“If you say so.” I shrugged.
She wrapped her arms around herself as if fending off a chill. “I’m horrified.”
“Well, let’s see how she reacts to you. Class is next period.”
She stared at me and said, “Oh boy, I can’t wait.”
But Miss M wasn’t in class. According to our ancient substitute, Mrs. Blandish, she was “a little under the weather.”
PHILIPPA, OCTOBER 21, 1948
Judy and I agreed to meet up after school. We needed to make a plan to investigate what happened to Miss Martins. So, there I was, scanning Horsfield’s malt shop for her, peering in through the O in the red-enameled script that swept across its wide plate glass window. I felt jittery, nervous that I’d witnessed too much at Miss Martins’s apartment and said too much to Judy about it. This afternoon—and still now—my loyalties are strained, even divided, not that I’m somehow beholden to Miss Martins and not that Judy doesn’t deserve to know. In truth, I’m not sure what I actually saw, but it felt intimate, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done something to add to Miss Martins’s pain.
Inside Horsfield’s, kids from school were clustered around cafe tables. In their crisp navy-blue letter jackets, Jake Wallace and his buddies were peacocking for a group of adoring MBBS girls, including Her Holiness Ramona Carmichael. The last thing I wanted to do was bump into them, but I wasn’t going to be intimidated by Ramona and her entourage. So, I went in, chin-up, shoulders back, blinders on.
The warm, buttery smell of grilled cheese and the sugary odor of malt mingled in my nostrils and roused my stomach. I weaved between the tables, avoiding Ramona and the others, located two empty barstools, sat on one, and dropped my book bag on the other. I caught my reflection in the chrome service station behind the counter—a blurry twist of pink and blond. “My God, who am I?” I thought. “Just a smudge of flesh and freckles?” I wondered what I’d look like if I chucked my pastel palate and started wearing earth tones or even black, like Judy. Somehow that seemed wrong, too. Waking me from my self-loathing reverie, the waitress, Iris Baker, greeted me. She took my order—a vanilla malt and a piece of pumpkin pie with lots of whipped cream—and gave me a wink.
Judy is a regular at Horsfield’s, and she and Iris bonded over their mutual hatred of the MBBS crew. Ramona and the MBBS-ers make a point of reminding Iris how “blessed” she is, as a Negro woman, to have the honor of serving such lovely Christian girls as themselves. I can hear them now, congratulating each other on being such generous tippers: “I gave the poor thing a whole extra nickel!” Ramona and her lemmings are fools. The job at Horsfield’s helps Iris pay her living expenses while she studies medicine at Howard University. Luckily, Mr. Horsfield isn’t a stupid segregationist. As an undergraduate, Iris participated in sit-ins at cigar stores and diners that refused service to Negros. “She knows what she’s about,” Judy told me. “She’s not putting up with bigots. I want to be like that.” As far as I can tell, Iris is Judy’s only other friend.
I felt someone poking me in the shoulder and spun around. “Hi, Philippa,” Ramona said, smiling, her lips freshly lipsticked. Was she on her way back from the bathroom?
I wasn’t going to let her cooing fool me: “What do you want?”
“We need to talk,” she said, dousing her saccharine voice with a squirt of lemon.
“About what?”
“Your new best friend.”
“Don’t think so.”
She squinted at me, sizing me up. For a moment, I thought she was going to walk away, but instead, she grabbed my book bag and moved it to the floor. My first impulse was to tell her to scram, but I wanted to hear what she had to say.
“What are you doing?” I said.
She tucked her salmon-colored dress under her and slid onto the stool. “I want to be your friend. I really do. I wanted to when I first met you, but you developed such an attitude. It’s like you’re becoming her.”
“I never asked you to be my friend.”
“I have to warn you about her.” She touched her cross like she was making a solemn pledge to her Lord and Savior. “It’s my duty.”
“Go away,” I said, sitting up and turning away.
“Judy isn’t a good person.”
“Thank God!” I glared at her. “Good people are dull.”
“She’s done horrible things.”
