The Girl with a Clock for a Heart

by Peter Swanson

I

The bus terminal smelt of bacon-grease and stale piss. When I reached the ticket-seller I was told there was a bus in an hour that would take me to DC, and from there I could board another bus that would go direct to Tampa. Audrey had lived in Palmetto, Florida, about an hour south of Tampa.

I sat toward the back, which turned out to be a mistake because the door to the toilet was partially busted, and kept flying open and smacking closed again.

My head pulsed from an afternoon and evening spent drinking beer. I'd gotten up early and packed quietly, although there was little chance of waking my roommate Kevin, who was snoring like a bear hit with a tranquilizer dart. I left a note that said:

Taking off. Don't worry.

I'll call my parents this afternoon.

I pulled a sweater from my bag, folded it several times to use as a pillow then drifted in and out of troubled sleep all the way to Washington. There was a twenty minute wait before I had to catch the bus that would go all the way to Florida. I ate half a cheeseburger at McDonalds, then went to a line of payphones to call my parents, using the calling card they had given me back in September. My dad would be at work and I was hoping my mum would be having lunch with one of her friends. No luck--she picked up.

“George, what's wrong? What do you need?”

Mine was not a family that checked in with one another that often. “Mum, remember I told you about that girl named Audrey Beck.”

“I don't but I'll take your word for it.”

I explained what had happened, eliciting a series of sighs from my mother. “What a waste,” she said, as though she had personally known Audrey and her prospects. “But what I'm most concerned about is you, darling. I don't want this to affect your time at college. This should be a happy time for you.”

“Don't worry, Mum,” I said. I couldn't tell her that I was about to board an overnight bus to Tampa. If the school caught wind of my absence they would have to notify my parents, but I'd deal with that later.

“Mum, I'll call you in a week. I'll be fine.”

“I know you will, George.”

For the second leg of my journey I sat toward the middle of the bus, eating my way through a bag of apples and watching the grim highways of the South go by. The bright blue skies and frigid temperatures of New England had turned into low cloud-cover and bursts of icy rain. Night came, and I turned on my reading light and opened Washington Square , but the look of it, the feel of it, made me nauseous. It would always be the book I was reading when I heard that Audrey had killed herself over Christmas break.

II

I closed my eyes and thought of her, trying to reconstruct moments from the three months we had known one another.

We had met the first night at college. My RA, a gangly, nervous sophomore named Charlie Singh, had brought several of his freshman charges to a jam-packed keg-party in MacAvoy. I followed Charlie up the crammed stairwell to a sweltering, high-ceilinged quad with window-seats and scuffed hardwood floors. I drank a sour beer and made small talk with Mark Schumacher, one of the freshman from my hall. Then Max begged off, leaving me alone in a sea of upper classmen all engaged in making one another laugh riotously. I determined that I could leave the party but only after I got myself one more beer. I mapped an approach across the room to the currently unmanned keg and picked my way through the flannel and khaki. I was edged out by a girl who took hold of the nozzle just as I was reaching for it, then sputtered nothing but foam and air into her lipstick-smeared cup.

“It's empty,” she told me. She had dark-blonde hair, cropped at her shoulders, and grey-blue eyes spaced far apart on either side of a face that was flat as a pie-plate. The spacey eyes made her look a little dim, but I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd seen so far at college.

“You sure it's empty?”

“I don't know,” she said with a slight southern accent. “I haven't really ever done this before. Have you?”

I hadn't, but stepped forward, took her cup from her. “I think you pump this thing.”

“Are you a freshman too?”

“Yes,” I said, as a stream of beer went half into her cup, and half over my wrist.

That was how I met Audrey. We spent the party together, smoking her cigarettes by an open window, then exploring the campus late at night. We made out under an arch that linked the college chapel to the main administration building. I told her that my father--a farmer's son--had invented a mechanized system for slaughtering poultry and had made more money in one sale than my parents' farm had made in its lifetime. She told me how her dad was an ambulance-chasing lawyer in a small town, then added, as I slid a hand under her shirt, that she was a girl from south of the Mason-Dixon line who had no intention of having casual sex just because she was in college in New England.

So I escorted her back to her dorm and dropped her off, then speed-walked across campus to get into my bed with the freshman orientation handbook, class of 1989. Audrey Beck's name and address were in it, but no picture.

Over the next few months we continued to see one another, sporadically but exclusively. She was true to her word about taking it slow, but a steady progression of allowances led to an evening at the end of the semester, the two of us naked and nervous in my single bed.

“Okay,” Audrey said, and I fumbled with a condom I'd had since junior year of high-school. Audrey said it was her first time, but thankfully there was no blood. We stayed up all night, and the following day we'd each left for our respective home-states, me by train, Audrey by car.

Somehow morning came, the bus driver announcing that we were still on 95, and had crossed over into Georgia. The hazy fields that bordered the highway were free of snow, and dull green leaves adorned the trees. I pressed the palm of my hand to the bus-window: it was cool to the touch, not cold, and the spiderwebs of frost that had adorned the window the night before had turned to pin-pricks of condensation.

We stopped at a rest-stop and I bought a large coffee in a Styrofoam cup and two honey-glazed donuts. I was actually hungry for the first time since I'd heard the news about Audrey. Leaning against the bus and eating the donuts, watching a pale sun spread its warmth across the acre of asphalt that was nearly devoid of cars, I wondered what I would do when we reached Tampa. I was not old enough to rent a car, but I'd extracted a wad of cash from the machine at college, enough to hire a taxi to drive me to the cheapest motel in Palmetto. From there, I'd figure out what to do next. I could call Audrey's parents, ask to meet. Find out if there was going to be a funeral. Find her friends and talk to them. If it had been a suicide, then why? If it hadn't, then who was responsible?

The bus driver flicked her cigarette into a gutter, announced that coffee break was up. I followed her onto the bus.

III

Tampa was warm, somewhere in the high sixties under a low white sky. The air smelled like tar and tidal water. One rust-eaten cab was parked outside of the bus station. The driver, a long-haired Latino man, had his elbow out the open window, his head resting on his arm. He looked half asleep.

“How much to go to Palmetto?” I asked.

“Why you want to go there?”

“How much would it cost?”

“I don't know. Eighty bucks.”

“I'll pay you a flat fee of sixty if you take me to a motel in Palmetto.”

The cabdriver looked at his watch. “Okay,” he said, and I got into the back seat with my bag. A slow trickle of sweat began between my shoulder blades as we crossed a terrifying bridge that rose high above Tampa Bay. There was cloudbreak in the distance, and the sun dotted the gray water with a pool of light. Once out of Tampa, the ocean disappeared, and the highway was edged by motel signs higher than the grand palms, pockets of chain restaurants, gas stations, and topless clubs.

Audrey had rarely talked of her life prior to college, but she had spoken about the town she had grown up in.

“I'd like to visit,” I had said once.

She laughed. “There's nothing to see. We've got a waffle house and a pawn shop.”

“What did you like about it?”

“I liked leaving it. Small town life and me. Like this.” She held her two index fingers three inches apart.

The cabdriver took the first exit for Palmetto and pulled into a motor-court that advertised rooms for $29.99 a night. It was between a restaurant called Shoney's and a used-car dealership. Above it loomed a billboard that advertised a place called Billy's, selling fireworks and oranges a quarter-mile down the road.

“You wait here while I make sure they have rooms?”

The driver peered out the passenger side window at the row of empty parking spaces in front of the vinyl-sided motel. “I think they'll have a room,” he said. I paid my sixty dollars and walked across the lot to the front office. It was late afternoon but still warm and I realized I'd forgotten to pack a pair of shorts.

The motel took cash upfront for two nights. I filled out the card, leaving the information for the car blank.

“No car?” asked the desk-clerk, a yellow-skinned old lady with a black tooth.

“No car,” I said. “What's the best way to get around Palmetto?”

“With a car.”

“You think I might be able to rent one. I'm not twenty-five.”

“That how old you have to be to rent a car?” She laughed. “Try Dan next door. He might lend you one of his tin cans for cash. How old are you, anyway?”

“I'm eighteen,” I said.

“Well, that's about how old you look, too.”

My room had dim beige carpet, a shiny floral bedspread, and poorly papered walls. The front window, that overlooked the parking lot and exit ramp, was darkened by a grimy Venetian blind; the back window was propped open and fitted with an air-conditioner, currently turned off. I threw my bag onto the bed, stripped and showered.

