Page 44 of Fade Out
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to seem too disappointed. Although, what I thought I’d find out, I have no idea. I turned and began to walk away.
“Hold on,” he said, stopping me. “You know, why don’t you talk to Cathy Clough? She’s right up there in the bleachers. Her daughter Tia is our second flute. I think Cathy is class of seventy or seventy-one. Somewhere around there.”
“Which one is she?”
“Sunglasses, purple scarf.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I looked over to the bleachers and picked out a woman close to my own age wearing a giant pair of sunglasses—very dark, white plastic—and a purple scarf in her hair. She wore a pressed white blouse without sleeves, a tight pair of khaki shorts and leather sandals.
When I got to her, I said, “Hi. Sorry to bother you. The, uh, bandleader thought you might be able to help me. I’m trying to locate my cousin who was a student here in the late sixties. Rita Lindquist?”
She looked over the edge of her glasses at me. Her eyes were pretty but bloodshot. “You’re lying. You’re a reporter, aren’t you? You guys called a couple of friends of mine.”
“Um, busted.”
Turning away from me she watched the field.
“Do you remember Rita?” I asked.
“I didn’t know her, not really. I haven’t talked to her since we were sixteen. And I certainly don’t know anything about her murder.”
“That’s okay. I’m doing a deep background kind of story. I want to let our readers know what kind of person she was.”
“Which paper?”
“Daily Herald.” That seemed to please her, so I marched on. “What kind of kid was Rita?”
“A mess. Her mother died when we were in grade school. We were a year apart, so I knew of her more than knowing her.”
The more she told me she didn’t know Rita, the more I believed she did.
“It was just her and her father. They had a little house, on Prospect I think. Her dad wasn’t there much. The house was disgusting. Dirty dishes everywhere. Weeks old. Just gross. But that didn’t stop us from hanging out there. You know, kids.”
“Did you hang out there a lot?”
“No. A couple of months maybe. During my stoner phase. My very brief stoner phase.”
“Did she have any other relatives? A cousin, maybe, someone who was a bit younger than her?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but the girl in the box could be related to her.
Cathy shook her head. “I mean she might have had cousins or whatever. She stopped coming to school before she was even seventeen. So, you know, I lost contact.”
“Did something happen? Was there a reason she stopped coming to school?”
Cathy shrugged. “Probably. But we were kids. If we didn’t know what was happening we just made it up. There were rumors, but I don’t think any of them were true.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“That she’d had a baby and gotten married, that she’d gotten arrested, that she joined some Christian choir touring the country. It was ridiculous.”
“Didn’t you ever just go by her house to find out?”
“I think I did once, but she wasn’t there.” Then she looked at me very seriously. “Do you really think any of this had to do with her getting murdered?”
“Probably not,” I said. “It does paint kind of a sad picture, though. Well, thank you.”
I began to walk away. As I did, she said, “It said in the newspaper that she took over her dad’s business. That she was a private eye. When we were kids she’d tell us she worked with him. We didn’t believe her, but now I wonder. She was kind of weird about her dad too.”
