The Mortal Groove (16 page)

“But what about Melanie? That's not a cold case—unless we let it become one.” Normally, if Jane wanted to do something, she just did it. She didn't need Cordelia's approval. But on this one, she was truly conflicted. Certainty gave a person the edge—whether she was right or wrong. Cordelia had it. Jane didn't.

“You want Dinosaur Don Pettyjohn to be our next governor? Think, Janey! He's owned by every corporation in the state—hell, the universe. You give those sharks an opening and they'll eat your dad alive. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“I had a friend in Arizona tell me once about a great candidate she was supporting for the U.S. Congress. The guy's campaign manager got caught doing drugs with a prostitute seven months before the election and, of course, it made all the papers. It wasn't like the candidate had anything to do with it, but his opponents made the rest of the election all about this guy's lack of judgment. How could he hire a man like that to run his campaign? Would you want a man with judgment like that working for you in Washington?”

“Did he lose in the general election?”

“By a landslide. And that's exactly what will happen to your
dad if Del Green's name is associated with an old murder. Hell, Randy is one of his biggest backers. They'll use that to annihilate Ray.”

“I see your point, but—”

“This is bigger than just Melanie. There was a third guy, right? Can't remember his name, but—”

“Wilton,” said Jane. “Larry Wilton. Maybe he's the one who murdered Sue Bouchard. Could be he's the guy in the truck. If we could just prove he did it, my dad—and Del and Randy—would be off the hook. And then we could tell the police what we know.”

“That's a huge
if.
Hey, I've got an idea.” Cordelia pulled a quarter out of her jacket pocket. “Let's toss a coin.”

“Oh, great. I love it. You always come up with such innovative
mature
solutions.”

“Creative to the core.”

Jane thought about it for a second. “Okay. Sure, I'll play. Heads we don't tell the cops. Tails we throw caution to the wind and tell them everything we know.”

“No,” said Cordelia, cupping the coin in her hands and blowing on it. “Heads we don't tell the cops. Tails, you and me, we drive down to Waldo for a little R & R. Maybe talk to the guy who wrote that op-ed piece.”

“You'd do that?”

“It's what you want, right?”

“Yeah, actually, it is.”

“Fine. To shut you up, I'd do just about anything. And besides, there's a fifty-fifty chance it will be heads and”—she poked Jane in the chest—“that means you have to shut up about talking to the cops for the duration.”

“All right. Toss it.”

Cordelia launched the coin into the air, caught it, and flipped it onto the arm of her jacket. Raising her hand to look at it, one eyebrow shot upward. “Well well. Seems like we're headed down to Waldo on a little fact-finding mission.”

“What about Melanie? You can't just leave her.”

“We won't be gone long. And until we go, I plan to spend every waking minute by her side.”

 

 

P
eter tried a smile, but it wasn't returned. The woman with the thick Jersey accent standing behind the counter at Child Protective Services in Newark instructed him to take a seat in the waiting room. She might have added, but didn't, that since he had chosen to come in without an appointment he was royally screwing up her day. In a tight voice, she told him she couldn't promise anything, but that she'd see if her supervisor could squeeze him in.

Peter took the chair next to the door. There were at least thirty other people in the room, some with children, some trying to ignore the din by reading a magazine, others looking bored, anxious, confused, or a combination of all three.

By the time Peter was finally allowed in to see someone, the room had all but cleared out. It was going on five-thirty. He ran a quick hand over his hair, wished he had some gum. He hadn't eaten since breakfast. He'd stopped at a gas station after leaving Cabot's place and searched the yellow pages for the address he
wanted in Newark. He was still hoping he wouldn't have to spend the night.

“How can I help you, Mr. . . . Johnson?” The woman looked down at a yellow Post-it note, then removed her glasses and stared up at him. She had iodine-colored skin, a slippery spray of black bangs, and kind eyes.

He explained what he knew about Margaret, said she'd been dropped off somewhere in Jersey City on February 17th—eight years ago.

“And you have no name, just a description.”

“That's right.”

“You have to understand, Mr. Johnson, that even if I could help you, I simply don't have the time.” She nodded to the foot-high stack of files on her desk. “The system is already severely overloaded. Every one of these cases needs my immediate attention. There aren't enough hours in the day to take care of all the kids—or parents—who are in trouble and need help. If I were to stop, spend all my efforts looking for your wife's little girl, what would happen to all these people?”

“Don't you have someone on your staff who might be less busy?”

“Everyone here is as backed up as I am.”

“But-—” His eyes locked on hers. “I mean, isn't there any way I could do the searching myself? Don't you have records I could look through?”

“All our records are confidential. I'd like to help you, but it's just not possible.”

“The fact that she was learning disabled, doesn't that make her case stand out, even a little?”

She gave a mirthless laugh, shook her head. “Not in the slightest.”

“So there's nothing I can do to find her.”

She gazed across the desk at him with sad eyes. “I'm afraid not. I'm truly sorry.”

“I don't accept that,” said Peter, shooting to his feet.

