The One I Left Behind (12 page)

“We don’t even know he’s got her,” Charlie said.

“Of course he does,” Tara said. “I can feel it.”

“How convenient that you all of a sudden have these newfound psychic abilities,” Charlie snapped. “I mean, dead people are talking through you, giving you messages . . .”

“There’s more to this world than meets the eye, Chuckles.”

Charlie teased her, rolled his eyes, and said going to the diner was a little twisted, but he went. It turned out they weren’t the only ones with the idea: the place was packed, and they had to wait for a table. And as soon as they walked in, they heard the buzz of customers anxiously talking about the missing waitress and saying maybe she’d been taken by the same man who’d killed Andrea McFerlin. There was this strange electricity in the air. Maybe it was danger, and they all wanted to be close to it.

Reggie explained that she had met Candy Jacques only once, when her mother took her to the Silver Spoon for ice cream when she was seven or eight. The waitress was a woman with fried blond hair and a tired face who wore thick blue eye shadow and had candy cane earrings and a candy cane sticker on her name tag even though it was only October. She was finishing a cheeseburger when they arrived.

“Hey, Vera,” she said when they first sat down, side by side at the counter, on spinning stools once again. “Long time no see. How are you, hon?”

“Good,” Vera said.

“See much of Rabbit lately?” Candy asked.

“Now and then,” Vera said, looking away.

“You tell him I said hello, huh?” Candy said. Then, her eyes moved to Reggie. “Who’s the little lady?”

“My daughter,” Vera said. “Regina.”

”No kidding?” Candy dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

She looked at Reggie and said, “Yeah, I can see the resemblance. Around the eyes. You’ve got your mamma’s beautiful eyes. And just look at those lashes! You’re gonna be a heartbreaker, little Regina, just like your mama.” She reached out and brushed the unkempt hair away from Reggie’s face.

“How about a little sugar for Candy?”

Reggie looked up at her mother, who said, “Go ahead, Regina, give her a little peck on the cheek.”

Reggie stood up and the waitress leaned down, offering her cheek. Reggie gave her the tiniest kiss, her lips barely touching the waitress’s warm, sticky skin. She could smell cooked meat and onions on Candy’s breath.

“Just like a butterfly,” Candy said. “Hardly a kiss at all. I hope you do a little better than that when you get around to kissing the boys.” She chuckled.

Reggie spun on her stool and buried her face in her mother’s coat, smelled the cold air, perfume, and Winstons. Vera laughed, too.

“I bet I know what you’d like, little lady,” the candy cane waitress said. “How about one of my magical mystery sundaes? I only make them for my most special customers.”

Reggie pulled her face from her mother’s coat and nodded, and when the waitress returned, she carried a sundae with three different ice creams and every topping imaginable.

“This is a real treat I’m giving you,” she promised. “It’s not even on the menu.”

Later, when they were on their way home, Reggie asked her mom how she knew Candy. “Is she an actress, too?”

“Once,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette, then fiddling with the radio, searching for a song she liked. “She was once.”

“J
UST THINK OF IT,”
Tara said now, sipping a cup of black coffee once they were seated in a booth. Reggie and Charlie had milk shakes and were sitting across from Tara. Reggie had moved her knee so that it was touching Charlie’s. They were all splitting an order of fries and onion rings. “We might have our very own serial killer. Hell, he could be here, in this restaurant, right this minute.”

“If he was here, wouldn’t you be able to tell?” Charlie asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be psychic now? Wouldn’t you go all rigid and start speaking in tongues if he was nearby?”

Reggie knew his teasing was just his own stupid way of trying to flirt with Tara. But she also knew it wasn’t working—it was just pissing Tara off.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Tara hissed. She shot Reggie a look like
Can you believe how ignorant some people are?
Reggie smiled back and shook her head empathetically.

Reggie scanned the crowd: truckers, tables of high school students in letter jackets, families with kids who were kicking each other under the table and fighting over packets of sugar.

Charlie frowned and stirred his milk shake. “For all we know, this waitress has just shacked up with her boyfriend.”

“But she hasn’t called her mother. And on the news, they said she was scheduled to work today. If she wasn’t missing, she’d probably be waiting on us
right now,
” Tara said.

Reggie, making up her mind to ignore the bickering, had pulled a pen from her pocket and was doodling on the backside of her menu. She drew the ketchup bottle, capturing the faint and distorted reflection of Tara on its left side.

Charlie shook his head. “But if she wasn’t gone, we wouldn’t even be here, Sherlock.”

Tara turned away in disgust, not bothering to reply.

As she drew, Reggie thought of how, just an hour ago, riding her bike to the diner, she’d seen pictures of Candy plastered all over town, like the lost kids on the back of milk cartons: have you seen me?

The photo showed her heavy eye shadow and candy cane earrings, though they looked more like fishhooks in the blurred image. She smiled out from telephone poles and bulletin boards in her greasy Silver Spoon uniform, and Reggie could still smell the charred meat and onions on her breath.

A little sugar for Candy.

She thought of her mom’s theory, about how everyone was connected by these invisible threads, making this big web. Reggie had a string that went right to Candy. She’d met her once, kissed her cheek. Somehow this made her feel all the more frightened and jittery at Candace’s disappearance.

Tara looked down at Reggie’s drawing, seeing herself in the ketchup bottle. “That’s totally awesome, Reggie,” she squealed. “No one’s ever drawn my picture before. Can I have it?”

Reggie shrugged, looked down at the drawing, and realized she’d given Tara’s reflection the candy cane earrings.

“It’s not really that good,” Reggie said, but Tara folded up the place mat and put it in her bag.

“Please, Reggie,” Tara said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got more talent in your left pinkie toe than most people have in their whole bodies.”

