Last Seen Leaving (14 page)

“As if you know anything about her!” Tammy fired back, rings clacking against her own glass as she picked it up with her free hand, amber liquid nearly spilling over the side when she thrust it into the air at her husband. “You never even tried! She was just an object to you. Neither one of you made any effort—
I
had to do all the work.” She turned to me then, her eyes almost manic. “
I
did all the work. Every peace that had to be brokered in this house fell on my shoulders, and not just the ones with January, either. Ask him about his criminal of a son! They're
bribing
him to stay out of trouble while the campaign is on, and he's
still
nearly impossible to control—”

“Tammy, calm down,” Mr. Walker ordered through gritted teeth.

“Jonathan's never even here,” Mrs. Walker continued acidly, still keeping her focus on me, even if her words were obviously for her husband's benefit. “Ask him where he was the night my baby didn't come home! The night I
needed
him! The night I spent all alone, sick to my stomach, until the sun came up and my daughter was missing and I finally had to call the police all by myself!”

“I have already apologized a thousand times for that!” Mr. Walker slammed his glass back down on the desk, making framed photos, campaign buttons, and other detritus jump with the impact. “I had drinks with some boosters and couldn't drive home, so I got a hotel room! I won't be made to feel guilty about it anymore!”

“That or anything else,” Tammy retorted cryptically. Before Mr. Walker could respond, though, Eddie intervened.

Covering the phone with his hand, the campaign manager stated, “John, we really need to put together an official statement about this. Fritz is practically drowning in calls right now.”

“I already gave a statement to the press this afternoon,” Mr. Walker snapped.

“It's not good enough.” Eddie was impatient. “You know what these situations are like; they need more, something substantial.”

“For fuck's sake, Eddie!” Mr. Walker finally exploded. “They
just
found her clothes two hours ago! Can't we take a day to process before we start planning press conferences?”

“Not a week out from the election, you can't,” Eddie replied bluntly. “You disappear now and voters start to wonder whether you can handle the pressures of the job.”

“Yes, you certainly don't want to disappoint your voters, Jonathan,” Tammy intoned frigidly, one finger circling the rim of her glass. Her husband eyeballed her for a moment before seizing his campaign manager by the shoulder and dragging him out of the room.

“Not in here, at the very least,” he muttered brusquely. As the pair disappeared around the curving staircases, their dress shoes clacking loudly against the marble tiles, Tammy tossed back the remnants of her drink.

The footsteps died out immediately, and I suspected the men had disappeared into the carpeted library that opened off the foyer on the other side of the stairs; perforce, however, my attentions were now occupied by January's mother. Returning her tumbler to the coffee table with almost delicate motions, she placed her hand on the side of my face and smiled with muzzy fondness. “You're such a good boy, Flynn. You made my daughter happy.”

It wasn't true, and I knew it. Guiltily, I mumbled, “I tried, Mrs. Walker.”

“Call me Tammy,” she implored. I always felt weird calling adults by their first names, but January's mother had insisted upon it at first, saying it made her feel young. Then, after she'd married Mr. Walker, she suddenly had to be called “Mrs. Walker” all the time, and I wondered what
that
had made her feel. Important, I suspect. Her rings were cold and hard against my cheek as she said, “You were about the only thing that still made her happy, you know.”

Shame muddled my insides, and I looked down. “I think … I'm sure she—”

“Do you remember that night you came over to the condo and the three of us made cookies?” Tammy apparently hadn't heard me. “It was before you two were ‘official,' but even back then you were all she talked about.” She gave me a sly, maternal smile, and I felt myself blush. “We were all out of eggs, and January suggested we use peanut butter instead, remember? And everything stuck together, and the cookies came out like charcoal briquettes, and I nearly burned that damned condo to the ground when the third batch burst into flames in the oven, but you kept cracking all those jokes and I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life.” Tears welled in her eyes and she swiped at them with a long, slim finger. “January was walking two feet off the ground for a week after that, she was so charmed by you.”

“I remember that night.” I smiled in spite of myself.

“Life was such a mess back then,” Tammy said in a dreamy, agonized way. “It was a constant battle every day, trying to keep us afloat, trying to keep us
alive
. Jonathan was the best thing that happened to either of us in a long, long time.” She gave me an apologetic look. “He really is a good man—an important man. He's done so much for us. I just don't understand; how could she be happy when things were so awful, and so … angry and destructive when they were finally going just right?”

January and her mother had competing ideas of perfection, of course, but I didn't think it was the right time to explain that to her. So, instead, I offered, “Sometimes it's just hard to deal when your life changes so much overnight. Even if it seems like it's changing for the better.”

“I'm glad she had you, Flynn.” Tammy beamed at me, her expression pitiful, and she clasped both my hands in hers again. “I'm so glad she had you, at least.”

Again, it was like a knife in my gut. I loved January—honestly loved her—but I hadn't made her happy. And it hadn't been the kind of love she'd wanted, or the kind she'd had the right to expect from a boyfriend. There had been so much unsaid between us, and the words were an albatross around my neck as I looked at the expression on her mother's face. Finally, I said, “I'm the lucky one.”

“Tell me about her,” Tammy begged suddenly, her voice a broken whisper. “Tell me about January.”

Tell me about California, okay?

I took a breath. “For our two-month anniversary, we planned out this big ‘perfect date' evening.” It was a story Tammy had to have heard a million times before, but she listened quietly anyway, a poignant look of grateful expectation on her face as I continued. “We rented a limo, and we made reservations at this fancy restaurant on Main Street, and January's favorite indie band—the Disasters—was doing a show at this place downtown. We got all dressed up, like for homecoming or something, and we couldn't stop talking about how awesome it was gonna be. And then the limo didn't show up.

