Son of Destruction (33 page)

Cute Bobby Chaplin was riding shotgun, smart and safe as houses, so why not? If the look Bobby shot her should have told her that he had misgivings, she wasn’t about to pass up a ride. Who wouldn’t want to be seen out riding around these cool guys? She tossed her hair like a cheerleader and jumped into the back.

Stitch Von Harten and the Coleman twins skooched over so she could slip in between Buck and Darcy instead of jouncing along on their knobby knees – too bad about Darcy but who knew he was already doomed? Brad passed the bottle – God only knows what they were drinking – and Jessie knocked one back. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thinks now, but in the beginning, so crazy and so very much fun, being with these guys – top of the line, leaders of the pack. They were singing, and she remembers riding along thinking,
Now I’m in with them, these are my main men.

When you grow up on the outside and something like this happens, you think,
Now everything is going to be different
. They’ll want you at all the parties now, and not just because you have big knockers. Yeah, right. Brad took a turn nobody expected and her neck snapped. They were at the head of a coral road going nowhere. ‘Shit,’ Bobby said, and Brad said, ‘No shit.’ Then Bobby, who Jessie was so psyched to be hanging out with, said, ‘This is where I get off.’ She remembers just exactly how it sounded. ‘This is where I get off.’ He reached over the seat and grabbed her hand. ‘And you should come too.’ He was asking her to jump down and come along but she was out with the boys and they liked her and by that time frankly, she was too fried to think about that big of a decision.

Oh shit, Jessie thinks, jumping up so fast that she upsets her chair.
Done is done.
She can’t go back and she can’t make it change. The trouble is, she can’t get rid of it, either, and seeing Walker again today the way she did on a bright Sunday afternoon after so long and just when she thought she was on top of things – she can’t handle it. She just can’t.

It isn’t the pain or humiliation, it’s the knowledge that Walker Pike saw her like that, tattered and bawling in the sand, which he did because it was Walker who ended it. Just when she thought she was going to die – and by God she wanted to die that night and at certain times every night for years afterward – Walker came. Alone by that time, and she can’t know when the others fled – alone, and brutish, vengeful Brad Kalen was rolling her over to try something new when headlights exploded the night and everything changed. A car door slammed and Walker Pike came down on them like the Trojan army and ended it.

Everything stopped in a shower of sand and flying spit and her attacker’s bloody teeth and the hell of it is that every time she sees Walker now, and she does love Walker, Jessie knows he is remembering. No matter how old they get or how pretty she makes herself, Walker is seeing her like that.
Like that.

It isn’t fair, she thinks bitterly, he never looked that way at Lucy. In spite of all that.

Distracted and miserable, she finds herself running around the lobby of her hotel thumping tapestry pillows and misting her bromeliads – anything to escape the sense memory, which is overwhelming. She is straightening lampshades when the kid from up north comes out of the elevator with a Jiffy bag under his arm – when did he come in? Was she so wrecked that he went past the desk without her noticing?

Lucy’s boy.

It breaks her heart to see him. Then she looks at his face and her heart goes out, and for more than one reason.

She chooses the easy one. ‘You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.’

He grins, probably because Jessie is smiling. ‘Long day.’

‘Bar’s closed, but I can buy you a cup of coffee.’

‘I just came to pick up something. Gotta be somewhere.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Now, why does this embarrass him?

She says kindly, ‘You need a Flordana burger so you don’t die on your way to wherever you’re going. Chips on the side, and guaco. Come on, come and sit five minutes while Sibby fixes it, it looks like you could use the mercy.’

‘Mercy?’ He stands there, juggling the Jiffy bag while he thinks it over. Should he stay or should he go? His lips aren’t moving but they might as well be. It’s not clear what he is considering, but she can see that he’s sifting through significant material.

‘I can get it to go, if you’re in that much of a rush.’

‘OK.’ It’s a good smile. Honestly pleased. ‘Thanks.’

This is nice
, Jessie thinks, studying the kid while he stirs too much sugar into the iced tea she ordered for him because, she said laughing, he needs a caffeine jolt to keep him going while Sibby gets his hotel Happy Meal into the clamshell. All these years childless and she’s sitting here with a great-looking man, and instead of flirting she’s coming on like Mrs Mom. It’s kind of restful. Besides, it’s taking her out of herself.
Sweet, sitting here with a sweet guy who doesn’t know how they did me, talking about nothing.
‘So,’ she says, ‘Fort Jude. Scary, right?’

