The Scamp (22 page)

We were in the kitchen of my mother's trailer, the place I'd done all my homework, all my arguing with my mother, and where I didn't believe I would be staying again for very long. It was darker earlier every night. My mother stood at the counter, slicing up a lime, and I was waiting for her to slice off her finger. Her hands shake a little all the time.

You should go, I said to Sissy. She was wearing a baseball tee that said
Summer Fun.
She'd been working full-time since July at a Ponderosa off the interstate. I watched my mother nod her head.

Rayelle, Sissy said. I was afraid she was going to try to hug me. I shrank under every touch.

No, I said. I can't have this conversation.

Rayelle, my mother said. She sloshed a little gin onto her wrist as she turned with the glass. You know she's right.

Get out, I said to Sissy. And I'd tell you to get out, I said to my mother, but it's your house.

Goddamn right it is, she said.

I slammed my bedroom door so hard it knocked the cheap molding right off the tin wall.

Now, instead, I find myself halfway between Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, and Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, living in a trailer with a man whose stuff I'm rifling through.

We parked at a Walmart, even though Couper prefers to shop at Target. Target won't let you park there all night. There's nothing stopping anyone at a Walmart. Maybe because so many of them are open twenty-four hours. There's no telling if you're in the store shopping, or in your trailer sleeping. Walmart has better supplies for us, propane tanks and charcoal, but Target's stuff is prettier.

You're a little bit Target, I say to Couper, before he goes in to buy beer. And I'm a little bit Walmart, I say.

He smirks. I'm actually a little bit Nordstrom, he says.

Well, I say. I narrow my eyes at him. I've never been in a Nordstrom in all my shitty life, I say.

He shrugs. It's a West Coast store, he says. I'll take you sometime.

That's when I go through his stuff. When he's inside Walmart at 1:00
AM
, buying beer and water bottles and barbecue potato chips, because that's what sounded good to me. I open the cabinets where he keeps his clothes, checking the pockets of the shirts and jeans. His
T-shirts feel like washed woven silk to me. His socks, too, thicker, but so soft. Not the pack of eight white pairs that Chuck buys.

When I look in the trunk that's inside the bench seats, I find an airtight bin with papers. Newspapers and legal pads. Some of them new and some of them filled with his scrawl. The size and slant vary from page to page. On some pages, he's doodled all the way down the side in tight crosshatching that looks like the weave of linen. The press of the pen making a dent in the paper that you can run your fingers on.

At the bottom of everything, there's a binder-clipped stack of legal-length documents, with places highlighted and marked by thin colored pieces of tape that flag off the edge of the papers. A pale yellow Post-it on the front page with the note
C, take care, K
.

Divorce papers, already signed by Amanda L. Kessler and dated June fucking fourth. All the lines with
Couper A. Gale
underneath, blank.

I hightail it diagonally across the parking lot, in the middle of the night, my dress blowing, my sandals flapping with each step. The papers rustle in my hand. I wait for him outside the automatic door, smoking a cigarette under the ugly light, and holding the papers behind my back.

He pushes a cart out, filled with a box of bottled beer and a case of water.

Who's K? I ask. He's startled to see me standing there, my cigarette making a cloud up around my head.

In what context? he asks. His face has this open surprise to it, his eyebrows high, but cinched.

C, take care, K, I say and I drop the papers in the cart on top of the beer. He looks down at them and his face changes from surprise to amusement.

Kaplan, he says. My brother.

What are you waiting for? I ask him.

Uh, he says, but I move in. I put the cigarette in my mouth and put both hands on the cart, pushing back toward the Scamp.

Go buy a mailing envelope, I say to him. The cigarette bobs on my lip.

We sleep for only a few hours. I can't get comfortable next to him. It's hot and we're close to the highway, where the trucks rumble down the off-ramp and their lights shine in the windows, even with the curtains closed. In the morning, Couper seems better rested than I expect him to be, and he gives me a briefing on what he knows. That Jeff Henderson is living in Wrightsville Beach. That he's a special education teacher with a wife and a baby.

