Back on Murder rm-1

by J. Mark Bertrand

  Her hands fret the hem of her cardigan. “We haven’t dismissed class yet. I should really — ”

  “Please,” Cavallo says. “Just humor him, ma’am.”

  She moves slower than a reluctant snail, but she does move, her hand sliding into the drooping cardigan pocket, returning with a tiny sliver of a phone, which she thumbs open without glancing down. She punches a speed-dial button and puts the phone to her ear.

  “Baby?” she says. “I’m still at the school. Yeah. Listen, the police are here looking for you. I don’t know. . All right, here you go.”

  She hands me the phone.

  “It’s Roland March,” I say. “We met yesterday. I was wondering if we could have a chat.”

  “Right.” He sounds wary. “You want to meet at the church?”

  For some reason I don’t, and I tell him so. “How about I drop in wherever you are?”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll have to tell me where that is.”

  A long time passes. His wife looks up anxiously while Cavallo consults her watch.

  “Mr. Robb?”

  “I’m. . I’m sitting in the van. Outside James Fontaine’s house. Trying to work up enough nerve to go knock on the door.”

  I walk alongside the red church van, giving the roof a nice tap, then climb into the passenger seat. Robb doesn’t even glance over. His eyes are fixed on the house across the street, a rather palatial brick mansion dating from the late seventies or early eighties with concrete lions on either side of the front steps. Not the crib I’d have expected for a Klein High weed dealer, but I can’t think why not. Where else is he going to live? We’re in the suburbs, after all.

  I rap the plastic dash with my knuckle. “You really shouldn’t be doing this. For one thing, you’re not exactly keeping a low profile.”

  “I’m not really trying.”

  “For another thing — and I shouldn’t even be mentioning this — we’re already keeping an eye on this kid.” I crank the rearview around, glancing back at Cavallo, who’s still behind the wheel, leaving this one to me. “Putting up flyers is one thing. That’s great. But conducting your own stakeout? Not so much.”

  “I’m not here to spy on him,” he says. “I wanted to confront him.”

  “Won’t he still be in school?”

  He looks at me for the first time. “He’s on suspension.”

  “Didn’t the school year just begin? He didn’t waste any time.”

  Robb wears cargo shorts today, along with Converse sneakers. His black T-shirt imitates the popular milk advertisements, but says got JESUS? instead. After meeting the wife, something tells me he chooses his wardrobe for ironic effect.

  “Let me level with you,” I say. “When I saw you yesterday, something didn’t seem right. You were squirrelly. Like our being there made you nervous. So I started wondering what you’d have to be nervous about. Why don’t you save me the trouble and just tell me?”

  “I’m not nervous about anything.”

  “Really? ’Cause let me tell you something. What you’re doing right here, it’s abnormal. This is not how people react to situations like yours, not when they’re on the level.”

  He runs a hand through his spiky hair. “How do they react?”

  “Not like they’re guilty.”

  “That’s how you think I’m acting?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  He reaches out and straightens the rearview mirror, reclaiming the territory. “How am I supposed to answer a question like that?”

  “You have a guilty conscience, Mr. Robb. I want to know why.”

  Human physiology is a funny thing. No matter how cool we think we’re playing it, most of us don’t have poker faces. Our tells can be ludicrously on target. Robb’s a perfect example. His top lip clamps down over the bottom, forcing the tuft of hair on his chin to pop out like porcupine quills. He’s literally biting down the words, and he has no idea.

  “Come on,” I say, jabbing his arm. “Just tell me what you’re holding back. You’ll feel better.”

  He turns toward the window, head shaking imperceptibly.

  “You want to find this girl, right? So help me out. Don’t hold anything back. It’s not fair to Hannah.”

  He lets out a breath. “Hannah? You don’t even know her.”

  “Then tell me about her, Carter. Fill me in.”

  His breathing comes hard and heavy, the muscles in his forearms flexing, struggling to hold himself together.

  “Come on.”

  Then I hear it, the sound I love. The gasp of capitulation, a long exhale that leaves him smaller than before, hunched over and broken. In the interview room, this would be the moment the guys on the far side of the glass slap each other’s backs. When they give that sigh, it means everything is about to come out all at once.

  “This,” he says, his voice quiet, “this is all my fault.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I encouraged her. I thought I was doing the right thing.” There’s a plea in his eyes. “You have to understand, when I first came to the church, nobody was on my side. What I found here wasn’t at all what I expected. You’ve got this big, famous church — all my seminary friends, when they heard I was coming here, said I’d hit the big time. But what I discovered. . It was all so comfortable. So complacent. The kids go to nice schools, they drive nice cars, they have nice lives to look forward to. It was all so nice.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I say.

  “Christianity, it’s not about being nice. It’s about sacrifice. All they wanted, though, was an ordained baby-sitter, like I said before.”

  “I thought you were trying to be funny.”

  “I was, but it’s still true. The parents. . The church, what they all wanted was some help with keeping the kids in line. Keeping them insulated. Sheltered and safe. ‘You’re young,’ they’d tell me. ‘The kids relate to you. They look up to you.’ And they wanted me to use that to help them out, you know? Or they’d get me to lay down the law, then behind my back the parents and kids could bond by talking about how unreasonable I was. That kind of shocked me, but it happens.”