Then he puts the snapshot on the table. Yes, she saw it the first day. Yes, she knows what he wants. No. She knows what she wants. It’s time.

‘Do you know these guys?’

Him.
She puts her finger on the snapshot so she won’t have to see that face again. ‘Oh,’ she murmurs, ‘Oh, shit.’

‘So you do know them.’

She grimaces to mask what she is thinking. ‘Always did.’

‘I’m looking for my father?’ Not a statement, a question.

Jessie says gently, ‘We don’t always know what we’re looking for.’

‘You’re going to help me, aren’t you.’ Not a question.

‘If I can.’

‘These guys.’

She takes a long breath. OK, as the guy who led her business seminar in Vegas said,
Let us begin
.

‘Lucy should have known better than to get in a car with those guys, no matter how many there are. There is no safety in numbers in this town.’ Like it or not, she is back there. ‘You don’t do that when you see him, not even when it’s full of boys which is why you get into the car in the first place. Son of a bitch loses the others along the way, he just throws them out the back or they get fed up and jump out because they can’t stop him and they know where this is going, and where you thought you were safe . . .’ She breaks off, hoping she can jump from here to the business about Lucy without telling him too much about herself, but it’s too late.

‘When you get to be my age, you get used to a lot of things and you learn how to handle it, but I was only fifteen!’

‘You.’ Daniel is too quick for her. ‘You?’

So she has to tell him. ‘Yeah. Me.’

‘Same guy?’ He grimaces. ‘Same guy.’

‘After he did it he beat the crap out of me.’ This pops out even though she is trying hard not to talk about herself. She pulls her voice back together and starts over. ‘Your mother should have known better, she was eighteen.’

Sad, what his face does then.

‘It’s OK, it ended differently.’ Then without explaining because she can’t bear to tell another living human what happened to her when she was young and stupid, Jessie makes the jump cut to Lucy’s story, that is, as much of it as she knows.

‘Nobody in her right mind gets in a car full of drunks, but look. She was sheltered, it was her first beach party, how was she supposed to know? Oh shit, I should have warned her but we didn’t talk – not that she was snotty, just standoffish, and besides, I was distracted. I was with Clete Rucker that night and hey, I was
invited
, getting down with all the kids out there just like I belonged, down with the bonfire and great music and moonlight on black water, God only knows what we were drinking; we were all crazy and by the time I looked up, she was getting into that Jeep and it was too late to warn her.

‘When I saw what was happening I screamed and ran after them but by that time they were bombing down the beach and I knew. I ran along after them it seemed like all night, crying and screaming to stupefy the dead. I yelled, “Lucy, watch out,” but the wind took it. Forgive me I ran screaming and forgive her she didn’t hear and then I lost sight of them.’ She is swallowing tears. ‘There was sand in my eyes and in my mouth and in my hair and my God, I cried and cried.’

Ashamed, she meets his eyes; it’s what honest people do. ‘I should have called the beach police, I should have brought the Air Force down on them, I should have taken their guns and shot him dead or howled to break glass and kept on howling until she heard me and took warning,
Watch out for Brad
. . .’

‘Brad. Kalen, you mean.’
Click.

‘. . . but I was so drunk I was puking sand, and . . .’ She breaks off. The kid is sitting across from her with his mouth cracked open, not drop-jawed, just trying to hear more than she is willing to say.

‘And what?’ He drops a warm hand on her wrist, squeezing until she flinches and pulls away. ‘And what?’

Now they arrive at the heart of her pain and, OK, Jessie thinks, it’s time to admit it, her bitter, bitter jealousy. She tells him, ‘Thank God Walker saw them go.’

‘Who?’

Jessie Vukovich loves Walker Pike, she always will and they both know it but that’s as far as it goes; Walker is a very private person. Never mind that she knows without having to look that he’s parked out front on Central Avenue right now, that he’s sitting out there in the dusk waiting for the kid to come out so he can follow him, and never mind that Jessie isn’t sure why Walker is tailing him, but she has her suspicions.

