Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “That’s insane,” Gregor said. “How do they ever get anybody to work for them? Are you the only—what did you call it? Adjunct?”

  “Better than three quarters of all the teachers at Mattatuck–Harvey are adjuncts,” the woman said. “And the percentage is higher at Pelham. And the reason why I do it is that it’s the only job I could get. I’ve got a doctorate. I’m almost sixty. Put the combination together and you’re not going to get hired full time at much of anything. All the people they’ve hired full time at Mattatuck–Harvey over the last ten years have been under forty.”

  The woman held out the hand with the gun in it, then dropped that hand to her side. Gregor swore he could see her blush, even in the darkness. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve never had any cause to take it out before. And it’s a good coincidence you found me here, really, because I’ve been meaning to come and talk to you. My name is Penelope London. I was Chester Morton’s English teacher at the time he disappeared.”

  Gregor thought about it. “London,” he said. “That name’s in my notes somewhere.”

  “Oh, it should be,” Penny said. “When they actually bothered to start investigating Chester’s disappearance they did get around to me. Howard Androcoelho and Marianne Glew came and interviewed me for nearly an hour. And Marianne took notes. I knew both of them, though, before that, because they’d both been at Mattatuck–Harvey for a while. That’s what people do around here. If they go away to college, they don’t come back. If they’re going to stick around, they go to Mattatuck–Harvey.”

  Gregor looked at the woman standing there, and then the car, and then back at the lights in the parking lot of the hotel. He’d come through all that tall grass, and as far as he knew, there were snakes in it.

  “Come on,” he said. “You can give me a ride back to the hotel. Then we can go sit someplace and talk.”

  3

  It took less time than Gregor thought it would to talk her into it, just the assurance that there was an entirely separate room, with nobody in it for the night, and nobody likely ever to sleep in the second of the big queen-sized beds.

  “It seems a shame that the man has to spend the entire night sitting up with a corpse,” Penny London said. “And what for? Because Howard Androcoelho can’t get his act together. Howard’s always a big fave with the Mattatuck–Harvey Taxpayers Association. They’re the ones who don’t want to pay for anything. They’re the reason the police radios don’t work for half the town.”

  “Excuse me?” Gregor said.

  “Oh, I’m not making that up,” Penny said. “Mattatuck’s a huge place, really, considering just land mass, and there are dead areas for the radios in at least half of it. So we had a referendum a few months ago, to vote on getting a new system put in and a new service provider, but it was going to cost five million dollars, and that was that. I suppose none of them live out in the middle of nowhere where the radios wouldn’t work if they were in trouble. I mean, for God’s sake. Really.”

  Gregor let her go into Tony Bolero’s room to shower and change. He heard the shower go on immediately, and when he did he called down to the restaurant and ordered takeout. He ordered a lot of takeout. He had no idea what Penny London liked to eat. She could be a vegetarian. She was a middle-aged professional woman with a doctorate. She could even be a vegan. He ordered four entrees—everything from the vegetarian stir-fry to a pair of very thick steaks—and slipped out to pick them up. This kind of thing was easier to do in places that had real room service.

  When he got back to the room with his bags of food, the room next door was quiet. Penny London had finished taking her shower. Gregor knocked on the connecting door.

  “Are you all right for company? Come on in. I brought us some dinner.”

  “Oh,” Penny London said, from behind the door. Then the door opened and she stuck her head into Gregor’s room. Her hair was wet and sleeked back. She was wearing a pair of loose cotton pants and a sweatshirt. “Oh,” she said again, looking at the food Gregor was spreading out on the table near the windows. “You know, I’m really not poor. I do eat.”

  “You’re living in your car, and dinner is on me. Come on in and have something and tell me about Chester Morton in your English class.”

  “Just a minute.” Penny London disappeared for a second. When she came back, she was holding a manila file folder. She left the connecting door open and came in to sit at the table in front of the food. “This is incredible,” she said. “Do you normally eat this much?”

