The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  “No, mid-March. Just one of those cold early spring nights.”

  “So after Nica and Jamie broke up,” I say, thinking out loud.

  “You were expecting her to have cheated on him?”

  “No, it’s just I still don’t know why she ended it with him. And if she fell for someone else, that would explain it. Did she ever tell you?”

  “She refused to discuss him, which was fine by me. The two of them were done, she said. That was all I needed to know.” A pause. “You and Jamie are friends. Can’t you just ask? Or won’t he talk to you about it?”

  “The breakup? Before Nica died, that’s all he talked to me about. Hours and hours and hours, every night on the phone.”

  I feel Damon’s eyes fix me sharply.

  “What?” I say, not looking at him, self-conscious because I know I’ve just given something away. “Like you said, he and I are friends. Friends talk.”

  “Then that’s the first thing we should try to find out.”

  I stare at him. That the we was on purpose, not a slip of the tongue seems too much even to hope for.

  “You think I’m going to let you run around by yourself, chasing after a psycho who’s killed two people and—”

  I interrupt. “Two? How did you come up with that number?”

  “Nica plus Manny. Am I forgetting someone?”

  “No,” I say. “Jesus, I was. I was so focused on Manny not having killed Nica that I didn’t, like, take the logical next step. Of course. Someone must have killed Manny, too.”

  “And made it look like a suicide.”

  “Wow, yeah.”

  We’re both quiet, lost in thought.

  It’s Damon who finally speaks. “Get up.”

  “What? Why?”

  “So you can help me get up. My leg’s stiff. All right,” he says, once I’ve pulled him to his feet, “I’ll see you tomorrow at the office. Sleep tight.” He starts off down the street toward his grandmother’s.

  The abrupt end to the conversation has taken me by surprise, and for a while I just stand there, watching him. When at last he’s absorbed by the darkness, I snap out of it. Begin walking myself.

  I’ve just about reached my car, when, suddenly chilly, I slip my hands into the pockets of Nica’s jacket. My fingers collide with something. I pull it out. A torn-off piece of blank paper, folded in half. I unfold it.

  Nica,

  Jeanne’s been acting skittish lately. I’m FREAKING out. Does Bill know about us? I thought we’d been so careful, but maybe not careful enough. Could he have said something to her??? I need to talk to you. Same place? Same time?

  T

  As I drive home, I keep looking at the scrap of paper on the seat beside me, rubbing my eyes over the words on it, trying to interpret them, understand how they might connect to Nica’s death. Jeanne is Mrs. Bowles-Mills’s first name; Bill, Mr. Mills’s; making T, obviously, Mr. Tierney. So Mr. Tierney was romantically involved with Nica, just as Jamie had thought before he spotted Mr. Tierney skulking outside the Millses’ house all those months ago.

  The anger I feel toward myself is so overwhelming it makes it hard to breathe. Had I been a little sharper, a little slicker, not quite as wide-eyed, I would have put this together much sooner. Wouldn’t have made the naive assumption that because Mr. Tierney was sleeping with Mrs. Bowles-Mills he wasn’t sleeping with Nica too. Would have understood that an affair with a middle-aged woman in an unhappy marriage made an affair with a teenage girl with a reckless spirit more likely, not less.

  But if T’s identity is clear, not much else in the note is. It sounds as if Mr. Tierney had ended things with Mrs. Bowles-Mills and she wasn’t happy about it, that Mr. Mills might have seen or heard something that led him to believe Mr. Tierney and Nica were a couple, and that Mr. Tierney was afraid he’d voiced these suspicions to his wife. Why was Mr. Tierney afraid, though? Or, rather, of what was Mr. Tierney afraid? That Mrs. Bowles-Mills would rat him out to the school? To the police? That she’d turn violent? That she’d make Mr. Bowles-Mills turn violent? Toward him? Toward Nica? Or was he the one who turned violent? He sure sounded desperate in his writing, practically beside himself. Could the vector of his desperation have changed? Become directed at Nica?

  The only way I’m going to get answers to any of these questions is by asking. Confronting Mr. Tierney’s a definite. What isn’t, though, is whether to take Damon with me when I do. I’m torn. He’s just agreed to help me find Nica’s killer, which means he’s entitled to be informed of any new developments. But he’s also just finished telling me that Nica was the love of his life. Does he really need to hear about the other guy she’d been fucking while she was with him?

