Practical Jean (24 page)

“So where are you? I called your home number and Milt said you've been staying at Natalie Skilbeck's house, but there's no answer there.”

An image appeared in Jean's mind of Natalie, dragged out of view behind the kitchen island and shoved up against one of the low cupboards, which was all Jean could manage to do with her because she was so heavy. And the blood had been almost impossible to get out of the grout between the tiles. “Don't go bothering Natalie, Welland,” she said. “I'm not there anymore.” She looked over at Fran, who was happily driving in the fast lane of the highway even though she was not going very fast at all. Her whole life Jean had complained about cars that did that, and now she was in one.

“Right,” said Welland. “So tell me where you are.”

“Welland, don't be bossy.” He was starting to sound not only like a police officer but also like Andrew Jr., which was even more off-putting. “At the moment I'm enjoying a nice drive and I don't want you to spoil it.”

She hoped that would be the end of things, but it wasn't. Welland just kept pushing for her to tell him where she was, and whether she was with anyone, and where she intended to go. And if it was far away from Kotemee, Welland said, then that might be a problem for the detectives. They might consider that “suspicious,” he said. Even listening through her little phone, sitting in Fran's slow-moving Cadillac SUV, Jean knew the code of Welland's voice well enough to hear what he could not actually say. That he was afraid for her, but didn't know why. That he was not even sure that he had a reason to be afraid, and was almost frightened to find out. That he loved her and wanted to be a good brother to her, but that he was also a little excited, because he was finally on the inside of a real police investigation. It was quite remarkable, thought Jean, the messages a voice conveyed.

And she understood too—although Welland's voice didn't tell her this, it was her own common sense—that she was rapidly running out of time. The detectives from the city wanted to talk to her, and once that ball started rolling you couldn't stop it. Soon they would want to talk to people who knew her and had spent time with her recently. People like Jeff Birdy. People like Milt. People like Natalie.

But that was all right. Because there was only one person left in the world whom she cared for enough to call a friend, and she was going to see her soon.

“Fran,” said Jean, when she finally hung up on Welland, “I'm fairly certain this Cadillac can go faster.”

They were heading along the interstate to Owasco Lake, and according to the little clock on the dash it was about five o'clock.

“Nearly suppertime,” said Fran. “Why don't we pull off for a bite?”

Over the preceding several hours, Jean had come to understand a few things about Fran, apart from her Celine Dion obsession. One was that Fran was rather expert at reading maps. The Cadillac had a computer capable of providing directions, but Fran never used it. Instead she folded the state map into precise and easily accessible quadrants and had Jean hold it for her. She had learned that, she said, while traveling with Jim through southeastern Turkey, where “one wrong turn could have meant our heads.” Indeed, it sometimes seemed as though Fran felt the same way traveling through New York State; without warning she would snatch the map from Jean's hands and check a coordinate before handing it back. After the second hour Jean was no longer startled by this, although she was not yet fully inured.

Another thing that Jean had learned was that Fran did not like driving for very long without stopping. Already there had been two pull-offs for a bite, and one fairly recent bathroom break. Fran had caught a glimpse of an Applebee's beyond the veil of trees and wondered aloud whether Jean needed to “go to the loo.” Jean had assured Fran that she didn't, but found herself leaning hard to the left anyway as Fran swung onto the exit ramp. She thought there might be something wrong with Fran's bladder, but Fran explained that it was precautionary. Taking regular breaks, she said, allowed you to stay alert behind the wheel, and staying alert meant staying safe. She had learned that driving with Jim through Bolivia.

But this time, Jean thought she would take a polite stand. “Wouldn't you rather keep going?” she said. “I think we're almost there.”

Fran snatched the map out of Jean's hand, gave it a once-over, and handed it back. “We're still an hour away,” she said. “Also, as you said yourself, we don't know what we're going to find when we get there. And if we're just showing up at your friend's door, we can hardly expect her to feed us.”

“I suppose,” said Jean.

