They looked at each other, saying All right, we're in something now, and we're in it together, and we both know it, and Craig glanced from one to the other and sensed that they were in something together, and that it was about their best friend who was dead and no one knew why, and he said, "R'lly. He went out with her, y'know."
That was wrong. Bob hadn't been going with anybody last semester. If he had, they would have known. Still, the way Don's eyes were fixing him, David knew there was more to hear.
Craig repeated the story. "No, see, it was just that weekend. Saturday." Right, that was the last time they had seen Bob. He had been working on that damned Senior History paper. "I was washing my car, right? And Robert pulls in next to me, the next stall, and starts rollin' up the windows and so I ask him, you know, 'Who're you takin' to the Senior Party?' An' he says he doesn't know yet, and so I say, 'Goin' to any good orgies tonight?' and he says, 'What d'you know about the new girl?' I guess, yeah, I think he said he gave her a ride home or something. I got the idea he was goin' over to see her that night. Like she asked him to come over or something. You know."
The new girl. The one nobody had had time to get close to, coming in as she had the last month or six weeks of school. A junior. Nobody knew her. Something about her. Her skin was oiled, almost buttery, and her expression never changed. And her body. Dumpy — no, not exactly; it was just that she acted like she didn't care about how she looked most of the time; she wore things that covered her up, that had no shape. So you didn't try for her. Still, there was something about her. She was the kind of girl nobody ever tried for, but if somebody asked somebody if he'd ever gotten anything off her, you would stop what you were doing and listen real close for the answer.
"So maybe you'll want to talk to her. She's the last one to see him. I guess." The football player, unmoving in his felt jacket, glanced nervously between them.
David stared at Don, and Don continued to stare back. Finally they rose together, scraping the bench noisily against the floor.
"Only thing is, she'll be pretty hard to find, prob'ly." "Why's that?" asked David.
"I heard she moved away soon as the school year was over."
Later, driving home, taking the long way, thinking, David umembered the photographs. The way the body was mangled. (ut off almost at the waist. He tried, but this time he could not >-<-(it out of his mind.
So they did a little detective work the next day. Bob's mother had not seen him after that Saturday morning, when he left for the library to work on his research paper. No one else had seen him after that, either. Except Craig. And maybe, just maybe, the girl. So.
So the family name was in the phone book, but when they got there the apartment was up for rent. The manager said they had moved out the 12th, right after finals.
So they stopped by the school.
The Registrar's office was open for summer school and Mrs. Greenspun greeted them, two of her three favorite pupils, with a warmth undercut by a solicitous sadness of which she seemed afraid to speak. It was like walking into a room a second after someone has finished telling a particularly unpleasant story about you behind your back.
Yes, she had received a Call, she said, a call asking that Cathy's grades be sent along to an out-of-town address.
"The young lady lives with her older sister, I take it," confided Mrs. Greenspun.
David explained that he had loaned her a book which she had forgotten to return.
"Of course," said Mrs. Greenspun maternally. And gave them the address.
It was in Sunland, a good hour-and-a-half away.
David volunteered his old Ford. They had to stop once for directions and twice for water and an additive that did not keep its promise to the rusty radiator. In the heat, between low, tanned hills that resembled elephants asleep or dead on their sides under the sun, Don put down the term paper. They had picked it up from Mr. Broadbent, Bob's history teacher, and had put off turning it over to his mother. They had said they were going to read it but had not, sharing a vague unease about parting with the folder.
It was only the preliminary draft, with a lot of the details yet to be put in, but it was an unbelievable story.
"He was really into something strange," muttered Don, pulling moist hair away from the side of his face.
"I guess that means we can talk about it now."
"I guess," said Don. But his tone was flat and he kept watching the heat mirages rising up from the asphalt ahead.
"I've read something about it," pressed David. "It's pretty grim, isn't it." A statement.
"It's got to be the most horrible story I've ever read. Or the most tragic. Depending on how you look at it," said Don. "Both," he decided.
David felt subjects mixing. He was light in the head. He sucked on a bottle of Mountain Dew and tried to shift the conversation. "What did that guy at the coroner's office mean, do you think?"
"You mean —»
"I mean about the 'other two'." Suddenly David realized he had not changed the subject at all.
"Well, you remember Ronnie Ruiz and — what was the other one's name?"
David remembered, all right. Two others had disappeared, one a couple of weeks before Bob, the first a few weeks before that. A month or six weeks before the end of school. He had known what the attendant meant but had been carrying around a peculiar need to hear it confirmed. "Patlian, I think. The younger one, Jimmy Patlian's brother. The junior. But I thought he ran off to join the Reserves."
"I don't know. It must have been him. Give me a swig of that shit, will you? Hey, how can you drink this?"
"I know, I know, my teeth'll fall out," said David, relieved to talk about something else. "But we always had it around the house when I was a kid. I guess you can be raised to like a thing, just like your parents' parents probably gave them the taste. Hard to put down."
"Sure, man, just keep telling yourself that until your stomach starts eating itself. Anyway, I know they found Ronnie Ruiz in some kind of traffic thing. Torn up pretty bad."
"The guy didn't even have a car, did he?"
"I don't — no, now that you bring it up. But they found him by some road somewhere. Maybe he got hit. The way I remember it, no one could identify him for sure for quite a while. Shit, man." He handed back the sweltering bottle. "This is shit."
"It's shit, all right," said David. "A whole lot of it." "Cathy?"
'' I remember you." The girl showed herself at the shadowed edge of the door, out of the blinding sun. "And you. I didn't think you'd bring anyone with you, when you called," she said to David, softly so that it was almost lost in the din of the freeway above the lot. "This is Don. He —»
"I know. It's all right. My sister will be pleased."
The boys had worked out a scenario to ease her along but never got past side one. She had a quality of bored immobility which seemed to preclude manipulation, and a lack of asser-tiveness which made it somehow unnecessary.
They sat in three corners of the living room and made conversation.
She was not pretty. As their eyes mellowed to the heavily draped interior, her face began to reflect warm tones like the smooth skin of a lighted candle: oiled wax. She wore a loose, very old fashioned dress, high-necked, a ribboned cameo choker. As at school, though now the effect was in keeping with the close, unventilated room studded with fading, vignetted photographs and thin, polished relics of bone china. She moved without grace or style. She all but stood as she walked, all but reclined as she sat, inviting movement from others.
The afternoon passed. She drew them out, and they did not feel it happening.
Finally the ambience was broken momentarily. She left the room to refill their sweating glasses.
Don blinked. "There is something about that girl," he began measuredly, "and this place, that I do not like." He sounded nearly frightened about it, which was odd. ' 'Does any of this remind you of anything?"