In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Where’s her work?” I asked. “Romeo and Juliet and something about immigration—the paper she was writing? See? The newspaper said her backpack had schoolbooks in it, but her books aren’t actually here. This doesn’t make sense.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mackenzie said with little interest. He was looking behind me. “You know her?” he asked.

  I did, to my regret. I watched her squatty figure determinedly bear down on us. “Evening!” Aldis Fellows said.

  I made introductions, and took a step away, toward the front of the building where Five would be waiting.

  “Would you look at that!” Aldis gestured at the unimpressive back of the school. “That’s what eats the budget and doesn’t let us have books or films we need. A disgrace!”

  “You mean the paint spray?” I asked.

  “The what? I mean those lights!”

  Three barely visible bulbs illuminated the recessed back door.

  “This citadel of learning does not seem to know that the days are longer in summertime. The sun has not yet set, and yet lights blaze away, burning energy and limited funds. No one has the intellect to reset the timer! It’s all wasted resources around here—false alarms ringing midday, lights on before dark—”

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured. The woman had the ability to make me feel responsible for the decline of Western civilization, as demonstrated in the three wrongly burning lights. I was relieved she didn’t seem to know who’d set off the afternoon’s false alarm.

  “Excuse us, ma’am,” Mackenzie said softly but firmly.

  Aldis nodded, and we made our limpy, slow way around to the front of the building. “She may be the single angriest woman I’ve ever met,” I said.

  Five’s dark green sedan waited at the curb. “A narc car,” Mackenzie said. “What’s the guy afraid of?”

  Two teachers on a mission to console parents, and Mackenzie behaving as if Five and I were having a tryst. “It’s hard to buy a Maserati on a teacher’s salary,” I said. “He has an ordinary car, what’s it to you?

  “Five, this is my friend, Mackenzie,” I said as I tried to hold the backseat door open for the invalid. However, he looked affronted, his manhood questioned, so I left him on his own.

  “Mackenzie?” Five asked. “Sorry, I didn’t catch the first—”

  I climbed in the front. “Crispin,” I said. “It means curly-haired, and isn’t that appropriate? Did you have lots of hair when you were born, Crispin?”

  The detective arranged his right leg in a diagonal across the back of the car. “Hitting What to Name Your Baby again?” he murmured.

  I had, indeed. At least the C’s. “St. Crispin was the patron saint of shoemakers.”

  “Then are you a cobbler?” Five asked. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Scion of a shoemaking dynasty, perhaps?”

  “No,” Mackenzie said.

  Rude, rude, which prompted a need on my part to make social noises. “Or like Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the American Revolution. That’d be a name you’d know, Five, wouldn’t you? Five teaches American history,” I babbled. “Knows all kinds of things about Philadelphia, too, even a poem about Peppers!”

  “Interesting,” Mackenzie said. “Well, I’m not of the Attucks branch. Not the scion of a slave dynasty, either, far as I know.”

  Five’s laugh was forced.

  “Mackenzie’s been reading a lot of history this summer, while he recuperates.” I sounded like a nervous hostess at the start of a bad cocktail party. Come on, somebody, pair up and mingle!

  “I noticed. Ski accident or what?” Five asked with minimal interest. It doesn’t take a whole lot for men to feel slighted, and somehow, both men already did.

  “Or what,” Mackenzie said. “Bullet misplacement. Into my leg. I’m the scion of a bullet-ridden branch of the service.”

  “Sorry,” Five said, “I’m not following.”

  “Special division of the Philadelphia Police. C.O.C.—Cops on Crutches,” Mackenzie said. “You know these new laws—can’t discriminate against us crips. Our motto is: We’re hobbled but hot.”

  We were silent most of the rest of the ride into the Southwest section of the city. Five gallantly, I thought, did not comment on my splotched skin, mottled hair, or missing eyelashes. Nor did he comment on the outside scenery, which was no more aesthetic than my recently painted face was.

  We drove up Woodland Avenue, past boarded and steel-sheathed stores. Past paving dense with broken glass and wire-fenced playgrounds that looked like Bosnia on a bad day. No one needed statistics to know this was one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in the city. And no one needed to point out that this was not the Southwest with which decorators had fallen in love.

  There was a pervasive grayness despite the orange sunset sky, the leafy attempts of curbside trees, and the occasional hydrangea on a tiny front lawn or pot of petunias hanging from a porch support. And the tension was almost palpable. We were a nondescript car with three riders, but a great deal of curbside energy went into checking us out as we passed.

  “A lot of ethnic strife around here in the past,” Mackenzie said.

  I remembered ten years ago, when I was in college, a black family had bought a house on an all-white block around here and they were burned out. Thugs set the house on fire. After we’d thought the Civil Rights Movement had to do with the South.

  “Right,” Five said. “Ever since the influx of Asians and blacks. Used to be Irish, Italians, Russians, Germans, and Brits, then, mid-century—”

  “I meant in the past.”

  I felt yellow fever approaching again.

  “Swedes took it from the Lenni Lenapes, then the Dutch threw the Swedes out, then the Brits threw the Dutch out.”

