Claire and Present Danger (26 page)

I knew how they knew so much so quickly. We’d turned over everything we had: the news stories, the anonymous notes. This presented a new ethical question. Could I accept her as a client if I was the one who’d gotten her into trouble by providing information the police would otherwise have no ready way to know?

Awkward did not begin to describe how I felt. Another situation in which A. Pepper not only failed to help but actively made everything worse.

“I apologize,” I said. “I meant to find out about this situation, but something urgent came up. I promise I’ll check into this. Are you all right meantime?”

Her laugh was closer to a quick, hard bark. “I can’t sleep or eat, Leo barely looks at me directly because”—she shrugged, ready to foolishly trust me with whatever she knew—“because the medicine they found in her bloodstream . . . I had pills like it for insomnia. Leo knew it. We’d been . . . I’ve been staying with him. Now, it’s so awkward . . . I mean, if there’s no trust, if a man thinks maybe I killed his mother!—I’m going back to my place for a while.” She hoisted the tote bag straps up higher on her shoulder.

“A little space between us. Maybe for the best.”

Leo was her perceived problem. Leo’s lack of faith. She had a powerful innocence—or fabulous acting skills. Whichever it was forced me to acknowledge that the police were probably right, and Batya was guilty. Which also meant that not only had Emmie not 202

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harmed Claire Fairchild, but that it was possible she hadn’t ever deliberately harmed anyone.

I noticed a generalized movement of the students across the way, as if they were swaying, en masse, toward the school building. I checked my watch. The bell would ring in three minutes. “I have to run,” I said.

She shook her head. “I still don’t get it how you can do two jobs, but I guess it’s obvious you can.” She sounded wistful, perhaps because of her own spotty work history. “You’ll call me, then?” She fumbled around in her bag and found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down a number. “That’s my place,” she said softly.

I nodded.

She looked down at her toes, today shod in utilitarian running shoes. “I’ll probably be there a while.” Head still lowered, she walked away.

I turned to go, then reconsidered and ran a few steps to tap her on her back. “I have a question.”

She pivoted, eyes wide.

“What’s with the names?”

“I don’t—”

“Your names.”

“My names?”

“There are so many of them. Why is that?”

She looked surprised, then, stymied. Her pretty brow wrinkled above her nose. “I guess, if you’re going to help me, you need to know whatever you need to know, but the names don’t have much meaning. I mean, I could explain each switch, but it’s so boring, starting with never liking Mary Elizabeth.” She closed her eyes and did a mock shiver. “It wasn’t ever me. It’s a Goody Two-shoes kind of name.”

“Bore me. Lots of people dislike their names—but you’ve disliked a whole series of them.”

“All I did, mostly, was play with the name itself, use nicknames, 203

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so I was Maribeth at one point, and Betsey at another, and I think Liz for a short time, but that didn’t fit, either.”

“Emmie, there are—”

“Oh, yes. M. E., the initials, too. I nearly forgot.”

“But how about Stacy? Weren’t you Stacy Williams for a while?”

She grimaced, and nodded. “I dropped out of college and got married to a guy named Billy—William Stacey—and so I was Betsey Stacey then. I’d always dreamed about going on the stage, or being in movies, but that wasn’t the right kind of name, and Billy didn’t want his surname used that way, so I turned his name around.

Stacy Williams. That sounded right but, in the end, it was the only

‘right’ thing going on in my life. I didn’t get anywhere with the acting—of course, we were in Atlanta, not exactly the center of the world of drama, and then, the marriage ended, too.”

She looked at me as if I now understood some arcane secret, as if she’d said enough. She hadn’t.

“You were going to explain all the names.”

She lowered her head. The word “woeful” snaked through my brain. “When Billy walked out—”

I was surprised to hear that her husband had ended the marriage. I’d assumed that those choices—that everything—had always been in her control. The new understanding troubled me and suggested other untested assumptions on my part, and that idea, potentially upending everything I took for granted, was dizzying.

“I was pretty much of a mess. Not my favorite time,” she said, trying for a small smile that, instead, upped her “woeful” quotient.

