Only Flesh and Bones (17 page)
Read Only Flesh and Bones Online
Authors: Sarah Andrews
“Hmm.” Cindey led me into the vast cavern of her living room. We seated ourselves on opposite ends of a mauve leather-covered couch laden with throw cushions, facing each other. “So you’re beginning to
find out
about her, aren’t you,” she stated, her voice taking on that seductive purr again.
find out
about her, aren’t you,” she stated, her voice taking on that seductive purr again.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, beginning to knock the princess off her pedestal a bit.”
I leaned back and looked at her appraisingly. “If you have something to tell me, why don’t you just spit it out?”
Cindey busied herself with an examination of her fingernails. They were long and narrow, and projected from the tips of her chubby fingers like talons from a hawk’s toes.
I tried again, something more mollifying. “You know, of course, that I’m really only doing this for Cecelia. After all, I never even met Miriam.”
“Yes, poor Cecelia.”
“What was their relationship like?”
“Oh … it had its ups and downs.”
Cindey’s act was beginning to grate on my nerves. “Tell me about the downs,” I said, playing along in spite of my irritation.
“Well you know, Cecelia has never been a very popular girl.”
“And?” This was like pulling teeth. Only I wasn’t quite sure whose teeth were being pulled.
“Oh, it just infuriated Miriam. She had no sympathy for it.”
“Really. And just how was this expressed?”
“Oh, she was always trying to drag the poor dear off for a haircut, or to buy clothes. It was shocking.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black,
I thought. Something about this didn’t fit. Cecelia really had been an unkempt mess until fairly recently. She’d needed all the help she could get. So why was Cindey taking this tack? Just to
get some digs in at Miriam? It was time to steer the conversation somewhere that would give me more hard facts and less innuendo. “I remember that a couple years ago, Miriam went away for a while. Do you know where she went?”
I thought. Something about this didn’t fit. Cecelia really had been an unkempt mess until fairly recently. She’d needed all the help she could get. So why was Cindey taking this tack? Just to
get some digs in at Miriam? It was time to steer the conversation somewhere that would give me more hard facts and less innuendo. “I remember that a couple years ago, Miriam went away for a while. Do you know where she went?”
“No.”
“Or with whom?”
She shook her head, but gave me a look I suppose was meant to be coy.
I found it annoying. “You don’t know,” I pointed out, meaning it to sting just a bit. “But you two spent a lot of time together. What did you do with all that time? Shop? Go to the spa?”
Cindey shot me a heated look. Recovering herself, she offered me a cigarette, and when I refused, she lit one herself. “My one vice,” she said. Had she asked my opinion, I could have suggested a few others to add to her self-awareness. After breathing in the smoke, her voice came out even more hushed, a hiss from the grave. “To answer your question, Miriam and I had a long-standing habit of lunching together.” She leaned her head back and tried to make a theatrical gesture with the cigarette, arching it through the air, but her body was so stiff and tight that the movement was short and spastic.
“How long was long-standing?” I coughed as the smoke curled past my face.
Cindey ignored my hint. “It started clear back in college, when we were in classes together. We’d go straight from history to lunch. It was on the way back to the dorm,” she added, as if I might think she cared whether she had lunch with Miriam or not. “But Miriam didn’t confide in me very much. I won’t say she was secretive, exactly, just didn’t seem to have much to say,” Cindey pulled her feet up underneath herself, pointing her toes to make her feet look more elegant.
“I see. So you knew everyone she knew in college, then.”
“I suppose so.”
“Even this Chandler guy.” I tried to make it sound like a casual question, but I failed miserably.
“Chandler?” she asked, her voice all innocence.
Okay,
I thought,
if that’s the way you want to play this.
“The man in her journal. Big guy, older than the rest of the class. Good dancer.”
I thought,
if that’s the way you want to play this.
“The man in her journal. Big guy, older than the rest of the class. Good dancer.”
“Oh,
him.”
Her eyes glittered.
him.”
Her eyes glittered.
“Yes,
him.”
him.”
Cindey shot me a more shrouded look, took another drag on her cigarette, then studied the smoke at leisure. “I’d say we were acquainted, nothing more.”
“What was he like?” Now it was my turn to feign innocence.
A long pause, during which time Cindey looked straight into my eyes, as if gauging her next move. “Kind of wild.”
“Wild how? Like an animal? Like a bad boy?”
“Oh, I hear he ran with a rather fast crowd.”
“Drugs?”
A shorter pause. “Ye-e-es, lots of people did drugs back then. It was the era.”
“Ah. Have you seen Chandler since college?”
