“I tried calling first. But you weren’t answering your phone. And like I said, this is important.” As Flo unlocked her door, Allison tossed a backward glance in the direction of Averson’s office, adding, “Though maybe not quite as important as your staying on top of the latest office gossip.”
They stepped into Flo’s office and she closed the door behind them. “Please. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? I don’t see anything ridiculous about it.”
“You don’t see anything, period, because there’s nothing for you to see. The woman’s a colleague, Ally, that’s all. Jesus.” Flo threw herself down in the chair behind her desk. “Now, what is it you wanted to talk to me about? Not your wacked-out teacher story again, I hope.”
Allison had a difficult choice to make: Act like she didn’t know that Flo was trying to divert her attention from Averson, and say what she’d come here to say, or pursue an argument over something that probably—hopefully?—amounted to nothing more than a harmless, if vexing, flirtation. The latter felt more urgent at the moment, but if she missed this chance to find out if Flo could see a pattern in her “wacked-out teacher story” that she could not, Allison might not get another one until late tonight, if not the next day.
Allison chose to leave “Patti” Averson alone for the time being and told Flo about her day.
She started with her interview of Laura Carrillo and ended with the brief meeting she’d had with Michael Edwards and Milton Weisman. To her credit, Flo listened attentively, and even managed to avoid rolling her eyes. But maybe a guilty conscience was behind all her good behavior. Allison couldn’t stop herself from suspecting as much.
“Well, you’ve been right about one thing,” Flo said when Allison had finished. “There is more going on here than just—how did you put it this morning?—‘a teacher going postal in the classroom.’”
“I know, right?”
“It sounds to me like they’re all crazy. Carrillo, the boy’s father, this old man Weisman. And in all likelihood, the boy’s mother, too.”
“Yes, babe, but crazy how? Everybody seems to be suffering from their own personal delusion. Carrillo thinks the Edwardses faked a death nobody can remember. Weisman thinks he, the Edwardses, and Carrillo do remember it, but that it wasn’t a fake death at all. And Michael Edwards. . .I don’t know what the hell he thinks, other than that I’m writing a hatchet job solely intended to destroy Carrillo’s career.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No! I admit that there’s almost nothing I could write at this point that wouldn’t be damaging to her, but is that my fault? The story is what it is. I can’t change it just to lessen its impact on Laura Carrillo.”
“Good for you. That’s precisely the right attitude to have.”
“So I’ve got the right attitude. What I need now is the right perspective on this mess. Exactly what am I dealing with here? I think I get that it all starts with Michael and Diane Edwards somehow, but in what way? Carrillo’s charge that they faked their son’s death just doesn’t make sense. There’s no evidence that they ever did such a thing and I can’t imagine what their motives would have been if they had. Can you?”
“Well, the most obvious answer would be for the insurance money. But nobody bilks an insurance company out of a life insurance benefit just to declare half a year later that the insured never actually passed away.”
“No, they don’t.”
“And yet, you say both the teacher and the old man appear to have been convinced by the boy’s parents that he was deceased.”
“Correct. But again, why? Why would they want to make two people, and only two people, believe that their son was killed in a car accident? And why single Carrillo and Weisman out for such a deception?”
Flo shook her head. “I have no idea. But I will say this. If Carrillo’s right about them being born-again, fundamentalist Jesus freaks, any discussion of rational motive would be a waste of breath. People like that don’t need a motive to do the things they do.”
“People like ‘that’?”
“You know what I mean. Believers. Acolytes. Subscribers to the idea that there’s something out there bigger than us that hears prayers and answers them, just because it cares to.”
“You’re talking about people like me, Flo.”
“Am I? Maybe. But not really. Because let’s be honest, Ally. All you do is say the words. You believe, but you never let your belief get in the way of what you want to do. Correct me if I’m mistaken.”
Allison couldn’t. And much to her surprise, this shamed her.
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Flo went on. “Absent your lack of demonstrable faith, you and I could never be together. Peaceably, anyway.”
“And if that were to change?”
“That would be very unfortunate for us. It hasn’t, has it?”
“No, but. . . .” Allison had no idea how to complete the sentence. “No,” she said again, forcefully this time. “Of course not.”
“Miracles aren’t real, Ally. God isn’t real. Whatever’s behind this circus you’re writing about, it’s not a God-given miracle. Trust me on that.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
The question had surprised Allison herself.
“Yes, why. Why should I trust you on it?” She paused to cushion the blow of what she was about to say, painfully aware of how Flo might react. “I know you feel like an authority on the subject, after everything you went through with your father’s passing and all.” The accounts all ended the same way, with an angry, disillusioned little girl weeping hysterically in the back seat of a limo as the man she had loved more than all others was being lowered into his grave. “But—”
“But nothing,” Flo said, whatever patience she had for this conversation on the wane. “And leave my father out of this.”
“I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t mean—”
“You have no idea what it was like and, if you’re lucky, you never will. Watching someone you love wither away and die like a starved dog.”
