by Phoef Sutton
“Sure. But I didn’t tell him anything else about me.”
“Just your name?” Kit was already flipping through the damned phone book. There was only one Carl Robson. “But cheer up,” Kit said, “maybe he won’t think to look.”
“You’re worried too,” Carl said.
“The check is a problem. I guess I’ll find the brother. You don’t know his name?”
“Sorry.”
Kit threw the phone book down. “Then I have to actually work.”
Carl caught Kit just as his car was pulling out of the driveway. Kit gave him his best patronizing look, but let him have his say.
“I was thinking about that letter from her little brother. He was supposed to be here just before she died, but in the letter he didn’t seem to understand her problem. Ackerman tried to explain that away, but I don’t think he was out here at all.”
Kit considered. “Why would he lie about that?”
“I don’t know, but it might be a good idea to talk to Jeff too. I wish there was a way to get in touch with him.”
“In Peru?” Kit laughed. “Wait, I have some good contacts, I’ll ask my lawn man.”
Carl watched him drive off. He stood on the curb and looked up through the eucalyptus trees to the twilight sky. He went back into the house and put Bobby Brown and the Rhythm Aces on the CD player. The music sounded hollow and tinny, fighting against the silence of an empty house and losing. He cranked it. His father wasn’t there to tell him to turn it down. “Searching, searching for my baby…” Carl turned it off in disgust.
EIGHT
The clock in the rented car read two a.m. Carl huddled in the front seat and missed the temperature button in his car. It was cold, but he’d feel warmer if he knew just how cold. He rubbed his arms and watched the huge, quiet, white house.
It’s late for her to be out, he thought. If she looks at a clock, she’ll think ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to get home, my folks’ll kill me, and she’ll drive back here and he’ll be waiting outside in his car to find her. If she looks at a clock. If she has the car. If she’s free to come and go at will.
There could be any number of perfectly harmless reasons why she might not be able to make it back here tonight. Any number. And if she didn’t, well, when the morning came, he could just go up to the house, leave his name and number and tell them to call if she shows up. They’d be glad to co-operate. They’d do anything to get rid of her.
And if she never did show up here? If he never saw her again, never heard from her? Would he find himself believing Kit’s idea that she was an apparition? Even if it were true, why would she have come to him? To haunt him into avenging her murder? But remember the feel of her, he told himself. Remember the taste of her. She was real and she needed him.
He drifted off to sleep in the front seat and dreamed he was kissing her while she rotted in his arms.
He slept for about ten minutes before his door was flung open, someone grabbed his arm and yanked him out onto the street.
NINE
Four blocks away, in another silent house, Jenny Kallen was reading a letter by flashlight under the covers. Her parents were asleep, the whole world was asleep, but she could never join them. She could never join them in anything now, she was too far-gone. The feeling inside was too different, too powerful, too wicked to ever let her be like normal people again. Tomorrow would set them apart from everyone and probably destroy them both, but if it did it didn’t matter. There was no denying it; there was no resisting it.
She would meet him tomorrow and she would be his. Tomorrow in the theater.
Carl was lifted off the pavement, shoved against the hood of the car and shaken once or twice before he had time to get confused.
“Who the hell are you?” The voice was loud and close to his face, the breath smelt of eggs.
Carl tried to look around the huge face that was barking so close to his. It was still nighttime. Jesse’s house was still not there.
“What the hell are you up to?” The voice was still barking. “You want me to call the cops?”
Carl coughed weakly and tried to speak. “I’m just waiting for somebody.”
He didn’t listen. “You and your crazy girlfriend have just about scared my wife to death and if I see you around here one more time I’m not gonna waste my time with the police, I’m gonna start breaking fingers.”
Carl admired the use of a specific image; his fingers were already clenched together, hoping to find safety in numbers.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t find her.”
“Who?”
“Jesse, the woman who came by here before.”
“Who the hell is she?”
Carl searched around for an answer. “She’s my wife,” he lied. “She has this brain problem, she forgets things. She used to live here and she forgets she doesn’t. I know she’ll be back, she’s bound to. Just let me give you my number, call when she comes. I promise you, it’ll be the last time she comes back.”
The man looked up at him, then relaxed his hold. Carl straightened up and looked at his assailant for the first time. He wasn’t a really big man. Just an average guy in pajamas, driven to an average fury because someone had been bothering his wife. Don’t mess with the loved ones, Carl thought, that brings out the monster in everybody.
He took the piece of paper Carl had scribbled his number on and pocketed it, then looked at Carl doubtfully. “You lost her, huh?” Carl nodded. “That’s tough. I’ll give you a call if we see her.”
Carl thanked him profusely and got back in the car, keeping his eyes behind him and trying to figure out what to do if the hand grabbed him again. It didn’t. He shut the door and started the engine.
The guy called out from the street, “You do have the cops looking for her, don’t you?”
Carl drove off without answering.
