The Twisted Thread (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

L
ater that morning, Jim French thought that he was probably
the only person on campus who did not know that Claire Harkness was dead by seven. He'd been underground, and his phone didn't ring at certain junctures in the tunnels that furrowed the earth below Armitage. He had been working contentedly, one of the few members of the buildings and grounds crew who actively liked this rotation. People got spooked down here, though the tunnels were clean and well lighted, built during World War II as an innovation for heating the dorms and, some said, as a place where the students, faculty, and even townspeople could take shelter if Armitage were ever bombed. Jim's father had fought in the Pacific, and his mother had told him that, yes, unexpected as it seemed, a village in the center of Massachusetts had at that time seemed vulnerable to the Germans and Japanese. She never said so, but Jim guessed from the way she spoke that the invitation to share the shelter of the tunnels hadn't been entirely inclusive. The academy would protect its own above anything, she implied when she could be coaxed to talk about those days. She had never been pleased that Jim worked at what everyone in Greenville called the school on the hill. Even at eighty-two, she could summon the energy for disapproval. Her family had lived in Greenville for five generations, and she still occupied the house where Jim and his siblings had grown up. A former postmistress, teacher, and during the war, a worker in a munitions factory, Angela made aging look like a manageable process. Her carriage was startlingly erect, her hands firm, her skin almost unlined.

Still, there was no denying her age; she bore watching. Jim was the youngest of her children and the only one living in the area. Before work each morning, he drove from his apartment to make her breakfast. Each evening, when he was done, he drove back to prepare her dinner. Despite the fact she'd had six kids, or maybe because of it, she was an indifferent cook and entirely uninterested in nourishing herself or others. He, on the other hand, enjoyed the work of making good, healthy food to be eaten in the company of family.

He thought about his mother, her carefully styled hair, her head buried in the newspaper when she wasn't observing the neighbors, and he sighed. Orienting his day around the need to keep Angela fed was hampering his social life. His wife had left three years ago, his youngest daughter was a freshman in college. His mother herself had said she didn't need him so close by, but he knew she depended on him more than she liked to admit. In the summer, he mowed the lawn and tended the yard, and this year, he had hired a high school student to come in three afternoons a week to empty trash cans, sweep, and accompany Angela to the pharmacy, the senior center, or the beauty parlor. Though Angela complained about how little the girl knew about the world, Jim knew his mother liked Kayla, who was polite, kind, and prompt. She even drove slowly enough to please Angela.

He replaced a dead bulb along the corridor, and the dim stretch of the tunnel bloomed with light again. It was warm and peaceful here, the only sounds pleasant mechanical clicks of heating and plumbing doing their jobs. Once in a while, students liked to go roving down here, and if he was in the tunnels, he instantly knew they were there. Something changed in the way air traveled. Even when they were incredibly secretive, something shifted, as if sneaky behavior produced a smell that wicked off them. Last year, he'd stumbled on a gaggle of sophomore girls drinking Diet Sprite and vodka, and he'd had to report the whole shrieking group to their dorm head.

Jim's most impressive bust had occurred in 2004, aboveground, on a night shift one spring, when he nabbed three seniors rolling Marie-France Maillot's '76 Mustang out of the garage. They'd successfully arranged a hotwire and were preparing to take it for a spin. He'd had to turn them in, though he understood the allure of the car and admired the delicacy of the engineering it had taken to make the engine roll over. Marie-France had bought the Mustang for a song when she'd come to the academy in 1977, and she drove the car only to and from the supermarket to buy coffee and cigarettes. Saturdays, she washed and waxed it, and five times a year she had a groundsman change the oil. Recently, she'd even had antique plates put on it. An absolute classic, it was worth probably a hundred times what she'd paid for it. Every time one of the boys saw it, they couldn't stop staring. The ones he'd caught had been summarily kicked out and lucky they hadn't been charged with grand theft auto. Kids from the academy, no matter how you looked at it, received special protection. All kinds of laws didn't seem to extend past the gates.

