Nineteen
I suppose only the wildly optimistic in Springfield were surprised. I saw Les Mis. Turn your life around? It doesn’t matter. Maybe it shouldn’t. I’d never really thought about it before. I just knew Caroline Sturgis and couldn’t see what purpose it would serve to have her making license plates in the big house for the next fifteen years.
I turned off Babe’s computer. It was time for that drink, and Babe Chinnery obliged, pulling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a small wooden cabinet under the window in her office. I’d had a Jack night once a few years back. All I remember was that I forgot where I parked my car, and it was a damn good thing, since driving would have been suicidal.
“What do you have for lightweights?” I asked.
“How about a dark and stormy-rum and ginger beer?”
“Maybe just coffee for now.”
Babe locked up her office and we took our time walking to the diner’s front entrance. If I hadn’t spent the time going to Mossdale’s and blowing eighty dollars on lunch, maybe I could have driven to Bridgeport and convinced Caroline to see me, but it was too late to speculate.
“Something happened that day,” I said. “She got a ticket, saw the priest, and then came here. However startling those first two events might have been, they didn’t put her out of commission. She was pretty happy when she got here.”
“Yeah, she came in to see you, you talked, she started to leave, and the trucker hit on her,” Babe said. “That long-haired guy who tried to help Terry?” I didn’t know who she was talking about, then realized the waitress with the bolt in her eyebrow was Terry.
“She flung a tray of coffee cups and nearly decapitated someone? You were there, remember?”
“Right. The guy who said Caroline looked familiar,” I said, trying to dredge up a mental image.
“Please, I hear that ten times a day. It only registers when it’s one of my regular customers and I’m worried that it’s early stage Alzheimer’s.”
“Maybe he wasn’t throwing her a line. Maybe she looked familiar because he knew her back in Michigan when she was Monica Weithorn. Maybe she was upset because he looked familiar to her.” Could be. It was right after that that Caroline made her hasty departure, giving some phony excuse to her friends outside.
All I remembered was that the trucker had long hair and wore a baseball hat, but Terry had spoken with him. He’d even gotten a laugh out of her, which was the first time I’d ever seen her teeth. Maybe something about him stuck with her.
“He was with another driver, someone you knew, wasn’t he?”
“Retro Joe,” she said. “No one knows if that’s his real name-that’s just what everyone calls him. One of the long haulers. I can almost see the truck, red logo, two letters interlocked. I’ll get it but it may take some time. But those guys don’t always drive with the same partners.”
Inside the diner, we escorted Terry to a booth and sat her down to ask her a few questions.
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? You guys are worse than my parents. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I dropped the tray and he helped me clean up until Babe came over. It was two seconds. No great meeting of the minds.”
I went into schmooze mode. “Come on, Terry. You’re an observant girl. And sensitive. You write songs-you notice things about people.” She looked down, working hard to live up to my flattering assessment of her powers of perception and conjure up his image. All three of us were.
“He had long hair and a baseball hat. He said something that made you laugh,” I prompted. “What did he say?”
“It was nothing. Something stupid, like I had a nice wrist move. He was a champion Frisbee player when he was in college, so he would know. It just seemed like a dumb thing to say at the time, but it was perfect. Better than asking if I was okay. I hate when people ask me that.”
(Note to self: When we’re finished, don’t ask if she’s okay.)
“Did he mention where he went to school?” I asked.
“Man, it was all of two minutes. It wasn’t a date. He said it was cold and they jumped around a lot to keep warm.” She ratcheted down and gave it some more thought. “His friend called him JW-he was with Retro Joe.” Then she made an up-and-down motion with one hand, almost as if she were playing a washboard. “And he had something strange about his lip. You could barely see it because of the facial hair. A scar-like the guy who played Johnny Cash in that movie.”
“He had a cleft lip?”
“I don’t know what you call it. It’s kind of cute, like a little line. And his hat had an ornate D on it.”
“D like in Dodgers?” Babe asked.
A voice over my shoulder said, “No,” and three heads turned in its direction at the same time. It was one of the truckers.
He peeled off a few bills and left them on the counter. “D like in Tigers. Detroit Tigers,” he said.
Twenty
Detroit was big, but Caroline/Monica’s hometown wasn’t. The papers had said she was from Newtonville, one of the smaller specks on the MapQuest page, and a Google search made me think people probably didn’t go there unless they were visiting relatives or were passing through to get to somewhere else. Blue-collar residents commuted to jobs in the bigger cities or simply packed up and moved when their jobs did. The ones who stayed were rich or old, or just didn’t have any other place to go. It seemed like a lot of other towns-nice enough, maybe even wonderful forty years ago, but now still lovely on the surface but quietly dying.
I’d start my Internet research with Caroline’s high school. The papers had said Caroline had been a senior at Newtonville High in 1981. How many kids could have been in her graduating class in a town that size? Or were enrolled during the four years she attended? And how many of them could have had a cleft lip? Wasn’t that pretty rare?
I found the school online and ordered yearbooks from all four years that Caroline attended. If I wasn’t successful, I’d have to eat the cost (and the cost of my eighty-dollar lunch with O’Malley), but if I found out who the tipster was, I knew Grant would reimburse me. And I had my fingers crossed that a pretty and popular girl like Caroline would be in lots of pictures and I’d get a handle on who some of her friends were. There was no guarantee our trucker who talked to Caroline even went to high school with her, but it was the only lead I had from Michigan.
Who knew how long the yearbooks would take to arrive? In the meantime, I took the plunge and said yes to one of the biggest time suckers on the Internet, highschoolmemories.com. I signed in pretending to be Monica Weithorn.
For free, I got the tantalizing “Old friends are trying to find you” page with the names strategically blurred. Of course they are. All those people who ignored you or made your life miserable when you were sixteen really wanted to find you. Why? To make sure that they were still cooler than you? For more specific information, I’d have to upgrade my membership. Fifty bucks got me the whole enchilada and a bag of chips. Every classmate’s name in alphabetical order for the four years Caroline had been enrolled, even the old varsity team schedules and records. And updated background info on everyone who’d been dumb enough to enter their current coordinates.
No one I knew used highschoolmemories.com. Well okay, one person, but she was recently divorced and looking for love, or a reasonable facsimile. Why she thought she’d find it among her former high school classmates was beyond me. Most people would rather eat ground glass than relive their high school years.
I printed out the list of Caroline’s classmates and planned to search the likeliest candidates on Facebook- athletes, cheerleaders, and those with the same zip codes as Caroline had had. I didn’t know the demographics of the average Facebook user, and it was a long shot that there would be a lot of overlap with Caroline’s classmates, but it would keep me busy until the yearbooks arrived, and I might trip over somebody with the initials JW. In my former career I had unearthed more than a few good stories by just doggedly pursuing trails that others had dropped.
