The Twisted Thread (3 page)

Fred peered at his colleagues. Everyone was chastened. Even Alan Shepherd, a physics teacher who complained frequently that sports—or theater or dance or chorus—cut into the time his students had to prepare for the AP, had the wit not to protest. But Fred also noticed that a few people were staring a little more sharply than usual at Grace Peters. It had happened under her supervision, in her dorm. Claire had been her advisee. And she hadn't known. She hadn't seen. That none of them had either was, at the moment, immaterial. This situation, drastic as it was, demanded an almost immediate apportioning of blame. Grace's chin was set and hard. She was clearly aware she'd be called on to explain and was girding herself for scrutiny. Readying her script and her defenses. Fred hoped Madeline realized that she, too, was going to come under fire: she lived in the same dorm, and Grace would be looking to shift responsibility off her own back. That's what these places encouraged with their emphasis on perfect behavior, flawless results. When there were slips, minor or extreme, the cost was high and so was the corresponding need to heave guilt elsewhere as quickly as possible.

“That's all,” said Porter. “Please get to your dormitories and talk to your students.” Nina the counselor would be rotating among dorms to assist teachers and students, and they were bringing in the network of psychologists the school used to help everyone through this first difficult period. Teachers prepared to go, and then, inside the murmur of voices and the scrape of chairs, Janie Marcus, the spindly ballet mistress, asked, “Have Claire's parents been told?” She so rarely spoke at faculty meetings, everyone was startled.

“Yes,” said Porter. “Her father will be here as soon as he can from New York. Her mother lives in Paris and will arrive tonight.” It struck Fred then that no one envied the head at that moment. And they frequently did. The man earned an excellent salary; he oversaw a school that possessed both intellectual and social prestige; trustees, teachers, students, and alumni all admired him. He'd written well-respected books about educating adolescents, and he helped Stuart Murray raise head-spinning amounts of money for Armitage's already healthy endowment. His elegant wife and three handsome sons traveled with him each summer to a seaside cottage in Maine and the rest of the year surrounded him with what appeared to be open, plentiful affection. The twins were at Cornell, and the youngest, a senior named Miles, a handsome, lively boy with a quick wit, was well liked by faculty, Fred among them. Next year, he was going to Amherst, as his father had. Porter had been at the academy five years, the same amount of time as Fred, and everyone hoped he'd last much longer. He wore these achievements lightly. Those who didn't approve of Porter could be discounted as jealous, malcontent, or insecure.

But today, no one coveted one ounce of his responsibilities. People started to make their way toward the door. Then Mary Manchester, the librarian, asked in her braying voice, the same one she used to badger faculty about planning their students' research projects six months in advance, “Porter, was Claire murdered?”

“We can't talk about that,” Porter said slowly. “Not at the moment.” He looked profoundly sad as he said this. Someone cleared her throat then, and the sound somehow released the crowd of teachers, got them moving again. Fred glanced around and saw that the prompt had come from Tamsin Lovell, dressed in a black skirt and blindingly white blouse. Porter's assistant, she had stationed herself below the dais and to the right. She was picking up the extra Xeroxes, her face as always unreadable. Fred looked at the headmaster, who was folding his handkerchief carefully. The gesture didn't register until later, but Porter never folded his handkerchiefs. He always twisted them into balls and stuffed them back in his pocket. Owning these bits of linen was the mildest of affectations, something vaguely French or nineteenth century about it, an impression he counteracted by treating them carelessly. But that ruined morning, Porter took pains to restore the cloth to a square and touched the neat packet as if it were something precious, something easily torn.

CHAPTER 3

I
n the woods, where the pines and birches thinned and gave way to a wide stand of beeches, Matt Corelli was running as fast as he could manage. His heart was banging hard as he breathed the warm air, which he thought changed in this part of the forest. The light certainly did, filtering through a veil of lime green leaves. The ground, too, became more treacherous, with a webbed net of gray roots that could send him hurtling if he didn't pay close attention. He had run this route when he was on the cross-country team at Armitage, and even now, fifteen years later, he couldn't make the loop without memories of meets—corded muscles, pumping arms—crowding into the present, though he took the five miles more slowly than he had.

Passing through the beeches, he took the next quarter of a mile at a trot, delaying the return to town, his rented house, the station. The woods were clean, separate, and despite their raft of associations, relaxing. Each morning, he ran past trees that had grown there undisturbed for three hundred years, beholden only to themselves, nature so much more neutral than the troubles humans knitted for themselves. When he finally emerged onto a sidewalk, he turned down High Street, took a left on Elm, and then another left on Concord, before arriving at the shingled bungalow where he'd been living the last two years.

