Prom Date

by Diane Hoh

  She was almost to the store’s side entrance when something lying on the cement just outside the door caught her eye. There shouldn’t have been anything there. She had swept around the door just before closing, as she always did, and fed a stray cat a saucer of milk, something her mother had expressly forbidden her to do. “Feed them,” Adrienne said, “and they’ll never leave. They can take care of themselves, Margaret.”

  There hadn’t been anything in the alley when Margaret fed the cat.

  But now there was something. A bundle of something lying in a puddle left over from the rain the night before. Wet newspapers, maybe.

  Margaret moved closer. It wasn’t newspaper, she realized as she arrived at the puddle and looked down. It was … clothing. Crumpled and soaking wet with oily, muddy water. What looked like black tire tracks waved across the top layer like canceled postage stamp marks.

  Margaret crouched to investigate the sodden mess.

  Red … a red silk dress with spaghetti straps, one of them ripped away now, the dress so soaked with mud, the bright red had become dark brown. Beneath that, a black dress, strapless, its bouffant skirt flattened into a thick pancake by car tires. And on the bottom in the fouled mess, something pale blue …

  Stephanie’s red prom dress. Liza’s black one. Beth’s blue gown. Ruined, all of them, ruined beyond repair.

  Margaret knelt then, gingerly picking up the garments, holding the edges in her hands. No amount of steam cleaning or soaking or ironing would make them wearable again. They were beyond salvaging.

  The ruined clothing clung to Margaret’s fingertips as if the dresses expected her to somehow, miraculously, restore them to their former glory. Frowning, Margaret sank back on her heels.

  What, exactly, had happened here?

  Chapter 2

  MARGARET HAD NO IDEA how long she sat there on the warm, moist cement, holding the remains of the slaughtered dresses in her hands. The sudden slam of a car door brought her head up. Glancing around the alley in search of someone who might look as if they had a psychotic hatred of fashion, she saw only a middle-aged couple heading toward Impeccable Tastes, the restaurant located directly ahead of Margaret. She became aware of the tantalizing odor of heavily seasoned Italian food. Her stomach smelled it, too, and growled angrily.

  I have to get up, Margaret thought, her mind still foggy with shock. I have to get up and I have to do something about this mess. But she couldn’t think what.

  When she tried to swallow, her throat closed and she gagged.

  It wasn’t just the dresses that brought bile up into her throat. Aside from the long hours her mother had put into making them, Margaret didn’t care about the garments. They were, after all, just dresses. And look who had purchased them: three girls who wouldn’t lend you a shirt if you were standing naked in a snowstorm. Well, Beth or Liza might. If Stephanie didn’t talk them out of it.

  It wasn’t the dresses. It was the raw violence of the act that made Margaret gag and sent her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms. It was the stupid, needless, vicious act itself. The dresses hadn’t arrived in the alley on their own. They’d been brought to the puddle by someone bent on destruction. Why would someone attack and drown three pretty prom dresses and then, just in case they might still be salvageable, flatten their corpses into fashion oblivion by grinding them into the mud like insects under a heavy boot heel?

  It made no sense. But the anger of the acts, the fury represented by the ruined garments, made Margaret’s hands shake.

  I have to get out of here, she told herself again. This time, she scrambled to her feet, dragging the dresses behind her with one hand. She headed first for the Dumpster to her right, then changed her mind and aimed for the van instead. She wouldn’t toss them. Not yet. Impossible to describe to her mother the condition in which she’d found the three dresses. The only way anyone would believe such a thing would be to see it with their own eyes. She had to take the murdered dresses home with her.

  Margaret hated the idea. She couldn’t bear the thought of how her mother’s eyes would look when she saw the remains of three of her loveliest creations.

  I can’t do this alone, she decided as she started the engine. I can’t! Remembering then that her mother had had dinner plans and wouldn’t be home yet, anyway, Margaret drove straight to the public library to find Caroline and Scott.

