Dead on the Island (4 page)

"Have a seat," she said, and I sat in one of
the rockers, which was covered with some sort of Early American
pattern: lanterns, plows, harnesses.

"Truman," she said. "That's a funny sort of
name. Is it a family name?"

"No," I said. "It's a political name. My
father always liked that picture of Harry Truman holding up the
newspaper headline declaring Dewey the winner of the 1948 election.
He liked to see the underdog win."

"Oh," she said.

"Most people just call me Tru," I said.

"All right, Tru." She looked at me with her
dark eyes for a minute as if making up her mind about something.
"Dino says I can tell you everything. He says you won't involve me
in any way that might . . . might . . . . "

"I won't compromise your position in town,
not if I can help it," I said.

"That's what I mean, I guess."

"Then don't worry. Dino and I grew up
together, played a little football together. He was a couple of
years ahead of me in school, but we know each other pretty well. If
you trust him, you can probably trust me."

"I'll try," she said. "Do you mind if I
smoke?"

It was her house. I was so surprised that
she asked; I said "no" before I thought about it. She got up and
went out of the room, then came back carrying a table that looked a
little like a TV tray. She set it down by her chair, and I could
see a package of Marlboro Lights on it, along with a Bic disposable
lighter and a pink ceramic ashtray shaped like a scallop shell.

She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and
lit it with the Bic. She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out in a
long, straight jet. I don't really mind smokers, and in fact she
made smoking look so good that I was tempted to take it up
myself.

"What do you need to know?" she said.

"Let's start with you," I said.

"Me? But I thought--"

"You thought this was about your daughter,
and it is, but Dino didn't tell me much, and I want to get a feel
for things. So we'll start with you. For one thing, you're a lot
younger than I expected. That is, if you worked where Dino said you
did."

She smiled behind a cloud of smoke. "I'm
forty-six."

She looked a lot younger than that. "Still,
I would've expected someone around fifty. Maybe older."

She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the
ashtray. "You're sure you want to hear this?"

"I'm sure."

"All right. I came down here when I was
fourteen years old. I wanted to be a whore." She looked at me to
see if I was shocked. I wasn't, so she went on. "I was from
Houston, and I'd heard about the houses here. Where I lived, you
heard about places like that."

"You hear about places like that
everywhere," I said.

She tapped the cigarette again. "I guess
that's true. What I mean is that where I lived, places like that
seemed like an attractive alternative. Anyway, I hitched a ride to
Galveston and showed up at one of the houses on Postoffice Street.
There's always a market for girls of fourteen."

I did some quick arithmetic. "You
couldn't've worked for very long. The last of those places closed
in 1957."

"Technically, you're right. But for a young,
attractive girl there was still an opportunity for some free-lance
work at certain hotels. I didn't have anywhere else to go, and I
needed the money, so I was able to keep working for a while."

I'd brought the folder Ray had given me, and
I handed it to her. "Where does your daughter come into this?"

She opened the folder. "Her name is Sharon.
Didn't Dino tell you?"

I shook my head. "Dino didn't tell me
anything. I wanted to hear it from you."

She held the folder in her left hand,
looking at the picture. In her right was the stub of the cigarette,
which she ground out in the ashtray. "This picture was taken a few
years ago, her senior year in high school. She's nearly twenty
now."

I did some more figuring. Sharon had been
born when her mother was twenty-six, twelve years after she'd come
to the Island. "Were you still, ah . . . ?"

"Whoring? The word doesn't bother me. I just
don't want people to know for Sharon's sake. Yes, I was. I'd been
on the circuit for a bit by that time, but when Sharon began making
her presence obvious I came back here. I moved into an apartment,
told people that my husband had died in an automobile accident. I
got a Social Security card. I looked pretty good, and I had a good
telephone voice. I've been a receptionist ever since."

I looked at her a little dubiously. "Most
women with a background like you've described wouldn't find it
quite so easy to fit into the straight life."

