Old School Bones (4 page)

“LOOK at this,” she says.

They’re sitting in her gray Saab, parked between the piles of plowed snow behind Hibernia House. A laptop wedged between the seats whirs, giving off little popping sounds as her fingers flick over the keyboard. Locks onto a wifi signal from the dorm. Images coming, going on the screen. Blue banner—myspace.com, a place for friends.

click

She’s logged in.
click

Hello, Awasha Patterson

click

Friends Space
click

Liberty

On the screen, a thumbnail of a photo Gracie showed him back at Pamplona. A black teenage girl in her track uniform, sweat running down her face, smiling at the camera. Her arms are hugging the shoulders of three other girls in track uniforms: Gracie, a cute blond, and a tall Mediterranean-looking girl. The young women of Hibernia House, a sprint relay team. The black girl, Liberty, has a baton in one hand. Her teammates are making the V-for-victory sign with their fingers.

click

Videos
click

Sistahood
click

Soundtrack playing. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” On the screen a grainy, badly lit video. The camera is hand-held, unsteady, struggling to stay in focus. The music fades.

“So, hey, y’all. This is my crib. See? Welcome to the Sistahood.”

Liberty. Live. Smiling into the camera. A huge grin. Perfect white teeth. Eyes more electric than in the track photo. They seem to almost pop out of her face. Amazing long, black lashes. Skin not nearly as dark as he expected. Almost as light as his own Portagee hide, with a shade or two more of
café com leite.
His mother’s skin. Hair a glossy black. Not quite African hair, it’s finer. Pulled back tight against her head. He can see a long ponytail swaying down her back. Her head and shoulders doing a cute, subtle bob-and-weave as she talks.

The camera pulls back.

She’s sitting on her desk, waving a stuffed, pink, floppy-eared bunny in front of her. Wearing a simple wheat-colored cardigan and jeans. They fit her long, slender body like skin.

“This is Mercatroid. He’s a magic rabbit. He keeps me safe, gives me love while I’m here at school. Wave to the folks at home, Mercatroid.” She waves the bunny’s paw.

“So check it out, y’all. This is how a sista lives at the big, bad boarding school ya’ll wondering about.” She waves a free arm to show off her room. “See, it’s not so whack as you thought, right? Pretty, pea green walls all gussied up with homegirl’s hotties.”

The camera pans to a poster of Denzel Washington in
Training Day,
Kanye West in a pair of mega-shades. Justin Timberlake. Bruce Lee.

“And this is where yours truly gets her beauty rest.” She stands up, walks three steps across the room to a bed piled with orange-and-green polka dot comforters, lacy pillows, more stuffed animals.

“We got to hit the books. Later, peoples. This is the first edition of the Sistahood Video Blog, signing off. Peace y’all.”

Both girls laughing, Liberty flashing the peace sign as the camera fades out.

“Did you see what I saw?” She’s staring at the blank space on the laptop screen where the video has vanished.

Long shadows of the trees fall across piles of snow outside, across the Saab, across her, him. It will be dark soon. His head hurts. Maybe from squinting at the video. He closes his eyes.

Almost sunset. They have been drinking Bacardi and the local Kalik beer since the middle of the afternoon, when she stops dancing, takes him by the elbows. Pulls him against her slick, wet body.

“Michael.”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you feel her spirit?”

“Yeah.” His voice sounds frayed.

“Why would anybody want to kill such … such amazing energy, that sweetness?”

“You really think I can answer something like that?”

“Check this out.”

click

Another Sistahood Video Blog.

Old School Bones—work in progress.

Liberty’s room again. Dark outside. The room full of shadows cast by a couple of floor lamps. The posters of Denzel, Kanye and company gone.

The camera zooms to the walls. Pans. Shows taped-up photocopies of old articles from
The Tolchie News
and
The Tochester Alumni Register
hanging where the posters of Denzel, Kanye and company once were. Time lines drawn on a roll of paper towels. Lots of photographs. Stacked on Liberty’s desk, and in piles around it on the floor. About fifty old yearbooks and what look like history texts.

The camera picks up Liberty standing beside her bed. She’s dressed for winter. Thick, long, red turtleneck sweater, black Lycra running tights, furry snow boots. Ponytail twisted on the crown of her head.

“Greetings, peoples. We’re back. After a long pause. But, yo, the amount of homework they give us here can really get in the way of our artistic expression. Anyway, Sistas Liberty and Gracie coming at you with some like serious shocking jive we found while working on our history research paper. Dig?”

