Dark Rooms (30 page)

“It sounded like Mr. Amory wasn't ever going to tell him, though.”

“Could be he didn't hear from his dad.”

“Then from who?”

Damon thinks. “We know he was hassling Nica, hounding her about why she broke up with him, demanding a reason. What if she finally lost her temper, gave it to him?”

“Then he'd be murderously angry at Mr. Amory. It's not like Nica was the one who'd been lying to him all those years.”

“Yeah, but she had been lying to him all those months. And think about what a hard thing that would be for him to hear. Not only was he having sex with his sister, but his dad knew about it and let it go on. He might have reacted by taking his rage out on her. Or maybe he didn't believe her, thought she was insulting the honor of his family, something crazy like that.”

After a pause, I say carefully, “I don't think that's what did happen, but I do agree it could have happened.”

“And, don't forget, your mom says he's a junkie. Junkies have mood swings.”

I start to object. Mom, who only ever half listened to any conversation she wasn't the subject of, had, I suspect, gotten the details of Jamie's drug history wrong, had misunderstood somehow. Jamie was too openly a druggie to be an actual addict. He was chronically stoned, basically, and if he had a problem with drugs, he'd be more secretive about using them, wouldn't he? Even a peanuts drug like marijuana?
But I stop myself. If I say that, I'll only piss Damon off, further convince him that I'm hopelessly biased where Jamie's concerned. (Like he's not just as biased.) Plus, my sense from my talk with him about Ruben and Ruben's dealing is that's he's pretty black and white as far as drugs go. Doesn't distinguish between a dime bag of pot and a rubber balloon of smack, or believe that such a thing as casual use is possible. So instead I say, “It looks like we've got a two-way tie for the number one spot.”

“You mean a clear winner, don't you? You honestly think Mrs. Amory could have sexually assaulted Nica before strangling her?”

Laughing, I say, “No. I think you're the sexual assaulter.”

Damon's eyes bug. “What?”

“I'm kidding. About the assault part, at least. But you did have sex with Nica that night. You told me so. And, as it turns out, the cops never said that she'd been assaulted, just that she might have been.” Off his stare, “Yeah, I only looked at the newspaper headlines at the time, too. Well, lately I've been reading the actual articles. Her underwear was missing, but you know as well as I do that she often didn't wear any. And there was vaginal tearing, which means she could have been forced to have sex, or she could have just had, you know”—flicking my gaze from his face back to the road—“rougher-than-usual sex, or even just more-than-usual sex.”

A few seconds pass, and then Damon asks, “Any body fluids?”

“Why would there be? You use condoms, right?”

He laughs. Attempts to laugh, anyway. “Mostly, yeah,” he says, before falling into silence. A minute or so later he pulls himself out of it. “So it's Mr. and Mrs. Amory, Jamie, and a dark horse. Any other candidates you can think of?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

A name jumps suddenly to the tip of my tongue. I swallow it back, though.

When I don't speak, Damon says, “That's our list then.”

We pass the construction sight, and the highway opens up again. We encounter no more delays.

By the time we're back in Hartford, Damon's retreated into himself, just stares silently out the window at the passing scenery. I drive him to his grandmother's, assuming that's where he wants to go. But when we pull up to the house he looks at it blankly, like it's a place he's never seen before, then asks me to drop him off at the hospital instead. I get the feeling he's anxious, so I rush—roll through stop signs, gun the yellows. Once St. Francis's entranceway hovers into view, though, he tells me he needs a minute. I turn into the Wendy's across the street. Parking, I run inside and pick up a couple of chocolate Frosties.

“Hey, look who's here,” Damon says, when I'm back in the car.

I follow the direction of his finger to the front of the hospital: Renee, leaning against a patch of wall, smoking beside a sign with a cigarette on it, a big red line through the cigarette. “Should we go over and say hi?”

“In a bit,” he says.

I flip on the radio. Tune into a talk station. There's a program on about the global spike in food prices. We listen, drink the Frosties, let our thoughts go away.

Abruptly, Damon kills the radio. “There's something I need to tell you,” he says.

