Cold Springs (10 page)

“This Samuel guy,” Hunter said. “He got some kind of blackmail leverage over John Zedman?”

“I don't know. It's been a long time.”

“You ever meet Samuel?”

“Once. Sort of.”

“Sort of.”

“I was picking up Katherine from a police station. She'd been busted at a party at the Montrose house. Samuel was in the next holding cell, staring at me. His eyes—you remember Galen, the arsonist kid we got a few years back, lit homeless people on fire in their sleeping bags?”

“That scary?”

Chadwick nodded. “After Katherine died, Mallory identified the Montrose house as the place they'd gone to get the heroin. The police looked for Samuel. As far as I know, they never found him.”

Hunter's fingers made a claw against his camouflage pants, as if he'd caged something there. His jaw was still tight with anger. “Look, amigo, I've known you since before Norma, before Katherine, before God entered puberty. Am I right? I understand about guilt. I understand you help kids because you feel like you failed Katherine. But Mallory Zedman isn't your daughter. You start trying to salvage the past through her, then I made a mistake, taking her.”

The bitterness in his voice stung like sleet.

Hunter was right, of course, about knowing him. Only Ann had known him longer. That was one of the reasons Chadwick had accepted this job, when his life was at its darkest point—just after Katherine's death, when it took him conscious effort just to get out of bed and take a shower.

With Hunter, Chadwick could almost believe that his adulthood was a shell—a layer of years that could be slipped off, set aside for a while, examined impartially.

“You can help the girl,” Chadwick said. “That's why you took her.”

“I've been telling you a long time, you're too hard on yourself: Katherine wasn't your damn fault.”

“But?”

“But it wasn't her dealer's fault, either. Maybe I don't like that you're so ready to believe your daughter was corrupted by the poor black kid she was hanging out with. Maybe that's been bothering me a long time. Now you're telling me his younger brother is ruining Mallory Zedman.”

“It's not about them being black.”

“Isn't it? What do we teach here? Honesty. Responsibility. Katherine was responsible for her actions. Mallory is responsible for hers. Period.”

“I can't just step back, Asa.”

“This necklace—Katherine gave it to Mallory before she died, right?”

“Right.”

“All that suggests to me—Mallory left it at the scene of the murder. Anybody's sending you a hate message, it's the girl.”

“If you think she was involved, maybe you should turn her over to the police.”

Hunter swirled his coffee.

Chadwick wondered if he saw something in the liquid—the faces of the thousand-plus kids he'd graduated, most of them rich, most of them white. He wondered if Hunter ever regretted the clientele he served.

With his charisma, his doctorate in education administration, his business experience after the Air Force, raising money for nonprofits, Hunter could've gone anywhere, been superintendent of any major metropolitan school district. He could've been a model for kids who grew up like he did—poor, scraping with gangs on the East Side of San Antonio, perpetually angry.

I don't want to go to work and see myself every day,
Hunter had told him once.
You want to help somebody, you got to have a little distance from them.
White
kids, I understand. I can save their sorry-ass lives.

When he said that, Chadwick got the uncomfortable impression he was talking about their friendship, too.

“Nobody gets access to Black Level,” Hunter decided. “I allow one exception, the integrity of the whole program is compromised. On the other hand . . .”

He looked at Chadwick, seemed to be weighing unpleasant options. “This Sergeant Damarodas—he could be on our doorstep next week. Court orders, I can fight. But I need to know what I'm fighting and why. I don't appreciate being kept in the dark by this girl's mother.”

“Like I said. Let me go back to San Francisco.”

“You got a full slate of pickups, and you're going to have a new partner to train.”

“What about Olsen?”

“She's asked for a different assignment. You probably guessed that.”

“I'll convince her to stay on,” Chadwick said quietly.

“Won't do any good.”

“Asa, I've had four partners in the last five weeks. I'm not going to lose another one.”

Hunter raised an eyebrow. “Why you making a stand, amigo? What makes Olsen different than the others?”

“Can I talk to her or not?”

Hunter gazed across the hills, at the land he owned all the way to the horizon. “I won't stop you. Now why don't you get some rest? I'll watch the class.”

