Punish Me with Kisses (17 page)

Penny looked at her. "You'll probably laugh."

"Why don't you try me and see?"

Suddenly she felt a great warmth for Cynthia, didn't feel nervous about appearing foolish anymore. "I want to find out what happened. You said it yourself a minute ago—it was probably one of those guys. Jared's got this whole scenario figured out, but he doesn't care about it anymore. He says I'm hung up and wasting my time, and I should just forget it and try to live with it and go on."

"Well, he may be right about that. Anyway, the police—"

"They never did a thing. I knew that but I didn't care because I thought my father had people investigating all this time. I just found out he didn't. He always thought it was Jared, and now he's furious because Jared's with me, and he's afraid his precious Chapman stock might go down." She shook her head. "When Jared and I got together again, I was so naive—I thought it was all over and we really could go on. But instead it just got worse. There's this undercurrent like you said. A girl at my office talks about it behind my back. Jared got fired from a play on account of Denver's column. I just can't stand it, being looked at like we're freaks, and meantime there's this guilty someone just walking around out there. It's like we're suffering all the time, and the only way out from under it is to find out what happened, which is probably just a hopeless task."

Cynthia was looking at her with compassion. Penny felt she understood.

"OK, Child," she said very softly, "tell me exactly what you're trying to do."

"Get together a list, the names of all those guys. I can't remember much about them now. I called you because I thought you might."

"Yeah." Cynthia shook her head. "I should, shouldn't I? I had intimate relations with most of them, I guess. But the truth is I was so grossed out by them I didn't even know their names half the time. As far as I was concerned they were just a sickening mass of hairy legs."

They talked a little more, Cynthia promised to come up with some names, and then Penny said it was time for her to leave. She was standing out on the corner of Bank and
Bleecker
about to hail a cab when she heard someone calling, looked up and saw Cynthia, head sticking out of her window, motioning for her to wait.

"Hey, don't go yet," she yelled. "I'm coming down."

Penny waited on the front stoop of the tenement. A minute later Cynthia appeared.

"Funny," she said, "I was just taking off my boots when I thought of something. Suzie kept a diary. Did you know about that?"

"No—"

"Well, it was something. Really lurid. More of a sex diary than anything else. She never let me look at it, but occasionally she read me little bits. It was a record of all her lovers and what she thought of them—really devastating stuff. She had all these crazy notes on the sizes of their cocks, the stupid things they said and did in bed. We used to lie on the waterbed giggling while she read. Then she'd laugh that horsey laugh of hers and tell me there was stuff about me in there, too. I begged her to let me read it, which, of course, was just what she wanted me to do. Then she'd snap the book shut and stick it under her ass where, she'd inform me, I wasn't to go nosing around.

"It was so sick. She said she wanted a record of all her 'transgressions.' Said she was going to publish it someday, when she was middle-aged and all her summer lovers were leading boring respectable lives. Told me how much she loathed Bar Harbor, and what a pleasure it would be to blow the place apart. 'Won't be able to get enough dynamite for that,' she told me, 'but this'll do it, right?' Then she'd pat the diary and stick it back under her ass."

"What happened to it?"

"Don't know. I thought it might have turned up after she was killed, and, to tell you the truth, I was a little worried since there was stuff about me in there, and I didn't particularly want our affair aired at Jared's trial. Maybe your parents found it and burned it up. It wasn't exactly the sort of treasure you'd save as a memento of a long lost loved daughter, you know."

"They didn't burn it. They never touched her things."

"It was black, leather-bound, unlined pages crowded with her tiny scrawl. She kept it hidden, of course. I remember looking for it a couple of times when she wasn't there. I wanted to read what she'd written about me, but she must have hid it pretty well." Cynthia paused, then shook her head. "I never found it anyway—"

W
hy do I worry sometimes I'll die very suddenly, be hit by a taxi crossing Fifth, be murdered by a madman in Central Park, then someone, Child perhaps, will stumble across this book and learn the secrets of my heart? Don't care. Couldn't give less of a shit. But then why do I leave out certain things? Why do I hide this journal every night? Compulsion? Busywork? Fear of what it tells me about myself? Surely this book is not the key to my secret garden. I don't own that key myself. The garden is surrounded by insurmountable walls, its vines and flowers mysterious, unknown—

T
he idea that there'd been a diary and that it might still exist someplace was so tantalizing she couldn't let it go. She thought about it as she taxied uptown from Cynthia's, tried to imagine where it might be and the sort of information it might contain. After Suzie died, she remembered, she'd gone through all her things, first in Maine, then in Greenwich, where she'd holed up with her mother after withdrawing from Wellesley College. She'd found a few letters, various papers of various kinds, but nothing like a diary, nothing personal at all.

Back at the apartment she detected a glimmer of interest when she told Jared what Cynthia had said. "Maybe the police found it," he suggested. "They must have combed the cottage pretty well."

"I don't think so. Remember how they bungled everything? If they'd found it they would have had to turn it over. Robinson would have had to show it to Schrader because it might have been exculpatory, with all those other guys' names and everything."

"Yeah, well maybe they just deep-sixed it, then." Already he was losing interest.

"I doubt it. Someone would have talked. There were reporters crawling all over the place. No, I don't think the police found it, and I don't think my parents did either. They stayed completely away from the
poolhouse
. I was the one finally who packed up all her stuff."

"Then maybe Cynthia was right," he said. "Maybe it was inside one of her speakers or someplace."