She lit another cigarette, exhaled. "Nobody
ever said it was easy. I did it, that's all."

"You were never tempted to make a little
extra money on the side?"

"Tempted? Sure. But I never gave in. I had a
job and a daughter. I wanted to keep both of them."

"How about romantic involvements?"

She handed me the folder after a last brief
look. "None. Oh, there were advances made to me from time to time,
but that's one thing about me that didn't change; I still see men
as good for only one thing."

"Let's talk about Sharon, then. What's the
story?"

For the first time she looked as if her calm
facade might crack, but it was only temporary. Then she was in
control again. I wondered if control was something she'd learned
while doing her job on Postoffice Street.

"She went out on Friday night. She didn't
come home. The next morning I called Dino."

"I've got to admit that's succinct," I said.
"So. Where'd she go?"

"I don't know." She blew another of the
smokey jets.

"Did she walk? Ride? Go alone, or with
someone?"

"I'm not sure."

"Look," I said, feeling exasperated already,
"you must know
something
."

She ground out the cigarette, looking at the
ashtray instead of me. "No," she finally said. "I
don't
have
to know something. My daughter lived here with me, but that doesn't
mean we communicated."

Something clicked. "She knew," I said. I
thought about it a minute. "She didn't know, and then she knew.
Recently."

Evelyn Matthews looked at the folder I was
holding, but she still didn't look at me. "Yes," she said.

I thought that now we were getting somewhere
and that this might turn out to be easier than I'd thought. "Isn't
it possible that she just went away for a while to figure out how
she felt about things? She'll probably call soon, or come home. You
can see that she's had a shock."

She nodded reluctantly. "It's possible, but
I don't believe it."

"Did she have any money? A car?"

"She might have a little money of her own.
She's been working part-time in a little shop on The Strand."

"What does she do the rest of the time?"

"She goes to the community college. She
wants to be a lawyer."

"Boyfriends?"

"No one steady." She reached for the
Marlboro pack, picked it up, and then set it back down. "I smoke
too much," she said. "There's a boy she likes, Terry Shelton. You
could talk to him. He works at the shop, too."

"What about the car?"

"I have a car. Sharon doesn't. Mine's in the
garage."

It was time to backtrack a little. "How'd
you get to know Dino?"

She smiled a reminiscent smile. "He used to
hang around the house. He was just a kid, eight, ten maybe. He and
Ray came around sometimes. We all knew he was related to the
bosses, so we were nice to him. He never came in at night, just in
the afternoon sometimes."

Something must have showed in my face.

"Not nice to him the way you're thinking,"
she said. "Jesus. He was just a kid."

"Sorry," I said.

She waved it away. "No more than what most
people would think. We were whores, after all. But we weren't as
bad as all that. Anyway, Dino remembers. He thinks of me as sort of
one of the family. There's not many of the old bunch left around
here, you know?"

I said I knew. "Did Sharon have any friends
at the college, anyone she might have confided in?"

She thought about it for a second or two.
"There's one girl there, Julie Gregg, who works in the Social
Studies Department. Sharon mentioned her a few times."

"One more thing. How did Sharon find out
about your past?"

She reached for another cigarette and lit
it, whether she smoked too much or not. "I wish I knew," she said.
"I wish I knew."

The last time I saw Jan was about six months
before she disappeared. She drove up to Dallas to visit me one
weekend. I'd been promising to get down to the Island for nearly a
year, but I'd never done it. We went out to eat, to a movie, and
talked about the old days. She seemed happy and pleased with her
life.

When her letters stopped, I got worried, but
not worried enough. And by the time I did get worried enough, it
was already too late. I hoped that I wouldn't be too late for
Sharon. Maybe I was thinking that in some way finding Sharon would
make up for losing Jan. Or maybe in some way I hoped that in
looking for Sharon I could find a trace of Jan, something new that
would put me on the right track. Whatever it was, I'd decided to
give it a try. If Dino hadn't convinced me, talking to Evelyn
Matthews had. I thought she was an honest woman.

