Girl in the Rearview Mirror Page 24

  She twitched. “Huh?”

  “If you help me get a sense of him—his past, who he really was, I could, uh, reveal the man behind the mug shot. For our readers.”

  She seemed amused. “The man behind the mug shot.”

  I nodded, trying to seem eager, like a reporter would be. “You said you knew him a long time.”

  She got so quiet I thought she’d lied. Maybe she’d barely known Clint, but was latching onto him for attention. To see her name—Argyle, like the plaid—in print.

  “Were you close?” I tried.

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Oh, yes. Even Clint would have admitted that by now.” Her tone was bitter and fond at once—the tone of someone with baggage. I relaxed.

  She jabbed the air. “There’s a pack of cigarettes, top of the fridge. Could you?”

  I fetched them from where they’d fallen on the floor. For a moment I lingered in the cool air conditioner stream. The items scattered on the tiles were startling in their ordinariness. Foil and plastic wrap, chopsticks in white wrappers, wooden spoons. Spilled out spitefully. Did people hide drugs in their utensil drawers? And if the police had been here, wouldn’t the manager have let them in and heard that Clint was dead?

  Back in the living room, Brenda lit a cigarette and coughed elaborately. “I quit ten years ago. Damnit.” She waved the smoke away. “Oh, Clint. What can I tell you? Spend five minutes with his record and you’ll get the basic outline. Always into drugs. Fighting. He had a temper. He didn’t inspire much sympathy from the law. He wasn’t a bad man but he seemed like one, plenty of times.”

  She’d regained her chatty tone, though she’d grown wistful. She drew deep, grand breaths from her cigarette and studied the wall, reminiscing.

  “Mostly he had bad luck. Hurt himself playing football and got hooked on painkillers, real young. Worked construction awhile, too, which got him more hurt. His . . .” She paused, searching, and landed on the word. “His issues lost him both his wives. Not that either was any good. He was dumb enough to get the second knocked up. Had to pay child support for a kid he never sees. Saw,” she corrected.

  “Why was he staying at the motel?”

  She nodded and pointed at me. “Exactly. There’s no good reason he was staying there. Last week, he drops by my place, bag on his shoulder, and asks me to keep an eye on things. Wouldn’t say where he was going. I assumed a trip—you know, away somewhere. Why would he stay in a fleabag motel down the road?”

  So Philip could meet him without being seen at his trailer. I said nothing.

  “Yesterday a neighbor came over with the paper. I couldn’t believe it. Dead, in a motel down the road.” She clamped her hand to her forehead. Her cigarette smoldered dangerously close to her wispy hair. “He wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “I went right down there after I heard,” she said. “The motel wouldn’t let me go in the room or see the body. But I hung out for a while. There were five or six cops. I heard them say the door’d been jimmied open. Like someone broke in.”

  “That wasn’t in the paper,” I said, uncertain.

  She clicked her tongue. “Lazy reporters. No offense. I was surprised as hell to see one of you out here, doing legwork. Now it’s paying off, though, isn’t it? You’ve got something no one else has.”

  “Do you know the name of the cop who said that?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “Some young cop, bald as a Marine and just as cocky.”

  “Did you hear how Clint died?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s possible he just died, isn’t it? Got sick.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Then why not say so and get it over with? Why tear through his place? Why all the secrecy?”

  I couldn’t answer. My forehead ached like a rope was squeezing it.

  She scratched her chin. “I think he went there to hide from someone. I think they found him.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged. “Someone he owed money to, maybe. He ran with a tough crowd.”

  “Did you see him with anyone out of the ordinary lately? Did he mention any names?” My voice was high and nervous. I was praying—not Philip, not Philip.

  Her face twisted, unfriendly. At last she said, “There were a couple girls here, one afternoon. Young girls, really pretty. But that was a month ago.”

  “Did he say who they were?”

  “I didn’t ask. I thought maybe—maybe he was paying them.” She flushed.

  I couldn’t speak. Heat was running in waves over my skin. My forehead and the back of my neck beaded with sweat. My stomach churned and tightened and I clenched my teeth shut to hold in the nausea.

