The Twisted Thread (5 page)

“Vernon, let's get that bulletin board, her laptop, and the contents of that desk into the office as soon as possible. We'll need cell phones, probably computers, too. I want to talk to the head of security, the facilities manager, the IT people. And the boyfriend.” Vernon started the chain of phone calls. “After the boyfriend, I want to talk to the dorm parents.”

“Some parents,” said Vernon, dialing, and in a moment, Matt heard him heading down the stairs. He couldn't help but agree.
In loco parentis,
the promise boarding schools gave to families to watch over their young, seemed to have failed with utter decisiveness in this case. He stood there for another moment, watching Parker and his assistants at their painstaking work. The rustle of plastic bags was the only sound, and the glint of sun on tiny tweezers darted through the room. A silent industry bustled around the girl's still body, which in the warmth had yet to stiffen.

The high window looking out on the Quad. Her own bathroom. Early to Yale. Beautiful and conscious of it. Why had she had the baby? Why had she been willing to put herself through an ordeal that required both secrecy and sacrifice? Who was the father? Who had hated her so much that he or she had been willing to kill? What if, a part of his brain said, Claire had simply wanted the baby and been unwilling to part with what she had made? But even in death, Claire had the look of someone who preserved her own interests above others'. Even so, why had she stayed here? Why had it been so important to remain at school and risk both her health and reputation? What had fueled such a dramatic choice? He crouched down next to her and saw the bruises Vernon had mentioned on her neck and wrists, as if someone had shaken her. He also noticed a red cord circling her left upper arm, a braided bracelet of some kind, the only ornament, if you could call it that, she had on. There was an Armitage tradition tied to it, he felt sure of it, though he could recall nothing specific. It was something about which the girls in his time had become cagey when questioned.

“Later, Norm,” Matt said, and Parker grunted a response. He stood and turned to go. In Philadelphia, he had known it was time to leave because, at this moment of an investigation, his entire body used to go heavy with despair at the dreadful information and complete misery he was about to uncover. Murder detectives survived their exposure to drastic violence in three ways. Some created a wide, permanent gulf between the selves that operated at work and the selves that functioned outside of it. Once, Matt had bumped into a colleague in Cape May and hadn't recognized him. The man was wearing a pink polo shirt, cotton candy in one hand, the other wrapped around the brass pole of a carousel horse, spinning to the music of a calliope as if murder had never once occurred in the world. Others immersed themselves entirely in the muck that surrounded them and lived veiled in smoke or the tang of bars, the ink of racing forms darkening their fingers. They carried the job about them in a smudged halo and, to manage what they had to do, became part of it. And the last group, the smallest, tried to find some abstract bridge between the person who looked at murder and the person who didn't. These detectives were the ones who fit the work inside a puzzle that was intellectual, sociological, or cultural and made of their profession a heightened game, wit and mental dexterity the factors that allowed them to survive daily tides of rank news about the kind of harm that people were willing and able to inflict on one another. That, and a caustic ability to laugh at his own foibles, had been what allowed Matt to savor and move forward with the work.

And then the strategies had stopped functioning. Not suddenly, but gradually, dread had grown to replace satisfaction. Discomfort around weapons had been one symptom, and slowly, he had sought out something simpler. Coming back to Greenville had worked in part; he hadn't needed to leave the police altogether. But the news with which Vernon had ripped open the day had brought the uneasiness back. He had to admit that he no longer had the stomach for murder. And then there was this unpleasant feeling to factor in. If he were honest, part of the prickly sensation running through his body now stemmed from schadenfreude, the guilty enjoyment of the misfortunes of others. Walking to meet Porter, Matt remembered that it was a word he'd learned in Mr. Snow's tenth-grade English class, while reading
Hamlet
. The old man had managed to teach them a lot of vocabulary despite his habit of drifting off during in-class essays. There would, Matt confessed with a twinge, be some keen, personal enjoyment in watching Armitage struggle.

