In Search of the Rose Notes (15 page)

But after a day or two of trying to figure out what you could possibly write in these letters to make this all happen, reality sets in—there will be no letters and no fancy lunch. You will have to learn to see your whole life without her. It hurts for days, but by the last day of school you’re pretending to yourself that you’ve accepted it.

Our world trip was ambitious, sure, and maybe a little unrealistic. But the idea that Rose would come along was just plain dumb. I saw that now. Even dumber than the idea that my fourth-grade teacher would come to my wedding. We couldn’t keep Rose forever. It came to me like a kick in the stomach. She wasn’t our friend—she was only our baby-sitter. She spent time with us because Mr. Hemsworth paid her money. He paid her a lot, in fact—last time we walked home together, I’d seen her counting the bills. Soon she’d go away to college, and then the wide world would swallow her up. And we’d never see her again. I hated to start thinking of it, but I was going to have to.

“So you really believe in miracles, then, Nora?”

“What?” I said, too sad to really hear what she was asking.

“You believe that that doughnut rock could heal someone. You believe in miracles, then.”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“I don’t think I can even say maybe,” Rose said. “I’d like to, but I don’t think I can anymore.”

“Yes you can. You’ll believe in anything,” I pointed out.

“I will?” Rose looked puzzled. “What makes you say that?’

“Well, you believe in aliens. Plus, you said it when you were reading about the werewolves. You said that when you walk up the street at night, you’ll believe anything.”

“A werewolf is hardly a miracle,” Rose said, sighing, looking up Fox Hill. She seemed a little anxious, or at least bored with this conversation.

“I think maybe it is, though. If you saw one, you’d think so.”

Rose finally smiled—just barely.

“I don’t know about that. You’d probably be too scared to stop and think about it being a miracle. And what I think I meant was that when it’s dark and you’re scared, it’s easier to believe in stupid stuff like ghosts and werewolves. But I don’t
usually
believe in that stuff.”

“Do you right now?”

“No. Do you?”

“No,” I said firmly, lying.

“Only the Druids, then?”

I wasn’t sure if she was teasing. Her serious expression indicated she wasn’t.

“The Druids and Easter Island,” I corrected her, trying to sound certain.

“Well, those are good choices. See ya, Nora.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”

I stood in my yard for a moment, cold but reluctant to go in and attempt small talk with Mrs. Crowe while I waited for my mother to get home. I watched Rose for a moment, her jeans moving in that swingy way some teenage girls had, unafraid of making their butts look big. She adjusted the strap of her backpack, then slung it over one shoulder again before disappearing where the sidewalk turned up the hill. Then I bent down to pick up one of the stray red leaves that hadn’t been raked the week before. Joe Dean had raked Mrs. Crowe’s leaves for her, although she’d grumbled that he’d done a bad job, saying she should’ve docked his pay. But I was glad he’d left a few leaves scattered across the lawn. I hated that winter was coming, that the trees were now bare, and that most of the yard’s color had disappeared so quickly somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention.

Chapter Nine

May 23, 2006

“I’m showing a movie to my sophomores tomorrow,” Charlotte announced as she came in the front door, tossing her fat teacher tote into a kitchen chair. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go out.”

“I bought some stuff to make you a curry,” I said, holding up the garam masala I’d gone all the way to Fairville to find.

“That’s great,” Charlotte replied. “That’s really sweet of you. You can make it tomorrow. Really, let’s go out. I need to feel like a grown-up tonight. The kids were making fart jokes all seventh period. There’s this one kid who names his farts after the different school lunches. Today was the Nacho Grande.”

“That rules out Mexican, I suppose.”

“Oh, I already have a place all picked out,” Charlotte told me.

“Okay, well, we can go out,” I said, leading her into the living room. “But I think maybe we need to talk for a minute.”

“Uh-oh,” she said with a sigh. “Sounds serious.”

“Maybe,” I said, handing her the page from the
Looking Glass
she’d left on the coffee table the first night. “I should’ve asked you about this earlier. I just didn’t know what to make of it. Why did you bring this up?”

“Oh.” Charlotte looked at it noncommittally. “I wondered where I’d put that.”

“You left it on the coffee table.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sort of a slob.”

“You were reading this thing to me from an old issue of the
Looking Glass,
Charlotte? Why?”

“I guess I just wanted to see if you’d be willing to talk about it.”

“What about it, exactly?”

“Well, I thought those poems might be a sensitive subject. I wasn’t sure if you’d
want
to talk about them, frankly. I guess I thought I’d start by letting you know I admired them.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Okay. You’re right. It was stupid. I felt stupid about it as soon as I did it. I probably should’ve been more direct. I should’ve learned my lesson the first time around.”

“First time around?”

“I tried to get you to talk about them just after we graduated.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about… . And what exactly did you want to ask me about it?”

“It felt to me like you still had something to say. About Rose, maybe, but maybe not. Maybe the parts connected to Rose were just to get my attention. Either way, it felt like you were trying to send a message to
me
at the time
.
Am I right?”

