They all had one thing in common: David Egan was the center of their lives.
I found the half-smoked marijuana stick on the bottom of the box. The grass was fresh as I squeezed it. Egan must have stashed his contraband in here. I’d tried the stuff a number of times in Iowa City but I always had the same reaction I did to booze. It put me to sleep.
When I went downstairs, the ladies were on the living room couch watching a quiz show with Garry Moore. I carried the box over and showed them the half joint in the box. “You know what this is, ladies?”
Amy said, “Oh, Lord, sister, I told you he’d find out.”
“So you knew he was smoking marijuana?”
“We’re not addicts, Sam,” Amy said.
“We just tried it a few times.”
“Amy,” Emma said, “will you please be still?
Sam just wanted to know if we knew that David smoked it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “you mean you were smoking it, too?” I couldn’t help smiling. I tried to imagine these two elderly Irish ladies, mass-goers seven days a week, smoking a reefer.
“We just tried a few of his sticks was all,”
Emma said.
“He talked us into it, Sam.”
Emma said, “He was always talking us into things.
He’d get us a little tipsy once in a while.
Or he’d teach us some new dance step while he played some of his records. Or he’d get us to watch some naughty movie on Tv.”
“He said we had to know what was going on in the world. He got a big kick out of it. He wasn’t in a good mood all that often-especially near the end of his life-s we went along with it.”
“Seeing him happy made us happy,
Sam,” Emma said.
I looked at one face and then the other. I could see them now in the newspaper: Saintly old ladies arrested for smoking reefers.
I laughed. “Well, did you enjoy it?”
They glanced at each other.
“Sort of,” Emma said.
“Not that we’d ever do it again,” Amy said.
“It mostly made us hungry the three times we smoked it,” Emma said. “We made this huge chocolate cake.”
“It was the first lopsided cake Emma ever made. Marijuana kind of confuses you.”
“So,” Emma said, obviously wanting to change the subject. “Did you find anything else?”
“Letters and photos.”
“He sure kept a lot of them, didn’t he?” Emma said.
“Did either Molly or Rita come over here much?”
“Oh, sure,” Emma said. “All the time.
They were all good friends at one time.”
“That’s why Molly hated her so much, I think,” Amy said. “She felt betrayed, I guess. She used to bring Rita along when they were in ninth grade. Then David and Rita started sneaking off together. I felt so sorry for Molly.”
“I did, too,” Emma said, “up until she smashed all the windows out in their cars.”
“Molly smashed out windows?”
“Isn’t that something?” Amy said. “You’d never think anybody like her could do something like that. But she was heartbroken.” She spent a moment gazing at the past. “A long, long time ago, and I’m sure Emma will remember this, I went out with this Nabisco salesman from Davenport. He’d come to town once a week. I had a head full of silly notions. The silliest being that he would marry me someday. I eventually found out he was married.”
“You wonder why we ended up old maids, Sam? That’s why. I had a similar experience.
Mine wasn’t married. But he wasn’t true blue, either. Hers was 1939 and mine was 1941.
We decided then to stay with our parents and work at our little jobs-we both worked in dime stores back then-and never be hurt again.”
“So I could see why Molly did what she did, Sam,” Amy said.
“So could I,” Emma said and smiled at her sister. “And I’m supposed to be the “sensible” one. Molly probably didn’t think she was being very sensible but I’m sure she was having a good time smashing in those windows.”
Amy grinned. “Why, look at his face, sister. He’s shocked. First, he finds out that his favorite two old maids smoke marijuana. And now he has to listen to us condoning smashing in car windows.”
“I’ll never recover,” I said. And I half wondered if I would. People become fixed points in your life, like stars. But sometimes you find out that they aren’t as fixed as you thought. “You don’t chop up people and keep them in the basement, do you?”
“We’ll invite you over for a delicious “meat” dish some night,” Emma said deadpan.
“Emma!”
“I’d keep an eye on that sister of yours, Amy,” I said as I was leaving.
“Don’t worry, Sam, I do.”
“Don’t forget that special meat dinner of ours,” Emma said. Amy slapped playfully at her arm.
Twenty-one
Andrea Prescott’s mother didn’t sound so happy to hear from me this time. Apparently her daughter had been helping her bone up on how to be snotty on the phone. “I’m not sure I want her to talk to you.”
“It’s really important.”
“To you, maybe, Mr. McCain. But we’re respectable people and we don’t want to get dragged into anything having to do with that terrible David Egan.”
“I may not be respectable, Mrs.
Prescott, but I am trying to find the proof.”
“That was an awfully stuffy thing to say, don’t you think?”
I laughed. I sort of liked her again.
“Yeah, come to think of it it was. I mst’ve heard that in a movie or something.”
She sounded much friendlier. “A very bad movie, Mr. McCain.” Then, “You may speak to her for two minutes and no longer.”
“You going to run an egg timer?”
“I have a watch and believe it or not, I know how to tell time.” Then, “Here, honey.”
“I wish you’d quit bugging me,” the girl said to me.
“Nice to speak with you again, too, Andrea.”
“I told you what I know and Mom and Dad wish I hadn’t even told you that much.”
“Jack Coyle was seeing her again, wasn’t he? He broke it off for a long time but then he started seeing her again, didn’t he?”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“And the baby wasn’t David’s, it was Coyle’s, wasn’t it.”
“Good-bye, McCain.”
“Where did they meet? They couldn’t go to a motel. That’d be too dangerous. But they had some rendezvous spot, didn’t they?”
She hesitated. Then whispered. “Mom just went into the kitchen. She really doesn’t want me to get involved. But I’ll tell you this.
There’s a hunting cabin out by Scarecrow Rock.
Sara mentioned it once to me.” Hesitation.
“That’s what they were fighting about the night before she got killed. She was still in love with Coyle and it was driving David crazy.”
I heard footsteps and then her mother say, “Tell Mr. McCain that my egg timer just went off.”
“Thanks for the help, Andrea. I appreciate it.”
I guess if you lie flat on your back and look straight up at it and the moonlight behind it is just right and the night is cloudless and if you really use your imagination, you can kinda sorta perhaps see how this tall, slender piece of red limestone came to be called Scarecrow Rock. One night in high school when I was particularly brokenhearted over the beautiful Pamela Forrest, I lay on the ground and did exactly that. And in my drunken state of poetic heartbreak, lying right at the base of the damned thing, I could indeed kinda sorta see how it did, if you closed one eye, more or less look vaguely like a scarecrow. I have spent my time in this vale of tears wisely, wasting not a moment.
It didn’t look at all like a scarecrow tonight. A small forest. A moonlit mesa. A five-foot-tall piece of limestone jutting up from a limestone base almost blood-red in this light. A buck deer heard me, pausing momentarily on the mesa and then fleeing with the fragile grace of its kind.