“Hey, cuz!” came a shout from across the restaurant. Charlie’s cousin Sid was meandering up to their table. His curly hair had a shaggy, just-out-of-bed look. He wore low-slung Levi’s, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and black Converse high-tops. He had two blond girls with him, wearing hippie clothes and reeking of patchouli. One was quite overweight, her belly spilling over the top of her Indian-print wraparound skirt. The other had horrible acne. “How goes it?” Sid asked. His pale blue eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and he had a lopsided smile.

“Good,” Charlie said, running a hand over his own close-cropped hair. “How ’bout with you?”

“Can’t complain,” Sid said, still grinning stupidly.

“Can I ask you something?” Tara said, looking at Sid.

“Shoot.”

“I hear you’re the go-to guy if someone happened to be interested in a certain something.”

One of the girls giggled. She wore a string of red glass beads and little round glasses with pink lenses. Her hair was long and crazy as a nest of snakes. There was a purple feather roach clip dangling from the left side.

“I could be your man. We should talk. My cuz here knows how to reach me. Y’all enjoy your snack.” He loped off, the twin hippies like bookends beside him.

Charlie glared at Tara and shook his head.

“What?” Tara asked. “I thought a little weed might be fun sometime. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, right,” Charlie said. “Just imagine what would happen if my dad got one whiff or found one seed on me—I feel like I’m half a step away from reform school as it is, I don’t need to give him an actual, legitimate reason. ”

“Too bad,” Tara said, keeping her eyes on Sid as he stood in line at the register.

“Sid’s a total waste-oid,” Charlie said, noticing that Tara was still staring at his cousin. “No brain cells left. My dad told me that Uncle Bo’s real pissed because Sid didn’t get into a single college he applied to. He’s gotta go to community college in the fall and take remedial English and shit.”

Tara watched Sid and the girls leave, then turned back to Reggie.

“Your mom must be tripping, Reg,” Tara said, stirring Sweet’N Low into her coffee. She stirred too fast and hard, making the spoon chink against the white ceramic mug and spilling coffee over the edge. “Are she and Candy still friends? How do they even know each other? When’s the last time she saw her?” Sometimes Tara’s sentences reminded Reggie of a bumper car ride—one slamming into the next, pushing it out of the way until the next one came along, faster and more furious.

Reggie shrugged. “I’m not sure. And my mom hasn’t been around the last few days, so I haven’t been able to ask her.”

“Where is she?” Tara asked.

“Don’t know,” Reggie admitted, then, reluctantly, told Charlie and Tara the story of what had happened at the bowling alley—how Vera had taken off with the man in the white shirt and hadn’t come home since. “She’s been doing this play down in New Haven. She’s probably down there, staying with friends.”

“So wait . . . ,” Tara said, setting down her coffee so hard it sloshed over the side. “This guy in the white shirt your mom took off with, he drove a tan car?” Her voice turned high and squeaky like a dog toy.

“Yeah,” Reggie said. “So?”

“Hello! Tan car, Reg. Like the guy that picked up Candace Jacques! The guy who might have killed Andrea McFerlin! What if your mom was picked up by a serial killer?”

“Jeez-us!” Charlie yelped, slamming the bottle of ketchup down. “I don’t get it, Tara. How is it that your mind goes to the most messed-up places so quickly?”

“I’m just connecting the dots. It’s not my fault that you don’t like the picture that shows up.”

“But they don’t connect!” Charlie snapped, rubbing his temples as if he was getting a headache. “You’re assuming all kinds of shit, jumping to conclusions based on nothing! I hope you’re not paying any attention to this, Reg.”

Reggie shook her head, to say, of course not. She picked at the fries that Charlie had dumped too much ketchup on, suddenly not feeling very hungry at all. She wiped her hands on a paper napkin, leaving red smeary fingerprints.

“R
EGGIE?”
G
EORGE SAID WHEN
he opened the door. He squinted at her through his glasses like he was trying to decide if it was really her. At last he smiled warmly. “What a nice surprise. You rode your bike all this way?” He looked past Reggie at her Peugeot, resting on the grass. “Do you have a headlight or something?”

“Reflectors,” Reggie said.

“Well, if you’re going to be riding around in the dark, we’ll have to get you some decent lights for the bike. Come on in.”

Reggie followed George through the doorway of his little ranch house and into the kitchen. It was small and dark with fake wood paneling. The countertops were white Formica, scrubbed until they gleamed. George had a small table with four chairs with a fake Tiffany lamp hanging above it. The shelf behind them was lined with wooden duck decoys and bowling trophies.

Reggie liked the way the rows of ducks watched her, as they did each time she came to George for advice or help with homework. Her mother wasn’t exactly the help-with-homework type, and whenever she asked Lorraine, her aunt told her to go to the library and look things up herself. So she came to George’s kitchen table whenever she had a particularly tricky assignment or a test she was sure she’d fail. He had a way of breaking things down into tiny pieces that made even the hardest tasks seem manageable.

“Want a Coke?”

Reggie nodded.

“I was just finishing up a project downstairs,” he said, handing her a can of soda from the fridge. “Want to see?” His eyes were all lit up, the way they got when he was hard at work on one of his decoys.

“Sure.” She followed George down the painted steps into the basement. Fluorescent light fixtures hung from chains on the ceiling, illuminating George’s workshop. He had a table saw, a jigsaw, a drill press, and a huge workbench with various clamps and vises attached to it. The Peg-Board wall behind the workbench was neatly hung with tools, each tool’s place carefully outlined with yellow paint.

Reggie loved George’s workshop. She loved the neatness, the rows of tools, the idea that you could just follow a pattern and plans and end up with a duck or a dresser. “There’s a right tool for every job,” George would say when he asked her to hand him things: a
-inch wrench, a no. 2 Phillips head screwdriver, a
-inch nail set.