Philly Stakes (6 page)

I pulled on my moral cloak along with a boot and spoke sternly to Mackenzie, or myself. “No morning games. I have to leave.”

“Shhh,” he said.

“If our situation were reversed,” I explained, “you wouldn’t like it if I—”

He pointed at the radio. “Clausen.”

“Another commercial?” I frowned.

Mackenzie shook his head, and the way he did it made my pulse skyrocket all over again.

“—flamboyant business style, then for his involvement in the city’s welfare and development, a prominent philanthropist, the prime mover behind the massive Liberty Harbor project, and widely held to be the front-runner for the office of mayor, Mr. Clausen had hosted a Christmas party for over seventy needy Philadelphians in his home hours before his death. He was still in a Santa Claus costume.”

I sat down hard on the bed, still holding a boot. “What do they mean, ‘still’? What happened?”

“A fire,” Mackenzie said. “Clausen died in a fire.”

Fire. I saw Santa’s ruddy cheeks, white beard and red outfit, all charred.

“—cause of the conflagration remains undetermined and is held at this time to be accidental. However, officials stressed that the matter is still under investigation.”

What did that mean? And what happened to the rest of the family? Alice Clausen—passed out somewhere? And Laura—had she left with Peter? I hoped she had—I hoped it desperately.

“Mr. Clausen’s wife and daughter as well as a houseguest were alerted by a smoke alarm and escaped to safety.”

I felt both relief and fear. Laura was safe. But she’d been in the house during the fire. Laura. Fire.

“Feelin’ guilty, right?” Mackenzie yawned and stretched. “No cause, Mandy.”

“I knew…”

The newscast droned on, listing Clausen’s charitable works. If only he were still alive, he’d be ecstatic over the amount of airtime he was getting.

“What? What did you know?” He sat up straight and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s sad, that’s all.”

It was more than that. I got up and hobbled downstairs, one boot on, one stocking foot, to my stack of marked papers.

And there it was. “Instead of protecting his child,” she had written, “…he sent him too close to the fire.”

Icarus flew too close to the sun, Laura. Not to a fire. Why didn’t you say it the way everybody else would? I stared at the phrase, at the paper, reading it for what I had always known it was—an indictment of more than Icarus’ father, an indictment of all of us for not caring, not saving him. Or her.

I thought of her burn-scarred arm, of the stories about her, of other papers about destructive dreams. “Purgings,” she’d called those fantasies. And “safe murders.” And there’d been fire in them, images of burned zones and sooty remains, fire storms and wildfires. And she’d written about Joan of Arc, about a martyrdom that burned everything but the truth of her away. Of course, she’d also written innocuous papers, lyrical, soft, meditative and gentle papers, but right now, they seemed only rest notes, quiet spaces inside her true song.

“What’re you doin’?” Mackenzie asked a few minutes later as he, too, came downstairs.

I bit my lip and said nothing, Laura’s paper in one hand, my suede boot in the other.

“I don’t think that composition’s what they’ll want from you,” he said. “Fellow on the news says they’re searchin’ for a guest list. You have it?”

The guests! I hadn’t thought of them. But then, why should I have? Why should the police? Except that it felt so good—almost wholesome compared to the alternatives. A stranger, an unknown, not a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old girl who looked twelve. And the guests hadn’t comprised the most stable group. Muttering, frowning. Pulled in from the fringes for one night only—angry, perhaps? Envious, enraged? The man who’d wanted a free car had sounded close to the edge. And what about the spitting ’Nam vet? They were floaters, drifters, disenfranchised unknowns. Anyone of them could have had a secret agenda, could have wanted something badly enough to kill for it if refused. They might not even have known they wanted it until they saw it in Clausen’s opulent house, heard it in Clausen’s jolly laugh.

There were sixty-five possibilities. Strangers. I felt relieved.

Except that I had no idea who they were, and I told Mackenzie so.

He pointed his thumb up the stairs, to the radio. “Accordin’ to one Dr. Maurice Havermeyer, it was your party.”

“So I can cry if I want to? Damn. Why would they want the guest list, anyway?”

“That’s not a real question, now, is it?” he said, almost sadly. He took Laura’s composition out of my hand. “’Cept we know the list isn’t where they should look. Pity. A good mind, all messed up.”

“Don’t even think that.”