Fran glanced over. “I guess you're getting anxious.”

Jean stared through the windshield at the highway that ribboned away from them into the distance, and at the license plates and taillights of the cars zooming by in the slow lane. “I am a bit.”

“It must be so wonderful,” said Fran. “For Cheryl, I mean. To have a friend who cares about you so much that she'd drive hundreds of miles just to see you in your hour of need. I've never had anybody who cared about me that much.”

Jean gave Fran the best smile she could manage. “I'm sure that's not true.”

“Oh, no, it is true.” Fran repeatedly checked her side and rear-view mirrors as she spoke. She'd been doing this the whole trip, because for the driver talking was as bad for alertness as eating and you had to work extra hard to stay focused. Jean was no longer disconcerted. “When I was little,” said Fran, “my dad took work wherever he could find it, and so we moved around all the time and I never had a chance to form a really close friendship with anyone.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“I have one sister,” said Fran, her eyes on the right-hand mirror. “But she's six years older. And anyway, siblings aren't quite the same thing as friends.”

“That's very true,” said Jean.

Fran went quiet, and for a while there was only the hum of the tires against the road. “Well,” she said finally, “I can hardly wait to see what real friendship looks like. I envy you so much. And Cheryl. Especially Cheryl, because she has you for a friend.”

Jean felt her face get hot and she knew that she was blushing. She had the sort of skin that blushed bright pink, although since high school it hadn't often been a problem. She turned away from Fran as if something beyond the passenger window had caught her attention. “That's very sweet,” she said. She noticed an exit fly past and realized it was the second Fran had missed since talking about getting a bite. “Didn't you want to stop, Fran?” she said.

“Oh, well, I thought it would be okay to keep going, just this once.”

Jean glanced over and she could see that Fran was blinking away tears. “Thank you, Fran.”

“No, it's fine,” said Fran, with a small sniffle. “It's just so exciting.”

The Finger Lakes landscape undulated around them like mounds and folds in a moss duvet, and here and there lay the chenille patches of vineyards. Whenever the road rose and the Cadillac crested the peak of a hill, Jean could see on the horizon strips of water that glinted pale gold in the early-evening light. Like a glass of Chardonnay, she thought. And she could read, in the highway signs they passed, place names by the dozens, so many of them “Hills” and “Mills” and “Corners” and “Springs.” This wasn't wine country, it was small town country. She thought now that she knew why Cheryl had come here. It was a land with a hundred Kotemees . . . a hundred versions of home.

At about six-thirty Fran pulled off the highway, and they began to follow a two-lane blacktop that took them rivering between hills and fields, through acres lavish with fruit. After a while Fran plucked up the map and studied it, as Jean watched row after row of tall vines troop past her window, and when Fran announced that they were getting close, Jean felt a surge of exhilaration in her chest and had to take a deep breath. She tried to picture the look on Cheryl's face when she appeared at her front door. Would she smile? Jean wondered. Would she be joyful to see her? Or, in the middle-aged face standing before her, would Cheryl see thirty-seven years suddenly gone, and hate her for it?

Fran discarded the map because it was no longer detailed enough for her liking. Moments later they rounded a curve and Jean spotted, thirty yards ahead at the mouth of an even narrower road, a battered white sign announcing the village of Bier Ridge. The blue border that surrounded the sign seemed to have broken off in places, and the painted bunch of purple grapes that accented so many of the signs in this part of the state seemed to be missing its top half. Jean also noticed that the sign was held up, at a slight tilt, by two unpainted wooden legs, as if the whole assemblage had been clapped together in haste or frustration. But it was the sign they were looking for.

“There!” said Jean.

“I see it,” said Fran, and she wheeled hard to the right. “Okay, what number am I looking for?”

Jean pulled the sheet with Cheryl's miserable picture out of her purse and checked the address the police had entered. “Three twenty-seven East Lake Road.” She looked up through the windshield. “How are we going to find East Lake Road?”