Most of the time, Jim shooed kids back to their dorms without a word to anyone, much less bothering to call the cops. Cigarettes, he just couldn't care about that. Couples sneaking around to kiss each other. But he'd turn them in no matter what they were doing if they were rude. If they were truly cocky, like that Scotty Johnston, who had once actually tried to bribe him, they didn't have a chance. Then he'd scare them by flicking his large flashlight on and off, like some slick investigator on a TV show. He'd play the whole role: steer them upstairs, get them to fish out their IDs, make them wait against a wall while he called their dorms. The trick was appearing to have no qualms about the consequences. Yet he rarely needed to go so far; most of the kids were quite polite. They at least had been raised to say please and thank you. That they also expected doors to open at their bidding wasn't exactly their fault; their parents had raised them to that, too.

He kept walking down the corridor and took a left at the next juncture, with the intention of going back to the supply room for more bulbs. It had taken him a while to learn his way around the underground network, and even now, if he wasn't paying attention, he could wind up somewhere he hadn't meant to. But this morning he felt alert and relaxed. The list of chores he had to accomplish was long but not impossible. Nancy Mitchell, head of facilities, was a good boss, with a clear sense of how much to ask and when to ask it. Her priorities were clear, too, and he'd never met a person with a firmer grasp on electrical maintenance than she had. She was at ease on a roof, better with heights than Jim himself. She was also very attractive, a fact he was letting himself notice a bit more intently.

Then, at the beginning of the next tunnel, he stopped short. The corridor was black, which it shouldn't have been. He flicked the switch, and still, total darkness. Jim turned his flashlight on, started down the corridor, then stopped short again. He heard something. A scuffle. A tap. Something more than a mouse, less than a raccoon. A very quiet person, if he'd had to guess. A person trying to be quiet.

Fear coursed through his body. That itself was also rare; he'd been here for twelve years and rarely felt more than occasional nervousness, and that was usually around faulty wiring, which still turned up despite extensive renovation. Besides, Jim was tall and solid and lifted weights three times a week after the kids were in study hall. He didn't frequent the school's gym when the girls might be around. He understood without Nancy or anyone else needing to tell him that it was better that a sweating man in workout clothes not spend too much time near students in tiny shorts and tank tops. It wasn't even that they interested him: they looked like his own daughters, pretty yet far too young to be taken seriously. He preferred the gym when it was empty, too, with its new equipment and precise sound system. Perks like this had gone a long way to keeping him these last years at Armitage.

But this was a new situation. His whole body was on alert. He knew instinctively the tunnel was neither empty nor safe. Someone either had just left it or was leaving. “Hello?” he called out, not so much expecting an answer as informing the intruder he'd been detected. Jim even found himself shifting the flashlight in his hand, turning it from a tool used to illuminate into something like a club. Farther off, he heard another sound. The unmistakable
click
of a door in its jamb. The door could only be the one at the far end of the tunnel, which led to Nicholson House. Whoever it was had become aware of him, briefly contemplated a confrontation, decided against it, and made a quick exit. A student? An adult? He had no idea, except that it was obviously someone who knew his way around.

Jim found himself running into the dark, and then he stopped. A door in the side of the tunnel was open, a door he hadn't opened himself. Again, he flicked the switch to no avail. The whole area around him was black except for the cone of yellow his flashlight revealed. If he remembered correctly, the last time he'd been in this room was when he and another B and G guy had dropped off a load of obsolete computer stuff: monitors and printers no longer current enough for students and faculty. At the time, Jim had thought, Looks good enough to me. The equipment was in fact newer than the computer on which he worked at home. It was going to be stashed here, Nancy said, until it got shipped to a local public school as a charitable donation. Tax write-off, his mother sniffed. Better than chucking it altogether, Jim argued.

At first, it looked as if nothing had been disturbed. Then he noticed a crumpled ball that appeared to be a white bedsheet. That might not have been worrisome: he'd caught couples in his time, though he hated when it happened. But the sheet wasn't wrapped around a pair of frightened lovers. It was, however, liberally stained with a dark red slash, which on inspection looked to be dried blood. Crouching there, Jim had a panicky sense that everything was about to fall apart. Part of him was tempted to grab the sheet and stuff it in the incinerator and let it burn along with the rest of the school's trash. The tranquillity of the last years was so hard-won. He remembered his wife's unhappy face, his children's anguish as Carla had announced that she was leaving for good.