  I stood, muttering about the bathroom, and ran out of the living room.

  I stumbled down a dim hallway, where enough light seeped in through a window that I could see the bathroom door. I hurtled through and hunched over the sink. Nothing came up, just dry gagging coughs.

  Two pretty girls. Iris and Stacy. If they knew Clint well enough to visit him, then maybe I was wrong that Philip and Clint were allies. Perhaps Clint was helping Iris. But Philip had called Clint his oldest friend . . .

  I felt I was missing something obvious. The longer I stayed in the trailer, the harder it was to remember Philip, my Philip, untarnished. How did he ever get mixed up with these people?

  My nausea was subsiding. Running the water to let it cool, I splashed my face and pressed my wet hands to the back of my neck.

  Philip had a key. I froze, hands dripping down my collar. Philip wouldn’t have broken into Clint’s room. My smile in the spotted mirror was deranged.

  The bedroom door stood open. Tangled bedcovers, dresser drawers open and disordered, the closet spewing a mess of stuff. Someone had been as interested in Clint Davis’s secrets as I was. I dug through his things with my toe, half-heartedly.

  I was leaving the room when I stepped on something that cracked noisily. I bent to pick it up, and a paper fell to the floor. A photograph.

  It was a picture of a woman. A girl. I shifted closer to the window.

  It was Iris’s sister, Stacy.

  My thumb whitened. It was unmistakably Stacy. The beautiful, younger version I’d seen on her bedroom walls, silver-haired, smiling. Only here she was pregnant. The huge swell of her belly lifted, as though straining to get into the photo. A grin lit her face.

  The photo had fallen out of a DVD case, some action movie. I opened it wide and found a few more photos stuck into the cover, and a strip of negatives. I took everything, snapped the case closed, and dropped it on the floor. My hands shook as I put the pictures into my purse. The clump of cash dug into my ribs like a gun.

  I went out blinking into the living room.

  “You done snooping?” Brenda asked.

  I wondered if she’d seen me steal the photos. But she sat in the same position, a fresh cigarette smoldering in her fingers. She stubbed it out. “You want to tell me what you plan to do? Come on in, I don’t bite.”

  Holding my bag close, I crossed the living room and stood in the threshold of the kitchen. My knees felt hollow and weak. “When Clint got married, the second wife, what was her name? Was it Stacy? Was she very young . . . blond. Pretty?”

  “Ha!” Brenda drew back, her chin tucked up and in, as if she were stifling a belch. “In his dreams.”

  “I saw a picture in his room, of a pregnant woman. I wondered if it was his ex.”

  Her lips puckered. “What pictures? He doesn’t have any pictures. He hates his ex-wife. His kid’s grown. Never calls him.” She braced her palms against the recliner seat and stood, swaying a little. “I brought you in here, gave you my time. What are you gonna do next? You gonna write that article? You gonna find out what happened?”

  I backed away until I felt the breeze of the air conditioner on my elbows. “Are you sure he didn’t spend time in Verde? Or mention anyone named Stacy?”
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br />   “He might have done time in Verde, if that’s what you mean. I can’t remember where they had him.”

  “And Stacy?”

  “You know how many women Clint mentioned to me? Dozens. He was one for telling stories. I can’t tell you how many nights we sat right here and talked.” She made it to the kitchen and leaned heavily against the counter. Her face was drooping, the menace slackened off. She took a deep breath of the cooler air.

  The door stuck. I tugged it hard and it flew open. “Thanks for talking with me.”

  She snatched my hand. Her grip was strong and gelatinous as a sea creature’s. “You’ve seen now, huh? You can write about what they did to him.”

  I agreed, pulling away. I was desperate to escape the claustrophobic tin rooms, to breathe fresh air and soak my head in sunshine. I tripped down the stairs and was swallowed up in the shimmering heat between the trailers.

  Miles away, I pulled over to study the photographs. They were all of Stacy. Plump and blissful, like a pregnant woman in a magazine ad—if those ads had teenagers in them. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. I flipped through.

