“Of course not!” she said, rising to her elbows. A shadow of a thought crossed her face, and she said, “Listen, I have to tell you something—”
There was a rap on the door. It swung open, and Edith swooped in, now with her Raven mask off. “Dears,” she said like she’d just chimed fine crystal for a speech. “Why are you hiding out up here? The party is just warming up.”
I studied the sheen of her black dress, the hard line of her lips, her plucked eyebrows, her over-powdered cheeks, and her proud Roman beak. She was trampling on our private moment, and I had no patience for it. I wanted to lash out, to drive her away, but I was unsure how Philippa would react, so I held back, but just barely. “No thanks,” I said flatly. “We’re fine here.”
“Don’t be a sourpuss,” she chirped, crossing to the bed. “Philippa isn’t a mope like you. Are you, Philippa?”
Philippa, now on her feet, shrugged helplessly. I felt protective of her. I didn’t want Edith to get into her head.
Edith turned to me, and we locked eyes. For a split second, I saw a glimmer of something there, as if she was trying to grasp my mood—or even consider my point of view. Imagine! Then, I remembered her reaching down to me when we first met in Crestwood and running her manicured nail along my chin. “You’re perfect,” she cooed, “a perfect little girl.” Anger thumped in my chest, and in a modulated tone, I slowly spelled, “A–H–K–A.” Her eyes flickered, and she gave me an odd look, like a cat might to a strange noise. She’d had a realization, but she wasn’t going to acknowledge it—or even me. She looked as if she were about to float out the door and melt back into her party. So, feeling bold and, to be honest, vengeful, I said, “A–H–K–A,” again, giving each letter a crisp pop. Each letter bit into her, and with each bite, she became more alarmed. This time she couldn’t slip out, wrapping herself in gauzy denial. “AHKA,” I said again, pronouncing it as a word, an evocation, a necromancer’s spell, conjuring Jackie back from the dead. The little bow-festooned vampire was now in the room with us. “I know all about it,” I said. “AHKA. Anka. Anna. Whatever it is.”
Edith cocked her head, and the black feathers sprouting from her collar twitched. “How did you find out about—?” She caught herself, not wanting to reveal too much to Philippa, I assumed. “You’re babbling like an idiot.” She laughed, waving it away, her eyes damp. “Philippa, can you please tell me what’s wrong with her? I don’t see how you can tolerate her. She’s strange and ghoulish and disruptive. She wants to destroy my good mood!” Her voice was high and brittle.
“Bogdan didn’t do it,” I said, locking in on my target. “Crazed killers choose victims with similar characteristics. Cleve and Jackie were like night and day.”
“You don’t know that,” Edith said, sniffing at me. “Since when are you an expert?”
“Why wait all these years, then choose a victim who wasn’t your type?”
“The police have solved it. Just let it be.”
“So now you trust the police?”
“Judith,” she snapped, and then in a tighter, hotter voice, she said, “you have no idea what your father and I have been through. How could you?”
Philippa remained motionless, her arms crossed, and her shoulders drawn up. She looked like she wanted to click her ruby slippers three times.
“Cleve wasn’t molested,” I said, hopping up from the bed and tossing the pillow to the side. “The police know it, and we found out.” I approached her, gazing into her bronze irises, feeling razor-sharp. “He wasn’t fucked like Jackie.”
Her face contorted and flushed bright red. “Don’t you—!” she seethed. “Don’t you dare. It’s awful to think… just awful… my God…” Her eyes burned with tears. She trembled, unable to speak. Suddenly she cried out and left, slamming the bedroom door so hard it popped open again. The murmur from the party seeped in. Philippa walked to the door and closed it. The Chopin had ended, the crackle of the turntable filling the airless room.
CHAPTER FIVE
As I thumb through the past hundred and fifty pages or so, I notice a theme emerging: THE ABSENT MOTHER. That’s what we had in common, the fertile soil for our bond to grow. If I’m honest—the sort of honesty that comes with a few martinis and a cigarette or two (or three)—it’s mothers, or our lack of them, that spurred our misdeeds. We might be the angel and the harpy or Leopold and Loeb, but we were both born from ghostly mothers, phantom ladies who drifted along the battlements of our childhoods. We couldn’t be raised by a wisp of smoke at the end of a long corridor or a faint shadow in a high tower. We were left empty, desiring.
