The Trapdoor

by Andrew Peterson

  I thought about Cambridge. I thought about Grant County. I thought about the trapdoor.

  2 It had been a while since I’d thought about that: about the trapdoor. But now I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I thought about it dropping open with a sudden thud. I could see the blur of the body falling through it. I could see her dangling there.

  It was the same that Monday when I drove to Grant County. It kept playing itself out in my mind again and again as I tooled my ancient red Dart—the Artful Dodge—up Interstate 84. It was a bright morning, early in November. The hills of trees had become hills of color. Overlapping swells of red and yellow and light green rose away into the haze of the horizon outside the car windows. The highway was clear. The air was fresh and bracing. The city was over fifty miles behind me.

  And I kept thinking about a trapdoor.

  At first I’d see her at the bottom of the stairs, her face uplifted to the scaffold. Her expression seemed calm to me, but somehow empty, as if she were under some irresistible spell. She was wearing a robe the color of port wine. Her hair was as I remembered it, thick and golden. I’d see her gray eyes sparkle a little as she reached the platform, as if she were about to awaken and run. But she didn’t run. The noose was lowered over her head, tightened around her neck.

  My heart raced as I drove through the lovely countryside. I turned the radio on, loud, to drown it out. I tried to shake myself out of it. Nothing worked. In another minute I’d hear the trapdoor snap open. I’d see her fall through. My hands would tighten on the steering wheel. I’d see her dangling in the air before me.

  It hadn’t been this bad in over a year. I hadn’t thought it would ever be this bad again. The assignment stank, that was the long and the short of it. It stank, and it was supposed to stink. That was Cambridge’s idea.

  Lansing was right, probably. I could have turned it down. Like she says, I have the leverage these days, and the Dellacroce trial was mine. Maybe it was pride that made me keep my mouth shut, maybe I just didn’t want Cambridge to see me quail. Or maybe it was just that Cambridge is the boss and you don’t show the boss up over a few personal demons. I’m not sure. Whatever the reason, I’d taken the story. And with the story came the trapdoor. The trapdoor and the port-red robe and the dazed gray eyes and the shadow of the scaffold. The noose. The drop. The dangling girl. Again and again, it played itself over as I drove to Grant County.

  Which was kind of strange in a way, really. I mean, my daughter hanged herself, all right. Five years ago. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  3 My hotel was called the Mountain Inn. It was a rustic lodge set high in the autumn hills. My room was enormous and paneled with pine. It had a double bed, a dresser, an easy chair, and a writing desk with a mirror on it. It also had a large picture window that looked out on the vast forests to the west. Quite a view. A thin layer of mist made the sky smoky and aqua. Beneath it layer after layer of pastel leaves sloped away into the valleys. I could see a lake on the farthest hill. It gleamed silver in the morning sun. I could also see a housing development over there. It gleamed too: Its windows caught the light. The only thing that marred the vista was the scar of an office park that was going up in the woods near the foot of the hill. It was a great brown gash where the trees had been torn away but not replanted, and the ground had been broken but not resown.

  As it turned out, a lot of that kind of thing was happening in Grant County just now. For a long time it had been an exurban area, too far for the commute into New York. It had managed to hover on the edge of the urban sprawl. The ravenous developers eyed it and drooled, but for the most part they were kept at bay. About a year ago, though, the railroad had begun to transform the steamline up here to electricity. It was going to take a while for them to lay the lines this far, but when they did, it would cut as much as a half hour off the ride to the city. The suburbanites were already on their way. Just the pioneers now, but the rest were coming. The businesses and the business parks—they were coming too. Land values were soaring. The developers were moving in.

  I could see it as I drove the Artful Dodge down from the hotel. At the bottom of the hotel’s mountain, just beneath the office park I’d noticed under construction—Capstandard, it was called—there was a low-lying swampland. The sound of peepers, bullfrogs, and crickets grew loud for a few moments as my car wheeled by. A sign told me the area was protected by the county. I glanced through my window at the scar of the Capstandard office park above. The county’s protection wouldn’t mean much once the sewage from the park started running downhill.

