A Hard Day's Fright

by Casey Daniels

  “What?” Lucy’s mouth fell open. “No! I wouldn’t have done that to Mr. Monroe. What he did was wrong, sure, but when I told him I wasn’t interested, he didn’t press it. And believe me, I kept my ear to the ground, and I told him if he tried it with any of the other girls, then I would go to the principal. I’d tell anyone who was willing to listen.”

  “Which means he might have been mad enough to kill you.”

  “I was actually mad enough to kill him.” Getting her thoughts straight, Lucy shook her head and her golden hair shimmered around her shoulders. “He gave me an F in my summer school class.”

  “Because you weren’t interested in him?”

  “Well, that’s not what he said. Mr. Monroe said it was because I hadn’t turned in my final assignment. That’s what I was going to see the principal about. To complain about my grade. And I wasn’t going to squeal on Mr. Monroe or anything. I mean, not about how he tried to kiss me. I was just going to say that it wasn’t fair for him to say I hadn’t turned in my assignment because I had. I even had a copy of it so I could prove I’d turned it in. I never had a chance to show it to Mr. Wannamaker. I was murdered, remember.”

  Like I could forget?

  I processed everything she’d said, then asked, “And when you talked to Monroe about your grade? I mean, you must have, right? You must have spoken to him first before you made that appointment with the principal.”

  She nodded. “Mr. Monroe said there was nothing he could do. That rules were rules, and the rules said that if the final project wasn’t complete, I couldn’t pass.”

  “So he deep-sixed your assignment, gave you an F, and got his revenge for you not being interested in him.” This made sense in a sick and twisted way. “Killing you seems a little above and beyond. Unless…” I slid her a look. “You’re not leaving something out, are you? Like that Monroe was your secret boyfriend?”

  “Secret boyfriend?” For a moment, Lucy’s golden brows dropped. Then her eyes flew open. “There’s no way you could know about that. Not unless…” Again, she put the back of the hand to the forehead. The girl needed a new drama coach. “Oh, the treachery!” she groaned. “Little Ella spilled the beans. She must have. She was the only one who knew my secret.”

  “Only she didn’t. Know the secret, that is. She only knew that you had one.”

  Lucy was silent.

  And I had better things to do than sit there and watch her pout.

  I threw my hands in the air, and then, because it attracted the attention of that transit cop who was suddenly keeping a very close eye on the woman sitting by herself and talking up a storm, I grabbed my cell and pretended to be dialing, then talking.

  “You and Ella are both dopes,” I said into the phone.

  Lucy’s bottom lip protruded a little farther.

  “You’re keeping secrets that are, like, decades old. Both of you.”

  “So Little One didn’t tell you?”

  “She told me that you told her that you wouldn’t tell except to tell…” Even I couldn’t follow what I was saying. I grumbled at my phone. At least it didn’t make me look as crazy as muttering in the direction of the empty seat next to me. “You told Ella that you had a secret boyfriend. And a broken heart.”

  “Which may or may not have been true.” Lucy sat up straight and pulled back her shoulders. It was the lamest display of nonchalance that I’d seen since the time I tried the same thing in the mirror, just to practice how to look if I ever crossed paths with Quinn again.

  “Who was he?”

  Lucy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “It doesn’t have anything to do with my murder.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know, that’s all. He wouldn’t have been my boyfriend in the first place if I thought he was a murderer.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say.” My editorial opinion delivered, I stared at her.

  Lucy mumbled a reply.

  “What was that?”

  “Darren,” she said.

  “Darren Andrews?” This was big news, and hearing it, I was certain Ella wasn’t holding out on me. She was so impressed by Darren and his big house and his bigger money, she never would have kept her mouth shut if she knew Lucy and Darren had been a couple. “And this is some big secret, why?”

  “Because nobody knew about it. Isn’t that what makes a secret a secret? Darren and I, we were keeping it all very hush-hush. You know, like the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine.”