“We're on it,” said Fran. She was leaning over the wheel, scanning the road ahead as if she were on safari, scouting for lions gorging on water buffalo.

“But I didn't notice a street sign.”

“There's only a couple of roads around here, and we're on the east side of the lake.”

“Oh.”

With nothing to do or contribute, Jean folded the paper away and stayed calm by watching the scenery scroll past. Some of the homes here were lovely: bright clapboard houses with pretty gingerbreading and accenting shutters; handsome stone edifices with wide, groomed lawns and carriage houses in the rear. There was love in these homes, she thought, or at the very least money. More money than most people in Kotemee had, except of course for Fran and Jim. Yes, Fran would certainly be in her element here, Jean thought. And she had a flash of worry. She wondered whether money might be at the root of Cheryl's current trouble. Perhaps her friend had aspired to some sort of life here that was out of her reach. Perhaps Cheryl was a nobody here, just a grocery store clerk with a farmhand for a husband. She wondered if Fran, unwittingly, was driving them in her shiny, late-model Cadillac SUV toward some sort of shack, a broken-down hovel scorned by other Bier Ridge residents as a local embarrassment. She hoped the best for Cheryl but, with that picture to consider, the worst was not beyond the realm of possibility. And as a girl she had never had the best of taste.

They passed through a brief density of buildings, a little clutch of shops and official-looking structures bunched against the road like aphids on a twig, and then the buildings again became more sporadic.

“And that was Bier Ridge,” said Fran. She sat back in her driver's seat and looked over at Jean. “Maybe we should stop and ask someone.”

“Maybe it isn't the right road. Where's the map?”

Jean checked the floor and between the seats, then craned around and saw the map tucked into the crevice of the back seat where Fran had tossed it. She reached for it, feeling herself tip slightly as the Cadillac took the incline of a hill, hearing the engine surge as Fran pressed on the gas. The map was a foot beyond the tips of her fingers.

“There was a little grocer's in the village,” said Fran. “Why don't we turn around and ask there?”

“No, no,” said Jean. “I'll get it.” The last thing she wanted was for her reunion with troubled Cheryl to happen in the checkout line of some awful food mart.

“You know what Jim and I have learned?” said Fran. “Once you're in the neighborhood of where you want to go, it's more efficient to ask for directions than to keep driving.”

“I'm sure you and Jim have learned a whole lot of things,” said Jean. She had unhitched herself from the seatbelt and now she was wedging herself between the two front seats, trying to stretch to reach the silly map, which was just . . . almost . . . she'd thought the seat leather would let her slip through more easily than it did . . . she felt her stomach lurch as they crested the hill and started almost immediately down . . . and the map began to slide toward her fingers . . .

“Got it!”

Jean realized now that she was wedged fairly tightly between the seats and her breasts were bunched up to her collarbone. She flailed for a moment with her free right hand searching for a hold to pull herself up, and, in the process, purely by accident, she whacked Fran somewhere on her face. The contact was so brief and sharp it wasn't clear to Jean where exactly she had hit Fran—it felt like an ear, though it might have been an eye—but she felt terrible and would have said something immediately except that before she could speak, Fran let out the most appalling scream. It was a sudden, explosive kind of scream, a scream of total shock, and Jean's first reaction was to think, well, that was a bit much; she hadn't whacked Fran that hard. But then suddenly she felt the whole car moving, swirling, she felt G-forces pushing her body frontways and sideways and she heard squealing tires and Fran making strange huffing sounds as though she was either working very hard or she was in shock, and it seemed to Jean that Fran was losing control and that any second they were going to crash. All because of a little whack on the ear. And the string of thoughts that whooshed through Jean's mind as she was tumbling forward and hitting her knee on the gearshift and her head on the padded roof of the car was that she was going to die before she'd given Cheryl her beautiful gift and that it was
just ridiculous
and that she loved Milt and that she did love her brothers and that she should never have let Fran drive.

And then the car stopped.

“Oh my God!” yelled Fran. “She just came out of nowhere! Are you all right?”