The Twisted Thread (2 page)

Claire had been a prefect, and as such had scored herself a large single with an attached bathroom. Sally was lunging toward Claire's room, but two uniformed officers pinned her firmly by the arms. “Slow down, sweetheart,” said the older one. “Take it easy,” said the other as Sally collapsed in the hallway. The cops were used to Armitage students. These men, large, local, unimpressed with privilege, knew exactly how to handle kids like Sally Jansen, and they frequently did when the more hapless were caught smoking pot in the graveyard or trying to buy liquor in Greenville's package stores.

Madeline panted up the last stairs and went toward the trembling girl. As she did, she couldn't help but glance inside the room, known in the dorm as Claire's Lair. Drawers were open, and expensive clothes were flung everywhere on the dhurrie rugs that she'd used to mask the tile. Her desk was piled with books and binders. A bulletin board was covered with snapshots and Post-its and her acceptance letter from Yale. Madeline could see the school's name from where she stood.

The room of a spoiled girl. A girl who had openly considered herself superior to others and been admired by her peers for her beauty and confidence. A girl whose social connections intimidated most teachers and made stark the gap between the origins of the students and the adults meant to guide them. But none of that had protected her from dying. All of a sudden, Madeline spied Claire, her almost naked body not even six feet away, sprawled on the floor near the desk chair. She was on her back, head tilted to the side. No wound or mark was visible from here; she looked almost as if she were sleeping, but there was no mistaking the absolute lack of life in the angle at which her neck was bent and in the pallor of her skin. The policemen moved protectively in front of the door but hadn't closed it yet, unwilling apparently to alter the scene before photographers arrived. Everything had to be frozen as it had been found. Even Madeline knew that. Still, the cops' wide legs couldn't block her view entirely.

Holding Sally to her chest, trying to still the girl, she couldn't help but stare. It struck her how little she had been around the dead. Americans kept death at arm's length, as if it were a country they would never visit. Yet even in places where mortality was less crudely separated from life, people would be stunned at the extinction of the young and lovely. No one could make Claire Harkness on the floor, her skin the color of a candle, turn into something normal. Sally kept sobbing, Madeline kept holding her. And then she realized something else that was not normal about Claire. It was her breasts. They were full, and rigid with veins, their tips wide, rosy caps. Something about them made her think of Kate. Her sister had been complaining about her newly huge nipples and had to be reassured by several doctors that they would eventually revert to small, delicate pinkness. She had nursed because it was what was best for Tadeo, she said, but after six months, that was it. She needed her body back. At the tip of each of Claire's breasts was a grayish pearl of what could only be milk. One of the officers had had enough of Sally, the crying, and Madeline's sweaty presence and was trying with gentle insistence to get them going. “Miss, take the young lady downstairs now, please,” he said.

But Madeline, arms still wrapped around Sally, was rooted to the floor. “No, no, that's not possible. Sally, did Claire just have a baby?” Madeline said sharply, still holding the girl, but lifting her chin so she could stare into the narrow face. “Where's the baby?” Madeline found that she was almost shaking Sally's bony shoulders. Abruptly, a number of details came into focus: Claire's refusal to participate in sports this spring, her low grades, her sickly color the last week, the eerie buzz that had run through the dorm this weekend that Madeline had thought was only end-of-the-year jitters. A baby. And none of the community's adults had even known she was pregnant. Or had they? Madeline's stomach felt as if a stone had landed in it. A girl she'd supervised and taught, and she hadn't noticed. How could she have missed something so obvious? How could she have been so stupid?

Sally, a damp weight, said brokenly, “Miss Christopher, she wouldn't let us tell anyone. She wanted to keep it a secret. She made us promise.”

“Sally,” Madeline said, more steel in her voice than she'd known she possessed, “I'm going to ask you again. Where is the baby?”

Sally shook her head and could not speak. “I don't know,” she finally whispered. “He's gone. When I found her this morning, we looked everywhere, but he's gone. Someone took all his blankets and the diapers. Someone took him. I just can't believe he's gone.” She burst into ragged tears again and threw herself on Madeline.

The officers' watchfulness had thickened. The taller murmured into his radio. Almost instantly, Madeline heard the scrape of men's shoes on the stairs. She held Sally close. She wanted to offer some reassurance, to blot away the girl's grief. She understood now why Sally had shouted on the steps and why the girls had seemed not just saddened but so scared. She started to ease Sally to her feet, but Madeline's mind was charging forward. Claire might have given birth in that room. Where was her child? Sally kept sobbing. Police in uniforms, in suits came swarming up the stairs. One was ordered to take Madeline and Sally downstairs, now, and as he leaned in to help them, Madeline saw that his face was almost as young as those of her students. Sally tottered back to the first floor, and Madeline followed, her hand on the girl's shoulder. As they moved, light poured in through the high windows and dazzled the gold braid on the officer's cap. Above them, radios crackled, cell phones shrilled, men barked into them, voices taut.

