The Twisted Thread (30 page)

It was almost medieval, this seating by ranks. First the aristocratic Harknesses, then the faculty, then the remaining students. Madeline saw Sally Jansen, her parents perched on either side of her. Even Maggie Fitzgerald was present, limp and wan as ever. Somewhere, Lee and Olu were lurking, Madeline was sure, but she couldn't spot them from her seat. Then came the staff. Madeline saw Jim French with a bandage on his head and a frail, elegant woman next to him who had to be his mother, they looked so much alike. Past the staff, she saw a few men with gelled hair and women in jewel-toned jackets and bright lipstick—media, though the television crews had been denied access. But who were these several dozen kids? Not Armitage students, certainly. They were much more reminiscent of Greenville's population, where the girls wore clothing so tight it made them shorten their strides while the boys almost tripped in their wide pant legs. If it hadn't been a memorial service, they would have worn baseball caps popped up at an angle, Madeline suspected. How did they know Claire? Why were they here? Was it curiosity? Had there been another connection?

One of them, a boy with a shaved head and a Boston Red Sox T-shirt, lifted his chin in recognition of someone he spotted. There was also in this segment of the crowd a suppressed energy, a kind of tense excitement that had nothing to do with death.

Wisely, Sarah kept her comments very short. She said, “We are here to commemorate Claire Harkness. While the circumstances of her death and the disappearance of her child are still unclear, what we can say and know for a certainty is that they are a tragedy. Her parents, her relatives, her brothers and sisters have lost a beautiful member of their family. The school has lost one of its most treasured students and now faces a crisis that will test it absolutely. We have not much to lean on in this drastic time. And in that humility, may we come together.” She was brief, she was honest, she reminded everyone of Porter, though she did not, of course, mention his name. The parents had not wanted to speak, and no one had burst into tears, though a few of Claire's classmates had seemed on the brink of an outbreak. Matt and his partner kept their heads bowed throughout. We'll survive it, Madeline thought. We will get through it. Wide strips of light ran through the stained glass and twisted into bright knots on the stone floor, the shifting pages of the programs, in an almost unseemly glory of red and blue.

But just as the choir had begun to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” something happened at the back of the chapel. Someone was opening the doors, which had been firmly closed once the service started. They were solid oak, studded with metal, and a considerable barrier to anyone trying to sneak in. It was a joke that the hinges were kept unoiled on purpose to make it impossible for anyone to creep past when he or she was late. Madeline wasn't imagining it. Someone was opening the doors, and the sound of metal grinding metal made the entire congregation turn to look.

Then another noise threaded through the church, and at first Madeline couldn't locate its source. What is it? she thought, and was suddenly reminded of Tadeo, but Tadeo at birth, with that reedy screech only newborns produce. A baby, Madeline knew, her heart rising. A baby. Claire's baby; it had to be. She stood, and so did Matt and the rest of the congregation, in a rustle of linen and astonishment. Matt reached for his phone and pressed a number urgently. His partner rose, too, swearing softly.

In the central aisle, a girl held the baby, a girl with long brown hair, the one Madeline had seen at Mackey's, the one who had been so frightened. Madeline heard a voice call suddenly, “Kayla!” and saw that the cry came from Mrs. French. She had to be restrained by her son, who was looking at Kayla with wonderment and pride. Then Madeline saw another person she had not expected to: Scotty Johnston was following the girl. He was the one who must have opened the doors as she held the tiny, crying baby. But while she kept walking, he melted into the crowd on the far side of the chapel.

Matt placed his hand on Madeline's shoulder and excused himself as he and his partner slipped out from the pew and moved swiftly to the girl's side. She looked up at them and said something. Matt answered, held her elbow, and steered her toward the Harknesses, who had, along with everyone else, turned to see what was happening. The partner started to search the crowd, apparently for Scotty. The choir broke off abruptly. The organ gave up in mid-bleat, and instead of shapely chords and voices, a wave of awe ran through the chapel. The baby wailed and wailed, high and piercing above the soft, perplexed whispers of the crowd.

Claire's baby, alive, in this strong, proud girl's arms. The teenagers who clearly didn't belong started to whistle and call her name. “Yo, Kayla,” someone shouted, but not even that dissuaded the girl from her task. With Matt at her side, she kept walking, heading, Madeline saw, for Flora.

Flora had understood instantly. She had pulled her sunglasses from her face and was moving as fast as she could to find Kayla. The two met almost at the top of the aisle, and Kayla, her face streaming with tears, handed the baby to Flora, waiting there with her own arms held wide.

