“OK,” I said. “Who is she?” For some reason my knees felt shaky. I got my back up against a tree.
“May-Ruth Thibodeaux, born in North Carolina in 1975, reported missing in October 2000 and wanted for car theft. Prints and photo both match.”
My breath went out with a little rush. “Cassie?” Frank said, after a moment. I heard him draw on a cigarette. “You still there?”
“Yeah. May-Ruth Thibodeaux.” Saying it made my back prickle. “What do we know about her?”
“Not a lot. No info till 1997, when she moved to Raleigh from someplace in the arsehole of nowhere, rented a fleabag apartment in a crap neighborhood and got a job waiting tables in an all-night diner. She had an education somewhere along the way if she was able to jump straight into a postgrad at Trinity, but it’s looking like self-taught or homeschooled; she doesn’t show up on the register at any local college or high school. No criminal record.”
Frank blew out smoke. “On the evening of October tenth 2000, she borrowed her fiancé’s car to get to work, but she never showed up. He filed a missing-person report a couple of days later. The cops didn’t take it too seriously; they figured she’d just taken off. They gave the fiancé a little hassle, just in case he’d killed her and dumped her somewhere, but his alibi was good. The car turned up in New York in December 2000, at long-term parking at Kennedy Airport.”
He was very pleased with himself. “Nice one, Frank,” I said automatically. “Fair play to you.”
“We aim to please,” Frank said, trying to sound modest.
She was only a year younger than me, after all. I was playing marbles in soft rain in a Wicklow garden and she was running wild in some hot small town, barefoot at the soda fountain and jolting down dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck, till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.
“Cassie?”
“Yeah.”
“My contact’s going to do some more digging, see if she made any serious enemies along the way-anyone who might’ve tracked her here.”
“Sounds good,” I said, trying to pull my head together. “That sounds like the kind of thing I might want to know. What was the fiancé’s name?”
“Brad, Chad, Chet, one of those American yokes…” Papers rustling. “My boy made a couple of phone calls, and the guy hasn’t missed a day of work in months. No way he hopped across the pond to kill off the ex. Chad Andrew Mitchell. Why?”
No N. “I just wondered.”
Frank waited, but I’m good at that game. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “I’ll keep you posted. The ID might take us nowhere, but still, it’s nice to have some kind of handle on this girl. Makes it easier to get your head round the idea of her, no?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
It wasn’t true. After Frank hung up I spent a long time leaning against that tree, watching the broken outline of the cottage slowly fade and reappear as clouds moved across the moon, thinking about May-Ruth Thibodeaux. Somehow, giving her back her own name, her own hometown, her own story, brought it home to me: she had been real, not just a shadow cast by my mind and Frank’s; she had been alive. There had been thirty years in which we could have come face to face.
It seemed to me suddenly that I should have known; an ocean away, but it seemed like I should have felt her there all along, like every now and then I should have looked up from my marbles or my textbook or my case report as if someone had called my name. She came all those thousands of miles, close enough to slip on my old name like a sister’s hand-me-down coat, she came pulled like a compass needle and she almost made it. She was only an hour’s drive away. and I should have known; I should have known, in time, to take that last step and find her.
The only shadows over that week came from outside. We were playing poker, Friday evening-they played cards a lot, late into the nights; mostly Texas Hold-’em or 110, sometimes piquet if only two people felt like playing. The stakes were just tarnished ten-pence pieces from a huge jar someone had found in the attic, but they took it seriously all the same: everyone started with the same number of coins and when you were out you were out, no borrowing from the stash. Lexie, like me, had been a pretty decent card player; her calls hadn’t always made a lot of sense, but apparently she had learned to make the unpredictability work for her, especially on big hands. The winner got to choose the next day’s dinner menu.