  “I didn’t know what you liked. I like steak, so I got two of those, in case you wanted one. Is that folder about Chester Morton?”

  “I do want a steak,” Penny London said. She sat down in front of the food, pulled a styrofoam box toward her and then fished a set of plastic tableware out of the bag Gregor had left at the center of the table. “This folder is definitely about Chester Morton,” she said. “Except ‘about’ may not be the right term. It belongs to Chester Morton, sort of. It’s things he wrote in my class and never picked up.”

  Penny waved the folder in the air. Gregor took it. Then he sat down in front of the food and got a steak for himself.

  “So this is what?” he asked. “English papers? Compare and contrast Jane Austen’s Emma with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying?”

  “Very good,” Penny London said. “But nobody takes that kind of English course these days, at least not in a community college. We don’t read Jane Austen or anything else except essays that are supposed to be models for student writing. They’re boring as hell, mostly. We had a pretty good textbook Chester’s year, though. Current Issues and Enduring Questions. It even had something by Rush Limbaugh. That shut up the ones you always get telling you how they’re not going to be brainwashed by liberal academia.”

  “Is that what you do? Brainwash students for liberal academia?”

  “Hell, I wish they had brains to wash,” Penny London said. “But that folder you’ve got there is interesting. And I’ve been holding on to it for twelve years.”

  “And it’s what?”

  “It’s papers, some of it, but most of it is the fifteen-minute writing exercise we do at the beginning of every class. Come in, sit down, write three paragraphs in fifteen minutes on whatever topic I give you.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Penny London said, “that is the first interesting thing. When Chester went missing, there was all this stuff in the paper—well, there was eventually. Charlene Morton had to kick and scream pretty hard to get anything done. But anyway, when they finally got around to it, there was some publicity, and part of it was all about how much Chester loved Wyoming and Montana and places like that—wide open spaces, big sky country, mountains, and wildlife.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Penny London said, “I think it’s full of crap. I don’t know. Maybe Charlene had lost touch after Chester moved out, although you wouldn’t think it would be time enough. But by the time he was in my class, Chester wasn’t interested in hunting and fishing and breathing the clean mountain air. Considering the tattoos and the piercings and the attitude, I’d think he hadn’t been interested in anything like that for years.”

  “What was he interested in?”

  “Urban everything,” Penny London said definitively. “And he spent a lot of time fantasizing about where he’d like to be, too. Los Angeles. Las Vegas. Lots of lights. Lots of urban grit. Lots of gambling.”

  “Gambling,” Gregor said.

  Penny London nodded. By then, she had calmly polished off a steak, a baked potato with butter, a pile of green beans, and most of the vegetarian stir-fry. She waved her fork at the folder Gregor was holding. “It’s all in there,” she said. “Just read through it for a while. Chester Morton loved to gamble. He wrote about it nearly all the time. Going out to Vegas was his big dream, going out there and breaking the bank, as he used to put it. He wasn’t all that bright. Which is interesting, you know, because I’ve got his brother this term, and the bro
ther is very bright. Kenny. And you’d guess that Charlene, lunatic that she is, has to be very bright herself. It’s hard for a truly stupid woman to be that consistently bitchy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I’ve met a few. But is that it—that Chester Morton liked to gamble and that he wasn’t likely to take off for a rural area? Was there something about his gambling? Was he in trouble?”

  “With the gambling? I don’t know,” Penny said. “But the other thing has to do with the last night I saw him. I’ve looked at the reports, and I think it might be the last night anybody saw him. It was after class. Chester and Darvelle Haymes were both in that class, and so was this other kid who had a thing for Darvelle, named Kyle Holborn.”

  “For some reason, that name is vaguely familiar,” Gregor said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Well,” Penny said reasonably, “if you got police reports about what happened when Chester was found, you probably saw his name. He’s a police officer now. But at the time, you know, he was just a kid. And Chester and Darvelle were inseparable. Except that night—”

  “It was a night class?”