“When?” I asked.

Charlotte leaned against the kitchen counter and fiddled with the sugar bowl, turning its white porcelain lid clockwise, then counterclockwise.

“When you wrote those things,” she said. “When you dropped them in the
Looking Glass
box.”

The confidence in her voice stunned me more than her words. It took a moment for their meaning to sink in.

“
I
didn’t write them,” I said, after recovering my voice.

“I
liked
them, Nora.” Charlotte let go of the sugar bowl’s top and looked up at me. “And trust me, I didn’t like much that was dropped anonymously into that box at the time. Mostly unrequited-crush confessions and the occasional fakey-sounding poem about incest. You know, the kids
still
use that stupid box as their personal Freudian dumping ground—”

“I didn’t write them,” I repeated. “This week was the first time I’ve read them. I went to the Waverly Public Library and found them. I’ve never seen them before. I never read the
Looking Glass
back then.”

“I
know
you wrote them. You put a couple of Rose’s dreams in them. It was cool how you worked them in. The one about the clothesline and the one about the gym mats…”

“Charlotte…
you
wrote them.”

“Nora…” Charlotte cocked her head, giving me a sympathetic look that made me want to kick her.

“
You
wrote them. I didn’t have anything to do with that stupid magazine.”

“I know it was a really hard time for you. This is why I was a little worried about bringing it up, kind of pussyfooted about it that first night you were here. But I’ve just so wanted to ask you about them for so long.”

“I didn’t write them, Charlotte.”

“You know, it was such a rough time. Maybe you just don’t really
remember
doing it?”

“That’s… ridiculous,” I sputtered.

“Why? Just last night we were talking about how we all take leave of our senses at some point in high school.”

“Well, sure. But I think I’d remember if I sat down and penned five or six avant-garde poems and submitted them to a school literary magazine in which I
never
had any interest.”

“
Avant-garde.
That’s funny that you’d call it that. That’s part of what I liked about them. The quirky tone. Years after we’d stopped talking, but they still
sounded
sort of like you.”

So sounding trippy sounded like me. Hmm. A few years ago, I might have been flattered by that, but not so much now.

“They weren’t
me,
” I insisted. “I would
remember.
I was afraid to raise my hand in
class,
Charlotte. Do you think I would ever’ve put myself out there like this? And then not remember it? To not remember—that’s not a
rough time.
That’s, like, psychosis.”

“Oh, I disagree. Maybe you just don’t—”

“You don’t need to say it again. I was messed up, but I wasn’t crazy.”

“No one is suggesting that you were. Let’s get in the car, Nora. We can talk about this over dinner.”

I hated how she said this, in that gentle way you talk to someone who just needs to come to her senses.

“Let’s go. We’ll have a drink, we’ll talk about it. It’ll be easier like that.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, grabbing my keys.

I’d make her admit it when we got there.

I offered to drive, figuring that Charlotte would be having a few drinks. I followed her directions until we were parked in the lot of one of Fairville’s strip malls.

“We going to that Chinese take-out place?” I asked.

“No, over there,” Charlotte said, pointing to the end of the building, with a large green sign that said
JB’S
.

“Is that a sports bar?” I could see about three big-screen TVs just from the window.

“Yeah.”

I was surprised by the restaurant choice, since Charlotte had billed the outing as a “grown-up” one. I didn’t care for these places. It’s not so much the tedious drone of a sportscast that bothers me, or the excess of televisions, or the icky fried onion blossoms, or the testosterone, or even the women with orange tans and lip liner. It’s just having to deal with all those things at once. But Charlotte had always been more of a “sporty” girl than I was, so maybe she went in for it all.

“There a game on of some kind?” I asked, trying to sound amenable.

Charlotte looked at me funny and then shrugged.

“Sure. There’s always a game on, I guess,” she said. “I told Porter to meet us here at a quarter till six.”

“Oh.” That explained things somewhat. So we were entertaining a guy.

But when Porter found our table—early, just after we were seated by an ample-bosomed blond greeter—he didn’t look to be the sports-bar sort either. He had unruly black curls, and wore angular, horn-rimmed glasses that overpowered his narrow face. A little more decidedly eccentric than I thought would be to Charlotte’s taste, but what did I know? We hadn’t talked boys much when we were kids. She’d never told me what her type was.

“How was school?” he asked Charlotte after we’d all made our introductions.

She responded by launching right into a story about some of her sophomore girls. As much as she talked about wanting to get away from the kids, Charlotte seemed to bring them with her everywhere.

“The sophomores are reading short stories,” she explained, “in American lit. Today we were reading Joyce Carol Oates. ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ Read it?”

“Yeah,” Porter said. “Actually, I think I have.”

Charlotte looked at me. “You probably read it in high school, too. It’s about this girl named Connie. She’s fifteen, and this sexual predator comes to her door. Slowly convinces her to get in his car.”

“Mmm… yeah, that rings a bell,” I said, scanning the menu.

