by Jay Brandon
“I’m investigating my case. I just got distracted.”
“I hate to tell you,” she said, “but this isn’t the scene of the crime. It happened a few blocks east of here.”
“I know. But that’s not the crime I’m investigating.”
“Oh?” She stood as if he were detaining her.
“I’m looking into Jenny Fecklewhite’s minder. They seem connected, you know.”
Laura nodded abstractedly. Even in the heat of the day, her pale face looked cool in the shade. Jordan looked for the slant of her cheekbones but couldn’t see it today.
“I thought I might go talk to her parents,” he continued slowly, “but I hate to. Can you tell me anything about them?”
“Yes. They won’t be home in the middle of the day.”
“I was hoping for something a little more personal.”
Laura studied Jordan, who stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit pants. Suddenly she appeared to make up her mind. “Come on. Where’s your car?”
“Over this way.”
“I hope you parked it in some shade,” Laura said impatiently.
From the perch of his courthouse office, Judge Waverly watched his court reporter run into the San Antonio lawyer in the plaza, continued watching as they talked, and stared at them as long as they were in sight. His profile was so hawklike he would have looked at home perched on the ledge outside his window. Even alone as he was, he let his face betray nothing.
Where Laura took Jordan was Franklin D. Roosevelt High School. It was a sandstone building with a tall facade and two-story wings that spread in both directions from the entrance. Carefully tended trees were arrayed across the building’s front, all of them young and slender as if something had killed their predecessors all at once only a few years ago.
When they got out of the car, Laura looked at Jordan critically. “Take off your jacket, look like a normal person.”
Jordan did as he was instructed. Under her continued scrutiny, he rolled up his sleeves, too. Laura’s lips remained pursed. Finally she shook her head hopelessly and led the way inside. Jordan looked down at his white shirt and paisley tie, wondering what it was about him that Ms. Stefone found hopelessly inadequate or ostentatious.
“Does Jenny’s mother work here?” he asked, hurrying to catch up.
“No. But if you want to get to know Jenny, this is where to start.”
In an otherwise empty classroom they found Christine Cavaletti. She was eating a sandwich at her desk while reading a paperback by Anne Tyler. On the blackboard behind her was written in authoritative cursive: “Romeo and Juliet: Inevitable or Accidental? Why not Juliet and Mercutio?” Laura introduced Jordan to her, adding, “Chris teaches freshman and sophomore English. Getting ready for school to start again, Chris?”
“At my own pace.” Ms. Cavaletti leaned forward to shake hands. “Keep the Christine to yourself, please. We guard our first names from the students, just the way we don’t let locks of our hair or our fingernail clippings fall into their hands.”
Ms. Cavaletti was perhaps a year or two older than Jordan, but she had an air of long experience. Her face was barely lined, but her dark-rimmed glasses made her look as if she didn’t give much thought to her appearance. She sat waiting for him to explain himself as if she had just called on him in class.
“I’m a lawyer, Ms. Cavaletti, Judge Waverly appointed me to represent Wayne Orkney.”
The teacher’s expression said that that didn’t answer her question.
“He wants to know about Jenny, Christine,” Laura Stefone said from the side.
“What about Jenny?”
“Well—”
“He doesn’t know anything, Chris. He’s just starting to find out about her.”
Laura sounded unaccountably angry, as if Jordan could be blamed for his ignorance of the dead girl’s life. Her voice had gone higher than her normal tone. Jordan gave Laura a look, and she subsided, turning her back on him to pace away, making the classroom suddenly look confining.
“I see,” Ms. Cavaletti said.
“Whatever you could tell me about her would be helpful, Ms. Cavaletti. She was a good student?”
“She was a pain,” the teacher said distinctly.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, she was a good student, the best I ever had. She was too good.”
“She got bored in class?” Jordan asked.
“I suppose she did, but the form her boredom took was to challenge me.”
“For control?”
