The Bluest Blood (20 page)

“The answer is yes. And no,” he said. “I did sleep over. But I wasn’t there when it happened. We left for a few hours, Griffin and me.”

“Where to?”

“Just out.”

I inhaled deeply and slowly. Not exactly an airtight alibi.

“When we got back, it was over. I mean, even the—even the cleanup—I mean, he was gone. We used the back stairway like usual. Nobody noticed.”

“Didn’t the police want to talk to you?”

“Why would they?”

“As possible witnesses. Even though the house is far back, a fire on the road—if you were upstairs, say, you might have seen or heard something. Noted the time.”

He shook his head again. “No police. If they came later or before, nobody told me.”

“Nobody asked your whereabouts?”

He shook his head.

“How about Griffin’s parents? How were they about your being AWOL?”

“They never asked, didn’t know. Like I said, we used the back stairs.”

And they never checked. Never caught on about the kids’ repeated adventures elsewhere. Never asked if they’d heard anything the night of a murder across the way. Very trusting or very lazy people. Another attack of that old affluenza. “Where’d the two of you go?”

He sucked in his upper lip, unconsciously trying to hold onto whatever answer was in the pipeline. Very bad.

“Reality check, Jake. A man you openly despised was murdered. And as far as anyone knows, you were at the scene of the crime. Don’t you think that sooner or later you and Griffin will have to answer for where you were?”

His color drained away and his mouth, held so tightly a minute ago, opened halfway.

“Where were you?”

“Jesus.” He leaned forward against the seat belt. “I’m tired. What a week.”

Fatigue and suspicion can be a toxic mix. I felt the combination poison me. Everything of late added up to trusting no one, believing nothing, suspecting everything. Add to that the torpor in my cells, and the combination was making me ill. What did Jake’s evasiveness hide? Sex, drugs—murder?

“I promised not to tell,” he finally said.

“I respect your integrity, but all the same—”

He looked at me with wide, imploring eyes. “We went to Suzy Houston’s.”

Sex, then. With Suzy Houston, a sweet, if dim, ninth grader. Too young for that, wasn’t she? I sighed and shook my head.

“Her mother was out on a date. She’d kill Suzy if she finds out she had people over. But Griffin had a pirated
Jane Eyre
—”

“What does
Jane Eyre
have to do with this? Or pirates, for God’s sake?” I felt frayed, and Jake’s incomprehensibility—deliberate?—made everything worse. I drove the Expressway, grateful for small favors—no delays at this hour of a predawn Saturday. “Please get to the point.”

“That was the point. Suzy—is she going to get in trouble over this? She hadn’t read the book like she was supposed to for you. We wound up watching it with her.”

“That’s it? All of it?”

He nodded.

So the evil deed was watching
Jane Eyre
. An illegal videotape copy of the recent movie version. It wasn’t officially on tape yet, or I might have shown it to my classes myself. So we weren’t talking murder, we were talking grand theft, intellectual piracy. Interesting what seems like good news sometimes.

“I won’t say anything unless I really need to, but if Griffin’s great technical expertise is being put to use pirating films, I’d suggest he has too much equipment and not enough sense.”

Jake shook his head. “Only for Suzy. They’re like a big brother–little sister thing.”

The closer we came to the paved-over city, the more the ground fog dissipated. I imagined it squashed and roiling beneath the cement. Nonetheless, relief seeped through my bones as driving became less onerous.

“What am I to do with you now?” I asked Jake, when we were on broad and silent Ben Franklin Parkway. Monumental sealed buildings shaped the horizon. “It’s not even six o’clock.”

I heard a short, nervous exhale, then a longer, more troubled one. He stared out the window into a landscape fuzzed by approaching daylight. “I could say I wanted to get home early, be with her. I guess.” His tone would have been the same if he’d suggested that I bury him alive.

“How are you going to explain the jail?”

“Do I have to? If they’re sealing our records like they said, why would I have to? She’ll get so…” His breathing speeded up, and he nervously rubbed the side of his hand across his upper lip. “And if my father hears about this, he probably won’t want me to move back with him.”

