Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  “He’s not a teacher here?” The information was coming almost too fast for me to soak it all in.

  Melanie shook her head. “Nope. I asked him about it once, and he acted like he didn’t even understand the question. The whole thing is fucking weird.”

  I had to agree. I’d encountered Cedric Hoffman only twice, and both times he’d made me uncomfortable; he gave off a strange vibe, with his soft, edgeless voice and probing eyes, and hearing about his fixation on January made my skin crawl like a swarm of millipedes—but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Mr. Walker had always rubbed me the wrong way as well, and my suspicions about him had turned out to be off base. I needed to know more.

  “Do you guys happen to remember what time Reiko left school on Friday?”

  “It was after us,” FBA announced. “She was in kind of a weird mood, and she had this drawing she was working on for January’s memorial thing—the one outside her house? She said she was going to stay until she finished it.”

  The girl’s throat closed on the end of her sentence, and the words came out as a hoarse, uneven whisper. She swiped at her eyes, and I waited for her to regain control before I asked, “Did anyone else stay after?”

  They all looked at each other again, and then Feather Earrings spoke up. “Some of the tech guys end up being here pretty late if there’s a lot of equipment to put away after the rehearsal, but I don’t think there was much to do that night. And it was Friday, so everybody wanted to just go home, you know?”

  “What about Cedric?”

  “Oh. Well, yeah, I mean obviously he stayed. He has to lock up once everyone is gone.” She shrugged. “I think he told the police that Reiko left while he was putting away some tools that were sitting out, and that he offered to walk her to her car, but she said no thanks.” It was her turn to tear up and Melanie took the girl’s hand and squeezed it comfortingly while she cried.

  “What about the night January went missing?” I asked. “Do any of you know who saw her last?”

  “It might have been me,” FBA surprised me by saying. “While they were running one of the scenes, I came outside to have a fag, and I saw January sitting by the fountain.” Knowing fag was slang for “cigarette” in England, I decided not to interrupt her narrative to take offense. “I was surprised, because she’d quit drama club, and I couldn’t figure out what she was doing there. And, I mean, school had been over for an hour already. I’d have asked, but she’d have just snapped at me.”

  She made a sulky face, as if she expected consolation or perhaps an apology, but I forbore to indulge her. “What was she doing? How did she seem?”

  “I don’t know.” FBA appeared bewildered by the question. “She wasn’t doing anything—just sitting there. And I don’t know how she seemed. Thoughtful, maybe? Depressed? I told the constables who interviewed us that she looked sort of unhappy.”

  It took every ounce of willpower I had not to roll my eyes at her use of the word constables. “And she wasn’t there when rehearsal ended?”

  “No. I don’t know where she went after that.”

  Distractedly, I gave the girls my phone number, asking them to call if they thought of anything else, and then turned around on clumsy feet. As I made my way back to the lobby, my brain was revolving like a pinwheel, thoughts spinning endlessly. Cedric? Was it possible? I’d been so focused on January’s miserable home life that her drama coach hadn’t even registered as a possible suspect—but if these girls were telling me the truth, maybe I’d been barking up the wrong tree all along; maybe January’s attacker really had been at Dumas the whole time. All of a sudden the sterile, acoustic hallways of the theater building were giving me the heebie-jeebies, and I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  Barreling back into the lobby, I stopped short. The vast room, clad from floor to ceiling in broad squares of spotless travertine, was empty. Through the bank of glass doors fronting the building, I could see the Harmon and Eugenia Davenport fountain—where FBA had last seen January before her disappearance—still spewing arcs of frigid water into the early November air. The little plaza surrounding it was vacant, though, and I could see no signs of life in the gathering dusk that spread across the well-tended grounds of the school beyond. Where was Kaz?

  Reluctantly, I ducked through the door to the auditorium, peering around to see if maybe he had decided to take himself on a little tour. A group of students gathered in a back corner of the room looking grave and subdued, while three more sat in a pool of light on the stage and conversed inaudibly. The drama club was clearly on a break, and I could see no sign of Kaz. Antsy to get gone, I turned to head back into the lobby, thinking maybe I would go outside and see if he had wandered out there, and ran straight into a solid wall of flesh.

