A Hard Day’s Fright (11 page)

His smile was gone in an instant. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Don’t worry, I was prepared. As if I couldn’t believe what a dummy I was, I laughed and blushed on command. “Oh my gosh! That came out all wrong. What I mean…” This time I pulled out all the stops and twinkled. “Come on, they all must have been in love with you.”

He tried to keep his thunderous expression, but it melted in the warmth of my smile. When he laughed, the skin around his eyes crinkled into dozens of crow’s-feet. “That’s the problem with being a poet,” he murmured.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a problem,” I said right back.

Ariel coughed.

I ignored her.

“One of those girls was Lucy Pasternak, right?”

His smile froze, and before he could recover, I closed in for the kill. “I’m sure you remember her. She was in your summer school class. Right before she disappeared and was never seen again.”

He scraped a hand through his hair. “Lucy. Of course. That girl who ran away.”

“Did she?”

As if he didn’t quite get it, he shook his head. “Did she…run away? Well, I don’t know. I thought that’s what happened. I left the area soon after, and it was a very long time ago.” He signaled to his minions to get his books and CDs and tote bags all packed up.

“Which is why this opportunity to speak to you about that crucial summer is so perfect,” I said, and when a couple college kids carefully moved the table out from between us, I stepped closer to Monroe. “I’m using the summer of 1966 as a focal point. The whole hippie movement was just beginning and that was starting to shape society. The Beatles were in Cleveland that summer. You were at the concert, weren’t you?”

His look was as steady as a rock and just as soft. “You really have done your homework, haven’t you?”

I took this as the compliment it was not meant to be and breezed right on. “You published ‘Girl at Dawn’ at the end of 1967, which means ’66 must have been a crucial year for you. You know, as far as your artistic growth and development.”

“It was…” He stepped aside as the kids folded the last table and carted it off. “It was an interesting time. So much of what we did and thought was influenced by the tidal waves of social change. There was the civil rights movement, of course, and the whole hippie subculture. There was the War in Vietnam—”

“And there was Lucy.”

“Really, I don’t see what she had to do with anything.” With a shake of his shoulders, Monroe turned and walked away.

But I’ve got long legs, and I’m a redhead, which means I’m not easily put off. I caught up to him in a heartbeat. “Well, I don’t know if her disappearance does have anything to do with your growth as an artist,” I said, watching a muscle bunch at his jawline. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Between Lucy and that job you lost in New York—”

He spun to face me. “You’ll never get anywhere academically if you listen to rumors and not the truth.”

“And the truth is?”

“The truth is, there was never any truth to those allegations in New York. You can put that in your thesis. Tell them you got it right from the horse’s mouth.”

“And the truth about Lucy?”

He narrowed his eyes and looked me over. “The truth about Lucy is that I don’t know anything about Lucy. She was here one day and gone the next. It was a long time ago and nobody cares anymore, anyway.”

“My mom does.”

I hadn’t realized Ariel had followed us across the stage. Now I turned and saw that her shoulders were back and her head was high. “My mom,” she said, “and Lucy were best friends.”

“That’s sweet. Really.” He ruffled her hair. Ariel did not appreciate this. She stepped closer to me. Monroe pulled in a long breath. “Look…girls…” He took us both in with a look I imagined he’d used on freshman English students once upon a time. He might be a friendly guy, it said, but he was definitely superior, and that meant he wasn’t about to put up with any crap. “There’s really nothing I can tell you about Lucy. I hardly knew her. She may have taken a class or two with me. Honestly, I don’t remember. It was a very long time ago. But other than that…” His shrug said it all.

And I knew when to back off. Or at least to make it look like I was backing off. I grabbed his hand and pumped it. “I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to talk to me,” I said. “Having your perspective on things helps so much.”

“That’s nice.” His smile was tight. “Good night.”

“There’s just one more thing.”

Since I had a death grip on his hand, it’s not like he was able to go anywhere, anyway. His smile firmly in place, that muscle jumping at the base of his jaw, he gave me one more minute. I knew it would be the last.

“I hoped you could provide some insight into one little thing. It really would be a coup in terms of my thesis.”

He’d had enough, but since I was standing between him and the only exit off the stage, the only way he could get around me was to knock me down. Call me crazy, but I think he actually considered it. Lucky for me, instead he said, “I don’t have much time. I have other engagements, other commitments.”

“Of course. I understand.” I took a step closer. “I was just wondering…about ‘Girl at Dawn.’ All that repressed sexuality. All that yearning and aching and vibrating. That girl was Lucy, wasn’t it?”

