In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Maybe he made her lie—make up a place,” Mackenzie suggested.

  I liked that explanation, although it still left the extra hour unaccounted for. “Do you know Officer Deedee Klein?” I asked. “She came to school today, about the disappearance.”

  He shook his head. “Not Homicide.”

  “I knew that. She was in uniform. And nobody in my class had a thing to say, as far as she was concerned. They were quieter than they’ve ever been.”

  “Maybe nobody in your class knows anything relevant. Isn’t that possible? But I’m glad you’re aware of Officer Klein and I hope you understand that it’s her job to find April Truong, not yours.”

  We were back to that. My turn to use my right to remain silent. A man who is used to questioning suspects is going to make his point—and too often yours, too—whether or not you like it. I combined my two skillets worth of sauté into one large flat casserole and put it in the oven. “I’ll get that paper,” I said, and I rummaged through my briefcase until I found Miles’s exam. I read it to myself again.

  Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with

  A group? An idea? A tradition? A

  Person? Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang. They’re dead.

  Assigning blame is useless, something he wouldn’t

  dare.

  Would he?

  Ask him. Perhaps he is

  Afraid.

  Probably is, because

  Reality

  Is too much like fiction and

  Life sucks.

  I still didn’t get it. I could sense something whiz by, but it only grazed me and kept moving. I handed the page to the wounded cop. I even felt a flutter of mercy and poured him a sangria refill, then busied myself with setting the table and phoning Flora.

  The message on her machine was cryptic, merely repeating the number that had been reached. “Call me if you need anything, please,” I said. “I’m at home.”

  “I don’t think this is likely to find its way into the anthologies of immortal verse,” Mackenzie said. “It’s more a coupla sentences with weird punctuation. Some people think poetry’s a matter of not letting the lines reach the right margin. There’s no logic to what’s where, or how he breaks these lines. I mean, couldn’t this be one sentence? ‘Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with a group, an idea, a tradition, a person?’”

  “Sure,” I said, “but not a good sentence. Needs a conjunction.”

  “Or this one—these two. Why are they split? ‘Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang, they’re dead.’ Or the next—I think this kid divvied up his few sentences to make you think he’s written more than he has. Listen, ‘Assigning blame is useless, something he wouldn’t dare, would he?’ What’s with that rhetorical flourish? Why’s it have its own line? It weights itself down. Don’t need it.”

  But as soon as he’d said it, as soon as I’d heard it rather than read it silently, I understood why he’d needed it, why it had gotten its own line. I pointed the fork in my hand at Mackenzie. “Woody,” I said. “It’s about Woody Marshall.”

  “Why?”

  “Listen to that line about assigning blame, about how he wouldn’t dare. I kept wondering what he Miles could have meant—but the next line tells me who. ‘Would he?’ That’s his name and that has to be what Miles means. Woody’s guilty.”

  “He’s only one option here. Prob’ly no more than a coincidence.”

  “Another knee-jerk reaction, because I said it?”

  “First of all, it’s real hard for me to jerk my knee these days,” he said, “an’ second, even when hale, I am not guilty of any kind of jerkiness, and third, there’s somethin’ else altogether goin’ on here. Those broken-up ideas, split sentences—is this Miles illiterate?”

  “No. Just unconventional.”

  “Yeah, but this is more than needing to be different.” And then he scowled. “Except it doesn’t work that way, either.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I thought maybe the point wasn’t in the words but in their first letters, that they spelled something. An old poetic tradition. Except these first letters don’t work. Wa Paw A Papr Il? Or maybe they’re scrambled. A papr a paw wil? Law Papa Rail. Warp a lap pail. None of them seem real high on the sense scale.” I heard his intake of breath. “Except for the last five lines.”

  April. They spelled April.

  “That can’t be coincidence,” Mackenzie said.

  “Romeo and Juliet and April and Woody,” I said. “And blame—as in that disappearance.”

