Stalker (9780307823557) (6 page)

“I’ve made my home with Roy ever since your mother died.”

“Don’t you know he’s glad to have you here?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know how that woman will feel about it if he’s fool enough to ask her to marry him. Lots of women don’t want another woman in their house.”

Jennifer hugged her grandmother. “Don’t worry about it now,” she said. “Everything will work out all right.”

But as she finished the dinner preparations and changed into a dress in Gloria’s honor, she wondered how she could say that. People spent a lot of time telling
each other that things would work out, that everything would be okay. How did they know? How did anyone know? You had to make things come out, make them happen, not just wait and hope for the best.

Why didn’t Lucas Maldonaldo call?

She started as her father came into the kitchen. Gloria trailed him like a bright banner with her ruffled fuchsia blouse, hennaed hair, and wide smile outlined in crimson.

“Everything looks nice, hon,” her father said. He didn’t look tired tonight. He looked like a boy waiting for Santa to show up.

From the corners of her eyes Jennifer saw Grannie peering around the kitchen doorway. “You can thank Grannie for the flower arrangement,” she said. “She really knows how to make things look pretty.”

As Gloria exclaimed over the flowers, Jennifer heard a satisfied snort from the direction of the doorway.

“Can I help you dish up?” Gloria asked.

“Sure,” Jennifer said, handing her a bowl and a spoon. “Would you put the rice in here?”

“Humph!” muttered a voice from the other side of the door. “She’ll be doin’ that soon enough.”

“Yes, Grannie, it’s soon enough to dish up,” Jennifer said quickly, trying to override Grannie’s words. She clattered the food into bowls and kept up a running conversation while the bowls were being put on the kitchen table. She shepherded her grandmother into a chair at the table and sank into her own, noting that nothing had dimmed Gloria’s glow or her father’s bewildered joy.

The telephone rang just as Jennifer picked up her fork.

“I’ll get it,” she said, sliding from her chair so quickly that she nearly knocked it over.

“If it’s Mark, tell him to call back after you eat,” Grannie said, but Jennifer knew it wouldn’t be Mark.

“Hello?” It was hard to breathe as the voice she had hoped for answered.

“This is Lucas Maldonaldo, Jennifer.”

“Yes?” she asked and could only repeat, “Yes? Yes?”

“I talked to Bobbie,” he said.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s a little scared, which is natural, and she isn’t too happy about being jailed.”

“Did you—?”

“Give me a chance,” he said. “Calm down and listen.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been hoping—”

“I said, ‘listen.’ ”

There was a pause that stretched like a rubber band to its limit. Jennifer closed her eyes in agony.

“I talked not only to Bobbie but to a couple of detectives who are assigned to the case. They’re coming down on Bobbie because it looks like a natural. But there’s a chance you might be right, that someone else killed Bobbie’s mother. I told them so, and they think I’m off base, but they’ll cooperate with us in giving us access to whatever information we’ll need from the department.”

“Oh!” Jennifer shouted. “Then you’ll help Bobbie!”

“
We’ll
help Bobbie,” he said. “There’s a lot of hard work involved in any investigation, and this will be a particularly tough one. We haven’t got much to go on. I’m going to need you to work with me.”

“Of course I will! Anything!”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Early tomorrow! I’ll be at your house right after breakfast!”

“No, you won’t,” he said. “You’ll go to school. Come by when your classes let out. If I’m not there, sit on the porch and wait for me.”

“I could skip school.”

“No,” he said. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.” He added, “You might learn something at school besides what you’ll learn in your classes.”

“You mean about Bobbie and her mother? But what?”

“That’s up to you to find out,” he said. “Ask questions, and above all, pay attention to the answers. Listen. Remember it’s often not what someone says, but how he says it.”

“Well—” she said, not too sure what he meant.

“We’ll talk more about it tomorrow,” he said. “I hope you’re a good student, because you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“I’ll work hard,” she said. “And thank you, Mr. Maldonaldo! Thank you!”

“By the way,” he said, “they’ve finished the autopsy, so Stella Trax’s funeral is set for Friday morning at ten. Will you be there?”

