The Elementals (9 page)

Katie had reminded me why I needed to go back to Berkeley. It wasn’t for the dream of John, Tania and Perry. It was for Jeni.

I couldn’t eat the tamales my dad brought home for dinner. The lights on the tree hurt my eyes. I left the table as soon as I could and called Katie. My heart felt as if it had stopped, replaced by the incessant rings of her phone. It was Christmas Eve. What if she didn’t pick up?

But she was there. “I wanted to tell you something,” she said.

I waited, biting at a cuticle, my legs jiggling up and down. “Is it about Jeni?” I finally asked when she didn’t say anything.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of? Is it or not?” I was pissed. A year and a half had gone by and Katie hadn’t even called me; she’d waited until she ran into me at a mall.

“I didn’t like the teacher who took us on that trip,” she said. “I think he’s a creep.”

“Did he do something?” I tensed my thighs to keep my legs from shaking; the repetitive movement was making me nauseous.

“No. And the police checked him out. There wasn’t anything. But he just gave me the creeps. I thought you should know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.

“I didn’t really think about it. But I keep having these nightmares. About her.”

I gulped down air. “Like what?”

“He was just looking at her in this way.”

“How did he look at her, Katie?”

“You know, leering or whatever. There was something slightly messed up about it.”

“In the dream or really?”

“Both, sort of. But like I said, I told the cops. They told me he had an alibi.”

There was a pause in which I tried unsuccessfully to straighten out the tangled threads of my thoughts. “I came to you a year ago,” I said.

“I know. It hadn’t really sunk in yet. I was in shock I think. My mom says it’s post-traumatic stress. But when I ran into you like that I thought it was a sign, that I should at least try.”

I didn’t blame her for reading our meeting in the mall as a sign; that was all I seemed to do lately.

I went over to my bookshelf and found the last yearbook Jeni was in. I hadn’t opened it in a long time but now I turned to her picture—the big eyes, the sweet, sweet smile. Tears blurred the image and I batted them away. No use crying now. I had to see clearly. Then I looked up all the kids that had gone on the trip with her: Katie Leiman and also Lex Salverson, Michael Chan, Isabella Franco, Jessica Landers, J.T. Lemus. Everyone smiling, no missing girls yet. They had all come home to Los Angeles and she hadn’t. They had all been questioned, nothing found.

I turned to the faculty page and looked up Mr. Kragen, who had chaperoned them. He wore too-large glasses and his face was pudgy and pale. As Katie said, Mr. Kragen had been questioned and nothing had tied him to Jeni’s disappearance.

I thought,
But he has never talked to me. In all this time he has never talked to me.

*   *   *

Mr. Kragen lived on a nice, tree-lined street not far from my house. I’d seen him out in front before, wearing polyester slacks, watering down his cement driveway.

I knocked on the door and waited. A Ford Taurus was parked in the driveway and I could hear the television talking inside. After a while I heard the key turn in the lock and Mr. Kragen opened the door.

He looked just like his yearbook photo except that he was smiling.

“Hello?” he said dully.

“Hi, Mr. Kragen. My name is Ariel Silverman.”

He peered out into the dark. “Yes?”

“I went to Reed.”

“I have a lot of students,” he said. “Were you a student?”

“I was friends with Jeni Benson?”

He coughed and started to close the door. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

“I was just wondering if you would let me talk to you about Jeni,” I said.

The hairs were standing up all over my body like antennae. Why had I waited so long to come? I must be stronger now, I told myself. I must stay strong.

Mr. Kragen stared at me and I thought I saw something change almost imperceptibly in his myopic eyes.

“Why don’t you come in, then. Have a cup of tea. Get warm.”

I watched him lock the door behind me.

The house was immaculately clean and orderly. It smelled of disinfectant. There wasn’t a live thing anywhere but that wasn’t why I felt a chill on the back of my neck as if the night had followed me inside. There weren’t any books, I noticed that, because I am always interested in people’s books. But maybe he kept his books in another room. There weren’t any photographs but that wasn’t necessarily strange, either. It wasn’t even that cold inside.

