“Ah.”
“And when I said the name April Cooper... I can’t explain it, but her face kind of lit up, like she’d been waiting all her life to be asked about her.”
Quentin held up a hand. “Is it okay if I record you?”
“Seriously?”
“It’s not for broadcast. Just for my own notes.”
Melanie broke out in a grin. “I’d be honored.”
Once he’d turned on his voice recorder and placed it between them, Melanie repeated that last sentence—not just a podcast listener, but someone who had a true understanding of the way they worked. Quentin had a passing thought about hiring her at the station, whisking her away from all the drudgery and stale heat and craft stores. “What did Mrs. Brixton say?”
“It wasn’t what I expected.”
“In what way?”
“Well... I always thought of April Cooper as an angry person, you know? Angry at her stepfather for being so strict with her. Angry at her mother for dying. You know what I’m saying? A girl who was pissed off enough to kill. But Mrs. Brixton told me that the April she knew was actually very hopeful. She’d meet with her after class sometimes, and they’d talk about the future.”
“Like the distant future?”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Mrs. Brixton said she came up with an assignment. ‘Letter to My Future Child.’ She wanted the kids to describe their current lives and predict what the world might be like in the year 2000. She said she kept the letters, and sent them back to whatever students she was able to track down twenty-four years later. Anyway... she only did it that one year. And April was the one who’d inspired her.”
“What about her was so inspirational?”
“Well... It’s kind of an odd thing for a high school freshman to say. I know when I was that age I couldn’t imagine anything worse,” she said. “But April told Mrs. Brixton she couldn’t wait to be a mother.”
Quentin’s eyes widened. He turned off the voice recorder. “You, um... you said Mrs. Brixton was at last year’s homecoming.”
“That’s right.”
“I bet her address is on file here, right? I mean, how else would they have sent the invitation?”
Melanie looked at him for a few moments, ruby lips twitching into a smile. “I can find it for you,” she said. “Just don’t tell my boss.”
“You’re the best human being I’ve met in years, Melanie.”
Quentin followed her down the sad, empty hallway and back to the front desk, where she clicked into the school’s “Friends of SRHS” database and found Edith Brixton’s address and phone number. She wrote them both on a slip of paper and slid it to him facedown, as though they were a couple of wheeler-dealers in a cheesy old movie, negotiating a deal. “No worries,” she said, after he thanked her. “Just make something great for me to listen to.”
Once he was back in his car, Edith Brixton’s address plugged into his GPS, Quentin found George Pollard on his voice recorder. He replayed that wistful voice describing his first true love, using the same words that had been looping through his own mind, the exact words Melanie had quoted Mrs. Brixton as saying about the smiling girl in the yearbook photo, again and again and again:She couldn’t wait to be a mother.
“AND WHO MIGHTyou be?” Edith Brixton’s neighbor said as Quentin approached the door to her home—a tidy ranch house amidsta swarm of nearly identical one- and two-story stucco buildings at Serenity Springs, a seniors-only condominium complex in West Covina. He’d spoken to Edith on the phone on his way over and was pleasantly surprised to find her both lucid (you never knew past a certain age) and happy to hear from him. “Come right over,” she had said. “Melanie told me all about you.”Melanie, the gift that keeps on giving. So, when he parked his car on the quiet street outside her home and strode up to her front door, he may have done it with a little too much exuberance and bravado. The neighbor, after all, seemed suspicious. Quentin turned to her—a woman probably in her mid-seventies with a dyed-black updo and a perfectly round face. She sweated into a tracksuit of tight pink velour, her face flushed, glasses dangling from her neck on a rhinestone rope. She clutched a skittish little terrier in her arms that yapped and yapped, as though it had been born into the wrong life and was desperately trying to alert the world about it.
“I’m a friend of the family.” Quentin gave the neighbor his most winning smile, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“Is Edith expecting you?”
“Yes.”
Her face relaxed a little. “Is she... uh... leaving with you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you taking her away?”
