The Ghosts of Lovely Women (5 page)

“Huh.” McCall didn’t look impressed or unimpressed. Her face was bland, but her eyes struck me as intelligent. “And when did you last see Jessica Halliday?”

“I had coffee with her one day last summer. That’s when she handed me the book. I hadn’t really thought about it since, I must confess.”

“And she hadn’t contacted you recently?”

That surprised me. “Well, she was in New York. I doubt she’d make a long distance call just to chat with an old teacher. I don’t think she’s been back since summer, but I can’t be sure. I mean, since this happened in New York…”

McCall stopped tapping her keys. “Were you under the impression that this happened in New York?”

I looked at Derek, who nodded encouragingly.

“Well… she lived there.”

“Miss Halliday had been in Chicago for the last four days. Her body was found in her car in an alley near her home.”

“Oh.” I had heard this at St. James, but I thought when they referred to “home,” they were talking about Jessica’s New York apartment.

“We’re still looking at her cell phone records,” she said, sternly, I thought. Perhaps giving me a chance to change my story?

“My students don’t call me at home, not present or former students. I don’t encourage it, and I doubt that they’d want to anyway. How uncool is that?”

I glanced at my phone. “But I haven’t checked my messages in a couple days.”

McCall saw it now: the flashing green light that I’d managed not to see while puttering around my apartment. I had forgotten to check for a day, and then I’d purposely not checked. I didn’t want to get into the reasons why with the police or Derek or anyone. That was personal.

Derek said, “I always forget to check mine, too.”

Detective McCall said, “Would you mind checking it now?”

The machine was on a table next to Derek. I said, “Just press that little black button on the left.”

He did so, and the phony-friendly computerized female voice intoned “You have… three new messages.”

I looked at my knees; it was odd to listen to messages with an audience. I wondered what potential things about me could be exposed…

“Teddy,” said my mother’s voice. “Did you watch
Masterpiece Theatre
last night? I need to know where I’ve seen that actress before, the one who played the main character. Dad thinks she was Gwyneth Paltrow, and I’ve told him she doesn’t do
Masterpiece Theatres
.”

My father’s voice in the background, disagreeing.

“Anyway, give us a call, honey. Take a break from grading papers. You never told me how that date went with the boy you met at the grocery store. Bye!”

A millisecond where we all looked at each other.

“He was forty,” I said to McCall. “Before you get the wrong idea.”

To my great surprise, she laughed. “Sounds like my mom,” she said.

Then there was the sound of a recorded message, telling me that I had seven items overdue at the Pine Grove Library.

“Unforgiveable,” said Derek.

And then, slicing the brief silence with a voice more high-pitched than I remembered, but still just as sweet: “Hi, Miss Thurber! It’s Jessica!”

“But still it was wonderful fun, sitting and working like that. It was almost like being a man!”

—Nora,
A Doll’s House
, Act I

McCall took the tape. She gave me a receipt for that, too. We had all listened to it together; it was horrifying for me to hear Jessica’s voice now — but even for McCall it must have been odd, listening to the ramblings of a young person who didn’t know she was destined for an early death.

The message had been relatively short, but quite revealing. “I’m calling because you never let me know what you thought of my website. Did you even look at it? I’m starting to think you didn’t, because if you had, you would have called me with one of your sermons, telling me to shut it down. Wouldn’t you? So go look at the website, Ms. Thurber! I want to have a good debate with you, just like we always did in class. I want to explain my own mini sexual revolution.

“Anyway, I’m in town! I’m in Chicago until Wednesday, so if you want to get together for coffee again and chat, let’s do it. It’s on me. I’m an independently wealthy young lady these days.

“Okay, well, if you get this too late and I’m already gone, think about coming to see me in New York — don’t you have spring break coming up? It would be so awesome, Ms. Thurber. I think New York would suit you just fine. New York would suit you, in DEED.”

Jessica Halliday laughed when she said that, and then she hung up the phone.

She had been teasing me at the end there. My students laughed at some of my eccentricities, one of which was a fondness for “indeed” as a transition word, a word of emphasis. Once I had suggested it would add some sophistication to their own writing, and I got a slew of essays full of sarcastic “indeeds.”

