I’m not supposed to give out addresses, but I don’t see why I can’t give you her name. She was here on the fifth?”

“Yes, the fifth.”

“And what’s her first name?”

Shit. “Um, it’s Lisa, I mean she goes by Lisa, but that’s really her middle name. Her real first name is something kind of weird, I can never remember it.”

“No Lisa on the fifth, but I’ve got a C. Hook who checked in that day. From Seattle. That’s gotta be her, right? I actually remember, it was right before we got so busy—you know, from the kidnapping?—so I remember. She was here with a guy. I think this is his car in the computer: a Toyota with license number DKT 747.”

Peter’s truck. Rhonda nodded in what she hoped was a calm yet grateful manner.

C. Hook…Captain Hook?

Lizzy? Could it possibly have been Lizzy? Rhonda had that moving-underwater feeling.

“Cornelia,” Rhonda heard herself say. “Her real name’s Cornelia. After her grandmother.”

The girl shivered. “Ughh! I’d use my middle name, too.”

“So you were working that day?” Rhonda asked.

“I’m here most evenings. I’m not supposed to work mornings, but Jennifer called in with a migraine today.” The girl rolled her eyes. “I remember your friend. Nice lady. Real pretty. And such a sweet little girl.”

“Little girl?” the words knotted in Rhonda’s throat, came out sounding more like a croak.

“Yeah, she and the guy, they had a kid with them. You didn’t meet her?” The girl looked at Rhonda suspiciously.

Rhonda shook her head. “No, I…Lisa, she said she had a daughter, but the kid was off with her uncle when we went out for drinks. I forgot all about her, actually. I wish I’d had a chance to meet her. What did…um, what did the little girl look like?”

“Like her mom: dark hair and eyes. Maybe six…seven years old.”

JULY 4, 1993

YOU SMELL LIKEold piss,” Peter complained.

It was the night of Peter’s fourteenth birthday party, and he, Rhonda, Lizzy, and Tock had ridden their bikes to the lake to watch the fireworks. They arrived at the beach as it was getting dark, and waited. They lay on their backs in the sand, looking across the water toward the center of town, listening as the band played and people laughed and applauded on the other shore.

They were the only ones at the little beach called Loon’s Cove, which was really more of a boat launch, but it’s where they always went swimming. There were people out on the water in canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats. Motorboats weren’t allowed on the water after sundown.

“And you smell like Tock’s snatch, matey,” Lizzy said back in her pirate voice.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Peter asked. He looked
like he’d been slapped. He got up and moved down the beach, ordering Tock to come with him. Tock stayed where she was, next to Lizzy, who did reek of old pee and sweat. Rhonda was on the other side of Lizzy. A mosquito landed on her arm and Rhonda let it drink. She watched it get so fat with her blood that it could barely take off again.

“I think you smell good,” Tock said to Lizzy.

“Christ!” Peter yelled. “Are you going out with me or my sister?”

“Asshole,” Tock muttered, but she got up and went to him, lying down next to him in the sand.

The evening had started out so well. Everyone was getting along. Clem and Daniel had grilled steaks, Aggie and Justine made potato salad, corn on the cob, coleslaw. Then, there was Peter’s birthday cake, Aggie’s creation: a rectangle decorated in red, white, and blue, to look like the flag. And in the center, a ring of fourteen silver sparklers, not candles. They flashed and sizzled, leaving their ashes scattered on the frosting. The whole cake tasted like discharged ammunition.

Rhonda lay on the beach, thinking about the painted rocks out in the middle of the lake. Each winter, when the lake was still covered in clusters of ice fishing shacks—tiny villages of men with propane heaters and flasks of whiskey, watching for a tug on their lines—when snowmobilers raced from one side to the other, the Pike’s Crossing Volunteer Fire Department would tow a big rock spray-painted in Day-Glo colors, with the year marked on top, right out to the middle of the lake. Everyone paid a dollar to guess the date the rock would fall through in the spring. There was a different prize for the Ice Out contest each year: a month of free coffee and doughnuts from Pat’s Mini Mart, a dinner for four at the Lakeside Diner, a fly rod from B&D Sports.

Rhonda thought of all those luridly painted boulders at the
bottom of the lake, each carrying the weight of a whole year, the numbers sprayed across them. 1982, the year she was born. Below it, 1978, the year her father married Aggie. On top of them all was this year, 1993, the year ofPeter Pan . A pile of years sunk in the sand and muck, covered with algae, a playground for fish and snapping turtles.

THE FIREWORKS SEEMEDto end only minutes after they began. Toward the end (which Rhonda thought must be the middle), she took her eyes off the sky and turned to her left to see Peter and Tock kissing, their faces flashing green, blue, and red. Then she turned to her right, to see Lizzy counting the silver dollars from her little treasure bag and humming to herself, not even looking at the fireworks, which, by the time Rhonda looked back up, were over. It was hard to make out in the dark, but it seemed like Lizzy had more coins than last time, and she’d stacked them into two piles.

“Whatare you singing?” Rhonda asked.

Lizzy raised her voice and sang so Rhonda could hear: “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy ithurts …”

Rhonda looked at her friend in her piss-scented rumpled pirate clothes. “Right,” she said. Peter and Tock were already on their bikes.

“Are you guys coming, or what?” Peter asked.

They rode home in a pack, Tock making the turn to the trailer, saying “Tick tock!” back to them when they called out their good-nights. Lizzy pulled ahead, racing down the street, her pirate shirt billowing out behind her. She kept singing about how sexy she was, in her Captain Hook voice, laughing between verses. Soon, she was so far ahead of them that all they could see was a speck of white, like the tail of a deer, then nothing.

Rhonda was supposed to spend the night at Lizzy’s and now
she was dreading it. Who really wanted to spend the night with a smelly old pirate captain?

Peter and Rhonda took their time riding home from Nickel Lake. When they pulled into his driveway, Lizzy’s bike was there, resting against the garage. The lights in the house were all off, which meant everyone was still in Rhonda’s backyard, their parents no doubt fully plastered by then.

“I have something to show you,” Peter said, heading toward the garage.

“I bet,” said Rhonda and stayed put. How pitiful did he think she was? He came back and took her hand, pulling her to the old garage Daniel used as his workshop—the one Peter had nearly jumped from in the homemade wings just days ago. His grip was firm and Rhonda had no choice but to follow.