“And I know it’s sort of tasteless of me to have them reading it now,” Charlotte continued. “Sort of a gross coincidence, but—”

“Gross?” Porter said. “ How… ? Oh. Yeah. I see.”

“Some girl’s mom called me to complain. But really, that was what I was planning to teach this week. And frankly, I thought of skipping it. To be perfectly honest, though, it’s so goddamn easy to teach, too. The kids always have a lot to say about poor old Connie. How dumb they think she is.

“So I was watching a group of girls in one of my classes today. They were supposed to be doing these group-discussion questions on the story. But they were goofing off, mostly. There are these pervy lines in the story where Arnold Friend, the creepy older guy, is trying to talk her out of the house, saying stuff like, ‘I’m gonna come inside you where it’s all secret and you’re gonna give it to me,’ and the girls were reading each other these lines in funny voices, imitating Barry White, practically falling off their chairs laughing. On some level I think they were just so amazed they’d been assigned something that contained these words. The sad thing is, they think Connie’s stupid, but they’re
just
like her.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“They can’t believe what they’re hearing. They’re so insecure and clueless that they have no idea how to deal with it. They’re so insecure and clueless that I usually want to wring their necks, to be honest. But it’s that insecurity and cluelessness that, at the same time, makes me so angry when I think of someone taking advantage, hurting one of them. You know what I mean?”

Our goateed waiter took our drink orders: Charlotte’s pinot grigio, my soda (I wasn’t in the mood to drink), and Porter’s gin and tonic. Porter’s choice nearly made me giggle. He had such a baby face he could’ve been eighteen. I knew he had to be at least twenty-three or so, and I hoped he was older than that. Still, Charlotte’s whole coiffed-teacher-with-a-cigarette bit—combined with the eagerly boyish way he conversed with her—was starting to give me a Mrs. Robinson vibe.

“So I was thinking that Rose was young, like my girls,” Charlotte said after the waiter had left us. “As cool as we thought she was, she was probably just like them. Maybe she
would’ve
gotten into a car with some creepy older guy. Probably didn’t have a clue what she was doing most of the time.”

“It’s hard for me to think of her that way,” I said. “But it makes sense. Hey—you thought any more about Aaron? You sniffed around the teachers’ lounge about that?”

“I’m keeping my ear out for that, trust me,” Charlotte said, lowering her voice, looking quickly around her for a moment, checking for eavesdroppers. “I heard Philippa mention she thought he and Rose were an odd pair, but I haven’t heard any hint of an accusation.”

“I see,” I said.

Charlotte nodded conspiratorially and sipped her wine. I couldn’t tell if she really believed that Aaron could have had something to do with Rose’s murder or if it had just been something to talk about late at night—and now something to gab about over dinner.

Porter cleared his throat. “Um, I have some Rose news,” he said, then clamped his lips around his cocktail straw.

Charlotte leaned forward. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“When I called you, I mentioned I had news.” Porter glanced at me. “That’s partly why I suggested we meet.”

“You’re a reporter, hon. You always have news. Out with it, then.”

“It’ll be in the paper tomorrow. Maybe it’s already on the evening news. The state police and the Waverly department got together, put out a short, careful release about the body. I think it’s partly saving face, stressing that two thorough searches were done in 1990 and 1991. The remains are many years old, but the receptacle they were in was not. The line they’re using is that ‘the burial likely occurred more recently than would normally be expected in a case of this nature.’ ”

Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “So the whole wicker-basket thing is true.”

“Well, no one said anything about wicker. I know how badly you want me to blow the lid off this wicker thing, but—”

“So the body hasn’t been there sixteen years. We kind of already knew that. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Porter said, glancing at me again. “One other thing.”

“Yesssss?” Charlotte said impatiently.

“Ben told me this off the record.”

“Noted. What?”

“Some of the bones were broken. They’re saying the cause of death, even based on the first forensics, was blunt-force trauma.”

Charlotte put down her wine. “To the skull?”

“Well. Yes. But here’s the weird thing. Also to the chest.”

“The chest?” Charlotte repeated softly. “How… ?”

“I don’t know,” Porter said.

“Maybe someone hit her over the head,” Charlotte suggested, “and then, when she fell over, kept beating her?”

I poked at my ice cubes and took a sip of soda, trying to ignore the faint nausea that was just starting to stir in my stomach.

“I really don’t know,” Porter repeated. “If anyone’s conjecturing, I haven’t heard.”

“Anything else?” Charlotte demanded.

“No. They’re expecting the lab results in a couple of days. That’ll confirm it’s her. Not sure if it will help them with anything else. Not sure how much you can get out of a body that’s been around that long.”

“Maybe there’d be hairs,” Charlotte said. “Of the person who buried her or something like that.”

I stared at the menu, suddenly doubtful that I’d be able to eat anything, much less a hamburger dripping with condiments and a side of greasy fries. I don’t know why it bothered me that Charlotte could process and discuss this information so quickly.

“Who’s Ben?” I asked.

“The dispatcher,” she said with a hint of exasperation. “He and Porter are pretty tight.”