Desire Lines (32 page)

It’s Jennifer, of course. Kathryn recognizes the sweater and the hair. She turns the photo over; the back is blank.

Her hands are trembling, and her fingertips are cold. She picks up the cassette again, slips it into the tape slot, fumbles in her shoulder bag for her car keys, and turns the key in the ignition. After a moment, a girl’s voice says, “What do you want me to say? Testing one, two, three.” The girl giggles. “Don’t just make me talk. Tell me what to say.” Then the voice ends abruptly, and a song begins. The opening strains are familiar, but Kathryn can’t quite place it until the ragged voice starts singing: “Every
time I think of you I always catch my breath /
And I’m standing here, and you’re miles away /
And I’m wondering why you left …”

It’s that song from high school, the one Jennifer used to call her anthem, the one she used for her yearbook quote. Kathryn listens to it for a moment, then fast-forwards to the end of the song to see if there’s anything else on the tape. Silence. She pushes the reverse button and stop-rewinds through the other side. It’s blank.

At the police station, it takes Lieutenant Gaffney a moment to recognize Kathryn. “Well, I’ll be darned,” he says, when he finally does. “What are you trying to do, go undercover? You look like a different person.”

She shrugs self-consciously. “I needed a change.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a change all right. I wouldn’t have recognized you in a lineup.” He listens to her story carefully, interrupting to ask questions, and pulls on latex gloves before he handles the photograph. “I’ll send this to the lab to see if we can get anything off it. You touched it with your bare hands?”

“Yes,” she admits. “Stupid. Sorry.”

“I doubt there were any prints on it anyhow. Whoever left this stuff in your car was pretty careful. There’s not much in the picture to pin it to a time or place.” He holds the photo under a bright desk lamp, studying it carefully. “But I’d say this is probably contemporaneous with the disappearance,” he says after a moment. “The photo’s faded, and the clothing appears dated.”

“I recognize the sweater. She wore it all the time senior year.”

He squints at the photo, holding it up to his nose. “Looks like early spring. It’s hard to tell with the pines, but that birch behind there doesn’t have leaves yet.” Tracing a faint line down the photo with his finger, he muses, “And the light is cold. There might even be snow on the ground. We’ll get this blown up and see if we can get any clues as to where it is.” He slips the photo back into the envelope and puts the envelope into a clear plastic bag. “Now let’s hear that tape,” he says. He leads her to the back of the station, into a small room with a sophisticated recording system on one wall. When he puts the tape in and Jennifer starts talking, a strip of small red lights jump and flash.

“Tell me what to say.”

Gaffney rewinds the tape.

“What do you want me to say? Testing one, two three.”
He rewinds again.
“Testing one, two, three.”

“Can you hear that tremor? She’s nervous,” he says. “Eager to please.”

The tape rolls; Jennifer giggles.
“Don’t just make me talk. Tell me what to say.”

“She looks up to this person,” Gaffney says. “She’s intimidated by him.”

“You think it’s a he?”

“I’m guessing. If it were a woman, or a girl, she’d probably have more of an edge in her voice. You know, like ‘This is stupid.’ I doubt she’d be this hesitant.” Gaffney adjusts some knobs—turns up the treble, turns down the bass—and they listen to it again. This time, at a higher pitch, the voice sounds quavery. Kathryn can hear the anxiety in it. Flipping a switch, Gaffney mutes the voice, amplifies the background noise. A bird calls, another answers. A horn sounds twice.

“That’s not a car,” Gaffney says. He replays it at a lower speed. “It’s not a truck either.” He sits forward, his head cocked to one side, listening to it again. “That’s a train,” he says. “They’re outside, near some tracks. And if this recording of her voice was made when the photograph was taken, they were in a wooded area somewhere.” He adjusts the controls so that Jennifer’s voice is audible again. “Yep,” he says, “I’d say this was made a long time ago, and then transferred onto this tape. Hear how scratchy it is? Also, she sounds young, like a teenager.”

