“I know you’ve answered a lot of the same questions before. But it’s the first time I’ve asked them. We’re starting over. Assume I know nothing, okay? Because I don’t.”
“What’s to know? Julie got in her car on July third to drive to Baltimore and we never saw her again.”
“Yes, that’s according to the guy who worked for her.”
“The chef.” Said with some disdain. Well, given Andrea Norr’s tea, she probably didn’t put a lot of stock in preparing food.
“But when was the last time you saw her before that day?”
She twisted in her chair, like a little kid playing with a swivel seat, although this chair was rigid, with no swing to it. “It had been almost six months.”
“Six months? So you weren’t close.”
“We were. Once.”
“What happened?”
“We had… words.”
There it was again, another strange usage. We had words. Everyone has words. Sandy and Andrea Norr were having words right now. What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.
“About?”
“I thought she was stupid, expanding the inn, adding a restaurant. I didn’t think it was the smart thing to do.”
“Did you have an interest in the place? A financial interest?”
“No.”
“Was she trying to borrow money from you?”
“No.” She clearly knew where he was headed and decided to jump the gun. “We didn’t have any money issues between us. I just thought it was a bum idea. The inn was doing fine as a B and B. She was making things unnecessarily complicated for herself. She had always made things unnecessarily complicated for herself, getting into messes and running to me, as if I could help her. I couldn’t.”
“Messes like what?”
If only people knew how obvious their lies were, at least to him. Maybe then they wouldn’t bother with them. “Nothing important,” she said, and he knew it was at least somewhat important.
“Messes involving Felix.”
She shrugged. “He was married. That’s always a mess. A big stupid mess that everyone saw coming but her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Same old story. She fell in love with him. He had a wife. He had always had girlfriends at the club, but he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He had a wife, a steady girl, and more girls on the side. Julie thought she was so sophisticated, thought she knew what she was doing. Me, I never got the big attraction. He was short, nothing to look at it. Sure, he had money, and he bought her things, but so what?”
“Didn’t he set her up, after he left?”
“Who told you that?” Defensive. Okay, it was gossip, pure and simple, but gossip wasn’t always wrong. Someone had staked Julie Saxony.
“Did he or didn’t he?”
“He gave her this little coffee shop on Baltimore Street. That’s all, as far as I knew. But she was good at running things. She parlayed up.”
“That’s a big parlay, from a coffee shop on Baltimore Street to an inn on the verge of opening a restaurant.”
“Look, I know what I know. I can’t tell you what I don’t. We weren’t in each other’s pockets. I never asked her for money, she never asked me. We were brought up to take care of ourselves.”
“And where was that?”
“Aw, c’mon, you know this stuff. You told me you read the file. You probably know more than I do.”
“I have to pretend I don’t.”
Andrea Norr sighed.
“We were born in West Virginia. Most of our parents’ friends had the gumption to leave during World War II, get factory jobs in Baltimore. Ours didn’t, which tells you everything about them that you need to know. They’ve been dead for years, since before Julie disappeared. We left when we were teenagers. Two giddy girls with a VW bus and four suitcases. Three of them Julie’s. She was the pretty one. That was okay with me.”
Interesting that she provided that detail automatically, as if it were still uppermost in her mind. It wasn’t like he was going to ask. Wonder, but not ask.
“We rented a room on Biddle Street and got hired at Rexall Drugs. Clerks. One day, two guys walked in, took one look at Julie and said she should be a dancer. A dancer. We may have been hicks from West Virginia, but it was 1972, we knew the score. One of the guys introduced her to his friend Felix and that was that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Love at first sight. I guess I should be grateful it was a respectable strip joint, where the girls wore pasties and G-strings, because Julie would have done whatever Felix asked her to. She was a goner. I never got it. Then-I never got men.”
“You married, though?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t Norr your married name?”
“No, it’s our given name. I’m a happy spinster. Saxony was something that Felix hung on her. It wasn’t enough to give her that stupid stage name, Juliet Romeo. He had to rechristen her completely. She made it legal, down at the courthouse. Although-well, she was prone to that. Trying to make herself into what she thought Felix wanted.”
He was stuck on that tantalizing although, wished she had followed it through. “Yeah? What else did she do for Felix?”
A vague hand, waving at nonexistent flies. “Silly stuff. Not important. You know how women are.”
No, he knew how one woman was, Mary. And, he supposed, Nabby, but he didn’t think Nabby’s behavior reflected on anyone but Nabby.
“Did your sister know where Felix was after he left?”
“No.” Fast, emphatic.
“Did she know anything about the circumstances of his flight?”
“No.” Too fast, too emphatic.
“You know the statute of limitations is long past on that.” He should check to see if that was true. Might be important in dealing with people as he went forward. “And your sister’s dead. She can’t get in trouble for something she might have done in 1976.”
“Not everyone is dead.”
“You know there was always this rumor about Felix, how he escaped in a horse trailer.”
“Rumors are just that. Rumors. It’s not my fault I work as a trainer, or that my sister dated that crook.”
He let it drop. He didn’t want her as his antagonist, not at this stage.
“Ever strike you as weird, the timing?”
“Timing?”
“Your sister disappeared almost ten years to the day. You think he came back for her?”
“To kill her? Even I don’t hold Felix in such low esteem.”
“No. But maybe someone else was looking for Felix. Someone who followed her that day-I mean, in 1986-in hopes of finding him.”
“It was the government that wanted Felix. I don’t have much affection for the federal government, but I don’t think they kill people.”
“Other people might have wanted him, too. Like the bail bondsman, for example.”
Andrea laughed. “You didn’t do all your homework, Mr. Sanchez. Remember those guys who walked into Rexall? One of them was Tubby Schroeder, Felix’s best friend. He wrote the bond, he took the loss.”
He did know. That is, he knew that Tubby Schroeder was a bail bondsman, a big fat guy, everybody’s friend. Sandy knew that Tubby had written the bond for Felix and been awfully philosophical about his best friend skipping out on him. Everyone assumed Felix had made good on the hundred thousand in cash. Sandy had thrown out the fact about the bond to see what she knew.
“Thank you for your time,” he said. “And the tea.”
“You barely touched it.”
“I don’t eat between meals,” he said. “Nothing but water. Doctor’s orders.”
“Well, why didn’t you say something?”
“I forgot.”
Fifteen minutes later, Sandy was at Chesapeake House, enjoying an early lunch at Roy Rogers. En route, he had passed the exit to Havre de Grace. The two sisters couldn’t have lived more than ten miles apart, yet they hadn’t seen each other for six months when Julie disappeared. Interesting. Nothing more at this point. Just another line in the geometry he was building, a distance between two points.