Philly Stakes (10 page)

“Did you go to—you didn’t, did you?” Alice wrung her hands.

Laura frowned.

“Did you? Where were you? What were you doing?”

“Walking. Thinking.”

“Outside?”

“I went into stores.”

“I meant—did you talk to anybody about…anything?” I almost reminded Alice that there was no point to her awkwardly disguised questions. I knew what she meant. But she wasn’t remembering who knew what, only that there was a frightening secret that mustn’t be shared. I wondered whether my own illusion of shielding someone from harm was equally misguided.

“I called Peter,” Laura said. “But he wasn’t home.”

“Nobody else?”

She shook her head, and Alice Clausen’s muscles visibly unknotted. Mine, on the other hand, tightened. What should I say about Peter’s whereabouts? I gnawed at the question while the Clausens dealt with their own concerns.

“You spend too much time with him,” Alice declared. “Up till all hours last night. Alma thought it was disgraceful. I had to keep explaining.” Alice adopted a pose of despair that didn’t rationally correlate with Laura and Peter’s late hours.

Laura looked at her shoes, nice penny loafers, a little scuffed, but not terrifically engrossing. Alice studied the rug. That didn’t seem much of a grabber, either.

So I made hostessing noises, mentioning that we’d been just on the verge of walking to Alma’s house, asking if anyone wanted anything before setting out, emphasis on leave-taking.

“Could I use your phone?” Laura whispered. “Maybe by now, Peter’s home.” She slipped off her coat.

I had gnawed the issue down to the marrow and couldn’t think of a reason why I had to keep Peter’s mission a secret from Laura. “He won’t be,” I said. “He’s at police headquarters.”

She dropped her coat, pressed a fist to her mouth and shook her head back and forth, as if forcibly containing a scream. “They arrested him?” she finally said.

I shook my head. “He went to them.”

Alice Clausen stood where she was, confused and fearful.

“I have to go,” Laura said. “Now.” She picked up her coat off the floor and was almost at the door when both her mother and I shouted “Where?” and, at the same time, began regathering and rebuttoning sweaters, gloves, hats and coats.

“Don’t!” Alice said.

“I know what he’s doing there. He’s lying. He’s saying he did it.” Laura’s back was to us and her hand was on the door.

“Why?” Her mother was swaddled in dark mink now, and for at least the tenth time that morning, I wondered how a woman could be so finely groomed and outfitted and still be such a mess. “Why would he?”

The words penetrated Laura’s coat, hit her between the shoulder blades. She turned around, looked at her mother with disappointment. “To protect me,” she said. Her voice was suddenly strong, almost belligerent, very un-Laura. “Can you understand that?”

* * *

Way back in Mackenzie’s past there was a travel agent who was either tenacious, forgiving, or incapable of updating her Rolodex. In any case, she still sent annual regards via a lush calendar, and Mackenzie therefore spent every working day near a full-color photograph of a glorious place he’s never seen.

This month’s geographic delicacy was a Tahitian beach. There was a Christmas bauble on a palm frond. I sat near his desk, imagining the slap of waves on sand, the rustle of palm fronds, the distant ocean roar.

My fantasy world was drowned by Alice Clausen’s sniffles, Laura’s hesitant, muffled half-sentences and C.K. Mackenzie’s repeated “What?” and “How’s that again?” and “This is the damndest…” He shot me a barrage of accusing glares, as if I had orchestrated this entire business, put the players up to their merry pranks. I shot back pure innocence. It wasn’t my fault that Servino, whose case Clausen was, had to sit by, annoyed and huffing, as a sort of auxiliary, paternal extra. It wasn’t my fault that Mackenzie was the confessor of choice.

We were well past the recitation of rights. Mother and daughter had passed on lawyers, against both Mackenzie’s and my advice. Peter had been booked and Mackenzie seemed definitely put out by the idea that the swift hand of justice was receiving a smack and a reprimand.

“Let him out. He lied. He was protecting me,” Laura said for the third time.

The word “protecting” had cropped up once again, once again reminding me of Laura’s composition. I almost knew it by heart now. Instead of protecting his child, he sent him too close to the fire, to his death.

Mackenzie nodded at Laura. “And now you’re protectin’ Peter.” His tone was soothing, compassionate, dangerous.