It was still cold when I left her house, but
the sky was beginning to clear a little. It was dark, and I could
see a star or two, which meant that the front had managed to push
its way out into the Gulf and that tomorrow would be considerably
warmer. You could never tell about February, though.

I drove back to my house, which really
wasn't that far, and parked in the back yard. Nameless materialized
at my feet when I stepped out of the car and followed me inside. I
made sure his water bowl was full and tore open a packet of Tender
Vittles for him. While he was scarfing it down, I went upstairs to
check out the refrigerator. There wasn't really anything I could do
about Sharon Matthews until the next day, and I was hungry.

The refrigerator still held what it had when
I'd looked earlier, a half a loaf of bread, part of a jar of peanut
butter, a nearly empty two-liter bottle of Big Red, a piece of
cheddar cheese wrapped up in plastic wrap so that I could see the
greenish mold spots on it, a couple of Hormel wieners, and a dish
of something that had probably been edible once, a long time ago.
Having had peanut butter for lunch, I decided to spend some of
Dino's money and treat myself to a hamburger.

I went back downstairs, carrying a load of
laundry. Nameless was chasing a roach the size of one of those
thick pink erasers I used in the first grade. I watched until he
caught it, then shooed him away and crunched it underfoot before it
could run away. He'd weakened it considerably, or I never would
have caught it.

I dumped the dirty clothes in the washer,
pitched in some Tide, which had been on sale last week, and started
the washer. By then Nameless was at the door, ready to go out. He
didn't spend any of the nighttime hours in the house, not by
choice. He was nothing more than an orange blur moving through the
darkness by the time I got to the first step.

Monday night in February--the streets
weren't crowded. I drove down Broadway to the golden arches and ate
two cheeseburgers and a large order of fries. The fries were better
than the burgers.

It was still early, so I went home and tried
to read a little more of
Absalom, Absalom
. This time, I
found the going a little easier. That worried me a little, but not
much. I read until ten o'clock; then I went to bed. I was surprised
next morning to realize that I drifted off to sleep almost
immediately.

~ * ~

I got up at seven o'clock, ate a piece of
dry toast, and let Nameless in. He was ready for more Tender
Vittles. There was a little sun, and the temperature was already
edging up toward fifty degrees. I got the washing out of the
machine and tossed it in the dryer. It was mostly sweatshirts,
shorts, and jeans, so leaving it in the washer overnight hadn't
hurt it.

I got dressed and drove down to the west end
of the seawall for my run. I wanted to get it done early because if
it warmed up and the sun came out, there'd be a lot more people on
the wall than there had been the day before. Besides, I had work to
do.

Back at the house, I took a shower, dressed,
and pitched Nameless out. He looked so comfortable balled up on my
bed that I hated to do it, but I wasn't sure when I'd be back in. I
didn't want to deprive him of his early evening rambles.

The community college campus was over near
Ball High School, so the drive wasn't far. But then nothing on the
Island is very far from anything else. It didn't take long.

I had a little trouble finding a parking
spot. The college had just built a big new library and classroom
building on the spot that had once been a parking lot. There was a
new lot a couple of blocks away. I parked there and walked back to
the campus.

At not quite ten o'clock on a Tuesday
morning, most of the students on campus were in class. I stopped
one who wasn't, a girl who was carrying a canned Coke down the
hall, and she directed me to the political science department. They
don't call it "social studies" anymore, the way Evelyn Matthews
had. That's high school terminology.

The office wasn't large, and there was a
blonde girl sitting at a desk. She didn't look up when I stepped
through the open door because she was too busy stapling papers
together, after she gathered them from the various neat stacks
lined up on the desk. She was muttering something under her breath.
It sounded like, "I hate this. Why is this in my life?" I stood
there for a second or two waiting for her to notice me, but she was
so intent on her gathering and stapling that she never looked up.
Finally I tapped on the door frame.