The Snow Garden (37 page)

     “You know,” Mitchell said, breaking the silence, “last time I checked, it was flying west that was getting you down.”

     Kathryn shrugged. “It was a good trip. I needed to see my parents.” 

     “That act’s not going to win you an Oscar.”

     Kathryn laughed and squinted at him, trying to ascertain if his persistent interest was for real. “It’s nothing. I just. . . Randall and I had a fight before I left.”

     “What about?” Mitchell asked, his words short, sounding put off by the mention of Randall’s name.

     Kathryn clenched. Was it right, this urge to protect Randall, to keep a secret he had devoted so much time, energy, and deception to keeping from her?

     “Randall’s sleeping with one of his professors.”

     
“I see.”

     “I mean, I didn’t think anyone actually
did
that. I thought it was just a bad joke, you know? Like, screw your professor to get an A.” She puffed at the cigarette. Up ahead, police lights marked the scene of the accident holding up traffic. The cars surrounding them began inching forward, and soon Mitchell was able to put his foot on the gas once again.

     “Actually,” Mitchell said, sounding as if he had needed the last minutes to formulate an appropriate response, “I think there are a lot more professor-student relationships out there than anyone would like to admit.” He seemed put off by this fact and stared darkly ahead. “I take it you didn’t know.”

     “No. I didn’t.”

     “That’s unfortunate. I hope you’re the only one who does know. Otherwise this professor is in some serious danger.”

     “I don’t know anything about this guy. I mean, I don’t even know if Randall’s in love with ...”

     A knot tightened in her stomach. Dr. Eberman. The professor Mitchell worked under, for the love of God. She turned her face to the window. The Tercel was gathering speed and the wind through the cracked window threatened to tear the tip from the Camel. She brought the cigarette to her mouth and took a long drag that burned. 

     “I doubt it’s about love.”

     “Mitchell. I really shouldn’t...”

     “The only reason I asked is because .. . Well, let me put it this way. Newly uprooted freshman arrives at school, away from home for the first time. Freedom to spare, but without the experience or, forgive me, maturity to figure out just what to do with it. It’s logical that he seeks out some sort of faux authority figure. An authority figure he can control.” 

     “Control?” she asked, intrigued but skeptical.

     “With sex,” Mitchell answered.

     “Keep going.”

     “I’m of the belief that these professor-student relationships are more about an exchange of power than they are about.. . love.” He, said the last word with evident disdain. “My working theory would be that Randall receives a kind of authority and direction from this professor. But it’s on his terms. He can withdraw when he’d like to. Withhold sex if the professor gets too parental.” '

     “What does the professor get?” she asked.

     “A sexual partner he too can manipulate, until he decides to dispose of him in the name of decency.”

     Kathryn couldn’t help a pained grunt. Thinking of Randall as a liar was a lot easier than viewing him as an easy mark for heartbreak. 

     “This doesn’t bore you?” she asked.

     “What do you mean?”

     “I don’t know, I just feel like I keep dumping this shit on you every time we see each other. The petty intrigue of my little dorm unit.” “Well, yes. But it’s your shit, Kathryn.”

     She had to laugh.

     “I’m certainly not surprised,” Mitchell went on. “I’ve taught freshmen in discussion sections for almost a good two years now. I happen to know they’re the most self-analytical creatures on the planet.

     They’re on their own for the first time, so suddenly they’re examining every minor decision they make as if each one was an embodiment of their true identity. And half the energy they should devote to feeding their minds they spend trying to create some sort of aura of identity out of their own verbiage.”

     “I’m praying you’re not talking about me right now.”

     “Oh, no. Your powers of analysis seem to have been devoted entirely to someone else.”

     It bit hard and sank deep, but Mitchell had no way of knowing that—until he saw her glowering at the harsh light of the highway ahead. “Which might not have been such a bad thing. If Randall hadn’t lied to you.”

     Kathryn kept silent until Mitchell hooked onto an off ramp she didn’t recognize.

     “Where are we going?”

     “My place. Is that all right?”

     Realizing he had never once mentioned where he lived, she was surprised. And excited. “Absolutely,” she answered as calmly as possible.