I'm in Audrey's town, I thought, as the water stung the back of my neck. Maybe it's all been a mistake, and she's here, still alive, recovering in a hospital. That thought had been hiding at the back of my mind, like a secret hope that could never be spoken out loud, ever since the Dean of Students had informed me that Audrey was dead. I toweled off, steam fading from the mirror, and took a look at myself: plain brown hair that curled out like wings when it got too long, a unexceptional face, nose maybe a little too big, a dimple in the chin that made up for it. My eyes were a light brown, the color of grocery bags. It was a face that Audrey had stared into, as recently as a few weeks ago. What had she been thinking? And where were those thoughts now? I tried to feel her presence but could not.

I dressed in a pair of Levis, and a dark green polo shirt with horizontal yellow stripes. The top drawer of the bedside table contained a Gideon's bible and a telephone book. There were two Becks listed in Palmetto: a C. Beck, and a Sam and Patricia. I guessed Sam and Patricia, lit a cigarette, and dialed their number. A man answered.

“Mr. Beck?”

“Who's this?”

“Hi, it's George Foss. I was a close friend of your daughter's. At Mather. I don't know if she mentioned me...?”

“Maybe to my wife...I don't really know.”

“I was so sorry to hear what happened.”

“Yep.”

“I was wondering...I've come down to Florida...I was wondering if I could come and talk with you and your wife?”

“Jesus Christ. Hold on a moment.”

I heard Audrey's father yell out, “It's some boyfriend. He wants to come here.”

I took a deep breath through my nostrils, then nervously yawned.

“Honey, who's this?” It was a woman's voice, on the line after a click.

“George Foss. I knew your daughter at Mather.”

I heard another click, probably Mr. Beck hanging up his end. I pictured Mrs. Beck in her bedroom, a framed picture of Audrey in her lap.

“George honey, did you come all the way from Connecticut? That's so sweet.” She sounded drunk, slurring a little bit on the word sweet .

“I was wondering if there was going to be a funeral of some kind? Unless I'm too late...”

I heard a sigh from the other end of the line, or else it was the sound of cigarette smoke being exhaled. “There'll be a funeral. There will be. But we want to bury our little girl and right now they tell us they can't do that...Oh, God.” Her voice had started to quiver a little on funeral , and had snapped outright on little girl .

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I probably shouldn't have called.”

There was no immediate answer and I was considering simply hanging up the telephone when Mr. Beck's voice came back on:

“Who's there?”

“It's still me. George Foss.”

“Goddamnit. What was it you wanted?”

“I'm sorry, sir, I don't really know. I was hoping to attend her funeral, maybe to see someone who might have some insight into what happened, to try and understand.” My words were making sounds but not much else so I changed tack. “I've brought flowers. I was hoping I could bring them by?”

“Sometime tomorrow maybe,” Mr. Beck said, after another pause.

“Thank you sir. Do you mind if I ask where you live?”

I wrote down the address then fell back on the bed, exhausted, temples pulsing, shoulders bunched and knotted. I was also hungry. I could go next door to Shoney's, eat a hamburger, drink a glass of milk. But the more I contemplated the effort that would take, the more tired I got. Exhaustion trumped hunger and I slid beneath the un-soft sheets, pulled the spare pillow against my chest, and fell into a silent hole of dreamless sleep.

IV

The following morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits at Shoney's, I walked across the already-glaring asphalt to Dan's Pre-Owned Automobile Emporium.

“What can I do for you this morning?” said a heavyset, pink-cheeked man wearing a tan suit.

Having internally practiced my approach over breakfast, I cleared my throat and said, “I'm in a predicament and I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

A thin smile pressed itself onto the man's lips, taking all the blood out of them. “Alright son. I'll hear you out.” He wore a shiny purple tie that exactly matched the handkerchief that flopped out of a front suit-pocket. I figured the tie and handkerchief had been a package-deal, and wondered if the tie was a clip-on and the handkerchief was attached to a piece of pocket-sized cardboard.

“I'm only eighteen but I need a car for a couple of days. I'll take any car you have and leave you my parents' credit card. I'm a very good driver. And I can pay you in cash.”

The man laughed. “That's a first.” He tilted his head back, exhaled sharply through nostrils that were filled with dark hair. “Tell you what. I'll do you one better: my employee took his eleventh sick day of the year today so I'm in a bind.” He spit out the word employee as though he were spitting out a piece of rotten fruit. “I need to deliver papers and get two sets of signatures and I need it by noon. If you do that for me, I'll let you have free rein on one of my cars, provided it stays in Manatee county.”

“Alright,” I said. “I don't know my way around here, though.”

“Can you read a map, son?”

The car was a powder-blue Ford Escort with a steering wheel that pulled to the left. With a map and some written instructions from Mr. Dan Thompson, I drove past the cow pastures and sub-developments of Palmetto and over the Manatee River into Bradenton, a town that at least had what appeared to be a center--several five-story cinderblock buildings stuck in close proximity. I brought papers to an insurance broker whose office was between a pawnshop and a thrift store, and then to a couple in the Seavue Trailer Court for residents 55 and over that were purchasing a $575 Dodge for their grandson. Back in Palmetto I spotted a florist in a stripmall and bought a $10 bouquet of flowers that I was told would be appropriate for a funeral.

Driving back to Mr. Thompson with procured signatures in duplicate, I lit a cigarette off the car lighter, blackly caked with the residue of a thousand lit cigarettes. Mr. Thompson was with a customer so I placed the paperwork on his desk then drove the hundred yards to my motel room to change my damp shirt for the last clean item of laundry I had, a short-sleeved pin-striped Oxford.

A couple of painted coral pillars welcomed me on to Deep Creek road, a stretch of asphalt recently patched with squirrelly lines of a blacker tar. The houses on Deep Creek Road were mostly two story dwellings with flowery yards; they looked as though one tiny, shuttered house had been dropped on to another, then painted the same tropical color: pink, or aqua, or an occasional neon green.

352 Deep Creek was aqua; it's scrubby yard and roof-high palm tree looked like everyone else's. But 352 had a police cruiser parked on its curb.

I pulled behind the cruiser, and killed the engine. Walking toward the door, gripping the flowers, I tried hard not to focus on the two-car garage where Audrey spent her final minutes, breathing carbon monoxide.

The door was answered by a policeman in uniform. “You the kid from Mather?” he said.

“I am.”

The policeman, who had blotchy skin and a wispy moustache and was probably less than five years older than me, jerked his head to the right. “Come in.”

I followed him into a living room that was located at the back of the house. An L-shaped couch and two leatherette recliners surrounded a gigantic wood-paneled television. The closest recliner was occupied by a tall skinny man wearing a denim shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. He had pocked skin and the kind of blonde hair that was almost white. Mr. Beck. His wife, Audrey's mother, was on the couch. She wore jeans with a black silk blouse tucked into them. A roll of stomach fat, pushed up by the too-tight jeans, was visible under her shirt. Her hair was blonde as well but looked like it came from a bottle. She was drinking a glass of pink-colored wine.

Next to her was an older man in a grey suit. He had silver hair cut short over a scalp that was rubber-ball red. His face looked like it had been punched flat, then squeezed back into normal proportions in a vise. I thought that he might be Audrey's grandfather.

As I stepped into the room, passing the 99-pound cop, I held the flowers toward Mrs. Beck, who regarded me with puffy eyes. “Mrs. Beck, I'm so sorry. These are for you.”

The man in the suit stood, hoisting himself upright by pushing his right hand against the arm-rest. He held a mug of coffee in his left. “This him, Serge?” He was speaking to the uniformed cop.

“Yep.”

“You the boyfriend from Mather College ?”

I felt the eyes of the room on me, and felt as though a gesture were needed. A speech about the love I felt for Audrey, or a burst of emotion. Instead, I nodded.

“What's your name?”

“George Foss.”

“Uh huh. I'm Detective Chalfant. This is Officer Wilson.” Then, addressing Officer Wilson directly, he said, “Serge, you want to do something with those flowers. Have a seat, George, and, Serge, one more thing, bring that picture back from the kitchen, the one we were looking at.”

I sat on the edge of the available recliner as Officer Wilson disappeared with the flowers into another section of the house. “I'm a little--” I began.