  As interesting as all this is, I don’t need a lecture on how hard being a youth pastor is. “Can we steer this back to Hannah?”

  “Like I said, Hannah was different. Her mom was, too, at first. They understood God didn’t put us on this planet to be cozy and quiet. We have to be outward-focused. We have to be missional.”

  Cavallo would know what that means, but I don’t — and I’d just as soon not find out. “Again, could we stick to the matter at hand?”

  He stops me with a raised finger. “It’s relevant. There was a sermon I did — I speak to the youth group on Sunday nights, I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you know the Narnia movies started coming out, and all the kids were eating that stuff up, so I did a talk about that line from C. S. Lewis — you know, about Aslan? ‘He’s not a safe lion, but he’s a good one’?”

  My eyes glaze over.

  “Anyway,” he says, realizing I’m not tracking, “the point is, God doesn’t want us to be safe. He wants us to do good. There’s a big difference.”

  “Right.”

  “So Hannah hears this, and it’s like a light bulb goes on in her head. This was — what? Three years ago? She would have been, like, fourteen. But she really woke up and started living her faith.”

  I’m not looking for ancient history, but sometimes there’s no choice. You have to let them tell the story in their own way.

  “There was this girl,” he says, “named Evey, short for Evangeline. She and her mom relocated here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the kid was really messed up. Evey ran away from home, got into drugs and who knows what else. She was Hannah’s age — but that’s all they had in common. I don’t know the whole history, but I think there’d been some kind of abuse, she’d been sexualized way too young and had this weird, kind of creepy maturity. The other kids in the youth group, th
ey wouldn’t go near her. I think they were afraid, and to be honest I was, too.”

  “But not Hannah?”

  He shakes his head. “She befriended Evey, the way she did everyone. The same way she did him.” He jabs his thumb at James Fontaine’s house. “She didn’t judge. She tried to show Christ’s love to everyone, no matter how hard it was.”

  “So she struggled with this love thing? And confided in you?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “She grew up without a dad, you know, and I think I came along at a certain time in her life when she really needed one. A youth pastor’s always acting in loco parentis, but it was more than that.”

  “You have any kids of your own?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

  I’m not surprised. Telling other people’s kids it’s better to be good than safe is one thing. No matter how much you like them, or even feel responsible for them, they aren’t yours. Losing them isn’t always at the back of your mind. If Robb had a child, he might understand the attraction of keeping her “sheltered and safe.” Parents want to raise future doctors and lawyers — above all, future candidates for happiness. They do not want to nurture martyrs, whatever the cause.

  “You can ask a lot of people,” I say, “but you can’t expect them to sacrifice their own kid. You’ll understand that when you have kids of your own.”

  “But that’s exactly what Christianity is,” he says, “a father sacrificing his son.”

  There’s a flash of passion in his voice, transforming him for a moment, giving me a glimpse of what he might be like in action. I can see how the teens in his charge might be inspired, and why their parents might get a little nervous. It’s one thing to talk the talk, but when you put your kid into someone else’s hands, you’ve got to believe that underneath all the radical rhetoric, there’s a check in place, some restraining impulse or inner voice to rein him in: All this is great, and you need to hear it, but in real life, in the everyday world, you’ve got to look out for yourself. Carter Robb doesn’t seem to have that restraint, or if he does, he thinks rooting it out is an obligation of faith.

  “And Donna,” I ask, “did she encourage this bond between you and her daughter?”

  “She thought it was great. Just like Hannah, she really got behind me. Considering what a great man her husband was, she could have let people at the church put her on a pedestal, but that’s not her way. She works hard. She mentors women at the church. She’s written books, you know. Quite a few of them. And speaks at women’s conferences, that kind of thing. So when I came along, she said it was just what ccc needed.”

  “CCC?”

  “Cypress Community Church.” He smirks. “Sometimes we speak evangelicalese instead of English. Sorry about that. . Where was I?”

  “Donna supported you.”

  “Right. When I first got there, the youth group would have these annual retreats every summer. They’d pack up the vans and go to this adventure camp in Tennessee. Bungee jumping all day and preaching all night. It was a tradition. But I went to Pastor Mike — that’s my boss, the associate pastor — and said, ‘Hey, look. Instead of driving all the way to Tennessee, let’s stay right here. There are ministry opportunities all over town, places where the kids can volunteer for a week and really advance the Kingdom.’ He looked at me like I was crazy, but Donna got behind it. Without her, we’d still be wasting that week. Now we do inner-city mission work, help at shelters, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s really great. But why did you say Hannah’s disappearance was your fault?”

  He takes a deep breath. “Because. She took it so seriously. I mean, she really got into the mission work. She’d take an interest in people, you know? Not safe people — and not necessarily good ones, either. Not that any of us are good, but you know what I mean. At school she started having some trouble. She was making friends with the wrong people — ”

  “Like the Fontaine kid?”

  He nods. “And at the same time, she’s a normal seventeen-year-old girl. She likes boys, she wants to date, and she has the usual confusing mix of adolescent emotions. Her mom had a hard time coping, and Hannah reacted by getting really secretive. Even with me.”