Coming down the central stairs, seeing the captain and the head now in Portland's main hall, Matt wondered if Claire had felt this way, too. If something in her had wanted to crack the veneer and draw attention to some polluted corner of someone's history. If rot had been what she was trying to expose with such a dangerous choice. Maybe Claire had found something she could not stay quiet about. But what had it been, and why would she risk so much? A quickening, a memory of desire for the chase, sparked slightly then, but there at the base of the stairs stood Porter, looking up at him. He was drawn but self-possessed, the man whose picture in the pages of the alumni magazine provided such a reassuring image of what the head of school should look and sound like. His hand was on the ball that capped the carved newel post, and he was saying with polite insistence, “Detective, may I speak with you?” and that, though the morning had barely begun, was the last private moment of the day.

CHAPTER 6

I
t was ten at night of that awful Monday, and Madeline was
finally back in her apartment rummaging in the refrigerator for something to eat. There was some yogurt, a beer, cream for coffee she had to brew as a supplement to what the dining hall made, half a falafel sandwich. She shoved the falafel in the microwave, but even warm, she couldn't touch it. It had been made by Ali Khalid, a Syrian guy who ran a Middle Eastern food stand from a small restaurant incongruously carved out of a laundromat, and it represented the best food available in Armitage. Madeline liked Ali, who told her he had changed his shop's name from Flying Carpet Foods to Al's Snack Shack after 9/11 and could sometimes be coaxed to talk of life in Aleppo, which seemed very exotic compared to her own. Madeline would have been surprised to know that her stories of suburban American dysfunction struck him as just as foreign and that he looked forward to hearing snippets about her unsupervised youth. She usually went to Ali's a couple of times a week just to get off campus. But tonight, her body refused the rich spicing, and she settled for yogurt and flat ginger ale left over from a dorm party.

A horrible day. A shocking day, she thought, sipping the tepid soda. And she had gotten through it and done what had been asked of her. She had rallied in the face of death and had been if not fantastically useful then not a burden to those around her. That might be as good a definition of adulthood as she had yet found, she admitted as she searched for raspberries at the bottom of the yogurt container. The question would be how long she could sustain this posture. Claire's death and the disappearance of her baby were going to unleash a long string of horrible days.

Several disturbing facts had emerged over the last fifteen hours. The first was that Grace was going to engage in a full-on campaign to preserve her own reputation even if that meant sullying the names of those around her, with a special emphasis on Madeline's. That a student was dead and a baby missing seemed almost irrelevant to the classics teacher: it was her position that she was considering above all. The other members of Portland's dorm team—Harvey Fuller and Marie-France Maillot—also had no intention of letting Grace tar them with her scorn or accusations, and combined, they had almost eighty years of experience in managing boarding school politics. I'm doomed if I'm not careful, thought Madeline, swallowing more yogurt. She was going to have to refuse to be naïve. In her first step toward astuteness, she had not immediately called Owen to tell him what was going on, not that he would have much cared. More to the point, she had not returned Kate's call demanding instant response and total disclosure; Claire's death had made national television by ten that morning. Of course her parents hadn't phoned to ask how she was or if she'd known the student. But several friends had, and Madeline had ignored them all. Porter had told them not to talk to anyone outside the school and had been right to do so. Besides, there was, at bottom, nothing more to say than Claire had probably been murdered and her baby was missing. All it made you feel was completely sick. Madeline, who hadn't even liked Claire, had been cowed by her, found herself shaken to the bone and overpoweringly sad. The girl had been young, alone, a new mother. She should never have been so neglected, much less killed.

Madeline reviewed the day's long events while pouring out some more ginger ale. The dorm meeting during which the girls had taken turns screaming, crying, or flailing. Sally Jansen had gotten so distraught that she had to be taken to the infirmary and sedated. Her parents were on their way from San Francisco. Nina Garcia-Jones in a tent-size dress and a green chiffon scarf had occupied the common room and told them that everything they were feeling was normal. She'd swayed and moved her hands in motions she apparently perceived as soothing as she said all this, looking, Madeline couldn't help but think, like a physically unfit interpretive dancer. When she'd finished talking, Lee Hastings, a prefect, a stern girl going to Stanford next year, had said, “Ms. Garcia-Jones, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but there is not one thing about this situation that is normal,” and then she had crossed her arms and taken turns glaring at every adult except Madeline, who had been relieved to escape her harsh judgment. There were many students who were far more intimidating than faculty, and Lee (and Claire) had ranked high among these.