The sun spread in hot bands through the stairwell, illuminating long threads of dust floating through the air. It was going to be a beautiful day, green, warm, rich with spring's fullness. With a suddenness that made Sally, the silent officer, and Madeline all jump, the chapel bells began to peal.

CHAPTER 2

F
red Naylor was sitting next to Alice Grassley and doctoring his dining hall coffee with a carefully engineered combination of cream and raw sugar. A miniature success with which to start the morning. It was just 6:45, and peace reigned in the elegantly proportioned room. He hadn't realized how much he savored the ritual until Rob Barlow, the dean of students, strode in, saw them both, and came over to shatter the day. Rob planted his hands on their table and said, with a rough attempt at lowered volume, “Tragic news. Claire Harkness is dead. We're meeting at seven fifteen in the Study.”

Fred and Alice happened to eat breakfast at the same early hour, and they'd developed a habit of sitting next to each other and trading sections of the newspaper. It was a friendship of sorts, an unexpected one. Alice was at least sixty, bony, exacting, the keeper of minutes at faculty meetings, and best known for the ruthless speed with which she graded calculus exams. Fred was twenty-nine, the painting teacher and boys' soccer coach, and had cultivated a professionally relaxed attitude about almost everything. Nonetheless, he and Alice had grown used to talking companionably together each morning in the hushed, almost empty dining hall, sports pages spread over the narrow table. They were both citizens of what was now called Red Sox Nation, but Alice didn't like that name. “Die-hard fan will do nicely,” she said. When Rob approached them, they were about to tuck into a discussion of last night's loss to Baltimore, a five-run lead blown in the ninth inning, a kind of mishap specific to the Sox. But Rob's news destroyed everything. Fred dropped the packet of sugar. Alice's tea spilled an amber river through her eggs. “Do the students know?” she asked Rob. Her face was as pale as the chalk she still insisted on using. Everyone else had long ago switched to whiteboards.

“A few,” said Rob. “The ones in the dorm, mostly. Sarah's meeting with them now.” Sarah Talmadge was the assistant head: professional, crisp, smart. Exactly the right person to calm a dorm full of panic-stricken girls. Rob was a former history teacher and had a bristling head of brown hair and a square set of shoulders he'd used to great effect as a hockey player and coach. A good person to convey bad news to adults, because he'd be brisk about it, but the wrong choice for kids. Porter McLellan, once again, had made the right decision. Rob stalked off to alert the next faculty member he'd been slated to tell. No doubt he was working from a carefully denoted list about who was contacting whom. Porter was remarkably thorough. It was 6:50. Fred and Alice had a few minutes to gather themselves before they had to leave.

He glanced at the group of Korean kids sitting in the corner where they chatted every morning. Breakfast was an optional meal at Armitage, and only the most dedicated of students got up this early. Jung Lee, a handsome senior, was laughing loudly at something Maya Kim had said. They had no idea about Claire, and Fred wasn't going to tell them. He was desolate at the thought that he would never feel the same about these mornings in Alice's tactful, pleasant company reliving the dramas of their baseball team as these serious children ate pancakes.

Alice was wiping her forehead with a napkin. “Thirty-six years,” she said, staring out the bay window through which they could see a broad green bank leading down to the Bluestone River. This Saturday, Armitage was supposed to host a rowing regatta that Fred knew would now be canceled.

“Thirty-six,” Alice said again. “I've been here thirty-six years, and in that time only three other students have died. Alex Schwartz, in a car accident. Louisa Harper, of leukemia. One other, in a climbing accident. Kids just don't die here. But this is different. I know this is different, Fred.”

Later, Fred would not quite remember how he and Alice made it to the meeting, but he did know that he offered her his arm and was surprised to realize she needed his support. Alice was wrong. Another Armitage boy had died here, but it was before her tenure and almost everyone had forgotten about him.

