She hesitated.
“Wherever you’re going,” Walter added. “Door-to-door service. Truck’s air-conditioning is so cold, you’ll need a sweater.”
It was cold. He saw what it did to her breasts when she got in. They were large for such a short girl, not that he let his eyes linger. He looked only once.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“The Rite Aid,” she said. “I want to buy some makeup, but my mother says I can’t. It’s my money, isn’t it?”
“You don’t need makeup.” He meant it as a compliment, yet she flushed, balled up her fists as if to fight him. “I mean, you’re lucky, you look good without it, but you’re right. It’s your money, you should be able to do with it what you want.” He couldn’t quite stop himself. Maybe that was the problem, that he just couldn’t stop talking soon enough. “Although you shouldn’t buy anything illegal with it, drugs or whatever. Just say no.”
She rolled her eyes. She was a girl, not as old as he had thought when he first picked her up. Maybe no more than fifteen, but she clearly considered herself more sophisticated than Walter. Was that it? Was that why girls like this were forever eeling away from him? There were some girls-plain, slow witted-who didn’t mind his company, but Walter couldn’t get interested in just anybody. He was good-looking. He should be with someone as good-looking or better-looking. Everyone knew that was how it worked. A beautiful woman could go with the ugliest man on the planet, but a man had to date above himself, or be shamed. He deserved someone special.
“I smoke pot,” this girl announced.
He didn’t believe her. “You like it?”
The question seemed to catch her off guard, as if that wasn’t the point, liking it or not liking it. “Yeah,” she said, as if it were a guess. She probably didn’t know the difference between average or median either, although Walter did now. He had looked it up. He always looked things up when he didn’t know them. No one had to be stupid. Stupid was a choice. He was forever learning things. He knew all the US state capitals and he was working on world capitals.
“What’s it like?” he asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No, it’s not something I’ve gotten around to.”
“You wanna find out? I got some in my purse.”
He didn’t, actually, but he wanted to stay in this girl’s company a while longer.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Kelly. With a y, but I’m thinking of changing it to an i. There are three Kellys in my class at school. What’s your name?”
“Walt.” He had never called himself that, but why not try it out, change his luck. Within the hour, they were in a little cove off the river, and she was trying to show him how to smoke pot. She said he was doing it wrong, but he was doing it wrong on purpose, wanting to keep his wits about him. He didn’t believe in drugs or alcohol, but if he needed to pretend in order to spend time with this girl, Kelly, Kelli, whatever, he would. He found himself wishing she wore a two-piece. A one-piece, that wasn’t going to come off easily, it wasn’t something you could slip a girl out of, bit by bit. He knew he had to take it slow, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. She was lying on her stomach, on a long flat rock. He blew on her neck, thinking of Claude’s brush. She wrinkled her nose, as if a bug had landed on her. He tried to give her a back rub, but she shrugged his hand off. “No,” she said. His hand returned, not to her shoulder blades this time, but between her legs. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t.” But she wasn’t quite as bossy and superior now. He tried to be sweet, kiss her neck, stroke her hair. He knew from magazines that foreplay was important to girls. But things just didn’t go the way they were supposed to. It was only later, when she was crying, that his mind began to catalog the possible outcomes-she would be his girlfriend, she would tell her parents, she would tell other girls, she might even tell the police, she was never going to stop crying-that he realized he had only one option.
“HOW’D YOU GET SCRATCHED UP, Walter?” his father asked at dinner that night.
“Stopped to relieve myself on the side of the road, walked right into one of those prickly bushes along the highway,” he said. If someone had seen his truck parked out on Route 118, that would explain it.
“Sure took you a long time to find that fan belt.”
“Like I said, I had to go all the way to Hagerstown, and they didn’t have one either. I ordered it.”
“Coulda sworn Pep Boys in Martinsburg said they had what I wanted in stock.”
“Nope, wrong size. People in those places, they’re just ignorant. No work ethic, no interest in customer service.”
That was all his father needed, and he was off to the races about the death of the small businessman.
By the weekend, the local news was full of stories about the missing girl, Kelly Pratt. She’d never get a chance to change her name now, Walter realized. A week went by, a month, a season, a year. He thought of her as Kelly Brat. He had showed her who was boss. It could have been nice, she shouldn’t have taken him down to the river to smoke pot, the pot was what screwed him up, he probably wouldn’t have been her first, and her just fourteen, according to the news stories. Slut. Druggie. The very fact that they never found her, that he didn’t get caught, that the police never came to speak to him, that no one came forward to say that they had seen Walter Bowman’s pickup parked on the hill above the river that day, that they never even searched near that part of the river-all those things proved he had been right to do what he did.
He found himself taking long drives on his days off, looking for other girls who might need a ride.
3
“HA-HA,” PETER MARVELED. “He actually wrote ‘ha-ha.’
“If it were an e-mail, if he had access to a computer, he probably would have put an emoticon there, the one that uses a semicolon to wink at you.”
Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.
Peter had arrived home at seven-thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an unexpected plot turn, her disinclination to wear her hair short, although the style suited her better than this not-long, not-short, not-anything haircut. Come to think of it, they hadn’t used the code for some time, not since Peter returned to the States earlier this year and began house hunting on weekends.
“The Victorian that you like, it’s near-well, one county over-from where Point of Rocks is,” he had told her via Skype. “It’s about an hour out of the city, but on the commuter line and it’s really pretty up there. Lots of people do it. But I thought-”
“You thought it would bother me. Because of the summer I was fifteen.” They were meeting each other’s eyes, yet not meeting each other’s eyes. She could never quite master that part of Skype.
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure it would, but if you’re willing to commute, what about Roaring Springs, where I grew up?”
“The trains on that line don’t run late enough, hon. And we’d have to have two cars, because I’d have to drive to the station.”