“This leaves us with the question: Where do they go?” she said.
On days Forrest rode his bike—purportedly to train for the big Labor Day event—he probably rode to some secret location they’d found. Then there were all those swimming days when he left the house in nothing but his trunks—gone for hours, supposedly to circumnavigate the lake.
Though houses lined parts of the lakeshore, there were wild spots too, where a pair of lovers might arrange a rendezvous. I could picture Brenda standing on the edge of Lake Catherine in one of those spots, waiting for Forrest—wearing a large hat to protect her precious complexion, and that heavy foundation makeup, with a blanket laid out on the ground. Forrest would emerge like a seal out of the water, his arms enfolding her. She’d get wet, but she wouldn’t care.
Seals didn’t live in lakes, of course. He’d be more like a water snake.
It was also possible they’d find a day when the Red Sox were playing and Kyle was off at some sports bar, watching the game. Then they might meet up at her rental cottage after all. Emerging from the water onto the Barnetts’ small, muddy patch of lakefront, so unlike the vast green lawn of Wonderland. Forrest would make his way up the pathto her back door. Brenda would be wearing a negligee with nothing on underneath.
I put fresh sheets on the bed,she’d say. She’d lead the way. As much as Forrest loved doing it on the grass, he’d make an exception then.
“If something like that happens,” Regina told me, “you’ll need to look in the windows. A stepladder may be necessary.”
43
Rendezvous
Ihadn’t even begun my investigation but already I knew a few things. Forrest went swimming almost every morning now, which suggested that his spot for meeting up with Brenda was more than likely somewhere along the water.
I’d taken note of the fact that though Forrest and Brenda’s affair had probably only been going on for a few weeks, his body seemed even more toned and fit than usual. Of course you could chalk this up to his rigorous training regimen, but to Regina and me, this served as further evidence that Forrest was keeping himself in the best possible shape for Brenda. Billy, the handyman, had even made a joke about it. Billy was a bodybuilder. He’d taken note of Forrest’s abs.
“You’re looking good, man,” he said, as the two of them shared a beer after Billy had finished up the mowing—Forrest shirtless, on account of the heat. “You got a girlfriend or something?”
He said this like it was a joke.
“Oh, you know,” Forrest told Billy. “Just the usual. Bo Derek. Morgan Fairchild.”
“I’ll need you to write everything down,” Regina told me. She handed me a spiral notebook small enough to keep in the pocket of my shorts.
This was when I pointed out to Regina that most detectives—every detective I’d ever heard about in books or on television, in fact—had some kind of vehicle to get around in. Even Nancy Drew drove a car—something referred to in the early books as a roadster. In the later ones she shifted to a Mustang convertible. All I had was a bike.
“That’s the beauty of how you’ll operate,” Regina told me. “Nobody suspects a girl on a bicycle to be doing anything important. And a bicycle is compact and quiet. Unlike a car, you can lay it down in tall grass and nobody knows you’re there.
“You’ll hide,” she said. “You’ll write down everything. What you see. What you hear.”
She handed me a camera—an unusually small Polaroid. Also a pocket-sized tape recorder, the kind a newspaper reporter might use doing an interview.
One more thing. Regina recognized that it could be difficult fulfilling my responsibilities as a mother’s helper while conducting my detective work. For this reason, she told me, she’d step in herself to bring the children to tennis when needed.
Jilly and Hayward may have something to say about that,I thought. I kept the observation to myself.
I didn’t mention this, but one of my principal concerns about Regina’s plan had to do with how my own tennis lessons would fit into the new schedule—how I could make time for hitting with Jonathan while spending my days riding my bike around, looking for Forrest and Brenda.
“Maybe I’ll just do this stuff on certain days,” I said. “It’s kind of a lot for someone my age.”
Regina ignored my reservations.
“You’re a smart girl, Frances,” she said. “I have no doubt you’ll figure it out.”
What she hadn’t explained to me yet was where I was supposed to go on my bicycle to locate the lovers. And what I would do, exactly, assuming I did.
44
From a Place like Every Song Bruce Springsteen Ever Wrote Rolled into One
Ihardly ever picked up the phone when it rang at Wonderland, but that day I did—adopting the words Prudence used when she answered a call. On the other end of the line, a familiar gravelly voice.
“‘Emerson residence?’ What kind of crap are they teaching you there?”
