Brad kidnapped in college? Hauled her off the Chi Psi front porch screaming, Fourth of July in our junior year?’
‘Secret marriage, Mrs Kalen’s opal ring.’
‘Valdosta was just a story,’ Chape says. ‘It cost the Kalens plenty to keep Brad out of jail.’
‘I was away.’ Every summer Bobby fled his parents’ expectations; he can still see that sad, hopeful pair, blinking like frogs whenever he came into the room.
‘But you’re the only one who ever saw the woman. Remember, Labor Day?’
‘Brad’s Georgia girl.’ Everybody has to come home sometime. He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out through tight lips. ‘I did.’
‘He had you out to his secret place, wherever he was keeping her,’ Chape says.
‘He did.’
‘God only knows why you went.’
Because Chape has made clear that they aren’t going there, he keeps the worst memory at bay. ‘I had to see if she was OK.’
She looked OK when Bobby met her, pretty but the kind of girl who has sharp elbows, cheap clothes – not the kind whose parents call 911 when she doesn’t come home; he saw Mrs Kalen’s gold slave bracelet riding just above the long bruise on her skinny arm as she flashed the ring. Given Brad’s history, were those K-mart rhinestones or was that a real wedding band? Kalen clamped her to his side maybe a little too tightly but he was proud and smiling, like this was the most important thing he’d ever done: ‘Bobby, meet the wife.’
Even so, Bobby whispered to her while Brad poured him another of whatever they were having, Are you all right? She lowered those spiky eyelashes and touched Mrs Kalen’s diamond lavalier with a sly smile. There were roaches running on the Formica and flies buzzing in the plastic curtains in that awful place but she was laughing and Brad seemed happy, maybe the only time he was allowed to be, but the Kalens put out enough money to make it all go away. Later he married Cecilia Parker. ‘Her mother was an Arnault,’ Bobby’s mother wrote him, ‘third generation in Fort Jude, charter member of the Junior League.’
Knowing how that one ended he asks uneasily, ‘Did Brad ever tell you what happened to that girl?’
‘There are things you don’t need to know if you want to stay friends.’ In a tone loaded with reproach, Chape takes Bobby where this meeting is going. ‘You’re the only one who knows the place.’
‘It was a trailer.’
‘Now you need to show me where.’
‘Oh, hell,’ Bobby says, and he means it on several levels. ‘Don’t make me go back.’
‘The man is passed out in his own vomit somewhere, with that poor child waiting for him at the club. Now let’s go find our friend and pick him up and scrape him off.’
‘Sorry, I can’t.’
‘Won’t, you mean. Harvard didn’t do you all that much good, did it?’
Bobby shrugs.
‘Look. If you won’t show me where he kept her, at least tell us where to look.’
He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It’s all freeway now.’
It’s as if Chape hasn’t heard. ‘OK then. One way or another, we go out there and find the bastard. We have exactly one hour to do this and get him to the club.’
16
Jessie
It’s still fun thwarting Fort Jude’s expectations, so for the biggest party the Lunch Bunch has mounted, ever, Jessie sidesteps the pudgy prospect they picked out for her and teams up with Wade Pike. She needs backup for this one.
And oh, they do turn heads, coming in. Jessie chose a simple red silk sculpted to her best self – plus diamonds, all high end and stylishly low-keyed, and bless him, Wade looks almost elegant in his bespoke linen suit. She sees people’s heads snap around as they enter, and thinks, OK. Fine.
In a way, it’s kind of funny, her new best friends’ eyes glistening with envy, their tight smiles. Look at them all, looking at us. She elbows Wade, who hasn’t noticed. ‘We clean up real nice, don’t we?’
For Pierce Point trash. Fort Jude society never says these things out loud, but that’s what these ex-girls said behind her back, from first grade through high school graduation week and on until she left town. She came back somebody, and that changed. They pretend there was never any difference between them, and for complicated reasons, Jessie lets it play. She is, after all, one of them now. She almost forgives, but she never forgets. In first grade she fell down in the lunchroom and it was horrible. Girls