“If I were you, I wouldn't either.” She stood and extended her hand. “Good luck, Mr. Johnson. I wish you only the best.”

 

 

W
hen Randy entered the family room that same afternoon, he found his daughter, Katie, sitting on the floor with a bunch of his old phonograph records spread out in front of her. A Bob Dylan song played softly from the stereo—“My Back Pages,” one of his favorites.

“What's up, honey?” he asked, a soft smile playing on his face as he sat down on the edge of the couch. “This music is prehistoric. Not exactly your style.”

Katie's attention was focused on the back of a Procol Harum album. “Just looking around,” she said, with an indifferent shrug.

“You like Dylan?”

“Not really.”

Randy had been anxiously waiting all day for Larry to get back with Melanie Gunderson's file. Del had phoned at least four times, but there was nothing either of them could do. Randy
envisioned Larry stopping at a bar to hoist a few and losing track of time. Larry was a talker. An extrovert. Get him started and he could go on for hours. On the other hand, Randy could come up with dozens of other scenarios for what had happened, each worse than the one before it. Sure, Larry could be a flake, but it wasn't like him to just forget about Randy and Del, not when the stakes were this high.

“Something wrong?” asked Katie, her blue eyes fixed on her father.

“No, honey. Just wondering where Larry is.”

“You know, Dad, I don't know why he's even your friend. He smells. He's a mooch. He tries to help around the house, but he always ends up making an even bigger mess. He's like . . . this weird person who appears every few years, drinks your booze, makes you stay up late laughing at his raunchy jokes, and then disappears. And you . . . you get all goofy around him, like he's some kind of guru, when anybody with a brain can see he's, like, this total loser.”

She seemed angry. “He do something to upset you?”

She chewed on her lower lip, set the Procol Harum album down and picked up a Grateful Dead. “I don't get you at all, Dad. You fall all over yourself to be nice to that man. Why can't you be nice like that to Mom? It's like you care more about Del and him than you do about Mom and me.”

“Never,” said Randy, the word catching in his throat. “That's not true.”

“Feels that way to me.”

“Honey, I love you and your mother more than anything.”

“Then why'd you split up with her?”

“It's . . . complicated. You're so young.”

“Oh, right. The kid wouldn't understand.”

“No, I just meant—”

“I see the way things are. You don't talk to us. You're always down in the dumps. You're too busy with your holy righteous work to make time for anything else.”

“God, Katie—” It felt like she was flaying him alive.

“But you get all zippy when Larry arrives. You spend hours talking to
him.
So . . . I decided maybe it has something to do with Vietnam. You three guys were buddies, right. But so freakin' what. Isn't family more important than friends?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Did they torture you over there? Is that why you're so screwed up?”

“No, honey, please.” He felt a trapdoor open in his stomach. “You never talk about that time in your life. Why? Was it
so
terrible? Mom told me once that when you got home, the first thing you did was invite Del and Larry to come visit you. If war was so awful, didn't they remind you of all you went through? I mean, I'd think you'd want to get as far away from them as possible.”

“It didn't work like that,” he whispered. “Not for me.”

“Then tell me something that will make me understand.”

Randy got up and turned off the music. When he sat back down, he found that he was having a hard time looking at her. In a flash, it came to him. He was afraid of her, of her judgment. He felt suddenly old—an old man sensing how impossible it was to reduce the truth of his life to something simple enough to satisfy a child.

“How do I explain war to you, honey, when I can't even explain it to myself?”

“Don't talk down to me, Dad. I'm not as young and brainless as you think I am. I'm sixteen.” Her eyes were fierce.

Randy desperately wanted to get up and go do something else, make an excuse that he had work to do and they'd talk about it later, but they both knew that wouldn't cut it. Not this time. “It wasn't just the war, Katie, but what came after. It was like . . . you know that saying I hear people use every now and then. About getting their ‘groove on,' or getting their ‘groove back.' It was like we were in our own kind of groove over there—a mortal groove. Death—the possibility of dying or killing—was our reality. I don't know if you can truly understand what that feels like.”

“I'm not a baby.” She seemed so indignant.

“One instant you could be walking next to a guy, a friend, talking casually about nothing in particular, actually being kind of bored, and the next second you'd still be walking along but what was left of your buddy was hanging from a tree. After a while, I got used to living that way. We all did. The flies and the heat, the horror and the stink, it became our norm. And this is the tricky part, honey. When we came home, we were still in that groove. It wasn't like we could turn a switch and go back to our old way of living. We'd seen things no human being should ever have to see. Our reactions—our instincts—had been honed to keep us alive, but they didn't work for us back here. They were so
incredibly
wrong. We tried to slip back into our old selves, but some part of our brains was still stuck back there.”

“But . . . like . . . how did that work?”

She really seemed to want to know, and that presented Randy with a problem. He felt obliged to give her a piece of the truth without getting himself in too deep.

“Well, for example. When I got home, your grandmother sent me to buy some groceries. I remember being in the store with all these other people who seemed so intent on what cereal
they were going to buy. What brand of milk. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that men were fighting and dying a world away. How could they even care about cereal brands. It was insane.”