  “So she liked Fontaine?”

  “I think so. And she also wanted to be a good witness, to be Christ in his life. I tried steering her away, tried to. . you know, give her a reality check or something. But she couldn’t understand what I was saying. All this time I’d been telling her one thing and suddenly I’m contradicting it all.”

  “Tell me about the relationship with him.”

  “I didn’t know a thing about it until she got suspended last spring, that’s how secretive she was.”

  This is the first I’ve heard of her suspension, but I try not to let on. “So what happened?”

  He gives a disconsolate shrug. “All she’d tell me was they’d had an argument and he got really mad. The next day, there’s a drug search at the school and they find a bag of pot in her locker.”

  So nice little Hannah Mayhew, the churchgoing wide-eyed innocent, was caught holding weed in her locker? That must have been awkward at home. Not that I’m surprised or anything. It’s the sheltered kids who go wild.

  “You’re certain it wasn’t hers?” I ask.

  The question irritates him. “It wasn’t. She said so and I believed her. Her mom, I don’t know. After that, she had doubts about everything. About Hannah, about me, the whole direction of my ministry.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She hasn’t said anything.” He rubs his eyes like he’s suddenly tired. “But she doesn’t have to. I know she blames me. And hey, maybe she’s right. I came here so certain, so self-righteous, and now. . I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  His voice dies, his fervor ebbs away. He glances at the Fontaine house, shaking his head like he’s not sure how he got here or what he intended to do. The conviction of a few moments ago is utterly gone now.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he says.

  Everything he’s said has the ring of truth about it, but as far as I can see, none of it advances the case. All he can give me is history. His awkwardness yesterday stemmed not from real guilt but from a false sense of responsibility, a dubious connection he’s made between his Sunday school lectures and Hannah’s ultimate fate. I’m disappointed, not because I expected a smoking gun from this guy but because I expected something and my instincts were off the mark. And I’m putting so much faith into those instincts right now that I don’t like to see them fail.

  I pat his shoulder. “Thanks for your cooperation.” I should leave it there and go, but I get the urge to pass along some wisdom. “You know something? The one thing you can’t control in life is the outcome. You do what seems right at the moment, and if it turns out wrong. . well, that’s out of your hands.”

  “It’s in God’s hands,” he says.

  “The point is, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this. And you shouldn’t get in the way of the investigation, either. Leave Fontaine to us, okay? Put up all the flyers you want. Spend time with those students of yours — they probably need it right now. But let us take care of the rest.”

  “I have to do something,” he says, running a palm along his leg. “I can’t do nothing.”

  Sure, I can sympathize. I respect his urge. And I don’t exactly agree with the platitudes I’ve just uttered, the boilerplate about letting the police handle everything. People expect too much from us sometimes. I’m not endorsing vigilantes or anything, but a little vigilance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In his position, I’d want to do something, too. But in my position, I’m expected to toe the line. And really, what can he do apart from posting his flyers and leading yet another fruitless search? I open the door and slip to the curb, turning to speak before slamming it shut.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do,” I tell him. “Say a prayer.”

  The door snaps shut before he can get out a reply.

 
CHAPTER 9

  Public is where you go to be alone. After my shift, instead of heading home to Charlotte for a reprise of our lunchtime grapple, the Paragon beckons with its promise of anonymity and thumping music. Though it’s earlier than usual and a weekday to boot, the parking lot is filling up already. As the door flaps shut behind me, an icehouse chill descends, along with the soothing darkness. My eyes take forever to adjust.

  When they do, I see Tommy threading his way between the tables, holding a longneck beer at shoulder level to avoid clipping the heads of any seated patrons.

  “Hey, Mr. March, how’s it going, man? Why don’t you come join us at our table?”

  He’s filled a table with what I assume are students from one of the undergraduate courses he teaches while toiling away on his dissertation. A couple of guys in thick-rimmed glasses wearing fitted Western shirts, a girl in a long, crinkly skirt and engineer boots.

  “You and me,” I say, “we need to have a little talk. My wife told me about this girl who was up at your place, seemed kind of messed up. I didn’t like hearing that.”

  “It was a one-time thing. You sure you won’t join us?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Instead of my usual table in back, which would put me in sight of Tommy’s group, I slip around the front of the bar into a side room added in the most recent renovation to accommodate the Paragon’s growing clientele. The ratio of speakers to square footage means the music is that much louder, but given a choice between deafness and another run-in with my tenant, I’ll take the hearing loss.

  The new location has an added advantage. No Marta. After the scene I made in the parking lot last time, I’d just as soon not run into the one person likely to remember me, thanks to that overgenerous tip. An unfamiliar plaid-skirted waitress comes by, taking my order without a glimmer of recognition.

  So I’ve had my talk with Tommy. Maybe that brief exchange will suffice for Charlotte, if I can spin it right. But she’ll want details, of course, which will mean explaining why I’m at the Paragon when the two of us have long since agreed I won’t come here anymore. It’s no good dwelling on things, she told me, back when she still had sympathy for my morbid obsession with the place.