He jerked his hand out of mine. “You think I had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance? Think again. The police interviewed me after Lucy disappeared. Plenty of times. They never found a connection between us. Except for school, of course. If you did your research the way a graduate student is supposed to, you might have turned up the not-so-unimportant fact that there was someone else who was far more likely to have had something to do with Lucy vanishing.”

He’d already turned to walk away when I grabbed his arm. “Who?”

He shook me off. “Research, darling,” he purred. “Start with that friend of hers who died in Vietnam. From what I’ve heard, he walked right into a firefight, eyes wide open. Suicide by Nam, they called it. You know, like he was feeling really guilty about something.”

“T
hat’s Lucy. Isn’t she beautiful?”

Over my left shoulder, I heard Ella expel a breath and watched as she touched a finger to the faded color photograph she’d brought to the office at my request. I recognized Lucy at once, of course, but I couldn’t let on. There she was in that cute little khaki mini, the pink top, the golden lipstick, and the waterfall hair. According to Ella, the photo was taken by her mom when the other kids came to pick Ella up for the concert. In it, Lucy was happy, smiling—and very much alive.

“She was always smiling like that,” Ella said, her voice dreamy and faraway. “It wasn’t just the concert she was excited about. Lucy was excited about life. About all the things she still had in store for her.”

“If she only knew,” I mumbled.

Ella moved down the row of bright-faced teenagers, left to right. “And there’s Bobby. You asked about him.” Her voice dropped. “He was so young.”

She wasn’t kidding. Though I knew Bobby Gideon was going into his senior year and must have been seventeen or eighteen when the photo was taken, he didn’t look a day over twelve, a grinning, goofy-looking kid with big ears.

“It wasn’t more than eighteen months or so after this picture was taken,” Ella said. “You know, when we heard he was dead.”

“Did you hear how?”

“How he died?” She’d dragged my guest chair behind my desk and was sitting in it, and she sat back. “In Vietnam. In combat. That’s pretty much all anyone ever knew.”

Not anyone. Not if Patrick Monroe was to be believed. He’d painted an incomplete but tantalizing picture of the incident. Suicide by Nam, he’d called it. Like Bobby was feeling guilty about something.

For a while longer, I stared into the face of a kid who looked like the only thing he could possibly feel guilty about was filching treats from his mom’s cookie jar, then I moved on. “This has got to be Janice,” I said, pointing to a girl in a bright yellow sheath dress and a teased, beehive hairdo. Now that I knew about Lucy and Darren and suspected that Janice might have had something to do with their breakup, I took an especially close look at her. I remembered what Ella had said about seeing Darren and Janice talking at the concert, about how insistent Janice had seemed. Yeah, she looked the type. It was there in the way she stood, her head high and her shoulders back and her gaze aimed right at Mrs. Bender’s camera in an in-your-face sort of way that wouldn’t have been unusual for a teenaged girl these days, but back then, I imagined made quite the political statement.

“Janice was a pretty girl, too, in her own way.” Ella slid the photo off my desk so she could take a closer look at it. “But she had a sort of harsh beauty, don’t you think? Lots of makeup. Lots of ratting her hair. That sort of thing. It wasn’t a natural prettiness like Lucy’s.” She set the picture back in front of me. “And there’s Darren.” When she pointed to a boy in madras shorts and an open-collared shirt, I gave him a careful once-over, too.

“Lucy’s secret boyfriend,” I murmured.

“Oh, no!” Ella was so sure of this, she boffed me on the arm for making fun. “Lucy and Darren? Don’t be ridiculous. If Lucy was dating Darren, I would have known about it.”

“Not if it was a secret,” I reminded her.

She pooh-poohed the very idea. “I’ve seen you think your way through mysteries, Pepper, so I know you can logically work through a problem. Not this time, though. Look at that shaggy mop of hair of his! And those sparkling blue eyes. Back in the day, he sent shivers down the spine of every girl at Shaker.”

Personally, I thought he was cute, but geeky. The fact that every girl at Shaker thought he was a gift from the gods made me wonder about the standards of the sixties.

“Besides,” Ella added while I was still lost in thought, “if Lucy was dating Darren, she never would have broken up with him. I mean, who in their right mind would?”

And what detective in her right mind wouldn’t ask why they had.

Then again, Lucy hadn’t exactly given me the chance, not with the sizzling electric light show of hers.

I made the mental note and moved on.

