Catherine (17 page)

“Why are you lurking in the shadows, Cath?” Dad took a swig from the beer bottle at
his feet.

“Just enjoying the music,” I said. “Don’t stop.”

But Dad got to his feet. “I have places to be,” he said. “Thought I’d check out that
guitar shop over on Bleecker. Have you ever been there?” That last question was directed
at Hence, and for a second I hoped Dad might invite him along. But Dad clapped a hand
on Hence’s shoulder and said, “Maybe we’ll check it out together when you’re not on
the clock.”

If Hence was disappointed the moment had passed, he didn’t let it show. Minutes after
Dad left the building, Q barged into the room and ordered Hence to scrub out the dishwasher.
Hence gave me a quick, meaningful look. Then he was gone.

As it turned out, I didn’t need Cooper’s help—or anyone else’s—to find Jackie’s studio.
And that was a good thing, because when the elevator deposited me on the first floor
of The Underground the next morning, the lights were out and the club was silent.
I called Coop’s name a couple of times, and when there was no answer, I went down
the creaky stairs into the basement, where light trickled in through the high windows.
Coop’s cot was made and he was gone; there was no way of knowing when he might come
back. Something about the echoing quiet of the building felt like a reproach. It was
easy to believe he’d gone out early to teach me a lesson.

The thought of navigating the subway alone made me sick to my stomach, but it also
made me queasy to know I’d said something to hurt Cooper’s feelings. I felt a twinge
when the words came back to me:
Hooking up with him is the last thing on my mind.
Okay, it hadn’t been a nice thing to say. But he didn’t seem interested in
me
in that way, either. So why had he stormed out and deserted me?

I considered my options. I could leave a note on Cooper’s nightstand, but what would
it say? You’d think I’d be better at apologizing, considering this wasn’t the first
time I’d lost a friend by blurting out the first thing that popped into my head. As
I searched for a scrap of paper and a pen, I struggled with the right wording. I tried
I’m sorry you took what I said the wrong way
, but I could hear my dad’s voice in my head, calling that a non-apology. But if I
wrote that I hadn’t meant what I’d said, would he take it to mean that I
did
want to hook up with him? That would make things even more complicated.

I’m sorry
, I finally scrawled on a scrap of paper ripped out of the previous day’s
Times
. I left it on Cooper’s pillow. Not much—but the best I could manage.

Before I could lose my resolve, I let myself out of The Underground and headed for
the subway, arms swinging, chin up, trying to look like someone who knew where she
was going. Someone who shouldn’t be messed with. And it worked: Nobody messed with
me. I followed the directions I’d gotten from the Internet, and it didn’t even take
me all that long to get to East Williamsburg.

I rang the buzzer to Jackie Gray’s redbrick warehouse-style building, thinking how
depressing it would be if I’d traveled all this way only to find she wasn’t in. To
my relief, a woman’s voice came over the intercom. “Hello?”

I hadn’t given any thought to how I would introduce myself. “Chelsea Price. Catherine
Eversole’s daughter.” I blurted the
words out. There was a long silence, then a buzz. Before Jackie could change her mind,
I slipped inside and climbed the narrow staircase to the third floor.

Shorter than she looked in her photo and dressed in a turquoise tunic over a floaty
black skirt, Jackie Gray waited in the hallway, her back pressed to the door of apartment
5E. “I don’t believe it,” she said when she saw me. And again, “I don’t believe it.”
She threw her arms around me. “You don’t mind if I hug you? I know I’m a stranger….”

“You’re not,” I said, because after reading about her in my mom’s journal, I felt
like she was a long-lost friend. We clung to each other for a moment, and then I followed
her into a huge loft with shimmering swaths of cloth hung from the ceiling to mark
out rooms. Sunshine fell in wide bars through the tall glass windows and onto the
gleaming wood floor. I noticed a scattering of children’s toys in the corner of the
room—a city built out of blocks and Matchbox cars.

