In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Surely Thomas isn’t playing on that family team of theirs. He’s in a gang that runs massage parlors. Not a wholesome lot, that group. Not exactly family values.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Mackenzie asked, but with curiosity, not hostility.

  “Somebody told me.” Five looked at me. “Was it you?”

  I shook my head. Even though I’d heard about Thomas from Woody or Miles or somebody, I’d never passed it on. Except to Mackenzie, who was choosing to play dumb.

  “But I’m interested how you relate that to April,” Mackenzie said. “You think a gang member snatched her? Revenge against brother Thomas, maybe?”

  “It sounds possible, doesn’t it? And then, it gets really murky when you get into the possibility of her being a…a harlot.”

  Five obviously wasn’t into PC talk, but even so, I was surprised by his choice of words. “But you knew her,” I said. “Didn’t she seem the least likely girl in the school to be a sex industry worker?”

  “Sex industry worker,” Mackenzie grumbled. “Hard hats and pasties. As for the sex industry itself, the smokestacks and Environmental Impact studies show—”

  “I didn’t know her well,” Five answered me. “Only through her classwork. We never talked about her personal life. We didn’t have that kind of time you must have had with her. She didn’t do special sessions with me.”

  “Never at lunch?” I asked, hoping to relocate the conversation to the issue of what went on at noon. “She wasn’t ever part of your fan club?”

  “My what?” His eyebrows rose.

  “No false modesty. The lunch bunch. The summer scholars.”

  “But I told you what really—”

  “I’m teasing.” I decided on another tack. “Remember how you were asking me about April and drugs?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Do you think much goes on at Philly Prep that way?”

  “Drugs? There? I didn’t mean that—I meant in her neighborhood, with her friends,” Five said. “Not at your school!”

  “Why not?” Mackenzie asked, semi-belligerently. “You think Philly Prep has some special dispensation, that rich kids are exempt? Who’d you think can afford the stuff?”

  “I didn’t mean, I only… No.” He relaxed, looked at me, and answered my question. “I don’t think so. If there is, I’m unaware of it. Jesus, if I thought for one minute—I have zero tolerance for that business.”

  But perhaps he was just naïve. I pressed on. “I’m still so jealous of whatever it is that makes your extra time with the kids work. Would it be possible—be honest, if this would be an imposition—could I visit some noon? Observe for a while?”

  “Observe? Well…sure.” He seemed ill at ease, and I wondered what really was going on. “Except it isn’t like a lesson. I told you. So don’t expect too much,” he added. “And more important, I can’t let it establish precedent.”

  “Meaning?” He’d lost me.

  “Phyllis,” he hissed. “What if she decides to observe, too?”

  Phyllis. That was all it was about. Not drugs but predatory females. Nonetheless, I’d pop in someday to set my mind at rest.

  “Hate to backtrack,” Mackenzie said, lumbering into the talk. “But I’m still not clear on the gang connection. Did you think the brother seemed put off by your questions? You know, how he was about the cops having already asked about what they needed to know?”

  “I’m sure he’s nervous about anybody asking anything that might involve him,” Five said. “He definitely wanted the interview closed. And who knows what the parents really thought?”

  “I keep wondering if Thomas is at all connected with her disappearance,” Mackenzie said. “What’s your take?”

  “I don’t know as I have one. I don’t think I knew what I was doing in there or where I was hoping to get. Looking back, I’m really embarrassed to have hogged the floor. I hoped that maybe asking around would get me somewhere, and then I’d know where to head from there, but it didn’t happen.”

  “Why?” Mackenzie asked abruptly. “Why do you care so much?”

  We were back to rude, and I didn’t see why.

