Beautiful Lies

eighteen

I guess it was unrealistic of me, but I kept looking out for the Firebird while I was driving with a heart conflicted by hope and wariness. I fantasized ways that Jake could have tracked me. He could be following in another vehicle, not the Firebird, to protect me from whoever it was who might be following me. Maybe he had a way to track my credit-card usage; he’d know I rented a car, bought a cell phone in New Jersey, charged something at Barnes & Noble. PI’s could do things like that, couldn’t they? But, of course, that was just me being a dork.

I held a picture of Jake in my mind and the memory of our nights together washed over me. Whatever else he’d lied about or omitted, that had been true. There was no way to fake that kind of intimacy. Was there? Does it sound like I was kidding myself? Normally even the slightest hint of dishonesty and I walked. But in my new universe, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Everything was strangely off and the usual rules didn’t seem to apply any longer.

When I got to the address Maria had given me on the phone, I parked the car and looked uneasily in my rearview mirror for the subway/B&N psycho. I didn’t see anyone and I laughed a little at myself then. I was really becoming paranoid. There were millions of stocky guys with shaved heads walking around, and absolutely no reason for me to suspect that the man Zelda spoke to, the one I’d seen on the train, and the B&N freak were the same. In fact, it was downright preposterous. Right?

I walked along an exterior corridor exposed to the outside, looking at numbers on the doors. When I came to apartment four, I knocked. There was a long silence inside and I wondered if Maria Cacciatore had changed her mind. I knocked again.

“Hold on, for crying out loud,” a muffled voice called from inside. “I’m coming.”

I heard a toilet flush, then water running, then heavy footfalls on the floor. The door swung open and a frowning round woman in a bright blue muumuu and matching turban stood before me.

“Ms. Cacciatore?”

She looked at my face and her frown dropped, was replaced by a look of awe. “Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, stepping back from me.

I looked behind me to see what she had seen, but when I turned back around, she was still staring at me.

“I’m glad you called me first,” she said. “You would have given me a heart attack.”

She stepped aside and I walked in. She didn’t take her eyes off of me.

“I don’t understand,” I said, though I think I knew exactly what she was talking about.

“You must know,” she said. “You look just like her. You’re her very image.”

When she closed the door, the room went almost completely dark. The windows were covered by red velvet curtains and the light that came in through them painted the room the color of blood. On every surface there were pillar candles in glass holders painted with the saints—you know, the kind you find in every bodega in the city. In the corner of the room sat a table covered by a dark cloth. It looked red, too. Everything in the room did, even my own hands. There was a chair on either side of the table, a stack of tarot cards, and another candle on top. Wind chimes hung from the ceiling but were silent in the still heat of the room. Somewhere musky incense burned; I could feel my sinuses swelling from the intense aroma.

“You want me to put that incense out? It bothers some of my clients.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said, still looking around me, taking in the space. “Ms. Cacciatore—”

“Call me Madame Maria, dear. Everyone does. Or just Madame for short.”

“Oookaay,” I said slowly.

“So,” she said, sitting down on the couch with a heavy sigh. Her muumuu flowed around her. She repositioned her turban. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light and I could see that she hadn’t stopped looking at me. “Why did you lie to me, Jessie? Why would you lie to an old lady who used to change your diapers?” She patted the couch beside her and I sat down.

“I didn’t lie. Not about my name. I’m not Jessie. My name is Ridley Jones.”

She nodded. “You came to find out about your mother. You want to know what happened to her.” She said this as if she had been consulting an oracle, though I’d told her as much already.

“I came to find out about Teresa Elizabeth Stone,” I said stubbornly. It’s difficult when people think you’re someone other than who you are. They call you by a name you don’t own, refer to parents you’ve never met. They’re certain of their information, as certain as you are of yours. And it makes your head foggy. It’s confusing. There was still no hard proof that I was Jessie Stone, and frankly, even if I had been, I was no longer. I was Ridley Jones. That was my identity and I intended to hold on to that.

“Okay,” she said, her tone motherly, knowing. “Ridley. Okay. Tell me what’s going on.”

I looked around me. “Don’t you know, Madame?”

“Hey, give me a break,” she said with a smile. “An old lady needs to earn a living. Anyway, I just read the cards. People need guidance in this world, someone to talk to about their problems, someone to tell them it’s going to be all right. Isn’t that why you came?”

I didn’t answer Maria, tossed around the idea of getting up and leaving. But there was something about the old lady that I liked, in spite of (or maybe because of) her pseudo-mysticism. She had a strong face, lined with wrinkles and heavy with sagging skin around her jawline and eyes. Her body looked soft and welcoming, as if a lot of people had found comfort in her arms. I felt safe in her weird little space. So I told her my story. Unlike I had with Detective Salvo, I omitted nothing. As you can see, it didn’t take much to get me to spill my guts. I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets.

She released a heavy sigh when I’d finished. “You need a cup of tea.”

