F is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton Read Free Book Online

prepared to cope with any actual loss. Murder would have been beyond comprehension. Jean Timberlake’s death probably still generated discussion among the people she knew, giving rise to a disquiet that marred the memories of youth. Bailey Fowler’s sudden reappearance in the community was going to stir it all up again: uneasiness, rage, the nearly incomprehensible feelings of waste and dismay.
    On impulse, I parked the car and searched out the library,which turned out to be much like the one at Santa Teresa High. The space was airy and open, the noise level subdued. The vinyl floor tile was a mottled beige, polished to a dull gleam. The air smelled like furniture polish, construction paper, and paste. I must have eaten six jars of LePage’s during my grade-school years. I had a friend who ate pencil shavings. There’s a name for that now, for kids who eat inorganic oddities like gravel and clay. In my day, it just seemed like a fun thing to do and no one ever gave it a passing thought as far as I knew.
    The library tables were sparsely occupied and the reference desk was being handled by a young girl with frizzy hair and a ruby drilled into the side of her nose. She had apparently been seized by a fit of self-puncturing because both ears had been pierced repeatedly from the lobe to the helix. In lieu of earrings, she was sporting the sort of items you’d find in my junk drawer at home: paper clips, screws, safety pins, shoelaces, wing nuts. She was perched on a stool with a copy of
Rolling Stone
open on her lap. Mick Jagger was on the cover, looking sixty if a day.
    â€œHi.”
    She looked at me blankly.
    â€œI wonder if you can give me some help. I used to be a student here and I can’t find my yearbook. Do you have any copies? I’d like to take a look.”
    â€œUnder the window. First and second shelves.”
    I pulled the annuals from three separate years and took them to a table on the far side of a row of freestandingbookcases. A bell rang and the corridor began to fill with the rustling sound of students on the move. The slamming of locker doors was punctuated by the babble of voices, laughter bouncing off the walls with the harsh echo of a racquetball court. The ghostly scent of gym socks wafted in.
    I traced Jean Timberlake’s picture back, volume by volume, like the aging process in reverse. During her high school years, while the rest of California’s youth were protesting the war, smoking dope, and heading for the Haight, the girls at Central Coast were teasing their hair into glossy towers, putting black lines around their eyes and white gloss on their lips. The junior girls wore white blouses and bouffant hair, which curved out in a heavily sprayed flip at the sides. The guys had damp-looking crewcuts and braces on their teeth. They couldn’t have guessed how soon they’d be sporting sideburns, beards, bell-bottoms, and psychedelic shirts.
    Jean never looked like she had anything in common with the rest. In the few group pictures where I spotted her, she never grinned and she had none of the bouncy-looking innocence of the Debbies and the Tammies. Jean’s eyes were hooded, her gaze remote, and the faint smile that played on her mouth suggested a private amusement still evident after all these years. The blurb in the senior index listed no committees or clubs. She hadn’t been burdened with scholastic honors or elective offices, and she hadn’t bothered to participate in any extracurricular activities. I leafed throughcandid shots taken at various school functions, but I never did catch sight of her. If she went to football or basketball games, she must have hovered somewhere beyond the range of the school photographer. She wasn’t in the senior play. All the prom pictures focused on the queen, Barbie Knox, and her entourage of beehived, white-lipped princesses. Jean Timberlake was dead by then. I jotted down the names of her more conspicuous