Maybe, if he hadn’t looked so interested, or used the word escort, which made our encounter seem more than a casual one. Maybe, if I hadn’t been as ambivalent about how casual and impersonal I wanted it to be. “Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I’ll be back in a flash.” He let the elevator door close.
Seconds later, I walked off into the elevator alcove, then to the right, to the balcony landing. It still seemed an impossible place for murder. The actual entry to the Rare Book Department was glass-enclosed, making everything on the balcony visible from inside, as well as from a twin balcony directly across from it.
A less than sane person might not realize that, a voice within me said. I stifled it, looked at the wrought-iron gate blocking the stairs, and with a sigh, returned to the elevator and was upstairs in the two minutes I’d promised.
“Find what you wanted?” Terry asked.
“I don’t know that I wanted anything specific. I thought maybe being there, I’d figure it out, but it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It’s too visible a place.” He was kind enough not to mention that logic and planning and even self-preservation might not have had a role in this murder.
The coffee was predictably awful, but welcome as preventive medicine for the rainy return to the great outdoors. “So,” he said. “Your job. You enjoy it?”
“Sometimes. Lately, not a lot. But mention of it makes me think about my students, and I don’t think you told me if you knew whose book bag it was.” I was sickeningly sure I knew.
He looked annoyed. Understandably so. He hadn’t wanted to talk about book bags.
“Everyone at my school carries one,” I said.
“Everyone at most schools carries one,” he answered. He didn’t say the word boring but I could feel it hover in the air between us like ash. He didn’t say—but I nonetheless heard—that for no apparent—to him—reason, having been ultravague about my “relationship,” I was making it difficult for any serious flirtation to get off the ground.
Then he suddenly grinned. “I’ll bet you got in a lot of trouble at school for asking too many questions. Am I right?”
“I’m sorry, I must be annoying—”
“No—I didn’t mean that.” His smile beamed on. “I just had this image of you as a cute kid with that same intent expression and curiosity.”
I kept my eyes on my coffee cup. “Well,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I became a teacher. I get to ask all the questions I have.”
His expression sobered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward about asking whatever you like. I was…I thought I was complimenting you. Ask away. What was it about? Oh, yes. The book bag on the balcony.”
The book bag that any kid in the city could have owned. Why was I making such a fuss about it? Thursday afternoon, the library had been filled with students, and the bag Terry found could have belonged to any one of them. I had to stop plugging in Adam’s face wherever there was a gap.
“I have to assume it was that crazy boy’s,” he finally said. “The one they’re saying did it. Who else? Adam Evans was the name in the paper, and the bag had a letter made of tape on it. That Greek thing—I should know what it’s called. The Æ dipthong, where they’re both one letter with the E’s prongs coming out of the side of the A. That’s all I know. It more or less fits him, doesn’t it?”
More. Adam had written his initials that way for years. I’d thought of it as part of his interesting mind before his mind got so interesting it frightened me.
Terry’s smile really was awe-inspiring. Till now, I’d thought “lights up a face” was just an expression.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t want to upset you.”
“No, what?”
“It’s just that…you love this stuff, don’t you? Visiting the crime scene, asking questions about evidence…why?”
“I hate not knowing. I hate being bamboozled. Guess this makes me feel less out of control or duped.”
“You’ve got an interesting mind. More analytical and logical than most, I guess. You’re a very unusual woman, Amanda Pepper. It’s quite attractive, as is the physical package, if I may be so bold.” He leaned forward and lowered his head in a mock bow.
I lowered my eyes and did a fair approximation of modesty and also hoped the demure pose hid how much I enjoyed his being so bold. How grand it felt to be actively and thoroughly appreciated.
“Seriously, I can tell how concerned you are about that boy, that student of yours.”
“I wish I could find him. He’s out there, somewhere, and I’m afraid for him. For what people might do to him, or he might do to himself.”
“Maybe I could help you find him. Not that I know how—or know him—but I’m reasonably intelligent and you could fill me in.”
I experienced a jumble of emotions. Shame, that we were using Adam. Using a murder and a missing and mentally ill boy as a ruse for flirtation. Amusement, too, at Terry’s transparent motives, and at the strong sense I had that he wouldn’t have minded a bit if I’d told him so. He wanted me to know he was interested. I wanted him to know that I knew.
The image of Mackenzie flashed.
Right. I had benched myself from this game. I was wrong to let the man across from me think otherwise, at least until I decided whether I wanted to keep my current status. “Thanks,” I said softly. “I’m not really hunting for Adam. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But thanks for the offer.” As if the offer had meant anything about Adam. I took a deep breath. “I’d better be going,” I said. “I’m running late.”
There’s a male way of registering hurt and disappointment in and around the eyes. Nothing is said, of course, but the light sputters for a second. Subtly, but definitely, as it did on Terry’s face. He cleared his throat and the look was gone, replaced by a hard-edged indifference.
I was sorry to have created an awkward situation. I thanked him profusely for his time, and made a hasty retreat, back out into the drizzly spring afternoon. After two years of one man, I wish I felt less ambivalent about my monogamy.
