What Strange Creatures (24 page)

I hesitated.

“Am I far off on that?” she asked.

“No . . . uh . . . I don’t think so.”

We were both silent. We both watched as a car marked
STUDENT DRIVER
moseyed into the parking lot and backed into a space, out of it, and into it again.

Once the car was gone, Colleen turned to me. “The business with Jenny’s brother . . . that had always disturbed me.”

I took a breath. “The part about Kyle Spicer, you mean?”

“Was that his name?” Colleen sounded more relaxed now. “I don’t remember.”

“Probably you mean Kyle,” I said.

Colleen shrugged. “Don didn’t share my feelings about it. And he doesn’t change his mind about things, generally.”

“What were
your
feelings about it?” I pulled out my knit glove and started picking one of the knots at the wrist.

“Well . . . that the things she said about Andrew and Jenny weren’t trustworthy, given what she said about the brother. I mean, you always have to be really careful with child witnesses.”

Susan Halliday’s lawyer had said the same thing in Kim’s interview. It seemed as if this was a theme Kim had been trying to build.

“Did you watch the footage before you gave it to her?” I asked.

Colleen seemed to notice my glove but didn’t say anything about it. “No, I didn’t.”

“Did Donald Wallace know you had this stuff?”

“No. It was temporarily stored at my place, and then it was forgotten.”

“Temporarily stored?” I shoved my glove back into my coat pocket and stomped my feet for warmth. “In a person’s private garage?”

Colleen’s gaze met mine. “It’s not as shocking as you probably want to think.”

It felt to me as though Colleen was confessing something with that statement. I wasn’t sure, however, what that something was.

“Would Donald Wallace be angry if he knew you gave this to Kim?” I asked.

“Most likely,” Colleen said, still watching me carefully. My hand fingered my glove in my pocket.

“Especially now,” I said softly.

“Especially now?” she looked puzzled. “Oh, I don’t know. These politicians are always in damage-control mode. I think Don could handle the likes of Kim.”

“But what if she released it?” I asked.

“Excuse me.
Released
it? From where? To whom?”

“Oh . . . like on YouTube.”

Colleen rolled her eyes. I could see she was more of my mother’s generation than my own with regard to YouTube. It wasn’t real life. It was all celebrity meltdowns and kittycats on treadmills.

“Kim thought parts of it would be controversial,” I added.

“Maybe she was right. But nothing Don couldn’t handle, I don’t think.”

“Are you sure?”

Colleen gave me a sad little smile. “I see you share Kim’s belief that people have the time to care.”

“So when you handed this stuff over to Kim, you weren’t afraid you’d get in trouble?”

“No. Given what happened to Andrew Abbott, I’ve often wondered how
none
of us ever ‘got in trouble.’ Maybe that’s one reason I sat on those tapes. It felt as if someone, someday, ought to come along and ask me about my role in the whole thing, small as it was. And when Kim came out of nowhere, it felt like a sort of reckoning. Something I was almost expecting. I thought it might help her forgive herself and get on with her life. It seemed like the least I could do.” She paused. “And screw the consequences.”

Despite her age, I had a feeling Colleen normally would’ve said “fuck the consequences” with anyone she’d known longer than our fifteen minutes. Or maybe I seemed prudish to her. It was a flattering notion, really.

“Has Donald Wallace contacted you since you gave that tape to Kim?” I asked.

“Tapes, not tape. It was a lot of footage.”

“So they were unedited?”

“That’s right.” Colleen gave me another smile, the meaning of which I couldn’t quite discern. “Unedited.”

“Was there ever an edited version? It seems like we’re talking about footage that never made it into the courtroom when Andrew Abbott was on trial.”

“It sure seems that way, doesn’t it?” Colleen patted me on the shoulder. I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be reassuring or condescending. “Listen,” she said, glancing away from me, “I had little kids then. What happened to Jenny Spicer terrified me.”

I nodded, unsure how to respond to this admission.

“So . . .
has
Wallace contacted you?” I asked.

“Why would he?”

“Because . . .” I wasn’t sure if I should tell her about Kim confronting Donald Wallace. “Because maybe he heard about her having the tapes?” I said. “Wouldn’t he be angry?”

