I heaved a sigh of relief to be out of there, and promptly popped the snap right off my Pucci skirt. It served me right for drinking that woman’s tea.
I found a safety pin in the glove compartment and fixed myself up, without drawing blood. A good sign, I thought. Of what, harder to say. That success comes to those who don’t self-mutilate? That she who does not expose her ratty undies to strangers will be lucky in love? Though I’m loath to admit it, I believe in all that stuff—signs, omens, astrology. Where I draw the line, though, is fairies.
Fairies. The stink of oil. And blackmail? Was that what Meredith Allan had meant by Jean’s little sideline? I wasn’t prepared to make sense of what had just happened. Not until I got home and had a pen in one hand and a glass of Pinot Noir in the other. I pulled onto the 101 and tried to empty my mind. But Scorpios are notoriously uncooperative. I focused on a splat on the windshield that used to be a bug. I opened the window a smidge, then closed it, diverted by the staccato blast of air. All right, that was it. Plus, I was hungry. I dug around in my purse for something to eat and found a Snickers bar that was only slightly mashed. I washed it down with the remains of a bottle of Diet Coke that had been rolling around the floor of my car for a week or so. It was warm and flat, but at least it wasn’t raspberry iced tea.
Working the caramel out of my molars took a while. Start with the little things and the big things will follow. I think it was Perry Mason who said that. Ellie and the gym teacher. It sounded like the name of a Sandra Dee movie. Only Sandra Dee never got mixed up in anything as sordid as blackmail. The worst it ever got for her was probably a tardy slip. Then I had a great idea. But I had to get off the freeway that second or I’d blow it. Honking the horn like a she-devil, I maneuvered my Camry across three lanes to exit.
Schools often look like prisons, but Ventura City High looked like a mausoleum. I parked outside the front entrance, which had the monumental geometry of a Pharaonic tomb. The graffiti on the facade heightened the effect; like hieroglyphics, it anointed a doomed power elite. Even the GO COUGARS banner draped across the chain-link fence seemed vaguely funereal. Maybe it was the missing exclamation point.
The student stationed at the front desk couldn’t be bothered to look up. She jerked a beautifully manicured thumb in the direction of the library. As I walked down the hall, my eyes darted nervously about. I felt like I was about to be busted. High school will do that to you. The air reeked of french fries, B.O., and benzoyl peroxide.
The librarian was absorbed in a book. I couldn’t make out the title, just the chapter heading “Retribution as Ritual.” She didn’t seem to like being interrupted and was discombobulated by my request. Her tiny, wizened head alternated between bobbing up and down and shaking back and forth—yes, no, yes, no. I thought she was going to pass out or, worse yet, put a hex on me, but she disappeared into the back and tottered out with a foot-high stack of dusty yearbooks.
I promised to be careful with them and settled down at a desk in the back. There was a kid behind me, smoking. Though it was a fire hazard, I decided not to turn him in.
I opened the 1954–55 volume. That year’s theme, printed in florid, Old English letters at the top of the first page, was “Quo Vadis?” Talk about lofty. That was just the question to ponder if you were eighteen, unqualified for everything, and staggering around under the weight of postadolescent hormones. I would’ve killed myself. When I graduated from high school in 1981, the yearbook editors picked the rainbow as our theme. Very profound. You can be blinded by its colors or confront the spectrum.
Now I smelled Cheetos.
I flipped to the index and found Joseph Albacco. Pages 49, 65, 67, 69, 101, and 111. Football team, debating society, yearbook staff. Voted Best-Looking and Most Likely to Succeed. I studied the boy in the picture. There was nothing left of him except maybe the smile. “What we seek we shall find.” That was his class quote. You couldn’t even call it ironic. It was bigger and sadder than that.
I picked up the next book in the stack. The theme for the class of 1956 was “Seize the Day.” Jean Albacco had graduated that year. Jean Logan had been her maiden name. I knew that from the transcript. And there she was, looking exactly like every other girl on the page. Short dark hair, neat white blouse, a string of pearls around her neck. Jean’s quote was also from Emerson: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” What cheek.
The Fairy Queen had graduated the same year as Jean. I looked her up in the index. Absent on picture day. And she’d missed the make-up day, too. Why did that not surprise me? But she was listed on page 107. Father-Daughter Night, 1956. A local band named the Whirly Birds sang doo-wop, and the guests drank cherry Cokes until they were fit to burst. I scanned the happy faces. The dads were spinning their little girls around, skirts flying. Awards were bestowed—Best Father? Best Daughter? I saw a beautiful girl I thought might be Meredith wearing a dark dress with a Peter Pan collar. Her father was nowhere in sight. My father had never been around, either. There was police business to take care of, leads to follow up, reports to file, double-shifts around the holidays. And I was just a girl anyway.
Back to the little things. The bit players. Ellie. She was the one I came here to find. I turned back to the index. Could she have been Eleanor? No, no Eleanors in that class. What about Ellen? One listed. I turned to her picture. Ellen Sammler wore glasses and looked like the sort of girl who would have been forced by her mother to take her cousin to the prom. She was going to get contacts, move to New York City, start a literary salon, and live happily ever after. You could just tell. Wrong girl. What about Elspeth? Here was an Elspeth Galloway. Oh, she had to be Ellie. Long wavy hair, dreamy expression, a soft chin. She had delusional written all over her.
