The sting of rejection in his voice is clear even all these years later. She sure as hell doesn’t buy this idea Fauver has of himself as righteous, good, just because he never forced a girl into sex—if he’s even to be believed. “How do you know she slept with Brentwood?”
“She was always trying to make me jealous. All,‘Trent’s going to take me to prom, Trent and I are hanging out Saturday…’”
“Did it work? Were you jealous?” There’s still a version of the story she can picture with Fauver at the center, jilted and taking revenge on the girl who taunted him, turned him down.
But Fauver only shakes his head and climbs into his car, leaves her shivering in the dark.
Trent Brentwood iseasy enough to find in the system. He’s got a few priors, arrested for possession, a little bit of weed. A DUI five years back. She’s able to find him easily on social media too. He’s a skinny white guy, blue-eyed with thick, fringed lashes. Posts lots of photos of the bay at sunset. Of himself on the back of a fishing boat. One in a blood-stained apron with the name of the fish market where he works. Geotags. Employer. A shot crouched by the tailgate of his truck, license plate in clear view. His whole life laid out for anyone to see.
Three days laterCallie is off and not watching Opal until the afternoon. She decides to interview Brentwood, will try him at the fishmarket where he works down in Sea Isle. As she drives the thickness of the woods yields to a wide stretch of parkway, but still there are stands of pine along the side of the road even as she starts to smell salt in the air, sees signs for Cape May and Wildwood, the casinos of Atlantic City across the marsh. But sunlight—so much sunlight, compared to the Pine Barrens—riches of it, gilds everything. She arrives at a little tollbooth perched high on the middle of a bridge, and then just on the other side she’s in Fish Alley, fishmongers and bait shops and seafood restaurants where people can tie their boat up while they enjoy a scampi and white wine.
She likes talking to people when they’re at work. They’re less inclined to make a fuss, don’t want to draw the boss’s attention, whereas at home, on their way to their cars, they have doors to slam. Places to recede. Another one of the reasons it’s been hard to press Billy Fauver—he only seems to answer to himself, has no appearances to keep up.
There’s a clatter of bells when she walks into the market, which is charmingly old-school. Trent Brentwood stands behind the display case where whole striped bass, silver and shimmering, laid out on snowy beds of chipped ice. Blue claw crabs in rows, metal buckets filled with rings of cleaned squid, a doormat of a flounder with its flat, dead eye fixed skyward. In a freezer behind her, quarts of fish stock. A tank of lobsters, all in one lethargic pile. Homemade red sauce. Piles of lemons in wire baskets and tins of Old Bay stacked in a pyramid.
Brentwood has tattooed forearms: several women’s names in script, a picture of Jesus looking mournful, his hands pressed together in prayer. She knows before she sees it that somewhere on his body it saysMother, and as he wraps a fillet of tuna in brown paper she spots it, curling out from underneath his gloved hand. He hands the fish to a wooly-haired woman who drops it right into her handbag.
“What are you cooking tonight, Mrs. Wentzel?”
“I’ll sear this and make a side of potatoes and green beans, somegood bread from the market—they bake fresh on Tuesdays, you know—and for dessert some banana pudding.”
“Okay then. What time should I come over?” He bats his eyelashes at her.
“Oh, Trent, you come over any old time, okay?”
“You’re sweet, Mrs. W. You’re the best. You enjoy your dinner, okay? And one of these days I’m gonna take you up on that.”
Mrs. Wentzel moves toward the door and his eyes fall on Callie. “What can I get for you, Miss? We got bluefin, just caught this morning. If I were you I’d snatch that up while it’s fresh.” Ah, he’s one of those, she thinks. The kind of man who can make anything about sex. Mrs. Wentzel felt it. Callie feels it now. Something indecent about the most banal of questions, how he cut a glance at Callie when he saidsnatch. This is her guy.
“You’re Trent Brentwood, right?”
At the sound of the last name he understands this is serious. The smile that crinkled his eyes contracts. His flirtation revoked. “That’s me.”
“I’m Chief Callie Hauser, Pine Lakes. Do you have a minute to talk?”
Brentwood calls out to a coworker she can’t see over his shoulders and she can tell he’s wary by the way his shoulders rise. “Hey Doug, can you come cover me up here for a bit? I gotta go down to the docks.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Callie even while he pulls his gloves off and even in this, she sees it, the proximity to sex. The snap and slide of the rubber reminding her of the way some men pull off a condom. Watching you watch them do it.
“You gotta stop smoking so much, dude,” comes a voice from the back.
“Quitting next week, brother, quitting next week.”
Callie follows Trent out of the shop, across a parking lot littered with crushed clamshells, and down to a bench near the docks. She feels something too, replacing the flirtatiousness. Fury. Brentwood is skinny but she can see him being the kind of guy who gets intobar brawls. Who has a surprising strength coiled tight in him. Can see those white teeth gritted into a grimace. Interesting. Fauver isn’t cleared in her mind, but she can see Brentwood for Sabrina’s disappearance, too.
He’s agitated, ready to blow his lid without her doing much at all. She crosses her arms and he paces back and forth. She counts backward in her head from ten, knows he’ll talk first.
“Look,” he says. “If this is about child support, I’m doing the best I can, okay? I told Jenny, I told her, that things are a little rough right now. That it was going to be late.”
“I’m not here about Trisha.”
“Amanda?” He kicks at some of the clamshells. “Shit. She’s never asked me for a thing since that kid’s been born. She’s gonna start now?”
“I’m not here about Amanda either.”
He looks up, confused and intrigued.
“How many children do you have, Mr. Brentwood?”
“Four.” He pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his apron, shakes one loose, lights it, takes a long draw. “At least that I know of.” A flash of it again. That charm, the wink-wink of it.