But then he thought of Angela. She would never tolerate such cowardice. He tidied the sheet, locked the door behind him, and walked as fast as he could through the tunnel and into the basement of Nicholson House, stopping only to check the fuse box. Someone had indeed shut a circuit breaker off. Snapping it back, Jim watched as lights blazed down the tunnel. He had to call Nancy. Climbing the stairs, knowing the signal would improve the moment he headed up, he checked his phone and found messages she'd left him. It was then that he headed past the Study and glanced through the window in the door. He paused for a moment and took in the faculty, ominously subdued, and assembled at the wrong hour. He knew then that what he'd feared had already happened. The change was in motion, unfolding everywhere.

CHAPTER 5

W
hen Matt first returned to Armitage and Greenville, an
irritable tension wound itself into every errand. He kept imagining bumping into classmates and former teachers in the cereal aisle or in line to mail packages. He'd be dressed like an off-duty cop, in jeans and schlumpy shirt. They'd be crisp and natty, New England posh. He'd have stubble; their jaws would be shiny from a fresh shave. On it went, the Armitage clan always having the upper sartorial hand, their cool intact as his wavered, limp head of lettuce in his hands. He spent more time than he wanted to admit devising conversations in which he presented himself in the best possible light as he selected beef and carrots. Kids didn't attend Armitage to become cops, much less cops in a small town, and it would take some finesse to put that decision in context. But gradually, as he bought Cheerios and stamps with no incident and few encounters, he relaxed. The academy was, after all, its own world, contained like a castle by a moat made not of stagnant water but of iron gates, forest, a narrow river, the school's slight elevation above the town, and its own sense of itself. Those inside it ventured rather sporadically into the surrounding area, and those outside rarely gained access, a condition that was about to reverse itself. A dead child, a missing baby. No institution could shut its doors against the scrutiny such disaster invited.

Vernon had called twice more en route, a feat given that Matt was driving fast and had no more than a mile to go. “Meet Angell at . . . what the hell's it called . . . Portland.” Like most townies, Vernon had had little direct contact with Armitage; its names and ways were unfamiliar. To Vernon, the school remained an elitist fortress, quite useless except that it provided jobs and paid a lot to the town in taxes even though it didn't have to. “Noblesse fucking oblige,” he said, though he had to admit his pension was the better for it.

Captain Thomas Angell, their boss, shared similar feelings but had hired Matt despite his Armitage diploma and other openly stated misgivings. He had listed them on his stubby fingers as he lounged behind his desk and Matt perched opposite in a flimsy plastic chair. “You did that prep school and Ivy League crapola. Made detective at twenty-nine and are now pissing off superiors who don't understand why you want to go. No history of behaving like an asshole. Why here?” He stared at Matt with small brown eyes. He knew that Matt's mother had just died and Joseph wasn't well but guessed as well the motive didn't end there. “You know what? I don't want to know. Just don't tell me you're in therapy or you're rethinking your decision to be a cop. And when something ugly comes up, you're the one dealing with it.” Anything cumbersome—murder, racketeering, drugs—drew state and federal cops in sticky waves, an extra layer of urban attention that was tiresome and frequently screwed things up. Matt had been on the other end of the problem in Philadelphia and knew the scowling faces of officers in Scranton and Lancaster. Their displeasure was often well founded. The keys to most crimes were specific, germane to the place and its particular people. Outsiders often blundered in the unfamiliar terrain and culture. Today, Angell would expect Matt to make good on their initial understanding. The men in good suits and black cars would start streaming in from Boston.

Angell was a deeply local man, rooted in much the same way Vernon was to his town, though he still barbecued and drank beer and far more closely resembled a usual cop. Yet working for Angell had allowed Matt to see the man had many, rather hidden gifts, and one of them was for assessing the talents of his staff and convincing them of the same insights he had. He had, for instance, been the first and only person in the department to grasp and rechannel Vernon's less than obvious virtues.

Just as Matt roared up the hill, Vernon called again and said, “If you forgot your gun, I will kill you.”