Maybe it’s not their absence that’s the problem, but the presence of another kind of materfamilias: THE INEFFECTUAL MOTHER. Poor Edith Peabody couldn’t find her way out of her grief, so tethered she was to Jackie’s memory, and Bonnie couldn’t find her way out of the kitchen, so wedded she was to the frying pan, and, let’s face it, Elaine Closs was no mother of the year—which is putting it lightly. In the grip of pharmaceuticals and her abiding despair, she couldn’t find her way out of a medicine cabinet. Of course, that may have been the idea. Anyway, none of them did much nurturing—well, not much that was of use. Bonnie tried, and Edith tried in all the wrong ways, and Elaine—she was beyond trying.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention yet another species of mother stalking her way through these pages: THE MONSTER MOTHER. A literary favorite. Think of the deformed child-eating Lamia from Greek myth or Grendel’s Dane-devouring mother from that cornerstone of English literature, Beowulf. Our monstrous mother is the inestimable Moira Closs, chinchilla cape swaying, bright eyes glaring, teeth gnashing. A controlling bitch of a woman. A Lady Macbeth with steely sanity and a penchant for unscrupulous self-preservation. Of course, I can easily—and with delight—point to her for the source of all our woes. But even monster mothers make better mothers than ghost mothers—they love fiercely. At the end of the day, I admired her. She knew what she was about, and she loved her son.
Since we’re on the topic of parents, let’s have a word about the fathers, shall we? Frankly, they’re kind of a blur; they melt together. If I concentrate hard, though, I can make them out, like tiny points on a continuum. Carl Watson was the upstanding, tight-lipped, morally righteous sort, terrified of his own flaws. Bart Peabody was always dissolving into the background, trying to be 3-D, but allowing alcohol to dilute him like watercolor paint. And Cleve’s father—well, he stands out a bit brighter and sharper, like a polished dagger wielded in the night. He’s there, then gone, the depth of the wound he caused uncertain; the blood is still seeping.
Of course, all of this is excuse-making. (Dear Reader, I can hear you saying it now!) We could endlessly blame our mothers and fathers for our behavior, but they’re like the masks we wear to avoid seeing ourselves clearly. Eventually, you have to take that mask off and say: “That’s me. I am what I am. I did what I did. No more excuses. No more fathers. No more mothers.”
* * *
PHILIPPA, NOVEMBER 1, 1948
After school today, Judy wanted to “stick a pin” in each of the pieces of information we’d collected so far to decide what our next move should be. So, once again, we climbed out of her bathroom window and up the fire escape. Still afraid to make the leap to Hill Estates, I crossed on the board. “Aargh, matey,” Judy said, “it’s always the plank for you!”
She fished a bag of M&M’s out of her sweater, ripped it open, and popped a few pieces in her mouth. “There are three crimes—Jackie’s murder. Cleve’s murder. And the attack on Miss Martins,” she said, holding the bag of candy out to me. I took several. In addition to smoking like a fiend, she had a sweet tooth. “Let’s lay out what we know about each.”
“Okay,” I said, slipping a pen and a notebook out of my lapel pocket. If I had to juggle clues, I might as well take notes. I didn’t see how any of it fit together, and it was beginning to bewilder me. “Let’s start with Miss Martins.”
“Hmm,” Judy said, mulling it over.
“On October twentieth, you walk in on a man having sex with—or maybe even attacking—Miss M. We now know the man is the gray ghost, because he wears that awful cologne, and he’s been following us. While you’re there, you drop your book, which either Miss M, or this man, or both of them find. Miss M is absent from school the next day. We search her apartment and find her smashed pin. Later, we walk in on her fighting with Cleve.”
“That’s right.” I gestured to her for more M&M’s.
“Then, Cleve disappears.”
I sucked on the chocolaty pebbles and scribbled a few notes. “So, we’re moving on to Cleve?”
“They run together,” Judy said, inhaling deeply. “There must be a connection.”