Matt held the girl then, and Madeline watched her crumple. He held her close and ushered her away. She saw nothing but the purest relief on his face, nothing but release. Flora stood uncertainly at the head of the aisle, looking at the tiny child in her arms, as her former husband moved toward her and Sarah Talmadge released her grip on the lectern. Only then did Flora begin to rock the child. It was that motion, that gesture of tentative tenderness, that unleashed the applause. The kids from Greenville began it, kids who must have known and helped Kayla; it was not the decorous response that greeted the Christmas concert or the violin recital or any of the other polite and well-heeled events for which the chapel served as stage. It was loud and rhythmic and full of cheers and whistles and a kind of raucous joy. A hooting, something untrammeled that everyone—the teachers, the staff, the students—gave way to.

“He's alive,” Madeline kept saying and found herself hugging Grace, who was hugging Alice Grassley. She looked for Fred, but he was caught in the tumult on the other side of the aisle. The children's applause had freed them all and somehow pressed them outside. The stern gray building was simply too small for the relief and wonder they were feeling. Out on the curve of lawn in front of the chapel, grateful for the hot sun, everyone who had attended the service could not stop reveling at the baby's return.

Then, in the midst of the confusion, Madeline saw something almost as unexpected start to happen. The pack of kids from Greenville edged by cautious steps toward the children who constituted the rather shattered remains of Armitage's student body. Not toward Olu and Lee and the rest of the oligarchy, who remained aloof, and always would, Madeline thought sadly. Some of Armitage's graduates would never really feel that they quite belonged to the rest of the population. But most of the others weren't that blind or provincial. Those were the ones who walked awkwardly forward to meet these new arrivals. The teenagers stood there, not in separate clumps but overlapping, the kids with the sweatshirts talking to the boys in the blazers, the kids from town and the kids on the hill. Madeline grasped nothing—how the baby had been kept alive; how that long-haired girl had been involved—but she stood there, transfixed, amazed at how much all those young people had to say to one another.

CHAPTER 24

K
ayla sat opposite Matt and stared out the window of his of
fice, which provided little more than a very dispiriting view of concrete and cars. Even so, she did not shift her gaze. Her father stood behind her, not quite hovering, but not touching her, either. For once in this case, no lawyer perched on every word, throwing a protective mantle over his client. Kayla's family didn't have enough money to afford a good attorney and appeared ready to deal with whatever happened themselves, not used to paying anyone for the privilege of representing them. The girl had immediately agreed to come to the station and called her father on the way. The man was pacing in the reception area when they arrived, in spotless clothes, silent, obviously wretched with concern. Now she said something to him in rushed, forceful Portuguese. He looked at Matt. “She wants to talk to you by herself. She won't say anything if I'm here.” He spoke to his daughter, again in Portuguese. She said, “Pie, they tape it. You can listen to every word if you want to.” The man kissed Kayla's head, glared at the digital recorder on Matt's desk, and told them both he would be right outside the door if she changed her mind.

But even with her father gone, Vernon off dealing with Scotty and the search of Harvey Fuller's apartment, and the door firmly shut, Kayla remained silent. Matt had guessed that she would want to tell the story without an audience, but perhaps, having been discreet for a critical time, she was having difficulty finding words that could capture what she had done. Which was, apparently, tend with remarkable gentleness to the needs of a newborn for an entire week with little adult intervention. Even as she sat there, tearstained and worn-out, her shoulders were back and her spine was straight.

“My father said, ‘Just tell the story.' But there are a lot of parts to it and you could start in a lot of different places,” she said softly, but this was as good a spot as any. Kayla had met Scotty and Claire at the Greenville animal shelter early this spring. “They didn't need to do their community service anymore. They just liked getting off campus and seeing the dogs, and I did, too. My dad says we have too many kids to have a pet, so I started going there to be with animals. They were on the same shift. We walked the dogs together. I thought, stuck-up rich kids, all Ivy League, but they were okay. And they were good with even the mean strays.”

They had gone when they hadn't needed to. That was why that information hadn't shown up as something people mentioned about them. Nor had it appeared on their schedules. But we forgot to look into that part of Claire's life, Matt thought. No one mentioned it, but we forgot even so. We assumed every aspect of the case took place up there, inside the gates.

Kayla said by the third week of walking the dogs, she had realized Claire was pregnant. “How?” Matt asked. “I'm interested because no one else seemed to. What did you see?”

Kayla looked at him directly then and said, “It was how Scotty treated her. Wouldn't let her walk the big animals. Carried her book bag. And she was wearing these boys' shirts, which skinny girls usually don't do. Then I noticed how she was walking.” She had six younger brothers, she explained. She had seen her mother. And girls at her school got pregnant all the time. “She barely showed. It was hard to believe she was at seven months.”