“Don't worry about it. I'll explain it all in just one minute. How did you get down here?”

“I took the bus.”

“You didn't take the bus all the way from Connecticut to Palmetto.”

“I took the bus to Tampa, then I got a taxi to here, and then I borrowed a car. That's how I got here today.”

“So you know some folks in this town? You've been here before?”

“No. Never,” I said. “I borrowed the car from Mr. Thompson at Dan's Emporium. I did him some favors and he let me borrow it. Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“No, no. Not at all. I'm just trying to get the facts straight. Serge, good, you've got them.” I turned to see that Officer Wilson had returned to the room, holding a framed picture. “Would you please show George that picture. George, do you recognize the girl in the photo?”

Officer Wilson handed an ordinary picture-frame to me. It held a school photo of a girl with curly blonde hair piled up high on top of her head. She was probably about eighteen, and might have been pretty after washing off some of the green eye-shadow. She had bunched up lips and baby fat under her chin. I didn't recognize her. I looked up and shook my head.

“You don't know who that girl is?” Detective Chalfant asked.

“No. I'm sorry--”

Mrs. Beck said, “Oh God,” rocked forward a little and began to say something indiscernible to herself. Mr. Beck stood up and walked across the room with three great strides, then stopped and turned.

“Goddamnit,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm confused. Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“That's Audrey Beck,” the detective said.

V

Over the next ten minutes I was handed several other photographs. I studied them all. The Audrey Beck I was shown was not the Audrey Beck that I had known at Mather College. Both girls had blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin. On the wide spectrum of human differentiation they would have been close to one another, but they were indisputably different girls. The nose of the girl in the picture--the real Audrey?--had a slight bump, the type of thing a richer girl might have eradicated with plastic surgery. And the pouty mouth was wrong, the eyes too close together.

“I don't suppose you have a picture of the girl you thought was Audrey Beck? Not with you, I know, but back at your motel, or at college?” Detective Chalfant asked.

“I don't have any pictures of her, at all. I thought of that, already, after I heard she'd died.”

“And you're sure this isn't her?”

“I'm sure. Positive.” Still baffled by what had transpired in the course of quarter of an hour, I kept registering little bursts of comprehension and hope. If my girlfriend wasn't Audrey Beck then she was still alive. I wanted to ask this of the detective, to confirm what seemed to be happening, but I was acutely aware of the grieving family of the real Audrey Beck around him. The father continued to pace, shaking his head and sighing to himself.

“What's going on?” The voice, a new one, came from behind me. All the heads in the room swiveled. A teenage boy had entered the living room, a tallish blonde kid with braces, wearing a Florida Gators T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts.

“Nothing, Billy,” said Mr. Beck.

A brother. But she never mentioned she had one. She said she was an only child. I turned to look at Detective Chalfant, and the older man, as though reading my thoughts, said, to the room in general:

“Let's wrap up here. George, if you don't mind, I'd like you to come down to the station so we can get an official statement from you. There's no reason to bother the Becks any longer. George, you'll follow us in your car, unless you'd prefer to ride with Officer Wilson and myself.”

I stood. “Either way is fine--”

“So what you're saying is Audrey never went to college at all?” This was from Mrs. Beck, her voice shrill, her wine slopping a little over the lip of the glass she still held. She directed the statement into the middle of the room, so that it fell somewhere between myself and the two policemen.

Detective Chalfant held a hand up. “Now, Pat. Let's not jump to any rash conclusions--”

“Rash conclusions?”

“--but, yes, it seems that there's some confusion as to who was going to college under your daughter's name. We're going to clear this up and get to the bottom of whatever happened here. I'll let you folks know as soon as I find out anything at all.”

“Where would she have been if she hadn't been going to college?”

“That's what we're going to try and find out.”

I followed the cruiser to a beige stucco police station, smoking a cigarette along the way. The palms of my hands were damp with sweat and squeaked on the driving wheel.

Chalfant's office was homey, with cluttered shelves of dusty knick-knacks and a wall crammed with tilted pictures, mostly of kids. I was offered a high-backed swivel chair while Chalfant walked around his desk and perched on a wooden stool. “Keeps me from falling asleep on the job,” he said and winked at me. “The stool,” he added, then picked up the phone on his desk.

I said: “Did you know about this? Did you know about Audrey not being Audrey. I don't mean to be pushy, but--”

Chalfant held up a finger, said into the phone: “Denise, honey, do me a favor, willya? I'm going to need all the Palmetto High School Yearbooks for the past three years...Yep...No, starting with class of '85 and then backwards...We have them here, right?...Might as well go four years back, then. Bring them here, willya. Asap...Thanks, hon.”

Chalfant hung up the phone and placed the heels of his shoes on the lowest support of the stool. He looked less like a detective and more like a dyspeptic baseball manager in the middle of a losing season. “Let me tell you what we already knew. I always find it easiest to disclose all the relevant facts. We know that the real Audrey Beck, the daughter of Sam and Patricia Beck, whom you just met, spent part, if not all, of last semester in Key Largo. She told her parents and most of her friends that she was going to college at Mather College. She packed her car full of sweaters and jeans and took off heading north, but apparently at some point she turned around and went to the Keys instead. According to Ian King--have you heard of him? No, I didn't think so. According to Ian King she spent the majority of the fall with him and other members of his band in a rented beach house. He's in a group called Citizen Lizard, I don't suppose...”

I shook my head.

“No, of course you haven't. I know all this because Ian King showed up here yesterday. He came to me because he thought Audrey Beck had been killed by a drug dealer named Sam Paris. Apparently Citizen Lizard and Audrey Beck owe money for drugs. We weren't surprised that Audrey Beck was a drug user because that showed up pretty clearly in the coroner's report. We were surprised to hear she hadn't spent the semester at school. We were getting all set to call Mather--oh hello, Denise, right on the desk, please.”

A pear-shaped, heavily made-up woman of at least fifty placed a stack of high-school yearbooks on the desk.

“We were getting all set to call Mather and then the Becks hear from you, a college boyfriend. You can imagine that we were very interested to hear your story.”

“You think someone else went in her place?”

“Seems that way, son, unless you think she was in two places at the same time.”

“The pictures I saw earlier, they were definitely not the Audrey Beck I knew.”

“Right, so what I was hoping you could do for me is flip through that stack of yearbooks. If someone went in Audrey's place, pretending to be her, it makes sense that maybe it's someone she knew from school.”

“Okay.” I placed a hand on the padded fake leather cover of the top yearbook. “I'll do anything to help you, but you have to help me find the girl I'm looking for. She must still be alive, don't you think?”

“I don't want to speculate, son, but it's one and the same what you said about the help. You help us and we'll help you. I have some things to do here in my office for a while. Here okay, or would you prefer I get you another room?”

“Here's fine.”

I flipped through page after page of Palmetto High School yearbooks to look for a girl with no name. I scanned portrait shot after portrait shot: girls with teased hair and shiny lips, girls in three-quarters profile looking back over a shoulder, girls with acne covered by thick makeup, girls who wore crosses around their neck and over their blouses, girls who were told by the photographer to lift their chin just a little bit higher, girls who looked like they were going places, and girls who looked like all the good times had already happened. All these girls were interspersed with dazed-looking senior boys, some handsome, most not, almost all with jock haircuts and expressionless eyes. I also studied the other photos, the black-and-whites of the clubs, the teams, the societies, the prom, all the group-shots that might give me a glimpse of my own Audrey. I flicked through page after page till the tip of my finger felt dry and raw. There were many elements of her: her haircut on a girl named Mary Stephanopolis, her profile on a brunette doing a layout for the school newspaper, her muscular hips and upper legs on a member of the swim team, but none of them were her.

“Are there more books for me to look at?” I asked a now-standing Detective Chalfant, who peered through bifocals at an opened manila folder in one hand.

“No. Quit. I'm worried about your eyes.” He came up behind me, and unexpectedly, place a large hand on my left shoulder blade and squeezed. I am a descendent of a long line of unaffectionate men and the gesture felt disconcerting. “Tell me about this girl you knew? What was she like?”

I told my story, and as I spoke, I became aware of how ordinary and uninteresting our courtship and relationship had been. We had met at a party. I liked her. She liked me. It was a ritualized dance enacted by a million matriculating students across the globe. “I never suspected she wasn't who she said she was,” I said. “She was cagey about her past, a little, but I thought she just didn't like to talk about it. Not everyone does.”

