Thicker Than Water

Chapter Twenty-Three

He was on the road to Immokalee first thing the next morning. It was Saturday and traffic was light, so he opened the windows and pushed the Mustang up over seventy, heading east on Corkscrew Road.

It didn’t take long for the small subdivisions to fade away, and then he was out in the scrub lands that formed the northern border of the Corkscrew Swamp. As he passed through a preserve, the light grew dimmer and cooler, filtered through the canopy of slash pines and ancient live oaks. He was only about thirty miles east of Fort Myers. But out here, away from the coast and in the vast nothingness of Florida’s gut, it was another world. Or maybe just another time, before man had left his mark.

He slowed, seeing signs warning: PANTHER CROSSING: Only 60 Left.

He thought of Susan and how happy she had been with what he had found out about Hayley and Brian Brenner. He had called this morning, catching her and Benjamin just as they were going out the door to Benjamin’s Bible study group. She had been so pleased, she told him to take the day off.

Orange groves lining the road led him into town, where a Rotary sign declared “Welcome To Immokalee, ‘My Home’.” The air grew ripe with the smell of rotting fruit. He had never been to Immokalee before, and had heard only two things about it: It was a farming town of Mexican migrants who worked for big fruit cooperatives, and that you didn’t want to pick a fight in the bars on Friday nights.

The directory had listed Stan Novick’s address on Armadillo Drive. A guy at the Sunoco station directed Louis west of town toward Lake Trafford. Louis found the house, a small but well-kept ranch house, its yard facing the entrance to a cemetery. He went to the door and rang the bell.

Someone was screaming. Louis could hear it through the closed front door. He rang the bell a second time, then opened the screen and knocked hard.

Finally, the door jerked open and a woman peered out at him.

“What?” she demanded.

She was in her mid-thirties, a shag of flaming red hair around a pale freckled face. Except for the lines around the eyes and thirty extra pounds, Joyce Novick looked pretty much the way she had in Kitty’s old snapshot.

“Mrs. Novick?”

“Yes?” she said warily.

“I’m Louis Kincaid, a private investigator.”

She used her forearm to brush her hair back from her face. “Is this about Sean?” Her voice sounded tired.

Louis shook his head. “No, Kitty Jagger.”

Her pale blue eyes widened slightly, then she blinked rapidly several times. “Kitty. . good God,” she said quietly.

“Do you have time to talk?”

She hesitated. “I. . Christ. . Kitty.”

Joyce Novick had gone even paler, if that was possible, as if a ghost had just knocked on her door. Maybe it had, Louis thought.

“I’m working,” Joyce Novick said finally, gesturing weakly behind her.

“I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes,” Louis said.

Joyce wavered. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk.

“Please, Mrs. Novick. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important.”

She hesitated, then nodded. She opened the door wider so Louis could come in. “I have to finish up,” she said. “Do you mind waiting?”

“No problem.”

Louis followed her through a small living room decorated in the country style that mandated plaid sofas, stuffed roosters and the cloying smell of cinnamon potpourri. In the tiny kitchen, two boys were sitting at the table, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The smaller one’s face was tear-streaked; he must have been the one screaming. They eyed Louis as he followed Joyce out a door and into the garage.

Off in one corner was a teenage girl, sitting in a swivel chair in front of a big mirror. Her body was covered with a green smock and she had big rollers in her hair.

Joyce Novick saw Louis staring at her. “I do hair,” she said.

The makeshift beauty salon was stuffed in one corner of the dark garage. An old a/c wall unit wheezed away above the mirror, trying to defuse the garage’s odor of mildew and car oil.

Joyce Novick moved in behind the girl and picked up a brush and a big pink foam roller. “How did you find me?” she asked cautiously.

“Ray Faulk told me about you,” he said.

“Ray. . I haven’t thought about him in years,” she said softly, winding a strand of hair.

“It took me a while to track down your address.”

Joyce smiled wryly. “Immokalee isn’t exactly the center of the universe.”

“You moved out here after high school?” Louis asked.

She shook her head. “I dropped out before senior year. Moved out here right after I got married. My husband Stan’s a foreman over at one of the cooperatives.”

Louis looked into the mirror and caught the eyes of the girl in the chair. She was looking between Louis and Joyce, trying to figure out what he was doing here.

“Time for the dryer, Rachel,” Joyce said.

The girl let Joyce deposit her under the dryer, wedged next to a tool bench. It was only when Joyce was sure the girl couldn’t hear anything that she turned back to Louis.

“I’m sorry I acted so weird at the door,” Joyce said. “I thought you were here about my oldest kid, Sean. He’s eighteen and been in some trouble. I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“Can we talk about Kitty?” Louis asked.

She began to pile the pink rollers back in a box. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can remember.”

Joyce nodded. “I used to think about her all the time, even though I didn’t want to. Then the years went by and it got easier to forget.”

“I’m sorry I have to bring it all back.”