TEN
There were three other cars in the high school parking lot – a black BMW, a black Mercedes and Ted’s old Jeep. Jenny parked her mother’s Chrysler next to the BMW. As if, she laughed to herself, parking next to Ted’s car was too intimate.
She still had time to back out, she told herself. She looked at her face in the visor mirror. Not pretty, she knew that. She carried too much weight on her face. Her mousy hair wasn’t blonde or brunette or red or any color with a name – it was just the color of hair. Her eyes bulged slightly – the contact lenses had been a mistake. At least her glasses had hidden that popeyed look. Her skin was all right, if you liked a fair, creamy complexion. She didn’t. To her it looked pale and fishy.
How could anyone look at this face and feel anything? But he did.
And the way she’d dressed had been a real mistake. She fastened the buttons on her blouse which she had left daringly open this morning. She wasn’t sexy, and trying to be only made her look ridiculous. No one could want her. But he did.
She was just an ordinary girl. Less than ordinary. A forgotten, plain girl. She couldn’t make someone crazy. She couldn’t break a heart or wreck a home. But she was going to.
Time to do it now, she told herself. Time to start the engine and drive home and forget the whole thing.
She opened the car door and started walking towards the school. Just for a second she was a romantic heroine, walking elegantly, in the jeans she filled perfectly, toward her assignation with destiny. The world would scorn her, society would reject her, but with a love as grand as theirs, it wouldn’t matter what anyone said.
Then the second passed and she was a fifteen-year-old girl and she was very scared.
Ted Ryan’s office was tucked away from behind the backstage area. It was supposed to be a storage room, but the school’s chronic office shortage had let to its conversion. Ted resented it at first, – the ultimate show of disrespect from the school to its drama teacher, shoving him away in a closet back there in the dark. But if it had been intended as an insult, he’d turned it on its head. The storeroom was now his
secret enclave, his hidden court, his private domain.
It was bigger than anyone else’s office and the bare cement walls, metal beams and exposed light bulbs gave it a boho personality. But best of all it was private, tucked away behind the double locked doors of the theater, enshrouded by heavy back fly curtains. It was the perfect place to get drunk with his students and discuss theater and existentialism and the First Lady and race relations and the rain forest and Kurt Cobain and who was sleeping with whom.
The brightness of the kids amazed him. Ryan was sure that people only said today’s kids were shallow because they failed to observe them through the necessary filter of bourbon and pot. Most of the adults he knew needed about twenty minutes of mind-altering before they said anything worthwhile; why should kids be any different?
So the office gave him the opportunity to get to know the kids better. It gave him an opportunity to do any number of things he wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Like ruin his life, he thought with a grim smile.
He was married, of course. He lived well on his meager salary and had long since stopped resenting his low place on the social totem pole. What profession was looked on with more patronizing pity than that of a high school teacher? Everyone had been to high school, of course. Everyone else had been eager to leave, and the fact that he was still there wasn’t seen as a career choice as much as a failure, as if he’d been held back a grade or twenty.
If it hadn’t been for his office he might have believed that himself. But the office was so far away from everything schoolish. It was a little world all by itself. And the evenings spent rehearsing the millionth production of Blithe Spirit or Our Town were all apart too. You weren’t a teacher and they weren’t students in those times and in that place. You were just people. And you got to know them, and in this world some of those kids were older and had seen more of life than he had.
But not Jenny. Jenny was a sweet, bright innocent young girl. And he could have her today if he chose.
He walked out of the office and into the darkness of backstage. The huge black curtains in the wings muffled his steps on the hard wood as he felt his way in darkness to the lighting booth.
Her innocence was no deterrent to him. My God, he told himself, she’s fifteen and still a virgin. That was a miracle in this school and it couldn’t last long. Better for her that her first should be somebody who knew what he was doing, someone who’d be careful, someone who really cared for her, than some idiot pimply faced jock in the back of his car who wasn’t thinking about anything but a quick fuck.
And he did care for her. He thought about her constantly, could hardly keep his eyes off her in class. At night he dreamed about her, or at least he tried to. He certainly thought about her when half asleep and half awake. His dreams he never remembered.
She was so different from Laura. Laura was so worldly, so decadently mature. Jenny’s innocent enthusiasm was like a breath of fresh air after all the time he’d spent with cynical Laura. Besides, Laura graduated last year.
He opened the wire cage of the light booth and stepped in. He pulled up the huge wooden lever on the ancient light board–unbelievable that they’d never given him the money for a new one – and the stage was flooded with lights, all focused on the single rehearsal couch, center stage.
There was a knock on the loading door. He could go to answer it, but he knew it was unlocked. Better to wait and see who it was.
The door opened slowly and Jenny entered. Ryan stepped back into the shadows and watched. Good God, she’d tried to put on something sexy. It looked ludicrous on her, but it touched him deeply. He knew how self-conscious she was, how she liked to hide herself in drab, loose fitting clothes. She must be feeling as foolish as she looked in those tight jeans and that blouse – and my God she was undoing the top button. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She was baring herself to him, risking humiliation, the thing she feared most. Lord, she must trust him.