  “And fear,” Mackenzie added. “Obviously, this kid was afraid to say whatever it is openly. Wrote it in code. You should show this to Officer Deedee.”

  “Sure. I’ll give it to her.”

  “After you’ve copied it, I’ll bet,” he said without a smile. My toes were across his line again, on his turf—even while he was disabled and not using that turf—and he was ready to book me for trespassing. A cop in the manger.

  Of course I’d duplicate the poem. So what? “I’ll give her the poem in exchange for a list of what was inside April’s backpack.”

  I’d taken him by surprise for once. His superior disdain was gone and he looked at me with open curiosity, waiting, but surely I didn’t need to explain silly amateurish theories to a Real Pro. “It interests me,” was all I said. “It’s one of those assumptions, one of those things we could too easily take for granted and build on—all in the wrong direction. The leaning tower of presumption. You know.”

  But he didn’t, and I was a sufficiently mean-spirited and unsaintly person to be glad. We had lots of contests going, Mackenzie and I. Only one was about cooking. More important others were about smarts and expertise and other subheadings to be filed under: power. Either this was a sign of an unhealthy relationship, or couplehood boiled down to one long balancing act.

  “This ending worries me,” I said. “About life being too much like fiction. The fiction in question ends with two dead kids.”

  “Let’s stay with reality, then. At the moment, there is one missing, not dead, kid, so don’t make any great and scary leaps.”

  “There’s two kids. One dead. Vanny Tran.”

  “Don’t count somebody you didn’t know. There are lots and lots of dead kids. But for right now, just take the next step. You are going to turn the poem over to the police, and confine your questions and curiosity to the classroom.”

  “No problem.”

  “That was too easy. What’s the catch?”

  “There is none. Luckily, all my questions—and people I need to question—are already in the classroom.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Mandy—” He was interrupted by a formidable buzz.

  “Saved by the oven timer,” I said, glad again for my domesticity fit. What would have saved me if I’d gotten takeout?

  Thirteen

  HELGA CAN SOUR EVEN FEEL-GOOD MORNINGS, AND THIS most definitely wasn’t one of those.

  She seemed surlier than ever, so I grabbed the contents of my mailbox and left the school office as quickly as I could. Flora’s door looked locked shut, and when I got to my room, the one student I needed to talk with was nowhere to be seen.

  “Anybody know where Miles is?” Why had he chosen to break his perfect attendance record today?

  “I heard he always misses a lot of school,” a girl in the back said. “I guess he’s got some kind of condition.”

  “Some kind of audition.” Carmen Gabel actually interrupted her third lipstick application of the morning to say this.

  “He has like an agent,” Toy Drebbin added. Miles must really be something to have engaged the minds of two apathetic seat warmers. “He’ll be famous someday. In fact, I think he had like a tryout this morning. Some movie that’s shooting here.”

  The girl across the aisle glared at him. “No,” she said firmly. “Today he’s sick.”

  Toy’s narrow face flushed and he sputtered a bit before getting words out. “He shoulda told m
e it was a secret,” he finally said in a loud hiss. “Now I remember. Yesterday afternoon he was all splotchy and coughing and his stomach hurt.”

  I didn’t know if Miles was exceptionally beloved, or whether I was especially disliked, but they were uniformly hell-bent on protecting him from me. I hated being the opposition, but that was my role. I was the law, the organization, officialdom. I was rules and regulations and prohibitions.

  And to think I’d imagined teaching as a helping profession.

  I squelched further discussion of Miles’s whereabouts and pushed the group toward the syllabus. Today’s activities included working on dangling participles, discussing “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, which they were supposed to have read last night, and SAT vocabulary building.

  While they worked on analogies I flipped through the memos and notices that had been in my mailbox, tossing most directly into the circular file, then picking out one that looked slightly interesting, mainly because it was printed on bright yellow paper, folded in thirds, and stapled shut. It suggested somebody had cared about protecting whatever was inside.

  Reading it was like being punched in the stomach.

