Been There, Done That (20 page)

Once, I replied, “Yeah, your mom.” Her face lit up and then fell in such quick succession that I wondered if she didn’t detest her mother for the instant’s heartbreak.

A couple of girls from her fellowship group stopped by one day to ask Tiffany to join them for ice cream, but she turned them down.

“Why didn’t you go with your friends?” I asked after they left. I could have had the room to myself for an hour. A whole hour!

“They aren’t really my friends,” she said. “They hardly even know me.”

When Ethan did call, Tiffany’s voice became breathy and giggly. She’d take the cordless phone to her bed, where she’d sit with her knees to her forehead, seeking privacy in the darkness between her thighs and chest. Then she’d hang up, lunge into her closet and grab some clothes that were no more flattering than the ones she was wearing. She had lost weight. I wasn’t sure whether love diminished her appetite or whether she was unwilling to sacrifice valuable phone-sitting time for a meal. For Ethan had informed her, early on, that he didn’t leave messages. “I don’t like machines,” he’d said. Tiffany believed him, but I was inclined to think he wanted to see or talk to her when and only when it suited him; otherwise, he couldn’t be bothered.

It was driving me crazy. I wanted to be annoyed or vaguely amused. Instead, I was worried. “Want to see a movie tonight?” I asked one Wednesday evening. She was sitting on her bed with her arms around her knees, staring into space. “What?” She looked surprised. She shook her head. “I’ve got too much to do. You know, reading.”

“You might want to think about playing hard to get,” I blurted. “Some guys like you better when you seem less available.”

She glared at me, and I realized with a shock that Tiffany no longer wanted to be my best friend. Quite the contrary. “Mind your own beeswax,” she said, and it would have been laughable had it been said without such venom.

As for Jeremy, he was the other friend I’d lost. It was different, of course. I didn’t feel sorry for him; I just missed him. He was the only student I’d met here who resembled an adult. Now I felt uncomfortable every time I ran into him, so I avoided him as much as possible. If I was about to leave my room and heard him outside, I’d stall until he was gone. A month in a dorm, and I was acting eighteen.

 
 
After my fight with Tiffany, there was nothing to do but leave. It was three o’clock on a Tuesday, but the sky was so black it looked like early evening. I sat in my Civic and waited for the deluge. When most people think of fall in New England, they picture red and orange leaves flaming against a sharp blue sky, but that’s just part of it. Late September brings violent weather shifts, seventy and sunny one day, forty-five and pounding rain the next. There’s nothing like a good storm to rip those pretty leaves off the trees and catapult us prematurely into winter. September is hurricane season. Headache season. The low pressure from the incoming storm made my brain expand. My head hurt like hell, and I’d forgotten to stop by College Drugs for a bottle of Aleve.

It was the kind of day when all I wanted was to read a good book beside a roaring fire, a cat on my lap, a mug of sweet tea on my table. But I don’t have a fireplace. Or a cat. And without those, the whole tea ritual seems kind of empty.

Right now, I’d settle for being back in my apartment. I’d been here for four weeks already, and I’d learned nothing. I’d retraced my walk to the library on several evenings and hung around that dorm looking for the girl with the long, shiny hair and had come up empty. I wasn’t sure I could stand three more weeks—especially if it meant admitting defeat at the end. As such, I was doing the only thing I could think of to get the damned story finished in time for my deadline, if not before. I was stalking a source.

Okay, Tim had written off Chantal as being a dead end, just a small-time hooker in a small town, but I wasn’t so sure. It is hard to keep a secret in a small town. Maybe she’d heard or seen something. Or maybe not. I’d run out of ideas, and Chantal was my last hope.

Her blinds were drawn. With the front window being positioned under the upstairs apartment’s landing, there wasn’t much light to be let in, even on a clear day.

It was 2:30 and five minutes after the sky had begun to unload when I saw a man scurry to her door, head down, and knock. He wore a jean jacket that looked to be highly effective at absorbing rain. He was fortyish, with a large rear end and no neck to speak of. The door opened briefly and he slipped inside. I tried not to think about what was going on in there, but it was hard not to. I shuddered. Really, what did I expect—Richard Gere? At least this guy looked clean. Well, cleanish. I hoped he was nice to her.