When the song comes on, it fills the room.

“What do you think this is all about?” Gaffney asks.

“It was a big hit when we were in high school,” Kathryn tells him. “For a while Jennifer was kind of obsessed with it. She used part of it for her yearbook quote.”

They listen in silence for a moment.
“I spend my time thinking about you /
And it’s almost driving me wild …”

“Did she associate this song with anybody in particular?”

“I don’t think so.” Kathryn tries to remember. “She must have had some kind of emotional connection to it, but it probably didn’t mean much. We overreacted to pretty much everything.”

Gaffney is holding up the flat of his hand, signaling her to stop talking. “Wait a minute. I want to hear that again,” he says. He rewinds the tape, stops, runs it back a little more.
“There’s a message in the wild and I’m sending you the signal tonight /
You don’t know how desperate I’ve become and it looks like I’m losing this fight …”

The song plays to the end, and then there’s an audible click. “Anything else on the tape?” Gaffney asks.

Kathryn shakes her head.

Holding his chin in his hand, he looks at her. “Somebody is trying to scare you,” he says.

“Well, it’s working.” She laughs nervously.

“I guess that article you wrote smoked him out.”

“So what do I do now?”

Gaffney leans back in his chair. “Well, number one, don’t publish another story until you run it by me. You made some inferences I’m not sure it was wise for you to make. Remember, Miss Campbell,” he says, hunching over the desk, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. This case is wide open. You could be putting yourself in danger by messing around in it.” He sighs. “Try to think now. Is there anyone-anyone you know—who might have sent this to you?”

She looks up at the ceiling tiles above their head, gray and porous like the surface of the moon. “I really don’t know.”

“Well, be careful,” Gaffney says. “We don’t know what this person is capable of.” He gets up, adjusting his belt with both hands. He isn’t smiling, but Kathryn can tell he’s pleased. “This could prove to be quite a break in the case,” he says, walking her to the front desk, “but it has to be handled right. If anything out of the ordinary happens, anything at all, I want you to call me right away. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she says, “I understand.”

At the door to the police station, Kathryn looks out at her car, parked fifty feet away. Then she glances up and down the street. A moon-faced woman is sitting in a pickup, tapping her fingers on the dash. Two boys walk by, a golden retriever trotting behind them. None of them so much as notices her. It’s an ordinary Saturday, and people are going about their business as they normally do. She goes out to her car, unlocks the door, and gets in, locking it again before she starts the engine.

WHEN KATHRYN GETS
home from the police station, in midafternoon, two lights are blinking on the answering machine.

“Hey, Kathryn, this is Jack,” the first message says. “I’m trying to round up the gang for drinks at the Sea Dog before the party tonight. Your piece in the paper might’ve ruffled a few feathers, but I’m sure we can all put that aside for the evening and have a good time. For old times’ sake, right? So five o’clock. Hope to see you then.”

After the second beep, there’s silence for a moment. Then a girl’s voice is saying, “God, I feel stupid. I hate it when you make me do this.” It’s Jennifer again—Kathryn knows instantly. “Besides, what are you going to do with it?” In the background a low voice, barely audible, answers. “Just keep it for yourself?” The girl giggles. “Isn’t that a little weird?” The message ends.

Kathryn stands over the machine, staring at it as if it might provide an explanation. She rewinds the message and listens to it again.
“What are you going to do with it? Just keep it for yourself?”
Panic, like quicksilver, runs through her veins. “Mom? MOM?” she calls, but then she remembers: Her mother has gone away for the night with Frank. “Think,” she says aloud. She picks up the phone and calls 911, and after a few transfers she’s talking to Gaffney. She plays the message for him, holding the receiver up to the tiny answering-machine speaker. As soon as it’s finished she asks, “What should I do?”