“What did she like to talk about?”

“She asked me questions about me, my town, my parents. We talked about movies and books. We analyzed friends we had in common. She hated her own upbringing, hated this part of Florida. She said it was ugly and provincial.”

“What else was she interested in?”

“She was very smart. She said she wanted to major in political science and minor in English lit. She planned to go to law school.”

“She got good grades?”
“Yeah. A's, I think.”

Detective Chalfant, who had worked himself back around his desk, placed one foot on his stool and began to tighten his shoelaces. “How long are you here for? In Palmetto.”

“A while, I guess, now. Till I find out what happened.”

“Okay.” Chalfant slid a business card into my hand. “You're at the motor-court, right? We'll be in touch.”

VI

Outside, the blue sky had been checker-boarded by thin patterns of clouds, cotton balls pulled apart. There was a note under my windshield wiper--a piece of lined paper torn out of a notebook. All that was written on the sheet was a phone number, seven digits, scrawled in lavender ink.

I carefully folded the note and put it in my pocket. It didn't look like Audrey's handwriting, but it didn't look categorically unlike her handwriting either.

Driving back to my motel, slowed down by the rush-hour traffic from an emptying tomato plant, I felt a sense of elation, not just that the girl I'd known was probably still alive, but also that I had become embroiled in something far more mysterious than I'd ever hoped to be involved in. The dull realities of Mather College, and of my suburban home, were receding into a pedestrian, grayish past.

I pulled the Escort into the car dealership's lot, and left the car with Dan Thompson, who offered me, in succession, a cold beer, and a similar deal the following day. I told him that I'd more than likely be by again in the morning and declined the beer, not because I didn't want it, but because I didn't want to hang around the office that smelt of cigar smoke and Lysol any longer than I had to.

I fiddled momentarily with the lock of my motel room door. It jammed a little and I muttered a curse to myself, loud enough so that I didn't immediately register the sound of the car door opening and shutting behind me. I registered something, a threat approaching, but that was only in the quarter-second or so before I was bowled forward onto the motel-room floor.

I rolled my body so that I was on my back. Two men entered the room and shut the door behind them. One of them, the smaller and skinnier of the two, tried to stomp on my knee and missed. The other one, taller and fatter, said:

“Get up, asshole. I'll fucking kill you.”

I slid back toward the middle of the room, my eyes adjusting to the lack of light. They were my age, boys really, still in their teens. They looked like a couple of high-school linebackers dressed to go to a Burger King on a Saturday night. They each wore stone-washed jeans and tucked-in Ocean Pacific t-shirts.

“Maybe I'll stay down here,” I said.

“Fucking faggot,” said the one who hadn't spoken before. “If we say get up, then you get up.”

“Let me think about that for a moment.”

The littler one, the stomper, reached down and grabbed the front of my last clean shirt. I tried to punch him in the nose, missed, and hit him in the Adam's apple instead. He made a ragged sucking noise and jumped back, his hand at his neck, his mouth wide open in an O.

“Asshole,” said the kid who could still speak.

I stood up, held both my hands in front of me, palms out. “I don't know what you guys want--”

The larger kid charged me. I tried to throw a punch, but before my fist even got all the way back, I was tackled and dropped to the top of the freshly-made bed. He twisted my limbs so that I was pinned face down, the back of my neck held by a forearm, the small of my back speared by a knee.

“How do you like that, asshole? How do you like that?”

Assuming it was a rhetorical question, I said nothing in return. The kid I'd punched in the neck walked over to the edge of the bed. He was breathing easier, and gingerly fingering his neck, maybe to see if his windpipe was broken. He stood in the stacked light that came through the pulled blinds. He had a narrow chin, red with acne, and a crew cut that showed a white scalp speckled with moles.

He said, “I oughta fucking kill you.” His voice was raspy, like an old lady's that smoked too many cigarettes.

“Just tell me what I did,” I said.

“You know what you did,” the big guy said, and leaned all his weight onto my spine. A spring broke inside the bed.

“Honestly, I don't. Has this got something to do with Audrey Beck?”

“No duh,” said skinny, who was now moving his jaw in a circular motion, like an airline passenger trying to pop his ears.

“Seriously, I don't know anything more than you probably know. I don't even know if I really knew her.”

“You get her into drugs?”

“Look, I don't think we're talking about the same person. Audrey Beck didn't go to college. Someone went in her place. She went down to the Keys with Ian King. I swear to God.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“Let me up a moment. I'll tell you.”

“Yeah, right,” said skinny, while the kid holding me performed another complicated set of wrestling moves and turned me so that I was on my back, the knee now in my solar plexus. I got a look at my primary assailant. He was wide and tall with a fat chin and a forehead bigger than the rest of his face. His blonde hair was short on the top and sides and long at the back.

“Will you just listen to me for a moment, I'm not lying. I don't think I ever met Audrey Beck.”

Forehead shook his head, like a parent being lied to by a young child. “If we find out you had anything to do with what happened to her, I will hunt you down like a deer and shoot you. You understand?”

“Yeah, b--”

“You understand, asshole?”

“Yeah.”

“Scott, Let me punch him in the throat like he punched me.”

“I'll do it,” said Scott, and reared a doughy fist back. I scrunched my shoulders up and tucked my chin down to my chest so that when I got punched, it was partly on the upper lip and partly on the nose. Blood sprang from both places and tear streamed from my eyes.

The boys took off as fast as they had come.

I stumbled to the bathroom and put my face into a thin towel that smelled of bleach. The worst pain was in my nose, second place was a tie between my cheekbones and eye-sockets. I held the towel against my face for about five minutes, then realized that the door wasn't locked and walked across the room and locked it. I sat down on the bed and dialed the phone number from the note. My heart was banging in my chest and I wondered if I'd have trouble speaking when it came time to speak.

“Hello?” It was a girl's voice, worried-sounding, and with a slight southern hitch to it, but other than that not very much like Audrey's voice.

“You left me a note, with this phone number.” I sounded as though I had a bad cold.

“Are you the one here from Mather College?”

“Uh huh.”

“I was friends with Audrey.”

I shook my pack of cigarettes until one filtered end appeared. “So was I, I thought, but I guess I wasn't.”

“She didn't go to college,” the girl said.

“Well, someone did. What's your name?”

“It's Cassie Zawinsky.”

“So you knew that Audrey didn't go to Mather?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Do you know who went in her place?”

“I don't know her name, but I know that someone did. She was from Braden River High, I think. You met her, you knew her, right? What was she like?”

“She was my girlfriend. She was nice.” I lit my cigarette. The first drag unclogged my nose a little and I could smell blood.

“But you don't really know anything about her?” Cassie said.

“Look, I have lots of questions for you as well. I don't even know how you know I'm here or what you're trying to figure out. Maybe we could meet?”

“I could do that.”

“Do you know the Shoney's off the highway?”

“Sure.”

VII

Two hours later, showered, dressed, with a bruised nose and a cracked and sticky lip, I waited in a back-booth, an extra large root beer in front of me.

Shoney's was filled with couples, old ones who were alone, and young ones with hysterical kids. Cassie was easy to spot when she walked in--alone, my age, wearing a man's vintage suit vest over a Crowded House t-shirt and a pair of tight, ripped jeans. I waved in her direction and she came over, slid in across from me.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Two guys wanted to know what I'd done to Audrey. Maybe you know something about it.”

“What kind of guys?” She had short reddish hair, small blue-green eyes, a button nose with a snub tip, and a huge mouth with big white teeth. It didn't help that she was wearing about a quarter-inch of bright red lipstick and that some of it had come off on one of her canines.

“I don't know. Jocks. One of the names was Scott.”

“Oh jeez. Scotty's my brother. Was the other one skinny with Frisbee ears?”

“That's Kevin Lineback, my brother's sidekick. Ah jeez. I'm sorry about that. They had no...They wouldn'tve even known you were here if it wasn't for me.”

“I still don't understand how you knew.”

A waitress appeared and Cassie ordered a Dr. Pepper.