“Is that the plan? Have you heard from him?” My surprise that the elusive journalist had actually surfaced and was offering to behave like a parent must have been audible.

“You think I lie about him, don’t you?” Before I could do more than sputter a negative sound, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “See this? I took it to show Griffin. You’ll probably say I made it up myself, typed it onto my computer or something. But how would I get stuff out of his newspaper morgue? It isn’t online.” He waved the paper near my face.

I smacked it away. “I have to see the road!” Then I took a deep breath and spoke more quietly. “Tell me what it is.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I just wanted you to…he did this on his own. I didn’t ask. I sent him my column about the unsolved mystery Web site, and he found more stuff about one of the cases I’d mentioned. The Cheshire Cat one. That was Canadian.”

I’d found the green-soled corpse and the dishwater drowning more intriguing, but I glanced over because he seemed to require that. I saw nothing except a copy of a news story with a dark head shot in it.

“He sent it to me,” Jake said.

This seemed to encompass the dimensions of their relationship—long-distance repartee and an easy bit of research and copying. Nothing that touched the heart. Nothing parental. And meantime, his son was in ever-escalating jeopardy.

I thought about the old child next to me, who had a mother with the emotional maturity of a prepubescent. Who had a father who enjoyed his son at a comfortably remote distance, as long as the relationship didn’t get difficult and personal. Who’d had a certifiably crazy stepfather. Who’d thought the Roederers were his sanctuary until one of them tried to jail him. Whose best friend had run away this very night.

Who knew, in short, no safety. “Could you use a little time to get yourself together before you go home?”

He looked at me and nodded, his expression nakedly grateful.

I still had a problem of logistics: The only places I could think of that were open and available for getting oneself together at this hour were park benches and the loft. The latter was warmer.

“Do you believe in him now?” Jake demanded.

“Who?”

“My father!”

Who was Loren Ulrich? Tinkerbell? Was it up to me to make him real? Accumulated fatigue and frustration smacked at my head with cyclone force. Thank God, we were finally home.

*

I emptied the cold dregs of coffee into a cup and headed directly for the microwave. “You want half of this?”

Jake shook his head. He seemed untouched by fatigue. If anything, he was wired, hovering around the table, demanding that I believe in his father. I couldn’t sympathize much longer. I offered Jake coffee, fresh, and offered some to me, too. I ground beans while sipping my reheated brew.

I tried to remember the steps by which I’d wound up virtually sleepless on a Saturday dawn with an eleventh grader in my kitchen.

“If you tell my mother about tonight,” Jake said, “and she tells him, I don’t know what’ll happen.”

He had the agitated look of something caged breaking free. I resented the youth that allowed him to be active and emotional on zero sleep, although he did seem to be wobbling out of control now and then in a way that might take the lid off his raw emotions.

“Why do you have to tell any of it? Even about Suzy Houston’s?”

“Because a crime—a
murder
happened.”

He shook his head too vigorously, leaned over the table near where I stood, his long frame bent at the waist, his face near mine. “You have to
listen,
understand!”

“Shh.” I wanted him back observing boundaries. “You’re exhausted, and things are out of proportion.”

“No!
You’re
the one out of proportion!” He grabbed my upper arms, as if to force me to pay attention, as if I hadn’t already been trying my best. I felt weepy with fearful frustration. “Nobody in the whole world listens to me!” he shouted, his grip tightening with agitation.
“You have to!”

And
blam!
Noise—pounding feet. My scream. A shout, “Let her go or I’ll shoot!” Hands grabbing. Then, “What the hell
is
this? Who the hell are you?”

That
voice. I exhaled. Jake, on the other hand, didn’t seem capable of breath. He looked as if he would crumple right to the floor—if only he weren’t being held in a human straitjacket by Mackenzie.

“Please,” Jake said. “Miss Pepper? Could you tell him to—”

“He’s okay,” I said to Mackenzie. “There’s no…what
are
you doing here? You were in Kansas.”

