His suffering resignation inspired her to torment him. “I guess we could get married. I’ll be eighteen in a few months.”
She could see that behind his widened eyes a film was running at great speed. It was about the things he wanted desperately—education, good jobs, prosperity, a beautiful young wife who would come into his life in about ten years—moving beyond his reach forever. He looked faint. “I don’t know. I want to marry you,” he lied. “But that’s—I don’t know. You’re not even eighteen, and I’m only twenty. We don’t even have a job after the first of the month.”
“Wouldn’t your parents help us? They must have some money.”
“I don’t know. My father will be pissed. My mother—God, I can’t tell her this.”
“It’s their grandchild. I’m pregnant, and I can’t even afford vitamins.” She was very proud of that one.
“Oh, God,” he said. “We always used protection. How did this happen?”
She looked at him with distaste. “Obviously, once it didn’t work. It leaked or something.”
He said, “We’ve got to think this through. How pregnant are you?”
“My period was supposed to start eight days ago, and I’m never more than a day or two late. I bought a test, and I took it yesterday. I bought another today, and used it. I wanted to be sure, and now I’m sure. I called the doctor because he doesn’t charge to talk on the phone, and he said the accuracy of the test is almost a hundred percent.” She gave a sad little smile that she had practiced for this moment. “He told me congratulations.” Then she made herself cry.
Tim held her and rocked her back and forth, but she didn’t stop, so he released her and finished closing the store. They walked to her house, but when she asked him to come in, he said he needed to be alone to think.
For two days, they exchanged looks of worry in the kitchen, where Alice and the customers couldn’t see them. Three days after that, when she arrived at the Dairy Princess he was waiting for her outside the back door, and they walked to the park. He was so nervous that she could see the sweat on his forehead. They sat on a park bench and he said, “I’ve thought about this. I have something for you.” It was a plain white business envelope. Inside were some green bills. He said, “It’s twelve hundred. Most of what I saved this summer.”
“You’re trying to buy me off?” Tears came to her eyes. “For twelve hundred dollars?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not to buy you off.”
“Keep it.” She tossed the envelope on his lap. “I can’t live on it if I have the baby, and I’m not getting an abortion.” She stood up. “I thought by now you would have talked to your father. You can’t keep him from knowing this.”
Tim was horrified. His eyes were swimming, but he wasn’t crying. It looked the way a person’s eyes watered when he was hit in the nose. “You’re not going to go to him. He’ll kill me. He’ll disown me. Really.”
“We’ll see.” She got up and started to walk.
“Wait. You’re right.” When she heard him running to catch up with her, she kept going. “Please,” he said. “Give me one more day.”
The next morning when she was almost dressed for work there was a loud knock on the door. She could see from the shadows on the curtain that it was two men. She was afraid it might be the sheriff’s deputy with an eviction order, but when she pushed the curtain aside a quarter inch, she saw it was Tim and an older man wearing a business suit, who didn’t look happy. She smiled into the mirror, fixed her hair, then went to the door.
When she opened it, Tim surged forward. “Can we come in?”
The older man held Tim’s arm in his hand and pulled him back, then stepped in ahead of him. “I’m Tim’s father. I know who you are.”
“I’m Charlene.”
“Tim tells me he knocked you up.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve both been very foolish. Neither of you had the right to do that. I’m here to try to settle this right now, while we still can.”
“How?”
“Tim tells me he offered you some money, and you told him it wasn’t enough.” He reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat, took out an envelope, and held it out. Charlene could see it had come from the same box of envelopes as Tim’s had.
“How much is in it?”
“Enough to see you through the pregnancy, or to get you an abortion. Three thousand dollars. In return, you sign this paper, saying he’s not responsible.”
Charlene said, “I appreciate your coming here to help me. But I haven’t decided what to do yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“The first time it happened, Tim forced me.”
Tim’s father’s head spun to face the boy, his eyes protruding. He looked like a bull. Tim’s eyes stayed straight ahead, staring at her as though he had been punched. “Charlene . . .”
Charlene said, “He was my boss at the Dairy Princess. I was afraid to tell, and afraid to say he couldn’t do it again. It was the only job I could get in town. I needed to work to pay for college, and I’m only seventeen, so I couldn’t work in a regular restaurant where there’s a bar. I’m thinking about talking to somebody about it—maybe a lawyer.”
Tim’s father’s eyes blinked as though he had a pain in his stomach. She could tell he had a suspicion about her, but he did not dare voice it without knowing the truth. He had to assume that this meeting was his only chance to settle her complaint quietly. She knew he was considering letting Tim take his chances, but the risk was enormous—greater than Tim knew. If she really was seventeen and pregnant, and told that story in court, Tim could end up in prison.
He said carefully, “Charlene, I’m sorry. I didn’t really understand the situation until now. I want to pay for your medical care and your first year at the university—tuition, room, and board. I make that about—” He looked up at the ceiling. “Three thousand medical. Fifteen thousand for the university is eighteen thousand.”
“Is that how much it costs?”
“Yes. I’ll be honest with you, that doesn’t include a lot of frills. But it should cover things.”
“All right, then.”
He said, “Here’s the paper.” He handed it to her, then held out a pen.
She took the paper but ignored the pen. “By the time you get back here with the money, I’ll have had a chance to read it.”
Late that afternoon, she packed and stripped the house of the few items she cared about that fit in her two suitcases, and counted the money Tim’s father had given her. The next morning she was on the early bus to Chicago.
Tonight, as she drove along the dark highway in Mary Tilson’s car, she remembered how much she had enjoyed the day when she had left Wheatfield on the bus. Lying about the pregnancy had given her some satisfaction—planning it all summer, then springing it on Tim’s father like that, right in front of Tim, when she hadn’t left him a way to even deny any of it—but what she had enjoyed most was the money. She remembered sitting on the bus staring out the window at the long line of telephone poles going by, and thinking about the beautiful things all that money would buy.
18
Catherine Hobbes sat at a stainless steel table in the crime lab and watched Toni Baldesar pouring epoxy into a small dish. Toni carefully placed the kitchen knife in the vapor chamber, then lifted the dish of epoxy onto the hot plate, closed the door, and began to heat it. She turned to Catherine. “All we can do is wait and see if the epoxy vapor makes some latent prints show up. If they match the ones I got from the rental agreement, we’ll have her.”
“I don’t think there will be any,” said Catherine. “She’s not careless. She’s got an obsession with cleaning things and wiping off surfaces to be sure she doesn’t leave anything. I don’t see her leaving prints on a murder weapon.”
“I know, but you’d be surprised at how often I get lucky with things like that. They get emotional, and then everything is such a mess, and they have so many things to think about at once. Sometimes I think that a person’s