“Challenge my assumptions,” Christine Cavaletti said. Her arms were folded. She watched Jordan as if waiting for him to catch up. “She would ask why did we read these books when others were better, why did certain essays get included in our textbook, who made the decisions? For example—let me think. All right. When we were doing the romantic poets, when we came to the Brownings, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett. I took my approach pretty much from the textbook, talking about what a team they were, how rare it was to find two such talented people so deeply in love, how fate, you know—
“And Jenny suddenly chimed in that maybe it hadn’t been fate, maybe it had been mutual advantage. Maybe Robert Browning had aimed himself at Elizabeth Barrett because her family had money and marrying her could give him the leisure to do what he really wanted. And maybe Elizabeth accepted that because after all she was this pathetic, almost crippled woman, she probably didn’t exactly get the cream of the crop in suitors.
“Then this other girl”—Christine Cavaletti stood up and pointed, directing a reenactment of the scene—“who had never said a word in class before unless it was dragged out of her, suddenly burst out, ‘You’re crazy, they were in love. Read their poems: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach—” ’ And she wasn’t reading the poem, she had it memorized. So then Jenny came back, ‘Yes, listen to it. It sounds like a Hallmark card. I bet she got paid by the word to write it.’ And then this boy I could always count on to smart off under his breath said, ‘But look, they didn’t have Hallmark cards then. Hallmark is ripping off Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not the other way around.’ And kids started wondering if we’d have a whole different tradition of romance if not for some of these old dead poets. We got completely off the track of my prepared lesson.”
“So she was a troublemaker?” Jordan asked.
“No! Well, yes, but always to good effect. She made good trouble. The year I had Jenny I started rewriting lectures I’d given for ten years. And the next year I wrote fresh ones again. She— I’d be more of a burned-out shell than I am if not for Jenny.”
Laura Stefone had retreated into the rows of student desks. She might have been remembering her own youth in this high school. Here and there she touched a seat back or desktop as if the object held specific memories, as if Laura might find her initials carved somewhere in this room.
“Well,” Jordan broke that brief silence. “That sounds great. But I read in the paper about how well liked she was by all her teachers, and it seems to me that this kind of thing wouldn’t go over all that big with a lot of teachers. Did some of them—?”
“Rare students get famous among teachers,” Chris Cavaletti said with a smile. “I asked around about Jenny, and I found out she wasn’t like that with everyone, in most of her classes she was just a quiet good student At the end of the year I told her I was glad she’d taken such a lively interest in English literature, and she said”—the teacher paused as if she didn’t want to part with this tidbit—“Jenny said it wasn’t just interest, that she acted the way she did in my class because she knew I could take it You know, in fifteen years of teaching I can’t think of a better compliment I’ve had.”
The teacher’s eulogy was punctuated for Jordan by the flash of Laura Stefone’s green eyes as the court reporter strolled around the classroom in the background but turned to Jordan periodically with a sharp glance that asked whether he got
it, whether he was capable of understanding.
“Thank you, Ms. Cavaletti, that helps me understand her. Oh, by the way, did you ever have Kevin Wainwright as a student?”
“Oh, sure. Somewhere in the back of the room.”
“I won’t take up any more of your time. Thanks again.”
“You should have heard her on Oliver Twist,” the teacher recalled suddenly.
“She hated it?”
“Loved it. She said it wasn’t just a great book, it was a good mystery. Her view was that Oliver wasn’t an orphan, he just didn’t know who his parents were. He spent the whole book trying to find them. She got the other kids trying to figure it out, too.”
Christine Cavaletti was chuckling to herself as Jordan and Laura left the classroom. They walked under the pressure of silence until in the sunlight Jordan admitted, “Sounds like a nice girl.”
Laura didn’t answer. She got into Jordan’s car, where the vinyl seats made their clothes stick to their backs, and directed him to a road that led out of town. “Of course, some kids have more advantages than others,” Jordan said. “Early start means a lot.”