  STOP LOVING MUD PEOPLE OR ARE YOU ONE TOO, A JEW? YOUR KIND HAS TO GO. NO MORE NIGGERS AND GOOKS. NO MORE WARNINGS.

  “Miss Pepper?” Carmen said. “Are you okay? You look sick.” I must have looked like death itself to have roused her out of her makeup fixation. But, in fact, why, for the first time this summer, was she paying attention to me? Was she concerned about me or was she checking to see if it worked? What about the rest of them? Several sets of eyes watched me. Why? I could feel the near-hysteria I’d witnessed on Flora the day before take hold of me.

  Maybe she’d been right. Maybe my class was my enemy in a new and chilling way. The note was made of cut and pasted letters in a sickening familiar typeface. The school newspaper again.

  Who was it? Why?

  I heard echoes of Lowell warning me that being friends with Flora could bring me grief from them. Was Lowell them? And what sort of grief came next? And it wasn’t only about Flora, it was about April, too. It was against their rules to care about anybody whose skin wasn’t exactly like mine.

  “Miss Pepper?”

  I looked at her almost blankly, and then I remembered what she had asked. “I’m fine, Carmen,” I said slowly. But I wasn’t. I was hot inside, and chilled as well. And I was furious. “No,” I said. “No, I’m not. I’m sick. Sick of the hate and poison in a note I was sent. Sick of the kind of ugliness that hit at Miss Jones. That should never be in this school. That should never exist anywhere at all.” I was shaking under my skin, each nerve echoing the pounds of my heart. But I kept my voice from quavering. I was willing to show my anger, outrage. I wasn’t willing to show my terror. Just in case there was one among them who would gloat over it, delight in it.

  “I’m going to trust in nursery rhymes. Names can never hurt me,” I said. “Because I don’t care what anybody calls me. I will never let anyone intimidate me out of what I know is right. I will never shut up and stand by, go along with something loathesome. I will never be a ‘good German’!”

  I hoped that what I was saying was true. I had had to hear it out loud, but it wasn’t easy getting it out. It had to make its way bumpily up through my vocal cords, over the bangings of my panicking heart. But the more I said, the more words demanded airtime. “These days there’s too much tolerance for hate and no tolerance for anything else,” I heard myself say. “My car radio’s broken, and I don’t mind. I don’t want to hear it. It’s all about hate—all sorts of hate, who wants to make cruel fun of whom. Why doesn't anybody call in to say it’s wrong to be so ugly, so undemocratic, so un-American? When did it get fashionable to hate and to be right out front about it, to sell it, even? The rappers, the INS, the Limbaughs, the skinheads, the woman haters, the anti-Semites, the gay bashers? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This is too cheap, too easy, too ugly, too ignorant and stupid. I refuse to be any part of it!”

  I was close to shouting. Going to flunk deportment, if we still had such niceties. I took a series of deep breaths. Slowly, my blood level simmered down until I could see my class clearly again. Not a one of them spoke, or moved. They were gape-mouthed, incredulous.

  I didn’t know if they’d heard or cared about a single word I’d said, or if they’d merely been dazzled by the sight of a teacher going stark-raving mad.

  I sighed. “This city started as an experiment in tolerance. Now, we’ve been voted the Most Hostile City in the United States,” I said. “Please don’t think the new title is something we have to keep justifying. That’s all I was trying to say.”

  And that was that. Despite my rhetoric, I spent the rest of the interminable morning fighting and defeating—then fighting again—the urge to give up. I wanted to be out of the mix, out of the messes people made. Uninvolved and absent. Unafraid.

  But capitulating out of fear meant I was letting the anonymous them call the shots, and I’d be damned first. I took more deep breaths.

  “Woody?” I said at the end of class. “Could you stay a moment? I have a question about your exam.”

  His eyes widened, then he flicked a glance from his buddy across the aisle back at me. Woody did not look well. His skin had a jaundiced undertone and dark shadows under his eyes. Earlier in the summer he’d looked frighteningly angry. Now, he looked just plain frightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  His buddies, accepting the idea that he was in academic trouble, didn’t question me when I closed my classroom door to have privacy.