She holds up a book in her hand. Camera zooms on the book cover. SECRETS OF THE TOMB: SKULL & BONES.

“For those of you who don’t know, this book is about a secret society at Yale. Powerful old white boy stuff, OK? Like the Georges Bush and their cronies. Naw mean?”

The camera follows her as she walks a section of the wall papered with photocopied pictures of scores of teenage boys with the words DEAD or LOST scrawled in red marker over their faces.

“Ninja Girl Gracie and I have found a possible link between college societies like Skull & Bones and secret societies here in our very own Tolchester-Coates School.”

She puts down the Tomb book, picks up a newspaper.

“Our happy, multicultural school claims they abolished secret societies here more than fifty years ago. But check it out. In the last two weeks I have found subtle references to secret societies called Red Tooth and Mystery & Mahem in Tolchie yearbooks from the last five years.”

The camera zooms to the features page of
The Tolchie News.
It’s the current edition of the school’s weekly newspaper that Liberty is holding up.

“The headlines on the page have a code hidden in them.”

She reads as someone’s finger, ninja camera girl Gracie’s probably, points out the headlines. It moves from left-to-right, top-to-bottom on the page:

RED BLAZERS MAKE A COMEBACK AT T-C

TOOTH DECAY CITED AS REASON TO BAN CANDY MACHINES

STILL WATERS RUN DEEP: MR. LYNCH, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

RULES COMMITTEE FACES TOUGH CHOICES.

“You don’t get it, homies?” She gives the camera a mock frown. “Look at the first word in each headline. Read them in sequence. RED TOOTH STILL RULES.”

The camera pulls back, shows us Liberty full-on. She puts the newspaper down, walks toward the camera.

“I’m telling y’all, this is bad business. Devils’ work, wait and see. Stay tuned for more from your trusty sista detectives. From the Danger Zone. Old School Bones is a work in progress. Ya hear?”

Fade to black.

“Now what do you think, Michael? You think this is a girl who would have killed herself … or could Gracie’s conspiracy theory have some weight?”

She stops dancing, takes him by the elbows. Pulls him against her slick, wet body. A soft whisper in his ear.
“
You’re not lily white, are you?”

“Can I see the room in the video?”

SHE unlocks the door with her master key, bites her lower lip. Feels like running. Anywhere, just away from here where she can still smell the death, the fear.

“God, this is so hard,” she says.

The door swings open into Liberty’s room, on the third floor of Hibernia House.

“It’s empty,” he says.

The room has the stifling smell of chlorine bleach. The faint scent of urine, puke.

She tells herself to find her courage, takes two steps into the room. Except for a spider just starting to spin her web in the corner, the room is empty. EMPTY empty. Not even the standard student desks, the chests of drawers, iron beds, chairs, mirror. All gone. Floor swept clean and mopped.

“I don’t understand.”

“What?”

“All Liberty’s stuff was here yesterday. I checked.”

“Maybe her family came for it.”

“Her mother wouldn’t take out the school’s furniture. Or clean the floor.”

“You got a point.”

“Bumbledork!” Her voice echoes in the empty room. The late afternoon sun casts a reddish glow on the polished hardwood floor.

“What?”

“Bumbledork must have done this, had the whole room cleaned out.” She peers into an empty closet.

“Bumbledork? Isn’t that the name of the guy in Harry Pot—”

“Sort of. It’s what everybody calls Sufridge, our headmaster.”

“He’s not a wizard.”

“He thinks he is. Dresses like one.”

“What kind of school is this?”

“It always had its dark side, but … now!”

She spins on her heels, walks out of the room. Crosses the central common room with its TV, couch, the fireplace with the dead gas log, poster of James Dean over the mantle. Keys the lock in the door to Gracie and Tory’s old room.

“Look.”

A draft from the door swinging open scatters dust bunnies across the room.

A small cloud drifting away. The rocky beach, the breaking waves. Vanishing. With no word, no sign of hope or redemption for the babies.

The school furniture in disarray. A cardboard box overflows with trash. Old graded essays and math tests lie discarded on the floor.

“What?”

“No one has touched this room since Tory and Gracie moved out over a week ago.”

“Maybe the cleaners ran out of time.”

“They don’t punch out of work for another hour.”

“You think something funny’s going on here?”

She puts her hands on her hips, stares at him. “Don’t you? Doesn’t it look like Bumbledork is trying to erase every last little bit of Liberty from this school?”