“So you were at the Becks today, right?” she said. “Did'ya see Billy Beck, Audrey's brother? Yeah, well he was the one who called me and told me, about a minute probably after you left the house. Thing is, he was like the only other person besides me who knew that Audrey wasn't planning on actually even going to college, and he knew I knew, so he called me right away. Thing is, my brother, the a-hole, overheard me talking on the phone with Billy. That's what I figure, anyway. Scott went out with Audrey for about five minutes last summer and he's all hung up on her still.”

“How did you know to leave a note on my car?”

“Billy told me that you followed the policemen to the station. And he told me what your car looked like.” Keeping her hands down by her sides, Cassie leaned forward and sipped at her Dr. Pepper through her straw. She looked pleased with herself.

“So how did Scott and his friend know where to find me?”

“Billy, of course. He told me over the phone and I must've repeated it out loud or something because Scott heard. Or else he listened in. I have a phone in my room but it's not my own line so anyone can pick up anywhere else in the house. Anyways, that's how Scott found out where you were staying. I guess he beat me to you.”

“So what I don't understand is why Audrey didn't want to go to school. She must've applied.”

“She had to. Her parents made her do it. She's like one of the few kids from Palmetto who could even afford to go to a four-year college, let alone get into one. Anyways, her parents told her she had to go. She picked Mather, I think, because it was so far away, but she didn't want to go. At all . She was into this guy Ian King--”

“From Citizen Lizard.”

“Oh my gosh, you've actually heard of them.”

“No, not really. The detective told me about them today. He said Audrey went off with this guy Ian.”

“That was her plan--what she told me, anyways. She was telling her parents she was going to go to school and then she was just going to skip town. She figured what could they do to her if they couldn't find her.”

“But then she found someone to go in her place?”

“Yeah. The thing is, Audrey didn't tell me so much about it. We were friends, Audrey and I, but not like best friends or anything. We all kind of grew up together. My dad knows her dad. My mom knows her mom. That's how come Billy and I know each other and Scotty and Audrey. It's like a family thing. So when Audrey told me she wasn't going to go to school I was like, I don't know. But then she told me that she met this girl from Bradenton who kind of looked like her, and she was totally smart but came from a bad family, and she wanted to go to college real bad.”

“How did they meet?”

“Forensics, I think.”

“Uh huh. What's that?”

“Competitions for the debate club. I don't know so much about it.”

“But she never told you this girl's name?”

“I think she got spooked that she told me so much as it was. As I said, we weren't best friends or anything. She told me I better not rat her out, and I promised that I wouldn't. I guess now I feel a little guilty. Maybe I should've said something.”

“Refills guys?” The waitress had materialized.

We both nodded.

“Have you guys figured out what you want to eat?”

I said, “I'm actually not that hungry.”

“You wanna split a plate of fries?” Cassie asked. “They're good here.”

The fries, crinkle cut, arrived in ten minutes on a big oval platter. Cassie had a lot more to say but the crucial information had already been spoken. The girl I was looking for was from Bradenton and she was on the debate team. The following day I could find her name by going through yearbooks again. What I hadn't decided was whether I would try and do that on my own, or enlist the help of Detective Chalfant.

I walked Cassie to her car. She looked up at the starry sky. “Look, it's the big dipper,” she said, pointing.

“You don't think this other girl had anything to do with what happened to Audrey, do you?” I asked.

“Sure, I thought about it. But Audrey was pretty into drugs, so who knows, you know.”

“Will you call me if you find out anything more.”

“I promise. And don't worry, I'll tell Scotty you had nothing to do with this and he won't bother you again.”

“I'll be ready for him next time.”

“He's kind of mean.”

“I noticed.”

VIII

Sporadic bursts of rain came in the night as I lay awake, my face still aching, on my broken mattress. The joints of the weathered motel clicked and whistled. Cars on the highway cast shadows that wheeled through the room, long to short to long again. I filled the ashtray with butts, and turned the television on and off several times. At dawn, when the wind had died and the rising sun bathed everything in the same thin light, I fell asleep, lips stinging, mouth thick with the taste of cigarettes.

I called Chalfant in the morning, told him that I thought the girl we were looking for might come from a neighboring town, maybe I could look at more yearbooks. I told him I thought Bradenton was a possibility. Chalfant told me to come by the station after lunch.

Dan Thompson lent me the car again. “You speak Mexican?”

“Sorry, no.”

“That's okay but it would help. I do need one favor from you. There's a Mexican joint--Abelito's--you know it?” He wore the same light tan suit again, but with a different matching set of tie and handkerchief. Today they were a shiny neon blue.

“No, but I can find it.”

Dan gave me the avenue and the cross street, and the paperwork that needed signatures.

I timed my errand to coincide with lunch, and ate at the busy Mexican place. Afterwards I drove to the police station.

Chalfant was out, but a stack of yearbooks, including Braden River High's, had been left in his office by the department secretary. I was left alone with the books and started with the most recent: the graduating class of 1985. Instead of looking at the individual photographs first, I flipped toward the back, where there were group shots of clubs and teams. I found Speech and Debate , a half page with a black-and-white shot of about seven students in two rows and scanned the faces.

She was there. Her hair was not the same in the photo--it was long and feathered and looked, somehow, blonder--but the rest was the same, the face, the posture, the half-smile.

I read the names printed along the bottom. She was second row, third from left: L. Decter. I flicked the pages back to the early section of the senior portraits, and found her almost immediately. Lacey Decter. She wore a black, scoop-necked dress and a string of pearls. I stared at the picture for a long time, her pixilated eyes staring back at me. They told me nothing new.

I closed the book, but kept it on my lap. Since the secretary had ushered me to the office I hadn't heard any activity at all in the hallway. Then I made my mind up, leaving the yearbook behind and casually walking out of the police station. I would tell her that I'd be back later to finish looking at the books. But she had her back turned and a file-cabinet open when I passed the reception area, so I decided to not say anything at all and swung through the glass doors and into the warm gusty day.

There were six Decter's listed in the Bradenton area. I started with the first and dialed the number, deciding to simply ask for Lacey, no matter who answered. Two of the numbers rang and rang--no answer, no machine--and one produced an unpromising message, and twice I was told that I had the wrong number. But on the final try a man's voice, in response to my question, said: “Who's asking?”

“I'm a friend of her's, sir.”

“You gonna tell me your name or do you want me to guess?” The voice was old, with a thick phlegmy sound to it.

“My name's George Foss.”

“Alright George. I'll let her know you called. Can't promise you she'll call back but that's your goddamn problem, not mine.”

“Thank you sir.” I had rarely referred to anyone as a sir, but realized I'd taken up the habit since arriving in Florida. “Can I give you my number?”

“What, she don't have it already?”

“No, sir.”

“Then fuck you boy. You think I'm my daughter's dating service.” He hung up.

I looked down at the phone book, spread open across my thighs. My heart was racing like a greyhound. My index finger, white at the tip, was pressed against the number I'd just called. There was also an address.

The Decters lived on 8th Street, and after driving for half an hour, I found it. It was one of the cheaper-looking sections I'd seen so far. Boxy houses with paved-over yards, most with two or three junky cars in front of them. A drainage ditch filled with greenish water lined the road instead of a sidewalk. Behind the houses ran a fence, and behind the fence was a stagnant-looking artificial lake. Even the palms along the street seemed old and tired. Yellow fronds littered the ground.

I drove slowly, looking for 401. I turned around once but found the place, not because it was marked, but because the house next to it --397--was. 401 was painted brown and peeling. Parked in front of its one-car garage was a red pickup, also in need of new paint. In the small patch of dirt was an oak tree, dripping with dirty gray beards of Spanish moss. I pulled my car onto the side of the road under the oak, hoping its shade would keep the car both cooler and less conspicuous.

After half an hour I realized it did neither. The inside of the Ford heated up like an attic in July, and the few cars that had passed me had all slowed down, their inhabitants craning their necks to get a better look at their neighborhood's intruder, the perv in the baby-blue car. I realized it was only a matter of time before one of them stopped, or someone emerged from a nearby house to ask me just what the fuck I thought I was doing.