The screen door creaked, and he heard his phone beeping the presence of a new voice mail. It was either his father, Joseph, reminding him for the third time that they were going to have dinner that night, or Vernon Cates, his partner, who rose at dawn and assumed everyone else should, too. Matt ignored the cell and went to the kitchen to get coffee on the stove before retreating to the shower. On a busy but generally nonviolent desk devoted mostly to tax evasion and white-collar crime, Matt didn't have to live anymore with the phone almost sutured to his palm. It was one of the reasons he didn't regret leaving Philadelphia, where he had worked on the homicide squad at a jolting, frantic pace. Distance from gory crisis was one of the reasons he'd returned to Greenville, a place he had to call, no matter how ambivalently, home.

He twisted shut the top half of his Bialetti, the octagonal silver pot in which he brewed what Vernon called his “toxic tar,” and placed it on the front burner. When the coffee was ready, the contraption bubbled volcanically, a controllable Vesuvius with which to start the day. An etching of a squat, mustachioed man in a trench coat and fedora, hand raised high and stubborn, decorated the side. An Italian Inspector Clouseau, a picture of unjustified confidence. Matt returned his salute.

Just as the eruption began, the phone rang again, and he guessed before he went to answer it that it would be Vernon. Often merely thinking of Vernon drew him toward you; he had an adhesive quality once he was part of your life.

“Enriquez testimony this morning at nine fifteen, Judge Mack Truck presiding.” Matt had an iPhone, a date book, an excellent memory, an aptitude for timeliness, and occasional help from the office secretary, in short very little chance of not being where he was supposed to be. He also had Vernon, who, if he had been an object instead of a person, Matt had decided, would have been a backup hard drive. They had been working together since Matt joined the Armitage-Greenville Police. Armitage didn't have quite enough crime to justify its own force, and it had just enough sense of self-importance to feel in occasional need of protection, so the two towns shared a station that straddled their exact border. Vernon had worked what he called with relish the “paper beat” for the last five years. Most of his and Matt's work arose from Armitage, and Vernon loved dispossessing the men in ties of their suburban certainties.

“I'll be there, Vernon. Early,” Matt said, walking back to the kitchen, where he fetched the milk frother from the cabinet. It had been a final, paltry gift from his last girlfriend, Ann, a lawyer who had invested in an impressive array of cooking gear that Matt belatedly realized had served a decorative rather than a functional use. His own spare kitchen held little more than blackened steel pans and a set of worn if excellent knives he sharpened himself. Still, he had kept the frother as a token of the relationship and had grown to like the dense foam and the touch of ridiculousness it added to the mornings.

“Wear the white oxford and the blue tie.”

“Got it, Vernon: white oxford, blue tie,” Matt said, sipping.

“You should use soy. You're going to kill yourself with all that dairy.”

“Shut up, Vernon,” said Matt, and he sipped louder, just to annoy his partner, who clicked the phone off quickly as if merely hearing the consumption of a milk product would cause a leap in his cholesterol.

Vernon, like Matt, had been born in Greenville. He had become a cop when he graduated from high school not only because it ran in his blood but because of what he described as “high standards for civic hygiene.” He took loitering seriously. Red-light running even more so. He was fourteen years older than Matt, and Matt remembered him at the school crossing, writing ticket after ticket and saying, as drivers protested, “See you in court, ma'am, and might I suggest you arrive there slowly.” Back then, he was 230 pounds, all red cheek, gut, and swagger. But he irritated the public so much he was taken off street assignments and put behind a desk, where he picked apart alibis, ran background checks on suspects, and developed his true skills: mucking with patient orneriness around large bureaucracies and discovering discomfiting information stored on paper or in files. There was a personal downside to this transition, however. Vernon's habit of Twinkie and Dorito inhalation accompanied him, and he got even larger. “My time as a blue whale,” he called it. His father and grandfather had both been cops, huge and dead by forty-five. Vernon had assumed he would follow the family tradition. “But then came Kathy.” He said this, Matt mused, the way other people might say, “And then I won Powerball.”

Still sipping coffee, Matt went to turn the shower on. He had been warned that Vernon was more like a burr than a person, but he soon realized the man was merely bored. He needed more and better work to do. Matt had helped him double his load, and together they'd started working three cold cases from missing persons.

The resolution of the second—the discovery of the whereabouts of an old lady named Olive Anderson in the nursing home of a neighboring town—had required celebration. That was when Matt learned about what Vernon called with messianic seriousness his conversion. He had broken an ankle on an icy sidewalk, and Kathy had been his nurse at Armitage General. She had fussed over him, suggested extra tests, found his bone density was low. He had told her his history, and she suggested it wasn't fate that he keel over in middle age. It might have something to do with choices.

