Photo, Snap, Shot (21 page)

I was still shaking
by the time I pulled off the access road. It seemed so weird to be here alone without Maggie. Sure, we hadn’t been close long, but I thought we were good friends.

I already missed her company. We’d talked a lot as we rode. We’d covered all that early friendship jazz like our early lives, our natal families, our hopes and dreams, and our hurts. I sniffled as I ran our conversation over and over in my mind. Was she right? I knew information that she didn’t. I knew Corey Johnson hadn’t committed suicide. But was it true? Did everyone think I was that awful? Was I really so driven that I’d hurt my own daughter? Was I that transparent? Was I more interested in chasing a married man than protecting my child?

I put all my angst into my ride.

I have a love-hate relationship with bike riding alone. I mean, I love being alone with my bike rimming the edge of the fields. Watching red-wing blackbirds light on the fences, hearing the brittle click that passes for a birdsong with cardinals, and having quiet time with open spaces suits me fine—which is one reason I don’t mind driving out here rather than riding closer to my home. As the spokes turn, there’s a meditative feeling to biking. The motion is rhythmic, and your breathing falls in line. The sights, the sounds, the feel all work in harmony and produce a soothing experience.

But when you are alone, perched on the top of a slender, thin set of metal tubes, you would be a fool not to feel vulnerable. A blown tire could send you flying. A crevice in the pavement could lock up your wheels and throw you to the ground. A rock, hit the wrong way by a one-inch-wide tire, could send you sprawling. Being alone meant accepting responsibility for a more dangerous ride, but it also meant freedom from having to communicate with another human being.

This afternoon, especially, I welcomed the quiet because I wanted to think.

I adjusted my helmet, pulled on my gloves, and climbed on my Trek. After the initial pedal stroke provided me with momentum, I settled into a cadence. The shoulder of the access road was uneven enough to demand a modicum of concentration. I picked up speed. My bike was a wedge, creating a slipstream, slicing the air around me in half. One of the joys of biking as a form of exercise is that you create your own breeze, your own cooling system. Feeling surer with each stroke, I picked up my pace, and my mind moved into another zone.

I built a partition and put Maggie and her accusations behind it.

I thought about Dodie. She’d been a lifesaver after George died. She taught me so much. She’d given me my self-esteem by offering me the job at Time in a Bottle. I would do anything I could to help her and Horace. But what? I didn’t want to be intrusive. I picked up my pace. I’d have to wait and see. Surely he’d tell me and Bama what we could do. He’d have to. How else could we run the store?

I took those worries and packaged them up in a box marked, “Get well soon.”

I navigated the turn at the end of the access road and doubled back. I thought about the week ahead. The Gilchrists were planning Sissy’s funeral, but when would Corey’s body be released? I’d have to attend his services. Ella. Poor, poor Ella. The image of her in a militant stance floated to the surface of my consciousness. What would it have been like to be both Old St. Louis and a civil rights protester? How would her peers have responded? Did her actions cause the rift between her and Mahreeya? Or was their tension a throwback to when Mahreeya was the proverbial ugly duckling and Ella a swan?

Even though the world had come to agree with Ella in the decades that followed her protest, it would be a mistake to overlook the impact of her gesture. Here was the daughter of an outstanding businessman with a membership in a secret organization originally intended—if you were to believe one historian—to keep minorities in their place, and she’d been shouting activist slogans in a state that still harbored a deep-seated ambivalence about issues of race.

What would she say when she heard Corey had been murdered? That her suspicions had been confirmed? That her son had been targeted and killed and for what? For loving a white woman? To cover up a murder? Because of what he knew?

What we needed was a motive for Sissy’s murder, a motive that made sense in view of the murder’s timing. That would help us figure out why Corey had been shot. The method of the violence, grabbing the nearest object to hand, a brick from the nearby construction site, suggested the murder was not premeditated. A lot of people had reason to want Sissy dead. But Sissy had changed. And she’d changed for the better. So why kill her now? After she’d turned in her resignation? What irritant became intolerable? And why now? Our only hope seemed to be to keep turning over rocks, so to speak, to continue talking to anyone and everyone, while eliminating possible suspects. Given time, surely the police would discern a clue within the detritus of Sissy’s final days.