Those worries competed with a riot of thoughts. My proximity to the home of Lacey Decter--also known as Audrey Beck--was conjuring a whole reassessment of her character, her upbringing. I wondered if she had taken the opportunity to switch identities with Audrey as a way to escape some calamitous fate on this very street. And what had been her long-term plan? Could she have gone on being Audrey Beck interminably? Maybe she could have at Mather College, all those miles and states and realities away, but eventually the truth would have come out. And, in fact, it had. Audrey's death had ensured that. I grappled with all I had learned in the past twenty-four hours, while alternately trying to work out the logistics of what exactly I was doing, staked out in my car. It was Lacey I was hoping to see, emerging from her home or returning to it. I wanted to get to her first, to hear her side of the story, and to warn her what was coming, that the police were aware that Audrey Beck had never been to college.

A muscle car pulled up across the street, bubbling black exhaust smoke. I slid down the vinyl of my seat, an unlit cigarette between my lips.

The car-door swung open and a gangly, denim clad man unfolded himself from it. He looked to be in his late twenties, with long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, and a face, that from my distance, looked pale and small-featured. He was wearing Ray-bans.

I watched him cross the street with a long, swinging gait and idle up to the Decter residence. Because of the position of the Escort, under and slightly behind the oak, there was no clear sightline to the front door, but after two minutes, the man reemerged into view and casually strolled toward me in the car. Before he arrived I quickly lit my cigarette, the filter of which had become wet between my lips.

The man placed one hand on the roof of the car, the other on the window-frame, then dropped down a considerable distance to stick his face almost into the car. His eyes, an almost pretty blue, scanned the interior of the vehicle. I wanted to speak first, but could not think what to say.

“How ya doing?” the man said, his voice casual, friendly enough to be on radio. I noticed for the first time that he had a pencil-thin moustache right over his colorless lip. He had high cheekbones for a man.

“Not bad.”

“I won't ask ya what you're doing out here, because I know. Lacey told me all about you, and she said you were a good kid from a good family.”

“I just want to see her.”

“Oh, I know you do. That's totally understandable. I think, under different circumstances, she would want to see you as well. But you have to understand that right now is not a good time. She asked me to ask you to leave town and go back to college.”

I said, in what I hoped was a reasonable tone of voice: “So, what will happen to me if I don't go back to college?”

There must have been some calculable time that it took for the man with the ponytail to move his hand from the roof of the car to the base of my throat, but I could never have measured it. One second I was finishing my question and the next I was struggling for breath, the man's large-knuckled hand constricting my throat and pushing me back against the headrest.

“It looks like someone already hit you recently, so you're probably thinking that taking a hit isn't so bad. Let's see what we got here...” The man explored my face with his free hand, turning it delicately one way and then the next, like a plastic surgeon examining a woman with crow's feet. “This must've hurt when you took one in the nose.” The man pressed against my tender nose with a thumb as wide and flat as a coffee spoon. I lifted an arm to protect himself.

“Don't fucking move.” The man squeezed tighter around my throat and pressed harder with his thumb against my nose. Fresh blood trickled down my upper lip and into my mouth and I could hear the sound of cartilage grinding together. “If I hit you in the nose you wouldn't be up and about the next day. It would be permanent damage. You'd have nothing left but a flap of skin and a bunch of powder that used to be bone. You understand what I'm saying to you?” The man moved my head up and down. “Good, you're nodding.” A car drove slowly by but didn't stop. The pony-tailed man was unfazed.

“Alright, George. I'm going to take off now and I suggest you do the same. If you see me again it means that you are about to endure some terrible pain, so you better hope you don't ever see me again.”

The man released my face and stood. I wiped the fresh tears away from my cheek, and took a deep painful breath. I knew I was going to cry at some point, not just tears, but sobs and snot, but I thought I could hold off until the man was out of sight. Outside of the car, the man adjusted his tight black jeans then strolled, as casually as he had arrived, back to his low, dark car, folded himself into it, and drove away.

IX

Back at the motel, I did cry, but not as long and hard as I thought I would. The worst had passed--the terrible fear that the man with the ponytail was going to really, truly hurt me. Permanent damage, he had said, and the phrase had stuck in my head like a pop tune.

It was time to leave Florida. I would take a bus back to college, and from there I'd call Detective Chalfant, tell him everything I knew, let him sort it out. Lacey was in some kind of trouble that was too much for me to deal with.

The phone rang and I almost didn't answer it.

“Hi George,” came the voice I had been waiting to hear.

“Hi Audrey,” I said to Lacey Decter. My voice sounded normal for someone who's heart had just stopped in his chest.

“So you thought I was dead?”

“What did you think I would think?”

“I'm sorry about that.”

I didn't say anything, so she continued. “I guess Dale scared you pretty bad this afternoon. I'm sorry about that, too.”

“He was pretty scary.”

“Yeah, that's what he does. That's his job. He's gone back to Tampa, though, so I was thinking we could meet tonight. I'd like to explain.”

I let a second pass then said, “Okay.”

“There's a place called Palm's Lounge, in Ellenton.” She gave me the street address. “You think you could find it?”

We agreed to meet at nine. I showered, even though I had no clean clothes to dress in. I ate at Shoney's, even though I wasn't hungry. I visited Dan Thompson and asked him for the car overnight. I was told I could keep it overnight so long as I checked back in at opening time the following day.

It was early afternoon and still light and because I could spend no more time in my motel room, I drove. I crossed the Manatee River into Bradenton , then took Cortez Avenue all the way to Anna Maria Island . I parked by the beach. The gulf was a deep metallic blue and the lowering sun reddened the sky and spread dazzling white light across the sea in a great swath. I walked down the beach and found an old wooden pier with a structure at the end. I walked the length of the pier, passing fishermen and elderly tourists. There was an outside bar at the end, three empty weather-stripped stools. I ordered a bottle of Budweiser and was given it. I'd drank in bars before--a few dives near my college were notorious for never carding local students--but I had never not been carded outside of that area. I drank the first beer fast, then ordered another, lit a cigarette, and drank the second one slow, watching boats drift in and out of the receding light.

n hour-and-a-half later, but still an hour-and-a-half before my meeting with Lacey, I parked in the gravel lot of Palm's Lounge. It was at the intersection of two flat empty roads, an old farmhouse with a painted palm tree fading on its side and a neon beer-sign above its door. I'd bought a cheeseburger to go from a fast food joint and ate it in the car. There were only two other vehicles in the lot beside mine, both trucks. I happily noted the absence of muscle cars.

The inside of Palm's Lounge was the size of a train-car, harshly lit toward the front with a hanging fluorescent light and barely lit toward the back. There was one employee and one customer, each drinking mixed cocktails at the dark end of the bar. The employee was a fifty-year-old man with a thick moustache and thinning hair on top; his customer was a woman about the same age wearing a straw short-brimmed cowboy hat.

I walked to the middle of the bar and rested an elbow on it. As the bartender made his way toward me I asked for a bud.

The bartender got me the beer and took my two dollars. “The jukebox is busted if you want to play a song. It don't cost nothing.”

“Thanks,” I said, and walked with my beer to an old jukebox in the back, with its line of 45s stacked horizontally behind the curving glass. The names of the songs were on little cards, some typed and some handwritten, and most were country songs. I selected a bunch, randomly picking them, based on little more than name recognition. Hank Williams, for instance, rang a bell. So did Patsy Cline.

I brought my beer to a table in the far back corner and waited.

X

She came through the door at one minute past nine. Since I'd been waiting, a short man in a vinyl jacket had come in, sat next to the woman with the long black hair, and ordered a Jack and coke. One other couple had entered, an obese man with a skinny tattooed wife. They'd ordered two whiskey sours, brought them to a table near the front, drank them wordlessly and left.

Audrey/Lacey had stepped through the front door, letting it swing closed behind her. She was in the full blaze of the overhead lighting, and I watched her gaze unseeing for a moment toward the back of the bar. She wore a pair of black cotton pants, the kind waiters and waitresses sometimes wear, and a short-sleeved blouse in green, her favorite color. She looked how I'd remembered her: small-shouldered, a little wide at the hips, exotic-eyed, startling. She spotted me.

I remained seated and she put a hand on my shoulder, leaned in slightly. She smelled the same--like cinnamon gum--and I realized it was something about her I'd forgotten in the few weeks since I'd last been with her.

“Did he card you for that?” she asked, indicating the beer.

“No. I don't think you need to worry about it.”

“You want another?”

“I'll get it,” I said. “You sit. You want a beer, or something else?”

“A beer'll be fine.”

She sat at the table while I went to the bartender for two more beers.