  “Mr. Doherty. We meet again.” His voice cold and reproachful, Cedric Hoffman himself stood in my way, glaring down at me with an irritated frown on his grizzled face. It was the expression of a man who’d just caught a pickpocket in the act of stealing his wallet. “For someone who isn’t actually a student, you seem to spend an awful lot of time at this august institution.”

  “I just dropped by to … see some friends,” I replied, disconcerted, when a better excuse failed me. His flat black eyes, warped by bifocal lenses, bored into me like he was trying to read the truth in my brain, and his resentful expression was as fixed as a mannequin’s. It gave me the creeps.

  “I don’t believe you have any friends here, Mr. Doherty,” Cedric stated in that soft, formless way of his. “I told you once before that you weren’t Dumas material. You don’t belong here, and I doubt any of the students care for the way you constantly disrupt their rehearsals any more than I do.”

  “I’ve only been here three times!” I retorted before I could stop myself, stung by the petty nature of his remark. I’d been scolded by teachers before, and talked down to by dismissive adults, but this man seemed to dislike me personally, and it was unnerving.

  “Three times too many,” he said briskly. “I shouldn’t have to remind you that this is not a public library, nor is it a parking lot or community center where you may come and go as you please. These students are working toward something, and their parents pay good money to see that they are not distracted. If I find you here again, I will be calling campus security.”

  “Actually, I was already on my way out when you stopped me,” I said, mustering up my dignity. Then, proud of the way my voice almost didn’t shake at all, I asked with a belligerent bravado I didn’t feel, “Do you mind if I leave now?”

  It occurred to me that both girls had stayed late after school on the nights they disappeared; and no one, I had been told, stayed later than Cedric. Had January lingered that day, waiting for an opportunity to confront her rapist? Had Reiko done so for the exact same reason? Did I have the guts—or the stupidity, depending on how you looked at it—to ask him about it point-blank?

  Of course, in Reiko’s case, a confrontation might not have been necessary for him to have known what she had in mind. Our conversation on Friday hadn’t exactly been in secretive tones; for all I knew, the Dumas Academy drama coach might have suspended rehearsal the second he banished us to the lobby, and then stood behind the door and listened in to everything we said. Cedric would have seen the writing on the wall, and possibly he’d already been planning his next move when Reiko played right into his hands by choosing to stay late. Looking up at his dour countenance now, I suddenly realized that I had been mistaken in what I’d told Detective Garcia; Reiko was not the only other person who knew what had happened to January. I knew it, too.

  Without a word, Cedric Hoffman removed his bulk from the doorway, allowing me to slither past him. I tried not to break into a sprint as I shoved through the glass doors with his black eyes on me like a pair of hands.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE NEXT DAY, the same day as Mr. Walker’s much-anticipated election, I did something I’d never done before: I skipped school. It wasn’t like I�
��d never been tempted to ditch in the past, but I’d always been too paranoid about the consequences, and too unswerving in my certainty that I would be caught in the act. My parents weren’t puritans or anything—neither in the rigidly moralistic sense nor, thankfully, in the public-flogging-builds-character one—but they could apply heartbroken disappointment like Torquemada applied thumbscrews, and I liked to avoid that whenever I could. But questions were eating at me like acid, demanding to be answered, and I had to take the risk. If I got busted, I would have to play the emotional/psychological trauma card again, and hope it still had some juice left.

  It had been Kaz who, after hearing the details of my visit to the theater building at Dumas, had suggested the impromptu day off—he’d even volunteered to skip a couple of classes of his own to help me. I don’t think he was particularly in favor of my amateur investigation, but I think he was eager to prove to me what a supportive friend he could be in this Time of Great Upheaval, and I rather shamelessly intended to milk that impulse for everything it was worth.

