Catherine (20 page)

Alone in The Underground, I couldn’t seem to relax. I kept glancing up at the window,
remembering the girl whose face I’d seen there, only now when I imagined her face
it wore the panicked look I’d seen on Jackie’s statue. Though I knew it was crazy,
I checked the window’s lock to make sure it was still fastened. Of course it was.
But even that didn’t make me feel less jumpy.

There was still so much of my mother’s journal left, but getting through it had become
harder. At first reading each entry had been like tasting a delicious little piece
of her. The more I read, though, the more scared I was that when I reached the end,
that would be it—I’d have uncovered all of her that was left. When I got to the part
about my grandfather’s death, I had to put the book down, to take a break from all
the sadness. Even reading the
happier parts gave me this dizzying feeling of forgetting who I was, of losing track
of my own life and getting caught up in hers.

The whole thing made me confused. While I was reading, I found myself liking Hence.
Her
Hence, that is—the young, vulnerable, romantic one. And it got harder to hate the
Hence I knew—older, crankier, in need of a shave. Weirder still, as I read I found
myself rooting for her and Hence to get together in the end, stupidly hoping the Catherine
in the journal would find a way to get everything she wanted—Harvard and Hence at
the same time. It was disturbing to catch myself rooting against my own father. Against
my very existence.

I couldn’t help wondering: If she was alive, would I rather see her reunited with
Hence than with my dad? If I found her, would I help make that happen? I wasn’t sure
of the answers to those questions anymore, and that made me feel uncomfortable. Disloyal.
Confused.

Then there were the poems, each one a puzzle waiting for me to unlock its secrets.
Like this one:

Given the title, it had to be about Hence and his band. Of course my mom would have
been thrilled that her boyfriend was becoming a rock star. Who wouldn’t be? But all
that business about being tugged away from shore and flung around like driftwood sounded
sad, or maybe scared. Then again, what did I know about poetry? My mom’s creative-writing
genes had completely skipped me. Lately my language arts grades had been
profoundly disappointing
, according to Dad. Maybe the poem was all about being swept away by happiness, and
I just wasn’t getting it. I reread it over and over, waiting for light to dawn.

Finally, the sounds of unloading on the street below broke into my reading. There
was a show that night—which meant Cooper must be back. I tucked the journal into its
hiding place and cursed the pokey old elevator all the way down to the first floor.

Sure enough, I found Cooper out front, instructing the roadies about what went where.
He kept going about his business, helping to lug a drum kit onto the stage while I
watched, waiting for the right moment. But the suspense was killing me. I shifted
from foot to foot.

Finally, drums in place, he looked up to find me there. “Oh,” was all he said.

“You got my note?” I asked. “About what I said last night? I was just mad at Hence
for jumping to conclusions.”

But instead of replying, Cooper scanned the room, looking for the next task to turn
his attention to, as if I weren’t standing there, right in front of him, practically
begging for his forgiveness.

“Please don’t stay angry,” I said. “You’re the only actual friend I have right now.
Nobody else knows where I am and what I’m going through. Besides, I can’t help what
comes out of my mouth when I get mad. It’s, like, my tragic flaw.”

Cooper’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “It’s tragic, all right.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” I said.

But the smile disappeared. “You know what really would be tragic? If I lost my job.
I took a real risk last night. It’s pretty clear Hence doesn’t want me anywhere near
you.”

“But that’s ridiculous! He’s crazy and paranoid. He’s…” I
could feel myself starting to sputter. Knowing I might be about to veer into saying
the wrong thing again, I bit my lip so hard I actually drew blood.

I inhaled and began again. “You said you and he are friends, right? Maybe if you tried
explaining to him…”

“Explaining what? The truth is, Hence wouldn’t like the fact that I showed you those
pictures of your mother. He wouldn’t like…” Unable or unwilling to finish, he dug
his hands into his pockets and looked off into the distance, his blue-green eyes full
of some kind of distress.

“Wouldn’t like what?” I asked.

“Us being friends,” he whispered.

“Oh,” I said. That was when my lower lip started to tremble, because although I hadn’t
given it too much thought, it was true: Coop and I had become friends. And now suddenly
we weren’t, and I was back to being completely on my own.

“I’m not here to make friends.” I whirled around so he wouldn’t see me blinking back
tears, and stomped off in the direction of Hence’s office. Like it or not, I needed
to talk to him. I had to find my mother so I could get out of this place where nobody
liked me and never come back.

When Hence looked up from the papers on his desk, his jaw dropped at the sight of
me in his doorway, but I spoke before he could start yelling.

“Calm down,” I said, in no mood to take any more crap from him. “I promise to leave
before the club opens. I won’t get you in trouble with the NYPD or the FBI, or whoever
it is that cares about underage drinking.”

Hence gave me a funny look, like he was searching for something scathing to say but
couldn’t find it.

“I went to see Jackie this morning,” I said. “My mom’s friend.”

To my utter surprise, his expression softened. Without saying a word, he beckoned
me to sit down in a spare chair on the other side of his desk, so I did. It was a
pretty ordinary office—just some file cabinets and a gray metal desk—except that the
walls were plastered with eight-by-ten glossies of bands that had played The Underground.

“Did you find out anything useful?”

