Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  “He is not on drugs,” his father said. “I read the literature, looked for the warning signs. He comes right home, doesn’t have suspicious friends, doesn’t go out on strange errands.” He shook his head. “No drugs.”

  The boy went to school in center city and didn’t have to sneak out to bad neighborhoods to make a buy. He didn’t have disreputable friends because he didn’t have any friends.

  But why waste my breath? “He’s withdrawn,” I repeated. “Doesn’t socialize with—”

  “This is a difficult time for him.” Dorothy Evans sat even straighter, although I would have thought that impossible. She darted a look brimful of malice toward her husband and waited.

  He said nothing.

  “Difficult how?” I prompted.

  She tightened her features and faced me with barely seeing eyes, a woman applying maximum force to pressures that otherwise were likely to explode out of her.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, let’s not,” I said. “We still have this problem at school.”

  “You have a problem, Miss Pepper,” Mr. Evans barked. “We don’t.”

  “His father and I are divorcing,” Dorothy Evans blurted out, still not meeting my eyes. “It’s not…it’s been…” She looked up at the ceiling, her hands still tightly folded. “A stressful time. That’s what I meant.”

  “However,” her husband said, “that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Next you’ll blame the hole in the ozone on me! Besides, Adam doesn’t have a problem. He’s a teenager.”

  “Adam and I are close,” Dorothy Evans said. “He’s worried on my behalf. About the future. About what will become of me. About whether there will be money for his education. About whether his father and his father’s girlfriend, who is four years older than Adam, will have time for him at all. About—”

  “Enough, Dorothy! Please, let us behave like adults and stick to the topic.”

  “The topic is Adam!” Dorothy cried. “The topic is the stress that boy is under!”

  Mr. Evans looked at me as if his wife’s words were so much dust clouding the atmosphere and would I please wave it away? And then his expression soured as he remembered that I was part of the problem. “Adam’s a gifted boy with his whole future ahead, and if his home isn’t as calm as it could be, well, these things happen, and he’ll develop the grit to get through it.”

  “Couldn’t wait, could you?” Veins protruded on Mrs. Evans’ thin neck. “Not a few lousy months until he graduated. Couldn’t wait and see him through. Now look what you’ve done.”

  “Please,” I said, “could we—I asked you to come today because I think Adam might benefit by seeing somebody.”

  “Dating?” Mrs. Evans looked horrified. “Why? You’re like his father, thinking a girl can solve anything.”

  “Not that kind of seeing someone. Seeing a counselor.”

  “Well, Mrs. Leary doesn’t seem to want to be seen.” Mr. Evans gestured toward the empty chair.

  “If he’s on drugs,” Dorothy Evans said, “if that’s what…a treatment center, you mean?”

  “We don’t know that. That’s just it: We don’t know why he’s behaving—”

  “We? Speak for yourself. He’s my son, and I know precisely why he’s behaving as he does.”

  “Is he bad?” Mrs. Evans asked.

  “I couldn’t call it bad because it doesn’t feel deliberate. It feels as if…as if messages aren’t getting through. As if…well, I have his latest essay with me, and maybe that’ll make what I’m getting at clearer.”

  “What do you mean, messages not getting through?” Mr. Evans demanded. “You make it sound like Adam’s crazy!” He half rose from his perch on the arm of the chair.

  If only Philadelphia had volcanoes and had one now, with lava pouring toward us. We’d race away—separately. If only a gigantic hole would swallow the school and me with it. If only I’d heeded Mackenzie’s warnings, and my sister’s and her husband’s and Rachel’s, and had given Adam a lower grade and moved on.

  But here I was without hope of natural disaster, and I didn’t think it would work for me to say “never mind,” get up and leave. I understood now how all those kids who marched around announcing their demented and destructive plans were ignored until they actually killed somebody or themselves. I saw how tempting it was to become the next adult who stayed uninvolved. “I would never use a word like crazy,” I said softly. “Or think it. Or mean it. But it feels important to have Adam tested or evaluated.”