“My husband’s at work, and my kids are at kindergarten,” Jackie explained. “Twins,
Zach and Zoe. I wish Cathy could have met them.” She invited me to sit on a long mauve
couch and started bombarding me with questions: Where was I living? How was my father?
What was I doing in New York? I filled her in, leaving out the part about my being
a runaway, trying—without actually lying—to make it sound like my dad knew I was on
a solo jaunt to Manhattan. It seemed to work, though when I mentioned Hence, and how
I was staying above The Underground, I saw her eyes narrow. She didn’t say anything,
so I continued my tale, ending with the purpose for my visit to her loft.

“Oh, Chelsea.” Jackie put a hand on my arm. “I’ve been trying to figure out for years
what could have happened to your mom.” Then she started talking. She had a deep, actressy
voice and long hands that fluttered as she spoke. I struggled to burn each detail
into my memory.

Mom and Jackie had met in fourth grade. Jackie had come to Idlewild Prep on scholarship,
and when Francesca Pasquale, the school’s queen bee, had picked on her, my mom had
threatened to punch Francesca out. “Not that Cathy knew the first thing about fighting,
but she wouldn’t have let a little detail like that stop her.” Jackie told me how
normal
Mom had been for the daughter of someone rich and important, how eagerly she’d lent
Jackie her nice clothes—even the diamond earrings she’d been given for her thirteenth
birthday. How when Mom left to tour Italy the summer she was fifteen she’d sent Jackie
daily postcards, promising that the two of them would travel together someday.

“Where did she go?” I prodded her. “What were her favorite places?”

The list was dauntingly long: Florence, Venice, Siena, Sorrento. It wasn’t as though
I could track her all over Italy. Absently fingering the beads of her orange necklace,
Jackie reminisced about high school, and before long she got around to talking about
Hence, and how his appearance on Mom’s doorstep had changed everything.

“After that, we weren’t as close. Cathy and Hence were attached at the lips most of
the time. It wasn’t the two of us anymore; it was the three of us, with me tagging
along, feeling resentful. It’s an old story, I guess.”

“You didn’t like Hence?”

“I was jealous. I wanted a boyfriend of my own, for one thing. But mostly I missed
having Cathy’s undivided attention.” Jackie’s cat, an elegant Siamese, had been watching
me warily from the doorway; now it rubbed against her legs, and she reached down to
scratch between its ears. “Hence was okay. He was very earnest—about his music, and
about Cathy.”

“Did she break up with him?” After seeing Hence’s bedroom shrine, I figured my mom
must have dumped him, but I was eager for the details.

“It was complicated,” Jackie said.

“Complicated?” I stretched out a hand toward the cat, but it hissed at me and bolted
from her lap and out of sight.

“Oh, you know. They grew up. Figured out they wanted different things. Had a few misunderstandings.
I don’t recall the details, to tell the truth. It was so long ago.” She sighed. “She
wanted to go to college, and he wanted to go on tour with that band of his, and neither
of them would back down. Then he got involved with some woman he met at a club. I
don’t remember her name.”

“Nina Bevilaqua?” I guessed.

“That sounds about right. If you ask me, I think he started seeing her to make your
mother jealous. And she did the same to him.” Jackie hesitated. “I don’t mean to imply
she didn’t love your father, Chelsea.”

“I wouldn’t call it love. She ditched him. And me.”

She leaned in like she might hug me again. “I’m so sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” If she started going all kind and motherly
on me, I might lose it. “Did she tell you why she left us when she did? I mean, she’d
been apart from Hence for years, and then all of a sudden she couldn’t stand her life
with us for another minute?”

“She called me when she got into town. She said Hence was flying in from England and
she had to be at The Underground when he got there.” Jackie looked down into her cupped
hands. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’d told her to go home to you
and your father. No—I
did
tell her that. I wish I’d worded it more strongly.”

“Would she have listened?”

