Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [88]
“I hear you want to talk to me about Jimmy,” Gillian says. Her heart feels too big for her chest.
“I’m afraid I do.” Gary sizes Gillian up fast—the tattoo on her wrist, the way she takes one step back when he addresses her, as if she expects to be hit. “Have you seen him recently?”
“I ran away in June. I took his car and hit the road and haven’t heard from him since.”
Gary nods and makes some notes, but the notes are just scribbles, nothing but nonsense words. Ivory Snow, he’s written at the top of the page. Wolverine. Apple pie. Two plus two equals four. Darling. He’s jotting down anything in order to appear concentrated on official business. This way, Sally and her sister won’t be able to look into his eyes and sense that he doesn’t believe Gillian. She wouldn’t have had the nerve to take off with her boyfriend’s car, and Hawkins wouldn’t have let it go so easy. No way. He would have caught up with her before she reached the state line.
“Probably a smart move,” Gary says. He’s done this before, smoothed out the doubt so it doesn’t seep through his voice. He reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out Hawkins’s legal record and spreads it across the table for Gillian to see.
Gillian sits down to get a better look. “Wow,” she says.
Jimmy’s first arrest for drugs was so many years back he couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Gillian runs her finger down a list of crimes that goes on and on; the misdemeanors becoming more violent with every year, until they veer into felonies. It looks as if they were living together when he was picked up for his last aggravated assault, and he never bothered to mention it. Unless Gillian is mistaken, Jimmy told her he’d gone to Phoenix to help his cousin move some furniture on the day of his court date.
She cannot believe what an idiot she was for all those years. She knew more about Ben Frye after two hours than she knew about Jimmy after four years. Jimmy seemed mysterious back then, with deep secrets he had to keep. Now the facts are apparent; he was a thief and a liar, and she went and sat still for it for longer than would seem humanly possible.
“I had no idea,” Gillian says. “I swear to you. All that time, I never asked him any questions about where he went and what he did.” Her eyes feel hot, and when she blinks it doesn’t do any good. “Not that that’s any excuse.”
“You don’t have to make any excuses for who you love,” Gary says. “Don’t apologize.”
Gillian will have to pay even more attention to this investigator. He’s got a particular way of observing things that catches you up short. Why, before he introduced the idea that love was blameless, Gillian never once stopped to consider she might not be responsible for everything that went wrong. She glances over to gauge Sally’s reaction, but Sally is staring at Gary and she has a funny look on her face. It’s a look that worries Gillian, because it’s totally unlike Sally. Standing there, with her back against the refrigerator, Sally seems much too vulnerable. Where is her armor, where is her guard, where is the logic that can put it all back together again?
“The reason I’m looking for Mr. Hawkins,” Gary explains to Gillian, “is that it appears he sold some poisonous plant matter to several college students which has been the cause of three deaths. He offered them LSD, then went and supplied them with the seeds of some highly hallucinogenic, highly toxic weeds.”
“Three deaths.” Gillian shakes her head. Jimmy told her there’d been two. He told her it wasn’t his fault; the kids were greedy and stupid and tried to trick him out of the money he was rightfully due. “Fucking spoiled brats,” that’s what he’d called them. “College-boy babies.” He could lie about anything, as though it were a sport. Gillian feels ill thinking how she automatically believed Jimmy and took his side. Those kids must have been looking for trouble. She remembers thinking that. “This is awful,” she tells Gary Hallet about the deaths at the university. “It’s horrible.”
“Your friend has