“I couldn’t say. This is all new territory for me.”

“I guess if you are going to help us find a killer, you better see the scene of the crime.”

“Look, Awasha, I’ll admit your headmaster may well be in a hurry to put this death behind him, behind the school. But who wouldn’t be?”

“That’s not the point.”

Her back teeth are starting to grind as she looks at him sitting there on the toilet lid, staring nonchalantly at the claw-foot bathtub where Liberty died. Can’t imagine how she ever thought he might be her great hope. A savior. Sometimes all men under the age of about forty seem to look and act the same to her. Like her twin brother Ronnie. Loveable. But meatheads. Large children.

And this one could use a shave and a haircut. Can’t he feel anything? Does he get off on hearing himself theorizing about bullshit, avoiding the murder that is staring him in the face? Listen to him rambling on.

“The death of any kid, let alone a popular kid like Liberty Baker, has got to be a major trauma for a school.” He reaches out and rubs the fingers of his right hand over the clean edge of the old tub. The porcelain gleams. “I just don’t see how you can come to the conclusion that Liberty’s death is anything but a desperate act. A suicide.”

“You saw those video clips. Liberty loved her life. And she was afraid of knives and razors. She couldn’t cut a banana!”

“Maybe she was drunk or on drugs. A lot of people get high before they try something like this.”

“I thought of that. I asked the police. They said that the medical examiner always runs a toxicology test on what they call
unattended deaths.
Liberty tested clean. Besides, she wasn’t a druggie. She treated her body like a temple. She was an amazing kid. Understand?”

He doesn’t respond. He is still staring into the tub … as if he is looking for something. Or just lost in a daydream about fishing.

She stamps her foot.
Like look at me, man!

“Sorry. What?”

Her teeth grinding again. “You know what? Let’s forget about this, OK? I’m sorry I troubled you. Go back to your fishing boat.”

She snaps off the bathroom light, Hibernia House suddenly almost immaterial. A collection of gray and violet shades in the low light of late afternoon in mid-winter.

He doesn’t move.

“Hey, let’s go! I’ve got places to be, a job. Three dozen students needing me.”

“I can’t picture how you could kill someone and make it look like she slit her wrists on purpose. It seems almost impossible … like …”

“Forget about it. It’s not your worry.”

“But you said she was threatened a couple days before her death. Somebody called her a name, a …?”

“A wog. It was a note. It said, ‘Back off you wog cunt. Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.’ Something like that.”

“And wog is a racial slur?”

“In England.”

“I hate that kind of thing!”

She switches the light back on. “Join the club.”

“You saw Gracie’s Old School Bones video. Maybe she was really onto something. Maybe she stepped on the wrong toes.”

“With the history term paper?”

“And the video, for that matter. Anyone can access the stuff kids put up on MySpace.”

“You mean like these fraternities?”

“Yeah.”

“You have the note?”

“Gracie said Liberty threw it away.”

“Shit!”

“What?”

“What have you got to go on but a lot of hearsay and—”

“Shsssh!” She snaps off the light. “Someone’s downstairs. Coming up. Get in a closet!”

IT smells like baby powder, athletic shoes, rose cologne. And something else faintly. Spiced rum, maybe. Like someone spilled some Captain Morgan in here once upon a time. Even in the dark, he can tell that a steam line for a radiator runs through here. The heat baking his right calf as he leans into the deepest corner of the big walk-in closet in Gracie and Tory’s room. His ear presses against the wooden door, listening to the muffled voices out in the common room. Awasha’s. And another female’s. A throatier voice.

“When I saw the light on up here, I figured it had to be you.”

“I guess I still need some closure with all of this.”

“It has to be horrible for you. Well … all of us. But especially you. Not just losing that beautiful … but losing your home.”

“I keep thinking, I should have been able to stop her. You know, the night before.” A choking sob. “She wanted to talk. And … told her to come back … was too late … trying to sleep. All the while …”

He hears another sob. Maybe she is trying to distract the newcomer, cover for him, but her emotion sounds so real. Raw. And now he hears the lower female voice. Cannot make out the words. Something, something. Soft, tender. Trying to comfort.

A long silence. The steam heat hissing in the pipes. His right calf burning again.

“… madness for me to come back up here … don’t think I’m ready. I …”

A long pause. He hears something. The slow, awkward shuffling of feet maybe. Fish squirming on a deck after the net spills. Their death upon them.

“Why don’t we go downstairs for a while?” It is the other female voice. The rough one.