“Well, first thing, bring the tape in,” he says. “And then go to your reunion.” There’s excitement in his voice; she can hear it. “I know this is unsettling for you, Miss Campbell, but I have to tell you, it’s a major development in the case. We’ve had more action today than we’ve had in the past ten years.”

Chapter 25

A
t 5:15
P.M
. the Sea Dog is packed, and there’s a line snaking out the front door. Kathryn walks past the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign and wanders through the bar area, past the tables surrounding the small stage where a three-piece band is playing “Devil in a Blue Dress,” and out onto the deck. It’s a humid afternoon, and several women are fanning themselves with menus and complaining about the heat.

Kathryn already feels sticky, though she took a shower an hour ago. The outfit she’s wearing—a cream-colored silk vest and brown-and-cream palazzo pants raided from her mother’s closet—doesn’t quite fit, and she keeps having to adjust her bra strap surreptitiously to keep it from showing. For the first time in months she’s wearing shoes with narrow heels, a pair of her mother’s strappy sandals, and she feels as if she’s tottering on stilts. Her mother’s Lancôme foundation, clearly intended for a different type of skin, feels like fingerpaint on her face.

Scanning the deck, Kathryn finally sees people she recognizes. Jack
and Rachel are sitting alone at a table for six in a secluded corner, engaged in animated conversation. Kathryn threads her way over to them through the closely packed tables. “Hey, you guys,” she says.

They glance up at her, and then their eyes go wide. After an awkward silence, Jack says, “Oh, my God.” Rachel looks down, shaking her head. She takes a sip of what looks like iced tea and stares out at the water, avoiding Kathryn’s eyes.

“What are you trying to do?” Jack says quietly, a funny smile on his face.

“What do you mean?”

“You look …” His voice falters. “You look just like her.”

“What?”

“You look like Jennifer.”
“What?”

Jack half laughs. “You just went blond for the hell of it?”

Kathryn steps back. Rachel still won’t look up. “I—didn’t …” A wave of shame washes over her, and she mumbles, “I’m sorry,” and turns around, stumbling through the crowd and back into the restaurant, and then out the front to the dusty parking lot.

As she stands at the drivers’ side of her car, pawing through her borrowed cream-colored leather bag for the keys, she feels a hand on her arm. She jumps.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Jack says. “But I don’t want you to leave.”

She finds the keys and tries to unlock the car, but her hands are shaking, and she drops the keys in the dirt. Jack bends down and scoops them up in his hand, making a fist around them. “Nope, you’re not going,” he says, holding the keys out of reach.

She halfheartedly attempts to grab them. “Just let me go.”

“No.”

“This was a bad idea.” She leans against the car and shuts her eyes. When she opens them, Jack is looking at her curiously.

“Which part?”

She thinks for a moment. Her face feels hot and filmy. Pushing out her bottom lip, she blows air, making her bangs flutter. “Coming here. Going to the reunion. Writing that article. Coming home. Getting married. You name it.”

“You forgot the hair.” He smiles and pokes her gently in the ribs.

“Fuck you, Jack.”

“Now, now—”

“I wasn’t trying to—Forget it, I’m not even going to try. Give me my keys.” She holds up her palm.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he says, “Listen. I’m sorry. It’s just a little shocking to see you like this, because honest to God, Kathryn, you look like her, and it’s hard to believe you didn’t intend it. Not that it matters anyway—you can do whatever the hell you want. But you know, with the article and everything …”

Kathryn kicks at the dirt with her sandals, covering her newly polished toes with a fine brown powder. “I don’t know why I did it,” she mumbles. “I wasn’t thinking.”

He nods.

“What’s up with Rachel?” she says, thinking about the expression of disgust on her face. It couldn’t have been just the hair.

“She’s kind of pissed at you. She’ll get over it. She’s mortified that all of Bangor knows she used to have a crush on Brian.” He rolls his eyes. “So what. The story is strong. Provocative, gutsy. It’s a really good piece of writing.”