“What? Like bombing cats with bricks?”
She seemed genuinely puzzled.
Iris whirled around, unveiling a creamy, frothy malt, and placed it in front of me.
“That looks decadent,” Ramona said. “But it would simply ruin my figure.”
“I thought you were impervious to sweets,” Iris responded. “The Lord willing.”
Ramona gave her a dyspeptic smirk.
“Say what you have to say,” I demanded. Beads of condensation were forming on the soda fountain glass, and the whipped cream was melting, losing its curled ribbon shape.
“Last year, Judy did something cruel to a boy…” Ramona glanced down and smoothed a wrinkle on her dress.
“Okay?”
“His name was Roy Barnes,” she said, lowering her voice. “He was a junior, a wonderful wide receiver, and an all-around nice fellow. Good looking, too. Anyway, Judy took a disliking to him. He wasn’t the brightest bulb, so that offended her. She enjoys taking offense but never considers how she offends.”
“Ramona.”
“Okay, so forgive me, this is inappropriate, but Roy got a reputation for going to the boys’ room during lunch and well…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “…abusing himself.”
Abusing himself! I couldn’t believe that’s where this was headed.
“It’s a sin and something us girls shouldn’t be concerned with,” she continued. “Anyway, Judy was working on the newspaper at that time. She caught wind of his distasteful habit and, one day, decided to prowl the boys’ bathroom, looking for headline material. She wore baggy slacks, tucked her hair into a golf cap, snuck past the hall monitor—that old blind goat Mr. Ives—and went into the boys’ bathroom, just outside the auditorium, which no one goes in. Apparently, she hid in an empty stall and waited for Roy. When he entered the boys’ room, she crept out and into the stall beside him. She’d hidden a camera under her baggy shirt. She climbed on top of the toilet seat, held the camera over Roy, and snapped a photo. The flash scared him so bad he slid off the toilet and banged his head on the partition.”
“He sounds like a real catch,” I said, growing tired of her gossip.
“He didn’t deserve what she did to him next.” She let it hang in the air for dramatic effect.
“Jesus, Ramona—what?”
“She sent the photo she took to his mother.”
I winced. Embarrassing him at school was one thing, but sending a photo home—well, Ramona had a point, that was cruel. It crossed a line. Walking in on Miss Martins was also like stepping over a forbidden border. It was so out of place with what I knew of her, but it wasn’t deliberate. I hadn’t meant to. I had trouble imagining why Judy would do such a thing on purpose unless there was more to it.
“He was so ashamed that he went to a private school across the city,” she added.
Iris set a thick slice of pumpkin pie in front of me. “Hello, honey,” she said, making eye contact with someone behind us.
We spun around. It was Judy.
“I was saving you a seat,” I said. “Ramona swiped it.”
“I was just leaving,” Ramona said in a squeaky voice. “Enjoy your food, Philippa.”
“Have a God-blessed day,” Judy said and gave her a benediction.
Ramona returned to her hive of MBBS girls.
Judy cast her black eyes on me, and I smiled. “I ordered for us.” I selected two straws from a chrome-lidded dispenser and planted them in the soupy malt. Neither it nor the pie were now particularly appetizing. Judy bent to her straw and inhaled the liquid. After drinking her fill, she said, “What did Miss Jesucr
isto want?”
“A question about homework.”
“I didn’t know she cared.”
I shrugged. The story about Roy Barnes was rattling around in my head. Ramona wasn’t warning me out of Christian charity. Still, I wanted to understand it—or at least find out if it was true.
After slicing off a piece of pie with the side of her fork, Judy said, “So, where do you think Miss M is?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, picking up my fork and jabbing it at the orangish-brown filling.
“Who do you think her lover is, if he is her lover? Another teacher? Or someone else at school?” Judy raised her eyebrows. “Could it be Cleve?”
“What?! No, he was an adult, much bigger than Cleve.”
“Hmm,” Judy said, holding her fork up, making little circles in the air. “Why was his shirt on? And his hat? If they were screwing, why was he wearing most of his clothes?”
