In the Dead of Summer (17 page)

“You think?”

“I’m sure it isn’t the essay he was supposed to write, but I’m not sure what it is.” I browned the rice in a second pan, added the tomatoes and wine and the precious saffron threads. My enthusiasm was already waning, and this effort feeling like an excessive amount of labor for something that would disappear in a matter of moments.

“What were you doin’ in Chinatown this afternoon, anyway?” he asked, apropos of exactly nothing. “Not on your way home, is it?”

“Lowell wanted to walk me home, and I didn’t want him near here, so I pretended to be on my way to Sasha’s, and then, when he was finally gone, I thought I’d get Chinese takeout for us.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Then what is it you’re whipping up back there? Uncooked takeout?”

“I
thought
takeout. Then I was possessed by the Happy Homemaker Demon, and I couldn’t help myself. I needed an exorcist.”

He shook his head for a little too long. I like verbal despair. The silent variety drives me up the wall with its chattering white noise, full of accusations. I was halfway up the wall when he finally spoke. “So,” he said, “somewhere between Chinese takeout and Spanish from scratch, you found a convenience store called Buddy’s.”

“The trouble with official investigations is that you don’t know the players,” I said. “You get cynical about what people tell you. I say she’s a good girl—but even I know that’s what everybody says about people who turn out to have chopped people in their basements. ‘Oh, but he was such a good neighbor. Gave generously to every charity.’ So, of course, you discount such banality, but what if it were true in this case? What if a certain action, like any connection with a massage parlor, was sufficiently inconsistent with her personality as to make it impossible? What if that inconsistency were important?”

He petted the cat, who had resigned himself to settling on lap, not cast, and he said nothing. His drink could have used a refill, but my domestic demons had gone off duty and I didn’t feel like waiting on anybody, even though I knew it was reprehensible being mean-spirited with the serve-himself challenged.

“You don’t accept that, do you?” I said. “You think that sooner or later truth will out, even in officialdom. But I think that by then it could be too late. Other ideas would have been built on top of that missed idea.”

“And I’m sayin’ your expertise is in the classroom, an’ I don’ make big suppositions about what tragic errors you could be perpetuatin’ there. Look, you need to show me somethin’ because you aren’t even sure if it’s poetry or not, but did I cast aspersions? Why do you always assume we all flunked Thinking 101?”

“I don’t. But nobody questioned Buddy Star, and somebody should have.”

“Why do I have the feeling you already did?”

“He won’t cooperate. April didn’t officially exist at his place. She wasn’t on the books and he didn’t pay any benefits.”

“Maybe he made her lie—make up a place,” Mackenzie suggested.

I liked that explanation, although it still left the extra hour unaccounted for. “Do you know Officer Deedee Klein?” I asked. “She came to school today, about the disappearance.”

He shook his head. “Not Homicide.”

“I knew that. She was in uniform. And nobody in my class had a thing to say, as far as she was concerned. They were quieter than they’ve ever been.”

“Maybe nobody in your class knows anything relevant. Isn’t that possible? But I’m glad you’re aware of Officer Klein and I hope you understand that it’s
her
job to find April Truong, not yours.”

We were back to that. My turn to use my right to remain silent. A man who is used to questioning suspects is going to make his point—and too often yours, too—whether or not you like it. I combined my two skillets worth of sauté into one large flat casserole and put it in the oven. “I’ll get that paper,” I said, and I rummaged through my briefcase until I found Miles’s exam. I read it to myself again.

Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with

A group? An idea? A tradition? A

Person? Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang. They’re dead.

Assigning blame is useless, something he wouldn’t

dare.

Would he?

Ask him. Perhaps he is

Afraid.

Probably is, because

Reality

Is too much like fiction and

Life sucks.

I still didn’t get it. I could sense something whiz by, but it only grazed me and kept moving. I handed the page to the wounded cop. I even felt a flutter of mercy and poured him a sangria refill, then busied myself with setting the table and phoning Flora.