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “I suppose he would. But given what happened to Andrew Abbott—given that we helped it happen to him—I figured Don could withstand a little discomfort, if it came to that.”

I couldn’t discern whether there was any vengeance in this statement—behind the rather matter-of-fact delivery.

“I see,” I said.

Colleen threw up her hands, signaling an end to our discussion. “I’m really sorry about your friend,” she said. “I hope they string up the boyfriend.”

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“I should get back to my desk. I’m expecting a call.”

She began to open the glass door to the realty office but then turned around and looked at me.

“Who has the tapes now, hon?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Her parents, maybe?” she suggested.

“I really don’t know.”

“That’s interesting,” Colleen said.

“It is,” I said.

She nodded and went back inside.

String up the boyfriend. String up the boyfriend
. It was all I could think of as I drove away from Raymond Realty. My hands were shaking so badly that I had to stay in the slow lane. I wanted some calming music, but my iPod was disconnected and I was too distressed to mess with it. I hit FM radio—always tuned, by default, to the classic rock station.

Janis Joplin was singing “Piece of My Heart.” I relaxed into the song for a moment, but then it made me remember something: Jeff and me doing homework in front of the TV, as was our habit in high school. There was some special on about John F. Kennedy’s presidency. When they got to the assassination, Jeff said, “I’ve seen this so many times, sometimes I could swear I remember it.”

And I knew exactly what he meant. Not about John F. Kennedy per se. For me it’s Woodstock. It’s Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sometimes, for a moment or two, I feel like I was there when it happened.

Maybe it was something about our parents. Maybe it was the kind of TV we watched. We both felt like we were spending our youth reconstituting Boomer memories. I remembered now the odd feeling that Jeff could articulate a thought I hadn’t quite realized I’d had till he said it.

Hitting the
OFF
button on the radio, I took the next exit and parked at a Mobil station. Once I’d stopped the engine, I tried to take a deep breath but felt like I was choking on it. I glanced into the backseat and wished I had Wayne there to talk to. Surely Wayne would understand on some level. Surely any of my animals would. They’d all been torn away from their siblings at some point, I had to assume.

I took out my phone and discovered a message from Zach:
DEPT. MEETING CANCELED. WORKING
@
STARBUCKS TILL
4:30.
CAN U MEET
?

Cute text shorthand from a professional English smarty-pants.

I’LL BE THERE IN
15, I texted back.

When I arrived at Starbucks, Zach was waiting for me at the best window table. His laptop was open, and a giant brown cookie sat on a plate beside it.

“I thought we could share it,” Zach said. “Do you like ginger molasses?”

“Of course,” I answered. I wasn’t hungry at all.

“This one even has baking soda in it, I’m pretty sure.”

“Bonus,” I said. “Are you working on your next book or what?”

“Yeah.” Zach sighed and closed his laptop.

“Can I ask what it’s about? Does it have a memoir element, like the last one?”

Zach sipped from his enormous cup of coffee. “It’s about . . . well, I guess the simple answer is that it’s about gambling, and gambling addiction to some extent. There are smaller sections about Atlantic City and the Connecticut casinos, but the majority of it is about Las Vegas. I mean, in a sense.”

“Have you been traveling to research it?” I asked.

“Yeah, some.” Zach broke a sliver from the cookie and pushed the rest toward me. “Last summer, and the January before that.”

“I take it that’s the personal part? Your travels?”

He shrugged. “Uh, sort of. The real personal part is about the year I spent in Vegas when I was twenty. Counting cards at the blackjack tables.”

“Really?”

“Yup,” he said. “I earned most of my first year’s college tuition that way. They want me to make a lot of that in the book. A corrupt Vegas coming-of-age. A twisted realization of the American dream or something. They kind of want it to be a big book. But I read parts of it that I’ve written lately and it doesn’t feel big enough somehow.”

I nodded, although I totally couldn’t relate.

“You know,” Zach continued, “I’m surprised you and I haven’t talked more about Margery Kempe. I’ve wondered if I should include her in one of my classes.”

