What Has Become of You (4 page)

“Oh,” Jensen said. “You’re welcome.”

“Maybe you’ll find it to your advantage that you’ve already read the novel.”

The girl looked her in the eyes briefly. Her eyes were not a dark brown, as Vera had guessed they would be, but a dark amber color. The amber-colored eyes, along with her dark hair and pale, lightly freckled skin, made a pretty contrast, though Jensen wasn’t what most people would consider pretty. “Maybe,” she said, and she hoisted her knapsack over her shoulder. Then, without looking at Vera: “Do you mind if I ask you a question? It doesn’t have to do with the homework.”

“Shoot.”

“You said you’re writing a book. How do you do that—I mean, how do you go about writing a book?”

With a self-deprecating little laugh, Vera said, “Oh, I’m afraid that would take days to explain, if not weeks or months.”

“I guess I mean . . . how do you go about writing a
crime
book? What made you decide to do that?”

Vera twisted her mouth, thinking. Unconsciously, she began rubbing the fat pads of her thumb and forefinger with her other hand. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know if I can speak to writing technique or method here, but I can speak to the
why
. It’s because of my rather idealistic desire to see things end as happily as they can. To see justice done. To see the bad guys caught and the good guys cleared and the victims’ families given the peace of mind that they deserve.”

“No other reason?” Jensen asked.

Vera looked at her again. Was there something owlish in the girl’s gaze—some hint that at any moment she might cock her head, spread her impressive wingspan, and swoop?
No,
thought Vera, looking again into her placid, amber-colored eyes.
She’s a sweet girl, that’s all. A sweet, albeit strange girl—not that there’s anything wrong with
strange
.
“There are always other reasons,” she said.

“I thought so,” Jensen said. “Thank you for answering. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

Alone again and feeling nettled for reasons she couldn’t explain, Vera shook her head and sighed. Jensen was a peculiar sort of girl, but she would surely not be the only peculiar girl she’d meet today, Vera thought. There were two more sections to teach before her day was over—essentially a repeat of the morning’s performance. She hadn’t had a spectacular start, but it hadn’t been terrible, either, she thought, trying to view it in a glass-half-full kind of way. She should be thrilled that it had not been worse.

Nevertheless, she felt a flutter of disappointment she had not expected to feel, and it took her a moment to place where this disappointment came from. She had hoped to get a sense that the girls might like her. She had not really gotten this sense. Surprising, to realize this hurt a little.

Having completed her first day of teaching—having reviewed, critiqued, and second-guessed it dozens of times—Vera found the early-morning class was stuck in her mind. She thought of the two willowy girls, Autumn and Cecily-Anne, their swan-like necks bent toward each other; of contentious and political-minded Harmony scowling under her knitted cap; of quiet Sufia Ahmed with her great, dark, liquid eyes; and of Aggie Hamada with her dimpled, radiant face. She thought of Jensen Willard, who was somehow both dignified and vulnerable in her wrinkled dress and mud-caked boots. The whole group together, all twelve of them, had been the wild cards, the girls she couldn’t have prepared for.

The midmorning and afternoon sections of Autobiographical Writing: Personal Connections had been more along the lines of what she’d expected: girls who seemed friendly with one another, who talked to one another when Vera was talking; girls who tried to slip out their cell phones to send a text when they thought Vera wasn’t looking and even when they knew she was; girls who looked at her shrewdly when they wanted to give off the impression of being good, of paying attention. They had none of the morning class’s quiet sense of expectancy. There was something to be said for students who came in with no expectations.

Though the students in her second and third classes were a less interesting mix than her first, Vera had become progressively more comfortable in how she presented herself—honing and retooling the aspects of the discussion that hadn’t gone so well the first time around, keeping her topics on track, and even managing a few jokes that had made the girls in the later sections smile. Indulgent smiles, a small sop to Vera, but smiles nonetheless. The morning class, she thought, was never going to see her at her best; they were always going to be her trial run for the day. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, guinea pigs that they were.

At home Vera sat at her worktable and scrawled a few illegible notes about the first four chapters of
The Catcher in the Rye
. She typed up a list of discussion questions, a handout for the students; since the handout was a last-minute idea, she would have to go to school even earlier the next morning to make the photocopies.
Really,
Vera scolded herself,
you need to plan better in advance.
Again, the feeling of fraudulence nagged at her. A real teacher would be better prepared. Disconsolate at this thought, she tried to cheer herself with a bit of mindless TV, flipping between a reality show about brides and a reality show about people who were hiding in bunkers because they believed a deadly apocalypse was coming.