After eight miles, I stopped for a drink from my water bottle. I downed most of the contents and readied myself for another eight miles. I clicked my right bike shoe into the same side pedal while holding the brake lever firmly so I didn’t roll.

I rose to my seat with the downstroke and felt along the left pedal with the ball of my left foot until I could click and lock in my shoe. The noise from Highway 40 started to fade. The gap between one flotilla of cars and the next left room for the calls and cries of one redwing blackbird to another. The blue bachelor buttons along the access road waved as I went by. A curious rabbit observed me from behind a fencepost and thought how clumsy I was. My computer said thirteen mph, but I knew that once I warmed up, I’d be hovering around fifteen mph. My goal was to work up to sixteen mph, but with my chronic asthma and my erratic biking schedule, I wasn’t making much progress.

I thought back to the list of suspects. Initially Sissy’s behavior moved Connie McMahan to want to strangle her husband. But Connie was among the first to know Sissy was leaving the school. So the timing of the attack didn’t make sense.

Who else might have come unhinged by Sissy’s flirtations? Someone with less self-control than Connie? I’d fallen into the habit of calling the murderer “he” when I talked with Detweiler, but I knew better than to limit our search. Was another mother behind the brick that smashed Sissy’s head?

Another woman who didn’t like Sissy’s flirtatious ways? Another mom whose son was heeding the siren call of the CALA temptress? Another wife whose husband had been involved with Sissy?

A woman like my confidential scrapbook client?

Maggie suggested the murderer was someone sick of Sissy’s interference in her child’s education. A woman whose child had been belittled by Sissy? A parent who felt Sissy jeopardized his child’s academic career? I thought of all those bumper stickers that proudly proclaimed, “My child is an honor student.” Parents who sent their kids to CALA were overachievers who expected a lot from the school and from their offspring. On one hand it seemed a pretty weak motive … and yet there was that case in Texas where a mom plotted to kill her daughter’s competitor on the cheerleading squad. And what about that dad who killed his son’s soccer coach? Or was it hockey? It wouldn’t be prudent to discount Sissy’s classroom antics too readily.

And what if Sissy really had seduced students? How would a parent respond? How would I respond? I wasn’t rational when it came to my daughter. Would a mother kill a teacher who trifled with her son? Considering the double standard in sentences for female and male pedophiles, this could go either way. The movie
Summer of ’42
portrayed sex between a boy and an older woman as romantic. Now that I was the mother of a preteen, I’d call it creepy. Ugh.

What about Sissy’s ex-husband? Could he have hired a killer? Or slipped in and done the deed himself? He knew the layout of the school. Did Sissy have life insurance? Did the school offer employees a policy? Did the Gilchrists have money problems? They wouldn’t be the first family in Ladue who were living over their heads.

Or maybe Sissy decided to tattle on her abuser. The statute of limitations might have run out, but she could still point fingers, name names, and make the man pay—at least with his reputation.

All these thoughts were chasing each other round and round in my brain. My concentration was so intense, that I was on the last leg of my second lap before I realized it. Ahead was the overpass, Boone’s Crossing, named in honor of Daniel’s homestead down the road a piece in Defiance, Missouri.

A slight sheen had sprung up on my forehead, and it felt darn good. I pulled up on my pedals, enjoying the power in my hamstrings and buttocks. The intersection linking access roads north and south of 40 was clear. My cadence slowed as I worked my way up the slight incline. I heard a car approaching from a distance, but I made clear my intended direction, heading straight down the road, by staying to the right-hand side, away from the turn lane.

The car engine grew louder. Dipping my left shoulder, I turned my head. The passenger door was immediately to my left. The car accelerated and—to my shock—the side mirror nearly brushed my shoulder. I edged my bike as far right as possible. I gripped the handles hard, straining to keep myself balanced as I bumped along the uneven surface. I hit a tiny rock, adjusted for the response of my tires, and managed to stay upright.