At a crossroads, Laura Stefone said, “The road to Pleasant Grove.” Her voice was harsh.
Jordan glanced left. He didn’t turn down the road, but the scene exerted a pull on him as he drove away.
“There’s the Fecklewhite estate,” Laura said a few minutes later. Jordan slowed and stared. It was a country house, ramshackle, with a short uneven front porch and an old roof. The people who lived in the house probably thought of its color as white.
The house was small, possibly three bedrooms, maybe only two. It was about a week away from looking abandoned.
“You should see Jenny’s bedroom,” Laura said, looking ahead down the road. “Going through her doorway was like stepping through a space warp.”
“You’ve been in her bedroom?” Laura didn’t answer, since the answer was obvious. “You really befriended her, didn’t you?”
“No,” Laura said tonelessly. “Jenny befriended me. People took her in hand because she gathered us up. She collected people wherever she went.”
“She was rather a courthouse favorite, wasn’t she?”
Laura didn’t seem to hear the significance of his question. She was staring out the windshield. Her mind might still have been back in the high school they’d left. Laura’s expression led Jordan suddenly to wonder what her own school days had been like. From the looks of her, she wasn’t dwelling on a happy memory.
“The judge took her under his wing, didn’t he?” Jordan asked more explicitly.
“No more than lots of others,” Laura said. “Like Chris Cavaletti back there.”
“Yes, but. ..” Jordan let the topic die. Judge Waverly’s court reporter wouldn’t confirm his suspicion for him. Jordan had already seen how protective of her judge Laura was.
She turned to stare at a house they passed and didn’t turn back until two or three minutes later, when she pointed suddenly.
“Now there’s who you need to talk to,” she said. “Stop here.”
He stopped at another wooden frame house, not quite as dilapidated as the Fecklewhites’, but just as tiny. The prettiest thing about the house was the white picket fence that staggered around the perimeter of the yard. In the side yard a lady who could have been eighty years old or only two- thirds that age was hanging clothes on a line. Laura guided Jordan through the creaky gate, saying softly, “Mrs. McElroy knows everything.
“Mrs. McElroy, I’d like you to meet somebody. This is a lawyer from San Antonio.”
“Jordan Marshall, ma’am. I’m—”
“I know who you are.” Mrs. McElroy, a tall, thin woman wearing a shapeless housedress, barely turned to glance at him. Secondhand information had already given her all she needed by way of Jordan’s biography.
“I want to talk to your neighbors, the Fecklewhites, but I haven’t gotten a chance yet.”
“Good, decent people. Always mind their own business.” Mrs. McElroy finished hanging a sheet. Its flapping wafted bleachy tendrils toward them. She stopped as if unwilling to expose the rest of her laundry to Jordan’s view.
Jordan cleared his throat. “Yes. If it wasn’t such a terrible shame about Jenny, I wouldn’t have to—”
“Good girl. Helped me plant my garden.” Laura and Jordan looked over their shoulders at a few leaning flowers in the cracked soil beside the front porch. “Smart to talk to, too. Always worth hearin’. Can’t say I thought much of her taste in boyfriends, but that’s the one part of anybody you can’t predict, can you? We all go haywire over somebody.”
The sudden laughter in her eye made Jordan want to see Mr. McElroy.
He asked a few more questions, unable to think of anything in particular he needed to know. After five minutes, Mrs. McElroy turned back to her laundry, and Jordan thanked her for her time.
“You didn’t half plumb that well,” Laura said in the car.
Jordan responded in the same rural vein. “Well, ma’am, I was afraid of getting in over my head.”
“Straining your attention span, you mean.” He was never going to get in the last word with Laura Stefone.
What Mrs. McElroy had confirmed for him was the general opinion that Jenny had been much too good for Kevin Wainwright. Maybe Wayne had thought so, too.
The violent end to the uneven romance seemed almost preordained. Jordan remembered girls from his own school days who had seemed so bright, so pretty, and never went out with anyone worth their time. It was inexplicable to observers, the way most romances are.