The message on her machine was cryptic, merely repeating the number that had been reached. “Call me if you need anything, please,” I said. “I’m at home.”

“I don’t think this is likely to find its way into the anthologies of immortal verse,” Mackenzie said. “It’s more a coupla sentences with weird punctuation. Some people think poetry’s a matter of not letting the lines reach the right margin. There’s no logic to what’s where, or how he breaks these lines. I mean, couldn’t this be one sentence? ‘Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with a group, an idea, a tradition, a person?’”

“Sure,” I said, “but not a good sentence. Needs a conjunction.”

“Or this one—these two. Why are they split? ‘Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang, they’re dead.’ Or the next—I think this kid divvied up his few sentences to make you think he’s written more than he has. Listen, ‘Assigning blame is useless, something he wouldn’t dare, would he?’ What’s with that rhetorical flourish? Why’s it have its own line? It weights itself down. Don’t need it.”

But as soon as he’d said it, as soon as I’d heard it rather than read it silently, I understood why he’d needed it, why it had gotten its own line. I pointed the fork in my hand at Mackenzie. “Woody,” I said. “It’s about Woody Marshall.”

“Why?”

“Listen to that line about assigning blame, about how he wouldn’t dare. I kept wondering what
he
Miles could have meant—but the next line tells me who. ‘Would he?’ That’s his name and that has to be what Miles means. Woody’s guilty.”

“He’s only one option here. Prob’ly no more than a coincidence.”

“Another knee-jerk reaction, because I said it?”

“First of all, it’s real hard for me to jerk my knee these days,” he said, “an’ second, even when hale, I am not guilty of any kind of jerkiness, and third, there’s somethin’ else altogether goin’ on here. Those broken-up ideas, split sentences—is this Miles illiterate?”

“No. Just unconventional.”

“Yeah, but this is more than needing to be different.” And then he scowled. “Except it doesn’t work that way, either.”

“What doesn’t?”

“I thought maybe the point wasn’t in the words but in their first letters, that they spelled something. An old poetic tradition. Except these first letters don’t work. Wa Paw A Papr Il? Or maybe they’re scrambled. A papr a paw wil? Law Papa Rail. Warp a lap pail. None of them seem real high on the sense scale.” I heard his intake of breath. “Except for the last five lines.”

April. They spelled April.

“That can’t be coincidence,” Mackenzie said.

“Romeo and Juliet and April and Woody,” I said. “And blame—as in that disappearance.”

“And fear,” Mackenzie added. “Obviously, this kid was afraid to say whatever it is openly. Wrote it in code. You should show this to Officer Deedee.”

“Sure. I’ll give it to her.”

“After you’ve copied it, I’ll bet,” he said without a smile. My toes were across his line again, on his turf—even while he was disabled and not using that turf—and he was ready to book me for trespassing. A cop in the manger.

Of course I’d duplicate the poem. So what? “I’ll give her the poem in exchange for a list of what was inside April’s backpack.”

I’d taken him by surprise for once. His superior disdain was gone and he looked at me with open curiosity, waiting, but surely I didn’t need to explain silly amateurish theories to a Real Pro. “It interests me,” was all I said. “It’s one of those assumptions, one of those things we could too easily take for granted and build on—all in the wrong direction. The leaning tower of presumption.
You
know.”

But he didn’t, and I was a sufficiently mean-spirited and unsaintly person to be glad. We had lots of contests going, Mackenzie and I. Only one was about cooking. More important others were about smarts and expertise and other subheadings to be filed under: power. Either this was a sign of an unhealthy relationship, or couplehood boiled down to one long balancing act.

“This ending worries me,” I said. “About life being too much like fiction. The fiction in question ends with two dead kids.”

“Let’s stay with reality, then. At the moment, there is one missing, not dead, kid, so don’t make any great and scary leaps.”

“There’s two kids. One dead. Vanny Tran.”

“Don’t count somebody you didn’t know. There are lots and lots of dead kids. But for right now, just take the next step. You are going to turn the poem over to the police, and confine your questions and curiosity to the classroom.”

