Collapsible

by Buchanan, Ruth;

  “How are you feeling?” Miss Day asked, fluttering her eyelids at Rachel and smiling nervously. She set down her megaphone at her feet and lifted her thick blonde hair off the back of her neck with one hand while fanning at herself with the other. “Your leg must be so hot in that.” She indicated the black cast.

  It was.

  “I’m OK.” Rachel shifted her weight forward on her crutches in order to give her left leg a break. “Except when I stand too long and my foot starts to swell, like right now.”

  “I told Ms. Martinez that I’d be happy to do this by myself, but she said that you wanted to—”

  “It’s fine.” Rachel brushed this aside, perturbed at the implied assumption that she wouldn’t be able to keep up. “It’s only twenty minutes. And after the tundra of my classroom, the sun feels good.”

  “Surely now that the first rush is over, you could—”

  “If I’m not out here, Yolanda will probably stick me inside that mess.” Rachel gestured toward the students still waiting to be picked up, bunched together on the sidewalk in an ever-shifting mob. She noticed poor Todd Perkins standing slightly apart from the mob, picking absently at a scab on his chin.

  At 3:30, Miss Day accompanied Rachel back across the field, careful to keep pace with Rachel’s slow crutching.

  “Can I help you carry anything to your car?”

  Rachel waved her off. “I know you have things to do.”

  “Really, I don’t mind.” Blink, blink, blink, blink.

  “I’ll handle it,” Rachel told her, “although that’s really nice of you.”

  Miss Day hesitated.

  Rachel choked back a sigh. “Really, don’t worry about it. Lee Martin’s coming by to help me with something, and I’m sure he’ll be able to get my things out to my car for me.”

  Miss Day blinked hard, seemingly surprised, although it was hard to tell given how much she normally blinked anyway. “Oh,” she said quickly, backing up a few steps. “I see. That’s fine, never mind.” She walked away, her heels clicking rapidly against the sidewalk.

  ~*~

  “I’m so flattered that you’re giving house calls now.” Rachel smiled as Lee let himself into her classroom. He flipped off the overhead fluorescent lights and opened the classroom shutters to let in the late afternoon sun. Its slanting rays had a pleasant, bronzing effect on his unruly hair. It failed, however, to bring out any highlights in his beard, which remained a flat brown.

  “I couldn’t very well ask you to hobble all the way over to D Wing in your condition.” Lee unslung his messenger bag and dropped it onto a desk before reaching both hands into his full beard and scratching mightily.

  “You should just shave it already.”

  “Can’t do that.” He smoothed his fingers through his beard, stroking it. “I still look fifteen without it.”

  “I very much doubt that,” Rachel said. “And even if you did, who cares? You were adorable at fifteen.”

  Lee snort-laughed, pulling a desk chair from the first row over to where Rachel had her leg propped up on her desk. “Adorable isn’t exactly the look I’m going for these days.”

  Rachel tugged back the hem of her dress pants to reveal the black cast in all of its pristine glory. “Your canvas,” she told Lee.

  On class days, Lee wore a fisherman’s vest under his thrift-store corduroy jacket. He shrugged out of the jacket and tossed it over a desk. He then reached into one of the little pockets of his vest and pulled out two correction-fluid pens. “I decided that these would probably work better than paint, although I’m not really sure because I haven’t worked much with fiberglass. It could be a little weird.” He scratched his fingernails back and forth against the cast, rapped it with his knuckles, and frowned.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably a lot better, actually, since I can hardly draw straight lines to diagram sentences on the board, and you—”

  “I teach art to children.” He sat down in the desk chair and scooted close. “Which pretty much amounts to helping them do crafts. That basically puts me one step up from being a camp counselor. I’m hardly Picasso.”

  “I’ll bet Picasso never had a beard that huge,” Rachel said. “So that’s something you’ve got on him. Probably. I mean, I know literally nothing about Picasso, so he could have had a bigger beard than yours.” Her gaze ran from the top of Lee’s rumpled head to the bottom of his brown beard. “But I doubt it.”