  I wound my way around the mountain’s base. On the other side, opposite the park, was an old graveyard: a collection of monuments rolling back up the slope. Old slabs leaning this way and that, washed clean of their inscriptions by time. I was fairly certain the bodies beneath them had been buried sometime in the seventeenth century. And across the street, on the slope of the opposing hill, was a collection of imitation Tudor houses in a development called King Henry’s Court. I was passing through a county at odds with itself.

  I cruised slowly toward the center of the town of Grant Valley, the county seat. I drove on winding roads. Thin roads already rutted with the early rains. Forests crowded the edge of the pavement on every side. If you didn’t look carefully, you’d have thought you were in the middle of nowhere. But behind the trees, in every forest along the way, bulldozers squatted like dinosaurs. You could see them now that the leaves were falling. You could see the brown gashes they’d ripped in the earth, and the heartless faces of new houses poured straight from the package. Where the woods were still intact, you could see For Sale signs growing up on the forest edges like the little sprigs that bloom under giant pines.

  I drove on. The forests receded. Pleasant houses sat among the trees: old, sturdy clapboards, most of them with porches and porch swings. Basketball hoop up on the garage. Mama’s old car parked under it. Papa’s newer car away at the office. A rake leaning on a wall.

  Sometimes you saw a woman hanging up laundry on a backyard line. Sometimes you saw a woman hauling groceries from the car’s rear trunk to the house’s front door. Sometimes you saw a golden retriever or an Irish setter or a collie snoozing on the lawn. Almost always you saw a bike or a tricycle lying on its side somewhere.

  I’d come about five miles from the hotel now. The woods were gone altogether, or wrestled back, anyway, into the hills that rose all around. The houses were larger here but closer to one another. Instead of woods, they were surrounded by trim little lawns. The cars in the garages were bigger than those I’d seen before. There were still bicycles and basketball hoops, but swing sets, too, and sandboxes, and even a jungle gym here and there.

  I came to a traffic light—the first I had seen. It was at an intersection where the winding road ended and a wider, straighter street crossed its path. The light changed and I turned right. I had arrived in the center of town.

  Main Street. Offices, groceries, gas stations, and convenience stores. A fire house and a medical building. A two-story brick town hall, and a four-story concrete county hall. There were sidewalks now. Parking meters, parking spaces. Cars—at intervals—passing back and forth. Around the next corner was a tiny mall, and next to that a community center. There was a liquor store, a radio store, a toy store, an Army recruitment office. The whole thing took up only a few blocks. The hills hung above them everywhere.

  The high school sat at the very top of the road, on the left side of an intersection. There was a parking lot beside it. I pulled in.

  I got out and looked up at the place. It was your standard federal schoolhouse: the one in the textbooks, the one on TV. Two stories of brick, then the wooden white dome on top. The clock under the dome and the dome capped by the wind cock.

  There were no kids to be seen. None on the front steps. None on the track and athletics yard around the other side. The cars on the road behind me whispered as they rolled past. There were two maple trees on the school’s front yard, and their dying l
eaves whispered too. Aside from those whispers, the place was awfully quiet. The windows were dark, and the whole soul of the place seemed hunkered in on itself. It seemed a somber place amid the autumn brightness.

  I glanced up at the clock under the dome. It was nearly eleven. I was right on time. The memorial service for the children was about to begin.

  4 The principal’s name was David Brandt. He was a tall man, trim but broad-shouldered. He had red hair and blue eyes in a pale, handsome face. He was forty, maybe, but a young forty. The vigorous type. He came out of his office to meet me. I was standing in front of the glass panel before the receptionist. Brandt pushed out through the door beside the panel, and a golden retriever trotted out with him. The retriever sniffed my leg and panted. I patted the retriever’s head.

