Marcia Talley - Sing It to Her Bones

“She was?”

“Oh, yes! We were on the cheerleading squad together. Everyone said we looked like twins.”

I studied this doughy young woman who was sliding into middle age far too early and tried to reconcile what I saw sitting before me with a perky blond youngster shaking pom-poms and shouting “Gimme a J, Gimme an O!” I couldn’t do it.

Angie began twisting the towel. “I still remember Katie at the homecoming dance. She was so happy! She couldn’t sit still. Just flying around the room in a gorgeous satin dress, blue like the sky. It cost the earth, too. Three hundred dollars! Katie showed me the receipt.” Her voice was a husky whisper, as if she were sharing a great secret. “She danced with all the guys on the basketball team, even though she came with Chip.” Angie reached behind her to rearrange a tin box of crackers that must have been cutting into her back.

“After she disappeared, I kept thinking about that night. Playing it over and over, trying to remember if I missed anything.” She leaned back against the shelves and closed her eyes. With one graceful hand, she beat out a slow, imaginary rhythm in the air. Suddenly her eyes snapped open, and she stared at me. “We had real bands then, you know, not disk jockeys like they have today who just sit on their duffs all night and play CDs.”

She let out a long sigh. “I broke a strap on my gown that night, and when we went to the rest room to pin it back together, Katie told me she was the happiest girl in the whole, wide world. Later I saw her standing near the punch bowl, holding Chip’s hand. Chip just smiled that sweet, closed-mouth smile of his and looked mysterious.”

“I read in the paper that he was the last person to see her before she disappeared.”

“That’s right, except for whoever…” She shivered. “But Chip could never do anything like that.”

“Maybe they had a fight and something got out of hand.”

“Oh, no! Chip was crazy about Katie. Besides, he’s way too religious, one of those born-again Christians. He attended that all-glass megachurch over near Lanham; still does, for all I know. You’ve probably seen it. It’s the one that looks like a humongous greenhouse.”

I shook my head. Episcopalians like me aren’t usually up on the location of churches with TV ministries and parking lots the size of RFK Stadium. I changed the subject. “I keep thinking about the Dunbars and how tragic it would be for them. Was Katie their only child?”

“Oh, no. They have another daughter, Elizabeth. She’s four years older than Katie. Now that she’s working for some hotshot law firm in D.C., though, she doesn’t come home very often.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I think Liz is a little ashamed of her parents, her father just being a handiman at the local nursery and all. They don’t call him a handiman, or course; he’s head gardener or deputy horticulturalist or something.”

The phone rang, and Angie took a minute to write down a carry-out order for four Italian subs and hand it through to Bill.

While Angie scribbled, I stared at a poster hanging crookedly on the wall and wondered how Katie’s parents could have afforded a three-hundred-dollar dress. I know we couldn’t. For her junior prom, Emily had selected a red leather skirt with a slit from here to Christmas and a strapless black plastic bustier with spangles that cost the earth and would have looked right at home in Madonna’s closet. I absolutely put my foot down, insisting it made her look like a tart. There had been a terrible scene in the dressing room that sent the sales associates scurrying for cover and ended with both of us in tears and not speaking to each other for a week. Shortly after that Emily had run away again, and I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t been my fault.

Angie hung up the phone and stuck the pencil she had been using behind her ear. “Sorry about that. Where was I?”

“You were telling me about Katie’s sister,” I prompted.

“Oh, yeah. Liz is a lot older than Katie. She was a sophomore at the University of Maryland when Katie disappeared.”

“It must have been hard on Liz, too,” I said.

“I suppose.” Angie paused. “But they were never very close. Katie was prettier and more popular than Liz.” She leaned forward, and her folded hands disappeared into her lap. “One time when Katie was a freshman and Liz was a senior, they had a knockdown, hair-pulling, rabbit-punching fight in the girls’ locker room just because Katie got asked to the senior prom by one of Liz’s old boyfriends.” She wiggled off the stool and turned to fetch our sandwiches, which had just appeared in the pass-through window. “I’m sure the police filed that interesting fact away in their little notebooks,” she added. “They talked to Liz, too, you know. She was home that weekend.”

Connie chose that moment to join us and demand what she claimed was a hard-earned lunch. Angie returned to the kitchen, and Ellie busied herself with the UPS delivery truck. Connie and I sat on the wooden crates and balanced our paper plates on our knees. “Gawd, these are good!” Connie mumbled through a mouthful of succulent backfin crab lumps. She offered me some of her fries, but she had ruined them with catsup, and I told her so.

“Picky, picky.” She waggled one under my nose, just to taunt me.

I had finished my sandwich and was standing at the cooler, selecting a fruit drink for Connie, when the screen door slammed and a familiar voice boomed out, “Hey, hey!” Dennis. He made a beeline for Connie. “I knew I’d find you here.” He gestured toward the front porch. “That decrepit heap you’re driving is a dead giveaway. I should give you a ticket just on general principles.”

Connie popped a french fry, loaded with catsup, into her mouth. “I had to put my boxes in something, Dennis. What brings you here?”

“I’m dying of thirst.” He joined me at the cooler, where he picked out a bottle of cranberry juice, twisted off the cap, and finished it in three long gulps. I simply stared.

Dennis put the empty bottle down on the counter and fumbled in his pocket until he found three quarters, which he laid on top of the cash register. He pulled up a crate and sat down next to Connie, his arms resting on his knees. “I’ve just come from the Dunbars.” He looked up at me. “I had the unhappy task of telling them that the body you found has been positively identified as Katherine Louise Dunbar and that she had been murdered.”

From the kitchen came a long, high-pitched wail and the clang of something metallic hitting the floor and rolling, rolling, rolling.

It was a Marx Brothers movie.

Dennis, Connie, and I reached the kitchen door simultaneously, a confusion of legs, colliding shoulders, and bumped elbows. Dennis straight-armed the kitchen door, but it moved only a few inches, stopping with a hollow thud against some inert object on the other side. When we finally squeezed through, it turned out to be Bill’s broad behind as he stood with his arms around the sobbing Angie, comforting her in the narrow space between the door and a stainless steel counter strewn with chopped vegetables. Angie rocked back and forth, moaning, using a soiled dish towel as a handkerchief, pressed hard against her eyes and completely covering her face.

Bill moved to one side so that Ellie could sidle by and join her daughter. Ellie fussed and cooed while escorting Angie to a folding wooden chair just to the left of the door. Angie sat down heavily beneath a wall-mounted telephone near the spot where a copy of the menu, sheathed in plastic, was tacked to the wall. While Connie and I hung back, leaning against a sink, I could hear Dennis’s voice, deep and reassuring, talking to Angie, arranging an appointment for an interview later in the day. Angie nodded mutely while dabbing at her swollen eyes with the crumpled towel.