“After that day, she seemed all right except like, not there anymore. Even though we still talked and hung out, she acted weird.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know. Like on Friday after the play I told her she’d been great, and she just laughed and said she was done acting. And I was like, Oh, you’re retiring at eighteen? Can you be more dramatic? But then she was. She was done, she was done.”
Portia broke into full sobs. Both her parents stood at the door, her mother clutching a dish towel, her father’s head bent.
“All right.” I pointed to the ceiling and waited until she registered the gesture. “You think of anything else and you know where to go, right?”
She nodded and walked out of the room, melting behind the wall of her parents’ bodies. I nodded at both of them and let myself out. Maybe it was unrelated, but I wanted to know what Hattie did with that suitcase and why she was carrying it around in the first place. I called Jake on my way into Rochester and filled him in. He was busy requesting a warrant on a few websites that he thought Hattie’d visited a lot, but said he’d check with the Rochester police for reports of abandoned luggage.
I chewed on the interview for the rest of the drive. Hattie hadn’t told her best friend about L.G. or where she’d been that day her truck broke down, and wouldn’t let Portia see what she did with that suitcase. Usually when someone stashed a suitcase they were getting ready to run away, but what did she need to run away from? The list of Hattie’s secrets was growing. What would Bud do if I had to tell him any of this? If I had to take his girl away all over again?
Part of me couldn’t help hoping the DNA would come back as Tommy’s. It was a simple story, one I’d heard dozens of times over the years with different variations, yet always the same key parts. A couple has a fight, things get out of hand, and he kills her. It wasn’t a crime I understood, but it’d become awfully familiar. The rest of this—a curse, a secret lover, a possible runaway attempt—came from someplace else entirely. Her body flashed into my head again, stabbed and bloody on top, legs bloated and floating in the water below, with me kneeling next to her, trying to fit her disjointed pieces together.
I turned off the highway into downtown Rochester, looking for another piece.
“Of course, she was an amateur. That was abundantly clear from the first day of rehearsals.”
Gerald Jones was built like a beanpole and dressed all in black. Not like Johnny Cash black, more like Fred Astaire pretending to be a cat burglar. We were in the front office of the Rochester Civic Theater, and he’d spent the last ten minutes wiping his dry eyes and showing me “stills” from the Jane Eyre play he’d directed Hattie in last fall. They looked like run-of-the-mill pictures to me.
“She didn’t even know stage directions at first. I had to ride her a bit, but by the second week she’d gotten up to speed and apart from the technical side of the business, she was a director’s dream.”
“Why’s that?”
“She was the perfect actor. Unformed clay. All I had to say was ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘urgency’ and she’d make the adjustment. It flowed through everything she did—her gestures, face, posture, tone, volume. I’d cast her because she had a good read and her appearance was exactly what I was after. See?”
He held up a picture of Hattie clutching a shawl and staring at a man in an overcoat and hat.
“She was thin, so she could pull off that gaunt look, but there was a fire in her—something always unspoken—which gave her a beautiful stage presence. The audience fell in love with her as much as Mr. Rochester did every night.”
“Mr. Rochester, he this guy?”
“Yes.”
“Anything going on between them backstage?”
He was genuinely surprised by the question. “No. God, no. Mack’s happily married with two kids.”
“But you just said he was in love with her.”
“His character was in love with her character.” Now he sounded as if he was talking to a small child.
I worked out the last bit of orange pulp caught in my teeth and flicked the pictures around on his desk. “And how about your character? Did you have any feelings for Holly?”
“Jane.” He sounded out each letter in the word, slowly, like he’d downgraded me from a child to an idiot dog. “The character’s name was Jane. And no, I didn’t have any feelings for her. What are you trying to get at?”
“Maybe you were feeling cozy with your new star. Looking to squeeze some of that unformed clay.”
He gave a quick bark of laughter. “I don’t think my partner, Michael, would appreciate the insinuation.”
The way he said “partner” cleared things up quick.
“Hmm.” I looked away, clearing my throat. “Right.”
Jones clearly wasn’t L.G. Even if he didn’t bat for the other team, he had zero reaction to Hattie’s screen name. I sighed.
“Why did you think I had a relationship with Hattie?”
“We found her purse in the bottom of the lake. The murderer had thrown it in the water after he hacked her up. You want to tell me why your business card was one of the only things she was carrying?”
“Oh.” His smug superiority dried up and it finally seemed to register that Hattie was dead. He sat down in front of his pictures and stared blankly at them.