The teachers seemed to hold her apart as well. She challenged Mrs. Ishman, an elegant and earthy lady, over the amount of trigonometry she assigned. Mrs. Ishman, grim and determined, defended herself as she would to an adult—the rest of us would have ended up in detention. Carol debated Mr. Zufall, our social studies teacher: Why should we bother watching the presidential debate? Everyone knew Kennedy didn’t have a snowball’s chance in heck anyway, because then the pope would be running the country, so it was all just a waste of time. Mr. Zufall laughed, shook his head. He let her get away with it. Mr. Zufall, in fact, almost seemed to encourage her.
He almost seemed to be in Carol’s confidant rotation along with the rest of us. He was one of those teachers who try to be one of the guys, and he came close. We liked him. He had a habit of rocking up on his toes while he was teaching, which we often mimicked but secretly admired. He was graceful, athletic; he’d been a pretty good basketball player for Hartsgrove High, then got a medal in the war. He used to make fun of the nonathletic types behind their backs, the same as we did, mimicking their pigeon-toed strut across the front of his classroom. He told us dirty jokes and gossip, the only teacher who did. And every day he could talk to us about how the Pirates had fared the night before.
He pulled us aside before class. “I came in the back way this morning,” he said. “No sooner do I open the door than who do I see standing there, behind the back stairwell, but a good friend of ours, with her boyfriend—I won’t mention any names, but you know her well. And her boyfriend is holding her breasts! One in each hand! Buoying them up!” Mr. Zufall was positively gleeful. He repeated the phrase— Buoying them up! —holding out his hands, buoying a pair of imaginary tits. We shared his zeal, wondering exactly who he was talking about, when we noticed Carol Siebenrock across the room, watching us.
The last place we saw her was Les’s, the evening she disappeared. Les’s was overflowing with the usual afterschool crew. Carol was sit ting with some of the other cheerleaders, planning a bonfire and pep rally for Friday night. We had a big game Saturday against Cranberry.
“Hey,” Carol yelled over to us. The music was too loud for talking. Everybody yelled. “Do you guys know where we can get any wood?”
“I know where you can get some,” Wonderling said, snickering.
“I don’t know,” Nosker said. “I haven’t been getting any either.”
“Get your minds out of the gutter,” Carol said.
“I’d like to lay the wood to her,” Knapp whispered, and we grinned.
Plotner dropped a nickel, reaching down to get it so he could look up their skirts, smacking his head against the table on the way back up, good for another laugh. He swore Brenda Richards had jerked her legs apart while he was down there, displaying her crotch for his viewing pleasure. “Sure, sure,” we said, refusing to allow the remotest possibility it was true, believing it all the while, because it’s what we wanted to believe. We were hooked on the implications of a free peek willingly given. The cheerleaders kept talking wood and fire, while we lapsed into our typical topics: who was getting bare tit off whom, who was getting bare ass, who was finger-fucking whom, and who was actually getting laid. And, most importantly, with whom. The jukebox stopped playing, but no one stopped yelling. Allshouse chased Judy Lockett around the pinball machine, and Les Chitester, his long white apron bloody with sauce, yelled from beside his pizza oven, “Hey! Take a cold shower!” Linda Pence was dancing, shaking her perfect ass in our general direction, and Nosker said, “Say this five times real fast: Tiny Tim tickled Tillie’s tit till Tillie’s twat twitched,” and we were up to the challenge. Many times. And every time we looked at Carol Siebenrock, all we could see were her nipples.
Les brought out the cheerleaders’ pizza, and Carol, taking her first bite, dropped sauce on her white blouse, close enough to her boob to prompt another outbreak of hilarity on our part. She tried to wipe it off with her napkin, but only smeared it around. She stood to leave, shoulders back, making no effort to conceal her sullied boob. “Grow up, you guys,” she said.
We wanted to run after her. We wanted to leapfrog over the parking meters down Main Street, fly up the hill, get to her backyard before she got home, but we didn’t. It was still light out, and we wondered why she was leaving so early, assuming it was the stain on her blouse, never guessing she might have had a date. It was a school night. So we stayed, laughing, leering, the occasional erection springing to life on our young, healthy bodies, and later we walked home listening to the Pirates’ magic number dwindling down toward zero. The last thing Carol ever said to us was “Grow up.” We remembered that later, smitten by the twist, sure that we were the only ones on the face of the earth ever to witness an irony so deep and true as that.