  “When?” Five asked.

  “Sixteen hundreds.” My history’s older than your history, so there. That ended that conversational tack, and all was silent until we reached the Truong home.

  April’s parents were small people who looked as if they’d been sandpapered close to the bone by time and circumstance. They lived in a narrow brick row house that had seen better days inside and out, and they sat close together, hands clasped, on a love seat that had probably been nondescript when it was in its prime.

  We were seated across from them, on unmatched straight-back chairs. Cups of tea and a plate of delicate cookies were on the table in front of us. A photograph of April in a bouffant white dress—first communion, perhaps?—was on top of the TV.

  I apologized for my dark glasses and said I had an eye problem. They looked confused. I moved on and said how fond I was of their daughter, and how I wanted to do anything I could to help her family and the search for her. I said what a bright student she was, how much I expected a good future for her, how impressed I’d been by her work and her attitude.

  Her parents smiled weakly and nodded. Now and then her mother wiped at her eyes and swallowed hard.

  April’s brother Thomas, pencil-thin, wore a T-shirt that had a painted tombstone with VO VAN TRAN written on it. Custom-made mourning shirts were a local growth industry. Thomas sat on the worn arm of an overstuffed chair and helped his parents with their conversational English. I had the distinct impression that he’d been coerced into being part of the gathering, but I had the equally distinct impression that Thomas Truong wouldn’t be an easy person to coerce.

  April’s parents spoke in a mix of English and what I assumed was Vietnamese.

  “My parents explained that the police have not been back,” Thomas said when they were finished. “Not since that first time.”

  “Did they question other people who knew—know—April?” I asked. “For example, the boy who was killed outside the school—the one on your shirt—Vo Van—could there be any connection between that terrible event and April’s disappearance?”

  The older Truongs inhaled in unison at the mention of Vo Van, and watched their son nervously.

  Thomas’s posture became defiantly rigid, his chi
n tilted upward. “My sister’s disappearance is not the fault of a Vietnamese, of our neighbors,” he said. “There is an unfairness toward us, toward my people. The truth is that while my sister has very little sense about the people she favors, Vo Van was not one of the people she favored. There can be no connection.”

  “Of course, we know April only through school,” Five said quickly. “And only for a few weeks. She was—is—a promising student, but I—we naturally feel deep concern about her disappearance, and wondered if perhaps there was anything she had said—about school—that might help the police find her.”

  Thomas sat up even straighter and spoke. “I do not understand.”

  “Do you feel the police were thorough enough about April’s life outside your home?”

  Thomas translated for his parents, who looked at each other, then shook their heads. How would they know if the police had failed to ask something significant about a portion of April’s life they didn’t share?

  “Perhaps something about school,” Five said. “Did she mention anything that worried her?”

  “Many things worry all of us, including April. But my parents are tired when they come home,” Thomas said. “And then there are the little children. April did not return from her work until nearly midnight, when they would be asleep. I do not think there were many long conversations about school.”

  “Then with you? You picked her up from work.”

  “Many times,” he said. “Not always. We did not talk a great deal.”

  “Why did you pick her up?” I asked.

  “My sister had no car. It is a dangerous city. She might have made an unwise choice of transportation otherwise. She did not always have sense about the people she favored. She needed to be protected. From herself.”

  From Woody. Thomas had thought he was making sure they didn’t see one another.

  “Do you think she might have meant to go away?” Five asked his question slowly, with deliberation and consideration of each word, and he watched intently as the Truongs responded.

  He was being the detective. Mackenzie was being nothing, his entire self as inert as his leg.

  “April is a good girl,” her mother said.

  “Why would she want to leave us?” Thomas sounded as if he were issuing a challenge. “Why do you ask such questions? What do you think about this, Mister…”

  “Dennison,” Five said. “And I don’t know what to think. That’s what I was hoping you’d help with.”

  “The police have already asked all the questions. Over and over. About worries, fears, problems.”

  “And they’ve come up with nothing,” Five said. “That’s why I thought together we might have extra insight.”

  I could see the hint of a lip curl on Mackenzie, and I could read his thoughts as if his skull were transparent. Another wannabe sleuth, he was thinking, and not with admiration.

  “But if we of April’s family are content that the police are doing their best, if the police are content with what they know, why should not you be?” Thomas asked. “Is it not wrong for citizens to try to be the law keepers? My parents do not blame the school. This did not happen on school time.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Five began.

  “We are confident that all will be well,” Thomas said. “And that all effort is being made in the meantime.”

  The older Truongs did not seem to share their son’s serenity. They looked wracked, devastated, had winced with pain each time April was mentioned, and they had been wringing their hands throughout the visit. But they didn’t contradict their son. I hoped their silence was due only to a problem with the language, or to a point of Vietnamese etiquette.

  “It is kind of you to have come all this way and made this visit,” Thomas said, rising. “To have put yourself to this inconvenience.” His parents also stood and nodded, nearly bowing. “It is good to know her teachers care about April.”

  “But—”

  “We thank you.” And then Thomas quite literally showed us the door, and used it, too.