“Okay.”

“And you're not going to like hearing it any more than I like saying it.”

My stomach pulls in, and the blood starts pounding in my skull. It's coming now, the “This was a huge mistake, I love your sister” speech I've been expecting—dreading—since the moment Nica's face popped into my head in the library parking lot.

He's silent for a second then inhales sharply, like he's about to speak. But before he can, there's a rap on my window. I turn. On the other side of the glass is Renee.

“Visiting hours are almost over,” she says, when I lower the window. “You two coming in?” She looks beyond exhausted, just totally worn out. Like she hasn't slept a minute since Max's heart attack five days ago.

“Just me,” Damon says.

As he reaches into the back to get his things, Renee points to the cup in my hand. “That a Frosty?”

I pass it to her.

“How's Max doing?” Damon asks.

“Same.” Renee pulls my straw out, spilling a drop of frozen dairy product on her chest. She dabs at it with her fingertips. “His cunt ex-wife's up there. Got me kicked out because I'm not immediate family.”

“Helene or Deidre?”

“Helene.”

“Shit, I better hurry.”

“I would if I were you. She'll probably put a pillow over his face as soon as the nurses aren't looking, hope he remembers her in his will.”

Damon turns to me. “Write this down.”

I search for a piece of paper. End up pulling an old receipt out of my wallet, scribbling the numbers he rattles off on the back.

“That's Max's room,” he says. “Tell it to the hospital operator and she'll connect you directly. They don't allow cell phones, so that's the best way to reach me. Got it?”

I nod that I do, and he gives my hand a quick squeeze. Renee, I notice, catches the squeeze. She doesn't say anything, though. Just peels off the lid of the Frosty. Puts her mouth on the side of the cup.

Damon swings himself out of the car. “All right, Renee. You ready to raise a little hell?”

“I was born ready, baby,” she says to him. Then to me: “I'm going to finish this, okay?”

It isn't really a question but I say, “Sure,” anyway.

The two of them begin walking across the street. I watch until the hospital swallows them up. I'm about to tuck the receipt back in my wallet, start the car, when I notice that the receipt isn't a receipt. It's the torn-off piece of blank paper, folded in half—the one Mr. Tierney wrote the note to Nica on. There's another thing I notice. Apart from the note itself, the blank paper's not blank. Not quite. Along the ragged edges of the tear-off is the lower quarter of a line of print. I study it. It appears to be the last bit of the Chandler honor pledge, the “in accordance with school regulations” from the “This represents my work, solely my work, in accordance with school regulations,” words that students are supposed to copy onto the bottom of every quiz, test, essay, and project. Supposed to but rarely do because no teacher enforces the rule except at exam time. Well, other than Mr. Fowler.

Mr. Fowler, largely deaf and wholly senile, left eighty in the dust long ago, is Chandler's oldest faculty member. Not that he's really faculty these days. His duties have dwindled down to a single class, Hamlet and the Ghost, which he's been teaching since the 1960s. I never took it. Nica did, though, was taking it, in fact, when she died. Of course she was. It's rumored to be incredibly easy, only two two-page papers in an entire semester. Papers Mr. Fowler doesn't even grade, has an assistant grade for him.

It's as I think the word
assistant
that I remember with a jolt: Mr. Wallace was the assistant for the English Department last year. A second jolt comes when I remember something else: Mr. Wallace's first name is Christopher, nickname Topher.

The dark horse.

Mr. Wallace opens the door to his room on the top floor of Minot House. He's got an uncapped red pen in his hand. His gaze is quizzical but polite. I hand him the note. As his eyes skim over the six lines, the color drains from his face like a plug inside him's been pulled. Without looking at me, he steps aside to let me pass.

The room I enter is neat and spare. On the arm of the one chair is a pile of papers he must've been grading when I knocked. He moves it so I have a place to sit. Then he arranges himself on the edge of the narrow bed. For a minute or two we contemplate each other in silence. He's a homely man, there's no denying: bony-featured and Ichabod Crane skinny. His eyes, though, are nice—large and clear and slow-blinking—and seem to bespeak a nature both gentle and serious. Looking into them, I realize that, whatever happened between him and Nica, I'm glad he's the one she chose, not that vain jerk Tierney. And then I remember that it could have been him who killed her or was responsible for getting her killed. Manny too. My attitude hardens.