I ran through the memory of all that Jackie had told me, hardly knowing where to start.
It had all been interesting, but was any of it
useful
? Then I remembered. “She might have been in the building,” I told him. “This building.
In fact, I’m sure she was, even though the front was boarded up. She could have climbed
up the fire escape and in through the window.”

Hence made a teepee with his fingers. Above it, his eyes twinkled unpleasantly. “Did
you find out anything I didn’t already know?”

His words stung as though he’d slapped me. “
You
could tell me things,” I said. “But you don’t. You just sit there smirking at me.”

As soon as I said the words, I regretted them. I thought he’d blow up at me again,
but to my surprise, that didn’t happen. Instead, he unlocked his desk and pulled something
out. It looked like a postcard. “How much do you know about your mother and me?” he
asked, his voice neutral, like he was working not to betray any emotion.

“Everything,” I said. “Well, not
everything
.” I struggled for an unembarrassing way to say it. “I know you were
together
.” Saying the words, I felt a flood of relief. Now he knew I knew, and maybe we could
talk for real. “I know she left us to be with you.”

His eyes narrowed, taking me in more closely, and handed me the postcard. On one side
was a glossy picture of some nightclub, with a little Union Jack embossed in the corner.
Just as I was turning it over, a band started playing in the next room, the heavy
bass and drums thundering through the walls. Hence leaped from his seat.

“I’ll be right back,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere with that.”

Glad to be unobserved, I read the postcard.

The postmark was blurry, with a date I couldn’t make out. The card had been addressed
to our old house in Danvers. So this was the trigger for my mother’s running away
from home. I turned
it over and over in my hands, hardly knowing how I felt about this new information.

“Cooper’s got everything under control,” Hence said as he reentered the room. “We
have some time.”

I handed back the postcard. “But how do you have this if you sent it to her? Did you…
did the two of you…?” I was trying to ask if he’d come home and found her here after
all, if they’d had time together before she disappeared. But what about the alibi
that supposedly put him in England at the time of her disappearance? I wanted to ask,
but the look on his face—a terrible sadness—made me fall silent.

“I found it here, up in her bedroom, lying on the rug. She’d left the window open.
The downstairs was boarded up; there was no other way in or out. There were no signs
of forced entry, or of any kind of a scuffle. She left the way she came—of her own
free will.”

“Why would she leave before you got here?” Could he be lying? Somehow I didn’t think
so. “If she left us to be with you, why wouldn’t she wait till you got here?”

Hence frowned. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be finding out?”

“Jackie said something about her having business to attend to.”

“I know that,” Hence snapped.

His tone of voice set me on edge. But a new thought occurred to me. “Do the police
know about that postcard? Do they know my mother was here before she disappeared?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Hence said. “It wouldn’t have helped them find her.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” I said. “You withheld evidence
that might have made you look guilty. That’s got to be some kind of crime….” The words
popped out of my mouth before I could think about what I was saying. I’d just gotten
a tiny bit comfortable with Hence, had decided I could maybe trust him, and he seemed
to have decided the same thing about me. But the look that crossed his face now frightened
me.

“It’s nobody’s business,” he said. “Not the police’s. Not even yours.”

“Then why did you show it to me?”

I thought my question was innocent enough, but it seemed to enrage him. He jumped
to his feet and glowered down at me. For a moment I wondered who would hear me if
I screamed. Nobody, not with the racket being made by the band one room over. “So
you can go home and tell that egghead father of yours his marriage was a lie. Catherine
could never love somebody like him. She spent their whole marriage waiting for a chance
to come back to me.”

This made me so angry I forgot to be scared. I sputtered, unable to speak.

“She was only trying to hurt me, like I was trying to hurt her. Everything I did—buying
the club, marrying my sorry excuse of a… I never loved that bitch, never even liked
her. I couldn’t hear her voice without wanting to slap her. Not that I ever hit her,
but I was tempted. I came close, more than once. I could have….” He turned and, without
warning, smashed his fist through the wall, the plaster crumbling under his hand.

Maybe I should have jumped to my feet and raced out of the room, but all I could do
was stare.

“And that’s what I’ll do to the skull of the son of a bitch who killed Catherine,
when I find out who he is.”

“She’s alive,” I heard myself say. “Just because she didn’t wait here for you to come
back doesn’t mean she’s dead.”

He spun around and looked at me like he’d forgotten I was in the room. What was I
saying? Did I really want to make him angrier than he already was? He took a step
toward me, his arm still raised.

“You’re seriously going to hit a girl?” It was the only thing I could think of to
say that might stop him.

To my surprise, it worked. He laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh, but at least he wasn’t
putting his hand through my skull.

“You do have some of your mother’s courage,” he said grudgingly.

Coming from him, this was a compliment. For one weird moment, it made me almost happy.

But then he frowned, and his tone turned poisonous again. “Even so, if there was any
justice in this universe, you would never have been born.”

What was I supposed to say to that?

“You’d better get out of here. I’ll give you half an hour to pack.” He looked at his
watch. “Starting now.” He turned his back to me, so I left the room.

It’s a good thing Cooper wasn’t in sight; I was way too upset to explain what had
happened. I punched the button for the elevator over and over, as if that would get
me upstairs faster. There was no way I wanted to spend another minute in the same
building with that madman Hence.