Pause. One heartbeat, two … “I’d
heard
he was in Denver.”
heard
he was in Denver.”
I felt like I was doing dental surgery with tiny tools on a large, slow-moving animal, all the time dimly aware that I was leaning too far into the creature’s mouth for safety. Cindey continued to stare at me. I sat up and leaned forward, put my feet flat on the floor, trying to indicate that I was ready to leave if she didn’t cut with the sleepwalking act. “Would you know how to get in touch with him?”
Cindey’s eyes glowed with unkind pleasure, looking right into me, as she shook her head.
“Well, then why don’t you put me in touch with your college alumni office?”
“I’m not sure they’d have an address.”
“Why?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He was something of a rolling stone.”
“Then show me your college yearbook. That’ll give me clues.”
My request clearly startled her. She glanced around as if surprised to be caught at an illicit act, like a teenager found smoking behind the barn. I was perhaps not supposed to know that she still had that yearbook, still kept it somewhere close, where she could easily retrieve it. But she got up, took another stylized drag on her cigarette, and shuffled off down a hallway. When she returned, she was holding a large, heavy book bound with a faux-leather cover in maroon with white letters. She held it open, flipping back and forth through the pages, her eyes scanning nervously, as if checking certain pages to make sure it was okay to show them to me. Even from across the room, I could see that the edges of certain groups of pages had grown dark from excessive contact with the oil of her fingers. “The senior portraits are in the middle,” she said as she handed me the volume, opened to the page where her own highly romanticized pose had been recorded among seven others. “Cindey Ann Shwartzer, Beaver, Pennsylvania; French,” it read.
I flipped back several pages to
M
for Menken, but of course J. C. had been in an earlier class, and Miriam hadn’t yet taken his name. “What was Miriam’s maiden name?” I asked.
M
for Menken, but of course J. C. had been in an earlier class, and Miriam hadn’t yet taken his name. “What was Miriam’s maiden name?” I asked.
“Benner.”
Yes, there it was, a few pages before Cindey’s. I stared into the eyes of a softly lovely young thing with dark hair worn long and straight and parted down the middle, the uniform of the times. She had an oval face, with the kind of eyes that arch at the top but are straight across at the bottom, a plain, straight nose, and a look of hopeful surprise. “Miriam Jane Benner, Pleasantville, New York; History,” the caption stated. History? Surely she hadn’t read up on the raids of the Vikings and the triumph of the agrarian class. And wait, there was Julia, also done up in long, straight hair, a look of challenge and youthful arrogance
stiffening her face. “Julia Joyce Richards, Northbrook, Illinois; Political Science.” “What about Chandler?” I asked. “What was his last name?”
stiffening her face. “Julia Joyce Richards, Northbrook, Illinois; Political Science.” “What about Chandler?” I asked. “What was his last name?”
Cindey lit another cigarette, said, “I don’t know.”
I reached the length of the couch and placed the book on her lap. “You can just flip around until you find it.”
Cindey began to turn pages with all the affect of someone killing time over a magazine in a doctor’s office. She squinted at two or three pages, paused, passed the book back to me. “I’m not sure I’d recognize him.”
I stood the book on its spine and let it fall open, certain it would find her favorite page. Sure enough, it flopped open not on her page, nor on Miriam’s nor Julia’s, but on another. One portrait immediately caught my eye. A husky god of a man in his mid-twenties, better-than-average good-looking in a rough-hewn, heavy-boned sort of way, but it was the eyes that arrested me. They were simply dazzling, but at the same time disconcerting. Wide-set, dark for a blonde, and of an unusual shape. And he held them wide, as if he’d been caught in a candid shot, shooting a challenge of surprised curiosity into the camera. It was the sort of look one sees in the eyes of a man crazed with poetry who lives on the streets. Even in this tightly posed portrait, he held his shoulders forward, raw and animalistic, a hunter about to spring forward onto its prey. The name captioned beneath the photograph was Edward Jennings. No middle name. It read, “Camden, Maine; American Studies.”
I spun the book around until the page faced Cindey. “That him?” I asked dryly.
“Oh,” she said. “Hmm. Yes, I think so.”
I shivered on behalf of the fallen Miriam, uninformed girl from Pleasantville. Shivered again for myself. “Edward?”
“I suppose Chandler was a nickname. People called him that. ‘The Chandler.’”
I took a slip of paper out of my pocket and wrote down
the name and town, and asked, between my teeth, “Did he rape a lot of the women at your college?”
the name and town, and asked, between my teeth, “Did he rape a lot of the women at your college?”