“No problem.”

“That was too easy. What’s the catch?”

“There is none. Luckily, all my questions—and people I need to question—are already in the classroom.”

“For Pete’s sake, Mandy—” He was interrupted by a formidable buzz.

“Saved by the oven timer,” I said, glad again for my domesticity fit. What would have saved me if I’d gotten takeout?

HELGA CAN SOUR EVEN FEEL-GOOD MORNINGS, AND THIS
most definitely wasn’t one of those.

She seemed surlier than ever, so I grabbed the contents of my mailbox and left the school office as quickly as I could. Flora’s door looked locked shut, and when I got to my room, the one student I needed to talk with was nowhere to be seen.

“Anybody know where Miles is?” Why had he chosen to break his perfect attendance record today?

“I heard he always misses a lot of school,” a girl in the back said. “I guess he’s got some kind of condition.”

“Some kind of
aud
ition.” Carmen Gabel actually interrupted her third lipstick application of the morning to say this.

“He has like an agent,” Toy Drebbin added. Miles must really be something to have engaged the minds of two apathetic seat warmers. “He’ll be famous someday. In fact, I think he had like a tryout this morning. Some movie that’s shooting here.”

The girl across the aisle glared at him. “No,” she said firmly. “Today he’s sick.”

Toy’s narrow face flushed and he sputtered a bit before getting words out. “He shoulda told me it was a secret,” he finally said in a loud hiss. “Now I remember. Yesterday afternoon he was all splotchy and coughing and his stomach hurt.”

I didn’t know if Miles was exceptionally beloved, or whether I was especially disliked, but they were uniformly hell-bent on protecting him from me. I hated being the opposition, but that was my role. I was the law, the organization, officialdom. I was rules and regulations and prohibitions.

And to think I’d imagined teaching as a helping profession.

I squelched further discussion of Miles’s whereabouts and pushed the group toward the syllabus. Today’s activities included working on dangling participles, discussing “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, which they were supposed to have read last night, and SAT vocabulary building.

While they worked on analogies I flipped through the memos and notices that had been in my mailbox, tossing most directly into the circular file, then picking out one that looked slightly interesting, mainly because it was printed on bright yellow paper, folded in thirds, and stapled shut. It suggested somebody had cared about protecting whatever was inside.

Reading it was like being punched in the stomach.

STOP LOVING MUD PEOPLE OR ARE YOU ONE TOO, A JEW? YOUR KIND HAS TO GO. NO MORE NIGGERS AND GOOKS. NO MORE WARNINGS.

“Miss Pepper?” Carmen said. “Are you okay? You look sick.” I must have looked like death itself to have roused her out of her makeup fixation. But, in fact, why, for the first time this summer, was she paying attention to me? Was she concerned about me or was she checking to see if it worked? What about the rest of them? Several sets of eyes watched me. Why? I could feel the near-hysteria I’d witnessed on Flora the day before take hold of me.

Maybe she’d been right. Maybe my class was my enemy in a new and chilling way. The note was made of cut and pasted letters in a sickening familiar typeface. The school newspaper again.

Who was it? Why?

I heard echoes of Lowell warning me that being friends with Flora could bring me grief from
them
.
Was Lowell
them
? And what sort of grief came next? And it wasn’t only about Flora, it was about April, too. It was against
their
rules to care about anybody whose skin wasn’t exactly like mine.

“Miss Pepper?”

I looked at her almost blankly, and then I remembered what she had asked. “I’m fine, Carmen,” I said slowly. But I wasn’t. I was hot inside, and chilled as well. And I was furious. “No,” I said. “No, I’m not. I’m sick. Sick of the hate and poison in a note I was sent. Sick of the kind of ugliness that hit at Miss Jones. That should never be in this school. That should never exist anywhere at all.” I was shaking under my skin, each nerve echoing the pounds of my heart. But I kept my voice from quavering. I was willing to show my anger, outrage. I wasn’t willing to show my terror. Just in case there was one among them who would gloat over it, delight in it.