At 2:50, the door opened again, and the man slipped out. I looked away, although of course he was fully dressed. Once I saw his pickup truck leaving the parking lot, I got out of my car and sprinted for Chantal’s front door. Fortunately, I’d brought a slicker to Mercer. It wasn’t very warm, but at least it kept me dry. She opened the door immediately, probably expecting the big butt guy to have come back for seconds. She wore a bathrobe: red and black flannel, not exactly what I would have pictured, but it does get cold here. She stared at me.

“I was hoping to catch you before your three o’clock,” I said, as if stopping by my hairdresser’s for a bang trim.

“My three o’clock what?” she said carefully. For at least a half a second I considered that maybe she was just having an affair with the guy in the pickup, but surely an affair demands a little foreplay and after play, not to mention a nice meal. Twenty minutes wouldn’t cut it.

“You probably don’t remember me,” I said. “My name is Katie. I came here a couple of months ago.”

She narrowed her eyes. “July twenty-seventh. Three o’clock. Except your name was Kathy then.”

I blinked at her. “You have an amazing memory.”

“I can’t exactly keep written records.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself, providing a kind of flannel armor. “Look. If you’re going to take me in, just take me in.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You got nothin’ on me,” she said. “But if you’re going to book me anyway, I gotta call my lawyer to bail me out. My daughter gets out of after-school care at six, and they get really pissed if you’re late.”

I couldn’t believe I once thought Chantal could be a college student. She was almost young enough, but her teeth were too crooked, her eyes too weary. Only her hands bespoke a woman of leisure. Her fingers were long and smooth, her oval nails painted a delicate shell pink.

“I’m not a cop,” I told her. “I’m a reporter.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And that guy you were with? The nerdy one—Tim?”

“He’s a reporter, too.” We stared at each other for a moment. “Do you really think he’s nerdy?”

She laughed, a surprisingly girlish sound. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nerds usually have the biggest dicks.”

I was speechless for a moment—I don’t discuss penises very often, even (or especially) Penises I Have Known—but then I stuck a hand on my hip and tilted my head in a world-weary way. “Actually, it’s pretty average.”

We ate at the Denny’s just off the highway. It smelled of disinfectant and grease. I’d suggested the restaurant because I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew there. I assumed Chantal would share the same desire for anonymity, but when the hostess greeted her with a warm, “Hey, Cheryl,” she smiled back. As the hostess seated us in a window booth (which boasted a view of the highway off-ramp), she said to Chantal, “You’re cuttin’ out of work early,” to which Chantal shrugged and said, “Business is slow today. The rain.”

We slid into a slippery brown booth. She pulled a laminated menu from behind the sugar shaker and began to read. I stared at her. “Cheryl?”

“Mmm?” She looked up.

“I thought your name was Chantal.”

“I thought your name was Kathy.” She went back to the menu.

“How do you know the hostess?” I finally asked.

“Our daughters are in the same class. First grade.”

“And she knows about your, um, business?” Chantal—Cheryl—had finally admitted to being a pro—her preferred term—after she’d taken me into her apartment and checked me for a listening device. Then she’d changed into jeans and a gray sweatshirt and stuck her tangled blond hair into a messy ponytail.

She looked up from her menu. “Some parents at the school, the accountants and professors, people like that, don’t think much of me being a palm reader, but they don’t say nothin’.”

“A palm reader? But what if someone shows up and actually wants a palm read?”

“Then I read it.” She shrugged. “I’m good, too. This one lady, I looked at her hand for a long time then said, now don’t be upset or nothin’, but I think your husband’s steppin’ out on you. So she goes home and confronts him, and sure enough, he’s got a little cupcake on the side.”

“And you could tell that from her palm?”

She tightened her mouth, considered lying, then decided to tell the truth. “Nah. Her husband had been a client for years, then he suddenly stopped showing up. Figured he must be getting it for free.”

“So what happened?”

“He cried a lot, told her he never loved anyone else and broke off the affair.”

“So you saved their marriage!”