  Woody slouched in a front row chair, legs straight out. His T-shirt was black, against which a single large red rose glowed. But what initially appeared to be a pearl of dew on one petal was actually a drop of blood. The image reminded me of the dark side of fairy tales—the pricked finger, the deep sleep.

  Woody was trying hard to look bored, tapping his fingers on his black jeans and keeping his eyes focused on the ceiling.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Be straight with me.”

  He stared as if I’d spoken in tongues. Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward. I felt a flutter of optimism. “I don’t have stuff to say. You said you wanted to talk about my paper.”

  My optimism collapsed in a dusty heap. “Cut it out. You didn’t hand in an exam and we both know it.” He had gone on automatic pilot, looking outraged by the suggestion of a no-exam scam, but his eyes dulled and he shrugged and closed his mouth as if protest weren’t worth it. “And that’s not the issue now,” I continued. “You were distraught. I’ll let you make it up.”

  He still said nothing, but he looked willing to listen, so I kept going. “Yesterday you said you felt responsible for what had happened to April, that she was dead and it was your fault. Why? What happened?”

  He shook his head and redirected his eyes to the tips of his clunky shoes.

  “Okay, then I’ll suggest something. You and April spent time together every night.”

  He settled back in his chair and looked like his formerly smug self. “How could we? She worked, you know.”

  “Yes, and I know you got her the job. Is that why she made up a name for the place? Or because it was a sleazy operation?”

  His smirk faded and he swallowed before he finally spoke. “Both. And because Buddy was white and her brother didn’t want her to work for whites. And because Buddy didn’t put her on the books and he said she shouldn’t say she worked there. Okay, now?”

  “And—look, I can’t resist—did you really date Lacey Star?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Not exactly date,” he said.

  I didn’t ask for further clarification. “But about April—you must have known she didn’t work the hours she told her family. All I can figure is that you saw each other, secretly, from ten to eleven, until her brother picked her up.”

  He sighed. “You aren’t making sense.”

  “Then help me out. The day I saw the
two of you on the bench, she was upset. It didn’t look like a casual encounter. In fact, it looked deadly serious. She disappeared that night.”

  “Are you saying I—”

  “Not necessarily, but I have to believe you had more than a casual relationship, and that you know a whole lot that’s important. What I can’t imagine is why, if you didn’t hurt her yourself, you aren’t telling the police.”

  He shrugged. He was a virtuoso with the gesture and used it much too often, as if it summed up his entire existence.

  “So are you saying the rumors are true?” I asked. “Did she have a second job at a massage parlor?”

  “April? No way in hell she’d—you knew her. She was going to go to college, be something. That’s all she’d talk about, almost. How could you believe that kind of…of stuff?”

  I waited.

  “Okay, listen.” Woody leaned forward in his seat. He looked drawn, much older than his years. He sounded that way, too. World-weary, ancient. “Yes. I have a part-time job at a gas station. I get off at ten, too. I used to meet her and spend an hour with her before she was picked up.”

  “Her brother picked her up every night?”

  “Him or somebody else he knew. Her family wouldn’t let her ride the bus at that hour. I’d have driven her home, but it would have made too much trouble. But we didn’t do anything wrong, her and me. We had a lot to talk about. She knew things. She was wise in a way that… Anyway, we kept a low profile because there wasn’t any time, really, and because—”

  “Your father. I remember.”

  He looked surprised. “But the night she disappeared? I didn’t see her. I went where we met, except she wasn’t there. I waited fifteen minutes, then I went to Buddy’s, but it was locked up. I figured maybe she hadn’t worked that night—she was upset after school. Maybe Thomas had come early, that she’d gone home, so that’s what I did, too. Go home. Don’t blame me for not wanting to tell the cops. You really think they’ll buy that story? Even if it is the truth? How about my father? Or Thomas, who was doing everything on earth to keep us from each other?”