As Aline skimmed the list, she was pleasantly surprised to see that many of the teachers she’d had were still at the school. “It feels like old home week,” she told Pat as she attempted a smile.
15
Marge didn’t know what to do. Had that detective been able to see that Jamie wasn’t telling the truth? The way Jamie kept looking at her for approval might be misinterpreted. That Detective Wilson seemed very smart.
As always when she was upset, Marge reached for her rosary beads. Before she began to recite the first Sorrowful Mystery, the Agony in the Garden, she began to think of Jack. His image was never far from her heart and mind. She had met him at an amusement park in Rye. He was a senior at All Hallows High School and she was a junior at St. Jean’s. She lived in the Bronx and took the subway to school on East 75th Street in Manhattan. He lived on West 200th Street and would be going to Fordham in September. She told him that she was planning to go to Marymount in two years.
We didn’t leave each other’s side even for a minute until his group got back on the boat and the nuns called us to our bus.
I thought Jack was the handsomest man I had ever laid eyes on, tall and with that blonde hair and blue eyes. Jamie is the image of him. He told me the Chapman name was on very old tombstones at Cape Cod, where his ancestors were buried. They weren’t on the Mayflower, but they arrived not much after, Jack told me. He was so proud of that, she thought tenderly.
My Irish father was from a farm family in Roscommon. He was younger than his brother, which meant his brother would inherit the farm. So when he was twenty, he said goodbye to his parents, sisters and brothers and sailed to New York. He met my mother there, and they got married when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two.
Like us when we got married, Marge thought. I was twenty and left college after my sophomore year. Jack was twenty-four. He had left college after his freshman year, deciding instead to get his electrician’s license. He liked working in construction.
Oh, Jack, I wish you were here now. We had given up hope of having a baby, and then when I was forty-five I became pregnant. After all those years of hoping and then accepting that God didn’t want to send us children, it was a miracle. We were so happy, she thought. Then we almost lost Jamie when he was born. He was deprived of oxygen, but he was ours.
Jack had the heart attack and died when Jamie was fifteen. The poor little guy kept looking all over for him and crying, “Daddy!”
Jack, I’m looking for you to help me now, Marge prayed. Maybe Jamie thought he was playing a game with Kerry, poor girl. But she had a blow on her head. He’d never do that. I’m sure of it.
But the cops could twist his story if they knew he had been in the pool with her. Can you imagine him going to prison? He’d be so frightened, and men take advantage of a boy like him.
It can’t happen. It just can’t happen.
Marge looked down at the rosary she was holding. As she began her prayer, Jamie came down from his room, where he had been watching television.
“I didn’t tell anyone about going swimming with Kerry,” he said. “Wasn’t that good?”
16
Aline loved her grandparents. Both in their late seventies, they had moved to Arizona because of her grandmother’s chronic arthritis. She had been sure that their arrival would combine both comfort and strained nerves.
The minute they were in the door, her grandmother, shoulders slouching, her arthritic fingers clutching a cane, wailed, “It should have been me. Why this beautiful child? Why? Why?”
Aline’s first thought was, Because you never go into pools! Her grandfather, strong and healthy for his age, said, “I understand she was having a party when you people were away. That’s what happens when kids are left unsupervised.”
It was more of an accusation than a consolation. “That’s what I’ve been telling Steve,” Fran chimed in.
Aline exchanged a glance with her father. She knew her grandparents had always felt her mother should have married the man she was briefly engaged to thirty years ago. He had gone on to work in Silicon Valley and was now a tech billionaire. Her father, a partner in an accounting firm, made a very good income, but it did not include a private plane, a yacht, a mansion in Connecticut or a villa in Florence.
Normally her father let their criticism roll off his back. Aline was worried about how he would react this time. A roll of his eyes was their unspoken message: “Don’t worry; they’ll be gone in three or four days.”
• • •
On Wednesday Aline suggested to her father that she go with him to make arrangements for a wake on Thursday and a funeral on Friday morning. She was afraid her mother would have a total breakdown if she had to choose a casket. But it was her mother who decided that Kerry would be buried in the gown she had worn to her senior prom. It was a beautiful pale blue, full-length organdy, and Kerry had looked lovely in it.
At one o’clock on Thursday afternoon, dressed in newly purchased black clothes, the family gathered solemnly in the funeral home. When Fran saw Kerry’s body in the casket, she fainted.
“Why, why?” Aline’s grandmother wailed, as Steve caught his wife before she collapsed. But Fran did manage to find enough inner strength to be on the receiving line when visitors started arriving.
As news cameras clicked from their locations across the street, the neighbors, teachers and students from the high school, and friends