“And I certainly didn’t want either my actual married name, last name Stacey, or that stage name that was his name in reverse. I moved to Austin and changed back to my maiden name—lots of women do that, so I was Stacy Cade. Then I fell in love with a great guy named Geoff Collins. We were engaged and then . . .

then his motorcycle turned over and . . .” She sighed, and shook her head. “It wasn’t legal. We weren’t married, but I didn’t know 204

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what to do, how to show how much I cared, and so I used his last name when I came to California, and I was trying to act again.

Stacy Collins, and after a year or so, I met Jake and I became Stacy King. After Jake . . . after him, I felt as if all the names had been . . .

part of my string of horrible luck, so I dropped Stacy and King and went back to being Mary Elizabeth Cade, except . . . I still can’t stand that name, so M. E. is a nickname, do you see? I told you it was boring.”

Interesting how history is seen by its various players. Her story rang true, but all the same, every suspicious overtone had been wiped away along with mention of repeated survivor’s inheri-tances. If she believed that version of her past, let alone if it actually was accurate, I could understand why she’d be confused by her bad reputation and the dark cloud of suspicion that had relocated with her.

“And now,” she said. “Now, with Mrs. Fairchild dead and Leo so worried and . . . I have no idea what all his mother said to him that evening, about me, what she heard, or thought, but he looks at me as if . . . as if—”

The bell rang. I don’t know if we were saved by it, but I was relieved. My tidy mental household, where facts and truths had all been hammered into place and I knew the territory blindfolded, was abruptly being renovated, leaving me dizzy and tripping over certainties. I needed to think. I quickly made my farewells.

Unfortunately, a classroom is about the last place on earth to enjoy peaceful contemplation. Emmie Cade’s sad trek to Claire Fairchild’s condo faded from my mind as the classroom filled. This group was starting the semester with a writing unit, and I was trying to make playing with words as enjoyable as possible.

“I want you to write an argument,” I said. “That doesn’t mean a quarrel, it means I want you to take a side on an issue, and write something that would convince your reader of your point of view.” We’d counted out, and now I said, “Everybody who was a one is on the it’s a good thing side, and all the twos are on the it’s 205

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a bad thing side. And here’s the idea you’re arguing: Would it be a good or a bad thing for a sophomore to win the lottery and wind up with one hundred million dollars.”

“Good!” the sophomores said in unison.

“No fair if I have to say it’s a bad thing,” said a boy who was made mostly of freckles.

“Why should we have to pretend to believe one way when we don’t?” a sulky girl in the back asked, so we talked about thinking about what our opponents might believe, and thereby being able to anticipate and answer their statements. “It gives you an advantage and stretches your mind—and makes you wilier in the future.

Consider it mind reading. And I promise, even if you’re on the side that says winning all that money would be a bad thing, and then you go out and win a hundred million dollars—you’ll be allowed to keep it.”

They divided into groups of yays and nays and collectively brainstormed for the next fifteen minutes. “See how many points are made and with which ones you agree. Take notes. Then you’ll organize your thoughts and write up your own argument, based on those points.”

I knew I could relax when I heard the “it’s a bad thing” group generate ideas. In fact, they sounded like Cotton Mather—anything enjoyable was inherently bad. The “it’s a good thing” group was having a heavy debate about whether a person that rich needed to complete high school and how many pairs of shoes any female had a right to own.

While they debated, laughed, protested, and made notes, woeful Emmie Cade pushed back into consciousness and I tried to un-assume, to see her as she was, to base my view only on facts, not opinions or loaded words I’d read.

It was nearly impossible, which was a frightening truth in itself.

The good news—and I sorely needed some—was that when the bell sounded again and the class ended, I realized that for the past few hours, I hadn’t had time to obsess about the evening ahead.

The ninth graders settled down with enough chatter to make 206

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me think they were forming a community. They’d come from several feeder schools, so the speed with which they seemed to have cohered was heartening.

Unless, of course, this was its own little Lord of the Flies community in the making.

I wondered where that thought had come from—and then I saw Olivia, who suggested that while no man is an island, perhaps an undersized adolescent girl might be. She looked as isolated as she had out in the park, but a thin veneer of fear had been added.