“Radio just said there was a fire in that house last year.” He stretched the word fire into “fahr,” somehow softer, more bearable. “You know about that?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Remember that paper you showed me about Joan of Arc? How fire cleansed her?” He shook his head.

“Imaginative writing. You said so yourself. Besides, she wrote others that were as ordinary as can be.”

“And a big fight between the two of them at the party.” He was almost musing to himself. “Front of everybody. Doesn’t look too great.”

“If you met her, knew anything about her, you’d know she couldn’t possibly—”

“I hope you’re right. Listen, I know this hurts, Mandy, that you care a lot about those kids, even if you won’t always admit it, and she’s real special. Nevertheless, you have to consider the possibility that—”

“She isn’t the kind of person who’d—”

“You’re a teacher, not a wizard. You can’t save the world. It’s hard when somebody you’re fond of—”

“Listen, Mackenzie, it was in the papers, that first…lots of people knew about that other…about the…”I couldn’t say it.

“Fire?”

I nodded. “Anybody could have set her up.”

“A motive would be nice. You suggestin’ that one of the homeless, sleeping in his newspaper found the story, got himself invited to her house a year later and torched the place?”

I felt ill. Save me, her eyes had begged. She’d let more of herself show in her papers than was safe because she trusted me. And I’d shown her secrets to a gentleman caller who happened to be a homicide detective. I’d given him ammunition with which he could now prejudge and damn her.

My sick guilt increased. Maybe I couldn’t have stopped anything from happening, but I could have taken some action, called for help when I heard that silent scream. I could have tried to do something, and I hadn’t. The most guilty sort of innocence—sitting on the sidelines.

I realized that although I denied Laura’s possible guilt to Mackenzie, I was privately assuming it. Otherwise, why was I thinking about what I could have prevented?

“Another suggestion,” Mackenzie said. “After you find that guest list, back off. Laura can make you sad, break your heart even, but the fact is, if she becomes police work, she doesn’t concern you.”

“Of course she concerns me! I’m very concerned!”

“I’m not playin’ word games. I’m givin’ you sound advice. She is not your job.”

“I know what the C in your name stands for, Mackenzie. For callous. Or is it cruel? Or maybe creep!” I pulled on the other boot and stormed to the closet.

“Where you goin’?”

“To my job!”

Let him take that any way he liked.

Four

THE DAY BEFORE VACATION IS ALWAYS A BLACK HOLE EDUCATIONALLY, SO I couldn’t blame its draggy disjointedness on the Clausen fire. In fact, the tragedy had been accepted with a level of indifference usually reserved for academic work. Sorrow and concern were expressed, but only for a moment. And then vacation plans took over and the classroom was all tropical isles or ski resorts.

Except for the eleven erstwhile waitpersons. They were like people who miss the plane that crashes. They told and retold the story of how little time had elapsed between their leave-taking and the conflagration and how they had almost decided to stay longer, might have been burned themselves.

Laura, of course, wasn’t there to add her point of view. Nor was she at her house, which was no longer inhabitable. I was so informed by a semifriendly, semisuspicious policeman who was on duty when I called during lunch. The fire had not touched the phone lines, so I could also be informed that the police were doing their job and, frankly, that the world would be better served if I did mine. Mackenzie’s message in a new mouth.

Peter Shaw was also absent, so I couldn’t find out what had happened after I left. Which was probably lucky, because I wasn’t sure on what grounds I could legitimately ask.

Maurice Havermeyer, Ph.D., was present, however, and since he had told the press that I would produce the guest list, he spent a great deal of his day trying to convince me of the same, humphing and throat clearing and suggesting where I might have placed it. I reminded him that I had had nothing whatsoever to do with finding the attendees. I had never even been told precisely how they were selected or from where. Besides, what on earth would a list say? John Smith, grate outside First Pennsylvania Bank? Molly Curtis, Baimbridge Street, various doorways? I tried to express that concept in patient, nonthreatening terms. I suggested that he tell the press the truth—he had erred. Sandy Clausen, not I, made up and kept the list, if there was one. But admitting fallibility was not Maurice Havermeyer’s strong point.

He looked discouraged. There was a reporter in his office, asking about Laura’s history of arson. This was not the kind of media attention Havermeyer had intended.

“I got there late,” I said. “Did someone check names at the door?”