I could feel him watching me and I turned around. His face was curiously babylike around the nose and mouth.

“Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ll get tea.”

He padded into the kitchen and I sat gingerly on the sofa and waited. My pulse was racing and I was starting to sweat in the cold air, so that the perspiration evaporated icily on my neck, but I made myself stay still.

Kragen settled himself in an armchair across from me and poured my tea, though he left his cup empty.

“So you and Jennifer were close?” he said. There was a phlegmatic sound to his voice that I remembered as if I had been in his class yesterday.

I twirled the beads on my bracelet. “We were best friends.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was an awful thing that happened.”

“I’m talking to everyone who knew her. I’m doing this sort of project to remember her.”

He pressed his lips together and shook his head from side to side. “Just an awful, awful thing.”

“What do you remember about Jeni Benson?” I asked. “From the trip.”

“She was a nice girl,” he said stiffly. “Charming laugh, I remember that. But I didn’t know her well.”

I held out the flyer I’d brought with me and watched his expression closely. His eyelids fluttered as he looked at Jeni’s radiant little face smiling back at him. I saw, for just a fraction of a second, his tongue poke out between his lips and then retract again.

“So sad.” He looked away from the picture.

“Did you see anything strange that night? I think you were one of the last people to see her.” My voice got harder than I’d intended it to.

He cleared his throat. “I’ve spoken to the police already. It’s been quite some time.”

“Oh, I know. I just wanted some personal details. For my project.”

Mr. Kragen stood up, wiping his palms on the front of his synthetic trousers.

“Maybe you should leave now,” he said.

“Just a few more questions. Please.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. This isn’t a good time.”

Without meaning to, I grabbed at his arm. His skin was soft and cold. “This is important!”

He shook me off and his eyes flashed behind his glasses. “I’m sorry, Miss … What was your name? Silverman? I can’t speak to you any more now. You’ll have to go or I’ll have to call someone.”

“Fine!” I said. “Call someone. What are you going to say?”

“That you’re disturbing me in my home.”

My voice went up a notch. “What did you do to her?”

“The officers have already been here. I’m sure they’ll be interested in the fact that you’re trespassing.”

“I’m sure they’re very interested in anything that has to do with you,” I said.

But then I saw Kragen pick up the phone and I turned and left.

*   *   *

I called Rodriguez the next day. “This is Ariel. I was a friend of Jennifer Benson’s. Am. I spoke with you last year.”

He cleared his throat and I heard papers being shuffled. “Yeah, sure. Miss Silverman, right? You doing okay?”

“I found something that might be of interest to you.” I hesitated, knowing how weak it would sound.

“Do you want to tell me what that is?”

“I went over to see that teacher who chaperoned the trip? Kragen?”

“Uh huh.”

“Something wasn’t right.”

I could picture Rodriguez’s big, handsome face, the way he pursed his lips and rubbed his chin. “Kragen. The teacher. We checked him out, Ariel. He’s clean. The guy he roomed with gave him a perfect alibi. I’m sorry. There just aren’t any new leads.”

I wanted to tell the detective that the hairs on my arm stood up in Kragen’s presence. Like most things it would only have made things worse.

12. The secret places I’d show you

As far as Kragen went, there was nothing I could do except to keep an eye on him when I returned to L.A., write about what had happened in my notebook and look for more evidence in the city where Jeni had disappeared. The experience in L.A. had set me more on edge. I was afraid that Kragen had been involved in Jeni’s disappearance, afraid that he hadn’t because that meant I wasn’t any closer to discovering what had happened to her. I was afraid of the homeless man who I believed was watching me, even when I couldn’t see him.

There was no one to remind me to avoid John, Tania and Perry, though; Coraline Grimm was nowhere to be seen and there were rumors about a breakdown of some kind. I wondered, as I rode the shuttle in from the Oakland airport, back down through the little town full of students and three people I couldn’t stop thinking about, why—especially considering that my mother had lost all of her hair and one breast and that I was not there to comfort her after her treatments and that she was not in Berkeley to comfort me—I had waited so long to go back to the house where John lived. And not just to slake my desire. Their beauty, their glamour, just their attention, would give me strength.

