“I’ll be right outside,” she said to her daughter.

Arthur took her arm and they went out. Molly closed the office door. Jesse leaned back in his chair and looked at Katie. She looked back at him, trying for defiance.

“So?” she said.

Jesse smiled.

“So,” he said.

“Like you never had sex?”

“I’m proud to say I did have sex, and hope to again,” Jesse said.

“So, you think I’m too young?”

“Probably,” Jesse said.

“You never had sex when you was my age?”

“No,” Jesse grinned again. “But it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“Everybody my age has had sex,” she said.

“Probably not all of them with a stranger forty years older, in front of a video camera,” Jesse said.

“Turn you on?” she said.

She looked at him with her eyes wide open. Jesse looked back. Big, blue, innocent and stupid, he thought.

“You were maybe the twenty-fifth person I looked at,”

Jesse said. “I was a long way past turning on.”

“So, you gonna arrest me, or what?”

“I don’t quite know what to do with you, Katie. Let’s try talking about things, just sort of pleasantly. I won’t be a 1 6 5

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

tough guy, and you won’t be a sexpot, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.”

She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he had said.

“You married?”

“Divorced,” Jesse said.

“Got a girlfriend?”

Jesse smiled. “Actually, I’m living with my ex-wife,” he said.

“That’s weird.”

Jesse continued to smile.

“Yes,” he said. “It certainly is.”

“If you’re divorced, how come you live together.”

“It has to do with love,” Jesse said.

“You love her?”

“I think we love each other,” Jesse said.

“So how come you got divorced?”

“Long answer,” Jesse said. “The short version is, we had problems we couldn’t solve.”

“And now you can?”

“Maybe.”

“You gonna get married again?”

“I don’t know.”

“They got divorced five years ago,” Katie said.

“Your parents,” Jesse said.

“Yes,” Katie said. “I don’t care.”

Jesse nodded.

“And I don’t want you giving me a lot of crap about broken homes and that shit,” Katie said.

1 6 6

S E A C H A N G E

“Okay,” Jesse said.

“I always been kind of wild,” she said.

“Must worry the hell out of your mother,” Jesse said.

“She’s scared out of her gourd I’ll get pregnant, like she did.”

“Which was why she married your father?”

“Yeah, and had me.”

“Your father worry about you?” Jesse said.

“He’s in Louisville, Kentucky,” she said.

“So you don’t see him so often.”

“For sure,” she made it one word. “He got married again.

Got a kid.”

“And,” Jesse said, “I gather your mother dates.”

“She’s boy crazy,” Katie said. “Like me.”

“Or occasionally,” Jesse said, “man crazy.”

“You mean Harrison? Yeah. I really showed him something. He said he couldn’t believe how great I was. He’s got this huge yacht and tons of money. My mother’s probably jealous. She’s always pigging these losers.”

“So how’d you meet Harrison?” Jesse said.

“Actually I met Tommy first and he introduced me to Harrison.”

“Tommy?” Jesse said.

“Tommy Ralston. He’s got a yacht, too. The Sea Cloud. ”

“How’d you meet Tommy?” Jesse said.

“Cathleen Holton,” Katie said. “Cathleen brought a bunch of us out to Tommy’s boat. She said it was a chance to meet some really cool guys.”

“She have a boat?” Jesse said.

1 6 7

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

“Naw, Tommy sent a launch for us.”

“How many were you?”

“Excuse me?”

“How many of you went out.”

“Me,” she said. “And Cathleen, Beth, Nancy and Brittany, five all together.”

“All around your age?”

“I’m the youngest,” she said. “I always hang around with older kids.”

Jesse nodded.

“Tell me about what happened on the boat.”

“It was wild,” Katie said. “There were four guys and a couple of older women. We had drinks, and we smoked some weed, and the guys said it was like an initiation. We all had to have sex with all the guys.”

“Everybody cool with that?” Jesse said.

“Everybody but Nancy. She started to cry and said she didn’t feel good and wanted to go home.”

“And did she?”

“They said they’d have somebody take her home in the launch, but she had to do a striptease first.”

“She mind?”

“She didn’t want to, but they said she had to if she wanted to go home . . . so she did. It was pretty pathetic.”

“And then she went home?”

“Yeah, one of the sailors took her in the launch.”

“And the rest of you partied.”

“Yes.”

1 6 8

S E A C H A N G E

“And the older women?”

“First they watched, then they joined in.”

“Hell of a good time,” Jesse said.

“Sure, and then Tommy said I was so good that he wanted me to meet his dear friend, and said could I come back tomorrow, and I said sure, and so the next day the launch took me to Harrison’s boat. Just me.”

Jesse was silent. Katie looked at him oddly, like she wanted something. Jesus Christ, she wants approval. He took a breath.

“Most people,” he said, “are probably doing mostly what they need to do. And maybe you need to do this. But it’s not a good way for you to live.”

“Why not,” she said.

“Again,” Jesse said, “long answer. Short version is you don’t become more important because a lot of people are willing to fuck you.”

“I’m not trying to be important,” she said. “I’m just having some fun.”

“I need the names of the other girls,” Jesse said.

“Are you going to tell them I told?”

Jesse looked at Molly, who had said not a word during the entire conversation. She shrugged and shook her head.

“To tell you the truth, Katie,” Jesse said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’ll start by taking names.”

1 6 9

35

J enn always brushed her teeth before bed.

Jesse lay in bed on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, watching her

through the open door of the bathroom. She was wearing one of his shirts, just the way she used to, and when she bent over to rinse her mouth, her butt showed. Jenn turned off the bathroom light and got into bed beside Jesse.

“Were you leering at me?” Jenn said.

“I was admiring your butt,” Jesse said.

“It is cute, isn’t it.”

“So you don’t mind admiring,” Jesse said.

S E A C H A N G E

“Admiring is good; leering is good.”

“I was admiring,” Jesse said.

Jenn tuned her head and kissed him lightly.

“Tell me about your day,” she said.

He knew she was mocking their domesticity.

“Any day that ends up with us in bed,” Jesse said, “is a good day.”

“Oh,” she said, “you charming devil.”

“I would like to get through with this floater case,” Jesse said. “It’s turned into a goddamned cesspool.”

“The one where you were watching the dirty movies?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s gotten worse.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I do,” Jesse said. “It’s one of the things I really missed when you were gone.”

“Talking to me?”

“I could always talk to you,” Jesse said.

“So talk,” Jenn said.

They had left the balcony doors open, and they could hear the sound of the harbor as Jesse talked, lying on his back in the nearly dark room, looking up the blank, uninteresting ceiling. Jenn turned on her side toward him as she listened.

Through the open French doors, they could hear a boat mo-tor. Softer, more persistent, so familiar in its endless rhythm as to be nearly soundless was the movement of the waves against the causeway at the south end of the harbor. Jenn 1 7 1