  “You think he’s disturbed?” Dorothy Evans said. “I’m a bad mother, is that what you mean? That’s what they say, isn’t it? It’s always something the mother’s done.”

  “Not at all. There are illnesses that typically start at this age. There are medications, really helpful treatments…”

  They stared blankly, severely, an urban, tailored version of American Gothic. In lieu of a pitchfork, a briefcase and a designer handbag. I waited for Rachel to return and say something clinical and illuminating, but she remained in absentia, wresting with her own child-related problems. “I’m fearful for him,” I said softly. “I want to make sure he doesn’t harm himself.” Or anybody else, I silently added.

  They stared at me with unreadable expressions. Finally the mister spoke, his voice dripping icy stalactites. “I think something is seriously wrong with you, Miss Pepper. I think, in fact, that you are out of your mind. What do you have against me or my son? What possessed you to make such a suggestion?”

  “Honest concern.” I could barely force the words out. A typhoon would do, I thought. A tornado. Aimed right at this room. Nobody hurt—just blown away, never to see each other again.

  “You are a single woman, aren’t you.” Not a question. I nodded anyway.

  “Childless,” Dorothy Evans said. “You’ve never been a mother, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I knew it. Women like you…you’re frustrated, jealous—”

  “No,” Parke Evans said. “I know why you brought this up. Very clever, you think, but it won’t work, so forget about your smoke screen. Trying to get us before we get you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The assault! The battery! Don’t think I don’t know that you molested my son!” He half stood, his face an angry mauve.

  “I never—”

  “You hit him! Grabbed him and assaulted him, and we are not about to let that pass. Very clever to create this diversion, but it won’t work.”

  I hit him? I hit a student? That was the most ridiculous—“You can’t mean—” They couldn’t mean. It was too insane. “The other day I had to restrain your son, stop him from—”

  “Restrain, hah!” He’d gone from yaps to a bark.

  “He was about to hit another student. I put my hand on his arm to stop him. That’s all.”

  “Save your story for court,” Parke Evans said.

  All the air in the room was gone. My story? Court? These words did not compute. Language had lost all sense.

  But not for Parke Evans, who was back on the scent. “What about his college applications? Have you gone after him there, too? Did you put your insane suspicions on evaluations? Adam trusted you.”

  I refused to be dragged down to the level the little dog sought. “I asked you to come here today to talk about finding a way to help your son.”

  “I’ll bet you did, or you want to now. You get your way and it’d look really good on applications, wouldn’t it? ‘Dear school, by the way, Adam’s under psychiatric care, on medications,’ or whatever else you dream up!”

  “You don’t like him, do you?” Dorothy Evans spoke with vigor, her voice matching her ramrod posture. The lioness was guarding her cub. “He told me you don’t, that none of you teachers do. I thought it was all youthful exaggeration, but he was right. You don’t like creativity. You treat originality as a problem. You must really hate him if you’re trying to derail him at this point.”

  “We don’t think
you’re fit to be in a school setting,” Mr. Evans said. “You’re dangerous to children.”

  At least he was now talking in terms of we. They were showing a unified front. If this went on much longer, they’d reconcile right here in the counselor’s office.

  “What is Dr. Havermeyer’s position on your accusations?” Mr. Evans demanded.

  “Nobody’s made accusations,” I said. “Please, can’t we help Adam instead of…of whatever it is we’re doing?”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he snapped.

  “Dr. Havermeyer doesn’t…” The last presence I would have willingly invited into the room, even if only in name, was my headmaster, to whom the only sin was upsetting a tuition-paying parent. “It isn’t procedure to keep him informed of every conference as it happens, although of course there will be a note to that effect in Adam’s folder.”

  “You kept this secret from him. This is a personal vendetta with you, isn’t it?”

  I had no intention of responding to his nasty, bullying tone, but it didn’t matter, because he didn’t require a response.