  I went to my first few classes Tuesday morning, but when lunch period rolled around I was waiting outside the school, glancing about as nervously as a junkie looking to score at a convention of undercover cops. As the Lexus pulled into the traffic circle, I darted to the passenger door before it came to a complete stop, grateful that I had almost no audience this time. Riverside’s administration didn’t encourage students to go off-campus to eat, but it wasn’t specifically against the rules, either, so no one stopped us as we cruised back down the drive to the road.

  The Hazelton School was located in Birmingham, a city tucked into a group of posh Detroit suburbs roughly forty-five miles northeast of Ann Arbor. The midday traffic seemed light to me, and we made excellent time, sailing under gray skies and billboards urging the over-eighteens to vote for Walker. I watched the dashboard clock and odometer with a mingled sense of excitement and dry-mouthed panic as my chances to call off this insane errand and return to school without incident became ever more remote. Finally, when my lunch period drew to its official close as Kaz negotiated the hair-raising interchange at I-696—breakneck drivers crisscrossing our path with the brutal, unyielding determination of charioteers in the Circus Maximus—I accepted that we were past the point of no return.

  Hazelton wasn’t a big school, but it had a big reputation—or so its website boasted, anyway. Its list of distinguished faculty and alumni went on and on, although most of the so-called luminaries were people I had never heard of. There were doctors, judges, authors of books I’d probably never be interested in reading, and a slew of individuals whose names were followed by initials like CEO, COO, EVP, and the like. One individual I could find no mention of whatsoever, though, was Cedric Hoffman. If his exit from Hazelton’s esteemed halls had carried any whiff of scandal, the Internet seemed to have missed it.

  The school’s architecture bespoke the same sense of inflated self-worth as its promotional materials. Pulling through a soaring, wrought iron gate that wouldn’t have been out of place at Downton Abbey, we were confronted by a Gothic pile of stone turrets, peaked windows, and pitched roofs, all wrapped in an endless skein of ivy. During the warmer months, I’m sure the clinging vines ennobled the place and invited visions of Harvard and Dartmouth and Yale; now, though, leafless and dung-heap brown, they looked like the desiccated veins of a flaying victim.

  Hardwood floors—scuffed, waxed, scuffed, and waxed again in an apparently endless cycle—resounded underfoot as we made our way to the main office. It was easy to find; Hazelton cultivated a deliberately intimate atmosphere, the dark, wood-paneled walls seeming to press against you with concern for your academic well-being, and it took only one sign with a single arrow to guide us to our destination, twenty feet beyond our first right-hand turn.

  Unbelievably, it wasn’t until I stood face-to-face with the general secretary, a battleship of a woman with charcoal hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and an aubergine sweater set, that I started to doubt the wisdom of coming there. Beyond the counterlike desk, as solid and imposing as the woman who occupied it, were a bank of filing cabinets, a warren of wall-mounted pigeonholes for mail, a Xerox machine, and some cupboards. A girl about my age, with long sandy hair and an austere school uniform, stood at the copier, but she didn’t even glance up as Kaz and I shuffled uncomfortably into the stuffy room.

  “May I help you gentlemen?” the secretary asked, although her starched tone suggested doubt on the subject.

  “I, uh … we had some questions,” I said, trying to sound confident. It was dawning on me that what I intended to ask would probably strike this no-nonsense woman—the nameplate on the counter read V. BAGLEY—as completely outrageous, and I wanted to sound as if I believed the information was owed to us.

  “About enrollment?” One eyebrow, plucked almost to extinction, rose into a skeptical arch.

  “No, about a teacher here.” I corrected myself, “A former teacher.”

  “That sounds rather unorthodox,” she replied in a way that suggested we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for asking, and frowned. “What sort of questions?”

  “Primarily,” I began, pleased with how mature the word sounded, “we were interested in knowing why this teacher no longer works at Hazelton.”

  The secretary’s frown deepened, grooves as ominous as fault lines spreading on either side of her downturned mouth. “I’m afraid it is not our policy to hand out information like that. Why are you asking? To which instructor are you referring?”

