In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Where did you meet every night? Maybe she went there, got there early—she never went to work that night—and maybe there’s a witness who saw her there and knows what happened.”

  “We met at the comer where she was seen. By the witness. The one who saw her get into a van.”

  “At eleven.”

  “Lookit,” he said. “I know you mean well. No offense, but you don’t understand a thing that’s going on and you’d be best off if you didn’t push, you know? It’s not something you can make better. And I’m not talking about April and me. All I can say is no matter what you might hear or think, I never would have hurt her. I never put a hand on her or took her anyplace in that van or in anything else that night—I didn’t even see her—and that’s the truth. We were close, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around, okay? To my pals, the Vietnamese aren’t… And April didn’t like my being with them, either.”

  “But I still don’t…you said you were responsible…”

  “For her being killed.” He swallowed hard, then nodded. “I’m going to feel rotten about it until I’m dead, too. But not because I did it.”

  “Then what? How?”

  “Why aren’t you asking the creep she worked for? Telling the police about him?”

  “I did.”

  “Good. He was always coming on to her, touching her, making bad jokes. Big mistake, my listening to Lacey and getting April that job. I told her to quit, but she needed the money. She was going to go to college, no matter what.”

  His words hung in the air. No matter what couldn’t include the what of being abducted. That what mattered.

  “This is making me crazy, Woody. All other issues aside, I have to say it again, I know what I saw on the bench that afternoon, and—”

  He stood up, and I realized with a start how large and menacing he could be. “No!” he said. “You don’t know what you saw, you only think you do.” His skin grew paler and the premature lines on it seemed to deepen before my eyes. “Look, Ms. P., there’s this story my last English teacher told us about a bunch of blind people trying to see an elephant. One touches a leg and says oh, yeah, an elephant is a tree trunk. And one maybe touches the tail and says you’re wrong, it’s a snake. And one touches a side and says it’s a wall, and—”

  “I’m familiar with that story.”

  “Then you should understand. No offense, but you’re like one of those blind people. You saw a little piece of something and from that you made up a whole thing—only the thing you made up is wrong. Not the real thing at all.”

  “Then tell me what I saw.”

  “I can’t. I swear it. It’s a matter of life and… I sound like bad TV. But we’re talking about something serious. What you should understand is that those blind guys who thought they saw the elephant could feel real good about their tree trunks and their snakes. But if they didn’t get out of the way, the thing they didn’t see—the elephant—could kill them.” He paused and folded his arms across his chest and waited for some kind of response.

  I stood up, too. I resented having him lecture me from above, which provided a sudden moment of insight where I saw myself looming over students day after day. “Meaning what?” I asked Woody quietly. We were still not nearly at eye level, and I had to tilt my head back a bit.

  “Meaning you have to stop thinking you know what you’re seeing. You could get trampled. You’re not a bad person, and neither am I. I’m trying to help you. You could get in trouble. Real bad. Please don’t.” And without waiting for my response, without even a flicker of interest in how I would respond, he walked to the door.

  “Is that what happened to April?”

  He turned back, one hand gripping the doorknob. “What do you mean?”

  “Did she see too much? Did she ask the wrong questions? Does what happened to her have to do with those other things I don’t understand?”

  “Please,” he said. “Please. I’m taking care of it myself. Trust me. I’m doing what she wanted, doing my best already. Don’t push me.”

  But I had one more push left. I picked up the yellow paper from my desk. I hated to even touch it, to reacknowledge its existence. “Is this the elephant?” I asked quietly.

  He blanched. “Jesus, Miss P., don’t—what is that? The thing you were talking about? Why’re you showing it to me? I feel like I’m going crazy! How’d you get that? Where? Why does everything have to do with me?”

  He looked enormous—and fragile. A brittle tree about to topple. Either I was seeing him for the first time or something had changed about him, drastically. He seemed a victim, not a thug. “Woody,” I said in a near whisper, “are you in trouble, too? Do you need help?”

  He rolled his eyes, raised his brows, almost grinned, then grimaced as if in pain. Expressions spilled one into the other, combining shock, near-laughter, the suggestion of tears, and, I thought, fear—all at once, as if I’d said something so beyond belief—and perhaps also so true—that there was no possible response except incredulity.

  “Thanks for asking,” he said in a strained, low voice. And then he was gone.

  So much for my Would he? Ask him. It hadn’t worked the way I’d hoped, to put it mildly. I sat back down at my desk, semiconvinced that if I waited long enough, some all-encompassing idea would come along, something that clarified the situation. I wanted to feel more certain than I did that Woody truly had nothing to do with April’s disappearance—but he had such an air of desperation clinging to him and was so adamantly close-mouthed that I wondered. Had he done it? If not, did he know who had? Did he know why?

  And what was the greater, further danger he repeatedly warned me about? What was the elephant I couldn’t see?

  My thoughts circled, swallowing themselves like cerebral serpents. Give it up, I counseled myself. Maybe April had truly gone for a kinky joyride. There’d been a recent news story like that. An entire town searching for a girl thought abducted by a stranger. She came back—at the stranger’s insistence. She refused to press charges, because she’d willingly, enthusiastically, gone.

