taught. She had a great future. I was quite sick about it.”
“Sorry.”
“No biggie. It’s what it is. No point in wishing things were different. She’s gone…You know what? I think I’d like a cup of coffee. How about you?”
It wasn’t a clever change of subject, but it was successful enough. Jimmy was already up and moving out of the room when I said, “Dying for one.”
When we passed through the living room on the way to the kitchen, we saw that Jazzy was asleep on the couch. Someone, Mom probably, had covered her with a blanket.
Coming into the kitchen, Jimmy said, “Jazzy is out for the count.”
Mom and Dad and Trixie were sitting at the table, already enjoying coffee. Mom said, “Keep it down. She’s exhausted. I bet she slept in that tree last night. Sometimes they lock her out.”
“Why won’t someone do something?” Jimmy asked.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Dad said. “We haven’t even seen her mother or her latest shitass come out of the house in a couple days.”
“Pete, don’t talk like that,” Mom said.
Dad ignored her as usual. “Her mother stays inside most of the time, like she’s afraid of the light. I don’t think she works, unless it’s over the telephone. The new daddy, he has a van with something about upholstery work written on the side, so maybe he does upholstery at home. But my guess is he isn’t a working fool. And then there’s the former Daddy Greg, who I guess is just Greg now. He comes around now and then. No telling what Jazzy sees. That girl needs a better home life.”
“Bless her heart,” Mom said. “Jazzy is a smart little thing. She can learn anything.”
“She’s being wasted,” Dad said.
Mom patted Dad’s hand. “I know, but all we can do is stay on Protective Services.”
Jimmy and I went over to the cabinet for some coffee cups, got coffee from the coffeemaker and sat down at the table.
“She’ll spend the night here,” Mom said. “And I bet her mother and her newest daddy won’t even miss her.”
“Drunk bastards,” Dad said. “Or maybe it’s something else they’re hopped up on. Or maybe they aren’t hopped up on anything, it’s just the way they act. Hard to tell.”
“Hopped up?” Jimmy said. “People still say that?”
“I do,” said Dad.
“How about twenty-three skidoo?” Jimmy said.
“Or Oh you, kid,” I said.
“Or the bee’s knees,” Trixie said.
Dad grinned at us. “You’re asking for it, busters. And you too, young lady.”
That night, after my brother and his wife left and everyone had gone to bed, I sat at my old desk and glanced through the file Mercury had put together for me. I found myself looking at Caroline’s picture over and over. I read through all the notes and filled my head with all the facts that were available. It was like planting seeds in my gray matter, trying to get them to take root and break through and bloom.
I looked for clues as if I might find them: Colonel Mustard in the study with the wrench. That sort of thing. I thought of how terrible and surprising it might have been for her, attacked by someone she trusted most likely, since that’s the way it usually worked out.
It wasn’t a pleasant thing to think about before bedtime, but I stayed with it, tried to figure a little of this and a little of that. There were no parents to talk to. No relatives she was really connected to. There was just the girl who said she hadn’t paid her movie rental bill, her library fine. The girl’s name was Ronnie Fisher and there was an address for her, but I didn’t see much in that. Still, I made a note to contact her. I finally went to bed. This time I didn’t dream.
11
A month went by, and for some reason, though it interested me the most, I couldn’t get up enough of a head of steam to write about Caroline Allison. I knew how I wanted to write about her, but for whatever reason I didn’t have enough gas in the tank. I think the business with Gabby had evaporated my fuel.
There were people I ought to interview so I could get a larger picture of who she was and what might have happened to her, but I wasn’t up to it. I was having a hard enough time just learning to be me again, not waking up and thinking I was still in Iraq and that pretty soon I’d be on the streets with my rifle and my asshole clenched, hoping today wouldn’t be the day I got my head blown off.
In the meantime I wrote columns on stem cell research, people who took the Bible literally, and even wrote one on gardening gleaned from Francine’s old notes. It was an easy thing to do, to use those notes, and I took advantage of it and got my column written quickly that week. It gave me more time to read through the research I had on Caroline, though what I had I had read a half-dozen times.
Then, one morning, all the notes, all my thoughts came together and I wrote a kind of lest-we-forget piece with the best photo of her and a shot of her shoes and that sad sack of food lying on her car seat. I wrote reminding the community that she had lived here, was well known at the university, was thought to have tremendous promise, that she had disappeared, and all these months later, no one knew any more than the day she disappeared. It was also about the fact that not only was there no information on her disappearance, when you got right down to it there wasn’t much information on her before her disappearance. I thought it might be a two-part or three-part piece, the other two parts a little more investigative. It depended on the feedback I got.
Anyway, the column got done, and I was at my desk on a Tuesday morning, two days after it appeared, having managed not to get drunk and to think of Gabby only a few hundred times since I got up, showered, shaved and had my coffee. I brought some more coffee to work from the coffee shop and was still drinking it when Mrs. Timpson came out of her office, stopped at my desk and shifted her ample ass onto the corner of it, then shifted the teeth in her mouth.
“Cason, you kind of got things stirring.”
“The column on Caroline Allison?”
“No. The one you did on Noah’s ark.”
“Oh.”
“Christians are all fired up.”
“Aren’t they always? What did I do, misspell Noah?”
“You suggested that it didn’t really happen.”
“And you think it did?”
“Do I look like an ignorant yahoo? No one in their right mind thinks some fella put, what was it you said, ‘thousands of species, times two’ on a goddamn boat and sailed it around for forty days and forty nights. But for some Christians, it’s like the best sex in the world to them. They can’t let it go. They like getting banged in the ass by the Noah story.”
“Actually,” I said, “I understand that. Personally, I’m still mad about there not being any Santa Claus.”
Timpson adjusted her teeth with her tongue. “Some of the people who put advertising in the paper are big Charlie Churches. We have to kiss their ass a little, right around the pucker hole.”
“You’re telling me not to write about that sort of thing anymore?”
“I’m not going to say that. But you followed it with stem cell research, and how we need it. Don’t put two ass kickers back to back. Space them out a bit. It’s all right to stir them up, but let’s don’t keep them stirred. Kick Jesus in the balls one week, then do some fluff piece or a profile, then come back for another kick. Give them time to heal. They get stirred enough, they’ll get deep-fried and sanctified all over our asses. I’m going to let Reverend Dinkins address your article in his Sunday column. He’ll take the fundamentalist view. It’ll be stupid, but it’ll make the church people happy.”
“Isn’t he the one trying to keep them from building a school down in the old black section of town?”
“He is at that, and so is Reverend Judence. Funny thing is, they both want the same thing, but not for the same reason, so they’re mad at each other.”