I crossed the many rain-shined lanes of traffic and walked through Logan Circle again, looking up for a moment to the parkway, the wet flags of the world limply hanging from poles all the way to the art museum. We had all seen better times. The pinks and oranges of the newly cultivated flower beds ringing the circle were blurred and softened in the misty rain.
The square was deserted, except for two homeless men too far gone to come in out of the rain. One slept on a bench with soggy newspapers as a blanket, and one sat staring at Alexander Calder’s fountain, which spouted on for its one-man audience. I knew, because Mackenzie had told me, that this had been the site of many good and bad events since colonial times, but the only one I could recall offhand was that it had once held a gallows.
I exited toward the Academy of Natural Sciences, its dinosaur and butterfly banners bright beacons against the drab day. My mind was stuck on that Æ. Where was Adam? What was he feeling? Fearing? Thinking? Had he done anything? Or in fact had I done everything to put him into a downward vortex just like the one I’d imagined for Emily Buttonwood? Next stop, his own wet bench on Logan Square. I’d been told that half the homeless were mentally ill, “mainstreamed” right onto the streets in the 1980s. Adam seemed on his way, with my cooperation.
At precisely which guilt-suffused, miserable moment, a hand clasped my shoulder, like some great judgment-day call of Guilty! I instinctively pulled away—or tried to, but couldn’t.
“Don’t!” Adam’s hand was so tight on my shoulder it hurt. “Don’t move! Don’t say my name. Don’t scream. Don’t say anything.”
Eleven
I screamed. Couldn’t help it—sometimes instinct overrides everything. I screamed and turned—and screamed again, a mix of surprise, fear, shame, and I don’t know what. “Adam! Let me go! Don’t do this! Adam!”
“No!” he bellowed. “Stop screaming! Don’t scream!”
The g
ray world around me felt ominous and harsh. The absence of anyone nearby—the homeless guys were half a block away and definitely not interested in my welfare—made the landscape desolate.
I didn’t know Adam. I wanted to believe in his innate nonviolent goodness, I wanted to defend him—but I didn’t truly know him at all, and I surely didn’t know who he was becoming. I’d been whistling in the dark, convincing myself he was harmless. That didn’t feel as much a given now with the two of us on a deserted street. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and nodded. “I’m…I’m…you surprised me.”
“You took too long.” He lowered his voice to a point midway between a mutter and a growl.
“Long what? Screaming?”
“Leaving there.” He gestured toward the library, a distant pale looming mass through the trees, the dusk, and the rain.
“You’ve been waiting? Why?”
“I left.”
“I meant—where have you been? I’ve been worried. Everybody was. Is.”
He shrugged. “I don’t like that place anymore, understand? I don’t like it.”
“Where are you staying? Sleeping?”
His eyes were without expression or light. He faced me, but I couldn’t tell what he actually saw.
“You’re wet,” I said softly. “I don’t want you to get sick. You need warm clothing.” He swiveled his flat gaze to the bright banner announcing a special exhibit across the road at the Franklin Institute. He was wearing his customary black sweater and jeans, probably the same ones he’d been wearing yesterday, and a light windbreaker. God knew how long he’d been out in the rain. “Adam, where is your scarf? You always wore that long black scarf, and you could use it now. Where is it?”
He touched his neck as if to check, looked back in the direction of the library, up the parkway to the museum, then nodded overemphatically, his brow furrowed. “I need it. Wait—maybe—” He squatted down and opened a bright red backpack, pawing through its contents, shaking his head. His dark hair looked painted onto his forehead and cheeks.
He stood up again, lifted the open backpack off the ground, and handed it over to me, his missing scarf no longer on his mind. “No scarf.”
The bag said DAISY in large blue-tape block letters. She’d told the truth about her missing backpack.
“That pack doesn’t look anything like yours,” I said softly. “How’d you wind up with it?”
“I—I got mixed up, maybe. I thought… I don’t know, it was mine. I couldn’t find mine and I needed one to put stuff in.”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff! Whatever stuff! Backpack stuff!”
I didn’t know what to do about his increasing agitation except to back off, at least metaphorically. After a few seconds of silence, Adam’s temper gauge dropped noticeably.
“I don’t want it. Too dangerous. Give it back.” He had no apparent interest in whose backpack it actually was, whose belongings he’d just searched for his scarf. “I don’t want it on me. Used as evidence against.”
“Against what?”
“Me!” He shouted the word, then laughed.
“Evidence of what?”
Now he looked annoyed, as if my questions were unfair, as possibly they were. “I don’t know that!” he said sharply. “I don’t know them. Whatever they want. Against me. Evidence!”
“Adam,” I said, “do you know what happened yesterday at the library?”
“Yeah.” The voice that had just shouted, laughed, reflected agitation, now went flat. “A lot of things. We saw the departments, we had lunch. I read.”
“I mean about Ms. Fisher, our tour guide. What happened to her.”
“She hollered at me in the library and God smote her. Fisherlady’s dead now.” His voice was low, vague, dissociated. I couldn’t figure out what was going on inside of him, what he felt, if anything.
