Claire and Present Danger (25 page)

“Sounds like I’ll like her.”

She would. I did. That didn’t ease my growing discomfort.

I headed across the street to the Square, thinking about anything and everything except the idea of being married four months from now. And thinking about weddings, how could I not wonder about Emmie Cade and Leo Fairchild’s? Was it still scheduled?

Were they being sidetracked by being suspects?

I walked through the crowds of students and citizens soaking up the September sunshine, and headed toward the farthest corner from the school. I told myself it would be the least populated. It was mere coincidence that my goal was only thirty-five steps away from the Fairchild building—I could, in fact, see its balconies from where I stood. The objective was a quiet, only partially occupied bench. Olivia didn’t seem to take up even the space a small person might.

“Mind if I share?” I asked through the pops and bursts of sound and laughter filling the rest of the park.

Olivia didn’t look up. She shrugged. Not precisely a warm welcome. One of her hands held her lunch, still in its plastic Baggie.

She looked like inert matter, as privately desolate as she’d appeared at the end of school yesterday. I settled for the shrug, and sat at the far end of the bench.

She took out her copy of Lord of the Flies, put it on her knees and, using only one hand, carefully found a page. Then she held it open with that hand while the other continued to cradle the untouched sandwich bag.

I felt pulled into her bubble of silence. It was more than a still-ness. The withholding of sound and the effort to keep something bottled up thinned and charged the air surrounding us.

She stared at her book. I was positive the show of needing to finish her assignment was a pretense. Olivia’s entire being announced 194

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

that she was the kind of girl who’d always have taken care of her homework. And in fact, when I really looked at the open book, I realized she was almost at the end of the novel, well ahead of where assignments would have put her. But her message was clear: Company was not welcome. I thought about finding the pretzel man, but talking with Beth about the evening ahead and wedding ceremonies had quelled my hunger. In fact, I felt as if food might make me ill.

That meant I had nowhere to go except, perhaps, to that building steps away. I tried to remember whether I’d actually promised not to, then laughed at my attempt to be legalistic. I didn’t have to have promised. Claire Fairchild’s death was now officially a homicide and out of our hands.

But during the course of the long night before, I’d wondered what Batya was going to do, or had done, and how she’d now support herself and her children. More than that, I wondered whether Leo Fairchild was privy or partner to his mother’s supposed bequest and/or to the I.N.S. threat she’d held over the housekeeper’s head.

“Thanks for the rest,” I said. “I just needed to sit a moment.” I saw a splat on the book, and Olivia slammed it shut, then reached up to fiercely brush her index finger across her right eye.

She was wearing a delicate yellow T-shirt and flower-sprigged short skirt, and all the same, she felt dark, something with the power to absorb even the brightness of this day. Her ache was almost palpable over here, on the other side of the bench.

I felt an impotent rage, knowing I couldn’t fix whatever made Olivia’s life feel so frightening and hard to bear. I was only her teacher. I crossed her life’s path five of the hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week. Something much more significant than I weighed her slight body down. However, maybe knowing somebody wished they could work miracles would help. “Olivia?” I whispered.

She looked at me for a slice of a second, then back down at her closed book, speaking so softly, I had to work to make out her hesi-tant words. “I . . . don’t . . . understand . . . why people are so . . .

mean.”

195

GILLIAN ROBERTS

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She looked at me again, her eyes wider, and shook her head.

“No. No. I meant—I mean—the book.” She looked away again.

As an English teacher, I should have been thrilled that assigned reading was having such a powerful effect. It was a magnificent, rich book, and its message heartbreaking, especially in this dangerous new world. For one frightening moment, I thought perhaps Sonia Lawrence had been right and this book was too much for these students in these times.

Then logic returned, and I could in no way buy the idea that William Golding had driven Olivia to stay in my classroom after school, and to sit alone during lunch, crying.

That, however, was what she wanted me to believe, so I sat weighing respect for her privacy and need to mourn whatever it was in her own way against my concept of responsible adulthood.

