Ethan splashes Laphroaig Single Malt over two ice cubes then settles onto his lumpish little sofa. Evening creeps into the living room, daylight draining from the front window in unhurried measures, as slow as the sips of whiskey disappearing from his lowball glass.
Cassmore.
That surname had been a bugger in his brain since the very first time Cameron introduced himself. He knows Cassmore, but from where? It wasn’t until he was brushing his teeth this morning when, out of nowhere, the memory popped into his head.
A bad check.
It was the sort of thing that happened with some frequency back in those days, back when check writing was still a common way to pay for groceries. You bounce a check, you get put up on the wall. Sometime in the ’90s, it must’ve been.
Ethan remembers the ancient, wrinkled slips tacked there, on the counter under the cash register, when he bought the Shop-Way. Bad checks from customers. A warning. Some of them had been there for years, such as this one in particular. The name Daphne Cassmore printed up in the corner atop the address block. The check was for some piddly amount. Six dollars and change.
Ethan took the checks down right away. That wasn’t how he’d run the store. But he made a mental note of the names.
It had been simple enough to link Daphne to Cameron. A few clicks on that ancestry website he’d bought a premium membership to a few months back led to Daphne Cassmore (who later married and became Daphne Scott) and then to a half sister: one Jeanne Baker, age sixty, of Modesto, California. Ms. Baker’s robust online presence seemed largely due to her involvement in several communities for collectors and consigners. Ethan knows the type: people who make a hobby of buying and selling rubbish. Cameron had complained about his aunt’s hoarding problem. It fit together.
Ethan drains the last of the scotch from his glass. He’s glad no one writes checks anymore. Seeing so-called scammers hung up like that, their shame made public . . . how cruel. And Daphne Cassmore’s bad check, in particular, always made him feel sorry for whoever wrote it. To be crucified over such a lowly sum. What measly six-dollar grocery haul precipitated her fall, in the store’s eyes, from grace?
It couldn’t have been a terribly long fall.
From the bits and pieces Cameron has told him of his mum, anyway, that seems to be the case. The lad gets tight-lipped when he speaks of her, but Ethan has heard enough to deduce drugs were involved. Can he blame Cameron for not wanting to get into it? His mum abandoned him.
The living room is fully dark now, and Ethan nearly trips over the pair of trainers he kicked off earlier when he crosses to the kitchen to pour another Laphroaig. Part of him thinks he ought to fill Cameron in on the town gossip, as it’s sure to spread now that Sandy Hewitt is opening her mouth in the middle of the produce section at the Shop-Way. Sooner or later, the lad will hear it himself: the rumor that his mother may know something about the disappearance of a teenage boy thirty years ago. Might have known and never said anything. Could Cameron’s image of her grow any more tarnished? Obviously, it all happened years before he was born.
Or did it?
How old is Cameron? Ethan can’t recall whether he’s ever mentioned his age, but he can’t be older than twenty-five, right?
And then there’s the matter of Tova.
How well can you know someone from bagging their groceries for so many years? Well enough to be certain she’s hunting down info on Daphne Cassmore right now. She won’t stop until she finds this woman who she thinks can tell her the untellable. Tova has never bought into the official story of Erik’s death, Ethan is certain.
And then what will happen?
He ought to tell her that Cameron is Daphne Cassmore’s son. She should hear it from a friend. Those two are chummy. How the lad has managed to crack Tova’s shell is a mystery to Ethan; he’s been trying to do so himself for nearly a year. But if Cameron’s mother was potentially involved in what happened to her son, what will she think whenever she looks at Cameron?
It’s past ten in the evening, but Tova Sullivan is a night owl. Gathering his wits, he picks up the phone. He’ll ask her over for dinner.