She leaned forward then and said, “What I am going to tell you is true. I'm bad at lying. Ask anyone at my school. Ask my father. I can't do it. I just blurt things out. I always get myself into trouble because I can't hide what I've done.” When she realized that Claire was having a baby, she couldn't help herself. “I said to her, ‘What are you doing at school? Why aren't you home? Why aren't your parents helping you?' ” And they looked at me like I was some alien who couldn't speak English.”

Matt could imagine it. The Portuguese girl with the large, close family, sly and haughty Armitage kids, the strays and the barking. Kayla stopped looking directly at him and again stared out the window, the story breaking from her more quickly now. “So I asked them, Is Scotty the father? And he got red in the face and looked kind of mad and embarrassed at the same time. No, Claire said, he's not and I haven't told him who is. You could tell it was this huge, suppressed thing between them, so I didn't say anything more about it. But I asked what they were going to do when the baby came. Did they have a plan? And they didn't. They didn't have a clue. All they said was Don't tell anyone. They were totally frightened that I would go to their teachers or something. But I didn't want to get mixed up with them. I nearly stopped going to the shelter and I tried to switch my times, and then something happened.” She paused to take a sip of water.

Matt guessed what was next. Claire and Scotty had seen the answer to their problem in practical, experienced Kayla. “They got nice to me. They asked me questions about my family. I felt sorry for the girl. For Claire. I thought she was brave to have the baby. Most girls like that, they get rid of it,” Kayla said, and she made a fast, slashing motion at her belly. She stopped again, looked at Matt sharply, and asked, “Where are you from?”

“From Greenville. Born here, but I went to school up there,” he said.

“You did? And you're a cop?” The words flew out of her mouth. He had already believed her when she said she was bad at lying, but this just reinforced that impression. He laughed and said, “You know what? That's what everybody thinks but almost no one has the guts to say.”

She shrugged. “It's just that those people, the ones up there, they do money jobs, they work in banks. Or they marry other rich people and don't work at all. Being a cop is a real job, like the kind my dad has.” Her father had worked in the mills for seventeen years, and he was a foreman now. Pride lined her voice when she told him that. But when Matt asked her what her mother did, she bent her head. “That's when it got complicated with them.”

When Claire and Scotty figured out that she had all these younger brothers, they asked her what she knew about babies. Kayla snorted and said she had said to them, “What don't I know about babies?” Matt saw her ambivalence now. She'd been showing off, parading her real-world knowledge in front of those shiny kids, who in spite of it all, intimidated her with their money, their education, their curious cool. So she told them that her mother had had all of her kids at home. And that was when she knew she had told them too much.

Matt finally understood the hold Claire and Scotty had on Kayla. The mother must not have any papers. Her father, Kayla explained, was from the Canaries, and he was still waiting after all these years for a green card. Her mother didn't have legal status at all. She was from Brazil, where she had grown up with nothing. She had saved enough twenty years ago for a plane ticket and had come to Greenville, where she had a cousin. She met Kayla's dad and they got married. Then the laws kept changing, and always she was on the other side of them. She'd had her babies at home, not wanting to risk hospitals and deportation, separation from her children. “We're legal, my brothers and me, because we're born here. We can stay. But my mom, she's vulnerable. And they figured it out. Those two figured it out.” Scotty said his father was a lawyer. Claire said her family knew people in the government. And Kayla believed them. And then they told her they wouldn't let anyone know if she agreed to help them out with the baby.

“First, he offered me money.” Her disdain was total, Matt saw. She might be grudgingly in awe of them, but Kayla would accept nothing from people like Scotty and Claire. “I told him I would help because it was the right thing to do and they couldn't go to the cops about my mom because I would go to the hospital with the baby and turn them in. We each had something on the other.” She had been satisfied with this part of the negotiation, holding her own against Scotty and Claire. They knew nothing, she said, nothing about birth or what it could be like. She paused then, collecting herself for the rest.

“Were you there when Claire had the baby?” Matt asked.

Kayla shook her head. “She was late, but it happened fast. She wasn't expecting it. Scotty was with her, in the tunnels, I think. I don't know how they managed.” They communicated by a dial-up computer he had rigged up down there. Kayla had an account that she checked every day on an old laptop a friend had given her dad. No cells. Scotty said they were too easy to trace. Then late Sunday night, early Monday morning, he showed up at her house. He banged on her window, which was on the first floor. She was the only girl, and she had her own tiny room, the only one in the family with that privilege. She must have told him that, but she had no idea how he'd found out where her family lived. “He had the baby with him, and he just said, ‘Take him. He's in danger,' and he gave me all this formula and diapers and blankets, and then he ran.”