  I decide to pursue the lead on my own. If it goes somewhere, then I’ll tell him. But only then.

  Chapter Twelve

  I crawl into bed at a quarter past five, crawl out again at a quarter to eight. Queasy with morning sickness and lack of sleep, I shower and dress for work. Head downstairs to slosh milk and cereal around in a bowl, leave the bowl in the sink or on the countertop—some conspicuous location where it will have to then be moved by Dad to the dishwasher. Once I enter the kitchen, though, I take two steps toward the refrigerator and stop short. The room is filled with stink: cheap alcohol combined with openmouthed breathing. I turn. There’s Dad at the table, under Nica’s Dream, body slumped sideways in the chair, lips mashed against a plastic mat with different types of citrus fruit on it, hand curled around an empty bottle with the familiar yellow label.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve found him like this. It isn’t the second time either. He hardly ever used to touch liquor. A beer occasionally or a glass of wine with dinner, but that was it. Since Nica died, though, drinking Jim Beam until he passes out is a regular thing with him. I know I should probably say something, ask him if he needs to see a counselor or join one of those programs with the steps, especially now that his doctor’s prescribing him trazodone. (Not that he’s exhibited much interest in the drug. He picked up his refill at the pharmacy weeks ago. The bottle’s still sitting in its crinkly white bag on the end table by the front door.) And it’s not as if I don’t understand the impulse, using a chemical substance to allay a pain that isn’t physical.

  Which is why I turn around, tiptoe out of the room. After all, Dad isn’t raising his blood alcohol level during the day, on the job, or posing a threat to anybody’s safety. It’s only at night, after he’s met his obligations—obligations primarily to me, providing food and shelter, the steady presence of a parent who won’t leave no matter how bad it gets—and only when he thinks he’s alone, no one around to witness the gruesome and heartrending sight of a man falling to pieces. If I wake him to help him upstairs to bed, he’ll realize I know about his drinking, and once he knows I know, he’ll feel compelled to stop. And, the truth of the matter is, I don’t want him to stop. I believe that he’s been pushed past the point of endurance, that Nica’s death has broken him, and that alcohol is what’s keeping him going, allowing him to function; it’s what’s allowing him not to function, too, to shut off, lose consciousness for a couple hours. And God knows he deserves whatever peace he can get.

  I decide to close the A/V department a period early, just cross my fingers and hope no late-day requests come in. As soon as seventh is over, I lock up and head to Knox Theater. Slipping in through a side entrance, I take the staircase down a level and walk along the corridor, passing the office of Mr. Savvides, the drama teacher, the storage room that contains old stage sets, some from as far back as the forties and fifties, then pause in the doorway of the ceramics and woodworking studio.

  Mr. Tierney’s at the wheel. He’s wearing a linen shirt, shorts, tennis shoes with no socks, his thick, wavy hair mussed just so. As he works, his hand moving up and down inside an expanding clay wall, he talks to a pretty junior, Leigh Cullen. I can’t hear what they’re saying over the hum of the wheel, but the soft cadences of their voices let me know it’s flirtatious. L
eigh drops her head as she responds to something he’s said. When she does, I see him look past her to catch his reflection in one of the dark wall tiles opposite.

  At last he notices me standing there. He stops the wheel and jogs over to me, hand outstretched. When I don’t take it, he looks down, sees it’s covered in clay up to the elbow. He shakes his head and laughs as if he’s done something foolish but charming. “Gracie, I heard you’d become one of us. I’ve been meaning to stop by the library, say welcome to the dark side. So”—laughing again—“welcome to the dark side.”

  Not laughing, I say, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Privately.”

  “Okay,” he says. “But can you give me a minute? I’m just wrapping up with Leigh here. She wants to switch into my adviser group.” He raises a hand vertically beside his mouth. “I’m trying to talk her out of it without letting her know I’m trying to talk her out of it. She’s a nice kid. Kind of a pain in the ass, though.” Then he grins, the grin meant to show that he knows he shouldn’t be calling a student a pain in the ass, is doing it anyway—a real little rascal. It unleashes a burst of rage in me.