Was she beautiful? I say to Couper.

Who? he asks. I don't know what his wife looks like, he says.

Amanda, I say.

He closes his computer. She still is, he says.

I want to ask him if she shops at Nordstrom, but I bite my tongue. He's in work mode, straightening his notes. He's already been over to the store, to use the
bathroom, wash up, and brush his teeth. He pours me a cup of coffee from the blue percolator pot. I've gotten quicker at putting the table back up from the bed, and I sit there at the table, drinking the coffee that I've gotten to like. Even black.

Do you think Khaki's dead? I ask him.

He pauses a long time. I don't know, sweetheart, he says. He stands, leaning against the counter with the sink behind him. Leaning is about the only way he can stand inside the Scamp. He says, I'll have a better idea after we talk to Henderson.

Do you think he killed her? I ask, and I don't wait for him to answer. I'll kill him, I say. I'll kill him with my own hands if he touched her, I say.

Let's just see, he says. He's a quieter type than I've known. What riles in me, settles in him. Sand sinking in water.

I ask Couper how he found Henderson, how he has found anyone. He tells me he has a subscription to a database that holds addresses and phone numbers and more background information than a regular person can find just searching the Internet.

I've had it, he says, since my newspaper days. But it wouldn't matter, he adds. Henderson's right out in the open, he says. I didn't even use the database. Anyone can find him. He's not hiding.

Is that good or bad? I ask.

I don't know, Couper says.

It's the first time, though, that I see him use a cover-up. A story to get in the door that's not about the girls. Every place we've been, it's been in the aftermath of a dead girl, a reporter doing a detective's work, asking the people left behind what they know, who they noticed, what was different. Waiting for the small detail that they overlooked, that will be the missing piece of his puzzle.

I listen to him make the phone call to Henderson. He says it's Couper Gale from the
Record
, and he asks Henderson if he's aware of a case involving a young developmentally disabled man who was tasered at a movie theater. If he can interview him.

He calls from the car. I watch Couper nod, the sleek, flat phone barely balanced between his ear and shoulder. He jots things in a small notebook.

Excellent, he says. It's a different voice, confident and in his professional element. It's just a few sly degrees different from the voice he uses on me.

Four times
, I think. Four different women. Four different towns. A newspaper office where everyone leaves eventually, their things packed in boxes, and desks emptied, once the presses stop moving. Some people have one wife and four or five different jobs, but all Couper's had is this one thing, moving him along from city to city, from wife to wife. He could always write. It was the women who came and went. The houses, the cars. It all seems like interchangeable parts. The rest of it, just suburbs, just stuff. All your possessions in trash bags,
tossed out on the lawn, put to the curb for someone else to come along and go through, to decide what's worth keeping.

We meet Henderson at a coffee shop that has about fourteen different types of coffee and a bunch of cookies that look grainy and healthy. My mother was never a baker. She would sometimes make brownies from a box, out of desperation, to stop me from asking her to bake something, and then I would eat the whole pan, even the dry edges, or the gooey middle where they hadn't baked all the way. She never had much of a sweet tooth.

There's a whole wall here of tea tins, green tea, oolong, jasmine, some shit I've never heard of. Matcha. Sencha. The walls are red, the room filled with brown leather couches and brown wooden tables. There's art on the wall that looks like a kid painted it, which probably means it's real, and expensive.

Henderson comes with his wife and their eight-month-old baby, who thank God doesn't look anything like Summer or I might have fainted on the spot. I haven't been around babies much. When your baby dies, people stop asking if you want to hold theirs.

Henderson looks different. Older, obviously, in his mid- or even late thirties, and clean-cut, not the scruffy stoner he used to be. His hair is just long enough to curl over his collar, but neat, combed back off his forehead. His eyes are bluer than I remember. His teeth, straight and white. His jeans, a dark-wash slim leg that he wears
with gray tennis shoes. His shirt, a wrinkle that you pay for, not that you get by leaving it rumpled on the floor.

