As I was leaving, Nash gave me the address of the friend Ann was going to visit the night she was grabbed. I drove there slowly over a perfectly squared few blocks. This west side was the newer section of town. You could tell because the grass was a brighter green, rolled out in prepaid patches just thirty summers ago. It wasn’t like the dark, stiff, prickly stuff that grew in front of my mother’s house. That grass made better whistles. You could split a blade in the middle, blow, and get a tweezy sound until your lips began to itch.
It would have taken Ann Nash only five minutes to pedal to her friend’s house. Add an extra ten in case she decided to take a longer route, stretch her legs at the first chance to really ride that summer. Nine is too old to be stuck pedaling in circles around the same block. What happened to the bike?
I rolled slowly past the home of Emily Stone. As the night bloomed blue, I could see a girl run past a bright window. I bet Emily’s parents tell their friends things like, “We hug her a little harder every night now.” I bet Emily wonders where Ann was taken to die.
I did. Yanking out twenty-some teeth, no matter how small, no matter how lifeless the subject, is a tough task. It’d have to be done in a special place, somewhere safe so a person could take a few minutes to breathe now and then.
I looked at Ann’s photo, the edges curling in as if to protect her. The defiant haircut and that grin reminded me of Natalie. I liked this girl, too. I tucked her picture away in my glove compartment. Then I lifted up the sleeve of my shirt and wrote her full name—Ann Marie Nash—in lush blue ballpoint on the inside of my arm.
I didn’t pull into anyone’s driveway to turn around as I needed to. I figured people here were jittery enough without unknown cars trolling around. Instead I turned left at the end of the block and took the long way to my mother’s house. I debated whether to phone her first and decided against it three blocks from home. It was too late to call, too much misguided courtesy. Once you’ve crossed state lines, you don’t phone to ask if you can drop in.
My mother’s massive house is at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can count approximately three square blocks of town as a section. She lives in—and I once did too—an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top. It’s full of cubbyholes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good.
The house is at the very top of a very steep hill. In first gear, you can drive up the cracked old driveway to the top, where a carriage porch keeps cars from getting wet. Or you can park at the bottom of the hill and walk the sixty-three stairs to the top, clutching the cigar-thin rail to the left. When I was a child, I always walked the stairs up, ran the driveway down. I assumed the rail was on the left side going up because I’m left-handed, and someone thought I might like that. Odd to think I ever indulged in such presumptions.
I parked at the bottom, so as to seem less intrusive. Wet with sweat by the time I hit the top, I lifted up my hair, waved a hand at the back of my neck, flapped my shirt a few times. Vulgar pit stains on my French blue blouse. I smelled, as my mother would say, ripe.
I rang the doorbell, which had been a cat-calling screech when I was very young, now subdued and truncated, like the bing! you hear on children’s records when it’s time to turn the page. It was 9:15, just late enough that they might have gone to bed.
“Who is it, please?” My mother’s reedy voice behind the door.
“Hi, Momma. It’s Camille.” I tried to keep my voice even.
“Camille.” She opened the door and stood in the doorway, didn’t seem surprised, and didn’t offer a hug at all, not even the limp one I’d expected. “Is something the matter?”
“No, Momma, not at all. I’m in town on business.”
“Business. Business? Well, goodness, I’m sorry, sweetheart, come in, come in. The house is not up to par for a visitor, I’m afraid.”
The house was perfect, down to the dozens of cut tulips in vases at the entry hall. The air was so teasy with pollen, my eyes watered. Of course my mother didn’t ask me what kind of business could possibly land me here. She rarely asked questions of any potency. It was either an exaggerated concern for others’ privacy or she simply didn’t care much about much. I’ll let you guess which option I favored.
“Can I get you something to drink, Camille? Alan and I were just having amaretto sours.” She motioned to the glass in her hand. “I put just a little bit of Sprite in it, sharpens the sweet. But I also have mango juice, wine, and sweet tea, or ice water. Or soda water. Where are you staying?”
“Funny you ask that. I was hoping I could stay here. Just for a few days.”
A quick pause, her long fingernails, a transparent pink, clicked on her glass. “Well, I’m sure that’s fine. I wish you’d phoned. Just so I’d have known. I would have had dinner for you or something. Come say hello to Alan. We’re on the back porch.”
She began walking away from me, down the hallway—luminous white living rooms and sitting rooms and reading rooms blooming out on all sides—and I studied her. It was the first time we’d seen each other in almost a year. My hair was a different color—brown from red—but she didn’t seem to notice. She looked exactly the same, though, not much older than I am now, although she’s in her late forties. Glowing pale skin, with long blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She was like a girl’s very best doll, the kind you don’t play with. She was wearing a long, pink cotton dress with little white slippers. She was twirling her amaretto sour without spilling a drop.
“Alan, Camille’s here.” She disappeared into the back kitchen (the smaller of two) and I heard her crack a metal ice tray.
“Who?”
I peeked around the corner, offered up a smile. “Camille. I’m so sorry to drop in like this.”
You’d think a lovely thing like my mother was born to be with a big ex-football star. She would have looked just right with a burly, mustached giant. Alan was, if anything, thinner than my mother, with cheekbones that jutted out of his face so high and sharp his eyes turned to almond slivers. I wanted to administer an IV when I saw him. He overdressed always, even for an evening of sweet drinks with my mother. Now he sat, needly legs jutting out of white safari shorts, with a baby blue sweater draped over a crisp oxford. He sweated not at all. Alan is the opposite of moist.
“Camille. It’s a pleasure. A real pleasure,” he murmured in his monotone drawl. “All the way down in Wind Gap. Thought you had a moratorium on anything south of Illinois.”
“Just working, actually.”
“Work.” He smiled. It was the closest to a question as I would get. My mother reappeared, her hair now pulled up in a pale blue bow, Wendy Darling all grown up. She pressed a chilled glass of fizzing amaretto into my hand, patted my shoulder twice, and sat away from me, next to Alan.
“Those little girls, Ann Nash and Natalie Keene,” I prompted. “I’m covering it for my paper.”