A thought occurred to me. I said, “Did Winter go to school?”
“Victoria taught her. Home schooled her. All the rage, now, from what I hear. Not quite so much back then.”
“She never went to a regular school?” Jeri asked.
“Not that I ever saw. Other kids’d take the bus. Stops right out there on the corner, but I never saw Winter get on with ’em. Like I said, if you saw Winter, you saw Victoria. Two of ’em was like Siamese twins.”
More silence. Jeri squeezed my hand. It felt nice.
Finally, I said, “Has there been any trouble around here lately? Say in the past year or two.”
“What kinda trouble?”
“Nothing specific. Just…anything serious. Something that might get the police involved.”
Kennedy pursed his lips, thinking. “A kid a couple of streets over was killed. Caused a fair commotion for a day or two. Boy was only seventeen.”
“How long ago?”
“Couple or three months back.”
“How’d he die?”
“Gunshot, from what I heard. Drilled ’im right through the heart. Bullet went straight on through, didn’t tear up much inside, so they’re thinking .22 caliber. Probably the reason no one heard anything, too. Detectives come around asking everyone in the neighborhood if they saw anything, heard anything. I was sorry I couldn’t hep ’em any, but…” He shrugged.
“Did they catch the killer?”
“Not that I heard.”
I thought about that, couldn’t make anything of it. I looked at Jeri. She shook her head at me.
“Anything else?” she asked.
A few seconds ticked by. “Was a suicide some years back. Two houses down.” He nodded up the street. “Guess it’d be four years ago. Arvin Weldon lost his job, got himself fired, hung himself off his second-floor banister with a bedsheet. Didn’t know him all that good. Guy was something of a loner, kept pretty much to himself. We’d talk about the weather if we ran into each other, that’s about it.”
I couldn’t make anything of that, either.
Half a minute of silence dragged by.
Jeri squeezed my hand again and gave me a look, a little shrug with her mouth that meant she’d run out of questions. I didn’t know what else to ask, either.
I started to get up, but suddenly Jeri’s hand tightened on mine and she held me down. She was looking at Kennedy.
His eyes were bright, eager, waiting. There was something more, secrets floating around in that dark light in his eyes. Jeri had spotted it.
“What else?” she asked him.
Kennedy smiled mysteriously, eyes shifting between us. “That girl, Winter, turned into quite a looker, same as her mama.”
I’d told Jeri as much, and Kennedy had said the same thing a few minutes ago. But there was more to it. “Yes?” Jeri prompted him.
“History,” he said slowly, “has a way of repeatin’ itself.”
“What do you mean?”
Whatever it was, it was good. He wanted to drag it out, savor it, chew on it a while, but couldn’t figure out how to go about it. At last he shrugged and said, “Four, five years ago, the two of ’em took off for a while. Month or so. When they got back, Winter was pregnant. Just like her mama, just like Jacoba. Fifteen year old, she was, an’ knocked up.”
I felt cold at his words. Jeri leaned forward a little.
“Had a kid, too, name of Miranda. My Olivia died that same year, September. Only way I can remember anything nowadays, seems like. Either a you want some ice tea?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
MIRANDA. LIKE THE warning, I thought.
Jacoba, Victoria, Winter, Miranda. Every fifteen or sixteen years there was another one. Children having children, generations piling up. I was hardly able to keep them all straight. If Jacoba were alive today, she’d be somewhere in her fifties and a great-grandmother.
“Miranda died about two months back,” Kennedy said. “That’s when they put the house up.” He looked down at Johnson. “Was one curious thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Jeri asked. “The way she died?”
“No, not that. She had a seizure, swallowed her tongue or some such.” He hesitated. “Well, maybe that was curious, but not if you knew Miranda. Thing was, she was simple, maybe even more than Jacoba had been.” He gave Jeri a half-hearted smile. “Two of ’em in one family. Now, don’t that beat all?”
* * *
I drove us back to Myrtle Beach, squinting to peer through the rain. Jeri was silent, lost in thought. As we crossed the Waterway, she said, “Wendell Sjorgen was murdered twenty-one years ago.”
Ah, yes, that was it. My brain gave a little sigh of relief.
“What do you make of that?” I asked. “Coincidence?”
She shrugged. We went another two miles before she said, “If you’re into coincidences, two of four of those women were retarded, Mort. And both of them are dead.”
“Emmaline Dorman told us Jacoba had been damaged during birth. Didn’t get enough oxygen.”
Jeri stared at me. “You never told me that.”
“I forgot.”
“You forget a lot…partner.”
“I never know what’s important and what isn’t. You think it means anything—Jacoba being brain damaged at birth that way?”
“I think it means her genes were fine. Most likely she would’ve given birth to a normal child. Which it appears she did. Other than that, who knows?”
We were on Highway 501, nearing Business Route 17 and North Ocean Boulevard. “Where to?” I asked.
“The beach.”
“The beach?”
“Roll your window down,” she said. “There’s an echo in here.”
“Okay, okay, the beach.”
Highway 501 had become East Broadway. I turned east, then went south on Ocean. Rain swirled over the tops of the condos, and between, driven by the wind. A few people dashed from their cars into stores and buildings, but the street was mostly deserted.
“Turn there.” Jeri pointed off to the left.
“What’s down there?”
She stared at me.
“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. “The Atlantic, full of old Nazi submarines.” I turned onto Fourth Avenue.
“Okay, pull over,” she said.
I steered the Mustang into a space half a block from the beach. Whitecaps were visible, dark gray clouds, rain, ocean spray.
Jeri took off her sandals and got out. “C’mon.”
“Jesus, Jeri.”
“Get your shoes off. Let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“The plane doesn’t leave for