He let Jake go and took a deep breath. “So I was, indeed.” He sounded his normal self again. “But it took so long to get the paperwork done that, lo and behold, they meantime invented airplanes, and I took one home. I was in Kansas and now I’m not.”

Jake, released, looked like an oversized puppy who’d messed the room.

“I called when I landed,” Mackenzie said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Are you arresting me?” Jake’s question was whispered. He kept his head bowed, his eyes on the floor.

“Should I?” Mackenzie asked.

“This is Jake Ulrich,” I said. “My student, and not yet a hardened criminal. He meant no harm. Jake, this is C. K. Mackenzie.” I don’t like sharing my domestic life with my students, so I said no more, but then, I didn’t have to. Maybe Jake and I could cut a deal and keep each other’s secrets. “Mackenzie also means no harm,” I said. “Generally speaking.”

“I tiptoe in so as not to wake you and suddenly I see this guy grabbing you. Student or no student, what the hell’s going on?”

“Good question,” I said. “I wish I knew the answer.”

Fourteen

A sullen, recently incarcerated teenager was not the welcome-home surprise I would have chosen, but there we had it. More precisely, there we had him. Jake and I presented a condensed and sanitized version of recent events, and Mackenzie scrubbed his Kansas adventures of all details good and bad. There had to be more to it than his summary, which consisted of: “Got him and brought him back.” Plus a few yawns and the comment that he’d been an “ugly cuss.”

I smiled at my hero. So what if he hadn’t saved my life, hadn’t needed to. He’d thought he was, would have if I’d required saving. That was just as good. But my limbs felt sandbag-heavy with exhaustion born more of the mind than the body. I was tired of worrying about a situation that seemed beyond my capacity, and as a reward for his heroics, I passed him the emotional baton.

“Time for home,” Mackenzie told Jake.

“It’s just after six,” Jake said.

“People do function at this hour. Even on Saturday. Even young people. People get up and jog or farm or practice the tuba or row on the river or write sonnets. People even go home at six of a morning.”

“How will I explain?”

“Say Griffin’s mom woke you up running the vacuum.”

Jake stared. “Mrs. R.? Vacuuming?”

“A joke, son,” Mackenzie said. “Say anything, including the truth.”

“My mother sleeps in, especially Sat—”

“What is wrong with you? Don’t you have a key to your own house?”

“Well, I…it’s a matter of…she’s…” He gave up and put his hands up in a position of surrender.

And out we went into the morning. The ground fog had gone urban, transformed into gray, watery air.

Mackenzie chauffeured. I was delighted—until he turned left, toward South Philly. “Jake lives in the Fairmount area,” I said. “Uptown and to the right. North.”

Mackenzie nodded. “Thought maybe breakfast first. I’m starvin’.”

He was also allowing Jake a grace period and a less surprising time of arrival. I studied Jake’s visible and extreme relief the way an archaeologist might read surface clues to buried secrets, and I saw signs of how deeply and completely unhappy he was. Unlike the archaeologist, I stopped there, unwilling or afraid to dig deeper.

Mackenzie’s job demanded knowing off-hour haunts, in this case an all-night diner. I yawned and rested my head against the seat. Total passivity was increasingly attractive.

When we entered the diner, Jake went off to wash up.

Mackenzie and I settled into a high-backed leather booth, from which I studied the decor.

Three walls were resplendent with paintings on velvet, although rather than toreadors or Elvis, the artist was enraptured with overloaded, steaming platters of food. And what retro, incredible edibles! Fat-edged steaks, eggs and sausage, ice-cream sundaes, pie a la mode, twelve-layered cakes.

I waved at the artwork. “Very chic and now. This is the new restaurant trend. The forbidden fatty old standards have become rewards for working out and eating sprouts and zero fat at home.”

Mackenzie raised one eyebrow. “Hate to say this, but the art’s been up since the Fifties. Nothing’s back
in
here—it never left. Never budged.” He smiled and took my hand. “I get any interestin’ mail or messages while I was gone?”