Obedience

“Dea

“Yes,” said Brian.

“You would want to talk to Bethany Cavendish. She was kin to Dea

Brian waited until the final bell rang at 2:15 p.m. and then he went upstairs to see Bethany Cavendish. She was a short, thin, masculine woman. He found her grading papers in a science room. She was wearing a Cale Blue Hens shirt that had been chemical stained in several spots, and her lab goggles were pushed up into her short, spiky hair. When Brian shook her hand, the woman gripped hard and pumped.

“Dea

She said it bluntly, almost spitting the word at Brian: man.

“Dea

“They thought Da

“At first. But we all knew. We all knew who was responsible.”

“Her father?” Brian asked.

“Uh-huh. Star. That was Dea

“The Big Bang,” Brian said.

“He even had stars custom painted on his bike, which cost him and Wendy a pretty pe

“Did he kill the man you talked about? In New Mexico?”

“I believe so. No, let me rephrase that: I know so. Star was as dangerous as they come. I have no idea what sweet Wendy was doing with him. He’d probably taken her out on his bike one night and named all the constellations, and she thought he was something. That’s how it always goes in Cale. These girls, smart as tacks and pretty as they come, get swept under by these no-count boys. That’s the legacy of this town. Nothing else to do here, I guess, except run off with some crazy. She should have stayed at Winchester when she was there, but of course she got pregnant and dropped out.”

“She was a student at Winchester?”

“Should have been class of ’sixty-six, but it never turned out like that. She got pregnant and moved out here to Cale, and the rest is…”

“Yes,” Brian said, leading her.

“Anyway, they were all over Star for his New Mexico stuff. I heard they almost had that murder pi

“His own daughter.” Brian said it more to himself than to Bethany Cavendish. He was thinking of Polly’s father, of Mary Butler’s wild theory. He wondered now if Mary was right.

“When I told anybody this,” the teacher said, “they looked at me like I was sick. It almost goes beyond the human capacity to understand, how a father would kill his own daughter and hide the body. But people don’t know the whole story. This was not your normal, run-of-the-mill dude. He was bitter to the core. Evil. I wouldn’t have put anything past him. Not anything.

“And when Da

During Street, he thought. Where Polly lived. Suddenly the two narratives were ru

“I went to see her one day. She was broken up by it. Assaulted. A beaten woman. But Wendy wouldn’t give Star up. I pressed her on that. I wanted her to say that he did it, you know, to have it all over with. But she wouldn’t. She said she was horrified at the thought. She told me that Star had some flaws but he wasn’t as bad as all of us thought.”

“The police were on him, though,” Brian interjected. “They tailed him out to Bell City.”

“Yes. The cops followed Star. And I guess they found this little girl. He was keeping her out in Bell City in this trailer, and they raided it and arrested Star, and thinking the girl was Dea

Nick Bourdoix. Brian couldn’t remember where he’d heard that name, but it was familiar.

“Bourdoix said that the girl had been dressed up to look like Dea

“She said she was Dea

“That’s how I heard it. She told them she was Dea

“What happened to Star?” Brian asked.

“They had to let him go, of course. They had nothing on him. He and Wendy and the two boys moved out to San Francisco, where his family’s from. And Dea