  We stood on the street, the night close around us. “Was that peculiar or what?” I said. I expected no more response than grunts of assent, so Five startled me. He had been so intent inside the house, so much more aware of possible holes in the search than Mackenzie or I had been, so tuned into each answer given.

  But what he said as he unlocked the car was, “Maybe I’ve caught their Asian sense of fatality or something.” He sounded relaxed, relieved, almost happy. “I think we should let go of it, too. Leave it to the pros.”

  I could almost feel him slough the residue of all those questions without a backward glance. Case closed. Leave it to the pros. It?

  But April wasn’t an it, and what about her? Suddenly, I heard echoes of Aldis’s judgment of the man, and I, too, wondered just how bright or observant Five really was, and how much he’d let slip by without his notice or comprehension.

  Sixteen

  “UP FOR A NIGHTCAP?” FIVE ASKED AS WE DROVE around the edge of Penn’s campus and started for center city.

  I was. Not particularly for the drink, but for the talk. I wanted to gnaw this over, pick apart strands, get to its center. But as I opened my mouth to accept, I turned around and saw Mackenzie’s eyes, even in the dark car, shouting absolutely not.

  “Thanks,” I told Five, “but I’m exhausted. Those hooligans today…” The official story was that my car and I had been the victims of random violence. Same old, same old. Nobody questioned it.

  “You sure? Maybe it’d be good to unwind. Plus, it’d be a chance to toss the topic around.”

  “You said we should let it go,” Mackenzie said.

  “Maybe not till we know what we’re letting go of.” Five’s voice filled the car interior. “I’d especially like to hear what a pro thinks. Unless you were pulling my leg about your leg, so to speak. The cops on crutches division? I know the division is a joke, but you are a cop, right?”

  You tend to forget that even a handsome, all-American specimen such as Five could be lonely. The man needed friends, needed to feel comfortable in his new environment. He was trying. You could hear it in every word. The least I could do was not be a card-carrying example of why we were the Most Hostile City in the U.S.

  “Of course I want to know what you think, too, Mandy,” he added, rather lamely.

  “Well, then, sure. A quick one.”

  At that exact second, Mackenzie’s slurry voice came from the backseat. “Some other time.”

  “Not you, Crispin? No problem. We’ll drop you off first. Whereabouts do you live?”

  I watched the words drop in front of Mackenzie like flags in front of a bull. “Changed my mind,” he said. “A quick drink’d be good.” And then he suggested a place about two blocks from the school. It was charming—dark, sleek, and cool, but not overly chilled. In the far corner a woman in a plumed extravaganza of a hat played piano just loudly enough, and more than well enough.

  I’d never been there. I wondered when Mackenzie had. I knew that if I asked, he’d say he read a review or mention of it in the paper months ago, and that might be true—he had an amazing ability to store abstract knowledge. But still I wondered.

  “Quite an interrogation you gave back there,” Mackenzie said when we were settled in and our orders taken. “Very smooth. Professional.”

  Mackenzie had a keen appreciation for language. Interrogation wasn’t the right word, unless he meant to insult Five. Maybe an extension of the evening hadn’t been the best idea, after all. It was unwholesome fun, having two men circling each other because of me, and not particularly pleasant, not even in a guilty, secret way, since I wasn’t part of the game. At least not consciously.

  The woman at the piano played “As Time Goes By,” but we were not the stuff of legends, not up to the standards of the Casablanca threesome.

  “Interrogation? Did I seem to be drilling them?” Five sounded truly concerned.

  “Didn’t mean it that way,” Mackenzie
said. “Jus’ interested in your questions. Very systematic approach.”

  “I should have let you do the asking,” Five said. “I’m not good at it, and it’s definitely more your line.”

  Mackenzie shook his head. “Wouldn’t have known what to ask. Didn’t know the girl or the circumstances.”

  Five’s eyes flicked from Mackenzie to me, then back. He was translating knowledge of April into mating data, deciding whether Mackenzie’s know-nothing stance meant we didn’t see each other much or that we saw each other a whole lot but didn’t confide in each other much.

  But we had talked about the missing girl. We’d talked it through a dozen times. So why, after practically putting yellow tape around me that said POLICE LINE: KEEP BACK, would Mackenzie lie in a way that was almost a quitclaim?

  “What was your take on what they said?” Mackenzie asked Five.

  “Not much. The parents didn’t know squat about their daughter, and the brother didn’t care. How about you?”

  “You think they were tellin’ the truth? That nothin’ bothered her, she didn’t fear anybody or like anybody in particular?”

  “Why would they lie?” Five asked. I wondered if he realized who was now the interrogator, whether he minded.

  Mackenzie’s shrug was barely perceptible. I’d known him long enough to translate it as All Kinds of Reasons, but he didn’t choose to share any of them.

  “I can understand now how she might well go off on a joyride,” Five said. “Anything would be better than going back to a house where nobody talks to you. Nobody’s even awake when you’re there.”

  “She didn’t see it that way,” I said. “There are younger children she cares for, and that didn’t seem a chore. They were a team, the family, and that was her job.”