Cold Case (11 page)

“I don't know,” I said. “I'd like to find out.”

Gloria said, “I plan to enjoy this.”

“And if I happen to find myself at a creep's house, I'll give Vandenburg a ring,” I said.

“You do that, but make sure you use the exact same words as the tape, okay, so we get the DEA going.” Gloria's voice got soft and sweet. “You might try calling from your shrink's house.”

I hung up, quickly punched the number she'd given me.

Two rings. Pickup.

“Avon Hill School. Emerson speaking.”

“Hi,” I said. “This is the woman who visited your campus today, Carlotta Carlyle.”

“Miss Carlyle, I'm so glad you rang back. My wife was unaware that several of our prospective students have chosen to attend other—”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “I don't have any Colombian nieces who want to go to Avon Hill.”

“You're—”

“Not interested. It's okay, Mr. Emerson. I was hired to find a former student. I found her.”

“You're some sort of investigator?”

“Private sort.”

Silence. He didn't end the call. Neither did I.

“May I ask for whom you were looking?”

Confidentiality didn't seem to matter.

“Thea Janis. Dorothy Cameron. Either name ring a bell? Was she a classmate of yours?”

Silence.

“Would you mind coming over?” he asked very softly.

“Why?”

“It seems odd that Thea should be of such interest after all these years.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'd prefer to discuss the matter in person.”

“I can be there in ten minutes,” I said. Chatting with Anthony Emerson might make me feel as if I'd done something to earn the cash Mayhew'd left behind.

“Come to the school,” he said hurriedly. “Not the house.”

12

More folks than usual strolled the late night streets, seeking relief from the heat, wearing minimal clothing, several—probably on the way home from Steve's in the Square—licking ice cream cones. Mooney's warning had made me extraordinarily conscious of passersby. I watched. I listened. I cataloged their attire. No footsteps seemed to dog my own. At a quick march, I made it to Avon Hill in seven minutes.

The porch light was off. I didn't get a chance to bang the huge brass knocker. The door opened, eerie creak and all, as soon as I lifted my foot to the first step.

“Miss Carlyle?” He'd been waiting.

“Yes.”

“So you have no students to place with us?” he said, his mouth twisting in a rueful grin.

“If I did, they'd need full scholarships.”

He shook his head regretfully while I wondered if the school rested on firm financial ground.

“Have you a license?” he asked, still blocking the doorway. “Any document that would assure me that you really are an investigator?”

I gave a sigh. “Look, you invited me over to talk, Mr. Emerson. I had my exercise. I can make it a quick round-trip.”

He hesitated only briefly.

“Please,” he said. “Come in.”

He was a slender man, hiding inside a well-tailored suit too heavy for the heat. His hair, a sleek blond pelt, was so fine that, despite attempts at a ruler-straight part, strands escaped every which way. His long, beaky nose looked like it might twitch at any moment. I'd expected his eyes to be cool blue, but they were brown, dark and deep, nestled in creased pouches that made him older than he appeared.

He'd be thirty-nine if he'd been Thea's classmate.

We walked down the ill-lit trophy corridor toward a room I took to be his office. Large, imposing mahogany desk with matching bookshelves. Persian rugs in reds, oranges, and browns, a leather sofa. Walls hung with gilt-framed diplomas. An airy sanctum in which to greet parents willing to drop large sums in exchange for the cachet of saying, “Yes, our daughter is at Avon Hill. Yours?” Knowing Avon Hill could be equaled but not one-upped.

Perhaps the headmaster kept a more casual workroom elsewhere. This office would do nicely for cadging checks from parents. And for discipline. Scare a kid to death in here. Afraid he'd knock over a vase.

One book sat on the desktop. A yearbook, an elaborate endeavor in a tooled leather binding. A gold satin ribbon marked one of the middle pages.

I showed Emerson my investigator's license. As if offering an even exchange, he asked if I'd like to see Thea's picture.

“Sure.”