  Stacy posed in front of a tree, holding a grapefruit in her palms as though about to lob it. She wore a white baby-doll dress that flared over her belly.

  Stacy dangled her feet in a swimming pool, a pink stucco wall behind her.

  Stacy sat on a cream-colored sofa, legs tucked under, hands resting on a plump tummy. Her smile caught me. Radiant.

  Stacy stood in front of a stainless steel refrigerator, eating from a container of ice cream, the only image in which she seemed unhappy. Her stomach tugged her red tank top upward to expose a pale seam of skin over her shorts. She looked ready to pop.

  None of the photographs was of the house in Verde.

  When I held the strip of negatives to the light, I saw more scenes of Stacy, always alone, always pregnant.

  What was Clint doing with these? Hidden away like dirty photographs. Had she been his girlfriend? But his yellowed body, the slouch of it—it was too grotesque. Stacy was so pretty, so well cared for, with her round happy face and the nice clean house.

  But the photos weren’t the whole story. I’d met Stacy. She was lonely, strange, something helpless about her that Clint might have taken advantage of.

  Overhead, the sky was the color of dirty wool. Against it, three distant specks of fluorescence drifted downward. The skydivers’ parachutes. How far could a person see from up there? Surely they could see north to the humped mountain where Ocotillo Heights overlooked the valley. And south, to flat, parched Verde.

  My heart beat in quick, shallow beats, as though I’d taken some of Erica’s caffeine pills. Anything might have happened to me in that trailer. Careless. The word was stuck in my mind. Careless. Where had I heard it?

  I made a U-turn and headed south.

  32

  Guy’s motorcycle wasn’t in the carport. Trusting that I was in luck, and he and Iris were out, I left my car idling in the driveway and ran to the door.

  When she opened it, Stacy wasn’t thrilled to see me. She may have been hungover—she blinked in the light.

  Instead of asking to come in, I invited her out for something to eat. “My treat,” I added.

  “I’ll need to get dressed.”

  She left me in the living room. The infernal TV noise drifted down the hall. The little dog was still curled on the sofa, growling lazily, a yellow tooth hanging over its lip.

  “Delilah!” Stacy clicked her tongue. She came in, fastening hoops through her ears. She wore a long-sleeved eyelet blouse, cuffs cinched over her wrist bones, hiding the scars.

  “I like your shirt,” I told her, and she gave me a sly look.

  “It’s Iris’s. Don’t say anything.” She locked up behind us carefully.

  “Do you and Iris share a car?” I asked, climbing into mine.

  She cranked her window down and rested her arm on the ledge. “I don’t drive.”

  “How do you get around?”

  She shrugged.

  As we pulled out, I saw a black mark scorching the road. “That must have been scary.”

  Stacy pulled a strand of hair into her mouth. “Someone started a fire. It was pretty big. Guy said we were lucky it didn’t spread to the house.”

  “Does Iris know who did it?”

  Shrugging, she lolled her head back and stared out the window. “Iris’s car was crap anyway. She’ll get a better one.” She stuck her hand out and stretched her fingers through the air.

  On the main street I pulled into a Denny’s. It wasn’t even four, but tables were already filling with early birds. Elderly, with an alarming array of maladies: walkers, canes, compression stockings, even an oxygen tank tugged impatiently across the tile like a naughty child. A waitress led us to a roomy booth by a window. Stacy fidgeted, pushing away her napkin roll and touching all the condiments, as if counting them.

  I wondered why she’d agreed to come along. Boredom. Loneliness. Maybe one less meal to scrounge from her kitchen.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” I said.

  To my surprise, she smiled. “I used to eat here all the time, with Jeremy.”

  “Your boyfriend?” I remembered the dark-haired boy with the mean eyes in her wall of photos.

  Her lips wilted. “Yeah, I guess. He went away to college.” She opened her menu and flipped idly through the pages.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one. I didn’t go to college, though,” she said, defensive. “I don’t know what I want to do yet. I used to be a waitress, but I didn’t like it.” She bent the menu in her hands.