  Maybe April had, too. Maybe the rigid pressures of her life, the careful monitoring by her family, and the dark side of all her self-discipline had been too much. Maybe she well and truly needed a break for freedom so that she didn’t break instead.

  Except that she’d been seen struggling. Was it an act? A cover-up?

  I should let go of futile and directionless speculation about April Truong, and direct all future futile and directionless speculation to my own life. And be safe.

  And give up Flora, too? And anything else I wanted that didn’t meet with my anonymous censor’s approval?

  Finally, I stood up. I was getting nowhere here, except closer to the fear again. Back off, a part of me insisted. The adult part, I feared.

  But the two-year-old in me dug in and refused. I was going to do what I thought was right. There was nothing else I could do.

  I walked down the hall. Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth, approaching from the other direction, waved. A sign, I decided, that I had made the correct decision and I was on the right track.

  “I’m still thinking about April,” he said when I caught up to him. A perfect opening.

  “Me, too, and feeling really sorry for her family,” I said. “Whatever hullabaloo or concern there was that first night is over. No yellow ribbons on trees for her. The Truongs must feel abandoned. I’m going to make a—not a sympathy call, but a sympathetic call, even though I’m a little nervous about going.”

  I’d thought I’d have to sell him the idea, but he nodded immediately. “Great idea!” he said. “Want company?”

  I was enormously relieved. I didn’t know whether April’s parents would welcome our concern or consider it an intrusion. I didn’t know if they spoke English, or whether April’s sullen brother would willingly serve as interpreter.

  “When?” Five asked.

  “Tonight, around eight? The Truongs work all day, so after school w
ouldn’t be any good. I’ll call them around six, see if it’s okay. If it’s not, I’ll call you. Otherwise, does it sound all right?”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you here, at school.”

  I walked taller, felt just a tad John Wayne-ish. No yellow-bellied sheet of paper was going to tell me what I could or could not care about.

  My momentary elation ebbed when I reached the back stairs and realized that sour Aldis Fellows had been watching me. She had a gift for creeping up on a person. “For a minute I thought you were part of the man’s midday mob,” she said.

  “Five’s?”

  Aldis nodded. “Current events, my foot! The man’s blind and has no sense of discipline whatsoever. Did you hear the noise from the room while he was out there with you?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”

  “He thinks they’re reading magazines and having small group discussions, but just ask around. They’re using him. He doesn’t understand what kind of boys they are.”

  “Using him for what?”

  She looked at me as if I were pathetic. Then she looked around. “Drugs,” she whispered. “That room at noon is ground zero for dealing and making plans, talking over strategy, distributing.”

  I must have looked dubious.

  “He’s a dupe. A nice enough man, but a fool. People must have fawned over his good looks his whole life, and he’s gotten too used to it. He would never wonder what those boys actually want from him, just take it for granted that they like him.”

  Was it possible? He had joked about how little actual attention he paid the group. He thought of it as insulation against Phyllis and Edie, so maybe… I felt sorry for him if it was true, but worried, too.

  “I’m sorry to drag a nice man like that into this, but I am going to have to report it, and anyway, if he’s that stupid and lax, he deserves it.”

  “What made you think that drugs—”

  “I thought it would be different here, this summer. I was looking forward to it, but it’s all the same, everywhere.” She gestured in the direction of Flora’s closed room. “She still in hiding? Still in a righteous sulk?”

  “I wouldn’t call it…it must have been—” I was having trouble shifting gears, still worrying over the possibility that Five was an unwitting front for student crime.

  “Those people,” Aldis said with a weary shake of her head. “Anything that happens to them becomes a major issue.”

  “But having your room trashed—”

  “Look, it happens. We’re way past the sweet little schoolhouse of yore.” She clomped down the stairs behind me, lecturing. “You’ve lived in an ivory tower here with your privileged students.”

  “I thought you just said things were the same everywhere.”

  She ignored my point. “Now,” she went on, “what with the people who were let in this summer, you can see how the world really is. And it’s her people who are responsible for a lot of the change, too. And not for the better, either.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable with this talk about Flora’s people, as if she’s an interchangeable—”

  Aldis simply didn’t care what I had to say. “Some people should wise up and smell the coffee,” she continued. “Maybe other people who are tired of what’s been going on in this country for the last twenty years are trying to get their message through.”

  “What do you—”

  “Don’t you just get sick of how everything gets twisted into a big civil rights case?” she demanded from behind. “I mean if a white teacher is hassled, who would care? You’d look to see if they had caused their problems in some way, antagonized somebody. But with them—it’s all a great meaningful outrage, a hue and cry. Poor me, poor me, I’m so oppressed. Meanwhile, who made the problem in the first place? I tell you, this minority business has gone too far. Time to put on the brakes.”

  She was so sure of the universal acceptance of her words that when we reached the bottom of the staircase and we were again side by side, she almost saluted me in a burst of camaraderie. “Good talking with you,” she said as she strode off and out the door.