She says lightly, ‘Just a boy I used to know,’ and the kid’s irises explode. Then because she can’t just drop it and leave it lying there she says, ‘But he got there in time. Walker caught up with the son of a bitch, which is why the ugly fucker graduated missing three teeth. I guess he beat her pretty bad. Walker had to clean her up before he took her home, and Walker . . .’ She is rolling into a little threnody when Dan Carteret lunges up like a shark, all teeth. ‘Wait! Your food!’

‘I can’t.’ Choked with anger, he wheels. ‘I have to go.’

‘Not yet. This is important. You might as well know . . .’ The details pile in on Jessie and she is surprised that even though she will never outlive her own misery and humiliation, what became of perfect Lucy after Walker saved her from Brad Kalen is a source of greater pain than anything Brad did to her. ‘Wait,’ she cries. ‘Wait for the rest!’

Too late. He’s out the door. Running for his car so hard and fast that he won’t see Walker parked there.

She says anyway, ‘If you’re looking for your father, Kalen’s the wrong guy. You got born a lot later. A whole year later, at the very least.’

The sun is over the yardarm, always a bad time for Bob Chaplin, Goldman Sachs. There will be no drinking, but his hands shake and his mouth waters every evening just about this time. His brother and sister are no help. Margaret’s trotting around upstairs, pray God she isn’t planning another of her Sunday night suppers, and Al is off at his favorite bar, leaving Bobby alone to replay tapes in his head – all those lost conversations, old and recent – with no way to rewrite them and nothing to take his mind off it. He won’t call friends. He found out last night that it really has been too long. He loves Von Harten and Coleman but they have their own problems, and after seeing his designated best friend up close last night he remembers what he always knew. Bellinger was never his friend, not really.

No problem. He’s used to being alone. He’ll be fine.

He is surprised and grateful when the doorbell rings. ‘Nenna! This is nice.’

‘Are you busy?’ She’s holding a basket covered by a checkered dishtowel with that freshly washed look, as if it just came out of the drier. She looks pretty in the creeping dusk, maybe a little shaky but hopeful. ‘I made too many corn muffins this morning, I hope you like . . .’

‘I just started a pot of coffee.’ Bobby is hopeful too.

‘I hope you don’t think it’s too late for . . .’

He lifts a corner of the cloth and peeks in, quick to reassure her. ‘They look great. Hey, Margaret brought orange blossom honey back from Homosassa Springs. Would you like . . .’

‘I’d love to.’ She smiles. ‘Can I come in?’

Her smile makes him smile. But, this house! He covers quickly. ‘It’s too pretty out to be stuck inside.’

‘The light really is beautiful at this time of day.’

He walks her around to the picnic table. ‘Let’s sit out here.’

‘Let’s do.’

‘Wait here, I’ll bring a tray.’

He likes the way she scoots her legs over the bench and sits. Bobby notes that unlike the girls when he knew them back in high school, Nenna does not jump up and offer to help, which is the Fort Jude way. She seems to know that he’d find it intrusive. When she had him at the front door she didn’t try to push her way inside. Maybe she knows he’d rather not have her nosing around in there feeling sorry for him, he thinks, going into Margaret’s dim kitchen.

She doesn’t need to see how he lives, which . . . yes!

Which he is going to change. Apartment down town, he’ll gentrify a neighborhood. Fresh resume; he’ll add a line that says
consultant
to explain the gap. With his credentials, he can get a new job.

Bobby collects coffee cups and the full pot, sugar bowl and two spoons, butter and two butter knives, honey with its wooden dipstick, proof against drips. Two of his mother’s Minton dessert plates. He works quietly because he doesn’t want to bring Margaret downstairs. He’s rather not hurt her feelings – which he would, if she found the tray and asked him to explain. When he comes back outside Nenna is waiting nicely in the twilight, sitting there with her head bent, like a child. He sets down the tray. ‘I’m sorry it took so long.’

‘This is so nice!’ She smiles.

‘I’m glad.’

She breaks one of the muffins and puts it on a plate. She butters the halves, drizzling them with honey and pushing the plate across the table. ‘Here, this one’s for you.’

‘Wonderful.’ Soberly, he pours the coffee, setting the first cup down in front of her. ‘Sugar?’