“Sure. Plus I got one of my best clients back.” She grinned slyly.

The waitress brought us ice water in cloudy glasses. I almost didn’t order anything since it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but even Denny’s food had to be better than whatever cornstarch-thickened mess they were preparing at the dining hall. I ordered a club sandwich, while Cheryl chose a grand slam breakfast. “I never get to eat breakfast,” she said once the waitress had gone. “Too many early clients.”

“I would have thought you’d be busier at night.”

She shook her head. “They like to catch me on their way into work. The lunch hour’s pretty busy, too. I’d get a lot of after-work business, but I’ve got to pick up Destiny. When I had her, I swore I’d always put family ahead of work, and I’ve stuck to it.”

“Is Destiny—was Destiny—from, um, working?”

“I don’t follow.” She took a gulp of water.

“Do you know who the father is?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t being offensive.

“Oh! You mean was I on the game. Nah, that came later. I had this boyfriend, Brent, we went out all through high school, then the summer after we graduate I get pregnant and he splits.” She shrugged. “It don’t matter. Destiny and I, we do okay. It was rough the first three years, before I got in the game. All these dumb-shit minimum-wage jobs. Every time Destiny got sick and I had to take off work, I got fired. Now I make my own hours, make good money. We do okay.”

The waitress brought our plates. Cheryl dumped syrup over her pancakes, bacon and sausage, careful to leave the scrambled eggs unsoaked. I glanced at the other diners—not many at this odd hour, but there were a few, nonetheless. We were the only ones who weren’t either dangerously obese or wearing trucker hats or both. My club sandwich could have fed me for the next two days, if only I had a fridge.

“What about competition?” I asked, extracting a frilly toothpick from a towering triangle of my sandwich. “Are you the only game in town?” I took a bite. A tomato slice slid out of the sandwich and onto my plate, followed by a piece of bacon. I never have mastered the multi-decker sandwich.

She shoveled some scrambled egg into her mouth. Still chewing, she speared a piece of bacon and a wad of pancakes. She lifted her shoulders at my question then gobbled the next bite before pausing to wipe her mouth with a paper napkin. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m hungrier than I thought. I’ve heard there are other girls around, but we don’t exactly get together for coffee.”

“Any chance”—I checked to make sure no one was listening—“could any of them be from Mercer?”

I expected her to look shocked, but she merely shrugged. Cheryl was a big shrugger. “Could be.”

“That wouldn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore.”

I nodded. “But you haven’t heard any rumors?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean anything. Give me your number, and I’ll call if I hear anything.”

twenty-four

I discouraged Tim from coming to the concert by saying it was too risky. He wanted to ask Gerry, the bartender at The Snake Pit, about the encounter I’d seen by the bushes, but I urged him to do it some other evening. I’d played that scene over in my head so many times that I’d started to wonder if there wasn’t an innocent explanation. Maybe the man was just saying good night to his daughter. His favorite daughter. Who he really, really, really liked.

Still, I had the jitters. It was stage fright, pure and simple. Backstage, I plucked at the chrysanthemums in my hair (this being fall, mums were plentiful and cheap). I smoothed my peach lace and scuffed the floor with my high-tops. I tried to tell myself that this was just another night in the life of an investigative reporter, that I would spend my time scanning the audience for any potential johns who were dumb enough to confuse us with the Red Hots. But I knew, of course, that I had no good reason to be here. The Alternative Prom Queens were a bunch of nice girls who liked to harmonize. They took up too much time and provided no clues about the elusive prostitution ring, which I was starting to suspect was a fiction anyway. But I was enjoying myself. Singing in a college a cappella group, I was doing something I’d always regretted missing out on. It was one of the points on my mental grievance list against Tim. I was reclaiming a college experience I’d never had: one that had nothing whatsoever to do with my future—as either a reporter or Tim’s lucky wife—and everything to do with having a good time and making the most of my youth, which was more fleeting than anyone around me could suspect. I would never cut a record, I would never belt out tunes on Broadway. Even if I had the ambition, I lacked the talent. A college concert was the pinnacle of my singing achievement. It made my head buzz with excitement and my stomach churn with fear.