“Will Margolis, right?” The nondescript kid was shorter than Darren and standing in front of him. He wasn’t looking at the camera. His eyes were glued to the girl standing next to him, the one in the plaid skirt, Peter Pan collar shirt, and kneesocks.

“He liked you,” I said.

Ella clicked her tongue. “Will was friendly, and not just to me, to everyone.”

“And you were as cute as a button!” I had to look at her when I said this, because I wasn’t going to take the chance of missing Ella blush. I was not disappointed. “Look at you in that adorable little skirt. I bet you had a matching sweater.”

She slid the photo away. “The sweater was my mother’s idea. And I…” She checked out the photo and cringed. “I looked like a complete and total loser.”

“An adorable complete and total loser,” I teased.

Ella tried to pretend she minded, but she couldn’t control her smile.

While she was still in a good mood, I pounced for more information. “Tell me about Will.”

Her smile was gone in an instant. “I really didn’t know him well,” she admitted. “He was a quiet, sensitive kid—an artist. He usually had a sketchbook with him, and he liked to show me his drawings. He wasn’t as young as me, but he wasn’t as old as the other kids. I think he and Bobby were neighbors; that’s how he got to be part of the group.”

“So what happened to him?”

She shrugged and looked at her watch. “Ariel should be here soon.”

Too off the subject not to be conspicuous.

Since I’m far more subtle, I played it cool. “Did Lucy ever date Bobby?”

Ella laughed. “Bobby? You’re kidding, right? I mean, I loved Bobby to death.” Another shot of color heated her cheeks. “Bad choice of words, considering what happened to him, but you know what I mean. He was a great guy, but he was out of Lucy’s league.”

“Why? She liked them handsomer? Older?”

“Well, not older certainly.” She made a face. “Not like Mr. Monroe. Handsomer? Maybe. She dated a guy her junior year who was really handsome. A chiseled chin, dark hair, eyes the color of oak leaves in spring.”

She made him sound like Quinn’s way older brother, and I batted the thought away before it could take root.

“Lucy liked guys with class, and that’s not to say Bobby didn’t have any. He was just…just a guy, just a buddy. He was always telling corny jokes and using puns so bad, they made us all groan. He was fun and funny. At least until…” Her expression clouded.

It didn’t take a detective to catch on. “Let me guess. Until Lucy disappeared?”

Ella shook off the thought. “Well, that doesn’t mean anything. We were all upset.”

“But some of you were more upset than others. Like Bobby, for instance?”

She got up and fussed over putting the chair back where she’d found it. Since I was never all that worried about what my tiny office looked like, it wasn’t a big deal to me, but Ella straightened and re-straightened, lining up the chair just  right. When she was done, she stood behind it, her hands curled around the back. “Truth is, I can’t tell you,” she said, and call me psychic (I’m not, and believe me, it would come in handy more than this goofy Gift I did end up with), I knew Ella was embarrassed. And upset, too. Considering we were discussing something that had happened nearly fifty years earlier, this was odd. And interesting.

She turned away from me and walked to the far side of my office, and since that took, like, maybe five seconds, she flipped around and came back the other way, her hands clutched where the waistband of her denim skirt met a white peasant shirt embroidered at the neck and cuffs with bright flowers. “Like I told you before, Pepper, I was never really part of the group. I went to the concert with them that night because Lucy invited me along. I was younger. I didn’t really fit in.”

“What you’re saying is that once Lucy was gone, the rest of them dumped you.”

“I wouldn’t exactly put it that way,” she said, but the look of misery on her face told me otherwise. All these years, and the rejection still hurt. “I was young, and probably too sensitive. I really didn’t expect them to somehow suddenly welcome me into the group with open arms just because of what happened to Lucy.”

“But…”

“But after the night of the Beatles concert, they didn’t even acknowledge that I was alive. I’d see them in the hallways and say hello and be all set to ask how they were coping, and they’d just walk right past me. It was like I disappeared when Lucy did.”

“And Will?”

“Will?” Her smile came and went. “After that night, when I ran into Will…well, at least he wasn’t as cold as the rest of them, at least he’d say hello. But when I tried to talk to him…you know, really talk?…it was like meeting a brick wall. I was a kid, and I didn’t know a thing about psychology, but even I knew not talking about what happened to Lucy wasn’t going to help any of us. After a couple months of trying to get through to Will, I finally gave up. And it wasn’t like it was just me he was ignoring,” she added. She hurried around to the front of my guest chair and sat down, suddenly looking tired. “Will cut everybody off. Even Darren and Janice and Bobby. He stopped drawing. He got into all kinds of trouble at school. There was talk of him drinking and doing drugs. I know it was all because of how worried he was about Lucy. If only he’d realized that talking about it might have helped.”