“I … getting back to the office. I told some Muslim kids I’d …”

“Just for a little while—for some tea.”

Another long pause. Fish on the deck again.

“OK.”

After she is gone for maybe a half hour—no voices, no signs of life from the floors below in her apartment—he tip-toes out of the closet. Stretches out on one of the girls’ beds. Flat on his back, forearm over his eyes. A position practiced every night for nine and a half months. In another dorm, another school. When all he wanted in life was to surrender to the gods of forgetfulness. While he waited to be released, waiting for graduation from all the preppie madness.

With his eyes closed, he sees her. The black girl in her track uniform.

Sweat running down her cheeks, a baton in one hand. The other making the V-for-victory sign.

The camera zooms to her face. Come-hither smile, those immense lashes batting. Suddenly her hand reaches up and tries to cover the camera lens …

She has the long-legged gate of a ballerina, her bare toes hitting the floor a split second before the rest of her feet. Something little-girly about the fluid, effortless, unselfconscious way she moves …

The camera at arm’s length captures herself leaning against the desk next to Gracie, throwing a long arm around Gracie’s shoulders.
“
Wave goodbye to the folks …”

“I’m so sorry!”

Her voice startles him. His eyes burst open. He doesn’t think he was asleep exactly.

It is night outside the window. His eyes try to find her form, her silhouette as he sits up on the bed, peers into the dark room.

“I don’t want to turn on the light. It would not be good for me … for us to be seen up here now. Come on.”

He feels a hand reach out of the gloom and take his. A small hand. Soft on top, but the fingers dry, a little leathery. A hand that has known hard work. Like his own. Maybe a fishing hand.

“Who was—”

“Shssss.” Whispering, “Just a worried colleague. We need to be quiet.”

He wonders why. Aren’t they alone?

“Follow me.” Her hand tugs. He rises. She walks, soft cat-steps. He tries to do the same. For some reason he has a memory of dancing school in the North End of Nu Bej. “The Blue Danube Waltz.” What the hell’s that have to do with how Liberty Baker died … or murder?

When her Saab stops to drop him back at his jeep on Mt. Auburn St. in Cambridge, it is snowing again. He can feel the tires skid a little on the road, knows yet another winter storm is winding up in the Gulf of Maine. Pictures twenty-five-foot waves, pounding seas.

“Well, that was a pretty different afternoon.”

She cocks her head, eyes him.

“What do we do now?”

He puts his right hand on the door handle.

“My dad and Tio Tommy want to get back out fishing as soon as they can. Prices of cod and haddock are sky high.”

“You’re going with them?”

He bends at the waist so he can see her better, peers into the car.

“Yeah, sure. I’m a Portagee from Nu Bej. I fish.” His eyes look through the windshield into the sheets of falling snow.

“What about Liberty and—”

He opens the door. A gust of wind cuts his cheeks. He pulls his navy watch cap lower over his ears.

“We’re in for a hell of a storm, Awasha. The Rosa Lee won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

“So …?”

“I don’t like that ugly word.”

“What?”

“Wog.”

“You’ll help? Even though I made you hide in a closet for God knows how …”

Sweat running down the deep brown face. Cheeks and young breasts covered with fine white sand. Fumes of gin, lime. And something rank. Marley singing
“
One Drop” from the distant bar. Or was it another song, like
“
Africa Unite?”

“Michael?”

“Nobody ever made me do that before, hide in a closet. I didn’t know I was so important.”

She smiles. A shy smile. In the glow of a streetlamp and the reflection from the swirling snow, her skin, eyes, lips seem to shine. “Can you close that door?”

He pulls it shut, pinches a cold cheek with his hand. The nervous tick again.

“It’s all about learning how and why.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Understanding a crime. Understanding death.”

“How and why Liberty died?”

“First we have to check out the official cause of death.”

“Suicide?”

“Yeah. Maybe she really had a motive you don’t know about.”

“There was no note.”

“When I was in the closet, I heard you tell your colleague that Liberty came to you the night before she died. Wanted to talk. Right?”

A long pause.

“Yes.”

“She sound upset?”

“No … Yes. I don’t know. We didn’t talk.”

“Why?”

“It was late, I was already in bed. Jesus. I screwed up, OK?”

“I’m not judging you.”

“Yes, you are. I can feel you are!”

“Maybe she talked to someone else.”

“Not any of the girls in the dorm, not her stepparents. Nobody heard anything from her that night or the next day.”

“What about her mother?”