“You’re right. I can only imagine what that must have been like.”
Allison’s admission seemed to take some of the fire out of Flo’s indignation. “I could talk to you about it until the sun comes up, and you’d still never understand. Diagnosed in November, dead in December. Near the end, he was in so much pain, he didn’t have the strength to turn his head on his pillow.”
Allison started to make another attempt to apologize or commiserate, and decided to remain silent instead.
“And all the while, he prayed,” Flo went on. “And I prayed. Everyone around us prayed, the church congregation and my classmates at school, day and night, twenty-four seven. All of us begging for God to show himself, to display his great mercy and power and love for my father. And of course, nothing happened. Nothing.”
Her bitterness sounded brand new, as raw as the day it had been born. Flo wasn’t above shedding tears—Allison had seen her cry many times, over countless other things—but her father’s death was an injury she was all done being humbled by to such an extent.
“Nine years old and I thought my life was over. What a fool I was.”
“You weren’t a fool.”
“I was a fool! Believing right up to the very end—to the very end, Ally!—that my prayers would make a difference. That this God of Moses my father had taught me to love and trust would do the impossible just because I asked.” She laughed at the utter idiocy of the idea.
“You weren’t a fool,” Allison said again. “You just. . . .” She searched for the words, the thought occurring to her she was as much defending herself as her partner. “You just expected too much.”
“Excuse me?”
“What I mean is, you probably thought it was a given. Of course God would save him. Your father was a good man, a man of
the cloth, and you were his little girl. You deserved to have your prayers answered.”
“You’re goddamn right we did.”
“But faith isn’t a meritocracy, Flo. What we deserve often has nothing to do with what we get.”
“Exactly. You’re the same hapless victim of circumstance whether you believe or you don’t.”
“That’s not exactly what I said.”
“No, but that’s what it boils down to. A god who cares for you but only lifts a finger to save you when it suits him? What the fuck is that? Who but a fool would prefer to believe that shit to believing in nothing at all?”
Allison couldn’t see her way around denying it: “A fool like me, I guess.”
Flo shrugged, as if to say, Well, there you go.
Allison fell silent.
“I don’t want to talk about ‘God’ anymore,” Flo said. “I have to get back to work.”
“Flo. . . .”
“Look, I don’t know what else I can tell you that shouldn’t already be obvious to you. I think your instincts are right about the boy’s parents. Whatever’s going on, it almost certainly begins with them. But what exactly it is, I haven’t the slightest. If I had to guess, I’d say it’ll turn out to be exactly what the teacher says it is: some kind of phony miracle designed to draw attention to whatever twisted variety of Christianity they happen to subscribe to. As for the old man. . . .
“Weisman.”
“He might be the target of the whole scam. The elderly are often taken advantage of in all kinds of sick and duplicitous ways, especially if they have money.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m sorry, Ally, but that’s really all the time I’ve got for this. If you absolutely insist, I suppose we can talk about it some more when I get home tonight, but I’d really rather we didn’t.”
Allison’s mind turned once again to Patricia Averson. “And what time do you think you’ll be home?”
“I’m not sure. But it’ll probably be late. I had to cancel my afternoon class today for technical reasons, so I have to rewrite next week’s lesson plan. I’d just as soon do that now as later.”
Allison nodded, not able to counter such sound reasoning for being left to an empty bed again. She waited to see if Flo would send her off with a good-bye kiss, but her partner didn’t move from her seat. Allison went around Flo’s desk to do the honors herself.
“I love you,” she said.
Flo smiled. “Me, too.”
Saying the right words, but with very little feeling behind them.
TWENTY-SIX
LAURA MADE ONE MISTAKE.
Elliott had come home from work in a conciliatory mood and she was happy to forgive him. She told him her visit with the district psychiatrist had gone well, and she was ready and able to admit now that Adrian Edwards’s death and burial were just tricks her mind had been playing on her, false memories produced under work-related stress she’d been in denial about. It sounded too good to be true, or course, and Elliott had to grill her thoroughly before he would believe it, but eventually, his skepticism gave way to relief. Laura had come back to reality.
She was thrilled to see her lie go over with such great success, and telling it had been easy enough, now that Allison Hope knew the truth. It was no longer left to Laura alone to speak it, to convince people Michael and Diane Edwards, and not she, were the ones who needed to be psychologically evaluated. Hope was her ally now, a professional bird dog who would ask all the questions Laura wanted asked until she discovered what the hell was going on.
Laura would be content to play the fool in the interim. While Hope did the dirty work of refuting all the evidence that Laura was delusional, Laura would pretend she had been precisely that, but was no longer. Elliott would stop worrying and believe in her again. The school district, reassured by her revitalized hold on reality and willingness to continue seeing Noreen Ives, would authorize her return to the classroom. All would be as it had been, with the exception of Laura’s growing impatience for Hope to serve her purpose and make sense of the nightmare Laura had been made to live for the last three days.