“The book,” I finally said, “is thought-provoking. Yes, people can be cruel. We all have the potential to be that way. To be uncivilized. But we also have the potential to be kind. To think things through. To not act out of blind fear. It would be heartbreaking if we didn’t have the ability to keep an eye on what’s right and wrong, to choose not to go along with the crowd, not to bend under mob rule.” I leaned forward, to try to really see her.

She didn’t move, except for her eyes, which glanced at me, as if to make sure I was real. “I sound like a jerk,” I said. “Sorry.”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t deny my jerkdom. At a time like this I almost missed Sunshine—or my future mother-in-law—both of whom, with profound insincerity, would have pooh-poohed, told me I was anything but a jerk, and insisted that, in fact, my platitudes had been enormously helpful. “Can I help you in any way?” I asked. “I would really like to.”

She shook her head rapidly, her eyes wide with fear that I might do something, anything.

“Okay, then. But take that as a permanent offer. At any time, if you change your mind and think of something I could do—or if 196

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

you want to talk . . .” She sat impassively, a plaster statue depicting resignation, loss, capitulation. “Okay?”

She finally nodded with great insincerity.

I had no choice but to move on through my day, although I no longer envisioned myself as skating on the surface of anything. I felt like someone who’d stumbled badly and had one leg through the ice.

The lunch hour was barely underway, I was not welcome on my park bench, I was practically face-to-face with Claire Fairchild’s building and I didn’t think I’d actually taken a vow to have my curiosity surgically amputated. I worried about Batya, too, about her impending delivery date, about her illegal status, and about whether Leo would honor his mother’s financial promises. I couldn’t see what would be hurt if I simply stopped by. A friendly, innocuous courtesy call.

There. I’d successfully argued my case with me and I’d won.

Guilt-free, I made my way to the lovely old building, where I was greeted with yellow crime-scene tape across Claire Fairchild’s once elegantly austere front door. If Batya was in there, she was now truly imprisoned, but of course, she couldn’t be, and wouldn’t have been, ever since the tape went up yesterday, when the dead woman’s blood showed traces of barbiturate.

C. K. was supposed to have been told of any new information, and this seemed new enough. I pulled out my cell phone and called the man.

“Mackenzie here,” he said softly.

“The door’s taped up.”

“Manda? We’re at Carpenter’s Hall, listenin’ to a talk about the First Continental Congress. I mean, they are, my parents. I’m outside to take this call. But this is where it started. This is where they talked about splitting with Britain. Can’t this wait?”

“I don’t think so. Claire Fairchild’s apartment is a crime scene now.”

“It was always a crime scene,” he said. “Ever since a crime was committed there.”

197

GILLIAN ROBERTS

Sometimes his wit eludes me. “But, Batya—she was staying here.”

“Tom called,” he said. “Cell phones are a mixed blessin’. Gets harder to escape work—and that isn’t even my work anymore.”

“Tom called and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t want to talk to that ditz secretary, an’ I know she doesn’t interrupt your teachin’, so I thought it could wait while I played tour director.”

I understood that his attention and interests were elsewhere. I didn’t care. “What did he say?”

“Tom?”

“Who else would I mean?”

“We’ve been hearing about and from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had a lot to say.”

“Tom.”

“There’s an A.P.B. out for Batya. She’s disappeared.”

It took me a moment to process that. “Batya?”

“Right. Once again, the butler, more or less, did it.”

“But disappearing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what happened to—for all we know, she’s in labor somewhere.”

“Her aunt says she doesn’t know where she went. Took the little boy, too.”

“But her aunt would never tell—she’s illegal. She’d be deported.”

“And turns out you were right. Her little boy has seizures and takes phenobarb.”

“That still doesn’t mean she’d—”

“You’re suddenly her defender? Yesterday, you were giving me reasons why it had to be her. So you were right. Why change positions now?”