“I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. I couldn’t summon any theories. The story about Roy was nagging me, taking up all my mental space. Sure, I believed that she could’ve done that to a boy, but not unprovoked.
“Well, you witnessed something,” Judy said, plunging her fork into the whipped cream. “But what?”
“He could be a maniac, a pervert, like the man who strangled Jackie—or Jack the Ripper.” A few years ago, I’d flipped through a book about the famous killer. I’d opened it to a photo of Mary Jane Kelly’s mutilated corpse. It was a horrible abstraction of blood, bedsheets, and limbs, a scorch mark on my brain.
“Can you remember anything else about him?” Judy said.
“His cologne. It was strong. Top-shelf.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m not sure…” I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the restaurant noises. “He was tall, wide-shouldered.” A kaleidoscope spun in my mind: the man’s thrusting rear end, Roy in the stall assailed by a camera flash, the black-and-white of Mary Jane Kelly’s body. I didn’t know what else to say.
“What about her?” Judy said.
“I couldn’t see her. Just legs.” I also remembered her arm, stretching out, her palm catching the light from the lamp. On the one hand, the gesture seemed pathetic, like she was giving up. On the other, it appeared persistent, like she was reaching out for something. Help maybe? I was about to mention it, a detail Judy would’ve sunk her teeth into, but I held back. Somehow, even as I think about it now, it feels too private to share.
Judy’s face darkened; she was indexing the information. “She’s never missed a day of school, has she?”
“Never.”
“We should check on the scene of ‘the crime,’ ” she said, sounding a bit like Calvin McKey.
I pushed the partially eaten pie away from me.
* * *
Judy has an I’ve-seen-it-all air to her that, for some reason, I assumed meant she’d lost her virginity or, at least, had messed around. But I wonder if I have it wrong. After all, she’s never mentioned having a beau or even pointed out a cute boy. When she brings up sex, she talks about it with an edge of disdain, as if it was all beneath her. Other than her scrutiny of Cleve or the occasional eye-roll in the direction of the football team—“Dunderheads! Simps!”—she hasn’t mentioned a single boy, especially not Roy Barnes.
I’ve considered telling her about my episode with Danny Barber back in San Fran. Perhaps it would get her to open up. I think about it all the time. He drove me home from the Midwinter Dance and, before dropping me off, turned his father’s Buick into a shady alley. He slid over, wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and without warning, smashed his face against mine, forcing my mouth open with his tongue, which began flopping around like a dying fish. “Throw it back!” I wanted to scream, but of course I couldn’t, because of his tongue. His left hand crawled up my satin dress and squeezed my breast, which he began kneading like a ball of dough. “Jesus,” I thought, “you’re not making biscuits!” While it was happening, I ordered myself to enjoy it, that it was something that should be enjoyed, but of course, you can’t will yourself to enjoy anything; that’s not the point.
Yes, he was handsome, even striking. I’ve checked out other boys, too. I could point to this or that about them—nice straight teeth, beautiful brown eyes, thick dark hair, full shoulders, muscular arms—but I always feel bored by them. The pretty ones seem more like pieces of art in a museum, staged and cordoned off. Perhaps that’s why I’m still such a novice. I don’t want to touch them or be touched by them. I’m not a prude. I’ve just never been properly inspired.
* * *
When we arrived at Miss Martins’s apartment, we knocked, but there was no response. I peered in the small window at the top of her door. The living room was shot through with angles of late afternoon light from the window wells. Its walls were bare, except the dusty outlines of picture frames. Cardboard boxes were stacked in clusters on the floor and on top of the furniture, most of which were everyday, inexpensive pieces. Only a cushioned stool, a ruffled loveseat, a frilly floor lamp stood out as more exceptional, more personal. A metal trashcan over-stuffed with garbage sat by the front door. No lights were on.
“She’s moving?” Judy said, cocking an eyebrow.
“But why?” Clearly, something was very wrong. I wondered if what I’d witnessed had brought all this about—or whether my witnessing of it set things in motion. Perhaps both.