He waved me toward a plush armchair. “She wasn't the sort who did clubs and sports and rah-rah events. But someone shot a candid. Here. You can see her profile.”

The gold ribbon marked the yearbook page. The snap showed little in the way of facial delineation. Thea's breasts jutted assertively. At fourteen, fifteen, she'd had a woman's body, a woman's stance.

“Is this the only photo of her in the whole yearbook?”

“Yes,” he said, a bit defensively. “Like I said, she wasn't into clubs, and she never showed for her homeroom picture. It's not as though she were a senior.”

Thea'd never made it that far in life
, I thought.
Never gotten to be a lousy high school senior
.

“You were her classmate?”

“As much as anyone,” he said.

I wished he'd been home earlier in the day. I'd have preferred questioning him while I believed that Thea might be alive.

“We would have graduated the same year,” he continued, “if she hadn't—run off.”

“Why do you say ‘run off'? Why not ‘if she hadn't been murdered'?”

His disapproval showed in the tight line of his lips. “I suppose because early speculation centered on with whom she had, uh, eloped.”

“Was there a clear favorite?”

Seated in his towering leather chair, behind his wide mahogany desk, he steepled his hands and looked pensive. I wondered if his feet touched the ground. I also wondered how he'd come to rule at his former prep school. Had it been a lifelong ambition?

He said, “At the very beginning, every boy in school probably whispered to his best friend—you know, in complete confidence—that Thea was waiting for him at his parents' summerhouse. That kind of talk stopped quickly.”

“What about the teachers?”

“We called them ‘masters,' then, because Avon Hill was fighting hard to keep up the old traditions, to ignore the rebellious times. The campus was seething underneath, but on the surface, all was extremely proper.”

His pronunciation was faintly British, as though he'd taken classes in the U.K. The accent could have been pure pretension served up for the bill-paying parents, but I didn't think so.

“The ‘masters,' then,” I said. “Was there talk that Thea'd ‘eloped' with one of them?”

He shrugged. “I shared a single class with her. The teacher was a woman.”

“Rumors? Speculation?”

“There were rumors about Thea and every man or boy in the entire school.”

“Why?”

“She was … unusual,” he said, fiddling with a shiny fountain pen as he spoke. “For her age. For any age. For this extraordinarily conservative school. My God, the simple fact that her parents sent her here is beyond belief. She was so out of place she could have come from another planet.”

“But she managed to communicate with the natives.”

“Her disgust, mainly.”

“How?”

“By refusing to do whatever anyone in authority told her to do. She was our rebellion poster girl. The rest of us didn't have a clue. We were all so terrified we might be expelled, shame our families forever. And that's what she seemed to want most. She courted expulsion. She was so free …”

“Free,” I repeated.

“Gloriously free,” he said. “In many ways.” He fidgeted in his chair and refused to meet my eyes. He seemed caught between wanting to tell me something and wanting to keep it to himself. I wondered how many of his students responded to questioning in the same shifty way, torn between the mingled joys of confession and secret sin.

“Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked, trying to keep anger and impatience out of my voice.

The anger and impatience weren't aimed at him. I was my own target. I shouldn't have come. Why was I there, making inquiries about a dead woman? What did I hope to learn? There was no case, no cause. Just curiosity. Because of a single chapter, some poetry.

“We had rather strange visitors the other day,” he said, his manner abruptly casual. The business with the visitors wasn't what he'd been tempted to confess.

“We?” I said.

“I,” he said with a smile. “You've caught me in my headmaster ‘we.' I'll do my best to avoid it. Promise.”

“And the other day was?”

“Wednesday last, the eighth.”

“What made the visitors strange?”

Standing, he wasn't more than five-eight, but he cut an elegant figure. He kept his hands clasped behind him as he paced. His stride seemed mannered, studied: This is the way a headmaster walks and talks. Maybe he'd read a book about it, taken a course.

He spoke. “It's summer. Almost everyone's away. If my wife weren't feeling so poorly, we'd be at our cottage in Maine.

I let him take it slowly, ramble on. I had time to kill.