I couldn’t have rationally said why, except that Batya was no longer an academic puzzle, something to be figured out. She was a woman whose motives were based on grave problems, and life in prison would only increase the weight of problems on the next generation. “Still and all,” I said, knowing how weak I sounded,

“she in no way seemed—she was so concerned about keeping the bedroom untouched—”

198

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

“Odd that she knew it was a crime scene, wasn’t it?”

“That was a language problem. A TV-watching problem. Not proof of anything.”

“I have to get back to my parents. I should tell you this: Before she disappeared, Batya tried to refill a prescription that didn’t have any refills left.”

“Not—” I gave up on blanket denial. “Phenobarb?”

“She said her aunt had lost the last batch.”

I was silent long enough for Mackenzie to ask if I was still there.

“So that’s it,” I finally said.

“Pretty much. She can’t get far with a toddler and ultimately a newborn. I’ll see you later.”

The image was horrifying and bizarre, but I thought she could get far. Women had children at home, or with midwives. Women like her would shelter and hide her.

I wondered why I found it comforting to envision her evading justice.

I made my way back toward the school, through clusters of students, nannies, toddlers, and a scattering of the elderly, most of whom normally wait until the Square clears of teens. Midway through the park, a blur on the far periphery of my vision spun around and came toward me at a near run.

I didn’t want to see her. I’d already struck out, dramatically, in my attempts to help Olivia, and then, to offer help to Batya.

I didn’t want to see a person I didn’t want to help in the first place, but there she was. Emmie Cade.

199

Seventeen

“IWAS going to come to your school later on—after school—to ask if you were going to, but look—bumping into you now. Great! Saves time, I guess.”

I unspooled the sentence, looking in vain for its core. I felt suddenly and totally exhausted, physically burdened, as if heavy weights had been strapped across my shoulders.

“So can you?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“No? You can’t?”

“I don’t even know what—”

200

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

“Help me! Take me on as your client. You said you’d find out if it was allowed.”

I’d forgotten all about that, and with great apologies, I told her so.

She looked like a child told that Santa was a myth.

“It doesn’t matter now, anyway,” I said.

“But it does. They’re already—the police, I mean—everybody’s being questioned and even Leo—even he’s acting as if I . . .” She didn’t look poetic today. She was wearing clothes, not a costume.

In place of long lace sleeves, a blue denim shirt, and jeans. Her skin, especially around her eyes, looked strained.

She leaned closer, her voice now a hoarse whisper. “I can’t let this ruin my relationship with Leo. I won’t. I need your help—I need to find out why I keep being—why—” She seemed unable to complete the thought, to say out loud what pressed so painfully on her mind.

“Say whatever it is. Putting it into words won’t make you guilty of something you’re not.”

She straightened her posture, inhaled, and said in one long breath, “I don’t know why people think I’m such a bad person when I’m not.” She exhaled again. “When I never was.”

I couldn’t help but notice that while her mouth had managed to brave saying it without breaking, her eyes were moist by the end of the sentence. What a tear-filled, no-lunch hour I was having.

“Please—you know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure, and the only thing in my mind was that old joke: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t out to get you.” Is it also possible that where there’s smoke, there’s really only fairy dust or fog?

“And it’s your business to find things out.”

I was about to tell her about Batya, and then I reconsidered. I didn’t care what the police believed or how obviously everything pointed toward the housekeeper—I still wanted to know about the anonymous notes. Why, in fact, people did seem to hate Emmie, suspect her of multiple crimes. That would be a new case, a brand-new 201

GILLIAN ROBERTS

investigation having nothing to do with the murder. “The police haven’t been bothering you, have they?”

She shrugged, nodded, shook her head, and completely confused me. “Everybody,” she said. “They haven’t said anything to me in particular, but they did ask me a lot about poor Jake. And even about . . .” She lowered her eyes, looked down at her hands.

Her eyelashes were amazingly lush and long, throwing shadows on her cheekbones. “About a man I was once engaged to. I can’t imagine how they did that much background on me hours after Mrs. Fairchild died—” She blinked, fighting back tears.