All this happened in seconds, but the natural time-space relationship had changed. Everything was now going slo-mo. I held my breath. Any minute now, the car would pull past me.

But it didn’t.

Instead, the mirror nudged my shoulder again. Then it withdrew. The car sped up. Testing me. Testing its options. Testing how to do me in.

I breathed again. I swallowed and tried to control my shaking. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw the car pull ahead. I was even with the back bumper. I squeezed my brakes, slowly, evenly so the bike wouldn’t throw me. There was no room on my right. No place for me to put down a foot to steady myself. The drop-off was steep. Cars whizzed by below. I concentrated on my balance. I stared down at the shoulder, trying to anticipate rocks and debris that might knock me off the bike.

I can do this, I told myself. I know I can.

Then, the car started to make a right turn into my path.

All I could see was car—black shiny metal—and I was headed straight for it.

I couldn’t stop. I squeezed the brakes as hard as I could. The bike tires seized but I kept moving. Gravel acted like ball bearings, rolling under me, pushing me forward. The car panel filled my vision. Closer, closer. I kept moving, propelled straight into the black side panel. My back tire skidded on the gravel. I couldn’t stop. I had one option.

I could make my own turn. I could tumble down the hill. I might be able to stop my descent. But right now, I couldn’t stop my path toward the car. I was skidding without control, like a skater on ice. Beneath me my wheels locked up. I couldn’t get traction. A sharp right would send me parallel instead of slamming into the car.

This was really bad. Really, really bad.

Maybe I picked the wrong hobby. Maybe I should have taken up spinning, where you ride a stationary bike inside.

If I didn’t turn, if I couldn’t stop my slide, there was the very real possibility I would wind up under the tires.

I jerked the handlebars as hard as I could. My back tire started sliding, sliding away from me.

I muscled the bike.
I gave it all I had. I wrenched it. I yanked it. I careened into a right turn just as the car zoomed past me. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

I was totally off balance. My back wheel left the pavement. It came back down. It bumped hard, rattling my teeth. I saw sky. I saw grass. I saw the black car. I saw the road.

I pitched sharply forward. The power of my turn sent me careening down the hill. My clip-on cycling shoes held me onto the bike. I bounced over the drainage ditch and continued down the landscaped verge of the overpass. At the foot of my grassy knoll was Highway 40. And on Highway 40 there were cars. Cars and trucks.

I struggled to stay upright. I held on to the bike with all my might, but I had to stop. I couldn’t keep going downhill. If I rolled onto the highway … if I rolled into the oncoming cars … they were going 70 mph in a 60 zone. Everyone did. But not everyone was on a stupid bicycle. They were safe and snug.

I flew through the air. My feet were clipped on. The bike and I were one, but the bike was moving without my permission.

I had to stop myself. I had to end the downhill tumble. And I had to do it fast.

The roar of cars deafened me. The smell of exhaust clenched my throat. The slap of tires chilled me. I shifted all my weight to the left. I threw my head there first, hoping my shoulders would follow. I watched the sky, the overpass, the tops of trees, the grass go by.

I crashed into the ground. My hands still locked onto the Trek. Instinct kept me holding on. I tasted blood in my mouth. I was on my side, sliding, sliding down the embankment. My forearms burned, my legs burned, as flesh was ground away. I kept clutching my bike, now bumping along on my side, headed for the traffic.

I thought of Anya and Gracie.

Of Mert’s warning. Of Connie’s threat. Of Maggie’s anger.

And Detweiler’s eyes.

I thought about Sheila.

She’d want to know if I was wearing clean underwear.

Mert would stand over my coffin and yell, “I told you to be more careful!”

Then I got lucky.

I banged right into one of the maple saplings planted by the City of Chesterfield. My feet tangled between bike frame and tree trunk. My arm and leg were on fire. Blood gushed into my mouth. My elbow dug into a hollow in the ground. But I quit my downward slide.

I rested there on my side.

I was alive. Alive!