  “It started at seven. We don’t usually make a big difference between day and night classes here. It’s all one schedule. Anyway, Chester and Darvelle were inseparable, until that class. And then they ended up sitting on opposite sides of the classroom glaring at each other. It was so bad, I nearly threw one of them out just so I could get something done. But we got through class, and the students left, and I sat behind for a bit to get myself organized.”

  “Were you living in your car then, too?”

  Penny gave him a look. “No,” she said. “Twelve years ago, the union hadn’t negotiated a contract that restricted adjuncts to only two courses in the system per term. I could afford an apartment all year round in those days. But here’s the thing. I waited a couple of minutes. I got my tote bag packed up. Then I went downstairs to the Frasier Hall parking lot. Students aren’t allowed to park there before five o’clock, but after five, it’s fair game. And there the three of them were, Darvelle and Chester and Kyle. Darvelle was kind of hanging back. Chester and Kyle were fighting.”

  “Fist fighting?”

  “Well, I don’t know about Chester’s fists,” Penny London said, “but Kyle was using his. I stood there and watched while he pulled back his arm and hit Chester so hard in the jaw that Chester went down flat on the ground. If I’d had a cell phone then, I would have called security.”

  “Did Chester get up?”

  “Oh, yes, he definitely got up. He took that bright yellow backpack of his and slammed it into the truck next to him hard enough to cause a dent. I saw the dent. I have to assume it was Kyle’s truck or Darvelle’s or even Chester’s own, because as far as I know there was no trouble about the dent. It was too bad, too, because that truck was mint new and shiny black. It looked like something out of a rock video about the devil.”

  “Did you ever see it again?”

  “The truck?” Penny asked. “No, not that I remember. But I wasn’t really looking for it.”

  “And you never saw Chester again?”

  “No, never.”

  “How about Darvelle and this Kyle person?”

  “Oh, they were in class every week. Darvelle always got A’s in everything she took. She pushed herself. I think Kyle just stuck with it because of her. It was that kind of a relationship. It still is, as far as I know. I see them around town together quite a lot. I asked some people I know, and they don’t seem to be married, but—well, you know. They always seem to be together.”

  “Interesting,” Gregor said.

  Penny London opened one of the smaller styrofoam boxes and discovered the first of the three desserts Gregor had brought in. She opened the other two and then took the big piece of chocolate cake.

  “Do you always eat like this?” she asked him. “I’m surprised you’re not the size of Howard Androcoelho.”

  SIX

  1

  Haydee Michaelman had to admit it. She had come to rely on Kenny Morton showing up out of the blue whenever she needed a ride, and she got a little depressed when she was hoping to find him and he wasn’t there. This was a very bad sign. She’d only met him at the very start of this term, and she’d only talked to him face-to-face just after Labor Day. It wasn’t all that long from then to now. Any minute now, she’d start mooning around, unable to concentrate on anything that was really important. She’d seen it happen too many time to too many girls. They started out with ambition. They started out with plans. They started out with a clear idea of who they wanted to be when they hit thirty.

  Then they got pregnant.

  Haydee rolled over in the unfamiliar bed with its massive wads of quilts and pillows and told herself not to be stupid. She and Kenny hadn’t even been out on a date yet, never mind done it. She wasn’t going to get pregnant just because she let some boy keep her out of the rain when she didn’t have an umbrella.

  Haydee sat up and looked around. The door to the bedroom was open, and she could hear the sound of somebody messing around in a kitchen from the other end of the trailer. Trailers, Haydee thought, were all alike. In fact, the trailers in this particular park were identical. Somebody must mass produce trailers somewhere, tooling them up on a conveyer belt, dumping them onto big flatbed trucks at the end of the line.

  Haydee looked at her watch. It was only six. The light outside the window was only pale and promising, not full-bore morning.