We listened for movement from inside but heard nothing. No one was at home. Judy tried the door; it was locked. “Follow me,” she said, leading us to the sunken windows on the East Capitol Street side of the house.
“What are you doing?” I said with a huff.
Judy hopped down in a well and began tugging at the frame, testing it to see if it was bolted. “What does it look like?” she said.
“We could get caught!” I said. Even though we were below street level, we were still visible. My heart was in my throat. I’d never done anything like that before.
“We’d still have less to explain than Miss M.”
“She’s not going to see it that way,” I said, crossing my arms. “Neither are the police.”
We hopped out of the window well and dropped into the next one. This time we were obscured by a large boxwood. The pungent stench of the bush—like a thousand dogs had urinated on it (or one cat!)—flooded my nostrils. The smell didn’t faze Judy, though. She yanked on the window sash, and the grimy frame banged open, a crack splitting the glass. “Great,” I said. “Now we’ve damaged property. What next? Theft?”
“Do you think I like squeezing through a window into someone’s basement? A few days ago, you were a Valkyrie wielding an iron spear, and now you’re worried about a little snooping. Come on.”
Judy wriggled her thin body through the small window and landed lightly on a toilet lid. I stalled, giving the wisdom of breaking and entering serious thought, such as how getting caught might affect my future. But, as she always does, Judy demanded I take action, so I buttoned up my cardigan and, bracing against the frame, lowered my body through feet first. Judy steadied me until I was balanced on the lid.
The bathroom was lined with black and white tiles and outfitted with dull chrome fixtures. A claw-footed bathtub dominated the far corner; its faucet dripped steadily and a rusty streak stained its enameled surface. The odor of ammonia cleaner was intense. There were no personal effects. She’d already begun to move. Clearly, she’d been in a hurry.
The bedroom was also void of personal items, save a bare mattress, a box spring, and a simple oak headboard. Its soft rose-colored walls and the faint fragrance of lilacs were the only signs this had been Miss Martins’s bedroom. I shivered. I remembered the man, whoever he was, attacking her on the mattress, crushing her against the springs. I could still see his angry, jagged movements and his shadow over the bed. I could hear him say, “Someone’s here. Jesus Christ!” The panic I’d experienced that night surged through me again, that impulse to flee, matched only by my strange tractor
beam–like fixation on the scene. Why had I walked deeper into the apartment? Why I had I lingered even a second? My stomach felt hollow, caving in on itself.
Judy paused at the door to the kitchen and looked back at the bed. “Is this where you stood when you saw it—them?”
“Yes.” My head began to ache.
“And he was covering her?”
“Yes.” My pulse thrummed in my temples.
I’d seen her legs akimbo, her outstretched arm, and her hand—I knew its long graceful fingers. I’d watched them hold a piece of chalk and write, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” on the board in a script that was both exact and fluid, an extension of her.
Judy drew back the curtain. Its scraping sound yanked me out of my memory.
The kitchen’s celadon walls and white cabinets were warmer in the daylight, but other than the small table and chairs, it was empty too. The spot where I’d slipped on the puddle from the broken vase was clean. I stooped and looked under the table, hoping by some miracle that Love’s Last Move would still be there. Of course, it wasn’t. Judy ran her hand down the Formica countertop, inspected her fingers, and went into the living room.
I looked back into the bedroom, and something beside the bed glinted in a strip of sunshine from the kitchen. I went to investigate it. For a moment, I stood over it, a little astonished. It was Miss Martins’s beloved art deco moon pin. It seemed to be flattened, as if someone had crushed it underfoot. It was missing several faux diamonds, but the crescent was still in place. When I picked it up, I noticed that the fastener on the back was bent out of shape. “Look at this?” I said to Judy, who’d come to find me.
She examined it. “It would take some force to do that much damage, like someone meant to destroy it. Strange.” She slipped it into her pocket.
“I guess we’re stealing something after all,” I said.
Judy wiggled her eyebrows at me. “We need to look one other place.”
The Savage Kind Page 8
