Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 39.

The next morning, the desk clerk at the used-to-be Econo Lodge told me, with some pride, that the high school served a dozen local communities. His pride was justified. The high school was big. Because it was summer, only a few cars were parked in the lot.

“You say you’re looking for a woman who may have attended this school over forty years ago?” the stern-faced woman in the administration office asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You don’t know her real name, or a maiden name?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yet you think you would recognize her in a yearbook photo?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you think she’d look the same, after forty years?”

“Close enough, I hope, ma’am.”

My side of the dialogue had been defensive right from the start. Being in a high school brought back memories of my own encounters with stern-faced administrators, and that triggered old instincts to provide short, nonincriminating answers.

“This is an insurance issue?” she asked. I’d given her one of my cards.

“A routine matter of an estate not being closed out. The company wants to make the payout but can’t locate all the beneficiaries. We’re hoping one or two might still be in this area.”

She wrote something on a small piece of paper and handed it to me. “Our librarian is in today, preparing for the new year. She’ll show you to the yearbooks.”

“Thank you.”

“Young man?”

I stopped at the door. “Ma’am?”

“See that you move quietly through the halls.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As I walked down the hall, I looked at the slip of paper she’d given me. It was a hall pass. I wanted to laugh, loudly-school was out for the summer-but I was too old.

The librarian wore faded jeans and a blue chambray shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Obviously, she’d come to school that day to sort and lift, and was not pleased with my intrusion. She put me in a small room, came back with the books I’d asked for, and told me she was very busy.

Looking for her family, I’d requested the six yearbooks around the year I estimated Sweetie would have graduated, if she’d been truthful about being fifty-eight. I began with the oldest book, going through the pictures of the graduating seniors because those photos were the largest. None resembled Sweetie Fairbairn.

I was almost through the senior photos in the next book when one stopped me. It wasn’t Sweetie; it was a blond girl with a sunny smile who’d been active, for her first three years in high school, on the girls’ cross-country team, the debate society, and the Future Farmers of America.

I stared at the picture, but I didn’t need to. I knew that blond girl. I’d gotten a glimpse of her when she was much, much older, after her skin had gone leathery from too much exposure to the sun. I’d seen her coming out of George Koros’s building.

She’d been why Koros hadn’t let me into his private office. She’d been hiding in there while Koros and I talked in his anteroom.

She wasn’t Sweetie Fairbairn, not quite-but she was very close.

The yearbook said her name was Darlene Taylor.

I flipped back to the book’s index. There was another Taylor listed. Rosemary. I turned to her homeroom photo.

Sweetie Fairbairn looked back at me from forty-two years before. She was a pretty girl, with happy eyes and a good smile. The girls-Darlene, a senior; Rosemary, a junior-were sisters.

I thumbed backward through the senior photo pages again, idling, not ready yet to think about what her sister Darlene’s presence in Chicago might mean about Sweetie’s disappearance.

This time my eye was stopped by another senior photograph, a boy’s. I’d not been looking at boys, but this one, in Darlene’s senior class, caught my eye because he had slicked-back hair that reminded me of Elvis Derbil’s. The boy’s name was Korozakis. There was no mistaking the wide Greek face. I knew that face.

George Koros.

Darlene Taylor, her sister Rosemary, and George Koros. All together in Hadlow, Minnesota.

I leaned back, shut my eyes.

Sweetie Fairbairn and George Koros had been lying to me since the beginning.

I wondered how I could find out why.