  I stared at her retreating back, her sensible shoes, wondering just how intensely she believed those brakes had to be applied—and where—and whether mudslinging and mail, phone, and in-box terrorism were a part of the braking apparatus.

  Aldis, her dark suspicions about student drug-dealing and her ugly assumptions about Flora, became part of the note, of the mud in Flora’s room, of the desecrated church.

  Too much, I thought, my breath short. My short-lived self-confidence had gone through meltdown and there was no oxygen left in the building. I needed air. Desperately.

  Fourteen

  I MEANDERED THROUGH A SPECIMEN NOON FOR HALF AN hour, wishing I were in a better mood, because the weather deserved it, could in fact be bottled and marketed as Essence of Summer. Its blue and gold perfection balanced out mosquitoes; flies; broiling, muggy, steamy days; thunder and lightning; and summer colds. I was sorry I had driven to school. This was a day to walk straight over the horizon.

  Nonetheless, I was not in a better, or even a good, mood, not even when I forced myself to stop thinking about Aldis. The yellow warning note haunted me, and I couldn’t stop the low-grade shaking deep inside me.

  How dare some anonymous coward tell me who and how I should be or live! Except—one had, and as enraged and combative as I felt, I also struggled against the urge to run for the hills and hide.

  I needed help. There was no time for a shrink, and the best the weatherman had to offer wasn’t doing it for me. Time to try retail therapy. It supposedly works for many of my sisters.

  I tried, but stores, in their ineffable wisdom, live a season ahead, and the displays were filled with falling leaves, itchy-looking sweaters, tam o’shanters, and thick knit stockings. Even with plate glass separating us, the ensembles gave me prickly heat.

  Their tempus fugit message layered misery on top of my anxiety. Each wooly-warm window along my route sang the same rondelet. Summer’s no longer a’comin’ in, hey, nonny nonny. It’s here, and it’s a-going out, and you’ve missed it!

  As the Chinese have long warned, I should have been more careful about what I asked for, because I’d gotten it: Mackenzie without the commitments of his often-draining job. What I hadn’t gotten were the delights of his companionship or of the season: the swims we could be taking, the walks on the beach or in the park, the picnics, and even, let us be frank, some uncomplicated, logistically simple shows of affection.

  Happy student sounds came from the square as I made my way back toward it. That didn’t seem at all fair. I looked yearningly across the street and did a double take as I saw Miles Nye, gesturing with great animation for one so ill this morning. That seemed even less fair.

  “Sorry I missed class,” he said when the warning bell had rung and I intercepted him on his way in. “An abscess.” He waved authentic-looking letterhead. “Dentist wrote me an excuse.”

  “Did you get the part?”

  “I got a toothache. Honestly.”

  “You’re a good actor. I’m sure you’ll make it But I need to talk. Can you spare a minute?”

  “I have class.”

  “Your dental appointment took four hours, Miles. Must have been pure hell. Maybe it took four hours and five minutes?”

  He lowered his head in an eloquent show of submission, and, gesturing him to follow, I moved to the side of the hallway. “I want to know about your exam. About the ‘Would he?’ and the spelled-out name.” I was trying to be discreet, not mentioning April directly, as students made their way past us. Every one of them checked us out and then moved on, the way a herd might glance at one of its members that had been seized by a lion. They felt sorry for their captured kin, but they had their own skins to protect. “What about it, Miles?”

  The normally voluble boy said nothing.

  “You sent a signal. I caught it. What sense is there in being coy now?”

&n
bsp; “I wanted you to get it, and you did. What else is there to say?” He was bleating for rescue, but the laws of nature are relentless, and self-preservation is its bottom line. The uncaught moved on past us.

  “I talked to Woody,” I said. “He didn’t see her at all that evening. Isn’t that what you were saying with the ‘Ask him’?”

  “No. That was about assigning blame. That was about Romeo and Juliet.”

  “But Woody said they weren’t…um…” In love? Girlfriend and boyfriend? I mentally stammered, unsure of what terminology played with these kids now. Lovers? Significant others?

  “Romeo and Juliet, the play,” Miles said. “It was an exam, remember? I was talking about the play.”

  “What about it?”

  “Oh, Ms. P., if anybody here knows about that, you surely do. What could I, a mere student, possibly say that would add to your vast storehouse of knowledge?”

  “Anything, Miles. You’re being smarmy. Devious. Of no help. Why? Don’t you care about April? Care what’s happened to her?”

  “Sure,” he said. “She’s my friend.”

  “Are you sure she still can be anybody’s friend? Some people think she’s dead. If you know something and don’t do anything about it, maybe it’s past tense now for her. Maybe she was your friend, but you let something bad happen to her.”

  His nostrils flared as he flashed a look of pure resentment. And then, with a breath, he was again bland and noncommittal. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t get into an uproar. What’s done is done. Go with the flow.”

  The crowd around us had thinned to three stragglers, shuffling toward their classrooms. I couldn’t believe how heartless Miles had become. The class jester, overflowing with emotions and quick, mostly joyous reactions to life, had turned into permafrost. “How can you say that? Maybe she’s being held somewhere. Maybe it isn’t too late.”