They took their seats in the Study, a mock Gothic, wood-paneled room off the main hall of Nicholson House, where the deans and Porter hatched administrative strategies on the first floor. The language lab lurked moldily in the basement, and the college counselors had spread themselves out for their embattled work across the second. The Study featured stained-glass panels of Pre-Raphaelite maidens and vaguely Arthurian knights posed among lilies. In the moony glow of these long-haired figures, almost seventy faculty members gathered each week to discuss everything from the curriculum to parents' weekend, benefits packages to student morale. At a regular meeting, a buzz of chipper, sociable talk hummed through the room. This morning, however, teachers folded themselves into their usual seats and refused to meet one another's eyes. It was so hushed Fred could hear a twittering flock of birds in the lilac bush that grew beyond the window.

Then Madeline Christopher rushed in. Fred raised his hand and waved her over. Her disheveled, dark brown hair distinguished her from many of the other teachers and most of the students. One of the first things Madeline had said to him, rather crossly, was “Blondes. Working here's like being trapped in some preppy, unfishy version of Iceland.” What had made Fred laugh was that she'd blushed unevenly and gulped “Sorry!” the moment she looked up at him and remembered his own tousled golden curls.

Just yesterday, she was making fun of Mindy Allison and the staggering, Scandinavian braid that swung down her back, calling Mindy and her kids the Happy Elves. Even the baby seemed fantastically cheerful, she complained. Madeline, a grunter in the morning, unfunctional without infusions of caffeine, was going out of her way not to run into them until she'd swilled down at least four cups of the weak dining hall brew. If she could stop grousing about the toothy smiles and the privilege, however, she'd be great at Armitage. He thought she was making a mistake going to Boston. Backtracking, he'd told her, straight to college. “But at least I won't have curfew,” she'd answered. Plainspoken and bright, Madeline loved her subject, pushed the students hard, and found they liked what she had to say. She'd done well this year. An intern in Spanish was downed by chronic fatigue in the middle of the first semester, and the other two, in physics and math, were shaky and worn and palpably ready to sprint off campus as soon as possible. But Madeline, against expectation, mostly her own, had thrived. “Jesus,” she said under her breath to Fred as she flopped into her chair. “This is the worst. The dorm is freaking out.”

Madeline was young enough to swear a lot when she shouldn't and use phrases like
freaking out
unironically. She was wearing baggy gym shorts and a T-shirt advertising Heinz ketchup. Her cheeks were densely pink, and a not unpleasant smell of sweat rose from her. “Oh, sorry, Fred, I'm disgusting,” she said, noticing that he was looking at her. “I went for a run, and there wasn't time to change. Fred, it's Claire Harkness. She's dead,” she whispered.

A vision of Claire flared in his mind, and he snapped it shut as fast as he could. He didn't want to think about it. Claire had been beautiful, even in a sea of beautiful girls. Friends from graduate school had visited campus a few times, but they stared at the students in a way that made him uncomfortable. One had even asked how he kept it together around all those gorgeous teenagers. He shrugged the question off. You just did, he thought privately. That was your job. You did not give in to temptation. You had your own life, your own relationships. They were just kids, and the lines were firm.

He heard Rob Barlow's words echo through his head again, followed by Madeline's. Claire was dead. He had taught her a few semesters ago and been impressed with her painting and articulate critiques of other students' efforts. Yet there'd been an essential ice to the girl, something calculated in the amount of energy she'd given to her own art and that of others. The students, however, had admired her work extravagantly, praise she had seemed to accept as her due. Girls like Claire were exactly what people meant when they claimed that Armitage was nothing but a den for the upper class, a lair for the perpetuation of entitlement. Claire dead seemed almost impossible to imagine. She had apparently relished the exercise of her particular power.

As faculty continued to gather, Fred noticed as he always did that the air smelled of stale coffee, apples, and newspaper ink. He remembered something Madeline had said early in the year.
The New York Times
and
The Boston Globe
were delivered daily to this room so teachers could have a snack, and a cup of joe, and catch up on world events in their free periods, an act that she considered a kind of insane optimism. She had read about two headlines all year, she confessed, and Fred had told her that it wasn't that people didn't have time to read as much as the fact that the action that swirled through Armitage started to seem like the only thing that was real. Today, those worlds would intersect. The media would be all over this. Margaret Oliver, the communications director, was pecking at her BlackBerry in a corner, while Stuart Murray, the head of what was now known as the advancement office, muttered fiercely to her. He was the money guy, the one who raised Armitage's millions, vulgar, loud, and none of it mattered because he was the one who brought the gifts and buildings rolling in. Fred wondered how long it would take him to spin or mute the death of a kid from a big donor family.