It was a good plan, and it was working. As she had demonstrated in Ives’s office, Laura was actress enough to convincingly fake contrition. The quiet dinner with Elliott was the return to normalcy Laura had been hoping for.
And then Elliott found Hope’s business card on Laura’s bedside table.
“What’s this?”
The question took her off guard. She had intended to put the card in her purse, or in a drawer Elliott rarely opened, but she’d forgotten to do either.
“What?”
“This card. From Allison Hope. She’s a writer, it says.”
Laura’s alacrity at lying on her feet had abandoned her. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Who is Allison Hope, Laura?”
“Nobody. She’s just—”
“Not the reporter Howard warned you about? The one who’s doing a story on what happened to you at school?”
Elliott waited, and it was obvious he was prepared to go on waiting for as long as it took Laura to find her tongue.
“Yes. She was here. But I didn’t tell her anything, Elliott, I swear.”
“And yet you kept her card. Why?”
Laura didn’t know what to tell him.
“You took her card because you talked to her. You weren’t able to stop yourself.”
“No!”
“What did you tell her, Laura? I want the truth.”
And something about his tone, about the self-righteous inflection with which he had infused the words, turned Laura one hundred and eighty degrees.
“The truth is all I have been telling you. But you refuse to believe it.”
“And Hope?”
“She does believe me. Or at least she’s willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Which is all I’ve ever wanted from you.”
Elliott shook his head. “You’re out of your mind. You told her that insane story about Adrian Edwards and this car accident that never happened? Is that what you did?”
“Yes.”
“Knowing what it would mean to your career? For what, Laura? What good did you think it was going to do you to expose yourself like that?”
“It’s not me she’s going to expose. It’s them. They’re the ones who’ve been lying all along, not me.”
“Even if that were true, how the hell is Hope supposed to prove it? How could anyone prove it? There’s no evidence to support your story! Nobody else remembers the boy dying because he never did. There was no accident in the park, there was no funeral, and there was no conspiracy to make people believe otherwise. It’s all in your fucking head! When are you going to understand that?”
This was a different Elliott than she had seen of late. For the last three days, they had been arguing constantly, Laura on the offensive, her fiancé on his heels, trying to defend himself. But now Elliott was the aggressor, his patience with Laura having finally worn thin enough to break.
“I can’t understand something that isn’t true,” Laura said. “I wish I could, but I can’t. Adrian’s parents led us all to believe he was killed in a car accident eight months ago. They held a funeral for him and we all went. You, me, and a half dozen people I work with at school.”
“Laura—”
“I remember the flower arrangements at the gravesite. I remember you wore that awful brown tie of yours with your blue suit, and the argument we had over it before we left home. I remember that it began to rain near the end of the service, and I turned an ankle, slipping on the pavement getting into the car. These aren’t things I imagine happened, Elliott. I remember them. Just as clearly as you remember what you did at work today.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Possible or not, it’s what’s real. And no
body’s going to convince me that it isn’t. Not you, not Howard Alberts, not anyone.”
“And Dr. Ives? If you’re so goddamned convinced this ridiculous ‘truth’ of yours is what’s ‘real,’ why didn’t you share it with her today instead of Hope?”
“Because I want my job back and she wouldn’t have believed me if I’d been honest with her any more than you do.”
“So you chose to confide in a reporter instead?”
“That’s right! Who else was I going to confide in?” Laura knew the line she was about to cross, but she was beyond caring now. “I need answers, Elliott. I need someone to help me find out why this is happening to me and what it all means. And it’s for damn sure I can’t count on you to help me anymore, isn’t it?”
Elliott couldn’t hide his hurt. “She’s going to destroy you,” he said.
“Maybe. I don’t know. But before she can destroy me, she has to prove me wrong. And I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Elliott stared at her, his anger finally spent. “I love you, Laura. I swear I do. But if you’re determined to do this, to throw your whole life away, you and me included, just to keep from admitting you’re sick and need help. . . .” He shook his head again. “Then I don’t want to be around to watch. I can’t. I’m sorry.”
He was out of the room and gone before she could utter a word to stop him.
The thought that he might never come back struck her almost immediately. She was torn between rejoicing and falling apart. Elliott was everything to her, and yet, over the last three days, he’d been almost nothing at all, just one more voice in the crowd declaring her a madwoman. She knew the hurt of his leaving would come, that she could hold the pain off for only so long, but right now she was glad to be rid of him.
Like all the others, he was wrong about her and, with or without the help of Allison Hope, Laura would find a way to prove it.
* * *
Something was different about their father, and Milton’s daughters weren’t sure that it was more for the better than the worse.
All his terrifying talk about killing a little boy with his car in March was done. He hadn’t said a word about it since Lisa had brought him dinner three hours ago. This was the change in him she and Janet had been praying for, and Lisa was happy to let sleeping dogs lie. But not Janet. Janet had to know why their father had stopped talking about the accident. Within minutes of joining them for dinner, Janet poked and prodded him on the subject, never satisfied with hearing an answer only once. Lisa could have strangled her.
In Things Unseen Page 18
