by Jane Haddam
“There would have been other police officers checking the area out that night?”
“Absolutely,” Howard said. “That’s valuable equipment there. We have to be careful.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “Then the next thing I need is the name of the officers patroling that area at night, and I need to talk to them, too. I think we can let these two go.”
“Really?” Jack DeVito said. “But this was nothing at all. You could have asked us all this on the phone.”
FOUR
1
Haydee Michaelman was not sure what she was doing. She was not sure what she wanted to do. She was not sure what she could do. The day seemed to stretch in front of her endlessly, and there were so many things in it that she couldn’t refuse to do. She had to go to work. She had to go to school. She had to go through the routine of her day as she always did, because that was the key to everything. You could not give yourself excuses to not do the things you were supposed to do. That was how people ended up in the trailer park.
The day was bright and clear and still. It was the first day that had felt like September yet this year. She was miles and miles away from the dam, all the way on the other side of town. They did not have to go back that way to get to school.
“You’re sure you want to do this,” Kenny said, holding the door open for her as she climbed into his truck. “You’re sure? You don’t have to go to class on a day like this. There isn’t a professor on the planet who’s going to mark you down for not coming to class right after your mother was—after she died.”
Haydee climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across her chest. “I’m not going to make excuses,” she said. “Everybody always makes excuses. There was a kid in my biology class senior year who made up that his grandmother died. Twice.”
“But you’re not making anything up,” Kenny said, climbing up into the cab beside her. “And he’s going to know you’re not making it up. It’s probably all over the Internet already. It’s at least on Channel 8.”
“When that kid died in the crash out in Middlebury last year, dozens of people skipped class and said they couldn’t face it because they knew him. You don’t do things like this. You don’t get it. I can’t make excuses. I can walk if you don’t want to take me. It’s all right. I’ve walked longer than it is from here.”
“Of course I want to take you,” Kenny said. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m just saying that you don’t have to do this. It’s all right to let it go just this once. And I don’t know what good you’re going to be in class in the shape you’re in. You’re not going to understand a thing.”
“I’ll be fine,” Haydee said.
This was true. She would be fine, one way or the other. She would sit still. She would face the professor. She would take notes. She was not really worried about having the wrong answers if she was called on in class. This was math class. She always had the wrong answers.
She wondered why that was. She could remember kids in high school, kids she had very few classes with, at the end. The ones who did AP everything. The ones who sat around at lunch, looking through thick college brochures of places with famous names. Harvard. Vassar. Yale. The University of Michigan. Notre Dame.
Some of those kids had not been much different than she was herself, but some of them had been very different. It didn’t matter what was said in class, they always understood it. It didn’t matter what question they were asked, they always knew the answer.
Haydee wondered what that would be like, to be like that, to just know it, all the time. It was not a matter of work. She worked as hard as anybody else in school, and probably harder. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t get through algebra except by staying up nights until she was ready to fall over, and then she’d only managed a C. She’d had to nearly kill herself to pass geometry at all. She had no idea what went on in the heads of people who not only got A’s in algebra and geometry, but went all the way up to calculus and got A’s in that, too.
They were coming up to the intersection where the signs were. That’s how Haydee thought of it. For a long time there was a sign that read: MATTATUCK DESERVES WORKING POLICE RADIOS. Haydee looked. It was still there.
They were stopped at the light. Kenny looked at the sign and said, “Gives you a lot of confidence, doesn’t it? The Mattatuck police are coming to your rescue, but their radios don’t work, so if you’re out in the country somewhere, you’re screwed.”
“There was a referendum,” Haydee said. “The whole town voted about it. To have the system upgraded so that the radios would work all over town. But they didn’t vote it in.”
“I know,” Kenny said.
“I’m sorry,” Haydee said. “I’m feeling sort of distracted.”
“For God’s sake,” Kenny said. “Of course you’re feeling sort of distracted. Haydee, you’re not making any sense here. You’re really not. I ought to be taking you to the emergency room instead of to school. I think you’re in shock.”
“Do you ever think about smart people?” Haydee said.
“What?”
“Do you ever think about smart people?” Haydee repeated. “You know, those kids at school. They take AP classes and they go away to famous colleges. Except not all of them. Some of them are just like everybody else, but they work harder. Except not exactly. I worked as hard as I could and I couldn’t get into an AP class. And I couldn’t do math. Some of them were just smarter than me.”
“You’re plenty smart,” Kenny said. “And you’re dedicated, and you work hard.”
“But I’m not smart,” Haydee said. “I don’t just know things, like some of those people do. And I don’t just understand. Sometimes, you know, with stuff in Dr. London’s class, even, and that’s English. Narrative arcs. Mythic archetypes. Getting the stuff in, say, ‘The Second Coming.’ Do you remember that poem?”
“I remember it,” Kenny said. “I thought it was going to kill me.”
“Well, it’s like that poem,” Haydee said. “Some people just get it. They read it and understand it. And I don’t. And I talked to Dr. London about it, and she said it was ‘cultural context.’ Or maybe ‘cultural literacy.’ Anyway, she said there are all these things out there in the world to know about, and the more of them you do know about the easier it is to read, because writers are always just assuming that readers will know stuff. And if you don’t know it, then it won’t make any sense when you read it.”