“Meanwhile, the gray ghost—I really want to stop calling him that,” I said. “It sounds like a bad detective novel: Ghoul in the Gray Hat by Ray Kane. ‘He comes for you by night. He comes for you by day. He’s the Man in Gray!’ ”
“No longer a Kane fan?”
“Moving on,” I said, wagging my pen at her. “The gray ghost starts following you and then both of us.”
“Why?” Judy said, popping more M&M’s.
“What do you mean?”
“Why is he following us? What does he want?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning my attention to the bright patch of sun on the chimney across from us and the high wispy clouds overhead. Coming back to earth, I added, “Maybe he thinks I could identify him as Miss Martins’s attacker.” The thought chilled me as I spoke it, and suddenly I was so glad to be on the roof with Judy, hovering above everything, gobbling M&M’s, safe for now.
“That makes sense.” She crumpled up the empty M&M’s bag and tossed it over the roof. She walked over to the chimney and forced a few low-set bricks loose. She produced a small flask. “Want some?” she said. “I filched this from Bart’s stash. It’s gin.”
“Ew. No.”
“Suit yourself.” She took a swig. “Okay, on to Cleve.”
“I’ll do him,” I said. “Although he’s always been the sulky sort, over the past few weeks, his anger at Miss Martins has been escalating.” I jotted notes while I spoke. “Then he runs us down on the sidewalk, and I clobber him with an iron railing. On the twenty-first, he and Miss Martins have it out. He calls her a whore and storms out of her classroom. The weekend passes, and his body is found washed up at the edge of the Anacostia. One of the witnesses mentions writing on his arm, which is most likely AHKA, but we need to verify that.” A thought flashed through my mind, and I gasped. “I forgot to tell you something! I was going to, but then Edith came in and it slipped my mind.”
Judy stared at me, her eyes urging, “Get on with it!”
Although I felt a twinge of guilt about breaking my word to Quincy, I explained to her that he’d told me that it was difficult to determine precisely what had killed Cleve, but that most likely, he had drowned. He wasn’t strangled like Jackie. I also told her about the traces of Bon Ami in his lungs and that Quincy had asked me if we’d discovered any Veronal in the Closses’ drug stockpile.
“Wow, Quincy was chatty,” she said, clearly pleased. “Hmm… I wonder about the Veronal. Maybe he was drugged and then drowned in a bathtub or pool. That would explain the Bon Ami. Then later, he could’ve been dumped in the river.”
“He also told me why they arrested Bogdan,” I said.
“The yearbook, I know. The police told Bart and Edith.” She squinted at me and twisted her lips in thought. “I’m beginning to think the Closses had something to do with his death, don’t you?”
“Cleve wasn’t happy at home. His father was gone a lot, and his mother—I don’t know, you saw her.” That day on the steps of Eastern High rushed back to me: Cleve bent over his biology textbook, blond hair catching the light. At that moment, I liked something about him. Perhaps his vulnerability—or his status as a fellow outcast.
“The queen bitch, the grandmother,” Judy said, after taking another swig of gin. “She knows something, I’m sure of it. And what about Cleve’s dad? We need to meet him and size him up.”
“Slow down. We’re not done yet,” I said. “Jackie has something to do with this.” Feeling bold, I gestured for her to hand me the flask. I took a whiff, winced, and drank from it. It burned like acid and soured my stomach. “Yuck, that tastes like rancid Christmas trees.”
“Bogdan didn’t kill Cleve,” Judy said firmly. “Maybe he killed Jackie, but he did have an alibi for her murder. The only thing that connects them, other than the Anacostia River, is the writing on their bodies.”
“What about the yearbook?”
“It just implicates him but doesn’t connect the two murders. Besides, it sounds too convenient, don’t you think?”
I glanced over my notes. “How do we go about checking what was written on Cleve? We need to know that for sure.”
Judy capped her flask. “The witnesses that found the body.”
“Rody James and Linda Wells?”
“That’s how.”
Back inside, we located Bart and Edith’s phone directory, grabbed the phone in the Peabodys’ main hall, and hunkered down in the powder room. It was as far as the line would stretch. We searched for the names. We didn’t find a Linda Wells, but we did find three Roderick Jameses.