“Probably not. But I still should have spoken my mind. Her thing with Hence… it wasn’t
healthy. Too intense, the pair of them. Cathy needed somebody like your dad—steady
and mild-tempered.”

“I guess
she
didn’t think so.”

“Your mom… she was pretty impulsive. It got her in trouble sometimes.”

So maybe I did inherit some of my mother’s personality after all. Figures it would
be her worst trait. “So she wasn’t perfect,” I said, more to myself than to Jackie.

Jackie chuckled. “No, honey,” she said gently. “She wasn’t. Who is?”

I wanted to let those words sink in, to hear about the ways in which my mom had been
an ordinary girl, like me. But my first priority had to be tracking her down. “Where
do you think she went?” I asked. “After she came to New York that last time. She came
to see you, right?”

“We talked on the phone. She wanted to get together, but she
never got back in touch. She mentioned having some business to attend to while she
waited for Hence. I’ve wondered a thousand times what she meant by ‘business.’ ” Jackie
jumped to her feet. “I have something to show you.”

At the back of her apartment, she held aside a gauzy curtain to let me into her studio.
Statues have always creeped me out, and hers were no exception: life-size stone figures
lurking in the dark, like storybook characters frozen by an evil curse. I maneuvered
through the room, careful not to brush against them.

In the room’s darkest corner, Jackie flipped a switch. There under the floodlights
gleamed my mother in black marble, her arms raised in alarm, her blank eyes wide with
what looked like fright, her long hair whipping behind her as though she were caught
in a hurricane. At the knees, she melted into a black mass, like she was being swallowed
by the earth or by a rising flood. It was more creepy than cool.

I caught Jackie’s eye. “You think something terrible happened to her.”

“I have no way of knowing,” she said. “I might be wrong. After she disappeared, she
was the only thing I could sculpt for months. I had this recurring dream—she was banging
on my door, asking for help. I would try to run to her, but I couldn’t get my legs
to move.” Her tone of voice changed. “Nobody just disappears for fourteen years, Chelsea.”

“They do if they don’t want to be found. Maybe she wanted to start a completely new
life. Maybe she got sick of waiting for Hence.” I touched the cold marble of my mother’s
bare arm. I’d been wondering which was worse, a dead mother or a still-living
one who had abandoned me without a backward glance, but Jackie’s stories had given
me the answer. If she was alive somewhere, I would find a way to forgive her. “One
of the detectives said Mom could still be hiding out in New York.” I explained about
the letter she’d sent me when she’d been staying at The Underground.

But Jackie shook her head. “The place was all boarded up. She couldn’t have been staying
there. I assumed she’d checked into a hotel. She called me from a pay phone on a street
corner in Midtown.”

“But what if she found a way into The Underground?” The suspicion I’d dismissed two
days ago was returning. “What if Hence met her there? Could he have…” I couldn’t bring
myself to say the word
murdered
. “He had a motive, right? Jealousy. And he has such a nasty temper….”

“The police investigated him, but they cleared him pretty quickly,” Jackie said. “He
was still in England, stranded at Heathrow, when Cathy got here. Some kind of bad
weather had grounded all the flights for a few days. Also, a transit strike slowed
him down, if memory serves. As soon as he got into town he called me, looking for
her.”

“Could the police have gotten it wrong?” I asked. “Could Hence have—”

“He’s not my favorite person in the world, but I can’t imagine him hurting a hair
on Catherine’s head.” Jackie shut her eyes, as if she was trying to look into the
past. “He worshipped her.”

At least I could still stay at the club without having to fear for my life. “Were
there other suspects?”

Jackie looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “Your father.”

“That’s insane.” My father was a lot of things—bumbling, hypocritical, distracted—but
there was no way he was a murderer.

“He was cleared, of course,” Jackie assured me. “A lot of missing women turn out to
be victims of domestic abuse, so the husband usually comes under suspicion. Especially
if the marriage was rocky.”