  “This doesn’t end in this office,” he added. “You’re a hazard, Miss Pepper. A fanatic. How many young lives have you destroyed already? And you don’t have one iota of concern. I may be just an appliance store owner because I didn’t have advantages growing up, but I’ve made sure Adam has everything I didn’t. That’s why he’s here—to grow his own way. This school says it’s for the unusual student. The one who isn’t standard issue. You should be ashamed of yourself.” He stood up, smoothing his jacket and trousers and waiting until Dorothy stood as well. “I’ve been advertising on TV and radio for twenty years,” he said. “I have friends in the media. This is not going to be a quiet episode you can all ignore so you can go on smacking kids around and wrecking their lives.”

  “I want to help your son.” I watched my words fly, fall, and burn. Kamikaze hopes.

  Mr. Evans paused at the doorway. “I’ll have your head for this.”

  Rachel appeared behind him and stepped aside as he and his wife stalked out. “Ouch!” she said. “If looks could kill—what happened?”

  “Basically, they did to me what I assume you did to the toilet bowl.”

  She sighed and gathered papers and a booklet from her desktop. “I could have predicted that.”

  “They did a you’ll-never-work-in-this-town-again thing. And an I’ll-have-you-arrested thing. I am now a hazard to children’s health. A batterer. Parke Evans has been generous to the school. I am disposable. He’s not.” I hoisted my briefcase strap to my shoulder. “I’ve managed to make things about as bad as they can be.”

  Wrong again.

  Three

  I left school quickly, avoiding the office and the agitated conference between the Evanses and Maurice Havermeyer. By beating a quick retreat, I might hang on to both my head and my job a while longer. I wasn’t as sure about maintaining my sanity.

  I was so overfull of boiling emotions, there was steam on the windshield as I drove home. If only Adam’s parents had said, “Oh, that kid. He’s been that way since infancy.” Or “Adam is already seeing someone and working through these problems.” Or “Did you ever notice how Adam’s prose gets odd whenever he rereads Finnegan’s Wake?” Anything to make me think they knew what I was talking about. But they were forcing him to stumble on alone, and I knew of nothing more I could do to help him. Not that I’d helped him at all so far.

  Would his parents tell him about our meeting? What would they say—and what effect would that have on the explosive, unpredictable boy? I’d know soon enough—his class was meeting at the library the next morning. It was a way to entertain the seniors and perhaps entice them into doing a bit more work before graduation. Maybe Adam would entertain the troops with a tirade against me. And maybe that would be good—would show he still understood cause and effect, a sign of mental health.

  Halfway home, during the hourly news break, the radio newscaster said, “The Vermont high school that was the site of last week’s tragic massacre that left two dozen injured and two faculty members and four students fatally wounded during a schoolwide assembly program, today held a memorial service in the same auditorium, to begin the healing process, according to Principal…”

  “You see?” I demanded. I couldn’t have said to whom I addressed the question or what, indeed, I expected them to see. What, in fact, did I supposedly see? Maybe the Vermont shooter had nothing in common with Adam Evans. There’d been so many stories, maybe I was imagining a homicidal youth behind each desk.

  Watch—Adam would turn out to be one of those geniuses who in years to come would lambaste the provincial twelfth-grade English teacher who’d suggested that he was mentally ill. I’d be a literary laughingstock. She who taught great literature but was blind to greatness when it was alive and in front of her face. Pepper will come to mean artistic ignorance and lack of foresight.

  “I wasn’t happy,” the Vermont boy had said by way of explanation for his killing spree. Disturbed, the announcer called him, a word that conjured up a more gentle image than that of a killer with a baseball cap on his head and a semiautomatic in his hands, spraying his schoolmates to death.

  “Neighbors and classmates characterize Todd as a quiet young man who made up elaborate fantasies and wanted to be a computer-game designer. He had, according to several classmates, changed lately. ‘Maybe as if he was always playing one of his games, a war game,’ one has been quoted as saying. ‘Kind of creepy, to tell the truth.’”