And that look in her eye as she crossed the stage into the bright lights. That wary look, half-hoping, half-fearing she might see something new. It was that mass of contradictions that had made him fall in love with her. The timid frightened little thing that walks into the light of danger. She’s an adventurer, he told himself, and I’m just a tired old love-smitten fool, willing to be everything she wants and everything she fears.
She sat on the sofa, looking straight into the darkness. Did she know he was there? He turned to walk out to her. He thought of turning down the lights. He’d turned them down for Laura, but then Laura had been through it all and was blasé about love, so he had to be the romantic; love is all about contrast. With a shy little thing like Jenny you kept all the lights on.
Jenny kept her eyes fixed in front of her for fear of seeing him and panicking, running, spoiling everything. She thought her heart would break if she saw him; break or burst. It was so wrong what she was doing here, so wrong in every way.
But he was such a good man, such a handsome, gentle man. So intelligent, so romantic. She loved him from the first time she saw him. Standing there on the stage, talking to the class in his beautiful gruff voice about art, about the power to move people. He cared so much. He had so much passion.
He could have been a great actor; she had no doubt of that. He’d be a movie star – no, that would be too cheap – he’d be a Broadway star, if it wasn’t for that wife of his. Oh, he denied it, but she could see how she weighed him down with responsibilities and worries. So he had to teach at this stupid school and it broke his heart to give up all his dreams. She used to say she’d give anything to make up for the sadness in his soul.
And then the silly had gone and fallen in love with her. Jenny. It couldn’t be possible. He must just feel sorry for her. But he said it was love and he wouldn’t lie, not on purpose. And instead of making him happier, she’d just made him sadder, damn it. But she could make him happier now, she thought, with a wave of panic. She’d wanted him so long and now he wanted her. It was horrible, like a nightmare and a daydream all coming true. She realized with a wave of embarrassment that she was wet between her legs. All this talk of love, she thought bitterly, when maybe all it came down to was that.
She jumped suddenly when she realized he was next to her, sitting on the end of the sofa. Had he seen her squeeze her thighs together just then? It would be too awful if he had, he’d been so disappointed in her.
“I was afraid you’d come here,” he said.
She nodded; there was no way she could talk. Her mind was crazy with the thought that he must know, that he could smell her scent. It seemed so strong to her, it seemed to fill the air around her with accusations.
“If you hadn’t I might have gotten through this, but now…I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.”
“What?” She tried to smile.
“Don’t tease me, I couldn’t bear it,” there was such hurt in his eyes. “I’m a teacher, I’ve never felt anything like this before. Not for a student. Not for anyone. I’m taking my life in my hands, risking my marriage, my career. What are you risking? I’m just an adventure to you. In a year you won’t even remember me.”
It hurt too much. She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Don’t say that.”
He stood in front of her, blocking out the lights from above. “Then what are you going to risk?”
She spoke, barely above a whisper. “We could go someplace.”
“And do what?”
She blushed. Why did he have to make her say it? “You could make love to me.”
He laughed. She looked up startled. It was a friendly laugh, but she didn’t see anything funny here.
“Is that it?” he said. “Is that all you can think about? I’m risking my life and all you want is a good fuck…What’s the matter? You don’t like the word? It’s a god, solid, Saxon word, one of the oldest in the language, from before all that French and Latin shit got mixed in. Why don’t you say it? Say it for me.”
She said it.
> “Good girl,” he stroked her face with his hand. “You can’t keep me waiting now.”
“Where shall we go?”
“What’s wrong with here?”
She was speechless for a moment. “But this is the school.”
“If we get caught somewhere else I’m just as dead.”
He moved closer to her. She flinched. “At least turn the lights off.”
“But I’m a teacher, aren’t I? If you’re going to learn anything from this, you have to see what I’m doing.”
She turned away. She would have gotten up to run, but he was standing too close to her. Not that he was holding her down of course, she was sure he wasn’t doing that.
“I can’t,” she said.
She felt him relax, sighing. “Then this is just a game, you don’t really care for me, is that it?”
“No, I care!” She said it quickly, without thinking.
“Do you really?” He took her hand and pulled it to him. “Feel that? That’s how much I care.”
ELEVEN
Kit kicked the lawn chair and Carl jerked out of it with a start. “You look like hell,” Kit said.
Carl drooped over the side of the chair, his head resting on the back of his hand. He felt like he was about to break into pieces.
“Didn’t you get any sleep last night?”
“I got some.” He staggered to his feet and stumbled back into the house for some coffee. He stopped half way through the living room when his brain kicked in. “Did you find Ackerman’s brother?”
“Yeah,” Kit threw his notebook onto the coffee table. Carl snatched it up. “Now are you going to call the police?” Kit asked.
“Not until I talk to him. Want some coffee?”
“Bullshit, Carl, she’s already been out there a whole night, what the hell do you think she’d going? The girl’s as helpless as she can be.”