Parents, phones, sobbing, usually all three at once, and all of it threaded through with visits from the police—tall ones, short ones, thin ones, fat. Ones in plainclothes, ones in hats. When her mind started to warp horror into Dr. Seuss, Madeline knew she needed a break. But it wasn't forthcoming. Exhausted by eleven, numb by noon, and ravenous by one, Madeline had at last retreated for ten minutes to the shower and revived herself under the stream of hot water. That was during the confiscation of the computers and laptops, and the discovery that a large percentage of the girls had cell phones, which they weren't supposed to bring to school. This wave of police activity caused a fresh outburst of hysteria, and Madeline, feeling she had done her part for the moment quite manfully, had let Grace deal with this development.

After her shower, she wolfed down a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and made several cups of espresso, which allowed her to survive the afternoon. The next three hours had included twitchy, low-slung German shepherds roaming the corridors followed by police officers elbow-deep in the frothy contents of the girls' bureaus. Marie-France had tried to block access to her apartment—arms akimbo, nose high, repeating, “I refuse, I refuse”—until Porter himself had to be summoned. Madeline had wondered for a moment what Marie-France was so set on protecting in her underwear drawer, but that thought was profoundly disturbing and she immediately set it aside.

In the midst of this, three other girls, spurred on by Sally's admission, made frantic confessions that they'd also known Claire had had a baby. They'd gotten her formula, they'd brought her sanitary napkins. They'd even seen the baby. Madeline kept wanting to shout, Why didn't you say anything to an adult? until finally she asked, far more delicately than she wanted to, “Why didn't you tell anyone?” And all of them had said the same thing: “We promised not to.” Madeline thought about the four girls Claire had trusted and realized she had chosen her handmaidens well—none of them was her social equal. In some strange way, they would all have been thrilled to do her bidding. And Claire, apparently still razor clear about her status, even nine months pregnant, had known exactly how to extract vows no one else would have given. Madeline had never gone to school with anyone quite as cool and scary as Claire and had missed that particular aspect of the ways adolescents could inflict trauma on one another. But it was still surprising that kids as generally confident as they were at Armitage could submit to such thorough manipulation. Post tearful admission, the other three went off to join Sally at the infirmary, where FBI officers reinforcing the ranks of the Armitage police scurried after them.

His dorm was alive with cops, too, Fred Naylor had said when he saw her at dinner, toying with some chicken he plainly wasn't going to eat. They'd taken all the cell phones, which had, as in Portland, shown up in staggering numbers. “Have the police talked to you yet?” he asked, and she said yes, briefly, but they had scheduled something longer for the morning and searched her apartment. She didn't tell Fred that in the process she'd discovered the location of two pairs of sneakers and three sweaters that she had thought long gone. She didn't think she'd imagined the look of disapproval on the officer's face, either.

Senior investigators, the ones clearly running the show, had been in and out of Grace's apartment, talking with Grace and Porter, though Porter had emerged to greet Claire's father, who looked, Madeline couldn't help but notice, nothing more than supremely irritated.

The police had also managed to seal off the campus, station uniformed cops at every entrance, road, or gate, and close some of those off entirely. Fred said the woods were full of men, too. The chuff of helicopter wings had broken the tense, hot air all day. A great wave of intent, relentlessly professional searching had consumed the campus and resulted in nothing but prickling anxiety and silence.

Madeline heard a bump in the hall, and it reminded her that she ought to bolt her outside door. It had been impressive to her, having moved from Somerville, that so few people took advantage of her spaciness out here in the countryside. She'd left her wallet the other night in her car, for instance, doors unlocked, and there it had been the next morning. Students sometimes stole from one another, but there was remarkably little thievery given how vulnerable most rooms and apartments were. Only cameras, AV equipment, medication, and dorm doors after 9:00
P.M.
were regularly shut tight. Opening the screen, she sniffed the rich air. It was disconcerting how nature and weather seemed to resist bad news: trees and rivers kept on being beautiful even when horrifying events occurred around them. Sunsets flared red. The world went on doing its best imitation of a livable place. A strategically located spotlight illuminated the grand spray of a still vibrant elm on the Quad. The path linking the dorms snaked through lush, low grass. The windows of the buildings shone gold. She could even hear the burble of the Bluestone River and, past that, the slow hooting of a train as it rolled through Greenville. It looked and sounded the safest of all possible locations for teenagers, a deeply regulated environment that would reassure the most nervous of parents.