  “You see?” I pounded my fist on the steering wheel. Had his teacher tried to talk to his parents? And had she been shouted down? Threatened? Do kids have to kill a dozen people in order to jump-start interest? “Why doesn’t anybody see?”

  I pounded my steering wheel so hard the side of my hand hurt, so hard I was shocked into hearing myself. I was becoming unhinged, an ironic result of concerns about somebody else’s mental health.

  I simmered down, but Parke Evans’ stony expression stayed with me, as did the force of his vast disdain in that barky terrier voice of his. No wonder nobody intervened when the boy in Vermont grew ever more weird. Why subject yourself to accusations, sneers, and unemployment? Why feel this awful mix of rage, worry and despair?

  I couldn’t stop hearing Parke Evans’ voice, accusing me of twisting the truth, of maliciously tormenting his son.

  One of my better students, Lia Jansson, was translating Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw into a play, starring none other than herself, and I’d been rereading her notes on the novel so I could discuss her adaptation. Now the story felt terrifyingly close to my present reality—or at least to Parke Evans’ vision of my reality. Was I that governess? A woman who saw ghosts, who knew the children were possessed by them, whose hysteria led to the death of the boy in her charge?

  Of course, maybe there really are ghosts. James’ governess goes on to be a fine teacher to other children.

  I was making myself crazy and making nothing else better. I had to put all this behind me and get on with my life.

  I parked the car and felt a pang of fear at the thought of joblessness. Then, oddly, I wondered whether that really would be so dreadful. Or whether I secretly craved an excuse to move on, find something new. The idea was staggering, but there it was, feeling comfy, as if it had been hanging around awhile, waiting to be noticed.

  Testing, one, two: Goodbye, Philly Prep.

  It sounded appropriate, as if the time had come. It sounded wonderful.

  I was appalled. But it felt great—as if a permanent vacation had been offered. I’d never meant to stay in this job. I’d taken it after several disheartening attempts to find a use for an English major, and I’d intended it to be short-term, after which I’d go back to school and train for something else.

  I rode the elevator up to the loft, apprehensive—and giddy.

  Anything was possible, if I opened myself to it.

  Anything.

  * * *


  With consummate bad—or perhaps good—timing, my mother called an hour later. Not that her calls are so infrequent that this marked an occasion. In fact, she calls too often, at any hour, now that telephone companies offer flat rates, and the pattern of her calls is appallingly predictable. A bit about her and my dad’s life in Florida (“pretty much the same” is her nearly unvarying news flash), health reports, the digest of her phone calls to relatives and friends, which always includes a lot of medical and marital updates, and then she cuts to the Message. She varies her approach, embroiders the idea with different designs each time, but strip away the anecdotes, the suggested reading list, the homey examples, and it’s the same mantra: My daughter is single and I wish she were not.

  My moving in with Mackenzie had changed her lyrics but not her aria. We troubled her because we were spinning our wheels on the road from single to married. There wasn’t even an engagement ring after all this time, she was wont to mention. She was right. I suspected that Mackenzie was just as fearful as I of the briar patch we’d enter when we did broach the subject. Neither of us thought the combo of homicide detective and high-school teacher sounded brilliant or even possible for the long haul. He couldn’t help but be unreliable, unavailable, and preoccupied. I couldn’t help but wonder what would be the point of being hitched to someone like that. There were reasons why police divorces were statistically more predictable than movie stars’.

  For example: Where was he now, when I needed to talk through this terrible day? As fine a specimen of manhood as C.K. Mackenzie might be, what would be settled about settling down with someone occupationally incapable of being around when it was important to be around? The only way I could guarantee his attention and presence would be to become a corpse.

  I never discussed my reasoning process with my mother, nor did she ask, but she saw the end result, and she did not approve. Surreptitiously or openly, subtly or with the force of a sledgehammer, she did not approve.

  Today I had good news—I was most likely being fired. In her peculiar logical system—and I suppose now in mine—if I were unemployed, I could no longer complain that C.K.’s job and mine were incompatible. Bag ladies’ hours were about the same as cops’.