The skull was gone from Kyle’s laboratory. There would be a private burial of Sabrina Jackson’s remains in Easton, Pennsylvania. Now it was known that the young woman was dead, the investigation into her disappearance would intensify. In time, Kyle didn’t doubt, there would be an arrest.
Kyle Cassity! Congratulations.
Amazing, that work you do.
Good time to retire, eh? Quit while you’re ahead.
There was no longer mandatory retirement at the university. He would never retire as a sculptor, an artist. And he could continue working indefinitely for the State of New Jersey since he was a freelance consultant, not an employee subject to the state’s retirement laws. These protests that rose in him he didn’t utter.
He’d ceased playing the new CDs. His office and his laboratory were very quiet. A pulse beat sullenly in his head. Disappointed! For Sabrina Jackson wasn’t the one he’d sought.
“Officer. Come in.”
The face of Sabrina Jackson’s mother was as tight as a sausage in its casing. She made an effort to smile, like a sick woman trying to be upbeat but wanting you to know she was trying for your sake. In her dull eager voice she greeted Kyle Cassity, and she would persist in calling him “Officer,” though he’d explained to her that he wasn’t a police officer, just a private citizen who’d helped with the investigation. He was the man who’d drawn the composite sketch of her daughter that she and other relatives of the missing girl had identified.
Strictly speaking, of course, this wasn’t true. Kyle hadn’t drawn a sketch of Sabrina Jackson but of a fictitious girl. He’d given life to the skull in his keeping, not to Sabrina Jackson, of whom he’d never heard. But such metaphysical subtleties would have been lost on the forlorn Mrs. Jackson, who was staring at Kyle as if, though he’d just reminded her, she couldn’t recall why he’d come, who exactly he was. A plainclothes officer with the Easton police, or somebody from New Jersey?
Gently, Kyle reminded her: the drawing of Sabrina? That had appeared on TV, in papers? On the Internet, worldwide?
“Yes. That was it. That picture.” Mrs. Jackson spoke slowly, as if each word were a hurtful pebble in her throat. Her small warm bloodshot eyes, crowded inside the fatty ridges of her face, were fixed upon him with a desperate urgency. “When we saw that picture on the TV... we knew.”
Kyle murmured an apology. He was being made to feel responsible for something. His oblong shaved head had never felt so exposed and so vulnerable, veins throbbing with heat.
“Mrs. Jackson, I wish that things could have turned out differently.”
“She always did the wildest things, more than once I’d given up on her, I’d get so damn pissed with her, but she’d land on her feet, you know? Like a cat. That Sabrina! She’s the only one of the kids, counting even her two brothers, made us worry so.” Oddly, Mrs. Jackson was smiling. She was vexed at her daughter but clearly somewhat proud of her too. “She had a good heart, though, Officer. Sabrina could be the sweetest girl when she made the effort. Like the time, it was Mother’s Day, I was pissed as hell because I knew, I just knew, not a one of them was going to call—”
Strange and disconcerting it was to Kyle, the mother of the dead girl was so young: no more than forty-five. A bloated-looking little woman with a coarse ruddy face, in slacks and a floral-print shirt and flip-flops on her pudgy bare feet, hobbled with a mother’s grief like an extra layer of fat. Technically, she was young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.
Well! All the world, it seemed, was getting to be young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.
“I’d love to see photographs of Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve just come to pay my respects.”
“Oh, I’ve got ’em! They’re all ready to be seen. Everybody’s been over here wanting to see them. I mean, not just the family and Sabrina’s friends — you wouldn’t believe all the friends that girl has from just high school alone — but the TV people, newspaper reporters. There’s been more people through here, Officer, in the last ten, twelve days than in all of our life until now.”
“I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Jackson. I don’t mean to disturb you.”
“Oh, no! It’s got to be done, I guess.”
The phone rang several times while Mrs. Jackson was showing Kyle a cascade of snapshots crammed into a family album, but the fleshy little woman, seated on a sofa, made no effort to answer it. Even unmoving on the sofa, she was inclined to breathlessness, panting. “Those calls can go onto voice mail. I use that all the time now. See, I don’t know who’s gonna call anymore. Used to be, it’d be just somebody I could predict, like out of ten people in the world, or one of those damn solicitors I just hang up on, but now, could be anybody almost. People call here saying they might know who’s the guilty son of a bitch did that to Sabrina, but I tell them call the police, see? Call the police, not me. I’m not the police.”