“No. I’m telling the truth. I did it.”

“With him?”

“Alone. All alone.”

“No she didn’t! She’s mixed up, I tell you! I did it!” Alice insisted. “And alone!”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then he opened them and looked at the clock. “Now I’ve asked you before, Laura. And you, too, Mrs. Clausen, but all I’ve gotten is answers like ‘he deserved it’ which aren’t answers at all. So I’m askin’ again and I’d sure appreciate something real this go-round.” He leaned closer to Laura. “We’re talkin’ about your father, your daddy, not some abstract idea. You’re tellin’ me you killed your own dad, and I’m askin’ you why.”

Laura’s eyes widened. She swallowed.

“Why that night? What did you and your father quarrel about at the party?” he demanded.

Information about the quarrel was compliments of my big mouth. I felt as sick to my stomach as Laura looked to be.

“Peter,” she whispered.

“What about him?”

“Everything. That he was there. That we spent time together.”

“Her father thought she was too young for boys,” Alice said. “He had his ideas.” Her head dropped forward, as if someone had smacked it from behind, and she sat in a position of complete dejection.

“Had you fought about it before?” Mackenzie asked Laura.

“Not really.” She looked at the detective. “He didn’t know until that night. Peter never came over or called the house.”

“You kept him a secret?”

She nodded.

Mackenzie stood up and looked down at her, looming. “So,” he said, “your father was real angry about your boyfriend. That’s one kind of thing. But we’re still talkin’ murder here. Why?”

Laura was again engrossed in her penny loafers.

“Now if your daddy was so angry about his visitin’ the house at all, why was Peter still there after everybody else had gone? Why was he there in the middle of the night?”

Laura’s mouth opened and shut, a little guppy in a police station.

“Why?”

“I asked him to stay.”

“With you?”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“Till morning.”

“In your house? In your bedroom? Overnight?”

She nodded again.

“Even though your daddy didn’t even want you datin’, you asked a boy to spend the night?”

Her nod was more like lowering her neck for the guillotine.

Mackenzie returned to the chair facing her. “Why is that?” he asked gently. “Why’d you do that?”

She looked at him gravely, leaned toward him, as if pulling to the truth, as if willing herself and her secrets into his hands. “I thought about it all the time,” she said. “All the time. That other fire—that was an accident. I think. But I remembered the flames. Burning it away. Like in hell, like where the devil…” She stopped and shrugged, as if she’d said nothing much.

“What did you need to burn away?” Mackenzie spoke softly.

Laura looked surprised, as if she’d forgotten where she was. She swiveled to see the room, Mackenzie, her mother, me, and then she stood up suddenly, pale and shaking. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Mackenzie pointed in the direction of the women’s room. Then he looked at me, but I had already gotten up to follow her.

From behind us, I heard Alice Clausen’s moans and weeping interspersed with Mackenzie’s low, slow questions.

Laura splashed water on her face and stood breathing deeply over the sink. She clutched its lip as if to keep from falling down. “Why won’t he believe me?” she said.

“Maybe because you aren’t telling the truth. Because you didn’t do it. Because none of this makes sense.”

“Why won’t he let Peter go?”

I took a deep breath. She looked so tiny and innocent in the white glare of the bathroom. “Laura, why do you insist that you killed your father? You have no motive. Who are you protecting?” There it was, that word again.

“No—” She shook her head. “I—” Her hands left the sink edge and clenched into fists. She stammered, flushed with frustration and conflict, then stopped trying to speak. Instead, she stood crying, hands at her sides, not even bothering to wipe her tears or running nose. As if that would be a waste of energy. As if everything was.

I was her teacher. She was my pupil. Until now, we’d had a lopsided, limited communication through her essays and my speculations. But it was a defined relationship. I knew what to do with it.

No longer. I stood back, afraid of crossing some line into the forbidden or inappropriate, wishing I knew the ground rules.

Laura continued to cry.

Icarus, unnoticed, still dies every day.

I noticed. She had to know it. Forget the rules—there weren’t any except the fundamental one that I was an adult and she was a child in pain. I walked over and held her. She was as fragile and lost inside her baggy clothing as a loosely joined pipe-cleaner doll. “He has to believe me!” she said into my shoulder.