  “Be-Beeause, she’s—I—”

  I really disliked my detective at that moment. “For heaven’s sake!” I said. “You can tell you’re not a teacher. And thank goodness for that. We care. Forgive me for speaking for both of us, Five, and feel free to disagree, but the question doesn’t make sense, Mackenzie. I don’t want to sound simplistic, but a young girl is gone. Swallowed up by the earth and somebody she struggled with. That’s scary. She’s our student. If there’s something to be done, then we’d want to do it. There’s a damn fine possibility that the police did not sufficiently question the people who were with her every day. Deedee Klein was nice enough, but nobody wanted to talk to her and she let it go at that. So there’s a good chance that they—the police—are missing something important that a lowly teacher might know. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Didn’t mean the question to sound like a challenge,” Mackenzie said mildly. But I thought he had. He is a man who generally sounds precisely the way he intends to. “It’s real impressive that you care about your kids. But depressin’ as this is going to sound, she’s a girl who is not underage, who got into a van.”

  “Was forced into it. She struggled,” I said.

  “The witness thinks. For all we know, she was giggling hard, play-fightin’, or just shrugging off her backpack.”

  “And leaving it there?”

  “And leavin’ it all behind,” Mackenzie said. “The sad truth is that people take off and disappear all the time. Like that, and for keeps. Because they want to or because they don’t want to. But there is a spectacular lack of evidence here, of meaningful clues. Of anything. And this is an enormous country, and she could be anywhere in it by now. Legally. In places where nobody’s given a thought to looking for her. I’m going to be real surprised if she is found. Ever. Or at least, in time.”

  We both stared at him.

  “Get on with your lives, you two,” he said with supreme calm. “If anything solves this one, it’ll be time. Your first reaction was the right one,” he said directly to Five. “Adopt that Asian fatality. Leave April to destiny and the police. Let go of it.”

  I opened and closed my mouth like an oxygen-starved fish, but my protests remained empty bubbles of silence.

  “Thanks,” Five said. “You’re right. Thanks a lot.” He picked up the check. “On me,” he added. And Mackenzie, obviously no longer proving anything, let him pay while he and I waited outside. The balmy day had melted into a mild and delicious night. Not the right setting for talk of abductions or runaways or gangs.

  “Should I drop you off at your place, or, um, your places?” Five asked with little subtlety once we were all outside.

  “We can walk from here,” Mackenzie told him. “I’ll see her home.” I could almost feel his glee at avoiding the issue of where, or in what combination, we lived. “But thanks,” he said with a minor reprise of his customary charm. “For the lift and the drinks and the company.”

  “You’ll walk home on crutches?” Five said doubtfully.

  “Good exercise,” Mackenzie insisted.

  Five waved as he walked off toward his car. “See you, then.”

  I stopped gritting my jaw. The imagined contest was now on hold, if not over. “I’m glad you eased up at the end,” I said as we walked back toward the school. “I think he’s a lot more shy than he seems, and maybe not too bright. He was just trying to make friends. Basically, he’s a decent guy.”

  “Likable,” Mackenzie said. “But decent? I don’t know…”

  “Come on,” I said. “This imagined rivalry—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mackenzie, you can be so perceptive about other people’s motives, but you are in such denial about your own that I can barely believe you function on this planet.”

  “Rivalry? With whom?”


  I waved him away, crutches and all.

  “What’s happened here?” he asked. “Blindsided by a square jaw?” Crutch-clomp, crutch-clump.

  “Jealousy is a worse handicap than a shattered bone,” I snapped. “And a whole hell of a lot uglier.” And so we might have continued, escalating to new heights of bickering, had not Flora Jones come marching around the corner. Flora and a high-spirited brown puppy who looked as if someday, when he grew into his feet, he planned to be a formidable Doberman.

  “Well, hey!” she said. “It must be somebody famous wearing those shades at night.”

  “We’re playing charades,” I said. “We’re the blind leading the halt. Get it?” The evening was becoming a mobile PTA meeting. Philly Prep faculty were everywhere, taking over the city. Once again I made introductions, and watched as Flora evoked a different Mackenzie than Five had. This one was cordial, indeed gallant, radiating charm and beguilement. He made it clear, in a soft, Southern way, that never before had such a charming woman and puppy crossed his path.

