Did Ruth, I wondered now, do something similar in her own vanishing? Did she believe that she had nothing left to lose? Was her shame so great it overcame her reason? How could such a thing happen, nearly simultaneously, to two women, those women a mother and daughter? Did it happen to one unbeknownst to the other?
Ten
Turkey Vulture
Cathartes aura.Nature’s garbage collector, this large species has been around since prehistoric times, using keen smell and sight to find ripe carcasses. Turkey vultures are scavengers that rip apart carrion. Scientists are studying how they can eat rotten diseased carcasses and not get sick and why their droppings are also disease free. Through their digestion, disease is cleaned out of the environment. Despised and unattractive as they may be, often regarded as harbingers of death, they play an important role in protecting other animals and people from contagion.
A few days later, I showed up at the coffee shop where I would meet Jack. I still wasn’t sure that he would show, and I was ordering my latte when I realized that he was already there. Most people, even people older than me, scanned their phones while waiting for their order, or for their companion to arrive, or for their turn to board the flight. Jack wasn’t doing that. He simply sat there perfectly composed without even the social crutch of a cup of coffee to legitimize him. I sat down across from him and fought the inane urge to comment on the weather. He was older, maybe in his early forties, on the other side of that decade in life when so many significant events seemed to occur. He said he had just taken his youngest, who was three, to preschool.
“My wife sees no sense in it. She would just rather keep them all at home. But I see it as socialization. Socialization skills can’t start too early. They’re the emollient of business. They’re the emollient of life.”
“Do you have older children too?”
“Four sons,” he said with no trace of either pride or unease. “I desperately want a little girl of my own, but the wife says she’s done and done, and she won’t consider adoption. It just seems like too much of a hassle, for Lucia, I mean. I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said. “But you didn’t want to talk about my home life.” In that moment, I considered the truth that his home life, in a sense, was exactly what I wanted to talk about. “You wanted to talk about Felicity Wild.”
“I do but back up first.” I turned on my phone and took out my purple leather binder with its tablet of scented notebook paper. “You’re a father. Of sons. You own a strip club. How does that square?”
“I own four apartment buildings, two commercial buildings, a couple of small hotels, and a tree farm as well. A whole slew of assumptions come along with that place, and most people think it’s a dive that attracts lowlifes. But the customers are ordinary guys out for a laugh. Or lonely. Or bored. Guys who like to see pretty women undressed, which does not mean they are perverts.” He rubbed at an imaginary speck on his sleeve and added, “Once in a while, sure, there’s a bad actor. Lily never fails to spot him—it’s her training—and if Kelly can’t handle it on his own, I come over and we convince this person to move on.” He smiled.
“I’m just curious though. Why does a family man own a strip joint, because, at the end of the day, a strip joint is not a library, as Lily likes to say.”
“I inherited it. It belonged to my godfather...” He gave me a wry look to signal that he knew just what he was saying.“None of his kids was interested, and I love the guy. The price was right—” he made a circle with one thumb and forefinger “—and I was just a couple of years out of law school. It seems like an odd thing, but it’s not that different from any other bar.”
“Okay.”
“So, why are you writing this story?”
“I can only say I’m compelled to. Felicity and I grew up together, we were close friends,” I added.
“Do you think she’s innocent?”
“I go back and forth, every day.”
“She’s a terrific person,” Jack said. “You can ask any of the girls. Thoughtful and very, very smart. The few times I got to really talk to her, I was so impressed by the way she could assess situations, whether it was a separate parking area for the girls or the problem of a geriatric president, in just a few words...”
“So that was what I wanted to know about. You had a relationship with her.”
“Well, don’t write this down—she was more interesting to talk to than some. She had more life experience and intellectual curiosity.”
“I didn’t mean the working relationship.”
Jack’s face changed then, so slightly that if I hadn’t been close enough to smell his faintly floral and clearly costly cologne, I might never have noticed. His face realigned somehow, right down to its texture and color, as if he had put on a very flattering mask. He looked not agitated, but even calmer and more composed. He said, with the ghost of a smile, “I never had any kind of romantic relationship with Felicity Wild.”
“I thought, I understood that it was... ” I stammered, feeling my face heat up.
“Who told you that?”
“No one specifically. Really, no one at the club ever said as much. I just had the sense that she, that you...”
“A professor told me history is really just gossip. She didn’t mean the dates of this battle or that factory fire, she meant personalities. That it was mostly anecdotes, somebody saying this, somebody saying that, and some of those things were wrong.” Jack took an old-fashioned hemmed and monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket. I didn’t know that men carried these anymore; the idea was both courtly and disgusting. He began to fold the crisp square into an elaborate trumpet-shaped pattern. “So the same information is repeated many times, a consensus forms, and then, from that consensus, a presumption that there had to be something to it.”
“Sure,” I said.
“But that consensus isn’t fact. That’s why hearsay evidence is inadmissible, for the simple reason that the person who said it isn’t there. Even if there’s like a diary entry from the day that something supposedly happened, if there’s no corroboration, it’s not evidence.”
I got up to top off my coffee. As I sat down again, I watched Jack finish his cotton sculpture. He didn’t hurry. Everything I knew about the power of silence was now working, from him on me. “Ophelia is a sort of community. A bunch of women, kind of like an old-time convent, right? And I’m the priest, right? Like in the old days, when my father was a kid. I’m not a spiritual adviser but I’m their boss. One of me, twenty of them. They’re waiting to dance, doing their nails, reading books, talking, talking, talking, about each other and their customers and me. One little nugget of gold turns into a gold mine. One conversation, one pat on the shoulder, one laugh, one tear, and boom.” He smiled. “I want to answer your questions, about the impact this incident had on our little world. But not if you presume that I had an affair with Felicity.”
“Even if you did, the story is more about the effect on this... well, community.”