“I called them, like, a zillion times, but the phone just rang and rang and no one ever answered, and eventually we realized that they weren't coming, and we ended up having to walk six blocks to the bus stop—all dressed up—and take this stinky, death-trap bus downtown.” Tammy chuckled at the image, and I did, too, remembering the crazy old woman with facial warts and filthy hair who'd sat across from us the entire trip, telling January,
You look just like I did when I was your age!
“Anyway, by the time we got there, we were so late the restaurant had given away our table, and we figured maybe we'd just eat at the bar where the concert was going to be … only we didn't even get
in
to the concert because our fake—um, I mean, because we looked too young.

“So, our so-called perfect date is completely falling apart, and I'm starting to get really upset, but January won't give up. She leads me to this dirty little parking lot in back of the bar, where we find the band in the middle of unloading for their show. Without even stopping to think, January walks right up to them, introduces herself, and tells them that they're her favorite band in the world, and it's her birthday, but they won't let us into the show—and then she tells them about the limo and the bus and dinner and by the time she's done talking, they're pulling out acoustic guitars, and they do January's favorite song for us right there on the spot.

“Afterward, we went and got burgers and fries, and we took it all to the top of this parking structure and just had a fast-food picnic in our fancy clothes and watched the stars.” Aside from a little awestruck blabber about how awesome it was that the Disasters had given us a private concert, we had eaten in a peaceful silence, listening to traffic and music and conversation drifting up from the street below. “She told me that it really had been the perfect date.” I smiled. “That's what she was like, though. She could take the biggest catastrophe
ever
and somehow turn it into the perfect night.”

“
Yes
,” Tammy whispered, her eyes squeezed shut, a tear sliding down the pale skin of her cheek. Her lips trembled as she clung to my hands. “
Yes.
”

 

TWELVE

TAMMY ASKED ME,
sweetly and fuzzily, to refill her drink. By the time I turned back from the desk, however, she had sagged against the sofa cushions, her mouth open, with faint rattling sounds emitting from the back of her throat. Trying not to wake her, I set the tumbler down on the coffee table and stole into the central hallway, ready to go home at last.

I didn't make it past the library. The double doors slightly ajar, I could hear the voices of Eddie and Mr. Walker coming from within. I didn't intend to eavesdrop, but just as I reached the spot between the polished newel posts of the twin staircases, I heard January's name and it stopped me in my tracks. Through the slivered opening, I could see the back of one leather armchair and the mullioned panes of a window that looked out on the front of the house. It was Eddie who was speaking.

“—don't care if you don't want to hear it, John. You don't have a choice. And do you have any idea what kind of a golden opportunity this is?”

“I don't think—”

“Just listen to me!” The campaign manager was vehement. “We put together a proposal—we call it January's Law, or something like that—and we go public with it immediately. Right now, you don't just have the attention of Michigan's voters, you have the hearts of the entire
country.
You cannot
buy
that kind of PR, Jonathan!”

“Eddie…” Mr. Walker's low voice carried the edge of a warning.

“No! You hired me to do a job for you, and I'm doing it,” Eddie persevered. “
This
is your calling card;
this
is what will get you into the senate! You propose harsher sentencing laws for any violent crime where the victim is a minor, mandatory jail time for first offenders, blah blah, whatever. No one will dare go against you on it. Nobody wants to be tarred with the ‘soft on crime' label, and
now
they'd also get lambasted for not caring about
kids
, about
your daughter
. Even that asshole Torkelson will have to support you!” Andrew Torkelson was Mr. Walker's opponent in the race, and a relentless critic of the man's views. “If we could just figure out a way to pin it on that scrawny little pothead boyfriend of hers, we could throw a Reefer Madness angle in there, too, get the anti-drug crowd running to the polls next Tuesday. You'd practically be guaranteed a second term.”

There was a silence, and my scalp prickled all over, goose bumps rising between my shoulders. I couldn't tell if that was sarcasm or not, and I suddenly wasn't sure if my alibi of studying at home the night January went missing was strong enough to withstand the irresistible force of the Walker campaign's financial influence. Then, with a disgusted undertone, Mr. Walker snarled, “What would it say about me as a father, as a
man
, if I capitalize on this for political gain, Eddie? I'll look like a monster! We can't treat this like just another platform issue.”

“Well, we have to,” the other man contradicted unapologetically. “
You're
going to have to, because in your line of work, everything is either a setback or an opportunity—and the only difference is whether you want the job or not. You're the candidate with the dead kid, now, John. That's the brass fucking ring!” He actually laughed. “No one has to know what an obnoxious brat she was when she was alive.”

There was another long silence before Mr. Walker spoke again, his voice low and measured. “Eddie, I'm going to do you the favor of pretending that I didn't hear you say that—and, as far as our official position is concerned, no body has been found, and January is still only missing.”

“Oh, come off it, Jonathan. It's just you and me here, and you're not paying me to blow sunshine up your ass. Everybody knows what blood-soaked clothes and
duct tape
means, and the whole Parent in Denial routine has short legs. That little bitch was your candidacy's Achilles' heel, a scandal waiting to happen, but now? She's your golden ticket to D.C. You can hate me for saying this if you want to, but you know I'm right. This shit is the best damn thing that has ever happened to your campaign, hands down.”

There was another long pause, and I suspected—hoped, really—that Mr. Walker was about to throw the man through the window. But instead, I heard the sigh of air escaping through cushion seams as someone settled into one of the leather armchairs, and then Jonathan's voice again, bland and weary. “Let's start researching current sentencing laws and set up a press conference for the morning. There's no time to put a functional proposal together, but we can draft a position at least. Tell Jeff and Rachel to get a speech ready for me to look over by tonight.”