At last Mr. Wallace gestures toward the note and says, “I didn't expect to see that again. Actually, I did. When the police were investigating your sister's death. Then I lived in fear of hearing their knock on my door.”

“Yeah, well, the prospect of jail's a scary one,” I say flatly.

He looks at me, confused. Then he laughs. “Jail? You've been reading too much Hawthorne. What we were doing might have been unethical, but it wasn't illegal.”

“Nica was sixteen.”

Another confused look. “So?”

“So where do you think guys convicted of statutory rape go?”

He opens his mouth. Knowing what he's going to say, I cut him off before he can say it: “Yes, the age of consent in Connecticut is sixteen, but not if one party is in a position of authority over the other. In that case, the age of consent is eighteen. I looked it up.”

Mr. Wallace lifts the note. Reads it. Reads it again. Then he just holds it in his hand, realizing, no doubt, that I have him dead to rights. Finally he takes off his glasses. “I made a mistake.”

I snort. “That's one way of putting it.”

“I mean a grammatical mistake.” He puts his glasses back on, reads the note yet again, this time out loud: “Does Bill know about us? I thought we'd been so careful, but maybe not careful enough.” Transferring his eyes from the sheet of paper to my face, “The
us
and
we
make it sound as if I was referring to me and Nica, when I was in fact referring to me and Jeanne. Vague pronoun reference.” He laughs, shakes his head. “Some English teacher I am.”

I stare at him, confounded. Can this be true? That it was Jeanne Bowles-Mills and only Jeanne Bowles-Mills that he was sleeping with? I look into his eyes, calm and unflinching, and my gut feeling is: yes. It makes sense, actually. Explains why Mr. Tierney got so emotional when I showed him the note. Mr. Wallace was double-crossing him, sneaking around
with the woman he was already sneaking around with. It explains, too, why he didn't try to stop me when I threatened to take the note to the Millses. Why would he have? I'd be doing his dirty work for him.

Still, I can't let Mr. Wallace off the hook so easily. Keeping my tone disbelieving, sarcastic even, I say, “If your relationship with Nica was totally aboveboard, why were you afraid of the police knocking on your door?”

“Because it
wasn't
totally aboveboard. She was a student and I was her—well, not teacher, but the assistant to her teacher—and I was telling her the sordid details of my affair with a married coworker. If the police knew, they'd want an alibi for the night she died and I couldn't give them one.”

Still sarcastic. “At home with a good book?”

“I was at a bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires with Jeanne. The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. Under the name Mellors.” A sad smile. “It was a joke.”

“I don't get it.”

“Oliver Mellors is a character in
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. One of the most famous adulterers in the canon.”

“Funny joke,” I say, stone-faced, making him really smile. Then seriously, the impulse to be sarcastic having spent itself, I say, “That's a good alibi, though, easy to check out.”

“Yes, but I couldn't count on the police to be discreet.”

“Oh, right. Your job.”

“I was afraid of jeopardizing that, of course. Teaching's what I've always dreamed of doing. But there are other teaching positions. It's Jeanne I was worried about. Bill's an angry man. He doesn't love her anymore but he doesn't want to hear that someone else does. He could make life difficult for her, fight her for custody of Beatrice. She's only a U.S. citizen by marriage, which complicates matters.” He sighs, then sinks into silence.

I sink with him, trying to work things out in my head. Finally
I say, “I don't understand. How did Nica figure in any of this? Why were you confiding in her?”

“It wasn't some regular thing. It just happened twice and the first time was by accident. Bill belongs to the National Model Railroad Association. The local branch of the club meets the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Jeanne always gets a sitter on those nights and we spend a couple hours together at the Econo-Lodge in East Hartford. You probably don't know it. It's pretty sleazy.”