He shakes hands with Couper and grins. His whiskers, in his just slightly grown-in beard, have a hint of silver at the corners of his chin. He eyes me once, and Couper tells him I'm an intern. His wife's name is Vera. The baby, Kaia.

I flip open my steno pad and take a felt-tip pen out of my purse. I draw doodles. Circles, overlapping. Henderson looks, then looks away. The baby, sitting with Vera on a couch behind him, curves against her mother's breast and sleeps.

I've never even heard of the case Couper is talking about. I haven't seen a newspaper, or very much TV other than a ball game inside a bar, in weeks. Henderson begins by going along, nodding, and then when I look up from my scribbles—I'm not taking notes on this—I notice that he's just looking at me, and my pad, where all I've drawn are these circles, locked together.

Did you go to Roosevelt? he asks me.

Not for special ed, I say and snort.

No, of course not, Henderson says. I mean, in general.

No, I say. I feel like the sound of my voice betrays me, different from this drippy, coastal town. Pennsylvania girls have a different twang. We age faster, and wrinkle harder. It's in the water, in the coal, seeping up from the ground. We're our own fossil fuel, burning up at a different pace.

You seem so familiar, he says.

The baby begins to stir, and Vera, who is short, but looks strong like a fighter, olive-skinned with dark hair cropped short and choppy, gets up and walks outside with the baby low on her chest, rubbing her curved back in a circle.

Attachment, Henderson says to Couper. You got kids?

Me, no, Couper says. He folds his lips in, tucked over his teeth. I've never seen him do this. His mouth is open, is full and wet and pink and sensuous, the rest of the time. Even when he's sleeping.

Phew, Henderson says. It's wearing me out.

What does that mean? I ask. Attachment?

It's a philosophy of parenting, he says. She's always in physical contact with one of us.

Always? I say.

He chuckles. I'm so tired, he says.

He and Couper talk then specifically about rights and laws, and then more generally about challenges, about changing public perceptions and sensitivities. Empathy. I put the steno pad down, bored, and undo the braid I'd twisted together this morning, rake my fingers through my hair. It's straight in spots, from sleeping. The parts against my neck, kinked with sweat.

Henderson had been looking at me with a curious head tilt. After I take my hair down, he looks like he's seen a ghost.

Where did you come from? he asks me. He puts his coffee cup down and leans over when he asks it.

Um, I say. Where am I from? I try to ignore his weird question, like I appeared from another world. Just a little town, I say. Not around here. No one's ever heard of it.

He looks back over his shoulder at Vera, outside in the shade with the baby.

Try me, he says.

It's called South Lake, I say.

I watch his blue eyes lose their sparkle and darken to something grayer, something filled with lead.

You're her cousin, he says. The cousin-sister.

I have a cousin, I say. My heart knocks hard. I don't know what you're talking about, though. I don't have a sister.

Outside, Vera paces with the baby, bouncing her, rubbing. She takes a bench with her back to the ocean, and moves a wide, brightly colored scarf over her shoulder and most of the baby's body so she can nurse her.

I couldn't wait to detach from Summer.

Khaki, Henderson says to me.

She's my cousin, I say. My stomach fills with electricity. Couper scuffs his chair back and looks over at me.

You two know each other? he says.

Do you remember me? Henderson says.

I shrug, but my hands are shaking. I watch his mouth turn hard.

You knew that, coming here, he says. He looks at Couper. Who the fuck are you? he says.

I am exactly who I said I was, Couper says. He pulls out a press card, an ID from a paper called the
Record.

Henderson looks at the card, at the photo that is clearly Couper, and pushes it back toward him.

Do you know where she is? he asks me.

How would I? I say. The last time I saw her, she was with you.

Pulling her leg into his car and slamming the door. Go home, Rayelle, she hissed at me. Go play.

Henderson picks up my note-less steno pad. You want to tell me what you're really here to talk about? he says. You're not even writing anything down. You're not a reporter, he says to Couper.

I am a reporter, he says.

You sure you're not retired? Henderson says.