Bayfront Storage had no sign. Behind a chain-link fence topped with battered coils of razor wire, two banks of single-story, garage-size lockers were laid out in an L shape. The neighborhood was mostly abandoned warehouses, their cargo doors left open or splintered, offering unwanted glimpses of shadowy possibilities inside.

     With one hand on the steering wheel, Tim reached over and popped the glove compartment and dug inside, feeling for something Randall couldn’t see. “What are you doing?”

     “Checking something.”

     “Oh, for the love of God, Tim!”

     “For your information”—Tim found some identifiable part of the gun Randall guessed he was looking for, withdrew his hand, and snapped the glove compartment shut—“once you leave the safety of our little hill behind, Atherton happens to be one of the most crime-ridden cities north of New York. Besides, it’s only a .25 caliber semi. My mom used to keep it in her purse, till she did some research on my new place of residence.”

     The place was devoid of all life, like the neighborhood. “I thought they’d at least have a dog.”

     “Sixty bucks a month doesn’t get you top-notch security.”

     “Pull up a little bit,” Randall said.

     “What do you mean he
attacked
you?”

     “I mean, he threw me up against a wall and called me a whore. For the tenth time. Can you pull up, please?”

     Tim shook his head and complied. They sat on a steel-girder bridge that crossed over a drainage canal. The canal’s sloping concrete walls funneled ice-strewn debris toward the bay, several blocks to their left. Evenly surfaced maintenance walkways had been set in the walls in a steplike formation. The highest walkway was a five-foot drop from the bridge’s rail.

     Randall tapped the window. “See? The fence ends.”

     Tim bent forward over the armrest. The chain-link fence stopped perpendicular to a concrete wall that matched the fence in height, but, blessedly, was free of the razor wire. The wall ran twenty feet down the top of the canal. On the other side sat one bank of lockers. “Back up a little bit.”

     Tim let out an annoyed snort, but complied. “So, you didn’t get a chance to look for the key?”

     “No,” Randall answered, eyes out the window.

     “So what? He just flipped out?”

     “He was drunk.” Randall almost sighed when the lockers came into view again; the two banks didn't meet. “How high do you think that back wall is?”

     “High.”

     Randall turned. “For two people?”

     Tim grimaced as if in the throes of a migraine headache. “Come on, Randall!”

     “Look, if we can get over the back wall and into that alley, we can just walk out into the middle of the parking lot. We’ll be right in front of her locker.”

     “And then what?”

     Randall examined the lockers nearest to the fence. Padlocks dangled from their garage style doors. “It would be basically breaking and entering if we had the key or not, Tim. No one was going to give us permission” he said. Tim slumped against the driver’s seat. “Tim,” Randall said more carefully. “Look around. A woman coming down here by herself. This was a secret.”

     “One last time,” Tim insisted. “What the hell did Eric do to you?” 

     “I showed up. He was drunk ...” Randall stopped. How could he have forgotten? Eric’s violent outburst had almost blotted out the memory, that was why. “He emptied out the goddamn liquor cabinet.” 

     “You’re just remembering this now?” Tim asked, urgently.

     “Shit,” Randall whispered.

     “He knows you have the bottle, Randall. That’s why he flipped out!” 

     “Maybe not. He was pissed because Kathryn knows.”

     “Kathryn. Murder weapon.” Tim lifted his hands as if they were scales, and then dropped his right one hard. “You decide!”

     Tim drove with the speed and quick thinking of a white boy trying to get out of the ghetto, and soon they were speeding through desolate downtown. “If he gets his leave of absence, when does it start?” he asked.

     “End of the semester.”

     “That’s barely four weeks from now.”

     “Not much time.”

     Tim didn’t interrupt with a shrill plea for Randall to run to the authorities, and Randall was relieved. The reporter could finally see his big story taking shape. “I’m about to tell you something I probably shouldn’t,” Tim said.

     “Why’s that?”

     “Because it violates a little pact I made with myself. You remember, the one about not getting involved in this just so you could sleep better?” Tim glanced at him sourly. “I talked to Richard.” 