She got up and went to the efficiency kitchen that was just across from the couch. She ran tap water into a cup, put a teabag in, and stuck it in the microwave. She came back over as the microwave hummed and placed a hand on the side of my face.

“You must feel like your head is going to explode, Ridley.” Her sympathy made me want to cry but I kept myself together. I really appreciated her making a point to say “Ridley” instead of “Jessie.”

The microwave beeped and she retrieved the cup, put in a little milk and honey, and brought it to me. “Your mother—sorry, I mean Teresa—was a good girl,” said Maria, sitting back down. “She just made the mistake of getting involved with that loser Christian Luna. I could tell from the minute I met him that he was going to be no good for her. But that was her karma, always involved with the wrong man. Some were rich, some were poor, some were handsome, some were homely. But they all had one thing in common—they were wrong for her.” She looked over at me, as if she was afraid her statement had hurt me. I shook my head, indicating that it was fine, that she should say what she felt.

“Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Christian Luna,” she said thoughtfully, with a small smile. She reached out and touched my face again. “Without him, maybe there wouldn’t have been any Jessie. And that baby was the love of Teresa’s life. The sun rose and set with that little girl.” She stopped for a second and put her hand to her chest. “Anyway, now you say he’s dead. And I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

“He said he didn’t kill Teresa. Do you believe that?”

“I never believed that he had killed her. I know it looked like he did. I mean, he’d been there that night, yelling and screaming. Everybody was sure he’d been the one. Especially with him disappearing and Jessie being kidnapped like that. But Christian Luna was a coward. It takes guts to kill a woman and steal her child. And he never wanted the responsibility of caring for Jessie. Not really. Why would he take her?”

“Yeah, but a crime like that is about control, isn’t it? You want what you can’t have just because someone says it’s not yours anymore.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But I didn’t see it in him. He would yell and scream, maybe slap Teresa around a little. He broke Jessie’s arm, but that was an accident. That’s a different personality than someone who murders the mother of his child.” She shook her head. “No. I never believed it was him.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know this: Jessie wasn’t the only child in the area to go missing that year.”

I looked at her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “There were at least three others that I heard of in the news over the next few months. More over the years.”

“Were the parents murdered?” I asked.

She squinted into the distance. “I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”

“So what happened?” I asked, sitting up. “I mean, the media must have been all over it.”

“Not really. It’s not like today. Back then you didn’t really hear stories like that. The idea of pedophiles abducting children, serial-type crimes…people didn’t really know that much about it, didn’t want to know. Plus, these were all poor children from the projects, low-income housing. It’s not as though they were rich kids stolen from their homes.”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure what else to say. The information was hitting me hard for a number of reasons. First of all, it gave a certain credibility to Christian Luna’s story, and if he’d been telling the truth about not killing Teresa, then he might have been telling the truth about me. Second, if Jessie was one of a number of local children abducted, and I was actually Jessie, what were the implications of that? How did I get from there to here?

Suddenly the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling started to jangle. There were several sets of them, all of them giving off different octaves of tones. The sound was at once eerie and alarming. Madame Maria jumped up from the couch.

“Don’t worry,” she said loudly, moving behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the space. “I have a fan set on a timer to go off every hour. It lets me know when a session is over.” She disappeared for a second and the fan, mounted in a corner on the ceiling, slowed. The sound of the chimes grew gentler. I was feeling edgy, jumpy, so I got up to leave. I took a business card out of my pocket and handed it to Madame Maria.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she took it and put it in her muumuu.

“For what?”

“For everything you’ve been through. It doesn’t seem fair.” She looked sad, older than she had when I arrived.

I shrugged. “Life’s not fair,” I said. But those weren’t my words. They were my mother’s. It was something I’d heard her say countless times over the years. I did, in fact, believe life was fair. Well, not fair exactly, but balanced. Yin and yang. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Bitter and sweet. One did not exist without the other. When life is bad, you know it’s going to get better. When life is good, you know it’s going to go bad. If that’s not fair, I don’t know what is.

She nodded. “Hey, you want a reading before you go?”

“No, thanks,” I said with a smile. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the cards held for me. “Call me, okay? If you think of anything else.”

She nodded again and looked like she wanted to say something. I waited. “You know,” she said tentatively. “Teresa used to take Jessie to the clinic on Drew Street. They took her insurance and she liked the doctor there. They might still have her records. Little Angels, it was called. It’s still there.”

I looked at her blankly.

“If you ever want to know for sure. I mean, maybe they have dental records or fingerprints.”

She meant if I wanted to know for sure if I was Jessie or not—because both of Jessie’s parents were dead and she thought there would be no other way for me to find out. She reached up for me then, took me into her arms, and embraced me. Her arms were as warm and as soft as I imagined they would be.

“Thanks,” I said as I stepped back and turned to walk away.

“Be careful, Jessie,” she said softly as she closed the door. I think she didn’t mean me to hear. I wished I hadn’t.