  Now I was the one to flash with jealousy, to fight the temptation to give his good leg a solid kick.

  “Meet my bodyguard, Lamont,” Flora said. “As in Cranston. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

  At the moment, Lamont looked as if all he knew was the pure joy of being alive and out on a summer night. “Pleasure to meet you, pup,” I said.

  Lamont wagged his tail, his hips, and his hind legs. In fact, he wagged his head, too. This puppy was going to have a hard time learning what evil lurked anywhere.

  Was this what she’d meant by taking countermeasures? I didn’t see how a dog, even the future fierce one, could prevent vandals from spray-painting a door, or leaving ugly phone messages, or mailing threats, or defacing a classroom. But it seemed cruel to say so. Besides, Flora had intimated that she had a whole arsenal, a multifaceted plan.

  “Mr. Cranston and I have just completed our evening constitutional,” Flora said, “and we were heading home and probably should continue doing just that. Pleasure to meet you,” she told Mackenzie. And, “See you in the morning,” she told me. “Both of us. I’m bringing Lamont to school.”

  “Wow,” I said, “does Havermeyer—”

  “Let him try and stop me. Let anybody try and stop me from now on. I am nobody’s willing target anymore.” And with a smile and a quasi-military salute, she and Lamont continued on, Flora walking, Lamont experimenting with a canine version of skipping.

  “Nice woman,” Mackenzie said.

  “Amazing woman. And gutsy. I’m not as sure about Lamont.”

  “But your Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth is a different story. Charming, sure. Good company. But I think the man was lying.” He spoke in a flat voice as he moved, little-crutch-clump, little-crutch-clump, down the sidewalk.

  I walked beside him, trying hard to think of what, if anything, Five had to lie about, or when he might have done so this evening. He hadn’t made any statements I could remember, simply asked questions. Except, maybe, about drugs at Philly Prep? But even so—and I didn’t want to think it might be—why would that bother Mackenzie so much?

  “Something about what he was doin’ was a sham.”

  “What?” I really didn’t get it. “Questions simply are. They can’t be a sham.” The word sham began to sound silly.

  “Motives for askin’ questions can be fake. Bet my entire sick pay that nothing Mr. Five said tonight is one hundred percent the way he made it sound. That he didn’t want to know what he said he wanted to know, and he didn’t care about what he—or you—said he cared about.”

  “You forget. The outing was my idea. That’s for starters. It isn’t as if he had some big secret scenario in which he involved us. And if he wasn’t doing exactly what he seemed to be doing, then what was he doing? Getting kicks in a particularly boring way? There’s nothing nefarious about running out to Southwest for a strained session with a sad family. Your professional skills have atrophied.” Instead of having insights, he was indulging in spite.

  The sight of the school across the street sent a blip of panic snaking through me. I was glad I wasn’t alone, even if I was with an impaired member of the C.O.C. He could swing a crutch if anything once again lurked in the alley behind the building.

  Mackenzie sighed and clumped along. “The man has a definite agenda,” he finally said. “Not necessarily one that’s about April.”

  “Look, I admit he’s good-looking. Exceptionally so. And maybe a little bit interested in me, too. And there were questions that annoyed you—probes for whether we lived together, what our relationship was. But that’s no reason to smear him. I’m a grown-up. You can trust me, and you’d better. Honestly, if we’re to have any kind of—”

  “He wanted to know something—wanted to know it a whole lot. Only not what we were supposed to think he wanted to know. He found it out, too. Tha’s why he was almost giddy with relief. An’ I’m sure it had nothing to do with April’s welfare.”

  But I remembered the conversation in the bar, and Five’s concern, and I told Mackenzie so.

  He shook his head. “I was the one kept going back to the issue at hand.”

  “No, he did—remember? He said we could have a drink and talk about it and you asked him why he’d changed his mind.”

  “Fact is, Five didn’t give a damn about the Truongs by then. Nope, there’s some other story there. He’s slick, too. Good at hidin’ it, all smooth surfaces, no edges to grab hold of.”