  I wasn’t sure when we started talking about whoever it was we were suddenly talking about. I didn’t care. Heathcliff and Catherine weren’t my problem. “Who broke it off?” I asked her.

  With one finger, Lucy traced an invisible pattern over her knee. “Me. Mostly.”

  “Then if you broke up with Darren, he might have—”

  “No!” The air around Lucy sparked. Just like her eyes. “Darren wouldn’t have hurt me. He wasn’t like that. Darren loved me.”

  “Then why did you break up with him?”

  The sparks sizzled like a current of electricity. They were so bright, I had to turn my face away.

  “He made some mistakes,” Lucy said. “That doesn’t mean—”

  “You mean another girl.” I chanced another look at her, squinting against the neon blue and icy white flickers that circled Lucy’s head. It was worth it when I saw her flinch and knew I was right. “So that was what he was trying to talk to you about at the Beatles concert. Ella said he looked like he was trying to convince you of something. And then…” The truth dawned, and I grinned, not at Lucy’s misfortune, but at my own brilliance. “And then Ella saw Darren and Janice and they were fighting. You were what they were fighting about.”

  Lucy crossed her arms over her chest. “He didn’t love her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He didn’t.” She slapped her knee with one hand. “He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t.”

  The sparks sizzled and flew. One of them landed on my leg and a puff of smoke poofed around me. I hurried to pat the spot before that transit cop could catch a whiff of smoldering raincoat, and while I was at it, I cursed my luck. So far, the only thing this investigation was any good for was destroying my spring wardrobe.

  When the fire was out, I looked over at the seat beside me. It was empty.

  And I was left with even more questions than I’d started with.

  What was the deal with Darren Andrews? And Janice Sherwin, was she jealous of Lucy? Jealous enough to kill her?

  And then, of course, there was still the big question mark that was Patrick Monroe. Like it or not, there was only one way to handle that.

  It looked like I was going to a poetry reading.

  Ariel and Gonzalo were still on the outs, and her mother had made it clear that if she couldn’t find an adult to accompany her, Ariel was out of luck as far as Patrick Monroe’s poetry reading was concerned. When I told her I’d go with her, the kid was so darned excited, it was clear—to me at least—that she needed a social life that included more than heart-wrenching poetry and boys with bad haircuts.

  The heart-wrenching poetry I couldn’t help. After all, that’s exactly what we were headed to hear.

  But I swore I’d do my best that evening to convince Ariel that she was better off without Gonzalo.

  Since Ariel’s love of bad poetry meshed just fine with my need to investigate, I made all the arrangements. She had to come to Garden View after school, anyway, so I told her it would be no big deal for the two of us just to go from there down to Case Western Reserve University together.

  Of course, when I think things are going to be easy, that’s when I should know they’re not going to work out.

  Ariel claimed there was no way she could be ready for something as wonderful as a reading by her favorite poet without a stop at home first. Rachel volunteered to drive her down to the university, and swore she wouldn’t drop her off anywhere except right in front of the auditorium whe
re the reading was being held and not leave her in the company of anyone except me.

  I was waiting there the next evening, watching the time tick away on my cell phone and thinking that the girls had played both me and Ella for chumps. How Ariel had talked Rachel into something fishy, I didn’t know, since Rachel was usually the sensible one, but the reading was about to start, and Ella was going to hang, draw, and quarter me when I had to call her and tell her there was no sign anywhere of Ariel.

  “Hey, Pepper!”

  I was looking right at the tiny redhead coming up the walk toward the building and I still didn’t realize she was talking to me. In fact, it wasn’t until she was three feet away that the voice and the face registered.

  I bent for a closer look. “Ariel?”

  She grinned and skimmed a hand over her hair. “I did it right before I left the house and I wasn’t sure how it was going to look. What do you think?”

  Since her hair was exactly the same shade of red as mine, it was impossible not to say it looked terrific.

