The man stared at them. He wiped out another glass and placed it on a high shelf, his eyes never leaving Brian’s. “Sure,” he said, his voice calm now and searing. “Everybody did.”
“Did she come in here?” Dennis went on.
“She was just a kid when she left Bell City. Nineteen or twenty. This wasn’t her kind of place.”
“Where did you know her from?” asked Dennis.
“I knew her aunt and uncle. They lived out on Upper Stretch Road.”
The bartender was being difficult. He was stubbing up, closing them out of some information that Mary could see he had. He was leery of them, she knew, suspicious of these questions. Just the name, the word itself-Polly-must have sent a charge through the residents of Bell City.
“What kind of girl was she?” Dennis tried.
“Nice,” the man said. “Sweet girl. Got involved in some stuff, you know. We all did. Made mistakes. Regretted them. Lived to see another day. It happens. Otherwise, she was just an average teenager.”
“Stuff?” asked Brian.
He was still looking at them, his gaze almost hot. He shook his head, then; laughed a little. The lights behind the bar were severe, probably on a mandate from the county because bad light led to fake identification scandals that a place like the Wobble Inn surely couldn’t afford. The man’s face was lit harshly in the glow.
He knows something, Mary thought. It’s right there. If I could just get him to open up. If I could just-
“Marco sent us,” she said, smiling at the man.
“Marco?”
“We saw him earlier today,” Brian put in, moving his stool in closer so that the bartender could refill his soda.
“Damn, Marco knows more about it than I do,” the owner said, spritzering the drink into Brian’s glass.
“But Marco’s not here,” Mary said coolly.
The bartender blinked. His eyes finally disengaged from them, and he took a step away from the bar. “Look,” he said, “everything I know is just secondhand. I got it all from Marco, anyway, so I’m not sure why he sent you to me. But if you’re really interested, there’s some stuff that will make your toes curl.”
“Such as?” Dennis asked.
“Such as: the girl was abandoned by her real mother and father. She was staying with the aunt and uncle because she had nowhere else to go. And these were good people, like I said, but they didn’t know nothin’ about raising a girl. They wanted to do what was best for Polly, but she got wild. She fell in with the Creeps. Dom Frederick started seeing Polly-and now, keep in mind, Dom was thirty-four and Polly was all of seventeen-and he was a member of that gang. Of course, that’s how she met Star, Deanna’s daddy.”
“What kind of a relationship did she have with Star?” asked Brian, urging the man forward, his foot now going crazy beneath the bar.
“Different people said different things, you know? Marco and Star went to school together down in Cale, and so Marco knew those folks pretty well. Star was fresh on the girl, I do know that. He came in here one night about that time talking sweet about her. We’d just opened. This was right before Deanna”-Mary began to see that people in these parts labeled periods of time according to that divide, Before Deanna and After Deanna-“and nobody knew a thing about what was going to happen. We were all just ignorant of it, you know, like the man standing on the bridge watching the storm coming on, and then in a few minutes lightning strikes and zap! The guy’s hit. He’s charred because he didn’t have enough sense to get off the bridge, poor bastard.” The bartender paused in his story, looked back toward the men playing cards. They had stopped to listen to him. He was commanding attention now. He had the floor and he didn’t intend to give it up. “Marco says that Star was seeing Polly’s aunt, but who knows. Who knows why he came around here. I never did really believe that he and Polly…you know. This guy could have had any woman in Martin County. What business would he have with this little girl?”
“Some people say Polly looked like his daughter,” Brian said.
“If by ‘looked like’ you mean that they were both teenage girls, then ‘some people’ are right. That’s about the extent of it. I saw Polly all the time around Bell, and I saw pictures of Deanna of course on the news when it happened, and there wasn’t much of a resemblance. The police fucked that one up. They said he confessed to it and everything. I never believed that. If he confessed to it, then why didn’t they arrest him?”
“Maybe the confession wasn’t about Deanna,” Dennis offered.
“You mean that New Mexico bullshit?” the bartender said. “No, there’s something more to this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist”-though, clearly, he was-“but come on. Any idiot can see that Polly was not Deanna Ward.”
He stopped talking and poured himself a beer. His hands were shaking a little, and it was obvious that the story had rattled him. The men in the back resumed their game. No, thought Mary. There’s more. There’s something that he left out.
“That’s about all I know,” he said, his voice scratchy now and nearly gone.
“Thank you,” Dennis said.
They turned to leave. As they were walking out of the bar, Mary whispered to Brian, “There’s more to find here. He didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. The guy-Marco-said that we would get our answers from this guy.”
“That’s all he’s got, Mary,” Brian said. They reached the door and opened it. The world outside had the thick and heavy smell of rain. As Marco had said, she could hear the nearby echo of eighteen-wheelers surging down I-64. The trees dripped, and somewhere nearby a creek rushed noisily down through the hollow on its way toward the Thatch River.
A sudden thought came to Mary. She stopped at the door, one foot outside.
“Do you have the book?” she asked Brian. He removed it from his pocket, just as he had done for Dennis that day on the Tau roof.
She returned to the bar and got the bartender’s attention. “Yeah?” he asked, clearly disturbed to see her again.
“Have you ever seen this man?” Mary asked, holding the book into the bar light so the bartender could see Leonard Williams on the back flap.
The man’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen him. That’s Polly’s uncle.”
33
It was late when they made it back onto Highway 72. It began to rain again, harder even than before, and when Dennis could not see the road any longer he pulled into a Days Inn, the students deciding to stay overnight in Cale. They pooled together all the money in their pockets, sixty-five dollars exactly, and got the cheapest room at the hotel.
There was an uncomfortable moment when Brian and Mary were in the room together and Dennis, who had sprinted to be the first in the bathroom, was changing. They were all wet from their run from the car, and Brian and Mary looked at each other warily, their clothes dripping on the carpet. Finally, when it was clear that Dennis was showering, they turned their backs on each other and got undressed, putting on some golf clothes that Dennis had in the trunk of the Lexus. Mary wore a long PING oxford and her underwear, and before Brian could turn around she dove into the bed so that he could not see her. Brian had put on a pair of bright-colored, checkered shorts, and he stood by the mirror shirtless, looking at himself. Mary had to laugh at the sight of it, and she lost it when Dennis appeared from the bathroom wearing pants in an identical pattern. He and Brian climbed into bed together as if they were twins, regarding each other suspiciously and creating a boundary down the middle of the bed with pillows so their skin couldn’t touch during the night.