  When they had finally accepted as reality the disgusting sight presented to them in the back of the van, Caroline turned away from the muddy mess and said, “Whose are they? I can’t even tell what color they are … were.”

  Margaret told her who had bought the dresses.

  Caroline’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “The Pops? These dresses belong to the Pops?” A slow, satisfied grin spread across her face. “Oh, this is cool, this is just too cool! I don’t believe this!”

  “Caroline,” Margaret said as she slammed shut the van’s back door, “quit rejoicing and think about my mother, okay? She worked really hard on those dresses. This is going to make her even sicker than it made me. You guys have to come with me. I can’t face her with this alone.”

  Caroline’s grin disappeared. Margaret’s remark had wiped every last trace of exultation from her face. “Oh, no, you’re right! I’m sorry! I wasn’t even thinking about Adrienne. How are you ever going to tell her?”

  “I’m not going to tell her anything. I’m just going to show her. I don’t want to, but I have to. Those dresses are paid for. She’ll have to do something about this. Get in. You’re coming with me.”

  “Why would someone do this?” Adrienne cried, whirling to face Margaret, Scott, and Caroline. “It’s so … it’s so … violent!”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Margaret said grimly.

  Then the businesswoman in Adrienne took over again. “Was the store broken into? How did those dresses get outside? Was any money taken?”

  Margaret had to confess that she didn’t know. “I found them in the alley and brought them here,” she said, feeling stupid for failing to check the store’s doors and windows. Hadn’t checked inside, either, to see if the culprit was still lurking within. “I guess I freaked. I never even thought about the store.”

  “I’d better get down there,” her mother said, grabbing a denim jacket from the hall closet. “I can’t call the police until I’ve checked out the shop. I’ll call from there.”

  “You should call them first,” Scott suggested. “If there was someone in the store, you can’t be sure they’re gone. You don’t want to go walking in there alone.”

  Adrienne hesitated in the doorway. But after a moment, she shook her head. “I can’t call the police and say that three prom dresses were ruined. We’ll just go down and see if there’s any sign of a broken lock or window. If there is, we won’t go in, okay? We’ll go next door and call the police from the restaurant.”

  “We?” Caroline asked nervously, her eyes wide.

  “She said we won’t go inside.” Margaret glared at Caroline. “Besides, we don’t have to worry. We’re not prom dresses. We don’t even own prom dresses. So relax!” But even as she said it, she knew relaxing, for any of them, was impossible. It seemed amazing to her that they were walking and talking like normal people who hadn’t seen what they had.

  Because neither the front nor side door locks had been tampered with, they did go inside the store. But they went slowly, cautiously, Adrienne leading the way with a flashlight until she reached the main light switch behind the counter.

  Nothing seemed out of place. There was no pile of shredded garments lying on the floor, (something Margaret had dreaded), no money missing, and nothing, inside the store, as far as they could tell, had been broken or stolen.

  Until they went upstairs to the sewing room they called the Sweatbox because it had no air-conditioning, and Margaret discovered that the lock on the window leading from the fire escape was broken. “It was okay earlier today,” she announced. “I know, because I closed and locked the window whe
n I came back in after my break.”

  The Sweatbox was a long, narrow room cluttered from ceiling to floor with bolts of fabric, sewing materials, large pink dress boxes, smaller pink boxes for blouses and tops and sweaters, thick packages of folded pale pink tissue paper, a huge cardboard box filled to overflowing with satin padded hangers, another filled with clear plastic hangers.

  Half-finished dresses hung on armless plastic mannequins. An antique sewing machine inherited by Adrienne from the grandmother who had taught her how to design patterns and sew, stood against one wall. An old ironing board, part of the same inheritance, stood in the center of the room. The board, its wooden legs old and wobbly, was constantly collapsing, but Adrienne refused to give it up. “It was my grandmother’s,” she insisted. “Without my grandmother, we wouldn’t have the shop. I’d still be clerking in an office by day and waitressing at night, like I did for eight very long years after your father raced that train at the crossing and lost. The ironing board stays.”