Cindey stiffened, a subtle movement in one already so rigidly posed. “Rape? What rape?”
I looked up from my note taking. Cindey’s eyes had gone black with fury.
I said, “Come on, Miriam wrote about it in her journal. Your freshman year. Chandler took her to his digs and forced himself on her. You remember, it was in those pages that she taped shut. You—” I stopped myself, mentally slapped my own wrist. I had not come here to engage in warfare with this woman.
But it was too late. Cindey narrowed her tiny eyes. “That was no
rape.
There was no
force.
Miriam knew exactly what was going on!”
rape.
There was no
force.
Miriam knew exactly what was going on!”
My mind raced as a jumble of feelings jammed in my chest. I groped for the words that could stem the heavy tide of her thinking, reached for some unassailable logic that could inform the sanctimonious Cindeys of the world, pierce their armor of denial and shake them into an instant of understanding. Very softly, I said, “Miriam was young. She was naive. She said no not yet. That should have been enough.”
“Oh,
bullshit
! Miriam
wanted
it.”
bullshit
! Miriam
wanted
it.”
My voice rising again, I spat, “What’s
that
got to do with what
he
did? Wanting it and asking for it are two different things!”
that
got to do with what
he
did? Wanting it and asking for it are two different things!”
“Well, she
asked
for it. Everybody knew about him. Did he have to drag her into that apartment? Hell, no; she walked in there on her own two feet! She’s the horniest woman I know.”
asked
for it. Everybody knew about him. Did he have to drag her into that apartment? Hell, no; she walked in there on her own two feet! She’s the horniest woman I know.”
“The hell. She didn’t know him. They ran in entirely different crowds,” I said, and then, realizing that I was falling into the trap of arguing on Cindey’s terms rather than my own, I asserted, “He told her he was only taking her inside for a cup of tea. She said no not this time and that was her right. He took advantage of her innocence. Besides,
nothing
Miriam might have done justified what
he
did.
Don’t you believe in holding men responsible for their actions?” And as I said all this, choosing my words with precision, I became aware that for a moment, Cindey had chosen words that suggested that to her, Miriam was still very much alive.
nothing
Miriam might have done justified what
he
did.
Don’t you believe in holding men responsible for their actions?” And as I said all this, choosing my words with precision, I became aware that for a moment, Cindey had chosen words that suggested that to her, Miriam was still very much alive.
Cindey’s eyes went down to slits, a viper getting ready to spit. “I get so sick of women who want everybody to feel sorry for them after they’ve had their fun. They want to blame it on the man. They—”
“No,
you’re
the one who’s blaming. You’re blaming the victim.”
you’re
the one who’s blaming. You’re blaming the victim.”
“Miriam was no victim! She
flaunted
her little proclivity. You should have
seen
the way she flirted! I mean, my God, you get her at a party and just one little drink, and—” Cindey broke off, sputtering, her mouth working like a fish on the bank. “The men
fawned
over her. It was
disgusting
!”
flaunted
her little proclivity. You should have
seen
the way she flirted! I mean, my God, you get her at a party and just one little drink, and—” Cindey broke off, sputtering, her mouth working like a fish on the bank. “The men
fawned
over her. It was
disgusting
!”
I was spellbound, awash in the potent poison of Cindey’s envy, slowly losing my grip, uncertain now just whether black truly were white … . “I suppose you think she killed her
self
, too, that there never was a murderer, that all this hue and cry searching for the man who did it is just a wretched scheme to make some decent man look bad.”
self
, too, that there never was a murderer, that all this hue and cry searching for the man who did it is just a wretched scheme to make some decent man look bad.”
Pause. “Exactly.” Cindey’s eyes flashed with the cold glint of victory.
I sat perfectly still, stunned, my scientist’s mind already taking this new theory and running with it, testing it, turning it this way and that to see if it might hold a grain of truth.
What if Chandler was a dealer, and he supplied Miriam with the pure stuff, and in a fit of despair, she … and Cecelia watched her mother do it, stood by in horror as her mother gave her the ultimate rejection?
…
But everyone keeps saying there was a man in that house, and
… I took one more long look into the eyes of the woman who sat across from me, and said, “I think it’s time for me to leave.”
What if Chandler was a dealer, and he supplied Miriam with the pure stuff, and in a fit of despair, she … and Cecelia watched her mother do it, stood by in horror as her mother gave her the ultimate rejection?
…
But everyone keeps saying there was a man in that house, and
… I took one more long look into the eyes of the woman who sat across from me, and said, “I think it’s time for me to leave.”
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