Carol’s two older sisters, Dottie and Mary, were married and gone. She was the baby. Some years before, her mother had tried to commit suicide with her father’s rifle—trying to pierce her ears, went the old, black joke. She’d managed only to graze her brain, leaving her more or less lobotomized. Mr. Siebenrock was a chubby, earnest fellow who owned a shoe store down on Main Street, and we all knew him pretty well—he’d been one of our Little League coaches, even though he’d apparently never held a bat in his own two hands before taking over the reins of Sterck’s Terriers. He cheered enthusiastically—maybe the source of Carol’s talent. As a coach, he made a pretty good shoe salesman.
He’d left Little League about the same time we had, when his wife had shot herself with his .22, which he’d kept in a closet and seldom touched. He was not a hunter, but for some reason thought he should own a gun. Everyone else did. Now, when he wasn’t selling shoes he spent most of his time taking care of his wife, bringing her to church and school events, trying to maintain some semblance of a social life.
The night Carol disappeared he’d taken his wife to the Hartsgrove Businessmen’s Association Banquet out at the country club. Home late, he’d assumed Carol was upstairs asleep. Next morning he discovered his mistake, along with her bloodstained blouse.
By the time we learned the blood was pizza sauce, a hundred different rumors had swept through town: Her bracelet had been found here, her shoe there, a stranger spotted here, Carol herself there. She’d run away with her boyfriend; she’d run away by herself. She’d been abducted from her bedroom; she’d been abducted walking up the hill from Les’s. She’d gone kicking and scratching; she’d gone willingly with someone she knew. She’d been raped; she’d eloped; she was being held for ransom. The rumors were flimsy, yet they lived and died and were born again, endlessly, it seemed. In the end, she was simply missing.
Her empty desk filled every classroom. Every blond head we saw in the hallway brought an instant of expectation, which dissolved again just as quickly. Mr. Zufall seemed as stricken as any of us. She’ll be fine, he told the class. Leave her alone and she’ll come home, wagging her tail behind her. And he grinned a rueful grin.
Shuffling down Main Street one afternoon on our way to Les’s, we saw Mr. Zufall coming out of Siebenrock’s Shoes with his arms full. It looked as though he’d bought half-a-dozen pairs of shoes. Seeing us across the street, he only nodded a greeting, his arms too full to wave. It struck us at the time as some sort of magnanimous, mature gesture, a show of support, the sort of thing we’d have been incapable of. We wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of what to say to Mr. Siebenrock in a circumstance such as that.
Evenings at Les’s were quiet, filled with the whisper of rumors. The pep rally and bonfire at Memorial Park were canceled; we lost to the Cranberry Rovers the next afternoon, 45–6. The cheerleaders’ efforts were halfhearted, as were the team’s, although the outcome of the game wasn’t all that far from the norm. No one was in the mood for a pep rally the next week either, but there was a large pile of lumber that had to be disposed of somehow, so the pep rally was rescheduled for the next Friday night, before the Harmony Mills game.
Like the crowd, the fire was large and nervous, shooting jittery
red trails of sparks and shape-shifting plumes of smoke into the night over the black running waters of Potters Creek. The speakers—the captain of the cheerleaders, the football team captain, the school principal—all spoke about our team, our school, our town, our pride, about giving our best and winning. No one mentioned the big white elephant sitting just beyond the bonfire. It was a decidedly pepless rally.
All the while Carol stayed missing.
The rumors grew silly and cruel. She was living with beatniks in New York City. She was living with cousins in Oil City, having been knocked up. She’d run away to join the circus girlie show. She’d run off to become a Playboy Bunny. She’d had to leave town because someone had spotted her in a skin flick. All the silly, cruel rumors tried to imagine where she was. None of them imagined her dead.
All the while the Pirates kept winning.
