him. He stood quietly in the room without touching her until she stopped crying.
“You got someone to talk to?” Jesse said.
She nodded.
“Shrink?”
She nodded again. Jesse took out a card.
“You think of anything… or you need anything.”
He handed her the card. She looked at it as if it meant more than it did.
“You’ll do that?” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“Might be good if you called your shrink,” Jesse said.
She didn’t speak or move. Jesse stood for another moment and then he left.
Chapter Twenty-two
Jesse stood in the open slider of his condo, looking out over his balcony toward Paradise Neck. Below the balcony the black water of the harbor moved with aimless purpose against the rust-colored rocks. Jesse liked the sound. He would like it even more with a drink. He knew the girl was Billie Bishop. He couldn’t exactly prove it yet, but he knew. He knew there was something wrong in the Bishop house. Were the girls being molested? They seemed angry. Especially Emily. He thought about how pleasant it would be to sit on his balcony with a tall scotch and soda and look at the harbor and listen to the gentle sway of the Atlantic Ocean and not think about molestation. He wondered if Emily was a lesbian. As the evening lengthened it grew dark enough for the lights of the big houses on the neck to show across the harbor. He wished Jenn were here. He wished they could sit together and look at the ocean and the far lights.
He got up and walked into his kitchen. He took a glass down from the cupboard, sixteen ounces, the kind you got when you ordered a pint of Guinness. He filled the glass with ice cubes, poured two inches of Dewar’s into the glass, and opened a can of club soda and filled the rest of the glass with it. He took a spoon from the drawer and stirred the glass until the colorless soda diluted the amber scotch evenly. He took a sip. Perfect. He brought the glass out onto the balcony and sat down with his feet on the railing. He drank another sip. There was no hurry to get it in. There was a half gallon in there on the kitchen counter. There were twelve cans of soda in the cupboard. The ice maker in the refrigerator was perpetual. He was only going to have a couple. But it was comforting to know that there was enough.
There was enough moonlight for Jesse to see the boats waiting at their moorings. Toward the outer harbor a single boat with bow lights cut across the harbor toward the town wharf. Jesse had another sip. Probably the harbor master. It was Friday night. He wasn’t scheduled to see Jenn until Wednesday. From the deck Jesse could smell the hint of clams frying at the Gray Gull, two blocks away. The smell was comforting. He thought about Billie Bishop’s picture. It was better to think of her in the picture. In the picture she was smiling. Probably doing what she was told to do. Cops see kids like Billie too often. Town pump. Kids so desperate for affection or connection or whatever it was that sex became their handshake. They were joyless encounters as far as he knew. For certain, it was not pleasure that drove girls like Billie to flop for anybody.
His drink was gone. One more. He got up and went to the kitchen and made another one and brought it back to the deck. The scotch made him feel integrated, complete. Not a wild drunk, Jesse thought. Mostly quiet. Mostly the booze enriched him. Jenn wasn’t nasty about his drinking. She had too much psychotherapy not to understand the struggle. But she didn’t know the feeling that when you were feeling it made it one you wouldn’t want to miss. Why would somebody shoot a kid like Billie? She could have been simply wrong place/wrong time. But that theory led him nowhere. Better to think about promiscuity. He took a swallow of scotch and soda. Sex was the only thing he knew about her that could have gotten her killed.
From the parking lot, out of sight of his balcony, Jesse heard a car door slam and the sound of brisk high heels. The front hall door of Jesse’s building opened and closed. Jesse took another swallow. Sometimes on Wednesdays when Jenn came, they would have sex. Often they would not. It depended mostly, he guessed, on what was going on in her therapy. He also was pretty sure that if she were having sex with someone else, she wouldn’t have sex with him, and vice versa. It was an odd standard, Jesse thought. But it was a standard. He had no such standard. He would sleep with Lilly Summers on a Tuesday and Jenn on a Wednesday and be pleased about both. Though he knew that if his relationship with Jenn hinged on it, he would develop such a standard on the spot. He smiled a little that he was having sex with a school principal. He drank some scotch. He wondered about Marcy Campbell. Maybe it was time to have sex with her again, also. Jesse Stone at stud. And he was going to find the sonovabitch who killed that kid, too. His drink was gone. He looked at the glass for a long moment. He didn’t want to give up the sense of wholeness. He took in some air and let it out slowly.
Out loud he said, “Fuck it,” his voice intrusive in the pale darkness. Then he stood and went to the kitchen and made another drink.
Chapter Twenty-three
It took Molly a day on the phone to find the shelters in Boston run by nuns. There were three. Jesse found the right nun on his first try. Her name was Sister Mary John and she ran a shelter in the basement of a church in Jamaica Plain. When Jesse came in, Sister was sitting on the corner of a plywood banquet table with folding metal legs that obviously served as her desk. She was red-haired, wearing a black sweat suit with a white stripe on the sleeves. The only sign of her calling was a small gold cross on a thin gold chain that hung around her neck.
“Are you sure you’re a nun?” Jesse said.
“Pretty sure,” Sister said.
Jesse smiled.
“You talked with Molly Crane on the phone about a missing girl.”
“Yes.”
Jesse took out a blowup of Billie, processed from the family picture, and held it out for Sister Mary John to look at. Sister nodded her head slowly.