  I thought it was rather unfair of her to demand answers of her own without first offering up even a token bit of information, but I decided to indulge her anyway, hoping her reaction might tell me something. “Cedric Hoffman?”

  The name had a definite effect, and not just on the secretary: The girl at the copy machine jerked up with a startled glance, her brown eyes wide and riveted on Kaz and me for the first time since we’d entered. The secretary’s expression had gone from guarded to serious in the blink of an eye, and at her young assistant’s reaction, she cast a look over her shoulder. “Klara, why don’t you take a break now? Come back in fifteen minutes.”

  It was not a suggestion, and after the briefest of hesitations, the girl gave a quick, birdlike nod, set down the papers she’d been holding, and made a hasty exit. Skirting the counter, she darted past Kaz and me with her chin tucked low, closing the door to the main hallway soundlessly behind her. Once Klara was gone, the secretary waited a while to make sure the girl was no longer in earshot before she spoke again. “Why are you two boys asking about Cedric Hoffman?”

  I wouldn’t say that her demeanor had softened, exactly, but a mixture of genuine concern and curiosity suddenly showed through the veneer of disciplined imperviousness. Her hands were folded together on the surface of the desk, and I watched as the skin around her blunted nails turned white with pressure. Carefully, I offered, “He’s working in Ann Arbor now.”

  “Teaching?” Her tone was agitated, confused.

  I shook my head. “No. He’s a drama coach at a private school.”

  Ms. Bagley’s troubled gaze darted to the desktop, skittered sideways, and then moved back up to Kaz and me. One hand reached reflexively for a discarded stress ball, which she proceeded to idly strangle the life out of. “Why did you come here?” she asked at last. “Did he … Has something … happened?”

  “Something like what?” I pounced, unable to temper my zeal, and watched as she immediately retreated into her armor again. “What do you think might have happened?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” she replied with brisk unhappiness.

  “What if I told you something has happened?” I tried, beseechingly. “Something bad. And even if I can’t prove it, it might have involved Mr. Hoffman?”

  She watched me for a moment, and I watched her back as shadows appeared around her eyes and a great, tired misery overtook her face. At last, she let out a heavy sigh and said, quietly, “I’m very sorry, but there’s rea
lly nothing I can tell you. Only … if something … if you really believe that Mr. Hoffman may have … done something, I urge you to tell the authorities about it.”

  “Please,” I tried again, desperately, wishing I could somehow make her understand the gravity of our situation. I was afraid to say out loud what it was he might have done, and risk having her shoo us and the legal implications of our questions off Hazelton property altogether. “We don’t want to go to the authorities unless we’re pretty sure we’re right, but…”

  My brilliant argument fizzled out like a dud firework, and Ms. Bagley’s expression slammed the rest of the way closed, her manner once again businesslike and impregnable. “I’m very sorry,” she repeated, “but for legal reasons, I’m afraid that the best I can do is to confirm that Cedric Hoffman was an instructor here, but his employment at the Hazelton School came to an end prior to the commencement of our fall session last year.” She pursed her lips and repeated once more, in a meaningful way, “I’m sorry.”

  The fruitless conversation at an obvious end, Kaz and I retreated to the stuffy hallway and started back for the lobby. “What now?” I asked glumly. “Wait till dark, break in, and search the office?”

  “Maybe one of the teachers would be willing to gossip.” Kaz remained doggedly optimistic. “If Cedric left on bad terms, I’m sure everyone who works here has opinions to share about him. We just need to find someone less discreet.”

  We didn’t have to look very long, as it turned out; rounding the corner to the lobby, we almost collided with Klara, the girl who had been working the copier in the office. It was immediately clear that she had been waiting for us. “I couldn’t help but overhear you asking Ms. Bagley about … about Professor Hoffman?”

  She spoke in a furtive whisper, her voice imbued with an accent—German, I thought, or Austrian—and it occurred to me that between the hardwood floors, paneled walls, and polished stairs, sound probably bounced a good long way through the halls of Hazelton.