Then she saw a boy running at a dead heat from somewhere on the other side of the Quad. She was used to this. A steady traffic of students flowed across the campus at night, as physics labs, Ritalin, and alcohol changed hands. But tonight Madeline noticed a special intensity to his speed as he altered course to head toward Greaves, a boys' dorm. She still didn't recognize him. Tall and blond, but that distinguished him from almost no one here.

She made the door fast and went to call the head of Greaves, Joyce Phelan, a history teacher and field hockey coach. Everyone here had at least three job titles, and teachers were expected to perform all of their tasks equally well, in some sort of crazed imitation of polymaths. Some of them wore this burden more lightly than others. Joyce looked about ready to give it all up and join the circus, and Madeline couldn't blame her.

Usually, Madeline didn't care what the students were doing after hours. She thought it incredible that they accomplished so much given how little they slept and how much trouble they were always courting. They still attended Ivy League schools and won national science prizes and music competitions in alarming numbers. Factored into her laissez-faire approach to enforcing rules was the fact that Madeline, at twenty-five, was only seven years older than most seniors. She remembered all too clearly the desperate need to get away with deceiving adults, the feverish intensity with which she had smoked palmed Marlboros and poured out sips of Stoli from her parents' stash. It was hard for her to situate herself unequivocally on the side of the grown-ups around her most days; they seemed so shorn of liveliness. More troublingly, her personality at times felt uncomfortably elastic, sometimes wide enough to accommodate adulthood, but often more at ease within the confines a child understood. Claire's death was apparently changing that. Madeline knew exactly where she was expected to stand, and she was able to do it.

Joyce sighed resignedly when Madeline finished explaining what she'd seen. “I'll go check it out. It was probably Scotty Johnston. He got taken in by the cops this afternoon, but sadly, they let him go. Thanks, Madeline,” she said, before hanging up, sounding not in the least grateful. Madeline could hear her toddler crying and her dog barking at once. Fred had joked that Joyce should get hardship pay for having had to deal with Scotty the last two years, as if he were a malarial or coup-ridden country dreaded by the diplomatic corps. Madeline ushered her thoughts away from Fred. It was a little dangerous to think about him too much. He had looked distraught at dinner, and she had wanted to do nothing more than push away his tray and the pallid chicken and, a bit to her mortification, throw her arms around him.

She heard another noise in the hall but chalked it up to ancient plumbing. Portland was due a renovation of its pipes. Madeline continued to sit on her lumpy futon sofa and observe her small apartment. There were two doors: the one that led to the outside world was the one through which she'd witnessed the running boy. The other opened onto the first-floor corridor in the dorm, a door she was supposed to fling wide while on duty, a signal of “cheerful welcome,” according to the faculty handbook.

She lived at the east end of the first floor; Marie-France lived on the west. Harvey occupied an apartment on the second floor, as did Grace. Only Claire and another student, studying in China this term, had had rooms up on the third floor. How many of the girls had known what was going on? Madeline wondered. All of them, she assumed. But apparently they had said nothing to a single adult. She stretched out on the futon, a castoff of Kate's from her graduate school days. Madeline had been absurdly happy to possess such a substantial piece of furniture.

She could understand their not talking to Harvey. No one did that unless she possessed some insatiable interest in mitochondria. Marie-France, too, was pretty off-putting, with her formidable Frenchness and her habit of cutting up apples and pears with knife and fork instead of eating them whole by hand, which she considered an American barbarism. Grace was a little sportier, perhaps appealing to some of the more athletic girls, but rather fierce. She always seemed to have a clipboard in her hands. And me, thought Madeline, they discounted me the moment I stepped on campus. An intern. Less status even than groundskeepers, who could be cultivated for access to all the keys.