Ceremony Read Free

for very long, they looked both ways all the time.
    "Kid's hot stuff," Cataldo said. "Queen of the burnouts. I've hauled her home four, five times now, puking drunk. Usually the old lady will take her in and clean her up and get her into bed so the old man won't know."
    "During the day'?"
    "Sometimes-sometimes middle of the afternoon, sometimes later at night. Sometimes one of us will find her on some back road five miles from anywhere and pick her up and bring her home."
    "She get left?" I said.
    Cataldo slowed and looked at a parked car and then moved on. "She never says, but I'd say so. Some guys pick her up in the old man's car, take her for a ride, get their ashes hauled, and drop her off."
    "Guys?"
    "Yeah, sure-queen of the gang bang, that's old April."
    "She always drunk?" I said.
    Cataldo took a right. "Nope. Sometimes she's stoned. Sometimes she's neither, sometimes she's just goddamned crazy," he said.
    "High on life."
    "Yeah."
    The houses on either side of the street were set among trees and their yards were broad. In the driveways were Volvo station wagons and Volkswagen Rabbits, here and there a Mercedes sedan. Only occasionally a Chevy Caprice or a Buick Skylark. Smithfield was not obsessive about buying American.
    "You ever have to bust her?"
    Cataldo shook his head. "I don't think there's a town ordinance against gang bangs. If there is, we don't enforce it. We've brought her in a couple of times for failing to disperse when ordered but, christ, we don't even have a matron full time. Her mother always comes down."
    "How's the kid act when you pick her up?" I said.
    Cataldo swung into the curving drive in front of the high school. In the faculty lot to the right I could see Susan's Bronco, looming like a rhinoceros above the Datsuns and Chevettes. The school was mid-sixties red brick, square and graceless. One of the glass doors in the entry had been shattered, and a piece of plywood closed the gap. Susan had moved up from the junior high school when someone retired. No more eighth graders she had said at the time, and two years later she showed no regrets. Susan doing high school guidance had always seemed to me like Greta Garbo co-starring with Dean Jones.
    "Mostly depends on how drunk or stoned or whatever, you know. If she was drunk she'd be abusive, if she was stoned she'd be sort of quiet and not with it-go-aheadarrest-me-I-don't-give-a-shit sort of attitude. If she was sober, she'd be sullen and tough and smoke cigarettes in the corner of her mouth." "She have any boyfriends?"
    Cataldo drove on out of the driveway of the high school and we cruised across the street into a development of high-priced homes.
    "April." He grinned. "She has several at a time, usually for half an hour in the back seat of Dad's Buick."
    "Besides that?"
    He shook his head. "No. She hangs on the wall with Hummer a lot, but no dating or that crap." He looked over at me for a moment. "You got to understand these kids, Spenser. Having a boyfriend just isn't something you ask about kids like her. You know? I mean, she don't go down to the fucking malt shop either."
    "You got a malt shop in this town?"
    "No." Behind the lifeless November lawns, merged one into the next, the new colonial houses gleamed in the rain, expensive variations of the same architectural plan like the Kyles' furniture on a larger scale, a neighborhood set: grand, functional, costly, neatly organized, and as charming as a set of dentures. It made me think fondly of L.A. In L.A. there was room for lunacy.
    "If you were going to look for her, where would you start?" I said.
    Cataldo shrugged, "Boston, I suppose. She's not around town. Or at least I haven't seen her in the last few days. Usually kids take off from here, they go to Boston."
    "Anyplace special?"
    "In Boston, how the hell do I know? That's your area, man. I get in maybe twice a year for a Sox game."
    "Why do you think she acts like she does?" I said.
    Cataldo laughed. "Before I got on the cops I worked