Maurice Havermeyer pantomimed deep thought. Obviously, he hadn’t paid attention and didn’t know, but he grappled with how best not to say so. “I walked right in,” he finally managed.

“I’m sure there were some controls. The group looked too handpicked, too fresh and clean and basically sane to be a random street selection. I’m sure there’s a list.”

“I certainly hope it’s found quickly.” He scowled and fiddled with the imitation Phi Beta Kappa key. “There are reporters all over, rumors and speculation about one of our own students, about our motives for the party, all in all, the worst publicity this school has ever endured. This project, this party of yours was supposed to be a pleasant expression of the holiday spirit. How did you allow this to happen?”

The bell rang for the next class, thereby preventing me from garnering additional unpleasant headlines by murdering my principal.

* * *

Midafternoon, during my free period, I tracked down Mackenzie at the station and managed to have a phone dispute. The school secretary, Helga the Witch, gleamed with malicious delight at my strident, unhappy sounds. I kept my back turned and my words as cryptic as possible, but every time I peeked she was staring, unabashed, and smirking.

“Mackenzie here.” A babble came out of the receiver. Shouts, calls, bedlam.

“It’s Amanda. I was wondering. Is it your case now or—what is that noise? A riot? A jailbreak?” I flashed with fear—who would you call if the police were in trouble?

“Christmas party. You were sayin’?”

“Is it your case?”

“Which is ‘it’?”

“You know very well which one.”

“Oh. The fahr. It’s not in this department. Yet. This is homicide.”

“It isn’t one, then?” I felt enormous relief. Of course the fire was an accident. Of course Laura was innocent—but all the same, nice not to have to prove it.

“Don’t know yet.”

“But you have no connection with it, right?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Then don’t do anything. You weren’t supposed to see those compositions, have any special knowledge about anybody.”

“But I did see them.” The cop party sounded as if it were going to have to be broken up by citizens’ arrests.

“Only because I was indiscreet.”

“What?”

“I was indiscreet!” Helga’s prurient-interest meter went off the chart. I hunched over the receiver. “You didn’t take a vow to tell everything even when you don’t know if what you know means anything.” The ruckus in the receiver was overpowering.

“What’s it mean—‘dake a cow’? Sounds unsavory. You sure I do it?”

“Take a vow, not dake a cow!” I zoomed around and yes, her hooded eyes were wide open and very interested. “Don’t say anything!” I shouted into the phone. “Don’t tell them! Don’t theorize!” The roar of manly chaos was taking over, a tidal wave of sound. “You have no moral responsibility.”

Let Helga have a heyday with vows, moral responsibility and indiscretion.

He slurred something. It didn’t seem worth asking for a translation. But I did ask if I’d see him later. It was, after all, soon to be Friday night. As in Thank God It’s.

He produced one of his noncommittal, frustrating and infuriating answers, the verbal equivalent of his shrug. I know he can’t predict his hours. I know that the first forty-eight hours after a crime are the most important and that Mackenzie and Company will work nonstop as long as they can and that it’s for the common good, et cetera. I know all that and it still annoys me. Especially on a weekend night. And my annoyance annoys Mackenzie.

“Never mind,” I muttered.

“How’s that?”

Useless. First the Philadelphia Police Force would carouse on my tax dollars, and then Mackenzie would work late. I hung up.

Bah. Humbug.

* * *

My last period class behaved like POWs sighting the armies of liberation, and Havermeyer had forbidden early dismissals. By the time we were all released, I felt bruised, inside and out.

At home, I realized I’d stormed off without feeding the cat that morning, and I apologized profusely while I fumbled through the catfood cans and Macavity strolled, purring, to his dish. “Yummy giblets,” I murmured, and then I saw a note propped against the can opener. “I fed the feline. Don’t let the little glutton bamboozle you.”

Life is really bleak when your own pet tries to rip you off. I put the catfood away, downed aspirin and made herbal tea that promised serenity. Then I sulked unserenely on a tall stool at the kitchen counter.

The cat settled in silky contentment on my lap as I flipped through late catalogues, cards from businesses and a manila envelope from Silverwood. I peeked inside and found a mimeographed collection of stories called Mining Silver. Some of the women who’d been in my Rediscovering the Classics class had also been in the Tuesday Creative Writing class, and they’d asked me, shyly, if they could send me their “book.” I put it aside for another time, wrote out two greeting cards and stalled on the third.