“All right,” Kenny said.
“But that’s the problem,” Haydee said. “How do you learn all that stuff? And I think some people have parents who already know it and so they learn it growing up just because they do, you know. Just because it’s stuff their parents talk about. But then what happens to the rest of us? Have you ever thought about that? What happens to the rest of us who don’t have parents who already know? How do we find out about all that? Shouldn’t they be teaching that in school? But they don’t teach it in school.”
They were pulling into the front entrance of Mattatuck–Harvey Community College. The billboard was still there, the one with Chester Morton on it. Haydee hadn’t realized they’d left the place with the signs.
“It’s like that thing you were telling me,” Haydee said. “About the tree, the Judas tree—”
“The flowering Judas,” Kenny said.
“I didn’t even know who Judas was until about three weeks ago. We didn’t go to church. My mother didn’t care about religion. I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. But that’s not stupid. That’s just ignorant. And that’s the thing, you see. That’s the thing.”
They were pulling into the Frasier Hall parking lot. Students were not allowed to park in the Frasier Hall lot until after five.
“You’ll get a ticket,” Haydee said.
“I’ll drop you off and then go park in C lot,” Kenny said. “This way, you won’t have to walk too far. I still don’t think you’re okay.”
“I keep thinking that it mi
ght have been different. She might have been different. My mother, I mean. If her parents had known things like that, you know, so that school was easier for her. I don’t know. I don’t know. You can’t just ignore the things she decided to do. I didn’t get any of that stuff and I didn’t get pregnant in high school. I didn’t drop out at sixteen and then just—just. I don’t know. You can’t ignore the fact that she made choices, it’s just that if things had been different she might have made other choices. I’m not making any sense. I’m not making any sense at all.”
“You’re making perfect sense,” Kenny said.
Haydee bent over and put her forehead on the dashboard. The air conditioner was on in the truck. The dashboard felt cold.
“I’ve got brothers,” she said. “Did you know that? I’ve got three older brothers, at least, and I may have one younger one. I don’t know. They all disappeared a long time ago. How am I going to find them? How am I going to find them and tell them? Do they even want to know?”
“Haydee—”
“I have to go to class,” she said. “Thank you for the ride. Thank you for the lunch. Thank you for everything, I guess.”
Then she opened the truck’s door and slipped out.
2
Darvelle Haymes did not go into the office the way most people did. That wasn’t the way a real estate office worked, and besides, there was very little to do at a desk if there wasn’t a client on the horizon. Darvelle did not have a client today. She did not have paperwork to prepare for other clients. She did not have cold calls to make. She did not have anything to do at all. She went into the office anyway, because it was better than sitting alone in her house waiting for the ax to fall.
Waiting for the ax to fall. That was the way Darvelle’s mind put it when she tried to think and even when she did it. The phrase seemed to be swirling around and around inside her skull as if she had a ping-pong ball up there. It bounced and rattled. It made her want to bend over double and cry.
Her desk was the closest one to the big front window that looked out on West Main Street, and she had always liked it like that. In fact, years ago, when she was very new to this firm, she had done a lot of wrangling to get this desk for herself. She’d had to wait until old Miss Fanshaw was out of the way. She’d expected the old biddy to retire, but instead she’d had a heart attack at this very desk, and been carted away in an ambulance to St. Mary’s.
There was coffee at the back of the room. It was a big room, long and open, taking up almost the entire first floor of the building. There was a bathroom in the back, and a little place to store records, and a big sink. Darvelle got herself coffee when she first came in. Then she sat down at her computer and bent over it as if she had a lot to do. Then she played Solitaire, and FreeCell, and Spider Solitaire, and even Hearts, with herself. Then she got on the Internet and went to PopCap Games and played Dynomite and Zuma and Alchemy and TipTop and Bejeweled in three different versions. She kept the sound off. She made predictions for herself. If she got to thirty-three thousand points on Dynomite, everything would be all right. If she got thirteen coins in Zuma, everything would be all right. If she won three Solitaire games in a row, everything would be all right.
Nothing was going to be all right. She lost every one of the games, and the more she lost the more tense she got. The muscles in her arms were slammed tight and hard. They ached just hanging by her side. Her head felt like it was going to explode.
Waiting for the ax to fall. That was what she was doing. Waiting for the ax to fall. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t killed anybody. Kyle was right about that. It didn’t matter because everything else they’d done had been so screamingly wrong, both twelve years ago and now. They’d been behaving like children who can’t control anything they do, who get themselves into more trouble the more they try to get out of the trouble they had. But what were they supposed to do? What? None of it had been their idea, and none of it had been their fault. All they’d ever wanted was to steer clear of the whole mess and act like they knew nothing about it.
Twelve years ago, Kyle had been in favor of leaving for California. That had been his best idea. They should pack up their things and drive West and settle down somewhere where nobody knew them.
“You know what the Mortons are like,” he’d said. “You know what they’re like. This is never going to go away. Not ever.”
