Goosebumps rose on her bare arms. This was more than she expected. During their earlier encounter, Ray had said he’d never met the man. ‘Was Tim ever with them?’
‘At the yacht club? I don’t think so. Just their own friends. It was usually a table for four, sometimes six. I remember this one woman with a tinkly laugh. Used to drive me up the wall. Skinny lady. Blonde bouffant. Always wore this choker of white plastic beads and big sunglasses like Jackie O. I remember feeling sorry for her husband. He didn’t say much. I had the idea he might be foreign because he ate like a European. You know, with the fork in his left hand? I remember thinking that was really cool. But she would hiss at him to sit up straight and not eat so fast. How could I have forgotten? The tinkly laugh, the hissing.’
The ghost of a memory flickered, and Erin briefly closed her eyes. The laugh didn’t sound right, but the foreign-seeming husband? It could have been them. Or not. With her memories of those years shattered by the drugs she’d been forced to take at Danfield, there were a million ways she could reshuffle the actors from her past.
An attractive woman in a backless dress brushed by their table, trailing a cloud of perfume. Ray didn’t give her a glance.
‘I remember one night when Stern snapped his fingers at me to bring him some notepaper. He and his friend had just come up with the “greatest idea ever” and wanted to write it down. So, the two started scribbling away, with Stern calling out for another round of cocktails.’
She studied his face, puzzled by the flood of details he so fluently recalled. ‘What was the great idea?’
‘Beats me.’ He gave her a sheepish grin. ‘I was something of a stoner in those days. Before going off to work, I’d take a couple of bong hits to get through the evening. The things I can’t remember from that time would fill a black hole.’
A stoner? She wouldn’t have guessed that, but at least a few details had filtered through the weed-induced fog. Tinkly laugh, blonde bouffant. She jammed her thumbnail into her wrist, hoping the pain would silence the alarm bells in her head. There were no photos from those days. All were lost, or so she was told. After her father died, and they moved to Concord. That photo she saw at Stern’s house. Was it the same couple? The woman with the annoying laugh and the man who ate with the fork in his left hand? Impossible to return to the house for another look, but Lydia had taken some snapshots of the rooms. There might be something she could work with.
‘Before I forget, I brought you this.’ She reached into her bag for the Belle River High School yearbook Ray had pressed into her hands before leaving his flat. She’d been planning to send it by post but changed her mind after he’d agreed to meet her for dinner.
His eyebrows shot up. ‘Wow, okay. I totally forgot I’d given that to you.’
An awkward silence grew between them. Erin was worried she’d spoiled the mood. But that was the reason she’d contacted him, for information on Tim, not for a date, however pleasant this evening was turning out to be. In for a penny, in for a pound. Ever since their first encounter at his flat, she was curious to know if Ray had known her brother.
‘Speaking of high school…’ She nodded at the yearbook. ‘I was going through the pictures and jotted down some names.’ Erin made a pretence of looking in her bag. ‘I must have left the list at home. Anyway, during my research on the Stern murders, this one name kept popping up.’ She sought his eyes. ‘Do you remember someone named Graham Marston?’
They had long-since finished their caramel flan, and Ray rose from his chair to signal for the bill. When their waitress arrived, he flipped open his wallet and extracted a card.
‘Marston? At Belle River High?’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t think so.’
She wanted to ask him about his yearbook picture and what ‘eldu#QUEpasa?’ meant, but that was surely going too far. What rational person would want the long-buried details of their teenage years picked apart?
Out in the street, Ray seemed to be in a hurry. He hailed a cab and held the door as she stepped in. No kiss on the cheek. No, ‘I’ll call you.’ Not a date then. Was she disappointed? Not in the least, she decided, after examining her thoughts. Just frustrated from grasping at so many straws. As her cab pulled away, he stood on the pavement with his hands stuffed in his pockets. His face was impossible to read.
The storm that had been building all afternoon broke just as her train pulled out of the station. A relief to listen to the rain pelting the carriage roof as they trundled north. Water streamed down the window, blurring the skyline. As they swayed along the track, she was lulled into the feeling of lying in a boat, adrift at sea. But the evening wasn’t a total loss. That bit about the Sterns and the couple at the yacht club was interesting. If not for Tim’s story, then her own. It could have been them. The few