  There were two tall, narrow windows in the atticlike room, one overlooking a driveway, the other opening onto a black metal fire escape that rose above the cement courtyard fronting the office building and restaurant.

  That afternoon, when Margaret had taken her break and stepped out onto the fire escape to gulp in a few breaths of fresh air, her eyes had moved down to the restaurant and she had thought, People will be going there for their pre-prom dinner. The Pops would, in the beautiful dresses that Adrienne had created. But not Adrienne’s own daughter.

  And she had thought that if she were going, she knew exactly which dress she would want to wear. Not black, like Liza. Black was for funerals. The dress she had fallen in love with when Adrienne was still creating it, was blue. The brilliant blue of an October sky at that time of the year when the nights turn crisp and the leaves turn orange and yellow and scarlet. Such a vivid shade of blue could turn even plain brown hair as glossy and smooth as a chestnut, give brown eyes a shining, golden glow. Margaret was as sure the dress was miraculous as she was that she would never be wearing it. Not to the prom, and not anywhere else.

  The thought had brought a sudden stab of pain to her chest, as if her mother had accidentally stabbed her with a sharp straight pin. The pain had made Margaret angry, and thoroughly disgusted with herself. She hadn’t realized, until that moment, just how much she wanted to go to her own senior prom.

  And she’d suddenly been afraid that she was turning into one of those weepy, whining females who put dances at the top of her priority list. She hadn’t attended a single prom in high school. And so far, she’d lived through every one of them, coming out on the other side of the weekend with all of her faculties intact and no visible serious damage.

  But this was her senior prom.

  “Are you sure that lock was intact this afternoon?” Adrienne’s voice broke into Margaret’s thoughts.

  Margaret snapped out of it, turned around. “Yes, I’m positive.”

  Adrienne called the police to file a report, but the investigator found no clues to suggest anything more than youthful vandalism. Adrienne agreed.

  Margaret had her doubts. A band of young kids roaming the streets looking for prom dresses to ruin? Taking no money, breaking nothing, not even spray-painting the walls outside the store? What were they doing in the store in the first place? And why had they only destroyed those three dresses? Youthful vandalism? Reality check, please. There had been a purpose behind such selective sabotage.

  Unfortunately, Margaret couldn’t even begin to imagine what that purpose had been.

  If someone thought that wrecking those particular gowns would keep Liza or Beth or Stephanie from the prom, they seriously needed a brain scan. Even if Adrienne couldn’t replace them (and she would), there were other stores, other dresses. And lots, lots more money. Liza’s, Beth’s, and Stephanie’s mothers were the other owners of Quartet. They had invested money in Adrienne’s shop because they had so much of it lying around doing nothing. Now, while they played tennis and gardened and enjoyed long lunches at Impeccable Tastes, and only Adrienne worked long, hard hours in the shop, their money grew. No, money was definitely not a problem when it came to replacing the three slaughtered dresses.

  So if keeping the Pops from the prom wasn’t the intent behind the violence, what was?

  She was too tired to think about it now.

  When the police had left, after instructing Adrienne to replace the broken lock, she asked Margaret, Caroline, and Scott to please keep the incident to themselves. “Bad for business,” she said in a disheartened voice.

  They all promised not to tell anyone.

  In a heartier voice, Adrienne said, “I’ll redo the dresses. Margaret, that might mean you’ll be working longer hours in the store. I’m sorry.”

  Refusing to think about finals coming up, which meant hitting the books in a major way, or senior activities like the picnic and Yearbook Day and the senior banquet, Margaret nodded. “No problem.” It wasn’t as if she’d be busy getting ready for the prom.

  When they left the store, after making sure that everything was locked up tighter than a bank vault; Margaret’s eyes avoided the puddle where the dresses had gone to their death. She carefully stepped around it, as if she were afraid that walking through it might bring her the same fate.