Mrs. Jackson spoke vehemently. Her body exuded an odor of intense excited emotion. Hesitantly Kyle leaned toward her, frowning at the snapshots. Some were old Polaroids, faded. Others were creased and dog-eared. In family photos of years ago it wasn’t immediately obvious which girl was Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson had to point her out. Kyle saw a brattish-looking teenager, hands on her hips and grinning at the camera. As a young adolescent she’d had bad skin, which must have been hard on her, granting even her high spirits and energy. In some of the close-ups, Kyle saw an almost attractive girl, warm, hopeful, appealing in her openness. Hey: look at me! Love me. He wanted to love her. He wanted not to be disappointed in her. Mrs. Jackson sighed heavily. “People say those drawings looked just like Sabrina, that’s how they recognized her, y’know, and I guess I can see it, but not really. If you’re the mother you see different things. Sabrina was never pretty-pretty like in the drawings, she’d have laughed like hell to see ’em. It’s like somebody took Sabrina’s face and did a makeover, like cosmetic surgery, y’know? What Sabrina wanted, she’d talk about sort of joking but serious, was, what is it, ‘chin injection’? ‘Implant’?” Ruefully, Mrs. Jackson was stroking her chin, receding like her daughter’s.
Kyle said, as if encouraging, “Sabrina was very attractive. She didn’t need cosmetic surgery. Girls say things like that. I have a daughter, and when she was growing up... You can’t take what they say seriously.”
“That’s true, Officer. You can’t.”
“Sabrina had personality. You can see that, Mrs. Jackson, in all her pictures.”
“Oh, Christ! Did she ever.”
Mrs. Jackson winced as if, amid the loose, scattered snapshots in the album, her fingers had encountered something sharp.
For some time they continued examining the snapshots. Kyle supposed that the grief-stricken mother was seeing her lost daughter anew, and in some way alive, through a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have said why looking at the snapshots had come to seem so crucial to him. For days he’d been planning this visit, summoning his courage to call Mrs. Jackson.
Mrs. Jackson said, showing him a tinted matte graduation photo of Sabrina in a white cap and gown, wagging her fingers and grinning at the camera, “High school was Sabrina’s happy time. She was so, so popular. She should’ve gone right to college, instead of what she did do, she’d be alive now.” Abruptly then Mrs. Jackson’s mood shifted, she began to complain bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe! People saying the crudest things about Sabrina. People you’d think would be her old friends, and teachers at the school, calling her ‘wild,’ ‘unpredictable.’ Like all my daughter did was hang out in bars. Go out with married men.” Mrs. Jackson’s ruddy skin darkened with indignation. Half-moons of sweat showed beneath her arms. She said, panting, “If the police had let it alone, it’d be better, almost. We reported her missing back in May. Over the summer, it was like everybody’d say, ‘Where’s Sabrina, where’s she gone to now?’ A bunch of us drove to Atlantic City and asked around, but nobody’d seen her, it’s a big place, people coming and going all the time, and the cops kept saying, “Your daughter is an adult’ and crap like that, like it was Sabrina’s own decision to disappear. They listened to her tape and came to that conclusion. It wasn’t even a ‘missing persons’ case. So we got to thinking maybe Sabrina was just traveling with this man friend of hers. The rumor got to be, this guy had money like Donald Trump. He was a high-stakes gambler. They’d have gotten bored with Atlantic City and gone to Vegas. Maybe they’d driven down into Mexico. Sabrina was always saying how she wanted to see Mexico. Now — all that’s over.” Mrs. Jackson shut the photo album, clumsily; a number of snapshots spilled out onto the floor. “See, Officer, things maybe should’ve been left the way they were. We were all just waiting for Sabrina to turn up, anytime. But people like you poking around, ‘investigating,’ printing ugly things about my daughter in the paper, I don’t even know why you’re here taking up my time or who the hell you are.”