Kim Jarvis had claimed to have found Charmaine Wendover by calling all the Wendovers in the book and asking for the girl, but Nightingale had his doubts about that now. His search had been much easier, since there was only one Elise Wendover listed in the Memphis directory. He slowed the SUV to a halt opposite her apartment building. It was four stories high, built as three sides of a rectangle, with a well-kept green area in the middle and a few benches dotted around it. The bricks of the walls were chocolate brown up to halfway between the second and third floors, where they changed to white. The roofs were all grey slate, and the whole building looked to be relatively modern and kept in good repair.
‘Nice place, I guess’ said Wainwright. ‘Do you think the cops are going to like you talking to her?’
‘It’s not against the law to knock on somebody’s door and ask to talk to them,’ said Nightingale. ‘And the cops aren’t investigating a crime here. They’ve probably forgotten she exists. It’s not a great time to call, but then we can’t afford to wait. You going to take the car to go see your tame priest?’
‘I’ll call a cab,’ said Wainwright. ‘I always prefer to have someone else do the driving.’
Nightingale nodded, and he headed across the street, while Wainwright took a blue sports bag out of the back of the car, slammed the tailgate and pulled out his phone.
The building didn’t appear to run to a doorman, and Nightingale was considering his options for getting inside when a tall black man in blue overalls, carrying a toolbox, opened the main door. Nightingale held it for him, and the man grunted an acknowledgment. He said nothing more, seeming either to accept him as a resident or, more likely, not in the least bit interested who he was, so Nightingale walked in.
The Wendover apartment had been listed as 315, so Nightingale only had two flights of stairs to climb. He opened the stairwell door on the third floor, walked along to 315 and rang the bell. He heard the shuffling of feet, and the door opened on a security chain. He could make out a pair of reddened eyes and some long mousy hair, and then the woman spoke. ‘Who are you? What do you want? I’m not seeing any more reporters.’
‘I promise you I’m not a reporter,’ said Nightingale.
The woman’s nose wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘You Australian?’
‘English. My name’s Jack Nightingale. Mrs. Wendover, I was the one who found your daughter. In the grotto. Can I talk to you?’
The door was immediately closed in his face. Nightingale thought for a moment that he’d have to try a different approach, but then he heard the security chain being taken off, and the woman opened the door again.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘The place is a mess, and so am I, I’m afraid, but I need to talk to you, too.’
Nightingale took a look around, and decided she was probably right on both counts about the mess. It was an upscale apartment that had been let go. The sitting room had a good view of the lawn outside, but the windows were dirty, and the curtains needed cleaning. The sofa and chairs looked grubby, with food and wine stains everywhere, and shoes lay on the floor where they’d been kicked off. Empty wine bottles lay in a basket to the side of the sofa, and there was a pizza box and a half-empty bottle of Californian Chablis on the coffee table. The woman straightened a cushion on one of the armchairs and waved him into it. Nightingale noticed there seemed to be no television, though there was a wooden unit across the room where one might have been. An open laptop stood next to the wine bottle.
Elise Wendover looked like a woman whose life had fallen apart. She was wearing a robe and slippers at 1.30 in the afternoon, her hair badly needed washing and a cut, her face was bloated with flushed cheeks and chin, and her eyes were red from crying. She looked as if she’d put on quite a few pounds recently, and her eye-liner and lipstick were badly smudged. She smelled of stale sweat and fresh wine. She slumped onto the sofa opposite him and Nightingale felt even more guilty for being there.
‘Mrs. Wendover, I’m really sorry to call here at such a bad time for you...’
She waved his apology away with her left hand, while the other lifted up the wine bottle. ‘Forget about it,’ she said, ‘I got the feeling there are never gonna be any good times again. You want a drink?’
Nightingale really didn’t, but anything which might establish common ground was probably a good idea. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She looked around for a glass and didn’t see one. ‘You want to get yourself a glass?’ she said, ’First cupboard on the left.’