     “Goddammit, Tim!”

     Tim held up one palm to quiet him. “I didn’t tell him squat. And he didn’t think it was unusual, considering we talked so much about Eberman when the accident happened. So chill and let me finish.” Randall sat back, still steamed, still scared. “Do you remember what time you got to Eric’s house that night?”

     Randall thought for a second. “It had to be after eight, ’cause I called around seven thirty and Eric thought Lisa was already on her way to Paula’s.”

     “She was,” Tim answered. “Richard told me the 911 call reporting the accident was placed at seven thirty.”

     Something inside of Randall leaped, and he twisted against his seat belt. “You didn’t know this before?" Randall almost shouted.

     “I didn’t ask before. And look, it doesn’t mean Lisa didn’t know about the two of you. The only reason I even bothered to check is because
Eric
has to know what time that call was placed. So he probably knows there’s no possible way she was driving like a madwoman because she had just seen the two of you in bed together. But that’s still what he wanted you to think.”

     Randall felt a surge of satisfaction. He spotted the bridge up ahead and expected Tim to make a left turn. “It’s good to know you’re still on my side,” he said quietly. Any distance —of time or otherwise — between him and Lisa’s death was a small relief. But that left the matter of her note. What did she know, and what did she see?

     As the Jeep moved across the bridge, both of them noted wordlessly that it had been repaired, the barricade removed, the newly placed metal a polished blemish against the length of weathered rail.

     Randall stepped out of Tim’s Jeep amid returning students lugging their suitcases up the front walk of Stockton. He fell into step with them, then heard Tim call out to him, “Kathryn!”

     Confused, Randall pivoted around to see that Tim had lowered the window.

     “How did she find out?” Tim asked.

     Randall searched for the best response as he approached the Jeep. When he saw Tim’s arched eyebrows, he realized he was prepared for Randall to duck the question. So Randall answered as close to the truth as he could. “A little bird told her. But he’s flown the coop.” 

     “Anyone I know?”

     “He barely knew anyone,” Randall said, and walked away before Tim could ask him to elaborate.

ICE-LACED HEDGES CONCEALED THE FIRST-FLOOR WINDOWS OF THE
brownstone. Mitchell held open the front gate and Kathryn passed through it, up the front walk through a generous front yard that had garden potential but was mostly snow-smothered grass and bushes. Two-thirty-one Slope Street sat behind a stone fence topped with cast-iron spikes. The shutters were drawn over all four windows in the house’s stark brick facade.    '

     For some reason, Kathryn had assumed Mitchell lived in one of the nicer row houses just east of campus, not far from his mentor, Dr. Eberman. She’d been surprised when he made a right several blocks short of the hill’s crown, taking them into an Unfamiliar neighborhood of low-end apartment complexes descending the hill’s eastern slope. Compared to its neighbors, the brownstone seemed downright stately, a holdover from the neighborhood’s better days.

     “You live here?” she asked. Mitchell nodded, tugging his keys from his pocket as he moved past her.

     He threw open the front door. She took a few hesitant steps into the darkened foyer. Mitchell flicked the switch and light from a brass chandelier fell on walls painted so white she almost squinted. She followed as Mitchell ducked into the living room. Another chandelier came on and she gasped.

     Mitchell turned to see her reaction.

     Kathryn held up both hands as if to shield her eyes.

     “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Mitchell informed her proudly.

     It took up the entire living-room wall, in vivid color and dizzying detail. She had glimpsed the painting before, but enlarged onto an entire wall its effect was overwhelming. The naked figures cavorting in a surreal garden of science-fiction-like fountains and gently rolling hills looked like pure anarchy. The scene showed pleasure taken to its most ghastly extreme. From where she stood in the doorway, the clusters of naked figures looked like swarming insects. The living room itself seemed designed not to distract from the reproduction. A faded Oriental rug covered the hardwood floor. The sofa and chairs were a muted beige. The other white walls suddenly made more sense; she guessed each one was a potential canvas.

     As she approached the wall, she almost walked into the glass-topped coffee table; only its slight metal frame made it visible.