Carol’s disappearance, magnificent mystery that it was, never distracted us from the heat of the pennant race. There was plenty of room in our hearts and minds for both. When the Pirates finally clinched on a Sunday afternoon in late September, joy erupted and settled back over the town like a golden mist. It was the only topic of conversation at school Monday morning— How sweet it is! How sweet it is! We sang, Oh, the Bucs are going all the way! The first fifteen minutes of Mr. Zufall’s class were devoted to nothing but Hoak, Groat, Mazeroski and Stuart, Clemente, Virdon, Skinner and the boys. By the end of class, however, it was business as usual; Mr. Zufall reminded us—warned us, really—that the Kennedy-Nixon debate was taking place that evening.
“Who watched the debate?” he asked next morning. “Raise your hands.”
No one was foolish enough not to. Mr. Zufall rocked up on his toes, his approving smile turning wistful as he glanced at the empty desk. “I’m only sorry Carol wasn’t here to see it,” he said. “History in the making. I think even Carol would have appreciated that.”
The collective sigh was audible, the moment of silence spontaneous. It was the first time anyone had spoken of her as though she weren’t coming back.
They found her two weeks later. Evan Shields and his grandson, hunting squirrel in the woods along Potters Creek just north of town, spotted her body snagged on a log in the water. Her skull was fractured, and she’d probably been dead since the day she disappeared. That was about all the coroner could determine, given the state of her body.
It was assumed she’d been raped. She was naked from the waist down.
Every generation or so there’s a murder in Hartsgrove above and beyond the usual run-of-the-mill, heat-of-the-moment killing, a murder with a certain cachet. About twenty-five years earlier, before we were born, a lady had been raped and stabbed to death in the railroad yard signal tower on the south side of town, where she worked. Les Chitester, manning his pizza oven with his long-handled paddle, remembered it well, though he’d been only ten at the time; the town had been in a frenzy of fear till the killer had finally been caught. Years later, after we’d scattered and were slogging toward the end of our own middle ages, a pack of drunken, drugged-up kids stripped and hanged a girl in a clearing in the woods by Potters Creek. The young always think these flashy crimes are unique, that life has devised this outstanding drama just for them, and them alone. That’s what we thought. Now we know better. Now we know it’s just part of the cycle, just another run-of-the-mill murder that happens to have a certain cachet.
Girls cried in the classrooms. Boys shook their heads. There were hollow-eyed stares down the hallways of the school. Gone but not forgotten; Mr. Zufall must have uttered that hackneyed phrase a hundred times. Les’s was even quieter. We hugged self-consciously, in solemn unawareness of what else we could possibly do. We talked about it, tried to exorcize it. We talked about Carol, every last little thing we’d ever done with her, every last little minute we’d ever spent with her, competing to have known her best, as if whoever had been closest to her would be closest to this new mortality, and therefore the most worthy among us.
Who had done it? Who could have done such a thing? Bucky Morrison, her boyfriend, naturally came to mind, but Bucky was away at college, and though his alibi wasn’t airtight, he was reputed to be a gentle creature, who, Brenda Richards let it be known, kept a kitten in his dorm room against all regulations. Mark Schoff-ner, the boy Carol had dumped for Bucky? In the army now, at Fort Drum. There were the usual local toughs in Hartsgrove, the high school dropouts and misfits, but we inventoried and dismissed them one by one, group by group. The crime was a quantum leap from picking a fight on a street corner with a bellyful of beer, from stealing hubcaps or keying the car of an antagonist. It was beyond them, just as it was beyond any of us, beyond anyone, really, that we knew. It would have to be a stranger. No one we’d ever laid our eyes upon could possibly commit such an evil.
She was buried on a Wednesday, the same day as the sixth game of the World Series. We were conflicted, to say the least, though we never dared suggest we’d have preferred spending the afternoon in front of a television, rooting for the Pirates to wrap it up; they led the series three games to two. But the Buccos made it easy on us that day. Their resounding 12–0 loss dovetailed perfectly with the tragedy, reflecting ominously on the future. We were sure they’d lose tomorrow too. It was how the planets were aligned.