It was too soon in the school year to be this concerned about a child. Too soon in the story, as if we’d skipped the introduction and the buildup, ruined the tension, and leaped directly to the nail-biting climax.

I wished I could approach Olivia, waggle my finger, and say,

“You know the rules forbid grave emotional distress the first two weeks of school. There are too many other things to attend to at that time, Missy, so reset your mental state to the ‘normal’ setting immediately.”

Things were degenerating on the fictional island of boys as well, but that was according to plan. I broached the meaning of the be-spectacled character of Piggy, carefully never saying words like symbolic. “Where does he fit in with the boys?” I asked. “What do you think is his role in the group?”

And after a minimum of searching, they suggested that he was civilization. He knew the rules; he advocated proceeding logically, taking things a step at a time, preserving themselves by building shelters, by taking a census of who was there.

“Then given that they’re so proud of being English, of being civilized—why is Piggy having such a hard time?”

“Because he isn’t attractive,” Melanie said. “He doesn’t look like a leader. I’m not saying that’s right,” she quickly added, “but all the same, I think that’s a part of it. And he doesn’t fit in.” She said this last line with great assurance. Melanie had the look of a girl who would fit in—or make the rest of her peers fit themselves to her mold.

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“Anything else?” I asked.

“What he wants, what he says they should do isn’t as . . . exciting or fun as what, say, Jack wants.”

“Good point, David.” I’d had no trouble memorizing his name.

Few eyes actually twinkle, no matter what poets say, and few are actually turquoise, but David’s did and were. He was also obser-vant and intelligent and it would be tempting to call on him all the time, to hear his opinions, of course, but also so see the turquoise twinkle trick. “It’s more fun to be wild, to give in to impulses.”

“For a while, at least,” someone else added, and the discussion flowed on about the meaning of the names, the specifically named Jack and Ralph, the derogatory nickname for Piggy, the merged names of Samneric, and the generically named “littluns,” about the fire that’s set and burns out of control.

It went so well that I believed Havermeyer’s hyperbole. Our standards were rising. This was probably the best and surely the most enjoyable class I’d ever had.

Olivia remained conspicuously silent, although she listened and watched and had read more of the book than most of the class.

And then, a few minutes before the end of the hour, we got to the beast. “What is it, do you think?” I asked. “Will the hunters find it?”

And then, Olivia, her posture abruptly ramrod straight, her hands flat on her desktop, spoke out clearly and forcibly. “There’s nothing to find. There’s no beast. They’re the beast. It’s whatever they don’t understand. Whatever they’re afraid of. That’s what they turn into a beast.”

And having said her piece, she sat back in her seat and, without showing any sign I could have defined, seemed to once again withdraw into the position of a distant observer.

The class rhythm of easy, rapid-flowing conversation halted.

Some of the children looked surprised, as if in the course of the hour they’d accepted Olivia as a mute, and they’d just witnessed a miracle.

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No one, perhaps with good cause, seemed able to pick up on her idea and run with it. “That’s a good observation,” I finally said. “Do you think it’s true off that island, too? Do we turn what we fear into monsters and beasts?”

And once again, I fell in love with my ninth graders. I hoped this lasted, that when their hormones fully kicked in and they felt more familiar that they didn’t try hard to “fit in” by imitating the older classes’ studied apathy. I hoped they’d always be eager to discuss ideas, even painful ones that questioned their own prejudices.

I wondered what Melanie Lawrence’s mother would say if she had been in the room. Would she have understood why it was not only good, but important, for our children to grow up able to think, and to consider ideas that were possibly foreign, or threatening? That if they did that, perhaps they wouldn’t turn those fears into their own beasts, to be hunted and killed?

Probably not.

At the thought of her mother, I glanced at Melanie herself, and caught her smiling pleasantly at Olivia and yet somehow project-ing a forceful negativity—a deliberate nothingness. As if poison came out from that smile. I couldn’t understand how she was creating that impression, but I could feel its result, and I knew I’d have to find language for it because I didn’t like it and wouldn’t tolerate it. Olivia, meanwhile, studied her fingernails, purposely or inadvertently missing the stare-down.