When I returned she had placed her hands flat on the table surface, expectantly, like a child waiting to be fed. I had seen her do such a thing before. Despite her forged identity, Lacey was the Audrey I had known. Half drunk, I wanted to reach across to her and clasp my hands around her shoulders. I wanted to kiss her, but first, I wanted to hear her story.

“I can't believe you came all the way down here,” she said, after sipping the rising foam off the neck of the bottle.

“I don't think you're allowed to start a sentence with I can't believe in it before I do.”

She smiled. “That's fair.”

“I thought you were dead. Do you have any-- ”

“Look, stop. I feel terrible about that. Let me take a moment to explain and maybe you'll understand, okay? You saw where I live today so you know I don't come from much money, not enough to go to college with. I don't really want to go into all the gory details but I live with just my father. He's a lot older for a dad, nearly seventy. He wrote for television about thirty years ago, in California. He says he wrote a Twilight Zone but I don't know about that, but now all he likes to do is drink beer, smoke pot and gamble. God, this sounds like...poor me, eh? Anyway, long story short, no mother around forever, old horrible father who's constantly in debt, and plain me, who thinks maybe she can go to MCC for a two-year degree after high-school. If she's lucky.”

“Then you met Audrey Beck. Because of Speech and Debate.”

She took a chest-filling breath. “Right. You figured all this out, Detective Foss. I became friends with Audrey, acquaintances really. We would talk to one another at forensic meets. She told me she liked my earrings. I told her I liked her jeans, etcetera. She also told me how her parents were making her go to college and how all she wanted to do was go to this beach house her boyfriend and his band were renting. I told her how I'd kill to go to college, but there wasn't any money. And I told her how my dad probably wouldn't notice if I moved my boyfriend into my own bedroom at home. And then we hatched a plan. No, that's not true, exactly. We hatched a fantasy, both saying how great it would be if we could just switch places. If I had her parents, I could go to college and everyone would be happy. If she had my dad, then she could go live with her boyfriend on the beach. This was back in May. Then we both graduated from high-school, and I didn't hear from her till August.”

“What were you doing all summer? What were your plans?”

“I was working as a hostess at a restaurant called the Riverview, like I'd done the past two years. I'd signed up for classes at community college. It sucked, but it was my life, and what are you gonna do ... then Audrey called me. She told me she'd decided not to go to college. She was going to the Keys instead, and when she didn't show up at school, then her parents would find out everything. And then she said that I should go in her place. I had my own car. I could tell my dad I had decided to take off--he wouldn't care anyway--and I could drive all the way up to Connecticut, matriculate as Audrey Beck, and no one would know. She'd arrange a time to call her parents every week, pretend like she was in school. If I got a call from her parents, I'd pretend to be a roommate and take a message and then relay it back to Audrey in Florida. It seemed plausible, I mean it was plausible. We did it, and it worked.” Lacey clenched her teeth and looked directly at George. “And I think it would've gone on working-- ”

“But Audrey died.”

“Right. Audrey died. So I died.” One of Lacey's eyes glittered in the light from the jukebox. Patsy Cline sang about walking after midnight.

“What happened?”

“You mean with Audrey?”

“Yeah.”

“She called me when I got back to Florida. She was back in Palmetto. We met, here actually. She was a mess. No surprise, her boyfriend turned out to be an asshole. She said that the whole band was into was drugs and getting laid. She said they shared everything, which included her. I guess the final straw was that there were drug dealers after them for money. It sounded like a nightmare. She asked me about Mather College, and I told her what it was like...I didn't lie, I told her I'd had this great semester, and I told her about you ... I could tell she thought she'd made this giant mistake, which I guess she had. I think she was still doing drugs that night--she seemed like she was on something when she came here to meet me--and then she got drunk. Anyway, she told me she wanted to switch back our lives. She wanted to go to college for the second semester.”

“What did she think, no one would notice?”

“I know, it was strange. I told her that it wasn't possible, that she couldn't just show up there, telling people she was the real Audrey Beck. I told her that I would stop going in her place if that was what she really wanted, and that she could transfer to another school. That's how we left it. She was pretty upset. I think she actually thought she could just jump back into the life she had traded away. It's not like we looked exactly alike or anything.”

“You don't.”

“And that was it. She drove home and so did I. That was the night she died.”

“So you think she killed herself?”

“I don't think so. She was real drunk so I think she might've just pulled into her garage and passed out. I didn't hear about it till two days later. Obviously, I'd already decided not to go back to Mather. I was planning on calling you. Then she died and I didn't know what to do.”

“Jesus,” I said and lit a cigarette. My beer was already gone and my head was swimming a little bit, but something about her story was not making a lot of sense. “How'd you feel when she told you she wanted her name back? You must've been planning on coming back to school.”

“Well, I was, but still, I always knew it was temporary. Being Audrey was temporary. I had become this different person, this person I'd rather have been--you know, in school, doing well, with a boyfriend ... a boyfriend like you--but it was like I had a secret disease, or there was this clock inside of me, ticking like a heart, that at any moment, an alarm would go off, and Audrey Beck would no longer exist. She'd die and I'd have to go back to being Lacey Decter. It's like a dream now, that whole semester.”

“It must have been strange.”

“And good. It was a good time, wasn't it?”

“Maybe you could come back somehow. As yourself. You were doing really well there.”

Lacey laughed. “You think they'd just forgive me for faking my identity. You think Audrey's parents would forgive me. They paid for a stranger to go to college.”

“Her parents know now that Audrey didn't actually go to Mather. I mean, everyone knows, the police as well.”

“Yeah, I heard that. I thought that would probably come out. I wasn't positive-- ”

“But thanks to me-- ”

“But thanks to you, and your unswerving devotion.” She reached out and put a hand on my cheek.

“Can I kiss you?” I asked.

“Okay.”

“My lips are kind of beat-up.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. It's okay.”

We kissed, gently, in the dark corner of the bar, an up-tempo rockabilly song replacing the Patsy Cline number.

XI

“You haven't told me the whole story,” I said.

“I know. But first tell me what it was like at school. How did people react?”

I lit a cigarette, and recounted the two days I'd spent at Mather, about finding out from the dean, and dealing with Audrey's friends, about the make-shift wake at Barnard dorm, about deciding to come down here. Lacey listened intently, her lips slightly parted, eyes wider than usual. “ “It's like being allowed to see your own funeral,” she said. “It's kind of fascinating in a morbid way.”

Then I told her about my trip down to Florida and what had happened during the past two days. When I got to the part about staking out Lacey's house, I said: “Now you need to tell me about that guy who was there.”

“Dale.”

“Right, Dale.”

“Okay. I suppose you've earned this but you're not going to like it much.”

“He's a friend of yours?”

“Sort of.”

“He's a boyfriend?”

“Not really but in a way. Just let me tell it. First off, as I said, my dad gambles. Majorly. He used to go to the races, but then he started betting on sports through a bookie in Tampa. Honestly, I don't even know the name of the guy he calls, but he used to be on the phone all the time, more than me when I was in middle school. He owed a lot of money, and when he wouldn't pay it, scary guys would show up. And one of those guys...”

“Was Dale.”

“Right. He was a collector and he used to come by pretty frequently. He's very good at inflicting pain and not leaving any marks, apparently-- ”

“That's not what he told me. He told me there'd be marks.”

Lacey gripped my forearm. “I'm so sorry you had to deal with him. I'm sure that was less than pleasant. He'd been away for awhile. He wasn't around the summer before school started ‘cause my dad had started going to gambler's anonymous. That's partly why I felt I could leave and go to Mather. I told my dad I was driving cross country with a friend, and that I'd call him and check in. He said he'd be fine. I made him promise he would keep going to his meetings but I guess he didn't make it.”

“That's why Dale was back.”

“Partly, but he was also back looking for me. Can I have one of those? I'm out.” I lit her cigarette for her. “This is the hard part to talk about,” she continued. “Things got really bad for a time and we owed a lot of money. Dad owed it really but I felt it was my problem as well. Dale was talking about severely hurting him, maybe even killing him. Dale knew me ‘cause he would come to the house. And he liked me. So, eventually, an arrangement got worked out.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“What do you think?”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“How old were you?”

“When it started, sixteen, but then I got my dad to quit gambling, pretty much my whole senior year, so Dale wasn't around so much.”

“Jesus.”

“You think I'm sick?”

