Desire Lines (16 page)

Sometime in midmorning she takes a long shower, shaving her legs and using conditioning treatments on her hair. She pretends she’s at a spa. She tries a mud mask she finds in her mother’s medicine cabinet and leaves it on until her face, in the mirror, looks papery and wrinkled, as if she were a hundred years old. She gives herself a pedicure with
her mother’s pumice stone and Lancôme Barely Buff nail polish. In the afternoon she sits in front of the television with the remote in her hand, flipping back and forth between Oprah and Ricki Lake. At five o’clock she pours herself a glass of wine.

Tuesday morning she calls to cancel her appointment with Rosie, claiming that she’s got a head cold or something, maybe the flu. “I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” Doris says, her voice full of concern. “You want to reschedule?”

“I’ll call you in a few days, when I’m feeling better,” Kathryn rasps. “You take care of yourself,” Doris says. “Tea and honey. And stay in bed!”

“What’s going on?” Jack says when he calls near the end of the week. She’s watching Regis and Kathie Lee—now on mute—but she doesn’t tell him that.

“Not much.” She rouses herself, trying to sound chipper and efficient. “I’ve been reading through all those clippings and the police reports.” It’s sort of true; yesterday she opened the folder and riffled through the pages, but after skimming an article she felt a little nauseated and put it aside.

“Anything you didn’t expect?”

“Not yet,” she says. “I’ll let you know.”

“Hey, I spoke to Rachel yesterday. I was surprised to hear that she hasn’t heard from you about the article.”

“I’ve been really busy. I was just going to—”

“Look.” Jack’s voice is low and knowing. “I’m going to be honest with you, Kathryn. I’m thinking of assigning this piece to someone else.” Kathryn feels her stomach drop. “What?”

“I need someone who’s really going to go after the story,” he says. “I can understand why that might be hard for you, and I’m thinking I probably made a mistake asking you to do it.” He sighs. “Look, there’s a lot to this story, a lot of research and people to interview. I need someone who’s going to make it happen. I don’t have the time to be on top of it.”

“But I’m doing it,” she protests. She sits up straight on the couch and the remote falls to the floor, blasting Regis singing a show tune at full volume. Down on her hands and knees, Kathryn scrambles after the remote, finally clicking off the TV. “Sorry,” she mutters. “Anyway, I’m totally on top of it, Jack. I’m just—”

“I need an article by next Friday,” he says bluntly. “That’s just over a week from now. Fifteen hundred words. It’s scheduled to run on Saturday, the day of the reunion.”

“I can do that.”

“All right, then. I want you to talk to as many people as you can before then, and I want you to explain to our readers why the hell nothing has ever been found.”

“Okay. I’m not sure how much—”

“Or I can assign this to a staff reporter. It doesn’t really matter to me, Kathryn. I just want the story done.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“I’m thinking this might be a series, three or four pieces,” he says. “How does that sound to you?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” he says. “Well, good luck. I’ll give you a call in the next day or two to see how it’s going.”

“You don’t have to check up on me,” she says. “I’ll get the story in on time. I promise.”

“When do you want to interview me?”

She calculates quickly—she should probably talk to a few people first, just to have something to show for herself. “How about … Sunday?”

She can hear him flipping pages. “Is Governor’s Restaurant okay? Four o’clock?”

“Sure.”

“See you then,” he says.

After she hangs up the phone, she sits on the couch for a moment, looking at her shadowy reflection in the gray TV screen. She has a sick feeling in her gut, one she’s had too many times over the last few years.
All those papers that weren’t handed in on time, the neglected friendships, missed work deadlines, unfinished master’s thesis, appointments made and broken. She recognizes the tone in Jack’s voice, disappointment and exasperation mingled with pity, and it frightens her. She realizes with a little shock that she hasn’t cared this much in a long time-not when she was quitting the English program, not when her marriage was beginning to fall apart, not even when she returned to her small bedroom in her mother’s house and realized that its parameters represented the scope and measure of her ambition.

In some strange way it has been liberating to be the kind of person others couldn’t rely on. The people in her life came to expect little of her; they just learned not to ask. But they also gave less themselves, and eventually whatever rocky soil her relationships were built on crumbled away. She doesn’t want that anymore. She doesn’t want Jack to think of her that way. She’s scared, all of a sudden—of failing him, of failing herself. And somewhere deep down she knows she’s also afraid of failing Jennifer, whose disappearance, she is beginning to understand, eroded whatever sense she may once have had about who she is. Jennifer’s absence is a rebuke and a challenge, and Kathryn knows that until she confronts it she will probably be lost as well.

Chapter 11

“C
ould I speak to John Bourne?”

“Hold, please.” There’s a click, and suddenly Kathryn is listening to a Detroit weather report. This is the third time she’s been transferred and put on hold, and the second time she’s heard the forecast. Partly sunny, with variable clouds and a chance of precipitation later in the day. She taps her pen on the notebook cover impatiently. Doesn’t the guy have voice mail? “Just a moment, I’ll transfer you,” a woman says, and Kathryn is on hold again. Then, finally, a man’s voice is on the line. “Johnny Bourne,” he says pleasantly. “What can I do for you?”

Kathryn sits up straight and opens her notebook. “Oh—hello,” she says. “I’m Kathryn Campbell, with—ah—the
Bangor Daily News.
I spoke to you a few times years ago when you were covering the Jennifer Pelletier case. I don’t know if you remember it—the girl who disappeared.”

