“My what?”
“Parents.”
“Oh. Dead.”
I meant that to shock her. She didn’t say anything.
Then she smiled a genuine smile. The white teeth in her dark face, like the light blue eyes, made quite a contrast; this was one striking-looking woman.
“Why am I giving you a hard time?” she said. “You were always nice to me, Mal. It’s just that I wanted more than nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a monster crush on you, all through high school. When you finally asked me out, I almost died with joy. Then when the time came, I got nervous, and clammed up, and blew my chance.”
“We went out more than once, remember.”
“I blew it both times.”
“If you’d blown it both times,” I said, with just a hint of Groucho, “I’d have kept going out with you.”
“Mal!” she said, with a shocked smile, a teenager pretending to be more embarrassed than she was. “How can you say such a thing?”
“I’m just one crazy kid, I guess. Are you married, Jill?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
Now she really smiled. “Part of me wishes you weren’t kidding.”
“Part of me isn’t kidding,” I said. “Where do you want to have lunch?”
She felt like walking, so we strolled outside and wandered out into the sunny day and down the hill into Weed Park. The lagoon was at the bottom, and a mother and her two kids, a boy and a girl both under ten, were feeding bread crumbs to the ducks. We went up another hill, past some tennis courts, toward the swimming pool, where kids were splashing and hollering, making a pleasant racket. There was a hot dog stand across from the pool.
We ate our hot dogs with plenty of mustard and not much conversation, at a picnic table in a little area by a cannon on a bluff overlooking the river. We had the table to ourselves, though the sound of a baseball game — kids again — intruded, in a good-natured way. Yes, it was warm, but there was a breeze. A warm breeze, but a breeze. It was nice to be alive.
We were not ignoring each other by not speaking; we were just paying attention to our hot dogs. Priorities. I was carefully trying not to get any mustard on my black shirt, not wanting to look like a jerk in front of her; she was waging a similar battle where her white blouse was concerned. Success met us both, and we began talking, nibbling at potato chips and sipping cups of pop.
“I noticed you at Ginnie’s services this morning,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t know if I’d have agreed to see you.”
“Oh? Am I that bad a memory?”
Small laugh. “No, you’re just one of those frustrating high school memories that haunts a person till his or her dying day. Truth is, I’d have accepted your invitation, under about any conditions. I’ve been waiting for this for longer than I can remember.”
That puzzled me. “Waiting for what?”
Her chin crinkled as she smiled with some embarrassment. “I always wanted to show you what I’d become.”
“You mean beautiful? Or a very together, intelligent businesswoman?”
She smiled tightly and viewed me through slitted eyes. “All of that,” she said. “And more.”
“I’d welcome more.”
“You’re flirting with me, aren’t you, Mal?”
“Yeah, I seem to be. So?”
“So,” she said. “I seem to like it.”
We finished our pop and walked over by the cannon, which was pointed out toward the Mississippi, which looked blue but choppy today.
And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t holding my hand.
I peered into those cornflower eyes, an incongruous blue in so dark a face and wondered if in her expression I could read permission to kiss her. Her chin tilted up a little, and I took that to mean yes.
It was a short, sweet, moist little kiss that tasted slightly of mustard. It was also in the Top Ten Kisses of this or any generation.
“See what you missed?” she said, and turned and walked away.
I followed like a puppy. “How was I to know you were going to turn into Pat Benatar’s older, better-looking sister?”
“What you mean older, paleface?”
I caught up with her. “You’re my age, aren’t you? Thirty-four?”
“Thirty-three,” she said, “and holding.”
“Slow down.”
“Mal,” she said, not slowing down, “this has been pleasant, but I really have to get back. I only take a half-hour lunch.”
“Whoa. I didn’t call you just so you could have your revenge on me.”
She stopped, poked a tongue in her cheek. “My revenge?”
“Sure. You turned beautiful purely to spite me, right? Just to rub my face in it.”
“You wish,” she said, moving quickly on again, but smiling.
I reached for her arm. “Hold it, hold it, hold on!”
She held on; stood with hands on hips, with mock impatience. From the evil little smile she wasn’t quite suppressing, I knew she was getting a real kick out of making me jump through hoops. The hell of it was, I was getting a real kick out of jumping through.
Nonetheless, I said, “I love fencing with you, Jill, and I would be glad to spend a lot of time over the next hundred years or so doing just that. But I did call you for a serious reason. Not just old times.”
Her smile disappeared. “What, then?”
“Ginnie,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Ginnie.”
Her brow knit in lack of understanding. “She... killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Please. Sit down.” We were near yet another picnic table. We sat. She was next to me, this time, not across from me. I held her hand, platonically, as I explained that Sheriff Brennan had asked me to ask around a little, due to Ginnie’s “suicide” having some suspicious over- and undertones. Though I’d spent all day yesterday talking to people about Ginnie, I had confided this to none of them. Just Jill. Don’t ask me why.
“I don’t know how I can help you,” she said. “I hadn’t seen Ginnie since the reunion. In fact, we had a little falling out there. An argument.”
“I see.” I didn’t mention to Jill that I knew about the argument already; I didn’t want to make her feel like a suspect. Not so much because I wanted to shrewdly manipulate her into telling me things that she might otherwise withhold; but because I didn’t want to get on her bad side. I wanted her to like me. Sue me.
Jill’s brow furrowed deeper as she dug into her memories, some of them painful, apparently. “I moved back to Port City six months ago, and when I heard Ginnie was still in the area, I looked her up. We were good friends in high school... you didn’t know that, did you, Mal? You two weren’t as close in high school as you were when you were younger — sharing books, talking out under the stars... does it surprise you I know about that? You forget — I had that monster crush on you and I always was one to do my homework; I found out everything I could about you, and Ginnie was a good source. She used to say you were like brother and sister. She really loved you. I think it hurt her after you stopped talking to her that time she insulted you.”
“You know about that, too?”
“I don’t know what it was she said to you, but it must’ve been bad. She had a childish streak, always did. She would say or try anything, just for the hell of it, to see how it played. And sometimes she lost. You were a major loss for her, Mal.”
“So you got back in touch with her when you came back to town.”
“Yes. Yes. We were seeing each other every now and then over these last six months — usually we’d share lunch in Iowa City and gab about old times. And she’d kid me — she couldn’t believe I missed the ‘revolution.’”