about Ricky and me, huh? I guess that means he didn’t talk about me very much to his friends.” The thought seemed to sadden her.
Jed shook his head. “No, ma’am, I guess not. At least not to the people we spoke with.”
She sighed and dabbed her eyes again. “He thought I was too ugly to show off to his friends. He never said it in so many words, but I always knew he was thinking it.”
Jed suddenly felt obligated to contradict her, to say she wasn’t ugly at all, but he sensed that Mitsy would know better. He just let the words hang in the air for a while as she seemed to travel in her mind to a faraway place. After ten seconds or so, he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Were you and Mr. Harris married?” he asked.
The question seemed to bring her back into the world. She shook her head and looked down. “No,” she said softly. “We talked about it a few times, but the time was never right. First we were waiting for him to have a better job, then after I got laid off, we were waiting for me just to have a job. When I finally found work, we needed to save some money. Recently, it’s been Ricky’s drinking. I was waiting for him to stop. All in all, we’ve been talking for nearly three years now. Never meant to be, I guess.”
Mitsy paused for a moment, looking like she might crumble. Then she smiled again—a tired, humorless smile that seemed to be an extension of her tears. “Like my sister told me, Ricky’s a man, and he was willing to take me in. With my face…” Her voice trailed off. “All things considered, he was a good man.”
Of the two of them there in the room, Jed wasn’t at all sure who was less convinced by her conclusion. “Did Ricky have anything to do with..” He aborted the question. There was no way to phrase it that would not seem brutish.
Mitsy let him off the hook. “My face? Oh, heavens, no. This was a gift from a boyfriend I dumped back in high school. Said he’d make me so ugly nobody else would ever want me.” She shrugged, as though she had told the story enough that it didn’t bother her anymore. “It worked, too. Until Ricky. And now I find out that he thought… Well, it’s been a very, very long day.”
Jed cleared his throat. “Well, Ms. Cahill…”
“Please,” she interrupted. “Call me Mitsy.”
Jed smiled. “Okay, Mitsy. I don’t mean to pry at such a difficult time, but I do need to ask you a few questions.”
“About Ricky?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He’s not just an innocent victim, is he?”
The directness of the question caught Jed off guard, yanking his eyes from his notebook. “Actually, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
The room fell silent as Mitsy struggled with her thoughts. “He hated that place,” she said finally. “He hated everything about it.” “The JDC?”
“Ricky called it the jungle. He always talked about quitting, but he never did. Just when he’d reach the breaking point, they’d come through with another cost of living increase, and he’d decide to stay. It was awful.” She stopped talking, as though she had run out of steam.
“Did Ricky ever mention Nathan Bailey to you?” Jed asked.
Tears flooded Mitsy’s eyes again as she leaned forward in her seat. “You know, I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times today. I heard about what that boy said on the radio, and I’ve driven myself crazy trying to remember the name, but it’s just not there. I’m sorry?’
“You know, then, that Nathan said some uncomplimentary things about Mr. Harris. What do you think about that?”
Mitsy stewed for a long time before answering. She clearly had something to say, but she seemed unwilling to say it out loud. Jed just sat patiently, giving her all the time she needed.
When she finally spoke, she addressed Jed’s shoes. “I wish I could tell you that killing one of those little bastards would be totally out of character for Ricky, but I can’t. He hated them all so much. They’d never show him the respect he deserved. If somebody pushed him hard enough, well, anything could happen?’ She faded away again, then stood up abruptly, startling Jed. “I need another beer. Do you want one?”
“No, thanks,” he lied. Actually, he’d have sold his arm for anything cold to drink.
Mitsy wasn’t gone thirty seconds before she returned to her seat on the sofa. She stripped the cap from the bottle with an effortless twist and tossed it into the pile at her feet. She stared at the bottle for a moment as though reading the label, but she never took a sip. Her mind had traveled off again. As Jed watched silently, her mouth took an angry set, and she squeezed the bottle with both hands. It trembled in her grasp.
When she made eye contact again, she was angry. “I think he was planning something for a long time,” she said. Her tone was one of discovery, her words carefully measured. “I never put it together until right now.”
“I don’t understand?’
“Of course you don’t. You couldn’t possibly. Beginning a couple of weeks ago, I noticed things missing from the house Ricky’s things. When I’d do laundry, there’d be a few less underwear to fold. He’d take clothes out of the house, saying he was taking them to the laundry, but then he’d never bring them back. When I’d offer to pick them up at the cleaners, he’d say no. It was kind of like he was moving out of the apartment a little at a time. At first, I figured it was another woman, but then he always came home at night and he was always at the JDC when I called him. Finally, I just stopped worrying about it.”
“Didn’t you ever say anything?”
Mitsy smiled. “Over the years, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the mystery is less painful than the answer. No, I never said anything. And neither did he, but he started drinking again. Over the past few weeks, it got really bad. He was coming home drunk. I’d like to think he was doing his boozing after work with some of his supervisor buddies, but I’m not sure. I think he was getting drunk on the job. That’s what worried me most. I just didn’t want to go down that road again.”
Jed was confused. As he scowled, his eyebrows nearly touched. “So you think that his drinking had something to do with a plan to kill Nathan Bailey?”
Mitsy scowled back at him. “No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. He stopped talking to me is the thing. No conversation at all. Nothing. Looking back, putting it all together with the disappearing clothes and the plane ticket, I guess now I think he was trying to deal with something…”
“Whoa, whoa,” Jed cut her off, making a waving motion with his hand. “What plane ticket?”
“Well, that’s the biggest mystery of all. About a week ago, I found a plane ticket hidden in one of his shoes in the closet. One-way to Argentina, paid for in cash. Nine hundred dollars! I can’t imagine where he came up with that kind of money. He must have been saving up, the son of a bitch. Here we go, month-to-month, barely able to pay the light bill, and he’s saving for a trip! I never said anything about that either, because I kept telling myself that maybe he was planning some kind of surprise getaway for the two of us.”
“Was there a second ticket for you, as well?”
Mitsy answered by looking away again.
“Where’s the ticket now?” Jed pressed.
“No clue. The shoes and the ticket both joined the list of missing stuff.”
Jed leaned back in the hollow chair and crossed his legs. His knees were nearly level with his shoulders. “Argentina,” he thought aloud. “When was he supposed to leave?”
Mitsy shrugged. Her day was getting longer by the minute. “Best I could tell, it was an open ticket, no date on it. I didn’t even know he had a passport.”
“Do you remember the airline?”
She shook her head. “Not really,” she said, her voice thickening. She finally took a pull on the beer. “It was an airline I’ve never heard of—something Spanish, I think.”
Jed took a full minute to jot notes into his little book. The whole time, Mitsy faded further and further away. When he finally looked up, it was as though she had left completely. She just stared out the sliding glass doors into the blistering afternoon sky. Her eyes were so intense that Jed found himself looking to see what was so interesting.
A feeling of desperate frustration gripped his belly. Here he had all this new information, yet he didn’t know what to do with it. Clearly, Ricky Harris was not the model employee that Johnstone had portrayed him to be, but so what? What did the Bailey kid have to do with any of this?