She picked up the remote again and paused at a local news station when the mug shot of a familiar face appeared in the upper corner of the screen. “As the date for the trial of the Angela Galvez murder draws closer, twenty-five-year-old Ritchie Ouelette of Biddeford, Maine, has changed his plea from guilty to innocent,” the news anchor said in liquid tones that barely masked her broad Maine vowels, but Vera was concentrating more on Ouelette’s mug shot. The young man had an elongated face, prematurely thinning hair, and an expression so incredulous, so seemingly without guile, that his picture was hard to look at. Vera had known he would come around to pleading innocent. Seeing this mug shot anew, she was even more convinced of her earlier hunch that he was, in fact, as innocent as he now claimed.

Vera prided herself in knowing a great deal about the criminal mind and considered herself intuitive when it came to determining a suspect’s guilt. Local serial killer Ivan Schlosser was a prime example—there had never been any doubt in her mind of
his
culpability. But Ouelette was young and nervous, the sort who could easily be coerced into his initial false confession, especially in light of the mounting circumstantial evidence against him—the carpet fiber from the trunk of his Ford found on the girl’s body, the unspecified DNA (blood, Vera imagined) that had been found on the vehicle’s front seat. There were some who also falsely confessed because they thought it would give them their fifteen minutes of fame, but Ritchie Ouelette didn’t strike her as that type. In all the news footage Vera had seen of him, he hunched his tall frame as though he wished to disappear into himself.

She thought again of her early morning class and what they had had to say about Angela Galvez. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Dorset, ordinarily so complacent, was still shaken by the crime that had occurred a few months before. The Dorset murder had, in fact, had some influence on her decision to relocate to that town. Still in Bond Brook when the story broke, she had started collecting news clippings about the Galvez murder, comparing her findings to other true-crime cases that bore some similarity to the case. She had even come up with a little psychological profiling of the culprit: He was a solitary figure, she’d decided. Probably someone who still lived with his parents. Past convictions might include minor charges for being a Peeping Tom or some other minor voyeuristic offense. He was someone who liked to watch people, and that desire to watch had escalated into a desire to touch, to control, to possess.

As it had turned out, Ouelette did not fit this profile. He was a young number cruncher with an associate’s degree in accounting, and he was raising his teenage brother by himself; he had once been charged with a DUI, but the criminal history ended there. Vera was sure that the person who fit
her
profile would damn well try to make use of his victim sexually before disposing of her body, yet there had been no discernible attempt to violate Angela Galvez, whose body had been found in a Dumpster behind a neighborhood Laundromat.

The news broadcast ended, and Vera sat in a stupor, watching the next two shows that followed. By the time evening had settled—another unseasonably warm evening, with the temperature holding fast—Vera became restless. To go out or not to go out? She decided it would do no harm to walk to one of her favorite bars for a solo congratulatory drink or two, a pick-me-up for having survived her first day at the Wallace School.

The bar she chose, a place called Pearl’s, was comfortable and dimly lit, with dark wooden fixtures and nooks where one could make oneself inconspicuous if one wanted to. Tonight she sat up at the bar, on a seat as distant from everyone as she could find; it was true that some men might notice her and try to strike up a conversation, but she trusted her ability to steer them away politely. Though she liked the validation of being thought attractive enough to single out in a bar—and found it hilarious that those who did ranged in age from twenty-two to sixty-two—it was the three-dollar well drink specials, and not the men, who drew her there.

An hour passed, then two. Vera enjoyed the music that was playing from the jukebox and even, in her own masochistic way, began to enjoy the banal conversations she could overhear from nearby tables. “I might have gone out with him a second time,” she heard one girl with a piping voice say to another, “but my ferret hated him. She hates all men. I think one time a man did something bad to her. You know, like a gerbil-type deal.” Her intention of leaving after two drinks somehow got cast aside, and as she was on her third drink, a man asked if he could take the bar stool next to her. “I guess so,” she said.

The man who’d taken the seat next to her ordered a bottled beer and introduced himself as Sam—or was it Stan? Hard to make out over the jukebox, not that it mattered to Vera. He might have been in his late forties but wore a boyish-looking athletic jersey; even after all these years, Vera never ceased to be surprised when athletically inclined men paid attention to her. She thought herself too intelligent-looking to warrant a second glace from them. Perhaps the memories of high school jocks jeering at her in the halls had helped her to formulate this opinion. She could only conclude, then, that some men didn’t look at her very closely or were not very picky.

“Let me guess,” the man in the athletic jersey said. “You’re a dancer, right? You have a dancer’s body.”

Vera looked askance at him; she had heard this one before. “No,” she said. “I’m a
teacher
.”

“What grade?”

“I’ve taught college English.”

“You look young to be teaching college.”

“I’m a writer, too,” Vera said carelessly, draining her drink. This was something she simply never said to other adults. They never believed it, for one thing.