She waved her hand at the door behind her, which was obviously the kitchen, and Nightingale got to his feet. The kitchen was a worse mess, with dirty crockery piled in the sink, food remnants on the worktops, and splashes of liquid on the floor. Nightingale found a glass, held it up to the light and rinsed it out before taking it back into the sitting room. He set it on the coffee table, and Elise Wendover splashed some wine into it. She raised her own glass, as he took his.
‘Well, cheers to you, Mr. Nightingale, though I guess I have nothing left to cheer.’
‘Cheers. Call me Jack,’ said Nightingale, raising his glass to her in return and taking a sip of the wine. He wasn’t much of a wine drinker but he nodded approval, and forced down another sip, before setting the glass back on the coffee table. He looked across the table at her, and noticed fresh tears in her eyes.
She pointed at a photo on the mantelpiece, showing an attractive young blonde woman, raising a champagne glass at the photographer, clearly in some restaurant. ‘You wouldn’t recognise me now, would you? Would you believe that was taken eighteen months ago?’
Nightingale couldn’t think of a good answer to that so he stayed silent.
‘Yeah, just a couple months before I found out my husband was banging some slut he met off Tinder. Very kindly she called me up to tell me. And to tell me she was pregnant. He never came home again, not even for his clothes. Saved me shooting him.’
‘You have a gun here?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Nah, just talk,’ she said. ‘But I’d have loved to. Bastard deserved it.’
‘He’s not helping you financially?’
‘Haven’t heard a word from him since. It’s like he cut me and Charlie out of his life like we never meant anything to him. He cancelled his cellphone so I can’t even call him. Turned out he was six months behind with the house repayments, the bank repossessed it, and all I could find was this place, which I’m getting a deal on from a friend. I owe her three months rent as it is, so I don’t know how much longer she’ll be staying a friend.’
Nightingale nodded, but said nothing. He had no solutions to offer, nothing at all except a listening ear, so he let her talk.
‘All seemed to happen at once, I was working as a secretary for a construction company which went under, and all I’ve been able to find since is waitressing. Doesn’t pay much, and they tend to want their girls younger and prettier. And soberer. And now this. Jesus, what did I ever do to deserve this?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just sometimes life doesn’t give us what we deserve. Things just happen.’
She nodded, and now the tears were really flowing. He wondered about moving to the sofa and putting an arm round her, but that kind of thing was easily misinterpreted these days, so he stayed put.
‘Shit happens, eh?’ she said, and sniffed. ‘Well you can say that again. But what happened to me, maybe I can deal with, but I killed my daughter, Jack. I killed Charlie.’
‘No, you didn’t, said Nightingale. ‘You’d never have done that.’
‘But I did, I just made things too hard for her to cope with. You know, she was only ten, but since Hank gave up on us, she’d been the adult round here. She used to make me dress to walk her to school, she’d do the washing up, clean the place, and she’d always be asking me to eat better, drink less, wash my hair. And in the end, it got too much for her, she couldn’t cope with having a child for a mother, and she killed herself. It was my fault.’
Nightingale shook his head again. ‘No, this isn’t on you. You’ve been through hard times, but this is something different. Have you heard about other kids recently who’ve killed themselves? Same age as Charlie, in public places?’
She waved at the empty TV unit. ‘I don’t hear about much these days, sold the television. I guess the computer will be next. You telling me there’ve been other kids like Charlie, just up and killed themselves?’
‘It’s been happening a lot, all in the last few days. One boy walked in front of a truck, another threw himself under a train, there was another child who hanged herself at home. All Charlie’s age. And all with no warning and for no reason that anyone could find.’
She looked at him as if struggling to understand what he was telling her. ‘So what are you saying? They were killed or something?’
‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘They killed themselves. But I think someone else, or something else, made them do it.’
She poured the last two inches of wine into her glass, not offering to share since Nightingale had barely touched his. ‘I don’t see what you’re saying, how can someone make a kid kill themselves?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Nightingale. ‘But Charlie never talked about hurting herself, did she?’