McCall respected my shock and grief. She handed me one of my own tissues, took the tape and told me that she would be in touch. She left her card, shook Derek’s hand and mine. She went to the door and opened it, and there stood a young man with a pizza box.

“Thanks again,” said McCall, and she went quietly into the hallway.

Derek moved forward, talking to the pizza guy and getting out his wallet. I stared at my answering machine, feeling a bit gutted by the adventures of the last few hours. The website, Derek, the police, the answering machine… How strange it was that one person’s death could have so much peripheral effect, even on an old teacher.

An old teacher
. I felt like one.

“Are you okay?” asked Derek.

“I don’t know. You’re a psychologist. What is this I’m feeling? Grief? Because I’m not her family or even her friend. I was her teacher. That doesn’t really make her mine in any sense, but—”

“It’s a special relationship. She showed you a side of herself that perhaps no one else ever saw. She shared the brightest of her intelligence and much, I’m guessing, of her ambition. Her parents would be envious of some of the conversations she had with you. Right?”

I nodded.

“Plus she cared enough about you to call you a year after graduation and ask you to visit her in New York. That means that you, as a teacher, made an impact. But I’m guessing that she made one, too. I’m guessing they all make an impact on you. That’s why this is your job.”

I nodded again.

“It’s hard,” Derek said, resting a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I grabbed a tissue from the box McCall had left in front of me and blew my nose. “And depressing.”

“Teddy?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s have some pizza.”

* * *

Derek managed to make me laugh while we ate. Most to his credit was the fact that it never felt like a date, or even a meal with a “new” person. Somehow sitting through a police interview together had bonded us enough that we had plenty to talk about, and our discourse was natural, as though we were used to bouncing ideas off of one another on a regular basis.

We sat digesting later on, sitting lazily on opposite ends of my couch and watching some ridiculous game show with the sound off.

“I should get going,” said Derek. P.G., who had been sleeping in the kitchen, came wandering in, as though to protest this idea.

“Let me pack you some of the extra pizza,” I said. “You ordered enough for a football team.”

“Just bring it to work tomorrow, lunch supplier. But I need to know one thing before I go.”

“Yeah?”

He tipped his head down to look at me and a little bit of his wavy hair fell over his eye. “How did things go with that boy from the grocery store?”

It was then, as he was taunting me, that I realized I liked him. I showed it in the same way I would have in the second grade: I punched him in the arm.

“In this case alone one might discover a whole new way of solving crimes.”

—Razumikhin,
Crime and Punishment
, Part 2, Chapter 4

I could never get my board quite clean. No matter how many times I dipped the sponge in the water, how many times I wrung it out, some chalk residue always remained in the sponge-mark rows. This disturbed me, since Stella Carson across the hall had a board as clean and shiny as marble, and I always wondered what defect caused mine to look so slovenly. I had heard that at some schools the janitorial staff cleaned the blackboards each night, but here at St. James our boards were our problem. I found I was not board-cleaning material.

As I struggled with the task on Tuesday morning, I got a visit from Ann Walters, our senior counselor. She stepped in with her discreet look and closed my door. I sighed, knowing that I wouldn’t like whatever was coming.

“Teddy, do you have a moment?”

“Sure,” I said, twisting water out of the sponge a final time and drying my hands on a tissue.

I sat on the edge of my desk and faced Ann, all hundred and ten pounds of her. She had gray hair and a youthful face. Something about teaching, despite its propensity to exhaust, seemed paradoxically to keep my colleagues perpetually young.

“I’d like to talk about Danny,” she said.

“Oh, no. Has he been arrested or something?”

“No. They took him in for questioning, but they had no reason to hold him. He’s told me he didn’t do it, and Teddy, I believe him. If you saw how devastated he was about losing Jessica…”

I knew Danny well; I’d taught him in two different classes. I didn’t think he’d killed Jessica, either, but what did I know? I would have bet all my money that Jessica didn’t have a pornographic website. “But if he killed her in a moment of passion…”

“He barely saw her, he told me. He feared she was going to break up with him, so to a certain extent he kept his distance, hoping she wouldn’t have an opportunity to do it.”