  Chapter 3

  THE SENIOR PICNIC WAS held on the following Wednesday, a gray, chilly day, threatening rain. Classes were suspended for all those who had made it to graduation without collecting more F’s than B’s. They traveled by car to the beautiful stretch of parkland north of Toomey known as Peninsula Point. Aptly named, the park was located in the very center of a long, narrow strip of land stretching toward the ocean like a pointing finger.

  While the peninsula’s middle was lush with greenery, the tip itself was barren, the only color provided by the golden-beige of windblown sand dunes and the white stone of an old, abandoned lighthouse.

  A white metal sign on a rusted metal chain in front of the entrance to the lighthouse swung gently in the ever brisk ocean breeze, spelling Danger and warning visitors against entering the aging structure.

  Many people ignored the sign. To some, the word Danger acted as a red flag, enticing them to climb over the chain and push open the rickety old door whose lock had been useless for years. To others, the thought of the awe-inspiring view from the circular wooden platform at the top of the structure just beneath the light itself, drew them onward and upward, heedless of the risk. The floor and wooden railing encircling the observation deck might be rotting and crumbling, but the spectacular view of the endless ocean remained intact. Nature lovers who made the precarious climb up the rusted, metal, spiral stairs that trembled beneath their weight felt the view was worth both the climb and the risk.

  The small white metal sign continued to flap uselessly in the breeze as if to say, “Well, I tried my best. It’s not my fault if they all ignore me.”

  Margaret loved the lighthouse. She’d been making the shaky climb to the top since she was a child, Adrienne’s stern warnings going unheeded. Few things were as thrilling to Margaret as reaching the top, breathless, knees trembling from the climb, emerging through the small, weather-beaten door to the deck to step outside and face the broad, endless stretch of ocean and sky. She didn’t mind the wind slamming into her like a cannonball, and she loved the taste of saltwater on her lips. Sometimes the water was gray-green, sometimes gray-blue. On cold, wind-whipped days, it was always gray-white, the whitecaps taller than Margaret.

  It was like that on the day of the picnic, the ocean raging gray-white, every last trace of blue or green gone from the water, blanketed by a sooty gray sky overhead.

  Still upset over the vandalism at the store and tired of playing softball and volleyball, Margaret left the festivities and trudged up toward the Point alone. No use asking Caroline or the others to come along. Jeannine and Lacey were afraid of the lighthouse, and Caroline hated it, calling it a “creepy old relic that
should have been torn down a long time ago.” Margaret knew she was just quoting her mother. Cecelia LaSalle, a close friend of Adrienne’s, had no interest in the past, and called antiques “junk.” She called the lighthouse “an eyesore to our community and a death trap.”

  Margaret had never thought of the lighthouse as “a death trap.” The only person who had ever died at the lighthouse, as far as Margaret knew, was old “Suds” Crater, who was ancient himself and drank so much that people in town joked that he’d actually died a long time ago but the alcohol in his system had preserved him for all eternity. He had fallen from the observation deck on a warm, balmy night in October. The fall had literally scared him to death, Margaret had heard. His heart had stopped on the way down.

  When she finally reached the top of the lighthouse stairs, Margaret moved to the edge of the circular walkway, avoiding broken floorboards. The wind ripped her sweatshirt hood off her head and stung her eyes. Careful not to lean against the white wooden, waist-high railing, she thrust her hands into the pockets of her bright blue sweatshirt. The sound of the breakers crashing into the rocks below thundered around her, as if a storm were imminent. She loved that sound.

  But it was so loud, that when a voice behind her said, “Awesome, right?” she almost didn’t hear it. She turned to find a tall, broad-shouldered figure in a red sweatshirt standing slightly behind her on her left. Because he was wearing his hood, it took her a few seconds to place him. Then a gust of wind caught the hood and flung it backwards, setting free thick, dark hair.

  Mitch McGill. Liza Buffet’s sometime boy-friend. Hard to figure why one of the cutest guys at Toomey would put up with an on-again, off-again relationship. And he must be nice, too, because he was always getting elected to things.