Elise Wendover shook her head emphatically. ‘Absolutely not, most of the time she was incredibly positive, kept telling me not to get too down, telling me we’d get through all this. The only time I ever saw her sad was when she was talking about how her father had just abandoned her. She...we...never so much as heard a word from him after that slut phoned. Not a damned word.’
‘Did you try to trace him?’
‘How? Police aren’t interested in a guy who just goes away, I didn’t have money for lawyers or detectives. Anyhow, in all that time, Charlie never once talked about hurting herself. Tell you the truth, couple times I talked about it and she was horrified. Kept telling me we had to be strong, we were all that each other had. You want some more wine? I got another bottle.’
Nightingale shook his head. ‘I’m good,’ he said, then watched as she levered herself up from the sofa and walked unsteadily to the kitchen. He heard the sound of the fridge opening, then the cork being drawn, and she tottered back in, set a full bottle down next to the empty one, then sat down again.
‘Last one for today. I keep thinking if I stay drunk, all this won’t have happened, not unless I sober up. You ever try that?’
The words weren’t that coherent, but Nightingale got the sense of them. ‘Once,’ he said. ‘In another life.’
‘How’d it work out for you?’
He forced a smile. ‘Not too well.’ He took another sip of wine, just to keep her company, then tried to get back to the point. ‘So Charlie wasn’t unhappy, she didn’t have any problems at school?’
Again the over-emphatic shake of the head. Elise Wendover was getting pretty drunk now. ‘No, she was happy at school, lots of friends. She liked her teachers, though she missed Mrs. Dominguez. She’s had a baby, so they had a few substitutes in, Charlie said they were okay, but Mrs. Dominguez was really special. She was looking forward to her coming back to school.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
‘Did she see her friends outside school?’
‘Not so much lately. Maybe she was a little ashamed of me and this place. Maybe the other moms didn’t want their kids hanging round a drunk.’
‘Did she talk to them on the phone much?’
She hung her head. ‘No. She wasn’t a great one for the phone.’
The woman’s eyes were beginning to glaze over, and he thought she might not stay coherent for too much longer. He’d probably got all he could from her, but his human sympathy wouldn’t let him leave it at that. ‘You shouldn’t be alone now,’ he said. ‘Is there anyone you can call?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s what the police said. Nah. My parents hated Hank, haven’t heard from them since they didn’t come to the wedding. Looks like they had it right.’
‘Why not try calling them? Maybe time to build some bridges? They might want to help.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, ‘been a long time, but maybe you’re right. Maybe not.’
Nightingale stood up to go, but she stayed seated, and put her head in her hands. ‘Mister. Jack. Why were you there?’
‘Where?’
‘The grotto. Where it…. happened.’
Where her daughter killed herself with alcohol and tablets, is what she meant. Nightingale couldn’t imagine how the woman felt, knowing that her daughter had taken her own life. Suicide was a terrible thing on every level, but it was always worse for those that were left behind.
‘I got a call from a reporter,’ he said. ‘She’d been looking into other kids and suicides. I don’t know how she knew Charlie was...where she was, but she called me there.’
‘The reporter woman shot herself, they said. Why?’
‘I don’t know that either,’ said Nightingale.
‘Seems you don’t know much, but then neither do I. Just know my little girl’s gone, and she never hurt anyone in her life. And I’m here without her.’
Her eyes closed, and her head slumped to one side. Nightingale walked over to the sofa, turned her onto her side, and put a pillow under her head, then turned to leave. Her voice came again from behind him.
‘Hey, Mister. I saw her in the morgue, but you saw her there in that Crystal Grotto. Tell me, how did she look when you saw her?’
Nightingale took a deep breath and didn’t look back. ‘She looked ...peaceful,’ he lied.
‘Peaceful. God, I hope so.’
He looked round again now, but her eyes were closed, and she was breathing rhythmically. He walked out of the sitting room, but stopped in front of the table in the hallway and took out his wallet, There were a half-dozen hundreds, plus a couple of fifties, and everything else was small stuff. He left the large bills on the table, then let himself out.
So many people with problems, they were like stray dogs. You couldn’t take care of them all, but every now and again, you did what little you could.