  Haydee got up from the bed and went to the door. She could see down the hall to where Desiree was cooking something on the tiny kitchen stove. The door to the other bedroom was shut tight.

  “Dez?” Haydee said, moving through the hall toward the smell of coffee.

  Desiree looked up. “Shh,” she said. “You don’t want to wake my mother up.”

  Haydee went down the rest of the hall and through the living room and sat down on the built-in bench behind the kitchen table. All these trailers were, in fact, exactly alike. The bedrooms were all the same. The living rooms were all the same. There were the same built-in tables and built-in benches.

  Desiree was making bacon. She kept turning it over and over and over in the frying pan, using a fork instead of a spatula.

  “I didn’t actually tell her you were staying here last night,” Desiree said. “I mean, she was close to passed out anyway, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble. She doesn’t like you staying here.”

  “She doesn’t like Mike coming over and busting up the place,” Haydee said. “Mike didn’t know where I went. Doesn’t know where I am. You know.”

  “He could guess,” Desiree said reasonably. “You always come over here, Haydee. He knows that. I’m surprised he didn’t land in our laps in the middle of the night. He was mad enough yesterday afternoon. Do you think he found your money?”

  “Nope,” Haydee said. “He can’t find my money. It isn’t around anymore.”

  “You mean you spent it? Did you buy a car?”

  “I didn’t spend it and I didn’t buy a car, because I don’t have enough money to buy a car yet. I put it in the credit union.”

  “The Mattatuck–Harvey Credit Union? That one? I don’t get it. Did you get a credit card?”

  “No,” Haydee said. She took a strip of bacon from the paper plate where Desiree was letting them pile up. She took one of the ones that had been there the longest, so that it had the least grease. “As it turns out,” she said, “a credit union is sort of the same thing as a bank, except that it’s supposed to be owned by the people who have accounts there instead of some big corporation. Okay, I’m not sure I get that quite yet. But what it comes down to is that you can have an account there and they don’t charge you money the way a regular bank does. So I can keep my money there where Mike can’t get it and it doesn’t cost me anything. Kenny told me about it.”

  “Kenny,” Desiree said. Then she giggled. “Does he have a place to go? Because I really can’t see you doing
it over there with Mike hanging around to watch.”

  “We’re not doing it,” Haydee said. “We’re not even sort of doing it. He hasn’t even kissed me good-bye. He told me about the credit union, though, and he took me over there, and now when I get paid at the Quik-Go I can walk to the credit union and deposit the check, and there won’t be any money around for Mike to find.”

  “Yeah, well,” Desiree said. “You’ve got to worry about that, don’t you? He’s going to beat you to a pulp someday if he can’t find it. I still can’t believe you found someplace to hide it where he wouldn’t look.”

  “Don’t you know where I hid it?”

  “No, I don’t. And maybe you shouldn’t tell me. Maybe you’re going to want to hide money there again. I don’t do too well when people are threatening me.”

  “I hid it over in the ghost trailer.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I didn’t go all the way in,” Haydee said. “I mean, I did, sort of. I went through the door and into the vestibule, you know, but I didn’t go any farther than that. The place was full of dust and it smelled weird. I just put the money in a little roll in a space where there was a crack in the wall of the front closet. There were bugs there, but I didn’t see why I should mind. It’s not like bugs eat money.”

  “But I thought that trailer was locked.”

  “Please,” Haydee said. “Anybody could get past one of these locks. And Mike wasn’t going to go over there and look, because he thinks the place is haunted. Really haunted. The man’s an idiot.”

  “Does your mother think it’s haunted, too?”

  Haydee shrugged. “I have no idea. She hates the place. She wasn’t going to go looking around in it anymore than Mike was. Which is odd, now that I come to think of it.”

  “Why?” Desiree asked. “I wouldn’t want to go into that thing. Maybe the ghost of Chester Morton is in there somewhere, just waiting to pounce on the first person who walks in.”