“He needs the truth.”

“It is true. I did it.”

“He needs to know why, to make sense of it.” She shook her head and pulled away, but I held onto her.

“I can’t,” she said. “Never. It’d kill her.”

“Her?”

“You’ve seen how she is! She’s worse than that. She can’t—she won’t—”

“Did you ever try? Sometimes people are stronger than you think they are.”

Laura shuddered and stopped crying. “I tried,” she said in an emotionless voice.

I took a deep breath. I could finally read Laura’s paper, see through the mask of Icarus and Auden to Laura’s face and message. Laura had tried to tell me that she was in grave danger. She wrote it in code, didn’t spell it out, couldn’t use the words because, while an adolescent might be willing to complain about almost every perceived oppression, there are some secrets, some problems so central, so mixed with guilt and warped love, shame and confusion that they make one mute. But very few.

She had tried to tell me. And with all good intentions, I had backed off as neatly as her mother had. I let Mackenzie tell me my instincts were off, or exaggerated. Let him because I didn’t want to force out a truth that frightened and revolted me because it reversed the natural order. The most basic law—that adults protect their young. I behaved like all the other adults she knew. And so finally, Laura had nobody to turn to except another child, Peter, her only defender, asked to help her through the night, not as a lover, but as protector.

Parents and children aren’t equals or ready to do the same things, and Icarus shouldn’t have been pulled into his father’s fantasy which, in effect, murdered him.

A part of me cried halt, warned me I was galloping to conclusions. But what else could it be?

Her father’s fantasy! How could he do such a thing! I was nearly shaking with fury. And how could she let him touch her daughter! Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Charity. Santa Claus for God’s sake! Poor Laura, flesh and blood, bright mind and long future twisted around the pain of protracted, silent victimization. The long slow murder of her childhood.

Her parents had failed miserably to protect their only child. Both of them. For how long had she been pulled into her father’s profound sickness, and felt murdered, nightly or however often he claimed her? For how long had her mother made herself deaf and blind with the help of a bottle? I took another deep breath. Impulses came from every direction, clashing midway. I didn’t want to add more pain or put Laura in further emotional jeopardy by forcing out the truth. But if my suspicions were right, and I was sure they were, then I’d be multiplying her pain just as her mother had if I remained silent, consciously ignoring her signals. I had to say something. I had to drag it out, disinter it, because it wasn’t dead.

“It’s time to be concerned with Laura,” I said. “Nobody else. You’ve been terribly abused, and the idea that you can’t tell the people who could help you is part of the damage he did to you.”

I watched her confusion and slow comprehension. Her secret was out, exposed to light and air, without her having said it. Then her expression turned to horror. Terror. Surely there would be a thunderbolt, the apocalypse. It had been so much easier, more permissible, to confess to murdering the man than even to whisper why she had cause.

“Not one bit of it was your fault,” I said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to be afraid of now, either.”

She looked at me bleakly. It was going to take a lot more than her English teacher saying things were okay before she realized the guilt was not hers. Her father had done his twisted work well.

“And your mother knows, too. She just doesn’t know what to do about it.”

“She could have stopped him!” The words ripped out of her throat. As terrified as she’d been of exposing her secret, I was sure it was equally terrifying to let out any of her anger. “She’s my mother!” The fury drained away almost as quickly as it had come, and her head returned to its bowed, defeated position.

“He was sick, and she’s a very frightened woman.” My rational tone surprised me. Inwardly, I felt homicidal rage against the senior Clausens.

Perhaps some of the violence I felt showed, because Laura crumpled. If I hadn’t caught her, she would have fallen to the floor. As it was, I held her, again aware of how little weight she carried.

She doubled over, clutching her stomach, visibly hurting deep inside.

I held her and eased us both down onto the floor. And there we sat, crying, holding each other.

I don’t know when it was that Mackenzie, worried, sent in a policewoman to check on us. Susan Bertram, her name was, and I will honor her forever, because when I explained, as obliquely and gently as I could, what had happened, she looked as if she herself had been wounded. She sat down next to Laura on the cold tile floor and put her arm around her and made it clear that she had all the time and intention in the world to stay with her and keep her from falling.