Doing my best impression of Torchy Blane—the swift-talking journalist from Torchy Gets Her Man, Fly-Away Baby, and Smart Blonde, all movies I’d adored when I was little—I impersonated a Post reporter. With the receiver between us, we rang the first Rody. No one was home. The second Rody—he went by Rory—growled about clogging the party line and hung up. Finally, the third Rody answered. After I explained that I was calling for a follow-up interview, he said, “Well, I don’t have anything new to add. I’m still reeling from the whole experience.”
“Our follow-up article will go more in-depth, make use of the human angle,” I said, having no idea what “the human angle” might be.
Judy rolled her eyes.
After soliciting some background information from him, I asked, “Would you mind describing the scene again? We want to see it from your perspective.”
“Okay, okay,” Rody said. “Well, let me think. Linda and me, we’d prepared a Sunday picnic. We decided to go down by the Sousa Bridge. It’s not far from my apartment on Kentucky Avenue. Linda, who lives in Cincinnati, was visiting me—we’re engaged, you see.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
Judy glared at me and gestured for me to hurry up.
“Anyway,” he said, “we’d just finished eating—we’d set up a nice little spread, but we had to bundle up in the blanket to keep warm. It was a cool day. That’s when Linda pointed over my shoulder and said, ‘What’s that?’ I stood for a closer look. I thought he was debris from a boat or something. But there he was, thirty or forty feet from us, floating facedown in an inch or two of water, his body stuck in the silt. He was stripped to the waist, and I could see he had something written on him.” He paused. “But the cops don’t want me gabbing about that.”
“It’s okay, Mr. James,” I said, trying to balance being at once amiable and authoritative. My mind was racing. How do I get him to spill the beans? So, I decided to use one of Judy’s tricks: “We already know that AHKA was written on his arm.”
“Oh, I’m glad the police are sharing information with you. It seems important.”
Confirmation! I gave Judy a thumbs-up. “Thank you so much for your time, Mr. James. Look for the article in the next few weeks.”
“Is that all you need?”
“Yes sir, you’ve been extraordinarily helpful.”
“I hope they catch the guy who did it.”
I hung up.
So, it was true: Jackie and Cleve had the same word written on them. Judy was frustrated by the news, but not daunted. “We need to find out more about the yearbook. Bogdan’s boat is moored on the Washington Channel near the Tidal Basin. I overheard B and E talking about it. That’s our next step. After s
chool tomorrow, we’ll go.”
On my way home, the weather began changing again, becoming gray and chilly. The trees’ limbs were showing through the leaves like lines of ink on washed silk. The shift in the weather or the swig of gin or the phone call—or all of it—had brought on a spidery headache. Rody’s description of Cleve’s body lingered, and even now, still won’t go away. To be honest, it satisfied a morbid curiosity in me, but I feel ashamed of that urge. Although Cleve was no friend—he’d tried to run us down after all—I didn’t want that horror to happen to him. I saw Elaine Closs’s unfocused eyes, her uncertain voice, her broken bearing. That was what devastating grief looks like, but I didn’t feel it then, and I don’t feel it now. When Blake Le Beux committed suicide, I felt nothing, too—or no, that’s not true: I was awestruck, like he’d done something fearless and remarkable. Maybe that’s how I feel about Cleve’s murder: there’s daring in it.
JUDY, NOVEMBER 2, 1948
Dewey has it in the bag. Damn. I wish I were old enough to vote. Truman, who’s something of a reformed racist, seems to care about civil rights, about Iris’s rights and Alice from Crestwood’s rights. The buzz is exciting—but damn the polls!
Anyway, after school, Philippa and I waded through the Election Day pandemonium and caught the streetcar on Pennsylvania Avenue and rode it down Independence Avenue to the marina. By the time we arrived, a storm was rolling in. Uneven raindrops splattered the streetcar’s windows, and the sky was tarnished blue-black. When we stepped out, I popped open my old umbrella, and we walked down to the maze of boats, most of which were leisure cruisers and motorboats covered with white tarps for the winter. A fishy odor wafted through the air.
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