A Hole in Juan (21 page)

The only message was from Pip. “I’ll be late. You were right.

The Constitution Center is radical and I met somebody and we’re hanging for a while so . . . See you!”

Judging by his vocal buoyancy, the met one was female. You had to admire how quickly he could pick up the pieces of his broken heart and pat them back into perfect shape. Farewell Bunny Brookings, life was worthwhile again. Of course, I could be completely off base, and Pip might have met a charismatic cult leader.

The weather was changing, with more and more hints that winter was huffing around the corner. My suede-cloth shirt-jacket didn’t make enough of a difference over my sweater for the GILLIAN ROBERTS

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damp, chilly inside of the VW. Rain was imminent, and I yearned to be home and warm.

I thought I was listening to Raymond Chandler’s brilliant words, to adventures infinitely more thrilling than mine, but then I realized that the narrator had become white noise while I mentally gnawed at the confusing happenings at the day job. I had not, apparently, done a thorough job of changing hats.

I tried to arrange the series of events, looking for their cause; I got nowhere. I took out paper and made a list. It added up to nothing. My missing roll book hadn’t been part of a greater scheme. Maybe I was working too hard to tie the rest together.

Or not.

I was getting nowhere and was beyond bored watching nothing. At least I could take care of something doable—ask for another conference with Serenity Wilson, and one with Seth’s parents as well. I did not want to get the boys in trouble if I could help it, did not want to take my worries to the administration. I didn’t know how Havermeyer would react, but I was willing to wager that it would be inappropriately. I didn’t want permanent records besmirched unnecessarily at this point, but I did want to understand what was involved. Personalities don’t change overnight unless something—life or drugs—is pressing them out of shape.

I was dialing Seth’s home number when I heard two toots of a horn. I looked up and realized I’d almost missed the crucial moment I’d been waiting for.

I slammed my cell shut and watched Berta Polley appear at her door in fuchsia sweats, shouting obscenities at the departing delivery truck.

She was not using a walker or a cane as she stepped out onto her cement patio and stared down at the large carton that had been left on her front pavement.

The car’s roof suddenly clattered as the rain that had threatened became an actuality. Fat drops fell straight down, as if the 167

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rain were fake, a badly engineered special effect from a hose held right above us.

Do not let the rain drive you away before I get your picture, I muttered. Do
not.

Berta Polley looked up at the sky with the first drops, then down to the pavement and her package, frowning as she watched the water splat it. Then she looked left and right, saw no neighbors, I assumed, and took a deep breath. Her chest rose and fell, like a bellows being inflated, while I positioned the camera.

I managed five shots of Ms. Polley not only scampering down the three steps without so much as a limp and on her own, but then hoisting the heavy-looking package with no apparent strain and carrying it up the three steps, across the small patio, and into her house.

So much for the disability claim. I blessed digital cameras that showed me I’d gotten precisely what I wanted. I’d cracked a case even though it had involved nothing more than staring and taking snapshots.

These days, I took my triumphs where I found them.

But now, sleuth extraordinaire had to go to the market even though Nora Charles never had to grocery shop.

And once home, again unlike Nora, I had to phone those parents about their children’s aberrant behavior. I gazed at the Thin Man poster while I waited for someone to answer at Seth’s house. Nora would simply have had another martini at this point—and after the way my conversation went with Seth’s mother, she’d have had still one more.

The woman nearly burst into tears at the idea of a school conference. Her husband was out of town on business, she herself was trying to work from home because Seth’s younger sister had broken her leg and arm in a horseback-riding fall; the housekeeper was home sick with the flu and—her voice continued to rise—yes, Seth had come home bloody and a mess and
what was
going on
?

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The bottom line was that she could not come to the school any time in the foreseeable future. There was a doctor’s appointment the next morning, probably a long wait at the office . . . and on and on. Poor frazzled woman. I decided that if I was going to add to her woes by being the bearer of bad news, I might as well do it literally, and carry it to where she was.

We made an appointment at her home for that evening.

