Meredith and I were quiet. She made an embarrassed laugh, though there was nothing funny.
“Chippy’s so bogus, sometimes,” she said.
I waited. She laughed again, an extraneous laugh, something to punctuate the silence.
“You know about your mother?” I said.
“Dr. Faye says we all do and won’t admit it. Not about her being somebody else, but the other…”
I nodded.
“Daddy would be up in his room with the TV on,” Meredith said in her small flat voice. “Chip was at college. And she would come home; I could tell she’d been drinking. Her lipstick would be a little bit smeared, maybe, and her mouth would have that sort of red chapped look around it, the way it gets after people have been kissing. And I would say, `You’re having an affair.”‘
“And?”
“And she would say, `Don’t ask me that.‘ ”And I would say, `Don’t lie to me.“’
I leaned forward a little trying to hear her. She had her hands folded tightly in front of her on the tabletop and her eyes were fastened on them.
“And her eyes would get teary and she would shake her head. And she’d say, `Oh, Mere, you’re so young.‘ And she would shake her head and cry without, you know, boo-hooing, just talking with the tears running down her face, and she’d say something about `life is probably a lie,’ and then she’d put her arms around me and hug me and pat my hair and cry some more.”
“Hard on you.”
“When I came to school,” she said, “I was having trouble, you know, adjusting. And I talked with Jane Burgess, my advisor, and she got me an appointment with Dr. Faye.”
“He’s a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.” The word was almost nonexistent, squeezed out in the smallest of voices. Her Barbie doll face, devoid of character lines, showed no sign of the adult struggle she was waging. It remained placid, hidden behind the affectless makeup.
“Know anything about money?” I said.
“Sometimes they’d fight. She said if he couldn’t get money, she would. She knew where to get some.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He’d just go upstairs and turn on the television.”
“What would she say?”
“She’d go out.”
“You don’t know what her plan was? For money?”
“She always just said she knew where to get it.”
“How long did you live like this?”
“I don’t know. All the time, I guess. Dr. Faye says I didn’t buy the family myth.”
I put a hand out and patted her folded fists. She got very rigid when I did that, but she didn’t pull away.
“Stick with Dr. Faye,” I said. “I’ll work on the other stuff.”
Susan and I were in the dining room at The Orchards, Susan wearing tight black pants and a plaid jacket, her eyes clear, her makeup perfect.
“There’s a beard burn on your chin,” I said.
“Perhaps if you were to shave more carefully,” Susan said.
“You didn’t give me time,” I said. “Besides, there are many people who would consider it a badge of honor.”
“Name two,” Susan said.
“Don’t be so literal,” I said.
There were fresh rolls in the bread basket, and the waitress had promised to find me a piece of pie for breakfast. We were at a window by the terrace and the sun washed in across our linen tablecloth. I drank some coffee.
“It is a lot better,” I said, “to be you and me than to be most people.”
Susan smiled.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Especially better than being one of the Tripps.”
“What I don’t get is the girl, Meredith. How did she escape it? She’s very odd. She’s obviously in trouble. Most of the time she’s barely there at all. But she’s the one that will look at it, that doesn’t buy the family myth.”
“There’s too much you don’t know,” Susan said.
“I may have that printed on my business cards,” I said.
The waitress appeared with a wedge of blackberry pie, and a piece of cheddar cheese beside it.
“My father used to have mince pie for breakfast,” the waitress said, “almost every Sunday morning.”
“And sired beautiful daughters,” I said.
The waitress smiled and poured me some more coffee, and gave Susan a new pot of hot water, and went off. Susan watched me eat the pie. She was having All Bran for breakfast, and a cup of hot water with lemon.
“What will you do,” Susan said, “now that you’re fired?”
“I’ll probably go back down to Alton,” I said. “And ask around some more.”
“Will it be dangerous?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Most of the cat is out of the bag, by now. There’s not much reason to try and run me off.”
“You think Alton is where you’ll find out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where else to look.”
chapter thirty-seven
I WAS IN the detectives’ room at the Alton County Sheriff’s Department talking with the pretty good-looking female cop who’d harassed me before. Her name was Felicia Boudreau, and she was a detective second grade.
“I didn’t much like that deal,” she said. “But you’ve been a cop. Do a lot of stuff you don’t much like.”
“Why I’m no longer a cop,” I said.
She shrugged.
“You know who put us on you in the first place?”
I nodded.
“Senator Robert Stratton,” I said.
“From Massachusetts?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “At least I never voted for him.”
“What was his problem?” she said.
“I’m investigating a murder,” I said. “Stratton was sleeping with the victim.”
“Afraid you’d turn up his name?”
“Yeah.”
“So what,” she said. “That’s mostly what they do in the Senate, isn’t it? They get laid?”
“He wants to be President,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “Give him a fancier place to get laid in.”
“Who put the tail on me?” I said.
She shook her head. She was sitting with her feet on the desk, crossed at the ankle. It showed a long, smooth thigh line. She had on light-gray slacks over black boots, and a flowered blouse with big sleeves. Her holstered gun, some sort of 9mm, lay on the desk beside her purse. Everybody had nines now.
“You grow up here in Alton?” I said.
“Yes.”
“You know Olivia Nelson?”
“Jumper Jack’s girl,” Felicia said.
“Yes. Tell me about her.”
“What’s to tell. Rich kid, about ten years older than me. Father’s a town legend, hell, maybe a county legend. Big house, racehorses, good schools, servants, hunting dogs, bourbon and branch water.”
“What happened to her?”
Felicia grinned.
“Town scandal,” she said. “Went in the Peace Corps. Married some African prince with tribal scars on his face. Jumper never got over it.”
“How about her mother?” I said.
“Her mother?”
“Yeah, everyone talks about Jumper Jack. I never hear anything about her mother.”
“She had one,” Felicia said.
“Good to know,” I said.
“Sort of genteel, I guess you’d say. Sort of elegant woman who didn’t like the muddy dogs in her house, and hated it that a lot of the time her husband would have horse shit on his boots at supper.”
“That’s genteel,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s hard to describe. But she was always like someone who thought she should have been living in Paris, reading whoever they read in Paris.”
“Proust,” I said.
“Sure.”
“What happened to her?” I said.
“Committed suicide.”
“When?”
“I investigated it. Lemme see, nineteen… and eighty-seven, late in the year. Almost Christmas. I remember we were working overtime on the sucker just before the holidays.”
“1987,” I said.
“Yeah. That mean something to you?”
“Year the market crashed,” I said. “October 1987.”