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t she? Isn’t she dead? I saw.”
I nodded. “Did you see God smite her?” I kept my voice as soft as I could.
He stared blankly. He seemed so changed, as if the road he’d been on had suddenly grown steep and he was speeding on a downhill curve. Two days ago his disease had been subtle enough to debate with his parents. But now, partly because of the weather and a night, I suspected, spent out of doors, and drugs, perhaps, and whatever he had seen, or done, in the library—he was mentally jumbled, emotions and words fragmenting, coming out overemphatically or not at all.
“Do you remember what you saw?”
“Her. I saw the fisherlady. Not a fisherman, no. A fisherlady.”
I smiled, to show I got his wordplay, and I felt a moment’s painful sorrow for what was going to be wasted if Adam didn’t get help. Even if help had to be within a prison system. “You could help the police, if you saw anything. Or heard anything.”
He seemed to shrink within himself.
“I have the feeling you did,” I said softly. “And you were frightened and still are, maybe, and it makes me sad to think about you being frightened. I think I can help you if I know what you’re feeling. Did something mix you up, maybe make you run out of the library without telling anybody?” I waited between questions, watched his eyes dart off me, into space, up into the young green leaves of the trees. He didn’t blink against the misty rain the way he should have. He didn’t seem to feel the drops. “Did anything frighten you? Anybody? You could tell me. I’m not scary. It’s the same old me, Adam. The same old two of us.”
“No, no,” he said. “No police, no, no trouble for me, no evidence. I didn’t see anybody. Nothing.”
“Not…God? Smiting her?”
“The dead lady. The fisherlady. I saw that.”
“How did you find that out? That she was dead, I mean.”
“She was there. She was dead.”
“Where were you?”
He shrugged. “In where we…in the room up there where I was going to—the little clay things. The shepherds. The receipts.”
I remembered mentally joking with myself about the odds of anyone’s being interested in cuneiform tablets. Some joke.
“I went out to the balcony. I thought—I was going to go somewhere else I can’t remember, but I saw her. And I heard.”
“You were on the landing?”
His face went through a series of unrelated expressions, as if he were testing them. A frown, a quizzical look, an annoyed moue, almost a smile. “The balcony? Is that the same as the landing?”
I nodded, trying to hear what lay behind his words, trying to determine if that was what he’d decided was the best answer, or whether it was the truth. Or whether he could recognize what was true and what was not.
“I didn’t see anybody except the fisherlady. On the floor, all…dead. Just dead. And there was shouting.”
“You heard a shout?”
Adam looked at me intently. “I hear things. Other people are deaf. I hear it.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you make my head hurt.”
He looked battered from inside. He looked crazy. He looked two or three minutes away from being the next denizen of Logan Square, sitting on a bench, talking to himself.
“I heard something,” he said, “then I thought I should run away but the elevator didn’t come, then I thought I should hide but I didn’t know where, then I thought I should go look and I did and she was still on the floor, fisherlady.”
I nodded. She was already on the floor. Not by his hands or doing. Please let him be right, I thought. Let him have the chronology right, and keep him coherent enough so that other people believe him, too.
“Somebody shouted. Said ‘dead’ or ‘kill.’”
“That voice—was it a man’s or a woman’s?” And not in your head, Adam, please God.
“I don’t know—it was too loud.”
Not good. I had been hopeful for a while, but now…
“And then the siren.”
The alarm.
“I w
as running.”
“You opened the big iron gate? Is that what started it?”
“Then ‘Adam! Adam!’”
“That was me.”
“Yes.”
“You knew it was me?”
He nodded.
So he’d been nearby when I called out. “I was looking for you. I heard the alarm, and I was frightened. I needed to know that nothing bad had happened to you. Where were you?”
He put his hands to his ears. “Running. I was running. Maybe the noise was inside me.”
“The person who said ‘kill’? Or ‘dead’?”
“No questions! No noise! My scarf!”
“Adam, let me take you—”
“No! Don’t touch me!” He backed away.
“Wait—” I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote my phone number on it. The least I could offer. “Here,” I said. “In case. For whatever. Call me anytime. I’ll help you, I promise.” I found two quarters and held them out, too.
He made no move to take any of it. “My scarf,” he said. “I need it!”
I shoved the paper and coins into his windbreaker pocket. “Don’t go!” I said. “Don’t—” But he was leaving for who knew where with long strides, and then a loping run. “Adam,” I whispered into the rain. “Adam.” He was gone. Lost.
I hoped he really did have a safe haven. I wanted him stored in a clean, dry place until some of this became clearer.
I walked slowly back to the school and my car, dredging for nuggets of fact within our bizarre, brief conversation. Had he been hearing voices or had he heard a voice? And how much of whatever it was should I relate to Mackenzie?
I saw a gopherlike image of Adam, brain aching from the scrambled bombardment of life, peeping out of the hole in the earth into which he’d fallen, searching for safety. And along I came, the great protector, taking whatever he gave me, forging it into a mallet, then hammering it directly onto his head, pounding him farther and farther into the pit. Protecting him from himself.
Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery) Page 13
