‘Jonah Ridl, calling for Laurel Jessup.’
‘For God’s sake…’ The line went dead.
Faces he’d just seen blended into a blurred kaleidoscope in his mind: a father with shoulders hunched in grief, a mother sobbing, and a young solicitous mortician murmuring practiced words that wouldn’t do anything at all.
Suddenly there was no air. He pushed at the folding metal door and stumbled out of the phone booth. He made it back to Murphy’s by concentrating on the symmetry of the lines between the squares of the sidewalk. He did not dare to think.
The white-haired man was still in the foyer, straightening a flower arrangement on a small table.
‘Sir?’ he asked, startled by what he must have seen on Ridl’s face.
‘The other person that was brought in…’
‘Miss Jessup.’
And there it was.
‘I knew her,’ he managed.
The white-haired man nodded because, after all, it was what he’d trained himself to do.
‘Tell me,’ Ridl said.
‘Sir?’
‘Tell me how she died, goddamn it, and don’t give me any shit about her being in safe hands.’
‘I’m afraid…’
Ridl advanced. He wanted to hit. Hard. ‘Murder? Was she shot, like Milner?’
The funeral man stepped back, his pale eyes horrified. It was so very good that he was afraid.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘My goodness, no. It was a car accident.’
His mind scrambled back to his own dark drive the night before, when he’d been tailed by a deputy.
‘Where?’ he demanded.
‘West of here.’ The old man named a different highway.
‘But still Peering County? Yes?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘What was odd about the crash?’
‘Nothing.’ The funeral man stepped back hurriedly.
‘There had to be something odd about the crash, damn it.’
‘Not really. The deputy who brought her purse said she must have fallen asleep. It was late. She ran off the road and hit a tree.’
It made horrible sense. ‘Was anything taken from Laurel’s purse?’ Like a notebook that contained the name of a source…
‘Please, sir, you must calm yourself. The purse spilled open from the impact. Its contents were scattered all over the inside of the car. A deputy brought it here. We gave it to the family. I’m sure everything was returned safely.’
That old weight came again, as crushing as when he’d gone to the morgue to see the pale skin and fuzzy beginnings of a mustache on a kid too young to be in a gang.
He bought two tablets of lined yellow paper at the Rexall and sat in his car. He wrote deliberately and slowly, pausing time and again to make sure it was all of what he knew, and all of what he suspected. There would be no redoing the story, not ever.
It took all of the afternoon and into the dusk. When he was done there were only a few sheets left on the second tablet. He threw them away. He never wanted to write on lined paper again.
He went back into the Rexall. He bought an envelope big enough for all the lined sheets of paper, and enough stamps from a rectangular machine on a stand to mail it twice to the moon.
He put her name on it and tried to push the sheets into the envelope. They would not fit, not all at once. Some had curled up from his rereading. Many were damp.
A young girl, not much younger than Laurel, came out from behind the counter and asked if he was all right. His voice sounded normal as he said, ‘Yes,’ but he knew then that he would never be all right again.
She took the papers from him and slid them in smaller batches into the envelope. She did not speak of their dampness.
There was a mailbox at the next corner. He let the envelope slide from his hands.
BOOK III: THE MAYOR’S STORY
TWENTY-ONE
The Present
Mac Bassett sat at his usual booth in back, waiting for nobody to come. Marveling, again, at how quickly it had all come apart.
He’d decided, right after he was sworn in as mayor, that the Willow Tree would be a better place to meet with constituents than the city’s offices over at the courthouse. At mid-morning, the restaurant was good, quiet, neutral turf. The lawyers, dentists and shop-owners had left to face the commerce and conflicts of the day. The retirees had gone, too, shuffled off to start their lawnmowers or oil their door hinges or do whatever they did to pass the time until lunch, before maybe taking a trip south to the Wal-Mart. By ten-thirty only the waitresses were left in the Willow Tree, and they were too busy setting up for the lunch rush to mind folks coming in to brace their new mayor about a neighbor’s sagging fence, an uncollected tree limb or a puddle of rain water in the middle of their street that just wouldn’t drain away.
Right off, April told him he was being a damned fool. Again. Patronizing a competitor’s restaurant was a boneheaded idea. Their own Bird’s Nest was the smart place to meet with constituents. Mac could listen just as well in his own place, and there was always the chance they’d come back to buy dinner. Had he forgotten the place had been killing them financially in the year they’d owned it? Any business advantage they could eke from him being mayor ought to be pounced on, squeezed and wrung for its very last nickel.
Mac joked it away, saying he wanted to keep his two lives – brand-new mayor and failing restaurateur – separate. What about him being a pie-eyed optimist, she asked – didn’t that qualify as a full life, too? Three lives, he corrected, allowing her that.
For the first month of his mayoralty, it had worked just as he’d hoped. People had come to the Willow Tree to slide in the booth opposite him and tell him of minor breakdowns in the creaking machinery that passed for government in Grand Point, Illinois. He’d listened. And later, he’d made calls. And sometimes, the trolls over at city hall or at the city garage, all of them put in place years before by the man Mac defeated for mayor, had listened. Sometimes, even, things got done.
But that was in March, three months before. In April, he’d been indicted. And quick as a thunderclap, the good citizens of Grand Point decided that living with sagging fences, uncollected tree limbs and puddles that never went away was more practical than wasting time sitting in a booth opposite a man headed for prison.
And so, on an otherwise fine day at the beginning of June, Mac Bassett sat alone, waiting only for the chance to order the coffee, eggs and crisp bacon that he hoped would ease him into a peaceful-enough mindset to drive south, to the crossroads, to face his own restaurant – that long, low, dying thing he’d bought for reasons he no longer understood.
‘How’s things legal-wise, Mac?’
Pam Canton, the plump, blonde waitress, always brought an observation or two, something national in scope, to go with the first fill of caffeine. She always said it fast, then left. Never before had she looked to start a conversation, particularly about his legal troubles.
And never before had she set a dog-eared manila folder on the table. She slid into the booth, like his constituents used to do, to talk more.
‘My lawyer says we’ll win. Their indictment is sour grapes politics, but proving that in a court of law takes time.’
‘And big money, I’ll bet.’
‘Yes.’ He sipped at the coffee, waiting for what was on her mind.
‘I’ve got something I want you to look into,’ she said.
It couldn’t be much. Pam wasn’t a constituent. She’d only recently moved to DeKalb, a few bumps in the road east, from somewhere down south.
‘Betty Jo Dean,’ she said.
‘Betty Jo Dean,’ he repeated. The name was familiar. Maybe he’d seen it in the paper.
‘A teenage girl. She was murdered.’
‘I’m sorry. A friend of yours?’
‘No. It happened in 1982. I wasn’t even born.’
His mouth went dry. ‘1982? A teenage girl killed in 1982?’