What Has Become of You (24 page)

Paul Nimitz sat down, and Vera followed suit, noticing that Paul was the sort who looked unnatural sitting still; his legs immediately began to jiggle under the table as he smiled at her and said, “Helen Cutler speaks very highly of you.”

“Does she?” Vera had to prevent herself from quipping,
That’s a surprise.
It had been Cutler who had called her to tell her that her volunteer application had been approved; she’d even said, in her laconic way, “Maybe this’ll be a good experience for you. We’ve got police checking in there every day, so you and I will be seeing a little more of each other.” It had almost been enough to put Vera off the idea of volunteering.

“Does the detective come by here a lot?” she asked Paul Nimitz.

“There’s a few from the police department who take turns. We’re lucky that we have the police working so closely with us. Once in a while, the Cudahys—Jensen’s parents—even come by. But they stay home as much as they can. They’re afraid they might miss a phone call from Jensen, or even miss her return. That would be the best-case scenario, of course—her just walking through the door one day.”

“That
would
be ideal,” Vera said. She cleared her throat and pressed her hands together as if in prayer, resting her fingertips under her chin. “In terms of what I can actually offer you for time—I was thinking maybe evenings from four to six? And I was thinking maybe I could help you edit the website. I’m a good editor. I’m not so tech savvy, but I’m constantly learning, so if you show me around the website, maybe I could help put updates on it, or even edit the comments feature or the tips.”

“Oh, the tips go directly to the police, and thank God for that. I wouldn’t want to have to make sense of all the bullshit that comes in. So far we’ve had four people reporting that they’ve seen Jensen dead, and eleven people reporting that they saw her alive. I guess one person even claimed he’d locked Jensen in the basement of the Franco-American Social Club, but that turned out to be a joke. You’ve got to wonder what makes people want to take ownership of stuff like this. It’s pretty sick.”

“Well,” Vera said, “over two hundred people confessed to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, back in the day.”

“You don’t say.” In a lower voice—even though no one else was around to hear—Paul said, “We’ve had some doozies, and that’s not even including the phone calls. We’ve heard everything from Jensen practices witchcraft, to she’s working as a prostitute in Romania, to she’s a raging drug addict who crossed the Mexican border. None of which seems to have any basis in reality. And then there’s the snail mail. I’m not even going to get started on what’s come in the mail.”

“Good heavens. Those
are
doozies.”

“It’s such a strange case overall. It doesn’t help that some of the most unreliable information comes from Jensen herself. That journal she kept—she mentions friends who don’t even exist. The police looked into them and found nothing but dead ends.”

“People who don’t
exist
? Like who?” Vera ran through a mental checklist of non–Wallace School people whom Jensen had mentioned in her journals. Was the neighborhood girl, Annabel Francoeur, a fictive construct? Scotty, who was big on weaponry and explosives? Bret Folger—was it possible that even Bret Folger wasn’t a real person?

“It’s all neither here nor there, really.” Paul Nimitz looked behind his shoulder at no one, seemingly embarrassed, as though he had been caught gossiping. “Getting back to the question of how you might be of service . . . we’ve got the edits covered. That’s my area, actually. And we’ve got Robin handling most of the phone stuff here at headquarters. Frankly, the flyer distribution is where we have the greatest need. Let me show you what we’ve got for our flyer prototype right now. Amy designed it herself, and the idea is to get these made up and good to go within a couple of days.”

Trying to squash her feelings of disappointment at the idea of being relegated to flyer distribution instead of something more hands-on, Vera looked at the countertop where Paul was gesturing; a flyer with Jensen’s squinting face and the words
HAVE YOU SEEN ME
?
printed across the top in large letters—as though Jensen were somebody’s missing pup, Vera thought.

 • • • 

Over the next couple of workdays, Vera became familiar with the ways of the BRING JENSEN HOME committee. While she waited for the flyers to be ready, she stuffed envelopes and smoothed return labels on their upper corners and dabbed liquid sealant on their flaps. Once she got into the groove of these mundane tasks, she found them less than hateful; she even began to look forward to this transition from her long, tiring, interactive days teaching to this steady, self-contained, almost Zen-like work. Still, she sometimes brought student papers along with her to correct during the slow times. No harm doing busywork, she reasoned, when there was no actual work to do.

