S Is for Silence

but I hadn’t stepped on his—as far as I knew.
    I said, “You were, what, sixteen in Violet Sullivan’s day?”
    “I was a junior in high school.”
    “Did you know Liza Mellincamp’s boyfriend?”
    “Ty Eddings? Sure, though more by reputation than anything else. I knew his cousin, Kyle. They were both a year ahead of me so we didn’t have much occasion to interact. Actually, I’m not sure anyone knew Ty that well. He transferred in from East Bakersfield High School in March of that year. By the time July rolled around, he was gone again.”
    “Somebody told me he left the same weekend Violet did.”
    “No connection that I know of. They were both troublemakers, but that’s about it. He’d been kicked out of EBHS and sent to live with his aunt in hopes he’d mend his wicked ways. Guess that idea flopped.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Word had it that he’d taken up with Liza Mellincamp, who was all of thirteen. The year before, he’d knocked up a fifteen-year-old girl and she ended up dead from a botched abortion. Ty was accorded outlaw status. Very cool in those days.”
    “He wasn’t disliked or avoided?”
    “Not a bit. We were all big on drama back then. Ty was regarded as a tragic hero because everyone thought he and the dead girl were deeply in love and her parents had forced them apart. He was Romeo to her Juliet, only he came out of the deal a lot better than she did.”
    “But is it out of the question that he and Violet might have gotten together? Two black sheep?”
    “Well, it’s always possible, though it doesn’t seem likely. Violet was in her twenties and married to boot, so she hardly registered with us. We lived in a world of our own. You know how it is; the big event for us was two classmates who got killed in a car accident. Violet was a grownup. Nobody cared about her. Liza was the one I felt sorry for.”
    “I don’t wonder,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday and she said she was crushed when Ty left town. What was that about?”
    “The story I heard was Ty’s aunt got a phone call from someone who told her he was fooling around with another underage girl, namely Liza. That was Friday night. The aunt turned around and called his mother, who’d flown to Chicago for a wedding. She got back to Bakersfield late Saturday night and picked him up first thing Sunday morning.”
    “You’d think he could have gotten word to Liza. She was dumped without so much as a by-your-leave.”
    “I guess good manners weren’t his thing.”
    “What happened after that? I asked, but she wasn’t happy about the question so I left it alone.”
    “Things went from bad to worse. Her parents had divorced when she was eight. She’d been living with her mom—essentially without supervision, since her mother drank. When her dad got wind of her relationship with Ty, he flew out from Colorado, packed her up, and took her back to live with him. Of course that went nowhere. The two didn’t get along; she hated his new family and she was back the next year. No big surprise. You take a kid like her, used to freedom, and she’s not going to react kindly to parental control.”
    “How’d he hear about Ty if he was in Colorado?”
    “He still had contacts in town.”
    “So she ended up living with her mom again?”
    “Not for long. Sally Mellincamp died in a house fire the next year and a local family took Liza in. Charlie Clements was a good guy and didn’t want to see her sucked into the foster care system. He owned the auto-repair shop in Serena Station that I bought when he retired in 1962. Liza married his son.”
    “So everything connects.”
    “One way or another; it sure looks that way.”
    Steve was called out to the service bay, but he urged me to stay where I was until my car was ready. His office was small and utilitarian—metal desk, metal chair, metal files, and the smell of oil. Parts manuals and work orders were stacked up everywhere. I took advantage of the moment to review my index cards, playing with the information every way I could. A moment would come when everything would lock into place (she said bravely to herself ). Right now, the bits and pieces were a jumble, and I couldn’t quite see where any of them fit.
    It was Winston’s confession I kept coming back to. For years he’d kept quiet about seeing Violet’s car. Now I realized how lucky I was his wife was booting him out. Because he was pissed with her, all bets were off, and he felt no compunction