Mr. Siebenrock looked softer than we remembered, like a marshmallow that had been stepped on. He followed Carol’s casket down the wide aisle of the Presbyterian church, his jowls inflated, his comb-over glistening with sweat, his hand fidgeting in his pocket like a squirming mouse; we could hear the coins jingle in the sniffle-filled silence. His wife, her hand clutching his coat sleeve, her hair too black, her gaze unanchored, looked as though she were wandering through a fog. Carol’s two older sisters, Dottie and Mary, not nearly as pretty as Carol, followed with their husbands. Our hearts ached at how sad they looked, and at the fact that we were missing the game, and as soon as the service was over we rushed out to Nosker’s car and turned on the radio—the Pirates were trailing 6–0 after two and a half! Crushed, we joined the funeral procession to Chapel Cemetery, a couple miles south of town, Bob Prince filling us in: Bob Friend, in whose right arm we’d trusted, had lasted only two innings. Clouds swelled with gloom over the cemetery at the top of the hill.
We did our best to say goodbye to Carol there. The view from the cemetery was wide, but the sweep of bright trees was dulled by the gray of the day. We were too far away to hear the words of the preacher, a skinny man with white hair and big ears. When it was over we drifted away. We weren’t in a hurry to get back to the game; we knew a lost cause when we saw one. Over our shoulders we watched Carol’s mother, her hand fluttering at the pile of dirt like a toddler just learning to wave bye-bye.
Next morning during homeroom, they interrupted the announcements over the PA system to call for a moment of silence for Carol. We felt it applied just as much to the Pirates. That afternoon they suspended classes, and we gathered in the auditorium to watch the seventh game of the series on the televisions they’d set up on the stage. We were absorbed from the first flickering image of Forbes Field, immersed for the next four hours, emotions soaring and plummeting, as the lead went back and forth, ecstasy and anguish in the balance. The Pirates blew a four-run lead and trailed, 5–4, after seven. When the Yankees tacked on two more in the top of the eighth, Allshouse actually snuffled and blew his nose, and we were actually too upset to ridicule him for being such a baby. We were on the verge ourselves.
In the bottom of the eighth, a routine ground ball took a bad hop and hit the Yankee shortstop in the neck. We rejoiced, Tony Kubek’s evident agony notwithstanding. This could be the break—pun intended—we needed; this might be the omen, the sign we’d been waiting for, and sure enough, when Hal Smith capped the five-run rally with a three-run homer, joy once again erupted, echoing through the cavernous old auditorium. With a two-run lead in the top of the ninth, and Bob Friend coming in to nail it down, it was all but over.
Incredibly, impossi
bly, the Yankees tied it up.
Blackness settled over the congregation. The wooden seats never felt harder. “I can’t watch,” Plotner said, and he was the stoic one among us. The big, bad Yankees were bearing down on us like an oncoming freight train. Nosker buried his head in his hands. And Carol Siebenrock revisited us, tragedy in all its guises, as we went to the bottom of the ninth.
Then, when Mazeroski homered, we were born again. We leaped in the aisles, teachers and students alike, hugging, cheering, delirious with bliss. Clover and Mrs. Ishman were dancing. Plotner and Nosker were dancing. Wonderling hugged Brenda Richards and Judy Lockett, every girl he could find, copping as many feels as he possibly could. Mr. Zufall, at the peak of his powers, lifted Allshouse over his head. And Carol was gone again.
Gone but not forgotten. Less than a week later we paid our final respects. It was a spontaneous tribute, unpremeditated. Leaving Les’s, we crossed the crumbling bridge over Potters Creek, heading up toward Main Street in the dwindling twilight. At the Court House, we turned up Pershing, still paved with bricks as all of Hartsgrove’s streets had been at one time, onto Coal Alley, and up the concrete steps that climbed the hill through the trees. The steps were tilted, old, and uneven. By the time we reached the top we were winded, our thighs aching.
The mansards and gables high on the school were nearly invisible in the dark. The streetlights couldn’t throw much light up through the trees, only a glint off a window here and there. We cut through the schoolyard. Mary Lou Allgier lived on Maple, just beyond the baseball field. We checked out her windows: the lights were on, but the shades were down, and we couldn’t see a thing. Halfway up Pine, we cut across to Diamond Alley. The best place to pay our last respects was not in the graveyard but in the backyard.
Harlan Coben Page 39