  Which is to say, there was nothing Mackenzie could name or identify. There was, in fact, nothing. Mackenzie was paranoid. Jealous.

  It’s a shame how quickly a perfectly good man could spoil in the heat.

  Seventeen

  WE CROSSED AT THE CORNER, LIKE GOOD CITIZENS. Whenever I approached the school in less than my usual double time, with no students or classes looming, I was able to appreciate what a handsome building housed it. Its turn-of-the-century brownstone walls and carved facades spoke of a very different city and social class than my small brick trinity house did with its three rooms, named for faith, hope, and charity. By the time the Philly Prep building went up, history and philosophy had marched way past the deliberately understated Colonial ethic, and new millionaires flaunted their success with expensive materials, carved stonework, gilding, sweeping staircases, and imposing entryways.

  I’ve tried to envision the successful brewer who built himself this palace, and wondered what life was like when only one family lived inside its walls. I imagined them enormous in number and girth—and the paterfamilias a strutting, proud fellow as he left his oversized front door each morning.

  And as if bringing my idle thoughts to life, a figure exited the building. Down the front stairs, onto the sidewalk. The ghost of brewers past? Except that instead of a swagger there was a hunched-over slump.

  “Lowell!” I called out before I could censor myself. No matter. He continued walking away from the school and us.

  “Lowell? Of Aunt Whatsis and Mom?”

  “What’s he doing here at this hour?”

  “Well, hey, I’ll prove my skills haven’t rusted. Let me demonstrate an advanced police technique of findin’ stuff out. Lowell!” he shouted. “Hey, there!” He turned his head toward me. “Should you happen to want to study up on it, the technique is called askin’.” He looked back down the street.

  Lowell continued to shuffle along, shaking his head from side to side. So much for advanced police techniques.

  “Lowell!” Mackenzie called one more time without any response.

  “Doesn’t matter.” We turned left, beside the building, toward the back alley and Mackenzie’s car.

  “Look at that,” I wailed as we turned again. “Somebody broke the lights.” The recessed back entry was dark. “The vandals are back. Who are they? What do they want?”

  “Probably they’ve been out for a while,” Mackenzie said, consolingly. “It was still light when we parked, so who’d have notice
d?”

  “Aldis. Remember her ranting about how stupid the school was?”

  “I pretty much tuned her out.”

  “The lights made her irate because—”

  “Because pretty much anythin’ could, was my impression.”

  “Correct, but it was those lights this time, because it wasn’t dark yet and they were on, wasting money.”

  “She busted them to make a point? It couldn’t have been easy.” The bulbs were set in mesh protectors. Somebody would have to poke and prod and stab at them. Two of them looked as if somebody had. With the third, the one directly over the back door, it appeared the vandal had lost patience—the entire mesh cage was crushed along with the bulb. “Cost more to replace them than to keep them off two more hours would have.”

  But of course, Aldis wouldn’t really have smashed the offending lights. She had her own kind of craziness—rigidity, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, discipline and efficiency to excess. But that was the sort of outrageousness that wrote petitions and harassed city hall, not the sort that smashed lights.

  I took deep, even breaths to control a mild attack of nerves. I reminded myself that broken lightbulbs were not cause for alarm, or preface to anything worse, but a basic city fact of life.

  Mackenzie, meanwhile, stood back on his crutches, leaning against his car and regarding the broken lights, the door, and then me. He smiled invitingly. I moved away from the school, closer to him. Very close. He smiled again.

  “What?” I said.

  He kissed me. Balanced against the car, he was almost as able-bodied as he used to be, and he had full use of his arms and hands.

  “You are a world-class kisser,” I whispered.

  He kissed me again, both his hands cradling my face, and it finally did seem summer with its soft, dark nights and sultry charm. Then he pulled back and looked at me, almost quizzically. “Listen,” he said, still holding me, punctuating his words with kisses on my temple, my nose, my mouth. “I have this idea… Don’t laugh, okay? You think anybody’s in there?”