“It
is
the first autobiography written in English.”

“Do you think it’s a very accurate autobiography?”

“Have you read the whole thing?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“Because aside from the accounts of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and some of the encounters with church authorities, a lot of it is quite humdrum. Petty disagreements with people in her town, getting kicked out of a church where the priest couldn’t stand her wailing, explaining why she was or wasn’t abstaining from meat or fasting on Fridays. I think most of it was accurate. If she was worried about its being a good yarn, she would’ve edited herself differently. You probably read the best parts, in an English-literature anthology, right?”

Zach nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I may be biased, but looking at it as a whole, I don’t think she took a great deal of license. The funny thing is, she was clearly trying to model herself after St. Bridget of Sweden and Mary of Oignies, two famous holy women of that era who had what Marge would’ve considered to be similar experiences—they were both married women who had visions of Christ, and Mary of Oignies also convinced her husband to allow her to swear a vow of chastity. But Marge doesn’t exaggerate her own life story enough for readers to take her as seriously as they might those women. She comes across very much like a wannabe.”

Zach nodded and motioned toward the front counter with his coffee mug. “Can I get you a coffee?”

“No thanks,” I said. “My nerves are pretty much shot this week.”

He put down his mug. “So you wanted to talk about that kid Anthony?”

“Well . . . yeah. But I have a pretty good lead to find Dustin, through one of his other friends. So it might not be as important as I thought yesterday.”

“I think you’re right that there are better ways to find Dustin. I doubt that Kim would’ve been able to find Anthony without his real name either.”

“Unless she asked
Dustin
about him.”

Zach looked perplexed. “Why would she ask Dustin about him once she’d
found
Dustin?”

“Well. Dustin says Anthony’s the only person he’s ever told everything about the night his father died. Maybe . . . well, I guess not.”

“What? Say.”

“You said Dustin seemed unstable. Maybe she wanted to see if what he told
her
matched up with what he told Anthony?” It sounded pretty lame now that I said it out loud. I’d simply wanted to look at Kim’s probable steps from every angle.

“Possible,” Zach said charitably.

“But not likely, probably. Can you tell me what you know about him?”

“Not much more than what’s in the book, quite honestly.”

“You know his name,” I hinted.

“Yeah.” Zach opened his laptop again. “I had to look it up in my notes.”

“You mentioned there were confidentiality issues.”

“Yeah. Most of the kids agreed to be interviewed only if their names were changed.”

I suppressed a sigh. “So . . . you can’t give me his name or anything?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll give it to you, under the circumstances. I think this business with Wallace’s old assistant is actually much more unsettling than her chasing after these kids, but just in case it’s of some use to you . . .” Zach lowered his voice. “His name was Michael Johnson. I’ve done some sniffing around online, but I can’t find him. I mean, with a name like that, it’s difficult. I’m almost certain he’d be in college now. His parents seemed pretty intense. They wouldn’t have it any other way. They were considering relocating the whole family once he finished his sentence. I wouldn’t be surprised if he even changed his name.”

“With parents like that, I’m surprised they agreed to let you put him in the book.”

“I changed some identifying stuff. Their jobs. The kid looked different from how I described him.” Zach reached his hand into his back jeans pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Stuff like that.”

“What did he actually look like?”

“Oh, he had black hair, and I said it was brown.” Zach unfolded the paper. “I said he was short when he was actually tall. Really basic stuff.”

I shrugged and made a mental note of this information: Black hair. Tall.

“You mentioned you had something else for me?” I said, sensing Zach was eager to show me what he’d found. “Something Kim wrote?”

“Yeah. Now, I don’t know if you read her piece on her friend Jenny or not—maybe you’ve been too busy.”

“No. I read it. Pretty well written, I thought. But sad.”

“Yeah. But I’d forgotten that one piece she wrote, she didn’t share on the site. You know, it comes up with a couple of students every semester. There’s something they want to write about but they don’t want everybody in the class reading it. Sometimes I give them a pass, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I tell them you shouldn’t write anything down you wouldn’t want the whole world to read. And have them pick a new topic. Depends on how nasty I’m feeling that day.”