“What’s his name?”
He tapped me on the chest with the prescription sack. “Isn’t that what your private investigator’s license is for, McCain?”
Wendy Bennett’s house was a split-level ranch situated on a rise overlooking a clear blue turn of river. The silver Mercury sedan in the drive, the powerful TV antenna on the roof, and the ruthlessly kept lawn and garden spoke of solid middle-class prosperity. Nothing arrogant, but nothing humble either.
She sat on the front steps smoking a cigarette and watching me walk toward her. We’d been friends in high school. Even though she’d been a cheerleader and the daughter of wealth, Wendy McKay had been forced to sit next to me in homeroom and various other school functions because of the Mc’s in our names. That was how she’d treated me at first, anyway. Forced confinement. But eventually we started talking. I’d made her laugh. Later on, I’d come across Andrew Marvell’s line from the fifteenth century: “The maid who laughs is half taken.” I’d never taken the blonde, green-eyed girl with the body that occasionally made standing up embarrassing, but we did become friends.
She wore a peasant skirt and a white blouse, and her shining blonde hair was in a ponytail. I sat down next to her and looked at the timberland on the other side of the road. The location was just about perfect, a sense of isolation but only five minutes away from town.
I’d called earlier and asked if I could come out and talk to her. I’d been surprised that she’d been home and not at the Bennett mansion. I was even more surprised that she’d agreed to see me. She smelled of heat and perfume, a mixture that stirred me.
“Thanks for coming out.”
“Thanks?”
“Yes. It gave me an excuse to get out of there. Linda wanted me to stay but that place always suffocates me. I told her an old friend of mine was in town and I had to meet her for lunch. She didn’t like it, but she doesn’t like much I’ve ever done anyway.”
Linda Raines was Wendy’s sister-in-law, Wendy having married Bryce a few years before he’d gone to Vietnam.
“Was it always like that?”
She smiled. She had teeth so white, you wanted to lick them. “To her I’ll always be ‘the cheerleader.’ Her father used to tease me about it and I think she was jealous. She caught him sort of patting my bottom one night when he was drunk. I got the feeling that she wanted him to save that for her.” The smile was impish now. “Pretty bitchy, huh?”
“Didn’t Bryce ever say anything to her?”
“Oh, no, Bryce wouldn’t. They had this strange relationship. They never criticized each other.”
“Seriously?”
“Very seriously.” She put her hand on mine. “Thanks for coming up at Bryce’s funeral. You said just the right thing.”
“I did?”
“Yes, because you didn’t say anything. Not with words. But with your eyes. And you held my hand just the right way and I thought of all the times you made me laugh in high school, and for just a minute there I didn’t have to think of how I wasn’t Bryce’s first choice.”
“First choice for what?”
“For wife material.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Karen Shanlon? From high school? The really pretty red-haired girl with the limp?”
“But they broke up when he went to college.”
Her ponytail wagged. “That’s what everybody thought. But he kept in touch with her and he managed to come home once a month or so. That’s why he went to Northwestern. He could drive home. The only reason he finally broke it off was because of his father. But then Lou figured out he was seeing her on the sly anyway.”
“I see her sister Lynn all the time. She works in the courthouse. Very quiet and very pretty. But I guess I haven’t thought of Karen in a long time.”
“Well, Bryce didn’t have that problem. He thought of her a lot.” She leaned back with her palms flat against the entranceway. I tried not to notice how her breasts were defined by the material of her blouse. “That’s why he went into the Army.”
Now I knew why she’d agreed to my visit. She needed to go to confession. Lou’s murder had forced her to face her life with the Bennetts.
“She died in that fire and he couldn’t handle it. He used to try and hide it from me, Sam. You know, how he felt about her. But after she died-He just had to get away from everything. Even a war was better than staying around here without her. That fire really took its toll. And the whole thing struck me as odd, the way she died, I mean. She was supposedly smoking in bed and it went up. Bryce said she rarely smoked, maybe three or four times a year when they’d be out somewhere. He seemed upset about the report they did on the fire, too. The whole thing just tore him apart.”
“Did he see her while you were married?”
“That’s the funny thing. I’m not sure. Whenever I’d start in on him about her, he’d tell me how sorry he was. That he should have told me about her before I agreed to marry him.” She sat up again, this time with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands like a little girl staring out a summer window on a rainy day. “He tried to be honorable about it. He even said that that’s why we shouldn’t have kids until he’d worked through it. And he was even worse after she died. That’s when he let Lou find him a spot where it was guaranteed he’d go to Vietnam.”
Listening to her, watching her, I realized that in all the years I’d known her, I hadn’t known her at all. She was smiles and laughter and breasts and perfect ankles, but emotionally she wasn’t real in any sense, because I’d never seen her hurt. I’d always supposed that with her looks and her money, she was one of those gleaming girls whose worst tragedy would be losing her looks at sixty or so.
“I’ll bet you didn’t expect this when I said you could come out here.” She strained a smile for my sake.
“I’m just sorry you’ve gone through all this.”
“You know-so am I. But I can’t hate him. I can resent him, but I can’t hate him. I blame Lou and Linda for breaking Bryce and Karen up. They should have stayed together.”
“That would have left you out. You obviously loved him.”
“Boy, did I,” she said wistfully. “I’d get kind of woozy sometimes just seeing him walking toward me. It was like being drunk. Sometimes I resented it. You know how it is? When someone has that much power over you?”
“Sure.”
“So it’s happened to you?”
“Two or three times.”
“The funny thing was, Bryce was never that way about me. But I’m sure he was about Karen. He had this little metal box that he kept in the garage with his tools. A pretty good hiding place if I hadn’t been looking for a screwdriver one day. I saw the box there and it looked wrong. Just out of place. So I took it down and opened it and I thought I’d pass out. I really did. I had to keep my hand against the wall to hold myself up. I managed to get to the steps of the back porch. I sat down there and opened the box again and started looking through all the photos of her he had. Her whole life. Teeny-tiny baby pictures right up through high school. Now, that’s love. Caring about somebody that way. I don’t think I’ve ever been hurt like that in my life. But I hurt myself. He’d hidden the photos from me. He had to know what they’d do to me if I ever saw them.”
“Did you ever ask him about them?”
“Oh, no. How could I? But I never quite got over them. I still think about them three or four times a day. Sometimes I want to take a knife and cut that part of my brain out. It probably doesn’t take up much space up there. Just slice out that one little part, the part about that little metal box.”
I’d been thinking the same thing about Jane since she’d left. Some freak accident that would magically cleave away all memory of her but leave everything else intact.
“I was such a bitch in high school. Sometimes I think this is just me getting what I deserve.”
She had a small soft laugh. “Nobody was as bad as Diane. You remember what she wrote in the yearbook about what she planned to do after graduation? ‘I plan to become a goddess.’ She was only half kidding.”