  “Take your time,” I say casually. And then, when he’s turned away from me, “Is this slutty schoolgirl or hot for teacher?”

  I watch the color rise up the back of his neck. “What?” he says in a near whisper.

  “I just wondered whose fantasy I’ve wandered into—yours or hers. I’d have thought your experience with Nica would have cured you of the schoolgirl fantasy. But, hey, maybe not.”

  “Leigh,” he says in a normal voice, “we’re going to have to finish this discussion another time.”

  Leigh makes a pouty face. “But, Mr. T, you said before that—”

  “It doesn’t matter what I said before. I’m saying now that this isn’t a good time.” Then, easing up on his tone, “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? In fact, just bring the paperwork by. I’d be happy to be your adviser.”

  When the door closes, Mr. Tierney turns back to me, his smile for Leigh quickly fading. “Grace, are you insinuating that—”

  “That you were having sex with my sister? No, I’m not insinuating that at all.” I wait until I see relief loosening his features before continuing, “I’m saying it straight out.”

  His only response is to stare at me. And then he says, “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You two were hitting on each other every chance you got.”

  “Flirting is different than—” He breaks off.

  “Than?”

  After a long pause, he says, “Haven’t you ever heard the old Victor Hugo line? God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.” The playful-teasing note has returned to his voice, and from it I understand that he’s decided to treat my accusation as a joke. Has decided to try to anyway.

  “Haven’t you ever heard the old Jimmy Buffett line?” I say back. “Fifteen will get you twenty.” Nica was sixteen. Still underage, though.

  Another long pause. “Listen, Grace, I don’t know where you got the idea that Nica and I were involved, but it’s not true.” All traces of jocularity are gone from his tone, and his eyes are holding mine. He wants to show me that he isn’t laying a line, that he couldn’t be more sincere. I’m not fooled. It’s just another pose.

  “I got it from you,” I say, and drop the note on the table in front of him. He looks at it, then at me, then at it again. Wiping his hands on the tail of his shirt, he picks it up. As he reads, I keep my eyes on his face, watch it fly apart, go wide and flat and stretched, before snapping back together. The reaction only lasts for a second—a spasm—but I catch it. If I’d had any doubts about the affair going in, I don’t now. “So the question, Mr. T, isn’t whether or not you were fucking Nica, it’s whether or not Mrs. Bowles-Mills or Mr. Mills knew you were fucking Nica.”

  He starts to speak, but the words stick in his throat. Trying again, he says, “Where did you get this?”

  “No, that’s not how this works. You don’t ask the questions. You answer them.”

  He gazes blankly at me, the note dangling limply from his fingers. Then all of a sudden, he steps forward. The room shrinks as he leans his body into mine, seizes my shoulders, shakes me. “I said, where did you get this?”

  Now I’m the one who can’t speak. All I can do is stare at the two white balls of spit that have formed at the corners of his mouth.

  “The answer to your question, Grace, is that I have no idea what the Millses knew or didn’t know—about anything. Now, for the last time, where did you get this?” He shakes me again, this time so hard my teeth rattle.

  “The pocket of Nica’s jacket,” I say, almost shouting. Immediately his grip slackens. Angry with myself for getting scared, for giving in to him, I jerk my shoulders back. “Why were you so jacked up about Mrs. Bowles-Mills finding out you and Nica were together? Was she jealous? Angry that you’d dumped her? Was her temper bad? Was Mr. Mills’s?”

  Mr. Tierney is silent, his head bent so that I can’t see his face. Sensing that the time to press my advantage is now, I say, “If you don’t start talking, I’ll go to the Millses. Get my information from them. Is that what you want?”

  Seconds pass. He brings his hands to his face, presses his fingers to his eyes. His shoulders begin to heave. My heart starts to beat fast with excitement. I’ve got him. He’s going to tell me what I want to know.

  And then he lifts his head, his smile so big it looks like his face is breaking in two. And that’s when it hits me: he was shaking with laughter, not sobs. I’ve overplayed my hand, I realize, have pushed him too far, made it so he’s past caring.

  “Go ahead,” he says, blotting his eyes with the cuff of his shirt.

  “This isn’t a bluff. I’ll go over to their house right now. I’m not kidding.”

  “So who’s stopping you?”