Jeannette Blais, the woman who owned the copy shop and always sat at the front desk with her bag of yarn, was a regular fixture at headquarters—the person who always greeted her comings and goings with a characteristic grunt. Secretly, Vera considered Jeannette her favorite person among the volunteers. She seemed the type who spoke only when she had something important to say, and when she did, her voice betrayed a thick, halting French-Canadian accent.

She might not have had such affinity for Jeannette had not Paul, who was turning out to be the most delicious sort of gossip, mentioned that the woman had donated more than one thousand dollars of her own money to the BRING JENSEN HOME effort. “It’s because she had a grandson who disappeared in 1985,” he had whispered to Vera during her second day at headquarters. “He would’ve been Amy’s cousin, but she wasn’t born yet.”

Once, when it was only she and Jeannette in the office, with Robin working in the back, Vera had sat close to the older woman, after asking if it would be all right if she worked near the sunny window in the front office.

“I don’t care,” the woman had said. So Vera took her stack of student papers and curled up in the window seat by Jeannette’s desk, enjoying the rhythmic clack of knitting needles. The big woman’s silence and steady, unflinching presence was somehow comforting to her. Occasionally, when she dropped a stitch, she cursed in French and sucked on her upper denture.

“You spend a lot of time here,” Vera stated when the woman had taken a break from the knitting to clean her eyeglasses with a tissue.

The woman nodded, not looking up from her task. “Oh, yes,” she said with a knowing roll of her eyes, which looked small and puffy without her glasses. “It’s my shop.”

“But you stay here even beyond business hours.”

“What else am I going to do?” The woman shrugged. “I like it here. Nothing better to do. Nothing better for you to do either, eh?”

“Maybe not,” Vera said. She itched to ask Jeannette Blais if the grandson who had disappeared in 1985 had ever been found alive. She had a feeling, however, that she already knew the answer, and she did not think it was right to try to chip away at the woman’s stoicism.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of knitting needles flying again as she waited for Robin to finish her work and give her the next assignment. She was glad that Jeannette Blais allowed her to sit there in companionable silence without asking her to leave. In a strange way, her volunteer efforts gave her a sense of something she didn’t ordinarily have: a quiet sense of belonging.

 • • • 

The new flyers were ready a few days later, still warm and gleaming when Vera showed up at four o’clock; their stacks covered the length of the conference table, and more boxes of them were stuffed underneath it. Paul showed these proudly to Vera. “I was thinking you could start distributing some of these on the east end today? I have a map with all the businesses that have approved them.”

“I could,” Vera said, not wanting to say no. She had not considered the logistical angle of flyer distribution up until now. Then, hesitating: “I don’t actually have a car. It might be hard for me to get to the east end carrying a really heavy stack.”

“You don’t have a car? You mean you walk over here every day?”

“Yes,” Vera said firmly, seeing his pitying look. Why couldn’t the locals adjust to the idea of someone who couldn’t drive? “I
like
walking.”

“We’ll switch your route with Amy’s, then. She’ll do the east end and you can do the neighborhood right around here.”

Vera, her tote bag filled with flyers, rolls of Scotch tape, and packets of thumbtacks, set off down the street. She tacked the signs onto the bulletin boards of coffee shops, hair salons, and small grocery stores around Dorset. Sometimes passersby stopped in their tracks and ogled her, wanting to see what she was hanging up; most walked away, seeing nothing that interested them, but others felt compelled to comment.

“Oh, I’ve heard about that girl,” one woman in a flowered, tent-like dress said. “So heartbreaking for the parents.”

Another woman, her words suspiciously slurred, asked: “Is that your daughter?”

“What?” Vera said, horrified. “Oh, no. She’s one of my students.”