Phys ed, phys ed. Page 38. Now for Ellie’s lover. Well, it couldn’t have been Logan Hiney, who had no hair at all and must’ve been close to a hundred years old. Here he was. Oh, yes. This had to have been him. Bill Winters. A mountain-climber type with a devilish grin and a Kirk Douglas cleft. Just the type to make a sixteen-year-old’s heart flutter. A long time ago Jean Albacco had made his life miserable. Maybe she had. And maybe he had been angry enough to put a stop to it.
On my way out, I stopped at the front office. I needed Ellie’s phone number and address. Did they give out information like that?
A matchstick-thin woman pretending to speak no English refused to meet my gaze.
“My mother went to school here,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could. “She graduated in 1956. Ellen Sammler, that was her maiden name.”
The woman was extremely busy, paper-clipping pieces of paper to other pieces of paper-clipped paper.
“We’re visiting from New York,” I continued, my voice getting louder, “and we wanted to get in touch with an old friend of my mother’s from high school.”
Now she was slitting envelopes with a daggerlike letter opener.
“Shall I spell my name? S-A-M-M-L-E-R.”
A humongous woman sitting in the way back near a bank of copy machines bellowed up to her colleague, “Lee, we talked about this, remember? You agreed, Lee. Public relations, remember?”
“I do not understand.”
“Yes, you do, Lee. Give the lady an alumni directory right this minute.”
She didn’t budge.
“Take two steps forward, reach down, and pass it on. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make me get up from my seat!”
It was a thankless task, restoring dignity to the term “civil servant.” Muttering to herself, an irked Lee fumbled around behind the counter and eventually produced the goods.
“Ten dollars. Exact change required.”
I didn’t sense much of an attitude adjustment, but at least she hadn’t asked for ID.
By the time I made it back to the car, I’d found her. Elspeth Day, née Galloway. She was a furniture designer who lived in La Jolla. Oh, god, I didn’t want to drive down there. Maybe I could do it by cell phone.
I let it ring five times. Finally, someone answered.
“Mrs. Day?”
“You people!” She slammed down the phone. Probably thought I was selling something. I hit redial.
“Mrs. Day, please don’t hang up. I got your name from Meredith Allan—”
“Meredith? I haven’t heard from her in years. Is she in trouble?”
Interesting. “She’s fine. I saw her earlier today.”
“To whom am I speaking? What is this about?”
Might as well spit it out. “It’s about Bill Winters.”
“Why are you harassing me? I don’t have to talk to you. That whole business was resolved years ago. Are you a lawyer?”
“No, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer from Los Angeles. My name is Cece Caruso.”
“And?”
“And I’m researching an old crime. A murder. Jean Albacco. Do you remember her? From high school?”
“Of course I do. Where is this conversation going?”
“I’m not sure. I guess I want to find out about Bill and Jean. For my research.”
“Listen, I don’t want to get into all of that again. Bill’s been dead for years. What good can it do to dredge it all up again?”
“When did Bill die?”
“Just after we graduated from high school. It must have been 1958. No, 1957.”
What year was Jean killed? Suddenly I couldn’t remember.
“They shipped Billy home in a box,” she said softly. “There was a big memorial service. Everyone in town showed up. It was awful.”
“In a box? I don’t understand.”
“Bill had been a big deal in Korea, special forces, I mean. When things started up in Vietnam, they sent him to Saigon to work with the CIA. But the Viet Cong got ahold of him soon after he got there, not that the government ever wanted to acknowledge it.”
This wasn’t making sense. “I thought Bill was a gym teacher.”
“He was, in between stints of killing people. Why is any of it your business? What do you want with us?”
“Listen, I’m not trying to hurt anyone, Mrs. Day.”
“I’m divorced. You can call me Ellie.”
“Cece. I’m divorced, too.”
“Tough luck. Was he a bastard?”
“Do you have to ask?”
That got her.
“Everything was so different then, Cece. Men were so different. Bill was really something,” she said wistfully. “He belonged to an important Ventura family. His grandfather was a state legislator and his father was prominent in local government. The grandfather helped clear the way for the oil business to really take off in Ventura. But Bill didn’t have a head for politics. Sexy, but no brains at all.”
She knew she was talking too much, I could feel it, but she needed to know how her life sounded, and I was as good an audience as any.
“After Korea Bill just sat around, not knowing what to do with himself. So his dad got him a job coaching at the high school. That’s when I fell for him. I guess Meredith told you about that.”
“She mentioned it.”
“I was young, and he was handsome. Oh, we made fools of ourselves.”
“Did Jean blackmail Bill about your affair?”
“Yes.”
Unbelievable.
“Could he have hated her enough to kill her?”
“Yes.”
I held my breath. “Did he?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Her husband did it.”
“Let’s say he didn’t.”
“Somebody far away killed Billy first.”
Damn it.
“Jean was there. At Billy’s memorial service. I remember perfectly. Decked out in a brand-new black suit. Probably laughing her head off. You never knew her, but, believe me, Jean Albacco deserved everything she got.”
Apparently there was a growing consensus on that.