“No...Yeah, I think it's sick. I think Dale is sick and your dad. It's awful. Jesus, I'm so sorry. For you.”

“Well, it wasn't Little House on the Prairie , but it's over now. My dad's going to quit gambling--he already has. Dale'll stop sniffing around-- ”

“Did you and he, this Christmas...”

“Yeah, that's why he showed up, but no , nothing happened. It's weird, even though it was coercion, in a strange way he really does think of me as his girlfriend. He protects me. That's why he went after you this afternoon. My dad spotted you in the car out the window and he called Dale and Dale did his thing. I wasn't even at the house today.”

“There must be something you can do about it.”

“Don't worry. It's over with. Let's talk about something else, or let's get out of here. This place is depressing.”

We stood outside in the dark parking lot, above us a spill of yellow stars. Lacey had parked her car next to mine and we stood between them, hugging and kissing. I felt like I was a million miles and a million years from any other part of my life.

“I'll only say goodnight tonight if I know I can see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay. But you need to go back to Mather eventually.”

“I don't know. Maybe I could stay here with you.”

“I won't let you stay here. I don't care how much you like me, this is not a place for anyone.”

“What? Florida? Or with you?”

“Both.”

“Florida's not so bad. Where else can you buy fireworks and oranges at the same place.”

“Ah, fireworks and oranges. The definition of my state. Let me tell you: it's not all it's cracked up to be--oranges. I used to have to drive past a juice factory, and do you know how bad they smell, those places? Made me never want to see another orange, let alone drink a glass of orange juice. And don't let me get started on fireworks.”

“What have you got against fireworks.”

“Stupid explosions in the sky. A few flashy lights and everyone oohs and aahs.”

“I don't remember you being so cynical.”

“Now you see the real me.”

I hugged her tighter. The way they were talking reminded me of how we'd been. After the confessions in the bar she had relaxed some. “Will you come and see me tomorrow at the motel I'm at?”

“I promise.”

“We can talk about options.”

“Okay. Options. I like options.”

“We could move somewhere together but not right away. I think the police are going to want to know what happened between you and Audrey.”

“I know. I'll deal with that later,” she said.

“No, we'll deal with it.”

“Right. We.”

Lacey got in her car first. She rolled down her window and I leaned in to kiss her goodnight. “You haven't called me by my name yet.”

“Goodnight, Lacey,” I said, before she drove away. I watched her taillights bounce their way out of the gravel driveway, then cut a steadily dimming swath down the pasture-lined road. I wondered later if she just had just kept driving all through that night, all the way to wherever she went, or if she had stopped in one more time at her father's house.

XII

From what I gathered later, the following morning Detective Chalfant and Officer Wilson went to the Decter residence on 8th Street. They had a warrant for the arrest of Lacey Decter on suspicion of murder. On the night of Audrey Beck's death, a witness--Audrey's younger brother Billy--confirmed that Lacey had met Audrey at her house and that they had left together in one car. Other witnesses confirmed that two blonde girls had gotten drunk at Palm's Lounge in Ellenton and that they had left at the same time. The crime scene investigators had found hair and fibers in Audrey's car that suggested Audrey had not driven the car home alone herself that night, and that she had been placed in the driver's seat, her fingers pressed against the steering wheel. On the passenger side there was a suspicious lack of fingerprint evidence: much of the car's interior had been wiped clean. However, there was one partial print on the passenger side door-lock that did not belong to Audrey.

Things had really fallen into place when the detectives followed me from the police station back to my motel and then to 8th Street in Bradenton. The white pages and the Braden River High-school Yearbook did the rest.

I think Officer Wilson would have enjoyed breaking the Decter's door down but there was no need--it had been left unlocked. Together the detectives stepped into the rank air of Kurt Decter's home. Its owner was lying face down on the couch, a blanket placed over his body. He had been shot in the back of the head with a .44. Several bottles of Miller Lite, a small pipe, and a sizeable baggie of pot were on the coffee-table. He'd died a happy man.

XIII

After being questioned, several times over the course of two days, I signed my statement and was released. I was told that my testimony would be needed when Lacey Decter was brought to trial. I gave Chalfant all of my contact information, including my mailing address and phone number at Mather College, even though I knew there would never be a trial, that Lacey would never be found.

Kurt Decter had been dead for fourteen hours when his front door was opened by Chalfant and Wilson. That left Lacey plenty of time to get far away, to get a new car, to dye her hair, to assume a new personality. She had done it before so she could do it again.

It was Serge Wilson who dropped me off at the motel. The parking lot was full, some of the spaces taken by news vans. The double murder in Florida, and the young pretty fugitive, had attracted lots of attention.

“Where are you going now?” the officer asked.

“Not back to school. I don't think I could handle that. I'll go home for a while, then I think I'll transfer to a new college.”

“Well, good luck to you.”

Back in my room, I packed my bag, then called my parents to let them know I'd make my flight that evening. I'd spoken to them two days before, telling them most of the story, and assuring them that I was fine. I called a local taxi service and ordered a cab then pulled the shade in the room and sat back on my bed in such a way that I could smoke cigarettes and have a view of the parking lot, black and sparkly in the midday sun.

I understood, intellectually, why Lacey had killed her father with his own handgun. It was punishment, of course, for being who he was: a weak-willed degenerate willing to pimp out his daughter in order to erase his debts. But it was also a mercy killing. Lacey was prepared to leave town forever, to never see her father again. She knew her father would continue to gamble and continue to lose and without Lacey there to protect him, Dale would keep calling. Kurt Decter was a dead man walking, and he was going to check out painfully. Lacey ended his life when he was asleep, comfortably comatose on his own couch. There had even been evidence that she had cooked him an expensive cut of steak that night. One last meal.

Understanding what had happened the night Audrey had died was more difficult. Lacey and Audrey must have fought at the bar. I believed what Lacey had told me: that Audrey had wanted to end the arrangement, that she wanted her life and name back. I also believed that Audrey had probably shown up half in the bag, drugged out, and that she had gotten more incapacitated at Palm's Lounge. That was the reason Lacey drove the car back to the Beck house. When the car was nestled back inside its closed garage, the engine still running, Audrey passed out next to her, Lacey must have made the decision to leave Audrey in the car to die from asphyxiation. Did she think it would allow her to go on living Audrey's life? She couldn't have. It made no sense. Maybe she thought that with Audrey dead she would have a fresh start, that the clock she had instead of a heart would fully stop, and she would never have to confront the life she had left behind, and the lies she had told. It would be a clean break.

I'd wrecked that plan by showing up for a funeral.

A yellow taxi wheeled into the parking lot. I stood and lifted my bag. I'd paid up for my room earlier, in full with cash. I'd considered saying goodbye to Dan Thompson next door, but decided I was not up for more questions about my involvement in the most notorious murder case in county history. As I walked across the tacky asphalt, under a cloudless sky, I glanced sideways at the Emporium, and could make out my blue Escort, parked against a chain-link fence toward the back of the lot.

On the drive to the airport I reassembled in my mind the last meeting with Audrey. I'd been thinking about that, hourly it seemed, since we'd parted ways. According to the timeline the police had constructed, Kurt Decter was dead before Audrey and me had met at Palm's Lounge. She'd cooked her father his steak, brought him his beers, shot him, then probably packed her bag and gone to meet me. I remembered the casual way in which she had asked me if I'd been ID'd, maybe the first words out of her mouth after she had committed patricide. I remembered our lingering kisses outside in the parking lot, the sky almost yellow with stars. It would be easy to assume it had all meant nothing, more play-acting, but, in truth, there was no reason for Lacey to keep her appointment with me. She must have wanted closure, maybe not with me, but with herself, with the character of Audrey, a college girl with future prospects, a character she could no longer be.

Walking from my terminal to the open-air parking garage at Logan, my father said:

“Sounds like you had quite a time down there.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me know if you want to talk about it. If you're not ready, I understand.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking to myself that I would never be truly ready.

“I brought you a hat,” my father said, producing a gray wool cap from his jacket pocket.

I pulled it on, down over my ears and just above my eyes. The near-zero temperatures were shocking. I'd been in Florida for under six days but had forgotten the way the winter air could make your cheekbones ache and your ears burn. It wasn't a bad feeling; in fact, it was a good one. I zipped my jacket up all the way to my chin, and asked my dad if he minded if I smoked.