One day I saw them on campus, near the English building, walking together arm in arm. I moved behind a tree to watch them more closely. All of them dressed in their usual finery, leaning together, laughing at some secret joke. They didn’t see me but my body heated up as if they were all holding me in their arms, as if it were theirs.

I decided to take this spotting of them as another sign.

The blue silk dress was still crumpled in the hamper—I hadn’t wanted to look at it before. I took it out, hand washed it in the bathroom sink and hung it to dry. I even ironed it with the iron my mom had insisted I take but I never used. On the first Saturday after school started, I put the dress on with my cowboy boots.

I sat at my desk applying the perfume, mascara and lip gloss I’d bought at the mall. As I was brushing my hair out, loose to my waist, I caught Lauren staring at me. “You look all dolled up. Where are you going?”

“Lauren,” I said, still brushing. “What’s your problem?”

“What?” She tossed her hair back and forth over the side of the bed, eyeing herself in the mirror above her nightstand. “Random! I just commented on the fact that you look
nice
?”

“You know what I mean.” I turned away from my own reflection to look at her. “The tampon last semester? That was fucked up. Come on.”

She rolled her eyes. “God! Paranoid much? What are you even talking about? Tampon? I mean, I’ve heard guys in the bathroom talk about how you don’t dispose of them properly if that’s what you mean.”

“My blood is preferable to your shit,” I said, too quietly for her to hear.

“What did you say?”

I put on my coat, went to the door; then I stopped. “And if you’re going to have sex tonight, could you please do it before I get back or go to your boyfriend’s room?”

Her voice followed me out the door. “If you have a problem with me and Dallas you might want to try getting laid yourself. It does wonders for tension.”

I flipped her off but only through the wall.

In the stairwell I practically slammed into Tommy Leeds, who was on his way up. He took a step back and stared at me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I kept walking down the steps.

“Ariel? Right?”

I didn’t remember ever telling him my name. All the searching for Jeni had probably given me more of a reputation than I was aware of. I stopped and looked up at him, poised on the landing above. His eyes looked electric, plugged into a hidden socket, and I remembered hearing Lauren say recently that he was a bit of a speed freak.

“Looking good.”

I knew he wouldn’t have even said hello if my hair was back, if I was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. “Ready to talk to me about Jeni Benson?”

“I get that was a big fucking trauma but you need to let it go.” I guess I wasn’t cute enough to keep from pissing him off about that. He kept walking.

I spun and ran up after him, grabbed his sleeve. “Yes, it was a big fucking trauma and you can speak respectfully about it or go fuck yourself.”

He pushed me off of him. “Valium, anyone? Fuck!”

I was sprinting by the time I hit the pavement outside the dorms. I couldn’t get to the house fast enough. My heart throbbed in my throat as I ran up into the hills.

They were there. They were there. They had to be.

I knocked on the door, knowing it—I could feel them. Or did I just want them to be there so much that I thought I could feel them? Or was I so terrified that they
would
answer that it had distorted my senses?

There was no response and my hand shook as I held it near the door, ready to knock again. They had to be …

If I left, where would I go? Back to the dorm room where Lauren was fucking her boyfriend and decorating with my tampons? To Telegraph where the homeless people wandered? Maybe I could find the dreadlock man and ask him what he had meant when he said, “The daimons exist everywhere. If you deny them they will appear in your head! Arise.” I could go to the library and find a book of poetry and disappear inside it. But it was hard to imagine ever wanting to come out again.

The thought of that made my throat close up and I raised my fist to knock again but just as I did the door opened and warm air hit my skin.

“It’s the sylph!” she said. “Johnny, it’s the sylph!”

*   *   *

It was as if I’d never left Thanksgiving night. I slipped so easily back into their world. They fed me again—a simpler meal this time. Steamy broth with nutty-tasting soba noodles and crisp lotus root and burdock and seaweed and tofu. I recognized everything from the Japanese restaurants my parents took me to but nothing compared to these tastes.