  “This is Sosh,” said Brandt. His handshake winded me. It was one of those firm, sincere, take-charge handshakes. He looked me dead in the eye when he shook my hand. He had a firm, deep, take-charge voice too. “Sort of the campus dog. Wandered into a Social Studies class a few years ago and has stayed ever since.” He dropped my hand and strode to the door. “She guards the place at night, and roams free during the day. Sort of our mascot.”

  And with a gesture, he was gone—out into the hall. The dog followed him. I followed the dog.

  We walked between rows of metal lockers separated by wooden classroom doors.

  “I’m glad you could be here for the service. I think it’s important for you to get a sense of how the school is dealing with this. I’m going to make a few remarks—sort of personal reminiscences about those we’ve lost. Then Reverend Jacobsen will be speaking, and Dr. Carter. She’s a psychologist we’ve taken on staff.” I could hear the dog’s toenails clicking on the floor tiles. Brandt set a rapid pace. “The idea of the memorial itself … well, after the first tragedy—Nancy’s—we simply found it necessary to give the kids … something. Let them know we cared and we were all in this together. Give them a chance to share their grief. Of course, we didn’t know there’d be so much grief to share.”

  We came around a corner. A narrowing corridor lay before me. Gun-metal lockers. Wooden doors with narrow glass windows on them. The pink water fountains too low to the ground. The green tiles of the floor. The pink tiles of the wall. Every high school in America must look the same.

  Brandt kept talking. He spoke forcefully. He gestured with his hand as he walked. His voice sounded sincere. The look in his eyes was solemn but hopeful. He told me about his programs. He told me about grief. He told me about the death of children.

  I walked along beside him, my hands in my pants pocket, my eyes on my shoes. I remembered sitting on the porch with my father. He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the rail. So was I. He was smoking a Winston. So was I. I was seventeen. Tall and broad and ugly as he was.

  “Hey, Pop,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Does life ever get any better than high school?”

  He laughed. “Hell, yes. Hell, yes. Hell of a lot worse too.”

  Brandt came to a stop. He stood before the double doors of the auditorium. He smoothed down the front of his jacket with one hand and reached for the knob with the other.

  “Did you know any of them?” I said.

  He glanced at me quickly. “What’s that?”

  “Did you know any of them personally?”

  He reared back a little. “I know all my students personally.”

  He glanced away from me. Still, I had seen it. It had risen in his blue, take-charge eyes like a body from the bottom of a lake. He wrestled with it, forced it under again. But by then I’d had a good, clear view.

  The man was in a state of panic. He was terrified. I wasn’t sure why. I guess it was because his kids were dying, and he was establishing programs, and holding services, and hiring shrinks, and he couldn’t do a damn thing to make the dying stop. What I saw in his eyes at that moment was a kind of plea. He was begging me: say I’m all right. Write it in your newspaper. Write in your newspaper that I’m a young, vigorous, take-charge kind of guy. Write about our programs and our psychologist. Write that we’re handling it. That it’s under control. Maybe if it’s in the paper, people will believe it. Maybe if people believe it, it will be true.

  I guess he was terrified I’d expose him—or maybe expose him to himself. I should have put his mind at rest. If I wanted to write the truth, I’d get out of the newspaper business.

  He took a deep breath. I heard the hitch in it. He pulled open the auditorium door. He went in. The dog went in. I went in.

  The place was a theater. About six hundred seats fanned out from a low stage. There was a podium on the stage with three wooden chairs behind it. The preacher and the doctor were sitting on two of the chairs. The audience was made up mostly of students, with one or two teachers here and there. A little chaos of young voices died as Brandt came down the center aisle.

  It was a grand entrance. He could have just used the stage door. But he was like that: flamboyant, as small-town high school principals go. Popular too. I could tell. The kids’ faces turned toward him when he entered. Their eyes fixed on him and held him and wouldn’t let him go. He had good reason to panic. They expected a lot of him. He smiled and nodded to them all.

  I stayed at the back of the auditorium as he continued down toward the stage. I watched him pause to speak with a student here and there. He would lean toward one of them, lay a hand on a shoulder. Speak in a confidential murmur, pass on.