He said, “They were street urchins. Beggars.” He pursed his lips around the words, made his visitors sound like characters from a Dickens novel.

“Street kids,” I said.

“The boy was older than a kid—a man, I suppose, under all that … hair. I'd put him in his early twenties. He had a walk, a strut, an attitude, if you know what I mean, but the girl was very young, twelve, possibly thirteen. She was carrying a blanket, a tablecloth, some piece of fabric. I assumed they were looking for a place to fool around. I went to order them off the property before they went at it underneath the trees or in the shrubbery. None of the gardeners was present and I thought someone ought to remind them that they were trespassing.”

I nodded. I'd seen the lush backyard. The gardeners were probably given orders to keep the overhanging foliage to a minimum during the school term.

“They weren't the least bit fazed by my approach. I admit, I'm used to a certain respect from students. I don't know, maybe I've gotten used to cringing cowards. I have power over the teens in my charge. The young man was positively brazen. I couldn't stare him down. I considered calling the police, and believe me, I would not do that lightly. Several parents live close by and I wouldn't like them to think I can't handle any situation that might arise. But I didn't like the way he looked at me. I didn't like his grin. It seemed—predatory. And then, out of the blue, they asked about Thea. Whether this was the school that Thea Janis, the writer, the famous writer, had attended. They wanted to know if there were a memorial dedicated to her, a ‘shrine.' They were laughing, stoned or high on something, drunk, but they used the word ‘shrine.' And then they asked if I could give them a photograph of Thea. Like Avon Hill was a Grade-B movie studio, and I was some flak who made the rounds to hand out glossies.”

He was indignant at such a slight to himself and his school. I moved on, asking, “Can you describe them in greater detail? What were they wearing?”

“The male was slim, almost emaciated. Height, well, he had a couple inches on me. Dirty T-shirt, ripped jeans stuffed into high black boots. His hair was quite dark, slicked into a ponytail, and his beard was straggly, like he hadn't really intended to grow one, just forgotten to shave. Oh, and he wore an earring, a silver dangle. The girl was a wispy blonde, practically a child, like I said, but she was all over the man, rubbing herself against him, touching him.

“I outwaited them, just stood my ground until they took off on one of those horribly loud motorbikes. The seat wasn't really big enough for two, but the girl snuggled up for all she was worth, wrapping her arms around his chest. She was wearing, well, it looked like a man's singlet, cut off so her midriff showed, and cutoff jeans, too. Sliced so high you could see she'd neglected underpants. I mean, her entire ‘look' had been manufactured with a scissors!”

“License plate?”

“Didn't think about it.”

I'll bet he didn't; too busy thinking about the young blond chick on the back of the cycle, breasts pressed into the young man's back, thighs clutching his butt.

“Color? Make?” I asked to snap him out of his reverie.

“Sorry. Red, maybe.”

“Did the engine sound okay?”

“The engine? I'm sorry, I honestly wasn't paying attention.”

“Anything else about them. Their names?”

“We didn't introduce ourselves.”

“Did they call each other by name?”

“He called her something. Dixie? An odd name.”

“Which one brought up Thea Janis?”

“The man.”

“Has anyone else come inquiring about Thea Janis?”

“No, and it's not like these two were collecting data for a biography. She's rather gone out of style, I guess, all that rebellion, and inner searching, and early death. I mean, she may be popular at other schools, but we certainly don't teach anything so modern or so … sexual at Avon Hill. We're very proper here. The board is quite concerned that my wife remain indoors during the latter part of her pregnancy. That's how advanced we are.” One of his eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. His eyes twinkled to let me know that he found the behavior of the board inexplicable, but somehow amusing. Quaint. Like his British accent.

“I'd like to know why you're interested in Thea,” he murmured. “Coincidence, two inquiries in one week.”

I ignored his question. Before I left I wanted to know his secret, the one he couldn't quite decide whether to tell.

“How did your classmates react when they found out Thea had written a book?” I asked. He could have tossed me out, but he seemed willing, eager to reminisce.