Chadwick was about to decline the offer, but his friend's expression told him it might be best not to argue. He left Hunter at the edge of the deck, the sunrise turning the steam from his coffee red.

Inside the main lodge, tan levels were doing their chores—scrubbing floors, cleaning windows, sweeping the enormous stone fireplace in anticipation of tonight's hard freeze.

When Chadwick came near, they stood at attention. He remembered each of them by name and pickup city, and by how each had performed during Survival Week, which Chadwick sometimes led. Sarah from Albuquerque, who couldn't light a fire; Lane from Rochester, who would eat anything no matter how slimy; Tyler from Houston, who'd never been camping and got the highest marks for survival in his team. Chadwick talked to each of them, told them they were doing a good job. He hoped his tone wasn't as weary as he imagined.

Hunter had a saying—staff members find their level, then dress to it. It was not a requirement, but it was a fact.

Hunter himself, like most of the drill sergeant types, tended to wear black. They felt most at home with the new initiates. They relished confrontation.

The hands-on learning buffs, the ranch hands, outdoor ed graduates who weren't quite up to Black Level—they wore the second-level color, gray.

The therapists, the part-time teachers, the studious ones who preferred to work with kids the way jewelers worked with settings—they all wore the fourth-level color, white.

But tan was the invisible third level. Tan levels did domestic chores, lived by quiet routine, combated nothing worse than boredom. They learned tranquillity through humility. They were kitchen patrol. They were toilet cleaners. They were not the center of the world. Their therapy sessions chased the most elusive byword in Hunter's program—Honesty.

Very few people on staff dressed to that level. And though his job had nothing in common with the level, Chadwick almost always wore tan.

Partly, he envied their invisibility. It wasn't something a giant like Chadwick ever got much of. If there were other reasons, Chadwick had never thought them through. Maybe that's why he was still wearing the color.

He walked down the north wing, past the gym, the cafeteria, the infirmary—all state-of-the-art facilities built with the bulging profits of Hunter's alternative-education empire. Eight years ago, when Chadwick started escorting, none of those amenities had been there. Now Hunter had five campuses in three different countries.

His apartment was in the staff dormitory on the second floor. He didn't realize his hands were trembling until he started searching his key ring.

Every key at Cold Springs was identical except for the number, and Chadwick had never gotten around to color-coding them. He stopped at the only unique one—the gold key for the house in the Mission. He told himself for the millionth time he needed to remove it, put it in a box somewhere. He still owned the house, refusing to sell because under the terms of the divorce he'd have to share the money with Norma. But he hadn't visited in years. Had no intention of doing so.

And still, every time he took out his key chain—there it was. He could envision the green door with its brass knob, brass numbers above the mail slot. He could imagine opening that door, calling up the stairwell that he was home.

What had Hunter said about not trying to salvage the past?

He and Chadwick had walked away from Southeast Asia together with never a flashback. They'd seen children who'd stepped on land mines, shriveled Vietcong body parts strung on jute necklaces like Mexican
milagros,
dead GIs Huey-ed into base, their bodies cooked from napalm Chadwick's colleagues had loaded onto planes. None of that affected Chadwick much anymore. None of it gave him the shakes.

But when it came to San Francisco—the house in the Mission—his hands still trembled.

He put his keys back in his pocket, walked down the hall to Olsen's apartment.

He had to knock several times before she answered.

She stood in the doorway, squinting, the room behind her a yawning darkness that smelled of sleep and rye bagels she'd bought in New York.

“Glad you're up,” Chadwick said. “Can we talk?”

“Are you crazy? I just went back to bed.”

“Your room or mine?”

She scowled. With her buzz cut, her shapeless fatigues, her harshly plain face, she looked about twelve years old. Chadwick wondered why young women who tried to look butch always ended up looking frail and vulnerable.

“Your room,” she decided. “It's probably cleaner.”