Choices, Matt thought. To come back, to stay away. To call someone or not. To admit what you felt or stay silent. The hot water pounded on his neck and back. Lucky water; no free will involved. It would flow wherever gravity demanded. He could have spent an hour there, suspended from his day, but it would be smart to get to the courthouse early and run through details. Matt already had the white oxford out. He had been planning on the blue tie before Vernon phoned.

Clean now, he dressed carefully, and as he threaded the tie around his neck, Matt knew that if someone who looked like Kathy had told him to drink a pint of motor oil, he would have given up on the concept of free will altogether and asked her if two were better. But she had had her eye on Vernon, and she told him to down green tea and kombucha and in the process fell in love with the gradually slimming and increasingly committed vegan that Vernon, spectacularly against type, was becoming.

That was ten years ago. He was now forty-seven and had baked a wheat-free carrot cake for the occasion. He had lost fifty-eight pounds and kept them off. He had married Kathy and produced twin girls, Sky and Shanti. “Don't ask. I may be vegan, but I draw the line at all that woo-woo.” Kathy did not, and Sky and Shanti, unimmunized, wreaked havoc at the Greenville Montessori. “They're expressing their shakti energy,” Kathy said cozily, indulgence lighting the deep blue eyes that had sent Vernon hurtling down his dairy-free path. “They're hellions, Kath,” Vernon said and wrapped them all in long, lean arms. Matt envied his partner his frisky, shakti-infused family. He also envied his lack of ambition, openly expressed, and his pleasure at living, working, and eating locally. “Paris, Shmaris. Look closely enough at anything and all you get is century after century of complication. At least this is complication I belong to.”

He had looked at Matt then, and Matt had seen his mouth pucker the way it did before he asked a pointed question. He'd paused, seen no invitation to continue, and said nothing, a rarity in Vernon's life. He had wanted to discuss, Matt assumed, why Matt had ditched a promising career to return to Greenville, and on that topic, Matt had decided, he would remain as silent as he could as long as possible. If he were honest, some of those motives remained so murky it was hard to understand them in private much less admit them out loud.

He sat down then on the queen-size bed, an optimistic purchase. It had not seen much of anything but his own restless sleep since he'd bought it. The phone rang again. He rose from the bed and checked the time. 6:55. He ignored the sound and shrugged on the jacket to his suit. Vernon was probably going to recommend something superfluous, like buffing his nails. While the evidence in the Enriquez case seemed incontrovertible—stacks of doctored tax returns, not to mention a grudging confession—Judge Henry Mack was a stickler, and Vernon was not averse to trying to sway an impression no matter how much the facts stank. For a moment, Matt stared at his closet, which held no clothes but his own. There was something pathetic in all that navy blue, all that suiting.

The phone didn't go to voice mail. It began to chime again. He tied his shoes, and that was when he noticed the sirens, a chorus of them. Abruptly, he knew that all of Vernon's warnings about what to wear weren't going to add up to anything today. Those sirens were too close to Armitage. And more were coming. Police cars, not ambulances, that slight shift in decibel and tone, something anyone whose life edged up next to emergencies would know. Matt flipped open the cell.

“Dead kid. Missing baby. That fucking school on the hill,” shouted Vernon. “Why the fuck do you never answer your phone?”

Because, Matt thought, that is exactly the kind of thing I do not want to hear anymore. More of them, sirens, echoing through the green day. He grabbed keys, phone, wallet. At the last moment, he spun the combination to the safe he'd bolted to the floor of the closet and retrieved his holster and gun. He hadn't worn them in days, though it irritated Vernon, who believed that weaponry was just one of the burdens of being a cop. Matt had tried to explain to him that one of the benefits of the paper beat was that the criminals were generally soft-palmed office folk, devious but unaggressive. Vernon didn't buy it. “Snakes everywhere, and last I checked, gun control laws weren't exactly working.”

So it was over, the interlude, the almost pleasurable boredom of self-imposed exile, backwater isolation, cases that did not sit heavy on his conscience and unfolded at a poky pace. Weekends spent leafing through the stack of novels and histories by his bed. Dinners with his widowed father, his sister joining when she could. Long runs in empty woods. Vernon's cranky, appealing friendship. Evenings when nothing, happily, happened. Most of all, the gradual accumulation of something close to peace and the wonder of actual privacy. As he struggled to fit the gun into the holster, Matt realized he hadn't really believed this tranquil period would last as long as it had or be as satisfying as it was. Nothing continued unchanged. Not a place on earth was exempt. But what he also hadn't expected, as he slammed the door shut and ran to his car, was that he'd mind the jolt so much, and that it would in fact frighten him.