  I hesitate, frantically trying to think of another move. I can’t. Snatching the note from his hand, I exit the studio.

  Ten minutes later I’m standing on the Millses’ porch, lifting their heavy brass knocker. No answer. I let thirty seconds pass, lift the knocker again. Still no answer. I cup my hands around my eyes, bring them to the glass panel beside the door. The houses owned by Chandler aren’t quite identical but almost: narrow, ramshackle, poorly ventilated, historic plaques from the Hartford Preservation Society in the first-floor windows. And the front hall I’m peering into could be ours. I see a side table with a Suzuki Method piano book on it—the Millses have a kid, a little girl, four or five years old, whose name I’m blanking on at the moment—a framed print on the wall, a Miro, I think, a pair of galoshes by the stairs. No people, though.

  I don’t know the Millses very well. They’ve only been at Chandler a few years and are part of the administration rather than the faculty. And, as the CFO, Mr. Mills, an intense balding guy in his midforties, travels a lot, putting the financial squeeze on the school’s far-flung alumni. When he is home, he seems to spend most of his time in the garage, working on his model railroad. It’s more often that I see Mrs. Bowles-Mills, a Canadian woman about a decade younger than her husband, pretty in a wan, no-makeup sort of way, wears her hair in a braid wrapped around her head. She’s always with her daughter—Beatrice, I just remembered, the daughter’s name is Beatrice—taking the little girl to swim in the pool in Houghton or to feed the family of ducks that live behind the Science Center. When we run into each other, we smile or wave or nod, but that’s about it.

  I send Damon a text, letting him know he’s going to have to get himself to and from the courthouse today. Then I drop down on the porch’s top step, settle in to wait for one or both of the Millses to come home. I hope it won’t be long. Informing a husband of his wife’s infidelity isn’t exactly my idea of fun. It’s necessary, though, a point of honor almost: I told Mr. Tierney I wasn’t bluffing, now I’ve got to prove it, not just to him but to myself. Still, I’m in a state of dread, sweat sliming the back of my ne
ck and the underside of my arms, nausea souring the pit of my stomach.

  Yet as I continue to sit there, picking at the bracelet of dried clay on my wrist, I realize that the expectation of an ugly scene isn’t what’s troubling me so. At least, it’s not the only thing. There’s something else—a feeling I’m getting. I close my eyes, concentrate on this feeling. After a while I determine it’s not a feeling so much as a hunch, a gut twinge, and the gut twinge is telling me that Mr. Tierney wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t have sex with Nica. It was his attitude toward the accusation—incredulous rather than defensive—that gave his denial the ring of truth. And once he read the note, the charge of carnal knowledge of a minor didn’t seem to interest him anymore, his focus shifting entirely to the Millses. Now I’m sitting on their doorstep, a bomb ready to go off, blow their lives to smithereens, and I can’t shake the sense that I’ve been planted here by Mr. Tierney, that he’s working me in some way I don’t understand for reasons that are beyond me.

  But how, I wonder, could he be working me? I’m about to turn his greatest fear into a reality. It’s possible, though, that he wants his greatest fear turned into a reality, is on a weird self-destructive trip. Who knows? Not me, that’s for sure. I’ve been pretending I know, careening from conviction to conviction like a human pinball, setting off every light and spark and bell, absolutely positive about one thing, then absolutely positive about another. But, the truth is, the only thing I’m absolutely positive about is that I don’t know anything at all.

  No, that’s a lie. I do know one thing. I know that I don’t want to go on that self-destructive trip with Mr. Tierney. Yes, it’s disconcerting that he was slipping Nica cryptic personal notes, evidence that there was something improper about their relationship, insufficient boundaries at the very least. Not evidence, though, that he killed her, which is all I care about at present. This isn’t to say I’m done with him, or the Millses, but I need more information before I proceed.

  I’m just getting to my feet when I hear the grinding of garage gears, smell a whiff of glue. I cock my head, see a pair of men’s work boots sticking out the bottom of the rising door. Mr. Mills. He must’ve been in there the whole time. I grab my bag, book it down the front path. By the time the door’s all the way up, I’m nearly across the street. Unable to resist, I turn around. Mr. Mills is standing at the top of the driveway in safety goggles and a paper mask. He looks like a monster in a creature-feature movie: half man, half insect.