Penny sighed. "We got rid of everything—her clothes, the remnants of her waterbed, even her stereo. There was this ghoulish atmosphere, people coming around looking for souvenirs. My father asked me if I wanted anything, and when I said I didn't, he said pack it all up and have it hauled away and burned."

Jared shrugged. "In that case I guess it's gone."

"Yeah, guess so," she said.

But even after they went to bed she couldn't shake off the idea that somehow the diary might have survived. She tried to sleep but couldn't. She kept thinking of the house in Maine, its rooms, its grounds. If Suzie had kept the diary regularly, writing up all her lovers as Cynthia had said, then she would have had to keep it fairly nearby, so the cottage was the logical place.
But where
? She imagined her way around the room, and then, suddenly, a memory came to her, first vague, then sharp, like pulling an image into focus through a lens. She shook Jared awake. "I think I know where she hid it," she said.

When she and Suzie had been little, she told him, before they were allowed to go off bicycling by themselves, they'd often been stuck for weeks at a time on the estate, especially when their father was working in New York. Usually their mother took them up to Maine in the middle of June, and they stayed there through Labor Day, more or less ignored. Their father, obsessed with building up the business, flew up on occasional weekends and then took a brief vacation the last two weeks before they left. So they were stuck on the estate, and since there weren't any other kids around, and their mother rarely ventured out, they were forced to amuse themselves. They played all sorts of games, indoor games on foggy days (
Scrabble
, which she'd loved and Suzie had loathed, and
Monopoly
, which she'd hated and Suzie had adored), and on the good days outdoor games, hopscotch and tag, hide-and-seek and treasure hunts which became more and more elaborate as their mutual boredom increased. One time, she remembered, Suzie had hidden the "treasure," a paperweight from their father's desk, in a metal cookie box she'd painted aquamarine, then placed at the bottom of the pool.

"We had such fun with those treasure hunts," Penny said. "We'd work hours figuring out ways to stump each other, and Suzie's ways were always best. She was ingenious about hiding things. She had a mind for that, secret stashes and passwords and codes. One time she loosened a tile inside the cottage. The floor there is tiled, just like the area around the pool, and there're tiles, too, like baseboards, running along the bottoms of the walls. She loosened one of them, and then she hollowed out the space behind it, and fixed some white cement on the edges so you'd never know it had been touched. I never found that one, so finally she showed it to me. I was just thinking, since she was living in there, maybe that's where she kept the diary."

"Hmm," said Jared sleepily. "Could be, I guess."

"Let's go up there tomorrow and see."

"Oh, come on—"

"Why not?"

"You got to be kidding. Don't you have to go to work?"

She sat up, turned on the light. "I'll call in sick. We can rent a car. It'll be good to get out of town."

He was looking at her strangely. "Hey, babe—let's not get carried away."

"Look," she said, "let's
do
something for a change. Let's get off our asses, and see if the damn thing's there."

T
he next morning she made breakfast while he called around to rent-a-car agencies. He finally made an unlimited mileage twenty-four hour deal with an independent on East Eighty-Fifth. They stuffed a few things into a knapsack—extra sweatshirts because she knew it would be cold in Maine—picked up the car, and headed for the FDR Drive. It was nine o'clock when they crossed the
Triboro
Bridge. Traffic was light, and half an hour out on the New England Thruway, barely a mile, she realized, from her family's Greenwich house, Jared stopped at a gas station and she went to a phone booth to call into B&A.

"Any special reason you want me to tell him?"
MacAllister's
secretary asked.

"Just say it's a family thing. I'll work next weekend and make up the time."

They lunched on clam rolls at a Howard Johnson's a little south of Boston, and she thought:
We're in New England now; Maine is getting close
. She'd felt anxious in the car as she'd contemplated what it would be like returning to Bar Harbor, returning to the house. She hadn't been in Maine since the trial. She'd resolved never to stay in the old house again, never even to return to the town after Jared was released. There'd been too many lonely, unhappy summers there, and after the killing and all the blood she had never wanted to go back.

Now she wondered if they weren't on a fool's errand rushing up there this time of year on the off-chance they'd find Suzie's diary in that old hiding place behind the tiles. For a moment she thought about turning around, going back to New York, leaving the past alone. But then she knew that wasn't possible. She had to try. She didn't have any choice.

Jared fidgeted with the radio, tuned into stations as they traveled up the coast so that they listened to the same top forty songs over and over again, and the chatter of DJs of varying talent and panache. He drove steadily, tried to divert her sometimes, chattering about the scenery, the people in the other cars, in an attempt to break her mood. But she felt grim and answered him in monosyllables. Finally he turned to her. "I feel kind of silly about this. It's so—I don't know—Nancy Drew or something," he said.

"First it was the Hardy Boys. Now it's Nancy Drew. It isn't, Jared. It's us. We're doing it, and that makes it real."

T
hey crossed into Maine a little after two o'clock. They followed the coast road that ran along Penobscot Bay and then north toward Mount Desert Island. It was foggy and nearly dark when they reached Bar Harbor. She'd never been there off-season, had never seen the town in its pristine state. The harbor was nearly empty, no yachts, just a few fishing boats. Most of the stores were closed, everything was dark and gray, and she felt a deep chill from the wind, the real cold of a Maine winter soon to bury the streets and fields and forests in snow. As they wound their way along the curving coastal road that encompassed Acadia Park and then turned onto roads they'd once ridden together on his motorcycle, passing the old houses boarded up by owners now snug down in Philadelphia or New York, she began to shake with cold and dread.