Porter came into the room then and strode to the dais, where he always stood. It often took a few moments for everyone to stop chatting and turn their attention to the head. But today, their focus was instant, tightened with worry and fear. Porter looked ghastly, Fred thought, even if his voice was mellifluous as usual as he thanked them for arriving so quickly. Not everyone was here, he continued, since they had to make sure that at least one adult was present at every dormitory. Fred noticed the absence of some key people: a dean or two; the head of history; Nina Garcia-Jones; Susie Allen, the athletic director. “I have tried to alert as many of you as possible, but if you haven't heard, I have the worst possible news. Claire Harkness died sometime early this morning.” He was right. In twenty-five minutes, on a campus of hundreds of acres, well before the start of the school day, the word had spread with astonishing speed. Fred, a student here before returning to teach after graduate school, had often noted you could leave your dorm with a cold and five minutes later the whole school heard you had pneumonia. Information not only traveled with terrific swiftness, it swelled and grew more dire with its movement. But there was no way to make this more awful. No one reacted as Porter spoke. Even if Rob hadn't reached them, they had indeed heard. They bent their heads and stared more fixedly at the floor.

Then he said, “A student found her at approximately six thirty. But there is more to tell you.” He paused. Fred snapped his head up; maybe it could get worse. “Apparently,” Porter went on, “Claire had just,” and here his voice did falter, “given birth. To a son, we think. But this child has not been found.” This announcement stunned them all, Fred saw, although a glance told him that Madeline had already known. She was looking hard at her fingers, which she had knotted into a ball. Chairs creaked, people caught their breaths. Someone stifled a shout.

Porter lifted his hands. “I know this couldn't be more horrifying. We have lost a student. There may have been crimes committed. Armitage will become the scene of an investigation that could take weeks to resolve. The police and the press are already involved.” If anyone knew anything about Claire or the baby that they thought would be of use, they were to come to him immediately so they could go together to the police. For the moment, classes and all sports competitions were suspended, as were seated meal and chapel. Probably the prom would be canceled, as well as other year-end festivities. They might have to modify graduation and reunion as well. They would know soon and keep the faculty informed. Teachers should expect, too, that parents would want their children to leave early. They would deal with that eventuality as necessary. He paused and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his temples. It was clear he couldn't, for the moment, say more. Then, inside the shocked, restless silence, someone coughed. “Porter,” said Forrest Thompson, the chair of English, “what are we going to do instead of having classes?” It was oddly kind of Forrest, intentionally or not, Fred couldn't tell, to offer Porter an avenue away from his distress toward some practical detail.

It worked, and Porter straightened himself instantly, snapping back to headship. “I've spoken with Sarah, Rob, and Nina,” he said, “and we've decided that we'll break up into dorm groups. Obviously, the girls who live in Portland will be among the most distraught. And the police will need to talk with them and with the faculty there right away. We'll probably relocate students from that dorm for the rest of the term as well.” For now, he continued, dorms would take turns going to the dining hall; he passed out a schedule from a stack of Xeroxes at his elbow. As the practicalities were being handled, he pleaded with them not to discuss the situation with family, friends, or journalists. Discretion wasn't the only issue at stake. “The police have made it very clear,” he said. “It's not the academy's reputation that we have to be concerned about. We're looking for a newborn.”

Porter usually allowed for a generous question-and-answer period after he spoke. He was very good at allowing people to disagree with him and speak their views without growing threatened himself. He managed the cranks, the bores, and the blowhards with even, thoughtful ease. It was masterful. Fred, whose grandfather had been Armitage's eighth head thirty years ago, had made a study of headmasters and was always comparing them to Llewellan. Porter was the most astute he'd ever seen. Among other virtues, he had the ability to sense when he was on the brink of turning into a caricature, a hazard for those at boarding schools, where the line between becoming a well-loved campus fixture and turning into a fossil was quite porous. For instance, Porter had spent two years after college as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal and for the first few months of his tenure at Armitage had given a hair too many talks that included the phrase
As they say in Wolof,
followed by the delivery of some quaint maxim to illustrate a point he was making. Wolof was the local language in the district where he'd worked as a water engineer. But Porter had soon gotten wind that students were mocking these lapses into tribal wisdom and he had dropped the practice, though he still occasionally referenced it with a self-deprecating smile that only increased his luster: not only was he smart enough to be alert to rumor, he had the confidence to poke fun at himself. Today, however, no shred of that liveliness was visible. He invited no comments this time. He told the faculty that classes in a shortened format would probably resume in the next two days. They were to check their school e-mail accounts frequently. They were to monitor their students with extreme care. When they had more information, they would talk about how to make up for lost time, lost events.