“Yeah? Whaddaya write—I mean, nonfiction or fiction or what?”

Vera wondered if he knew the difference between the two, never mind the
or what
. “It’s about Ivan Schlosser. He was what I guess you could call a minor serial killer from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. He killed a preteen girl in Vermont, a teenage girl in New Hampshire, and a teenage girl right here in Maine, in my own hometown. There may have been other victims, but those were the only ones they pinned on him. I’m afraid his crimes were eclipsed by the much more publicized crimes of Ted Bundy.”

“Whatever gave a little lady like you an idea to write a book about a thing like that?” the man asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.

A little lady like you.
This struck Vera as rich. “Well, for one thing, the crimes really happened. And I personally find Schlosser very interesting.” Vera realized she was having a hard time saying the word
Schlosser
. Her next drink had arrived, and she took a long pull from her straw. “For another thing, crime itself is interesting.”

The man named Sam or Stan said, “You oughta write one about that little girl they found choked to death. Now that’s a story right there.”

“Funny, you’re not the first person to suggest that to me recently,” Vera said. “However, I suspect that story isn’t finished yet. Despite what the public seems to think, I don’t think they’ve arrested the right guy. I could be wrong, and I hope, for the sake of all the other little girls out there, that I am. Do you want to know what I think?” She leaned in a little closer to the man—not trying to be provocative, exactly, but wanting to be sure he heard her.

“Sure, honey,” he said. “Who do you think did it?”

“Well, that I don’t know. I was just going to tell you an idea that I’ve often thought about. See, sometimes I think it’s a fine line between being a writer and being a serial killer. It’s all about creation versus anticreation. Building versus destroying. They both require a lot of energy, don’t they? The difference between the two vocations might as well be arrived at by a coin toss. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one more likely to keep me out of jail.”

The man named Sam or Stan processed this for a second or two. Then he muttered something about needing to excuse himself to go to the restroom. She knew he would not be returning to his seat near her. She was terribly tickled with herself. Nearing the bottom of her fourth gin and tonic, she wondered why the drinks were hitting her so hard; rummaging around in her recent memory, she recalled that all she had eaten that day was a small ham sandwich, consumed at six in the morning. The air around her was beginning to feel soft and muted and velvety, which wasn’t unpleasant; it was, however, a sure signal that she should leave soon.

Once outside the bar, she found that a bitter wind had unexpectedly picked up—the first wintry night in more than a week—and as she drew her coat closer around her and ducked her head, a couple of frat-boy types rounding the corner and heading toward the bar shouted, “You’re going the wrong way, baby!” She smiled at them, head still held low. Was she supposed to act offended? She never knew how to negotiate such things.

The more she walked, the more evident her excesses became. She felt as if she were swimming through the streets of Dorset with the purpose and precision of a shark, yet she somehow also felt as though she were seeing herself at a great distance, hurrying home, trying to look sober and dignified and, yes,
driven
, while the real Vera floated fuzzily overhead. Her bladder strained with fullness. On one of her more recent late-night walks home from the bar, when no one else was out on the streets to witness this, she had not been able to make it home before her bladder let go—her tights and shoes were soaked by the time she let herself into her apartment, and she’d felt morbidly ashamed. The last thing she needed was to become one of those drunks who soiled herself.

Five blocks away from her apartment, she became aware of an even greater cause for concern than her straining bladder. She could hear footsteps behind her, and although it was too dark for shadows, she almost thought she could feel a shadow in front of her, cupping her like a cool hand—and she knew that such shadows didn’t stay silent and passive for long, the way shadows were supposed to. She knew that some shadows gathered and grew, becoming a whole coven of shadows, an unkindness of them—a mob.

Hey, Vera, where are you going? Are you going to cast some more witchy spells? Are you going to wish for some more people to die? Death is just a part of life, right, Vera? You weird fucking bitch. You
wanted
that to happen to Heidi, didn’t you?

This shadow had footfalls. This shadow was a certainty now. She tried to gauge its distance or nearness without turning around—no, she couldn’t turn around, for if she turned around she might freeze on the spot, just as one always did in nightmares. And the last time that had happened . . . well, the last time that had happened, all those years ago, it had ended very badly for Vera.

Keep going,
she told herself sternly.
Don’t panic.
She sped up her steps, clutching the strap of the purse she had slung,
bandolero
style, across her body in the manner she’d learned from living in New York City. She withdrew her apartment keys from the zippered sleeve of her purse, holding them so that the point jutted out between her fingers—a makeshift weapon suitable for stabbing an assailant in the eye, if it came to that. And then she was on the steps of her apartment, practically tripping in her haste to get up them and into the safety of indoors. She let herself in and turned around just long enough to see a man tramping down the street, away from her and toward whatever destination he’d had in mind all along.