I opened it to the first page. One thing you did that always made me laugh…
“?‘Misty watercolored memories,’?” Tina sang to me, that Barbra Streisand song, and laughed. I realized she was dismissing me so she could speak to Frances privately. I felt I needed to assert myself, to offer something before I left. I pointed at the plate of cookies.
“Pignolis go stale fast. It’s the oils in the nuts. If you store them with a slice of bread, they’ll stay chewy longer.”
Frances looked at me, even more impressed than I’d privately hoped she would be. “What a valuable tip, Ruth.”
* * *
Outside, my mother was waiting in the car with the interior light on, reading one of her romance paperbacks. She jumped when I opened the door, which was understandable. A college girl had disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night, her roommate right next door. Everyone was on a razor’s edge.
“Was it fine?” my mother asked as we wove down the rain-slicked mountain at a walker’s pace.
“I didn’t say much. Mostly listened.”
“That’s good, Ruth.”
She waited until we hit Rainier Boulevard, the stretch where there are no streetlights, giving her just enough time to say what she wanted to say without having to remain in the car long enough to endure my response.
“You don’t need to talk about all the decisions you’ve made in there. It wouldn’t be fair to your father. I don’t even want to tell your brother you’re going to this thing. He’d probably want to know why I’m not the one in there talking about my grief. He was my husband, after all.”
We pulled into the driveway. My mother always did this. Trapped me in the car with her wishes, her martyrdom.
“I’m not there to talk about all that,” I said.
My mother opened the door, and the interior light illuminated. She put one foot on the pavement but then looked back at me concernedly, and for a second I thought she might apologize for the part that was her fault, or at the very least thank me for my continued discretion. I was twenty-five, so that made it nine years.
“Ruth, honey, stop picking.” She swatted my hand away from my face, a little harder than she needed to. “You’re going to scar.”
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1978
Day 2
I’d passed the campus police station countless times on my walk to and from the Longmire Building, but I’d never before been inside. It was a compact space, crowded with filing cabinets and storage boxes stacked as tall as the frosted glass partitions between a dozen or so desks. Here and there, a black push-button phone rang, but on the whole, it was much quieter than I’d expected it to be, given the circumstances.
“My name is Pamela Schumacher, and I’m here to see Sheriff Cruso,” I said to the guard behind the crescent moon–shaped desk. “I have urgent information.”
“The sheriff works out of the Sheriff’s Department.”
“But I called and they said he was here.”
“He happens to be,” the guard said snottily. “You got lucky.”
But I hadn’t gotten lucky. I’d called. It took everything in my power not to say as much to his lazy pink face. “Can you let him know I’m here?”
Somewhere behind one of those privacy panels came Sheriff Cruso’s extended sigh. “I’m aware, Miss Schumacher.”
* * *
“This interview beginning Tuesday, the seventeenth of January, 1978, at approximately eleven-oh-five a.m. Present at the interview are Detective Ron L. Pickell, Sheriff Anthony Cruso, and Pamela Ann Schumacher. Miss Schumacher, will you confirm your name for the record.”
As briskly as I could, I identified myself. Then: “I need to show you something.” I reached for my purse.
Pickell held up a hand, stopping me. “Can you first state your school year and address?”
“It’s all standard procedure,” Sheriff Cruso said when he saw the flash of impatience on my face. “You just happened to show up several hours before your scheduled procedural interview.” He and Pickell shared a weary smile I’d seen men make around me a million times before. It was the smile that agreed She’s a handful, huh?
I rattled off the answers to their standard procedural questions, one knee bouncing.
“Okay, then.”
I opened my purse and handed Sheriff Cruso the Wanted poster. “That’s him. That’s the man I saw at the front door.”
I sat on my hands while they reviewed it. I was wired to within an inch of my life. I’d been trying to track down Sheriff Cruso since yesterday afternoon, when Tina drove me home from the hospital. I’d caught one or two hours of sleep alongside Bernadette at Mrs. McCall’s house, before showering and dressing and waiting for the sun to rise. Then I’d taken off for campus, checking at every red light that I’d remembered to fold the Wanted poster and slip it into my purse.
“Have you been speaking to Martina Cannon?” Sheriff Cruso asked in an exhausted way that stunned me. I’d just handed him his suspect—ignite the manhunt!
“I only met her at the hospital yesterday.”
Sheriff Cruso shot Pickell the look of an angry boss. “We had security,” Pickell told him, a note of defensiveness in his voice. “The family told him to let her through.”
“The security was for her?” I asked, trying to keep up.
Sheriff Cruso drew one cowboy boot to one knee and reclined in his seat, slowly shaking his head in annoyance. “The security was to protect Eileen and her family from anyone who may want to hurt or harass them, a banner under which Martina Cannon falls.”
“What has she done?”
“She’s interfering with an active police investigation, for one thing.” Sheriff Cruso put a finger on The Defendant’s face and slid it back my way. “This is not our guy.”
I wanted to put my finger in the same spot and slide it back toward him, but I doubted that would go over well. “That is the man I saw at the front door,” I said as calmly as I could. “I am positive.”
“Not so positive that you didn’t name Roger Yul in your initial statement.” Pickell smiled at me almost sadly. He wasn’t trying to be antagonistic, just stating an unfortunate fact.
Sheriff Cruso picked up the thread. “How well do you know Roger, would you say?”
“Very well,” I answered with far too much confidence. “He was Denise’s boyfriend for three years.”
“And yet they broke up a number of times.”
“Yes, but he’s a member of the same fraternity as my boyfriend. Even when Denise wasn’t dating him, he was always around.”
“Since you know him so well, I’m curious if you know how old he is.”
What an odd question. “He’s twenty-two,” I said. “His birthday is in April, so he’ll be twenty-three soon. He was held back a year in high school.”
“We are not trying to make you feel bad here,” Pickell said. “But your answer demonstrates some of our deepest concerns about Roger.”
I blinked between the two of them, furious and confused. What weren’t they saying? What didn’t I know that, as chapter president, as Denise’s best friend, I should have known?
“Roger Yul is twenty-eight years old,” Sheriff Cruso said.
I laughed coarsely. “He is not.”
“Yes, Pamela,” Pickell said gently, “he is. He served in the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1970 before being discharged for ‘mental abnormalities.’ He spent the following year in an institution in Alabama before going off the grid completely. In 1973, he falsified high school records and applied to Florida State University.”
I thought about what Bernadette had told me just two nights ago, in Mrs. McCall’s chinoiserie-covered guest bedroom. What he had done to her. How she’d seen spots. She’d been sure she was about to die. I found that, like her, I’d opened my mouth and allowed half a vowel before remembering. She hadn’t given me permission.
“Were you about to say something?” Pickell asked. He was watching me closely.