Vera stopped on one quiet residential street in a neighborhood where all the house facades had been designed to look alike:
The village of the damned,
Vera thought, expecting malevolent towheaded youngsters to start drifting onto their doorsteps. Down the street a ways was a bus terminal whose glassed-in walls seemed a good place to tape another flyer. Several discarded bottles of vanilla extract littered the ground below the terminal bench; Vera noticed these and hypothesized that some of the local teenagers had bought these in order to get drunk.
Maybe not such a quiet neighborhood, after all.

A boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen—
one of the imbibers?
Vera wondered—was riding a skateboard up and down the outer edge of the sidewalk. He wore army pants cut off at the knees and Chuck Taylors like Vera had worn in the ’80s, though his looked cleaner and newer than hers had ever been. The sight of these new, clean sneakers touched a nerve in Vera; she did not know why, but her intuition told her to be mindful of this young boy.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched him slow down, and he and his board came to a stop a few feet away from Vera, one foot resting on his skateboard and the other on the pavement. She could feel him watching her as she stood on her tiptoes, assessing the height of the glassed-in walls and trying to place the flyer at what would be eye level for most people.

The boy laughed softly. His laughter had a strange, adult quality, and Vera could not have been more startled if he had reached out to her and touched her on the cheek.

“What?” said Vera, whipping around so fast that she dropped her roll of tape to the pavement. The flyer with Jensen’s picture on it fluttered to the ground. “What’s so funny?”

Pointing at the fallen flyer, the boy said: “That bitch is
evil
. She scarfs down crazy-berries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Vera cocked her head and looked at him, giving his comment the same grave consideration she might give to one of her own students. “I’m sorry? How do you know that?”

“Oh, trust me, I
know
. A lot of us do.” He laughed again, as though Vera were too stupid to understand, and mounted his skateboard and took off down the street in a squeaking of wheels. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt with something printed on the back; straining to read what it said, Vera first saw the word
FETISH
, and then the letters settled down and arranged themselves into what she could only assume was a surname:
FITTS
. She wondered fleetingly:
Do I know that name from somewhere?
She didn’t think so. The boy wore a second shirt tied around his waist, a black button-down, and it flapped in the wind as Vera kept her eyes on him, hoping he might turn his skateboard around; it was only when the boy was well out of sight that Vera bent down to pick up the dropped flyer. A partial footprint from Vera’s own shoe now covered Jensen Willard’s half-closed eye, leaving an impression like a bruise.

 • • • 

Though it was still April, the cruelest month—a time when freezing winds and snowfall weren’t uncommon in Maine—the weather outside was warming, almost humid. The restlessness of spring had already infiltrated Vera’s classroom; her girls were now about a third of the way through
The Bell Jar
, and they were not responding to it as Vera had thought they might. They did not like the young protagonist, Esther Greenwood. They found her dated and laughable, with all her mentions of finger bowls and hats and gloves and dances, and they zeroed in on the inconsistencies of her voice and her mood.

“One minute she’s cracking jokes, and the next minute she’s thinking about killing herself,” Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey said. “Who does that? I really think she just likes being unhappy. Happiness is a
choice
. And what does she have to be so unhappy about, anyway? She has a mother who loves her. She’s going to a good college. She gets to do all these cool things in New York City.”

The girls seemed to have even more derision for Esther than they had had for Holden Caulfield. They cut her no slack at all.
Typical female self-loathing,
Vera thought sadly.
Or am I really this out of touch with what today’s girls might respond to?
How she wished Jensen had been there—if not to defend the book publicly, then to write her journal responses with their own inconsistencies of mood and voice that proved the other girls wrong.

“Before I let you go today, I do want to share with you a memo that I received earlier this morning,” Vera said to her girls. “It seems that Katherine Arsenault’s parents have withdrawn her from Wallace. They plan to enroll her at Andover. This is a decision that was made rather suddenly, so far as I can tell.” She waited a beat, stopped dramatically between the rows of tables, and intoned: “And then there were nine.”

She meant it to be funny, but as soon as the words were out there, she knew they were not.