The comment forced Chadwick to think about what his room would look like—and it was clean, but like a hotel room, not a home. He had never asked for new furniture since the early shoestring budget days of Cold Springs. He still had the particleboard desk, the hundred-dollar double bed, the Sears CD player. The corners of the sheets, the clothes on the shelves were folded with military precision, but there was little of personal significance—just a few pictures, and a few essential books. Herodotus. Mark Twain. David McCullough.

He opened the sliding glass door to the porch, let in the smell of cedar, the distant rush of the river.

Olsen examined the photos on Chadwick's writing desk. Her fingers hovered momentarily over the picture of Katherine—a young girl of eight, the summer they'd planted morning glories, her smile wide with amazement, the flowers making a raucously colored arch around her body. Mercifully, Olsen's fingers moved on. She picked up an old group shot of Chadwick with a bunch of Laurel Heights eighth-graders, all of them in colonial costumes.

Olsen looked up at the present-day Chadwick, then back at the photo of him with the powdered wig. “Anybody ever told you—”

“Repeatedly,” Chadwick interrupted. “I look like George Washington.”

Olsen managed a crooked smile. “And these kids in the picture—”

“Students. Former students.”

“Why'd you quit?”

“My daughter was a student there,” Chadwick said. “She committed suicide.”

Olsen's lips quirked, like she thought he was kidding, and then, when she was sure he wasn't, she returned the picture to its place, carefully, as if it were a detonator.

“Katherine,” she guessed. “What Mallory was talking about that night in the car.”

“She took her own life while she was baby-sitting Mallory Zedman, overdosed on heroin while Mallory was watching
The Little Mermaid.
Mallory was six. We were gone several hours longer than we should've been. Mallory put in the call to 911.”

Olsen sank into a chair. She rubbed her palms on her cheeks, pushing up the corners of her eyes. “Christ, Chadwick. Okay. Fuck. I feel like a jerk now.”

“As you can tell, I'm a lot of fun to be with.”

“I've been mad at you for a week because you wouldn't talk to me about the Zedman girl. Wouldn't explain why you were acting weird. You left me in the car while you talked with her mom.”

“So don't quit escorting. I need your help.”

Olsen hunched over, laced her fingers together and stared through them.

Her hair gleamed in the light. Her skin had a yellowish hue to it, like half-churned milk. Once during the week, on the flight into La Guardia, a flight attendant had told Olsen, by way of a compliment, that she looked a lot like her father, then gestured at Chadwick. The comment weighed on Chadwick's heart like lead.

He remembered how many times he'd had to explain that he was Katherine's father. Yes—her, the Latina child. He'd learned to stare through people's momentary disbelief, their embarrassment and confusion. He remembered thinking that he would never be able to claim a resemblance to Katherine, so he would have to claim something else about her—common personality, or interests, or career. Someday, he'd thought, after she grew up, people would look at Katherine and think,
She's so much like her father.

“I should have told you I was requesting a new assignment,” Olsen decided. “It's not you, Chadwick. It's me. I'm not cut out for this work.”

“I don't agree.”

“Oh, please. I can't do what you do—not the direct intervention.”

“That's the job you requested.”

“I was unrealistic, okay? I wanted to be the rescuer, the one who whisked kids out of trouble. I thought they'd respond to me because I'd been there. I was wrong.”

She'd been there.

Chadwick remembered Olsen's interview, how she'd talked in vague terms about coming from a broken home, how that had gotten her interested in child psychology. Chadwick hadn't pressed her for details.

“You can't expect the kids to thank you,” he told her. “The more a kid fights, the worse she needs us.”

She shook her head. “The things Mallory said to me in the car while you were in the school . . . Not a thing about your daughter. Nothing about that. But vicious things. She reminded me—”

Olsen stopped herself.

Out the window, a trio of buzzards had gathered over the river, circling for breakfast.

“Kids like Mallory,” Chadwick said, “they've learned they can make authority figures cave in if they just act outrageous enough. That's terrifying power for an adolescent. They love it, but they hate it, too. So they keep getting wilder, hoping to find the limits. They need to hit a brick wall—somebody who finally says, ‘This is it. This is where you stop.' When a kid fights, she's testing to see if you're for real. Remember that. Remember you're basically dealing with a scared child, no matter how big or loud or out of control.”