CHAPTER TWELVE

1968

It had been oversized, even for Gray’s country-boy hands. His knuckles were swollen from jamming them playing football and basketball, and once he squeezed the ring past the second joint, it rolled around with a quarter-inch of air between it and his finger. He had to use moleskin to hold it in place.

On Annie’s slim and tapered hands, his senior-class ring was a monstrosity. When she wore it, it reminded him of girls in high school who wore their boyfriends’ sweaters, the bottoms of the garments almost reaching their knees.

Still it meant something.

She had never seemed that thrilled to be wearing it, and he knew that it was a gesture more fitting for high school than college. Still she took it when he offered it to her that chilly March day.

Once, when he came up to Chatham on a Friday night, she came down to the dorm lobby for their date, and he saw that it wasn’t on her finger.

“Oh, sorry. I forgot,” she said. She turned around and went back up. When she returned, she waved her hand with the oversized ring at him. He knew, then, that she probably wasn’t wearing it when he wasn’t around. He could imagine it sitting there on her dresser. He could imagine her hiding its very existence from the perfidious poacher, Winston.

Still he wanted her to wear it. He wanted to mark her as his, even when he began to see that she wasn’t, even if maybe she was his only when he was actually in her sight. Maybe the doubt made him want her to wear it even more.

That late April night she disappeared, she wasn’t wearing the ring. For some reason, he didn’t notice until they were back in his car, having their “talk.”

He would remember later how she retrieved it from her purse, rummaging through the oversized leather bag, when he finally noticed and asked her about it, his heart already full of dread. It was just before she gave him his walking papers.

“Here it is,” she said, after searching for a minute or so. She tried to hand it to him. He told her he didn’t want it. After she said what she had to say, after he lost his temper and she started to back away from him, reaching for the door handle, she tried again to give it back.

“Keep it,” he’d said. “I never want to see it again.”

She didn’t seem scared of his temper.

He wouldn’t remember what she said next for a very long time. In the haze that marked the days and weeks that followed, it somehow slipped his mind. Maybe it was Dot Gaines’s sleuth work that brought it back to him.

Annie had sighed.

“This is just like the other time,” she’d said. “You boys are all alike. You can’t get what you want, and you just throw a little hissy fit.

“This is just like back in high school.”

And then she was gone.

He wonders, forty-eight years later, why she didn’t just dump the ring in the Valiant. She obviously didn’t want it. He wasn’t sure she hadn’t done just that. He didn’t care. He remembers thinking at the time that maybe the cops would find it wedged behind the seat when they tore the car apart, but they didn’t.