  “And the jeans?” She turned all around so I could see that her grungy black jeans were gone. They, too, were replaced with a pair that was sleek, stylish—and exactly like the ones I was wearing. Ariel was wearing sandals, too, and her toe-nails were painted a boisterous pink.

  This was either the ultimate compliment or really disturbing, and I needed some time to sort it out.

  Good thing I’d have a lot of time to think. Thinking was better than listening to poetry. “Come on,” I told Ariel, “we need to get inside or we’ll miss the start of the show.”

  Her laugh was light and airy. “It’s not a show,” she said, tossing her red locks in a manner that was, until that moment, all mine. “It’s a reading. A poetry reading.” She slipped an arm through mine. “And we, girlfriend, are going to have a crazy wonderful time.”

  9

  I only nodded off twice.

  This, I think, says something about my remarkable stamina in the face of the adversity that is an egomaniac poet (come on, Patrick Monroe was wearing a T-shirt with his own picture on it!) with a monotone voice reading a whole slew of unrhymed gobbledygook that ranged from the incomprehensible to the just plain weird.

  I was about to slip into la-la land one more time when Ariel pounded on my thigh with her fist. I snapped to and saw that she was out of her chair, bouncing from foot to foot.

  “Is it over? Already?” My head was a little fuzzy, but even that wasn’t enough to keep me from pouncing on the opportunity to escape the blah-blah and get down to investigating. I grabbed my purse and the leather portfolio I’d brought along and whispered a silent prayer of thanks-giving that the torture was over. Poetry can kill you if you’re not careful. “Boy, that sure went fast.”

  “It’s not over yet, silly.” Ariel grabbed my arm and did her skinny-little-girl best to drag me to my feet. “It can’t be over. Not until he recites ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

  “Didn’t he do that one already?”

  The head toss she gave me told me she’d been practicing. It was that perfect.

  Because I wasn’t sure what the point was, I still wasn’t standing, and Ariel gave me another tug. “He always reads it last,” she said. “It’s his encore. And when he does, everybody stands. You know, to honor him. Come on.” She was more urgent than ever, and this time, it was give in or have my arm yanked off.

  I gave in, and saw that all around us, the college students, academic types, and aging hippies who packed the reading were stomping their feet and clapping. Monroe had already exited the stage—I wasn’t sure when that had happened since I wasn’t paying attention—and when he walked back on, the roar was deafening.

  He was my height maybe, a scraggly guy in jeans, wearing a sport coat that hung off his shoulders and looked as if it had been borrowed in honor of the occasion. It also looked as if it had been slept in. His hair was salt-and-pepper, thinning at the top, and long at the back and sides in a way that shouted artiste! He had a gold stud in his right earlobe, and wallowing in the applause, he never cracked a smile. But then, maybe poets never do. He bowed and pointed to his own face looking out from that T-shirt of his, all moody and glowering.

  Ariel elbowed me. “You’ve got to clap,” she mewled. “If everybody’s not clapping, his artistic sensibilities get offended, and then he won’t recite ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

  I clapped with as much enthusiasm as it was possible for me to muster. Apparently, Monroe had superhuman vision and spotted the last holdout finally cooperating there in the fifteenth row. He stepped up to the microphone.

  “‘Girl at Dawn,’” he moaned.

  And the place went zooey.

  Except for me. But then, I was busy sizing up the guy who just might be the guy I was looking for.

  My powers were far from superhuman, but my imagination was pretty good. I did my best to visualize what Monroe might have looked like forty-five years earlier.

  Just as scrawny, I was sure.

  Just as self-centered.

  I knew from seeing his picture in Ella’s yearbook that his hair was even longer and scragglier back in his hippie days, and he’d had a beard, too, but I suspected that when he was teaching, he was all about clean-cut. Sans beard, his weak, pointy chin was evident. His eyes were little blue marbles. When he wrapped them around the microphone, I saw that his hands were small for a man and his fingers were long and thin.

  I tried to picture those hands holding a blanket over Lucy’s face. Pressing. Smothering.