“Of course I remember,” he says. “I’m not sure I remember you, though, to be honest. Were you one of her friends?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she says. “And now I’m with the
News,
and we’re doing a follow-up on the story. So I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

“Did they find her?” he asks quickly.

“No. It’s just—well, it’s been ten years, and—”

“Jesus, it has, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah. And most people have pretty much forgotten about it. So we wanted to do a piece on what happened back then, and what’s been going on since. I’m planning to reinterview some people—”

He laughs shortly. “Have you started yet?”

“No.”

“Well, all I can say is, good luck.”

“What do you mean?”

He sucks air through his teeth. “It was a tough story. Frustrating. I kept thinking, Something’s got to break, somebody’s got to know more than they’re telling. I went over my transcripts again and again, trying to find a clue, or a contradiction—anything that might give me more to go on.”

“I just read the articles,” she says. “You did a good job with what you had.”

“Well, thanks. But it’s no fun to write those kinds of pieces unless they lead to something. It’s frustrating as hell. That case still bothers me. I guess it always will, at least until she turns up under somebody’s front porch one day.”

“So you think she’s dead.”

“Oh, probably. But your guess is as good as mine. I said all I knew in those articles.”

“Really?” she says, disappointed. “I was wondering if there might be anything else—anything you couldn’t use because you didn’t have substantiation.”

“I usually found a way to use what I had,” he says. “But in the end I just didn’t know that much.”

“Do you think the police were keeping things from you?”

“I don’t think the police knew jack shit. Pardon my French.”

“It’s okay, I’m bilingual,” she says, and he laughs. She can feel her reporter’s skills coming back to her—the ability to put a subject at ease, to win his trust, get him to open up. It makes her more comfortable, too.

“The cops just ran out of leads,” he continues. “Not that they had many to start with. Gaffney, that son of a bitch—” She scans her notes. “The detective.”

“Right. He had the instincts of an ostrich. Anytime it seemed like they might be getting close to something, he put his head in the dirt.”

“Like what?”

He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, “There was a lot of stuff that didn’t add up. Like, where was she on Tuesday night the week before she disappeared? She was home or out with friends every other night that week, but nobody saw her after eight
P.M
. on Tuesday.”

“Maybe she went to bed early,” Kathryn says.

“Maybe. But her brother said there was no answer when he knocked on her door at ten. And the door was locked.”

“Jennifer was pretty private. She usually locked her door.”

“Well, that’s why I didn’t put it in an article. And when I tried to follow up with her brother, Bill—”

“Will.”

“Bill, Will, it’s been a while. Anyway, he and his mother acted like I was invading their privacy or something. So I mentioned it to Gaffney, and he just blew it off.”

Kathryn makes a note to ask Will about it. “What else?”

“Oh, nothing concrete. Cumulatively, though, there was a lot of weird stuff. The father’s death, probably suicide. The girl’s quasi suicide attempt. The mother remarrying, what, three months later? The way the girl treated some of the guys she went out with.”

“So you know about that. The football player.”

“Yeah, and someone else. Brian somebody.”

Kathryn is startled. “Brian White?”

“Something about the prom. She got him to ask her, so he says, and then she blew him off. Not a big deal, really, just one more detail that didn’t quite make sense.”

She dimly remembers the incident—some mess she’d repressed that, at the time, had threatened to break up the group. Brian had been the one, in the end, to let it go. Jennifer acted as if it had never happened. “You didn’t write about that either,” Kathryn says.

“You’re right. I didn’t. Again, it didn’t really add up to anything.” He sighs, and Kathryn can tell that the conversation is winding down. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful. Just one piece of advice: Don’t waste too much of your life on this story. Wherever that girl is, I think she’s long gone.”

When the phone call ends, Kathryn hangs on to the receiver for a minute, absently rubbing it against her cheek. Don’t
waste too much of your life on this story.
It was lightly said, a flippant warning, but it turned her cold. Because that’s just it, she thinks—I already have wasted too much of my life on this story. I’ve been waiting for her to come back for the past ten years, waiting for the past to catch up with me so I can begin my future. I need some kind of answer. It doesn’t have to be the whole truth, she thinks, whatever that is, or was. Just something I can live with.

The phone starts to beep and she replaces it on the hook. Outside, the light is thin and white, the air is cool. Another morning gone, another afternoon. She curls up on the couch and rubs her hands up and down her arms, letting herself drift into dreamless sleep.

Chapter 12

T
he police station is a neat brick building set on a hill near downtown Bangor. Kathryn parks her car in one of three spots reserved for visitors, near a row of white Fords and Chevys with the blue Bangor Police Department seal on the side. On a tall pole in a patch of grass near the entrance, the state flag and the American flag flutter limply in the breeze.

At ten o’clock on a Friday morning the station house is quiet. Two men are standing at the front desk filling out forms; four uniformed officers, three men and a woman, are drinking coffee and talking. Another is tapping away at a computer keyboard, whistling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Kathryn watches them as she waits for the form-fillers to finish their business. She looks around the large, nondescript room with its banks of filing cabinets and citizen safety posters. A large wall clock covered with a metal grille ticks away the minutes, and three ceiling fans whir overhead.

“What can I do for you?” the desk sergeant asks when it’s finally Kathryn’s turn.

“I’m looking for somebody,” she says. “A detective, I believe. Ed Gaffney.” She holds up the sheaf of newspaper articles she’s carrying as proof of her intent. “He oversaw an investigation about ten years ago—the disappearance of a girl named Jennifer Pelletier.”

“Ay-uh, I remember it.” The sergeant nods. “Never solved.”