For the second time that day, Matt said, “Shut up, Vernon.” The gun lay in dense, metallic outline against his ribs, a weight where he did not want one. A uniformed kid stopped him at the gate, recognized him, let him pass. The rights of cops, Matt thought. To enter where the public can't, to see what others aren't allowed to. Not entirely dissimilar from the image Armitage tried to craft for itself. A place you couldn't waltz into, a place reserved for the extraordinary. But today the lawn in front of Portland looked as if a tornado had scattered cars there. Below the tires, the lawn had been crushed. Stupid. There could be footprints or tracks that would now be impossible to read. Since the moment of Vernon's call, almost against his wishes, the structure of looking at death was coming alive in his mind again, unpleating like a little-used map.

Matt glimpsed Angell and Porter McLellan on the steps, amid a cluster of uniforms. He had never met the headmaster but knew him from his omnipresence in the alumni bulletin,
The Armitage Record
. If anything, the man looked even more formidable in person than in his photographs; pictures never entirely captured someone's physical force. Porter's was powerfully serious. He stood at least five inches over Angell, who was rubbing the ends of his mustache.

It was 7:10. Students stood in sobbing knots on the steps, by the entrance, on the lawn, and cops and teachers were trying to press them steadily back. Vernon was pacing near the dorm and, the moment he spied Matt, came trotting toward him. Vegan life had been very good for Vernon's heart rate.

“We got unlucky and pulled Norm Parker for SOC. Brought the beauty queen along to take pictures. The kids who found the dead girl pawed all over her, teachers were up there. It's going to be a mess. You look like shit, by the way.” He peered at Matt closely and not without sympathy. By instinct, they walked slowly, knowing that, once they reached the building, there'd be no time to share details. My partner, Matt found himself thinking. How funny to have to come back here to find that someone as spirited and difficult as Vernon was just sitting there, eating kale and ripe for the taking. Still, there were limits.

“Thanks, Vern. And you smell like patchouli.” Vernon hated being called Vern and he hated hippies, except for Kathy. “Go on,” Matt said, and Vernon, momentarily chastened, glanced at his notes. The dead girl's name was Claire Harkness; she was seventeen years old. Hit her head or had it bashed. Bruises on the wrist and neck. Vernon's money was on bashing, but it would be hard to pin it down without good evidence. No weapon at first glance, and she could have smacked herself on the bedstead, the desk corner, a chair. No sign of the baby, which had probably been born on Saturday night.

Matt nodded and glanced around, hearing Vernon's voice as if it were coming in from a distance. It was jarring, the need to match such a situation to this beautiful, insulated place. Sweep away the flashing lights, the cruisers, the hectic pulse of a crime scene, and it was amazing how little had changed. If anything, the campus looked even more graceful than he'd remembered. The trees huge and pruned to elegant fullness. The Georgian and Federal lines of the brick and wood buildings. It astonished him he had once been part of this landscape, had felt even remotely entitled to the shade of its elms.

Vernon said, “She was a queen bee. They're not saying it, but no one liked this girl.”

“Boyfriends?”

“No one current. But last year, she went out with a kid named Scotty Johnston.”

Vernon pressed on. Claire being dead was almost the least of it. The problem was of course the baby. Gone, missing, no trace. The reason that, even if Claire's death had been an accident, this was still ruinous. None of the adults claimed to know a thing, though some of the girls had been in on the secret. The FBI was about to be unleashed, the whole campus shaken out. Angell was apoplectic. Feds complicated everything, and the captain's temper was fearsome, though they were usually too competent to incur it; his nickname was Devil Dog.

Matt was distracted. He shouldn't be thinking about Angell and his nickname. It was being back here. It altered everything. It even smells the same, the wet scent of cut grass, Matt thought. He could have been eighteen walking across that lawn. A senior on his way to college. About to stretch out his hand and receive his diploma.

Suddenly, Matt said to Vernon, “I want to go to the room. I want to see her before Parker gets his hands all over her.” It wasn't exactly that he couldn't face Angell and McLellan. It was the abrupt desire not to exchange pleasantries and put Porter at ease. All he wanted was to get immersed in his job, not tangled in his history on the steps of a dorm whose geography he remembered with uncomfortable precision. Memory sometimes felt like little more than layer upon painful layer of detail waiting for the slightest of triggers to release it. “There's a side entrance,” Matt said, and they swerved to the right. Another uniformed kid peered out at them from a frosted window set in the door.