  I was so lost in thought, I nearly jumped out of my skin when Monroe cleared his throat. Looked like I was the only one in the audience who dared to move. As if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room, the crowd held its collective breath.

  “Girl. Crimson and golden. Nymph. Chick. Babe.”

  He wiggled his silvery eyebrows. Ariel and all the rest of the Monroe-o-philes just about fainted on the spot.

  “Awake to the dawn,” he boomed. “Crimson and golden. A-l-ive…”

  Who knew two syllables could get dragged out like that?

  “…to the pulse, the vibration, the beat.”

  From there, it went on and on. And on. And although I heard the senior citizen hippie on my right purring the words along with him and Ariel’s tiny gulps of excitement, I didn’t listen. I was too busy trying to decide if a guy that geeky could tie up a woman, kill her, and dump her body somewhere where nobody would trip over it for nearly fifty years.

  Either I was having a horrible case of déjà vu, or the poem ended the same way it began. Monroe, his hands poked into the pockets of his jeans and his chin high, finished with a flourish.

  “Alive to the pulse.” He strutted nearer the microphone and lowered his voice to a growl. “The vibration.” It wasn’t my imagination because, believe me, my imagination does not go in such directions; when he said this, he actually cocked his hips. “The beat.”

  I don’t think a t on the end of a word has ever been drawn out longer. The tiny ping of it hung in the air. One second. Two. Three.

  And then the crowd erupted.

  “Come on.” Ariel was out into the aisle before I had a chance to shake away the weirdness. She had her hand boa-constrictored around my arm again. “We’ve got to be first in line for the meet and greet,” she said. She was clutching a copy of The Collected Works of an American Master: Patrick Monroe to her flat chest, and it was such a truly pathetic picture, I couldn’t refuse.

  But I had my own plans for the meet and greet, ones that did not include being first in line.

  I dawdled, shuffling my way along the back of the crowd that surged toward a table where student volunteers were selling Monroe’s books as well as CDs of him reciting his poetry, those T-shirts with his picture on them, and an assortment of tote bags, bookmarks, and DVD recordings of readings like this. Ariel was impatient, but I was firm. With people pressing us to move forward, Monroe wouldn’t have time to talk. But if we were last in line…

&nbs
p; “This is going to take friggin’ forever!” We’d already been in line for half an hour, and poetry lover or not, Ariel was a typical attention-deficient teenager. She groaned, bending at the waist to see down the line of people that still snaked ahead of us and toward the stage. “I told you we had to hurry if we were going to be first.”

  “You’re young and impatient.”

  “I’m in love!” She clutched her book and crooned. “Even Gonzalo doesn’t write poetry like that. Nobody in the whole history of the world has ever written anything as wonderful and as moving as ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

  I made a face.

  “What?” Ariel could do offended like no one else. “You think just because I’m a kid—”

  “I think you should pay more attention to what’s going on around you.”

  She considered this, and yes, it took her a while, but maybe there was more going on behind that teenaged exterior of hers than I gave her credit for. After a couple minutes, her jaw went slack. “You’ve been asking about Mom’s friend, Lucy, and you’ve been asking about Patrick Monroe. And Patrick Monroe was a teacher at Mom’s school when Lucy went missing, and”—her eyes were suddenly as big as saucers—“you don’t think that Patrick Monroe had anything to do with—”

  I shushed her before she could say anything that would attract the attention of the people in front of us.

  Lucky for me, besides having good taste in hair color, Ariel is a good sport. She swallowed whatever it was she might have said and her eyes sparkled. “We’re investigating,” she whispered.

  “And we’re going to be very subtle about it,” I reminded her.

  “But does that mean…?” She sneered at the Collected Works. Right before her lower lip trembled. “I can’t love his poetry. Not if he’s a…you know…” She glanced all around to make sure no one was listening and mouthed the word murderer.

  My instant and total dislike of Patrick Monroe aside, I tried to remain my usual objective self. “The jury’s still out on that,” I told Ariel. “But that’s what we’re here to find out.”