  I watched his progress. And I watched the kids. They looked very young. Many of the girls seemed pale. Some seemed to have been crying. One or two were sobbing outright, their faces in their hands, their shoulders heaving. The boys, also, some of them, looked wan and grim.

  I found myself thinking about the letters. The letters my wife got when Olivia died. The ones from the kids she’d known. “Dear Mrs. Wells, I wanted to tell you how sorry …” they all began. I read every one of them. Then I read them again. Some of them seemed to me full of spontaneous grief. Some of them were the hysterics of kids who just wanted to be in on the drama. I didn’t care. I read them all. In all of them there was something. Grief, or guilt at the absence of grief, or confusion at the absence of guilt, or terror at the absence of confusion. Something in the souls of every one of them to mark the place where my daughter had been.

  So then, standing in the auditorium, looking at the kids’ faces, thinking about those letters—just then was the first time I gave a damn about the suicides of Grant County. I felt the old juices flow: one part curiosity, two parts habit, three parts the tricks of the trade. I forgot the trapdoor. I pushed it aside. I stood there looking at the mourning faces, and began to consider how to get the story. Nothing else: just how to get the story.

  I figured I’d begin with the parents. That would be a good start. I would sit there wearing my serious, sensitive face and ask questions in my quiet, concerned voice. They’d look at me and see a friend, and they’d tell me everything. They’d talk about how bright their kid had been. How sweet and how outgoing. They’d tell me how baffled they were that he or she had decided to put an end to so promising an existence. There was no sign, they’d say. We didn’t know, they’d say. We didn’t do anything wrong, they’d say. Then they’d probably cry and I’d pat their hands. It makes good copy. It’s part of the story.

  Next, I figured I’d go to the friends. These kids who were sitting in the theater before me now. Not all of them. Just the ones who were closest to the dead. Just the ones who hurt the most, who’d give the reader the most pain and bewilderment for his thirty-five cents. I’d drop the solemn business then, and come on as the tough guy who’s seen it all. Kids usually go for that. They’ll spot you if you try to pretend you’re one of them. But they usually talk for the tough-guy routine.

  I’d finish off with the experts. You’ve got to have experts or the reader feels he’s being conned. Psychologists and Ph.D.s, authors and the
like. You can always find someone. For a little ink they come pouring out of the woodwork like beetles. Then all I have to do is get them to say something that makes sense.

  Anyway, it figured to be a good little series if the editors kept their hands off it. Lots of anguish, lots of tragedy. Human interest, as it’s called. The assignment stank, there was no question about it. But I’d been on worse. I’d seen the bodies of hundreds scattered on a field where a plane went down. I’d seen three-year-olds scarred with cigarette burns because their mommies got mad. I’ve watched guys with the IQs of children walk into the gas chamber to gag and die for a crime they couldn’t remember. I once interviewed a gentleman who’d tortured fifteen women to death, and when the interview was over, he shook my hand and clapped me on the shoulder. I stayed drunk for a month after that one.

  The trick to it is: you think about the story. No trapdoors. No psychology. Just the story. Just get the story. There was no one waiting for me at home, anyway. No one who wanted to. I was too ugly for the love of women, and too mean for the company of friends. My wife had left me, my kid was dead. I was forty-five, and a newspaperman, and that’s all I was ever likely to be. I’d get the story, basically, because I had nothing better to do. And I would not think about the trapdoor. I was determined not to think about the trapdoor.

  David Brandt mounted the steps of the stage. Sosh, the retriever, went up behind him, her tail wagging. The dog lay down up there, her muzzle on her folded paws. She looked out dully over the edge of the stage for a moment, then closed her eyes and slept.

  Brandt took his place behind the podium. Every trace of panic was gone. He was all vigor and sincerity. He spoke briefly about the sad occasion that had brought them together once again, and about how difficult it was to understand. He said they would all stick it out, anyway, and do their best. The kids nodded, and kept their eyes on him. Then Brandt introduced the doctor and the preacher who were sitting behind him. He gestured down the aisle at me.