Through the looking glass we go, Matt thought, as he tugged the handle. “Jesus, it even smells rich,” Vernon said suspiciously, sniffing deeply. He was right. It was the scent of perfume, real perfume, expensive shampoo, cleanliness, all of it at odds with a girl lying dead on the floor.

“It's fresh, and it's a nightmare.” Parker said this without even turning around; he'd heard them coming up the stairwell. He had three men in there and the photographer he insisted on using, a gorgeous brunette who spent a lot more time on her hair than she did on developing her camera skills. Without saying a word, Matt handed Vernon his iPhone; Vernon had mastered the slight delay in its shutter and could produce images of stunning clarity. They'd need supplementary angles captured if Jessica was the only person documenting the scene. Vernon began clicking pictures. The girl glared at him, but he kept right on snapping. “Dozens of people have been in and out of here. It's worse than Filene's Basement,” Parker said. “They've touched everything. And no, no weapon and not a lot of blood.” Matt and Vernon looked at each other. It would take weeks to sort out the DNA material: in addition, many of these kids were minors and protected ones; they'd all have lawyers. Every scrap would be contested.

“She was a beauty,” Parker continued nasally. “My vote would be for crime of passion. If anyone's asking.” He was thorough and he was clean, Parker, but he took forever to get results back and was crippling to the prosecution in front of a jury. His voice sounded like a saw on wire, and in a (backfired) effort to loan his field even more scientific credibility, he refused, in court at least, to say anything that could be taken as an absolute.
In the realm of possibility
was one of his favorite phrases. His unrequited lust for that untalented photographer had also more than once complicated their cases. Vernon loathed him.

They weren't going to have the leisure of waiting for Parker's results to come in. Everyone, from the girl's parents to the school, Angell to the feds, was going to want an instant solution, a yearning that might stem from anguish but even more from desire for the quickest and surest of answers to such an anomalous, unseemly event. Claire's death was a hideous twist in the order of a proudly orderly place. It would need to be rectified. It would require fast and thorough explanation.

But as Matt walked around her room and looked at her body, he had an unpleasant feeling that whatever answers he and Vernon would find would actually extend the disruption in the elegant world to which Claire belonged. Girls like this didn't simply have babies that went missing and then slip and bump their heads. Claire had made a cascade of choices for particular reasons, and something had gone completely awry. Most likely, neither adults nor peers had behaved all that sensibly around someone so beautiful. Even dead, she was agitatingly attractive, and that alone was disturbing. Most murdered people Matt had dealt with were scarred or battered, poor and unlucky. A few times, they had been girls as well, but never ones with teeth as straight or prospects as secure. The clothes scattered around the room were of delicate fabrics and colors. The pictures he glimpsed on her bulletin board showed Claire fine-boned and penetratingly lovely, and quite conscious of the power that gave her. In one, she was glancing at a blond boy, her clear physical equal, with both mischief and, more strikingly, arrogance. He wondered if there had been anyone this girl had respected.

Matt looked back at Claire's body, at the angle at which she'd fallen, the way the light spilled with unremitting clarity on her lean arms and the fan of her brilliant hair. As always when he was near the dead, he felt as if he had suddenly separated into two men: one that filled his clothes and moved about with solid physical presence, and another, a kind of watchful abstraction, a hovering awareness that darted and glanced, noticed and responded, trying to weave together impressions that might steer him toward who this girl had been and why exactly she had died. But a third person was observing the scene with him, the boy he'd been at Armitage, the kid who had lived and worked here for four arduous years, the townie who had climbed the hill. The one who would have taken a glance at Claire Harkness and not been able to stop looking, not just because of her beauty but because she embodied all the privilege that whispered through the place: the stretches of beachfront and the inheritances, the naming of the ancestors. The sureness of her right to be part of it all.

Vernon kept taking pictures, and Norm Parker went stolidly about his collection. Matt tried to gather himself into a single being and more or less succeeded. What was apparent as he grounded himself again in the room, the body on the floor, the play of light was that this was a death that had occurred in terrifically specific circumstances. The forensic evidence Parker was collecting might be the bright, shiny stuff that wove it all together, but the solution would start somewhere far more personal and knotted. Matt glanced at Claire's desk and the crowded bulletin board. That alone, all those layers of notes and papers, jokes and photographs, might hold exactly what he was looking for if properly deciphered.