“Mall security,” she said, stopping to inspect a glassed-in booth with uniformed men staring at a variety of screens, and Kay wondered if she was thinking that such men might have saved her, thirty years ago. “This is where Karmelkorn-No, no, no. I’m turned around. The new wing, with Hecht’s, threw me off. It’s not that the mall has gotten larger but that I was confused about the layout, transposed the two corridors.”
She began moving so fast that Kay almost had to jog to keep up with her. “The movie theaters would have been down here,” she said, skidding to a stop, then turning around, her pace picking right back up. “And if we go right here-yes, now it makes sense. The place where those escalators are, that wasn’t Hoschild’s but the J. C. Penney, which was still under construction that weekend. Here-this was the organ store, where Mr. Pincharelli worked on weekends.”
“Here” was now something called Kid-Go-Round, a store that apparently catered to children who needed the equivalent of prom clothes, for weddings and the like. Next door was a store called Touch of the Past, which Kay found eerie until she realized that it sold Negro League memorabilia, expensive jerseys for teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Atlanta Black Crackers.
“Mr. Pincharelli?” Kay asked.
“The music teacher at Rock Glen Junior High. Sunny had the biggest crush on him for a while.”
Heather stood transfixed, rocking slightly, humming again as she had in the car, hugging herself as if she were cold. “Look at those dresses,” she said. “Flower girls, junior attendants. Did you have that kind of wedding?”
“Not quite,” Kay said, smiling at the memory. “We married outdoors, in the backyard of a friend’s house on the Severn River, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the eighties,” she added with a note of apology. “And I was all of twenty-three.”
“I’m never going to marry, not for real.” Heather’s tone was not regretful or self-pitying, merely factual.
“Well, then at least you’ll never have to get divorced,” Kay said.
“My parents divorced, didn’t they? I didn’t get that at first. They split up. Do you think it’s my fault?”
“Your fault?”
“Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what…happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?”
“I think,” Kay said, picking her words with as much precision as possible, “that grief, tragedy, tends to magnify whatever is there, expose the fissures that are already there. Strong marriages get stronger. Weak ones suffer and, without help, may fall apart. In my experience.”
“Are you saying my parents didn’t have a good marriage before?” Her tone was fierce, straight from the schoolyard, the instinctive defense against even an implied insult against one’s parents.
“I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. I was speaking in generalities, Heather.”
Again the smile, the reward for using her name, for being the one who believed in her, perhaps even more than Gloria, whose dedication was billed hourly. “I thought everyone was dead. I just assumed everyone was dead. Except me.”
Kay trained her eyes on the gossamer skirts in the windows, the heartbreaking kind of girly-girl dresses that her own Grace had never wanted to wear. I just assumed everyone was dead. If they were, it would be much easier to carry the lie. But would someone tell a lie like this just to get out of being charged in a traffic accident? If that were the case, now that she knew the little boy was going to be okay, couldn’t she simply recant? She was so credible, yet the very fact that Kay was thinking along those lines might be the proof of how studied this all was.
Staring straight ahead, Kay could see Heather’s reflection in the plate-glass window of where the organ store had once been. Tears were coursing down her face, and she was shaking so hard that her teeth, her perfect, no-cavity teeth, were chattering uncontrollably.
“It began here,” she said. “In its own way, it began here.”
CHAPTER 31
The business section of St. Simons-the “village,” according to a local who helped Kevin find his way there-was lousy with charm.
The main drag was lined with precious shops, the kind that specialized in selling useless things to people who shopped reflexively, as entertainment. It wasn’t the high-end, name-brand type of shopping you saw in the Hamptons, where Kevin had worked landscaping jobs as a teenager, but it was a big step up from Brunswick. He understood now why Penelope Jackson had lived on the mainland, how out-of-reach the real estate must be for the people who scooped the ice cream, poured the beers, sold the pink-and-green dresses that seemed to dominate the window displays.
He had timed his visit to Mullet Bay for the late-afternoon rush, before the dinner hour started in earnest. The bar-restaurant was a typical resort establishment, another variation on the American dream, Jimmy Buffett version. Parrots, tropical drinks, no-worries-mon. It was hard to figure out how a going-on-forty woman had fit in here, a young person’s joint where the waitstaff, male and female, wore shorts and polos. But the manager, a dark-eyed honey of a girl with glowing skin, cleared that up by explaining that Penelope was one of the line cooks.
“She was great,” she said with a peppy enthusiasm that seemed to be her default setting, pronouncing it “graaaa-ate.” The plastic bar pinned above her perfect left tit proclaimed her to be Heather, and the coincidence seemed a portent of…well, something. Then again, Heather was a pretty popular name. “Good worker, very reliable. Would fill in at the last minute, even bartended once or twice when the regular guy didn’t show. The bosses would have dearly loved to keep her.”
“Why’d she quit?”
“Well, she just needed a new start. After the fire and all.” Even in expressing genuine sadness, this Heather retained a kind of indomitable enthusiasm, as if her beauty, her fine young limbs, supplied her with a constant, humming joy of self. Infante imagined arranging those limbs around him, absorbing a little of that sunny self-regard.
“What about this woman?” He pulled out the photo of his would-be Heather. “She look familiar? You ever see anyone like this with Penelope?”
“No. But then-I didn’t really see anyone with her, not even her boyfriend. She spoke of him, and he came by once that I recall, but that was it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Older fellow, kind of sleazy. He said some things to me, but I didn’t tell Penelope. It was just beer talk.”
“She say where she was going when she left?”
“No, not to me. She gave notice, and we even had a little party for her at the end of her last shift. A cake and all. But, you know, she was kind of private. I think-” She hesitated, touchingly sincere in her desire not to gossip, which made Infante like her all the more. So many folks he interviewed reveled in the opportunity to slander others in the name of their civic duty, volunteering all sorts of extraneous and derogatory information.
“Do you think she kept to herself because of her situation at home?”
An energetic, relieved nod. God, he wanted to fuck her. It would be like…like lying on a beach somewhere, only with the silkiest sand imaginable, warm and comforting, not the least bit gritty. There was nothing sour in this girl, no life taint. Her parents were probably still married, even still in love. She was breezing through school, popular with males and females alike. He could imagine birds alighting on her shoulders, as if she were some Disney cartoon princess.
“She came in once, with a bruise on her face? And all I did was look, just glance at her, and she got very upset. ‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. And I told her, ‘I didn’t say anything, Penelope, but if there’s something I can do,’ and she was, like, ‘No, no, no, Heather, you don’t understand, it’s not what you think, it was just an accident.’ And then…then-” The girl swallowed, a little nervous, and Infante fought to keep his attention on her words even as he was trying to figure out how to persuade her to come out to his rental car and climb on top of him. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it. I’ll come out on top.’ That was around Thanksgiving.”