She looked at him. “Oh, it wasn’t just you. It was that man, seeing him on TV after all this time.”

She was talking about Jack Cade, but Louis knew she didn’t want to say his name. He slipped a notebook out of his pocket. “I just have a few questions, Mrs. Novick. What can you tell me about the night Kitty disappeared?”

She sat down in the swivel chair, holding a hairbrush. “God, I can still remember that night like it was yesterday.”

Joyce’s pale blue eyes grew distant. “It was April 9th. And it was hot and sticky, like summer was coming early that year. All the kids were out cruising. We were very busy, I remember.”

“Do you recall anything out of the ordinary?”

Joyce shook her head. “Kitty punched out at eleven, just like always. I waved to her as she walked toward the bus stop. She turned and waved back. That’s the last time I saw her.”

“She didn’t leave with anyone?”

Joyce shook her head slowly.

Louis pulled up a stool and sat down opposite the swivel chair. “How long did you know Kitty?” he asked.

Joyce was staring at something on the opposite wall. Louis followed her gaze, but all he saw was a bunch of tools hanging on a pegboard.

“Mrs. Novick?”

She looked back at him.

“How long did you know Kitty?”

“We met in sixth grade. I remember the first time I saw her.” For the first time, Joyce smiled. It transformed her, made her look younger. “Kitty was in the girl’s john ratting her hair and making spit curls. I was in awe of her. None of the other girls ratted their hair in sixth grade.”

“That’s when you became friends?” Louis prodded.

“Yeah, I lived a couple doors down so we walked to school together, slept over at each other’s houses. We were like sisters.”

She smiled as another memory came to her. “When we were thirteen, Kitty came up with this big plan to run away to London, because she was in love with Paul McCartney and I was in love with George. But she decided she couldn’t leave her father. We used to talk with English accents and make up false identities. Kitty wanted to be called Lady Kitrina Jaspers. I was Lady Joy Heartsfield. Joy. . Kitty came up with that for me.”

Joyce’s smile lingered; she was still lost in the past. Louis waited, not wanting to interrupt.

“What was Kitty like?” Louis asked finally.

Joyce blinked, coming back. “Like? Oh, geez, she. .” She shook her head, like she didn’t know how to answer.

“She loved to swim, especially at night,” Joyce said. “Once, when we were in eighth grade, she made me sneak out of the house and we rode our bikes over to the municipal pool. It was closed, but Kitty just climbed the fence. I was so scared we’d get caught. But Kitty wasn’t. I can still see her laughing and jumping off the high-dive board.”

Louis had a vision of the two girls giggling in the moonlit water.

“Kitty wasn’t afraid of anything,” Joyce went on. “But I was. That night at the pool, I was afraid to jump off the high board so I kind of scooted down and hung from it. I was hanging there, scared stiff and she was yelling up at me, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid, Joyce, just let go!’ ”

Joyce fell silent. The only sound was the wheeze of the air conditioner and the steady hum of the hair dryer.

“I never figured out what she saw in me,” she said. “She was so pretty and I was, well, I was kinda plain and a little chubby.” Joyce blushed slightly. “I figured I could just get her rejects.”

“Her father told me Kitty didn’t date.”

“That’s right,” Joyce said, nodding. “I haven’t seen Mr. Jagger since-” She hesitated. “I was going to say since the funeral, but he didn’t come. He spent a fortune on the coffin, mahogany with these beautiful brass handles. But then he was so upset, he couldn’t even come to see her.”

She looked at Louis. “How is he doing?”

Louis thought a moment before he answered. “Still confused.”

Joyce nodded slowly. “I should go see him. I always meant to afterward, but I got pregnant with Sean and we moved out here. Twenty years. . goes by before you know it.”

Louis thought of Mobley’s words about the greasers, the “wild crowd” girls: They got pregnant.

Joyce glanced over at the girl under the dryer. “Excuse me a moment.” She went over, checked the dryer and came back.

Louis wasn’t sure how to phrase the question that was in his head. “Ray told me boys tried to come on to Kitty all the time. You never saw her go with anyone?”

“Ray would drive her home once in a while, but she never went with anyone else.”

“Was there any boy who was more aggressive than others?”

Joyce frowned. “Well, they all flirted with her, especially the football players. They’d cruise in after a game in their cool cars, all puffed up with themselves. Lonnie Albertson, Jeff, Tony Cipolli, Lance. .”

“Lance Mobley?” Louis asked. “Did Mobley come on to her?”

“Lance came on to to anything that breathed, even me once. I think he thought we were easy, you know, because we were from Edgewood.” Joyce’s eyes grew distant. “Lance Mobley. . he was a good-looking boy. He’s sheriff now, isn’t he? I guess he did all right for himself.”

“Did any of these boys get angry when she rejected them?”

Joyce shook her head. Louis could tell she was miles-and decades-away from the dingy garage.

“Ray told me Kitty was saving herself for a rich guy,” Louis said. “So Kitty was. .” He wasn’t sure how to make this sound anything but judgmental.

