I suppose only the wildly optimistic in Springfield were surprised. I saw Les Mis. Turn your life around? It doesn’t matter. Maybe it shouldn’t. I’d never really thought about it before. I just knew Caroline Sturgis and couldn’t see what purpose it would serve to have her making license plates in the big house for the next fifteen years.
I turned off Babe’s computer. It was time for that drink, and Babe Chinnery obliged, pulling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a small wooden cabinet under the window in her office. I’d had a Jack night once a few years back. All I remember was that I forgot where I parked my car, and it was a damn good thing, since driving would have been suicidal.
“What do you have for lightweights?” I asked.
“How about a dark and stormy-rum and ginger beer?”
“Maybe just coffee for now.”
Babe locked up her office and we took our time walking to the diner’s front entrance. If I hadn’t spent the time going to Mossdale’s and blowing eighty dollars on lunch, maybe I could have driven to Bridgeport and convinced Caroline to see me, but it was too late to speculate.
“Something happened that day,” I said. “She got a ticket, saw the priest, and then came here. However startling those first two events might have been, they didn’t put her out of commission. She was pretty happy when she got here.”
“Yeah, she came in to see you, you talked, she started to leave, and the trucker hit on her,” Babe said. “That long-haired guy who tried to help Terry?” I didn’t know who she was talking about, then realized the waitress with the bolt in her eyebrow was Terry.
“She flung a tray of coffee cups and nearly decapitated someone? You were there, remember?”
“Right. The guy who said Caroline looked familiar,” I said, trying to dredge up a mental image.
“Please, I hear that ten times a day. It only registers when it’s one of my regular customers and I’m worried that it’s early stage Alzheimer’s.”
“Maybe he wasn’t throwing her a line. Maybe she looked familiar because he knew her back in Michigan when she was Monica Weithorn. Maybe she was upset because he looked familiar to her.” Could be. It was right after that that Caroline made her hasty departure, giving some phony excuse to her friends outside.
All I remembered was that the trucker had long hair and wore a baseball hat, but Terry had spoken with him. He’d even gotten a laugh out of her, which was the first time I’d ever seen her teeth. Maybe something about him stuck with her.
“He was with another driver, someone you knew, wasn’t he?”
“Retro Joe,” she said. “No one knows if that’s his real name-that’s just what everyone calls him. One of the long haulers. I can almost see the truck, red logo, two letters interlocked. I’ll get it but it may take some time. But those guys don’t always drive with the same partners.”
Inside the diner, we escorted Terry to a booth and sat her down to ask her a few questions.
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? You guys are worse than my parents. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I dropped the tray and he helped me clean up until Babe came over. It was two seconds. No great meeting of the minds.”
I went into schmooze mode. “Come on, Terry. You’re an observant girl. And sensitive. You write songs-you notice things about people.” She looked down, working hard to live up to my flattering assessment of her powers of perception and conjure up his image. All three of us were.
“He had long hair and a baseball hat. He said something that made you laugh,” I prompted. “What did he say?”
“It was nothing. Something stupid, like I had a nice wrist move. He was a champion Frisbee player when he was in college, so he would know. It just seemed like a dumb thing to say at the time, but it was perfect. Better than asking if I was okay. I hate when people ask me that.”
(Note to self: When we’re finished, don’t ask if she’s okay.)
“Did he mention where he went to school?” I asked.
“Man, it was all of two minutes. It wasn’t a date. He said it was cold and they jumped around a lot to keep warm.” She ratcheted down and gave it some more thought. “His friend called him JW-he was with Retro Joe.” Then she made an up-and-down motion with one hand, almost as if she were playing a washboard. “And he had something strange about his lip. You could barely see it because of the facial hair. A scar-like the guy who played Johnny Cash in that movie.”
“He had a cleft lip?”
“I don’t know what you call it. It’s kind of cute, like a little line. And his hat had an ornate D on it.”
“D like in Dodgers?” Babe asked.
A voice over my shoulder said, “No,” and three heads turned in its direction at the same time. It was one of the truckers.
He peeled off a few bills and left them on the counter. “D like in Tigers. Detroit Tigers,” he said.