She stayed up with the infant, feeding him and holding him. At this point, Kayla stopped talking, clearly thinking about that night. Matt, too, marveled at it and imagined the tiny child, the girl's intense focus, the audacity of these young people in crisis. When Kayla started to speak again, she did so more slowly and was more subdued. The first morning she'd been lucky. Her mom had a job cleaning houses, her brothers and father left early for school and work, and she could stay at home and have nobody figure it out. The next day, Kayla said, she had heard about Claire and she got even more frightened. All Scotty wrote on the computer was “I didn't do it.”

“Did you believe him?” Matt asked.

“Yes,” Kayla said quite forcefully. “He loved her. He's a jerk, but he loved that girl.” She looked down at her hands and went on. It was all really confusing, but her luck had continued to hold. Her father had been away part of the week, at a conference for new foremen for the plant; her mother was busy with a new job. “I set up a nursery in the garage.” No one used it, Kayla said. “It was full of old boxes and bikes, but there was this attic that I set up to make it nice for the baby.” She had claimed to be sick for three days, and she'd gotten her best girlfriend and her boyfriend to help her. That was how the story got out at school. Not everyone, Kayla said, was good at keeping secrets, which explained how all those kids had heard about the service. She and her friends had rotated nights, but she'd been with the little boy most of the time. She'd had to give up her job with Mrs. French. “I didn't want to do that, but it was the only way I could manage to stay with the baby.

“But then on Wednesday night, he started to cry and cry, and my girlfriend and I couldn't figure it out. We were worried he had a fever, and we wanted to take him to a hospital. That was when we decided we had to tell my mom and dad. My mom took care of the baby, and I went to this bar where my dad goes with his friends to watch baseball. We don't keep a lot of secrets in my family, and I felt bad. But with everything going on up there, my father said we couldn't get mixed up with the police. We didn't want to expose my mom.” She was looking now at Matt with a combination of worry and pride. She had held up her end of the agreement. She had taken care of her family. She had taken care of that child.

Fortunately, the baby started to eat again and was fine, but that was it, Kayla said. They had all had it, and they were terrified about what was going to happen. She hadn't heard from Scotty since Tuesday, and so on Thursday night, she stole onto campus and threw a large rock into his window. “If he could figure out where I lived, I could figure out where he lived,” she said with some degree of satisfaction. “Even with security, it was pretty easy to get in by the river. No gates there.” Kayla told Scotty that she was going to the police and she was going to hand over the baby. His mother was dead, but he had grandparents and a father somewhere, and it was over, even if it meant her own mother was going to jail. But Scotty said no. Two more days, maybe three. It was all going to come down very soon, and the baby would go right where he should. “He was scared, Mr. Corelli. Even he was scared. So I agreed. I said Sunday, latest, and he said okay. And then we heard that the arrests had happened.” She sipped some more water and wiped off the moisture with the back of her hand, looking for once, Matt thought, like a child. “Then Scotty showed up on Saturday night. He looked bad. His eyes were red, his clothes weren't clean. He said he had to stay with me, he had to see the baby. He kept looking at him, but he didn't want to hold him. He barely slept. He just sat there, watching us. He said we would go up to the school the next morning.” She stopped again.

“It was creepy the way he and Claire talked about their parents, like they weren't there, like they weren't important. But I didn't think they could be totally right. I didn't think you could bring a kid into the world and not care what happened to her. So I agreed, but I wanted to do it in the church. Because Claire's mother would be there, and I would give her back her grandson.”

Kayla was crying now. She pulled a Kleenex from the box on Matt's desk. “Did you see him? We called him Pablo. I know they won't keep that name, but who cares? It's funny, but even when a person is really little, he needs a name.” She blew her nose and crumpled the tissue. “Is he okay?”

Matt said she had taken excellent care of him. She had done beautifully. The baby was at the hospital now with his grandmother, getting a checkup, but everything was looking fine. He had an officer with Flora, and after he was finished with Kayla, he was going to see her. He turned off the recorder. “Thank you, Kayla.” He meant that gratitude to encompass everything she had done: for being the kind of person who at sixteen could take care of a newborn, for being as strong as she knew how to be in difficult circumstances. For being someone who expected to solve her own problems.

The girl stood up. “I've got a lot of homework to catch up on,” she said. “I should go.” But she hesitated. “My mom . . . ,” she said, and it was the first time since he'd met her that Matt had seen her look truly frightened. Her face tightened, and she couldn't meet his eye.