Joyce looked up abruptly. “Kitty was smart, she could’ve gone to college if she had some money. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

“So she wanted someone to take care of her,” Louis said.

“Don’t we all,” Joyce said softly.

She noticed Louis writing in his notebook. “Look, Kitty wasn’t a gold digger. She just wanted nice things. She wanted to go live in England someday, meet a guy with manners, like James Bond or something.”

Louis remembered the poster of Goldfinger on Kitty’s bedroom wall.

“Tell me more about Ray,” he said.

Joyce let out a sigh. “Poor Ray. He had such a crush on Kitty. It was kind of pathetic. We were mean to him. We teased him behind his back.” She hesitated. “I remember one of the other girls told us he copped a feel behind the grill. She was afraid to tell his Dad because she thought she’d get fired.”

She looked up at Louis. “Why are you asking me all these questions about Ray?”

Louis debated how much to tell her. “You said Ray had a crush on her. It might be helpful to me to know about anyone like that.”

“But why now? What’s the point? Kitty’s dead. Why are you bothering with this now?”

She was looking at him strangely, like she suddenly could read his mind, or like he was some weird voyeur, like poor old Ray Faulk.

“It might have some bearing on Jack Cade’s present case,” he said.

She stiffened at the name and something flashed over her face, like she had remembered something she had tried very hard to forget.

“I saw him once,” she said softly.

“Cade?”

Joyce nodded. Her eyes went to the girl who was sitting under the dryer, absorbed in her Cosmopolitan.

“When I was walking to school,” she said. “I was walking past this house, one of those pretty places over near the park.” She stopped, her eyes downcast. She was playing with the brush, rubbing the bristles over the palm of her hand.

“Was Kitty with you?”

Joyce nodded. “His truck was at the curb, an old beat-up red Ford with that landscaping sign on the door. He was pushing a lawn mower and he saw us walk by on the sidewalk.”

She stopped again. The air conditioner droned on.

“I looked up,” she said, “and I saw him watching us.”

She was gripping the brush, pushing the bristles into her palm. “He looked at me and. . he touched himself.”

Louis looked up from his notebook. Her head was still down, the brush gripped in her hand. When she finally raised her head, her eyes were bright, her face red.

“Did Kitty see him, too?”

Joyce shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t say anything to her. It was too. .” She hesitated. “I thought about it later, after. .” Her voice trailed off again.

There had been no mention of this in Ahnert’s report of his interview with Joyce. “You didn’t tell the police,” Louis said.

She shook her head slowly. “A detective came and talked to me, but I didn’t think about it until later, when I saw Jack Cade on television after he had been arrested.”

Louis’s pen was poised over the notebook as he looked at her stricken face.

“I never told anyone. I guess I was embarrassed,” Joyce said. “I should have, but I never did.”

“Mrs. Novick?”

They both turned to look at the girl, who had ducked out from under the dryer. “I’m done, I think, Mrs. Novick.”

Joyce looked at Louis, then got up to rescue her young customer. When the girl was sitting back in the swivel chair, Joyce turned back to Louis.

“I’ve got to finish this,” she said. “I got another one coming in five minutes. Winter Fest dance tonight at the high school. Big event.” She looked wistfully at the girl in the mirror.

Louis rose, putting his notebook away. She followed him out and stood by the door.

“Thank you for your time,” Louis said.

“Are you talking to others?” she asked.

“Others?”

“From the school or the drive-in, I mean.”

“Should I?”

She was chewing on her bottom lip. “What you said about Ray, about him having a crush on Kitty. .”

“Go on.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “It made me remember Ronnie Cade.”

Louis felt something in his chest, like a sudden extra heartbeat.

“Ronnie used to come to the drive-in a lot in that old red truck,” Joyce said. “The guys laughed at him because the truck had that landscaping sign on it and dirt and bags of fertilizer and things in the back. Ronnie always smelled like that truck.”

“Did Kitty laugh at him?” Louis asked.

“No. But I remember he used to watch her and sometimes he used to stick around when we were closing and ask her to go for a ride.” Joyce’s eyes were steady on his. “Kitty turned him down.”

“Was he at the drive-in the night Kitty disappeared?”

“I don’t remember,” Joyce said. “It was awful busy that night.”

She was standing there, arms folded over her chest, staring at something off in the distance.

“Mrs. Novick!” The girl with the rollers in her hair was calling.

Joyce looked back at her. “They don’t know,” she said softly. “They don’t know how fast it all can change. One minute you’re singing along to the radio, then something happens and your whole life spins off in a different direction.”

Her eyes welled. “One minute you’re fifteen, the next minute your life is over. You know what I mean?”

But Louis didn’t hear her. His mind was racing, thinking about Ronnie Cade, Jack Cade and the broken connections between fathers and sons.

“I have to go,” he said quickly, starting away. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Novick.”

“It’s Joy,” she said.

But Louis was already gone.