“But that’s also when a lot of men and boys kill. When the girls try to leave.”

“I know. I know. But I’d testify in court that I believe this boy is telling the truth.”

This impressed me. Ann didn’t tend to be dramatic. The kids trusted her, as did I.

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“He’ll be back in school today. He feels he’d like to be around his friends, but he also fears it. He fears that people will suspect him, that he’ll become a pariah. I’m asking teachers to try to keep their ears open. If you hear anyone hassling him, anyone being inappropriate—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks. This whole thing — I’m still in a bit of shock.”

“You must be reeling with this Jessica news. You worked so hard with her, helping her to get that scholarship to NYU.”

“She worked even harder. Nice kids, she and Dan both.”

“Yeah.” I wanted to ask her about the website; might Jessica have told her about it? But I didn’t feel it was my place to talk about it. I wanted Jessica’s private life kept private, even if she hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about doing so.

One of the things that the current crop of young people were going to learn, I feared, was that their constant presence on the web — in My Space and Facebook and any number of me-centered internet activities — would be something they could potentially regret. They were ever conscious of their own images: my homeroom sat around taking photos of each other during the lunch period, posing and snapping away for no particular reason, then going home to post the latest on their web pages.

What they spent less time on, much less, was their discovery of what lay beneath those faces; what sort of people they were, what they possessed in the way of spiritual fortitude. Jessica had been one of those, I thought, who was more inner-focused — who understood the value of her own mind.

In the end, though, she was just as focused on her image as were all the others. It troubled me, that idea. I wondered, suddenly, whether her website had been disabled. I glanced at the clock; there were twelve minutes until the bell rang, until students came streaming in. I couldn’t check the address on my school computer — that would be a quick way to get fired and be on the 6:00 news.

I took out my I-phone (a gift from my rich brother) and logged on to the internet. I typed in Nora’s Revenge and got a “page unavailable” message. I sighed. I was glad that no one could see it anymore, that some random person from any country of the world couldn’t stumble across Jessica’s mistake.

I noticed that I had e-mail. I did a quick scan of the Inbox: one from my sister Lucky and another from my brother Will. Another from my book club and one, as I knew, from Richard Statten. Richard was my ex-boyfriend; we hadn’t dated in two years. His e-mails and calls had ended, for good I thought, a year or so ago. But they had started again recently; it was he who I feared had left a message on my answering machine — he who I dreaded to hear from and therefore had never gotten the message from Jessica Halliday. My stomach tightened as I looked at his name. I clicked on the message, which said, “Hey, Teddy. I wonder if you could give me a call at this number? I have a quick question for you.”

This was what his e-mails had all been like at the end. Little enticements for me to get in touch. Often they were cleverly phrased, so that it seemed almost imperative that I respond. But my instinct was to respond to none of them. That would suggest a dialogue, however minimal, of which I refused to be a part. It had worked, because eventually the e-mails had stopped, although the last few said things like “I’m worried about you. I haven’t heard back to any of my e-mails and I’m wondering if you’re okay. Please just get in touch to let me know that, and I’ll leave you alone.”

It had seemed to me that there were many ways that Richard could determine that I was alive and well, one of which would be to call my school and ask if I was there. The e-mail, therefore, seemed a ruse, and I treated it as such. And nearly a year had gone by.

Now here he was, asking me to get in touch. I clicked out of his message and sighed.

My period one students were starting to file in. I wasn’t going to be left alone with my thoughts, problematic as they were, and I needed to focus on their issues now, their learning and their continued sadness. I clicked the little computer off and stowed it in my purse. Then I began to write faulty sentences on my board — sentences which targeted common errors in student usage. I wanted the seniors to practice finding the errors daily so that they would eventually feel confident editing their own writing. They had so little use for revision, for attempting perfection, that I was forced to earn my eccentric reputation by shouting things like “The possessive apostrophe is not optional! It’s not optional! No matter how many text messages you send that way, it will not be okay in a college essay!”