Pip appeared, dripping wet, about five minutes after we’d given up waiting and had dinner on the table. Once again, I understood why nature didn’t start parents out with teenagers but instead softened them up with years of cuddly bundles first.

Once Pip had taken a shower to warm up and put on dry clothes, Mackenzie did the obligatory parental number about being home on time for dinner, which I am sure Pip heard as white noise, but politely so.

While we ate our pork chops, salad, and mashed potatoes, talk moved from my Berta Polley triumph, duly hailed, to guy-talk about the Phillies. C.K. and Pip energetically debated a rookie’s potential for next year, but to me, it was a mere time-filler until we could get to the important stuff: Whom had Pip met?

Mackenzie finally broke the ice. “And how was your day, Pip?” I was grateful, because I knew that had I asked, even in precisely the same manner, it would have been interpreted as prying.

With C.K., it was gracious southern cordiality.

“Great!” Pip nodded with such animation that I feared his encounter had been with crime. The only other time I’d seen him light up this way was when Mackenzie touched on things forensic. “I know you said the center was good, but I thought . . .”

“You thought it would be—”

“Educational,” he said. “You know?”

It made me sad, but . . . I knew.

“But it wasn’t.” He still sounded surprised. “And I learned a lot of stuff!”

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I was proud of keeping still, not asking how “learning stuff ”

was great while being “educational” was boring. Mackenzie, out of his nephew’s sight line, first rolled his beautiful blue eyes, then crossed them.

Pip ate a bite of pork chop. “This is good,” he said, “all of it.

My mother’s mashed potatoes, well . . .”

“Lutie’s talents never seemed to lie in the kitchen,” Mackenzie said.

It was turning into a good day, as long I didn’t count the bad parts. I’d caught out Berta Polley, Pip had dropped his hangdog look, and even Macavity was purring in anticipation of yummy table scraps.

“The show was interesting. The guy called the Constitution an ongoing experiment. Like it keeps growing and changing, like when girls couldn’t vote, or black people, or when you had to be twenty-one. I never thought about that. That it still could change.”

“Sounds like you picked up a lot,” Mackenzie said.

Pip’s eyes and mouth opened. He looked from one of us to the other, but said nothing.

“I meant information,” Mackenzie said. “But judging by your reaction—do I understand you met somebody?”

Pip focused on his remaining salad for a moment. “Yeah,” he said in a lower voice. “I met this girl. She’s pretty cool. She was, like, doing research.” He sounded surprised by this, too, by, perhaps, the idea of a cool female scholar.

“Is she from around here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know the neighborhoods.”

“I meant from Philadelphia, not a tourist,” I said.

Mackenzie was watching him quizzically, perhaps even critically.

“Oh. That. Yeah. I got her phone number,” Pip said.

Mackenzie nodded approval, and the two of them actually did a high-five.

“You know, Bunny . . . well, she’d have hated the place,” he said.

“She’s really, like, small-town. Not that smart or interested in stuff.”

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Bye-bye, Brookings. You’ve been supplanted.

“It happens, you know,” Mackenzie said to his nephew.

“Your eyes open up and the girl looks entirely different, suddenly wrong for you. Then you meet the one someday and that doesn’t happen and that’s how you know.”

“Guy talk,” I said. “So enjoy yourselves—and the dishes. I’ve got to run.”

“On the other hand,” Mackenzie said, “sometimes you think she’s the one and then she leaves you with the dishes to do and . . .”

A joke, I was almost sure.

Sixteen

Seth Fremont lived in one of the rare brownstones in Philadelphia, a city that favors bricks. The houses on this strip of Spruce Street had been built around the same time as Philly Prep—the late nineteenth century—and I suppose someone had been in a New York kind of mood. It isn’t easy living in the oversized shadow of the Big Apple, so someone decided that if Manhattan had brownstones, so would we. But we only have a sampler, to show that we could have them if we really wanted to.

I walked up the marble entry stairs and pressed the bell. The brass door-knocker was otherwise occupied with a dangling wooden scarecrow, and an orange-and-black flag hung between the door and the large front window.