“Oh,” she said. “The funeral. Day after tomorrow. I hadn’t thought about a funeral. Of course. Yes, I’ll be there. Will Bobbie—will they let Bobbie come?”

“Her lawyer thinks the judge will give permission.”

“Bobbie has a lawyer?”

“Everyone gets a lawyer. It’s in the Constitution.”

“Is he good?”

“He’s a young fellow, not long out of law school. I don’t know much else about him.”

“Oh, Mr. Maldonaldo! He has to be good!”

“Jennifer, if we do our work well, it won’t make any difference if he is or he isn’t. The courtroom’s not like a Perry Mason TV show. The lawyer doesn’t suddenly come up with a guilty party. The information is collected before the trial ever begins, and that’s where we’ll come in. If we find the evidence we want, there won’t be a trial.” He paused. “Get back to your dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good-bye,” she said. She continued to stare at the phone even after the connection had been broken. How did he know she’d been eating dinner? She heard the clatter of forks against plates at the table behind her and smiled. Apparently he had learned to listen. That’s something she’d have to learn, too.

She sat at the table, tucked her paper napkin back on her lap, and shared her smile with the others. She realized that they hadn’t said a word while she had been on the telephone. Now they’d want an explanation. I’m learning to listen, even if it’s in retrospect, she thought, and she told them about the work she’d do with Lucas Maldonaldo.

“It’s like in a movie!” Gloria said. She took a deep breath, and her ruffles rippled like a wavelet swelling and breaking against the shore.

“I wouldn’t want you to do anything dangerous, hon.” Her father’s eyebrows dipped into a frown.

“It won’t be dangerous, Dad. I’ll be gathering information.”

“That’s what they do on those TV shows,” Grannie said. “But those girl private eyes are always getting shot at or kidnapped or something.”

“Nobody’s going to shoot at me,” Jennifer said, although she realized she knew nothing about what being an investigator would be like.

“I’m not sure about all this,” her father said. “I don’t know if I should let you get involved.”

Jennifer sat up straight. “Dad,” she said. “I’m going to help Bobbie. I’m not asking if I can do it. I’ve got to do it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well.” His voice was raspy, and he coughed a couple of times to clear his throat. “I guess it’s
all right. I guess that policeman fellow will take care of you.”

Jennifer picked up her fork and knife and attacked the now cold chicken leg that lay under a pale orange mound of congealing sauce. Gloria began talking about a spy movie she had seen, with Dad nodding enthusiastically, as though his neck were a loose spring, and Grannie poking in sharp-tipped comments whenever Gloria paused for breath.

But Jennifer’s thoughts were like stragglers that had finally decided to form a neat line. And the line led to one thought she hadn’t faced yet. She and Mr. Maldonaldo were going to look for a killer. Whoever he was, he had killed Stella Trax. If he thought they were going to find him out, wouldn’t it be logical that he’d try to kill again?

I can’t stop worrying about it. The stuff. Maybe Stella didn’t have any, and that’s why I couldn’t find it. It’s obvious her kid didn’t have it, or it would have made the news.

Dumb. It’s dumb to worry about it.

This headache is bad. It makes everything worse. That’s why I won’t worry. Of course Stella had it.

But where is it?

There was nothing remarkable about Thursday morning, which was so ordinary it was horrifying. The sky was the same brilliant blue, its clouds handpainted a little too brightly white, the sun warm against Jennifer’s back. The constant breeze from the south carried the heavy fragrance of overblown flowers from the red and pink oleanders that lined Ocean Drive, and people went about their business as though this were just another day.

As though nobody cared.

“
I
care,” Jennifer said aloud, and she ached at having to go to school, to follow a routine that seemed to deny that anything more important had taken place.

She shifted her books in her arms as she approached the high school, and took a long breath. This was a waste of time. It was stupid! How could she accomplish anything here?

A gangly boy, who had begun too quickly to grow into his years, stood under one of the cottonwood trees. As
Jennifer approached, he stepped onto the walkway to join her.

“Hi,” he said in a voice that split into two registers. His pimpled face reddened, and he stared at the ground as he tried again. “I don’t think you know me. I’m a freshman. I—just—well, I’ve seen you at Bobbie’s house, because I live near her, and—”

Jennifer wanted to shake him away, to hurry off where she wouldn’t have to hear what he had to say, but she remembered she was here to listen; so she stopped on the walkway and waited.