  “I used to waitress, too,” I said. “I was glad to stop.”

  She nodded, biting her lip, still twisting the menu. “And you’re friends with Iris?”

  “More like we have friends in common.”

  She seemed confused, but our waitress arrived, distracting her. She ordered a sundae with extra cherries. I asked for a club sandwich and Coke.

  We sat, quiet. Overhead, a fleet of fans spun so fast their chains vibrated. Stacy scooped a piece of ice from her water glass and crunched it between her jaws. She’d been a silvery blond in Clint’s photos, but that must have been bleach. Her hair was now a pale strawberry color, and since she wasn’t even wearing makeup, I doubted she took the trouble to dye it. Though she was young, her face was tired and puffy. She was someone who stayed up late and slept in, got stoned, drifted from one end of her house to another, like a goldfish. The feeling of pity I’d felt last night, as she’d wept in her kitchen, resurfaced.

  I opened my purse and took out the picture of Stacy in her white dress, under the grapefruit tree. I set it on the table between us. “This is a lovely photo of you.”

  Her chin crumbled. She picked up the picture with her fingertips, as if it might burn her. “Where did you get this?”

  “From a friend.”

  Her lips dropped, rallied, dropped again. “I was fat,” she managed.

  “You’re pregnant,” I said. “You look happy. When was this?”

  She bit her lip. “I was living in Tucson.”

  “You guys used to live in Tucson?” I kept my tone bright, as if the question were innocent, even pleasant.

  A frown rippled over her forehead. “Just me. I went to stay for a summer.”

  “You’re young to be living alone.”

  She put the photo down on the table but didn’t take her eyes off it. “I stayed with a friend.”

  The waitress reappeared with our plates. They made a gritty sound sliding across the salt spilled on the table.

  Stacy probed her spoon through the layers of cream and chocolate.

  “Was the friend a man named Clint?” I asked.

  She looked up, surprised and pleased. “You know Clint?”

  “He gave me the picture,” I lied. Her happy expression could only mean she liked him—and didn’t know he was dead. “Was he the baby’s father?”
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br />   She laughed, showing small, round teeth. “No way. Clint didn’t like kids. But he was nice to me.”

  “He seems a little rough,” I said.

  “He’s ugly,” she said, “that’s why.” She scooped a cherry and ate it, her lips sticky.

  I took a bite of a french fry, hoping the salt might calm my stomach. “So the father . . . He was someone else?”

  Iris had been telling a slanted version of the truth. It wasn’t her sneaking around with Philip. It was her sister. Stacy. Years ago, when she was so pretty it made your teeth hurt to look at her. And so young it surely broke several laws.

  Waves of heat ran up and down my arms. I imagined Iris smiling at me, tilting her head. And you thought you knew him.

  “Stacy? Was the baby’s father . . . an older man? Named Philip?” I was holding my napkin in my lap under the table, wringing it and wringing it.

  Stacy kept poking her spoon into her sundae, as if she couldn’t hear me.

  “How did you even meet him?” I whispered.

  The ice cream slopped over the side, and she caught a drip with her thumb. She was frowning, annoyed.

  “Stacy?”

  She looked around, as if someone might be eavesdropping. She hissed through her teeth, “I never cheated on Jeremy. Not ever.” Tears thickened her lashes. “He said he wasn’t ready. That’s all. So I had to go away.”

  “What do you mean, you had to go away?”

  She looked out the window, biting her lip. Her body was rigid, and she blinked fiercely, quickly.

  “I’m sorry.” I touched her wrist. “Really. I’m sorry. I have a good reason to want to know.”

  I pulled a napkin from the dispenser and gave it to her. She dabbed her eyes. Blotches of pink stood out on her fair face.

  Then it hit me, so clearly I seemed to have known it from the first time I saw her. I knew that face. I knew those eyes.

  “Did you give up the baby?” The words floated between us. I wasn’t listening for an answer. I was leaping forward, rushing into understanding, suddenly so obvious, suddenly so clear. “Because he wasn’t ready?” Again I didn’t need her to reply.