I’d been told the mansard-style roofs and round-headed win-GILLIAN ROBERTS

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dows meant these were Second Empire–influenced, but as I was never certain what or where the Second—or for that matter, the First—Empire was, I merely admired the solid and spacious-looking homes for what they were. Had I not been increasingly uncomfortable about this visit and what it could possibly do to help the situation, I’d have been more excited about finally being inside one of these homes.

The shift of relocating our meeting from school, where it would have felt less urgent, to home, from school hours to this evening, shouldn’t have meant that much, but it definitely seemed to. I felt like an intruder, and the problem with Seth, now that it was outside its normal schoolhouse confines, appeared larger than I’d have wanted it to. Plus, I knew I was adding to a harried woman’s woes when there was no absolute necessity, only vague suspicions.

Laurel Fremont was on the defensive, anxiously and sadly, from the moment she opened the door. “Has he done something wrong?” she asked repeatedly. “Besides getting into a brawl. I know that was wrong, but it happens.”

I reassured her that I didn’t know of anything he’d done wrong. I was once again balanced on the fine edge of the truth. I didn’t know that he’d stolen my exam. I didn’t know that he’d set off a false alarm. I didn’t know that he had something to do with Juan Reyes’s accident, and I didn’t know why he was involved in a bloody fight with Wilson. I had my suspicions, my unhappy theories—but I honestly didn’t know.

“I thought, since he’s home, Seth could be a part of the meeting, but he said he’d rather not. That he didn’t have anything to say, and that this was—whatever this was—between you and me and you hadn’t invited him,” she said.

“But it would be fine if he—”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on with that boy. At home, he seems fine, and he’s been such a help with Lucy.

It’s her bedtime soon. I’m letting her watch cartoons, a video. I don’t usually allow that, but . . .”

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I wanted to hug her, to pat her back, to tell her that things were all right, that she needn’t be this worried, or explain herself to me this way. But she had a son whose behavior had changed dramatically, and who’d been close to a series of mishaps, pranks, or actual violations too often, and who’d now come into my class bloodied and defiant. So I murmured about how difficult sick children could be, and how I remembered being allowed to watch soap operas when I was ill, and that seemed to relax her.

She was a pretty woman, currently pale and drawn, but I was sure that was purely situational, as was her smile, which was ten-tative and fearful. I tried my best to put her at ease as we walked from a spacious entry hall into the living room, its wide-planked floorboards gleaming with generations of waxing. It was a room designed for comfort, with its cushiony furniture, a piano with music open on its stand, interesting art—Haitian, I thought—

and something I always notice, good lighting so that people could settle in with one of the many books in the cases on one wall.

You can’t judge a child by his parents’ décor, and probably shouldn’t judge his parents by it either, but the livability of this room and its values made it feel like a place where the right things were given time and space. I wasn’t surprised that Seth—at least until-last-week-Seth—had grown up here.

“Please,” she said, waving me toward the burgundy sofa. “I’m sorry I don’t have a thing to offer—anything an adult would want to eat except a cup of coffee or tea. I haven’t been able to get to the store for three days and—”

My turn to say I’d just had dinner and didn’t want a thing, and to once again try to convince her that I wasn’t there on a punitive mission but rather was trying to understand a situation and, perhaps, to help.

She sat down across from me and leaned forward in her chair.

“His
face,
” she said. She blinked hard, as if she might cry. “He said he and Wilson had a fight, but he wouldn’t say why, but Seth doesn’t fight that way—not since he was a kid. And not with GILLIAN ROBERTS

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Wilson—they’ve been friends for so long. They aren’t like that!

What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“He’s been so different this past week and he wouldn’t say why. I know what you’re thinking—but he is
not
on drugs.” She shook her head while she said it, just in case I hadn’t understood.

“He’s entitled to have moods. He doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“Of course,” I said. “And I didn’t really ever think it could be drugs. He’s still doing well academically.”