“He knew me as Ellie Cabot. Ask him. Ask your father what he knows that he never told anyone. Ask him why he railroaded an innocent man, a good man who never did anything wrong.”
She turns, walking swiftly, but not toward the public side of the parking lot. She heads for the dark, two-lane road that leads to the courthouse, the road that Lu won’t walk even in the daytime. Had she gone there first, in search of Lu, thinking to catch her after the hearing, then walked here, not realizing what a dark, dangerous trudge it was in the winter dusk? Although the woman has done her no harm—seems scarcely capable of doing harm—Lu clutches her coat at the throat. She didn’t think it was possible to feel colder than she did a minute ago, and yet she does.
THE AGE OF REASON
The first time I saw Nita Flood—really saw her, noticed her, who knows how many times I had walked past her before—was on my back-to-school shopping trip to the Columbia Mall in 1978. That is, I was supposed to be shopping for new clothes, which my father would come back and pay for, an arrangement reached after a summer devoted to wheedling and arguing. It was a ridiculous thing to grant an eight-year-old girl, but I think even my head-in-the-clouds father had come to understand it was unfair to entrust Teensy with the oversight of my wardrobe, and he certainly wasn’t up to the job. Witness my hair, worn quite short, cut by a barber, so it had no elfin, gamine quality. If my nickname hadn’t already been Lu, it would have been Lou.
Yet when my triumphant shopping day finally arrived, I was in no hurry to get started. Instead, I trailed AJ and his friends through the mall. They roamed in a pack, their agenda clear only to them. They seldom stopped moving and they never went into stores. There was a conceit at the time, a suburban legend if you will, that Wilde Lake students, whose high school was a two-story, windowless octagon built around the hub of a “media center,” had been trained to walk in a circle. When AJ and his friends stopped moving, they leaned on the metal railings along the mall’s second floor, just as they leaned on the railings at school between classes. There was a photograph in AJ’s yearbook, the Glass Hour, showing them doing just that in the fall of 1978. Let the freshmen and sophomores hurry to class. They were juniors now, sure of their power.
On this particular August day, AJ and his group lingered long enough at the Hickory Farms kiosk to grab samples of summer sausage from a girl with stringy hair, a face sodden with acne, and a Barbie-doll figure. If the term “butterface” had been in vogue then, someone might have made that cruel assessment, but I don’t think that crass term existed.
Cruelty did, however. We had plenty of cruelty in 1978. AJ’s friends didn’t even bother to walk out of earshot before they began making fun of the girl.
“If anyone knows sausage,” Lynne said, “it’s Nita Flood.”
Everyone laughed at this, except Ariel, who blushed and looked at the floor. Nita Flood stared stonily in the other direction, as if fascinated by the small camera store tucked into the corner of the mall just opposite her. I didn’t get the joke, but I knew better than to ask. That would only draw attention to my not quite legitimate presence. My arrangement with AJ was that I could follow him when he was with his friends, but I couldn’t interact with them. I was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, condemned to scare off the very people I wanted to befriend. AJ posed this as a win-win—we both got out of the house and away from Teensy, who always found chores to fill our idle summer days. But it was more of a win for AJ. My brother was generally a good big brother. And like our father, he disdained overt unkindness. I was astonished that he didn’t reprimand Lynne for mocking someone, just as he and Davey had come to the defense of that kid at the cast party. But the girl selling sausage apparently wasn’t worthy of his protection.
We were almost to Friendly’s when Lynne whispered something in Bash’s ear and he, with a backward glance at me, whispered in turn to AJ.