Darvelle changed her standards. She didn’t need to win three Solitaire games in a row. She only needed to win one out of three Solitaire games. As long as she won one out of three, everything would be all right.
She lost three in a row. She sat and looked at the computer. She picked up the phone and punched in a number she should not know, but that she knew by heart.
The phone rang and rang. Darvelle told herself she was being an idiot. Nobody would be home in the middle of the day. Charlene wouldn’t be home. Charlene would be at the business, because she always was. The woman spent all her time at work.
The phone was picked up. Charlene Morton’s voice said, “Yes?”
Darvelle hung up.
Somewhere on the other end of the room, women were gathering around a computer. Darvelle paid no attention to them. They were looking at The Daily Kitten site, probably, or at one of those “lolcats” pictures. The women in this office were always looking at pictures of cats.
Darvelle picked up the phone again. She put it down again. She pushed it away from her. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she wanted to do. What could she say to Charlene that she hadn’t already said?
Margie Cardiff looked up from the computer where all the women were and said, “Darvelle. Have you seen this? Did you know about this?”
Darvelle looked down at her own computer. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. She had come in well before noon. She had no idea what she’d been doing all this time.
“Is it a cat?” she asked.
“No, it’s not a cat,” Margie said. “It’s us. Go to Channel 8. Or come over here. We’ve got it up.”
Darvelle did not want to go over there. She wanted to go home—or, maybe, not home, but out to lunch, or shopping, or something. She wanted to find some way to not be anywhere at all. She wiped the Solitaire game off her computer and typed in the URL for Channel 8.
It was up there, right in front of everything, as soon as the page loaded. “Breaking News,” it read, in big red letters. Then there was a picture of the dam and next to it a big black pickup truck that she was sure she recognized.
She pushed her chair back. It moved on wheels. She hated chairs that moved on wheels. She pulled the chair closer again and tried to read.
“What is that?” she said after a while.
“Two people shot dead out by the dam,” Margie Cardiff said. “It doesn’t say who it was, but everybody knows. People have been calling for an hour. It was that terrible Michaelman woman, do you remember her? We had her daughter working here for awhile, and then she came in—the mother, not the daughter; the daughter was a lamb—anyway, the mother came in and she was drunk beyond belief and she chased away two clients, and then we had to let her go. The daughter, I mean. Oh, for God’s sake. You know what I mean. It’s those people over at the trailer park. Two of them, this Michaelman woman and somebody else, shot right through the head in a black pickup truck parked out by the dam.”
Margie was hanging over the desk now, looking at Darvelle’s screen. “There it is,” she said. “You can see it.”
Darvelle felt as if the skin of her lips had dried out and cracked. It hurt to touch them with her tongue.
“Who was the other person?” she said. “Was it the daughter, the one who used to work here?”
“No, of course not,” Margie said. “It was some man. Isn’t that something else? A woman like that, and she’s always got a man hanging around somewhere. Half the decent women you know can’t find a man to go out with, and women like that always have somebody. She’s dead now. They’re both dead. Isn�
��t that incredible.”
“What I want to know about is that truck,” Brenda Malloy said, calling out from the other side of the room. “Where did people like that get a truck like that? Do you know what something like that costs? You might as well buy a Mercedes.”
“It’s probably got orders of repossession out on it right now,” Margie said. “Or maybe it isn’t their truck. Maybe it’s the murderer’s truck. Maybe they were murdered over a drug deal, and the truck belonged to their connection. Drug dealers make enough money to buy a truck.”
“Some drug dealers do,” Brenda said, “but some drug dealers use up their product, and they’re just as broke as everybody else. Besides, who would do that? You don’t mess up a vehicle like that? It must have been their truck. You know what people like that are like. They buy everything on credit and then they can’t pay for it. The finance company is going to be livid. If the seats had cloth covers they’re never going to get the blood out, and if they had leather covers they’re going to be shot full of bullet holes. God, can you imagine?”
“Excuse me,” Darvelle said.
She got up and walked to the back, past the other women at the other computer, into the little hall. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She lifted the toilet seat cover and then the toilet seat. She stared down into the water and thought about the truck. Her head was full of helium. Every pore of her body was pumping out sweat.
She leaned over the toilet bowl and threw up.
3
It took her most of the morning to admit it, but Penny London found this whole thing—the motel room of her own; the open account to get anything she wanted from the restaurant—to be really something wonderful. It had been months since she’d been able to settle into an indoor space for more than a single night, and months since she could take as many showers and baths as she wanted just because she wanted to. That was how she spent her time between talking to the boys and noon. She took a shower. She took a bath that lasted an hour and a half. She took another shower. Then she went down to the restaurant and had another of those enormous meals. For some reason, she had to have fried food and butter and a big gooey dessert. Had she been starving herself, all this time living in the car? She didn’t think so. She hadn’t been absolutely destitute. Money had been automatically deposited to her bank account every other week in term time, and outside of term time there was always at least a little left, and there was tutoring. Still, she was hungry. She couldn’t believe how hungry she was. And she wasn’t eating like herself. She didn’t seem to be able to look a vegetable in the face.