But he gulped as though there was nothing more to say. Finally he stammered, “I guess I needed to say to somebody that I’m sorry about what happened with Bobbie and her mother. You’re her friend, so I—”

Again he stopped in midsentence. Jennifer wanted to cry out that what he felt didn’t matter, and run—just run away from all this. But she took a deep breath and asked, “You know Bobbie?”

“Kinda, I guess. We said hello a couple of times. We weren’t in the same grade.”

“She didn’t kill her mother.”

“The newspapers said she did.”

“I don’t care what they said!” Jennifer made herself calm down and added, “Did you know her mother?”

“No. Just saw her around. And my mom went to her for haircuts a couple of times when Mrs. Trax used to work at LaSalon, down on Chaparral.”

Jennifer reached out and grabbed his arm, surprised at the sinews that tightened under her fingers. “Were you around on Tuesday? Did you see anything that might help Bobbie?”

“Take it easy,” he said, his eyes widening. “I was playing basketball in the gym.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I came home and found out from my mom about the murder.” He took a step backward, shrugging out of her grip. “Look, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I thought you’d be—well, I didn’t know you’d get mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” Jennifer said, but he had turned and headed toward the school in long lopes, like a frightened ostrich.

“This is just the beginning,” she whispered to herself. Swallowing hard, to keep the tears from coming, Jennifer went to her first class.

During the day people stared at her, and as she passed through the hallways she left a wake of murmurs.

She was? Did you know? Really? Her friend. Did you hear? Her mother.

Some of the people she knew came close, hunching into her space, concern in their eyes as they said, “Good God! When I heard about it I nearly died! Jen, I’m sorry!”

“Bobbie didn’t do it,” Jennifer repeated over and over as the sun-shadows shifted from east to west. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Jen, I didn’t know Bobbie very well. None of us did.”

“Look, Jen, I saw her every day in class, but that’s about it.”

“She really didn’t want to be friends. You know that, Jennifer.”

“I honestly think,” Alicia said just after the last class ended, “that you were her only friend, Jen. Face it, Bobbie is kind of—well—different.
You
may think she wouldn’t kill her very own mother, but
we
don’t know that. We don’t know anything about her at all!”

So as soon as school was out, Jennifer, struggling under
a load of hurt too heavy to bear, dumped her books onto the Maldonaldo coffee table and her problems onto Lucas Maldonaldo himself.

“It doesn’t matter what anyone believes,” he said. “What matters is what you’ve found out today.”

“Nothing,” she said. She rubbed furiously at her eyes, as though she could grind the tears to a stop.

“What questions did you ask?” He shifted in his chair and stuffed a small pillow behind the curve in his back.

“Questions?” She looked up, startled. “There weren’t many to ask. Nobody really knew Bobbie. Alicia said I was Bobbie’s only friend, and she was right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well—yes. I mean, if Bobbie had any other friends I would have known them, wouldn’t I?”

“Would you?”

“They would have been at school.”

“Oh?”

Jennifer jumped to her feet and walked to the end of the living room and back. “Are you just trying to make me angry?”

“I’m trying to make you think.”

“I am thinking.”

“No, you’re not. You’re reacting. Now, sit down.”

Jennifer immediately plopped back on the sofa. She fished into her handbag, pulled out a wrinkled tissue, and blew her nose.

“Start with the first person you met and talked to today. Think.”

“Okay, okay. The first person was a guy who stopped to talk to me about Bobbie.”

“Good. What was his name?”

“His name?” Jennifer shook her head. “Oh, no! I didn’t ask him. He just said he was a neighbor of Bobbie’s,
and he didn’t know her well, but he said his mother knew Bobbie’s mother.”

“Why did he talk to you?”

“He said he just wanted to tell someone he was sorry about Bobbie and her mother.”

“Will you see him again at school?”

“I don’t know. He’s a freshman. That’s all I know about him, except that he plays basketball.”

“And he lives in Bobbie’s neighborhood. Those are two facts that will help you find him in case we need to talk to him again.”