There was a stack of old employee newsletters on my desk that I’d been asked to recycle by removing the staples and reusing the paper. Been there, done that, and I wasn’t going to get conned into it again. With nervous fingers, Ella reached for the papers. I didn’t stop her. Hey, if she was willing to do what I didn’t want to, bless her!

“They closed ranks,” she said, pulling out a staple, setting that newsletter aside, and reaching for another one. “That’s as simple as it is. The kids who were with me at the concert that night closed me out and kept to themselves. Their relationships with Lucy were different than mine. To me, Lucy was the big sister I never had. To them, she was a friend. They handled her disappearance the only way they knew how.”

“And the cops…did they see what was happening? Didn’t they think Lucy’s other friends were acting fishy?”

She stopped mid-pull and looked at me. “We didn’t have such things as grief counselors then, Pepper. Not like they have at schools now when something terrible happens. Lucy disappeared, and her friends…” Ella got back to work. “Well, we were pretty much left on our own to deal with it. The teachers at school didn’t talk about it, and I remember there was a big to-do when the yearbook editor insisted on putting that picture of Lucy in what would have been her senior yearbook. Like it was some kind of stain on the school’s reputation to admit one of its students was missing.” Still not understanding, she shook her head.

Finished with one pile of papers, Ella reached for another. “I was lucky,” she said. “My mom and my dad were great, especially my mom. She’d sit and listen to me cry, or we’d talk for hours and come up with scenarios that would explain what had happened to Lucy. I don’t know if she ever believed any of them. I think she was just trying to make me feel better. The other kids…” Her shrug said it all. “I have no idea what kind of support they got from their parents. Maybe none. Maybe they were all each other’s support, and maybe the only way they could deal was to lean on each other.”

“But the cops did talk to them, right?”

“Of course.” Ella was getting good at this recycling stuff. Finished in no time flat, she tapped the papers into a neat pile and set them back down where they came from. “The police talked to all of us. When they found out Lucy had been to the concert and who she went with, they brought us all down to the station and talked to us separately and then all together. We told them about the ride home on the rapid.” Since those old newsletters were in the most perfect of perfect piles, they didn’t need to be lined up again, but that’s exactly what Ella did. “I was the last one off the train. Before Lucy, that is.”

“And the other kids?”

Ella’s thoughts had drifted off, and she snapped to. “They told the police the truth, of course. Janice, Darren, Will, and Bobby got off the rapid together and they went to Darren’s house. He lived in a big mansion and there was even a third-floor ballroom. Can you imagine? That was where Darren always took his friends. They all told the police the same thing, that they were listening to record albums on Darren’s stereo.”

“And the cops believed them?”

“Well, of course they did.” Apparently, I was treading on thin ice by even suggesting that the kids knew anything. But though Ella’s voice was edged with exasperation, she refused to meet my eyes. My detective senses tingled; there was something she wasn’t telling me, and believe me, I intended to find out what it was. I settled back and waited for the right moment.

“And they had Mrs. Andrews’s word to back up their story,” Ella added while I was planning my strategy. “Mrs. Andrews said they all came home and trooped upstairs and she heard those albums playing and playing for hours. Besides…” She tugged at the cuffs of her blouse. “There was never any reason to think the other kids had any information that might have helped. They got off the train first. They were home listening to records by the time Lucy got off at her stop.”

“They got off first. Then you got off the train.”

My well-timed comment confirmed my suspicion. It was when she mentioned the train and how she’d gotten off before Lucy that Ella had gotten a little tweaky. Now, she tweaked some more. She stood up, then sat down again, her fingers laced together and her eyes bright.

“I’ve never told anyone,” she said, her voice wobbly. “I suppose I never wanted to admit it.”

I sat forward. “You saw what happened?”

“Oh my gosh, no!” She stood again, and sniffled. “It’s just…” She paced over to the door and swallowed hard before she said, “Lucy wanted to get off the train when I did so she could walk me home.”

Call me slow, I didn’t get the connection. “So…”

A single tear snaked over Ella’s cheek. “We’d been talking on the train, you see. About her secret boyfriend and about how she’d never told me about him because I wasn’t old enough to know everything. So when my stop came up, I told her I didn’t need her to walk me home.”