But sometimes they wised up, those smart girls hooked up with losers.
6
It was the weirdest case. Every time Jordan left town and went home to San Antonio, he felt as if he’d peeled off another layer of himself and left it back in Green Hills.
“Objection, Your Honor, calls for hearsay.”
“We’re not offering it for the truth of the matter asserted,” the prosecutor protested.
“Then it’s irrelevant.”
“Sustained,” Judge Sherman said offhandedly. Jordan allowed himself a fleeting smile, invisible to the jury. It was a brief triumphant moment during a losing cause in San Antonio. Jordan didn’t have a prayer of winning the trial, which was okay, the defense always lost, it was expected. What was so pleasant about the trial in San Antonio was his confidence that he was in command of all the facts, and his confidence as well that when the judge ruled against him he would do so impersonally, with no animus toward either side. In Green Hills, everything was personal.
“Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall? Your witness.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Thank you, Your Honor.”
In sudden memory, Jordan had been transported back there, to a dusty crossroads that now seemed populated, where it had been empty when he’d seen it. The road to Pleasant Grove Park wanted to tell him something. Almost as soon as his San Antonio guilty verdict was announced, Jordan was driving south.
He was sure he had the right spot, a small, densely treed copse that afforded privacy from the rest of the park; the trees provided shelter not only from the sun but from the sounds of other park patrons. A trickle of running water nearby softened the air. When a breeze came, it was a cool breeze. This might have been the spot that had given the park its name. But no one would ever find it pleasant again. Kids would come to whisper and dare each other. Lovers would startle at the sound of a soft footstep.
It was a fine and private place where Jenny Fecklewhite had met someone or come across someone or someone had caught up to her. The trees were cedars, their narrow leaves hanging like curtains. Jordan imagined the girl leaning back against the crumbly bark, invitation in her stance, or imagined invitation. The ground was rocky, and roots stuck out of it hard and cracked like old men’s knuckles. If there’d been a fight, there were impromptu weapons close at hand.
Leaves made the wind moan. The ghost might already be af
oot here. Jordan stopped, suddenly chilled in the hot afternoon. His shoulders prickled. He turned, terribly slowly, but he was still shocked at the sight of the face growing out of the tree. Jordan gasped an inarticulate cry and stepped back, losing his footing. The face came forward through the leaves. It was dark as the tree bark, dark with tan and the rush of blood. Finally Jordan saw the face was mounted atop a six-foot body that still looked rather treelike except for its blue uniform. The cop’s face had a thick brown moustache and eyebrows and a clamped mouth that widened when he opened it.
“What’re you doing here?”
“I have to have an explanation? Isn’t it a public park?” Immediately Jordan regretted the smart response. “But this part is special, isn’t it?” he added.
The uniformed officer was younger than Jordan, taller, much sturdier. He knew what his appearance was good for, too; he advanced on Jordan without speaking.
“You’re Officer Briggs, aren’t you?” The cop didn’t answer, but he wore a nameplate. “You were the first officer on the scene.”
“Second.”
“That’s right, second. Deputy Delmore was first. You got here in a hurry, though, didn’t you? Why did you come to the scene when it was outside your jurisdiction?”
“We share a radio frequency with the sheriff’s office. When I heard the call, I wasn’t thinking about jurisdiction. The last murder we had in Green Hills was before I joined the force. Murder’s something special here.”
“People keep talking to me like I’m jaded,” Jordan said with sudden heat. “Nobody close to me has ever been murdered. If they were, I’d take it goddamned hard. Just because we have more murders than you do doesn’t mean we get used to them.”
Briggs’s expression didn’t even soften to skepticism. “You got here before the ambulance?” Jordan asked.
“Yeah.”
“Delmore’d gathered all the evidence by then, right? He wins efficiency awards, am I right? Did you notice anything in particular? Besides the body?”