  Lee grunted. He leaned back in the desk chair as he shook the correction fluid pens, letting his gaze roam over the current assortment of motivational posters hanging on the walls of Rachel’s classroom. The chair groaned in protest. How he had managed to fold himself into the small space provided by a student desk chair seemed a feat beyond the laws of physics.

  “So,” he said. “Did you bring it? Or am I going to have to make something up?”

  “Oh, I brought it.” Rachel slapped a printout of her emergency room X-ray onto the little half-desk in front of Lee.

  Lee considered the X-ray with careful precision. He tilted his head to study it over the tops of his square, old-man glasses. “I can’t believe you did this rolling your ankle,” he said.

  “I know,” Rachel tilted her head back against her chair and groaned. “This is a soccer injury. It’s too embarrassing to admit that I just tripped over a few strips of plastic and rolled my ankle.”

  Lee laughed. He uncapped a correction-fluid pen and began scraping it down the sharp ridges of the cast. The barest sliver of white showed against the black fiberglass. Lee glared at the thin lines, seeming to find them personally offensive. “But I can see why you’re embarrassed,” he said. “Is that why you haven’t told the kids how you did it?”

  “How do you know I haven’t told them yet?” Rachel shut her eyes and listened to the rasp of the pen against the rough surface of the cast. She tried not to think about how close his nose currently was to her foot. She felt a vague wish that she had washed it this morning, but truth be told, she was just happy that she’d been able to wrestle into her pants without breaking her other ankle. Or her neck.

  “First of all,” Lee said over the rhythmic scraping, “D Wing isn’t Timbuktu. I hear things.”

  “It’s basically Timbuktu,” Rachel told him. “It’s all the way on the other side of the property, past the extension parking lot. D Wing doesn’t even show up in the school schematic in the handbook.”

  “That’s because art classes are above such monotony as directional diagrams,” Lee said with a pious air. “We’re on a higher plane of existence, basically. And also because I don’t think D wing is up to fire code. I’m pretty sure Ms. Martinez finds a way to skip it during tours. She just shows parents the art hung in the entryway and talks about our program. I don’t know what she does during city inspections. The inspectors probably think it’s a storage shed.” He scraped the pen up the cast more slowly, finally creating some solid, connected lines.

  “Yolanda Martinez would never lie to city inspectors, even by omission.”

  Lee grunted. Rachel knew that he really didn’t mind teaching out in D Wing. His only complaint was that the room could use more natural light, but since this was his complaint about every room in existence, Rachel took the criticism with a grain of salt.

  “And I haven’t told the kids how I broke my ankle because they care way too much about my life. It’s annoying.”

  “They only care so much because you never tell them anything.”

  “I never tell them anything because my life is none of their business.”

  “And also because you have basically nothing going on.”

  “Well, yes,” Rachel agreed. “There is that. But that’s not the point.”

  “The point is, if you just told them you broke your ankle while working out, then there would be no big mystery and they would move on.”

  “Thank you. Your advice has been duly noted.”

  While Lee worked on in silence, Rachel studied the top of his h
ead, searching for stray gray hairs. She found none, of course. Lee was an infant.

  As for Rachel, her age had long been a source of speculation amongst her students, both current and former. Thanks to amazing genetics inherited from both of her parents, she had been blessed with a deceptively youthful appearance—and somewhat overzealous hair, but nobody was perfect. She’d done everything in her power to keep her age under wraps, checking and double-checking her privacy settings on social media and trusting her friends and family to keep her true birth date a secret.

  As a former student of Rachel’s, Lee had spent quite a bit of time trying to puzzle out her real age. He’d scoured the Internet, surprised her with bombardments of offhand and seemingly disconnected questions, and done everything short of paying to run a background check on her. But like many students before and after him, Lee had found all his efforts to be in vain.

  That, however, was practically the only way in which Lee fell in line with Rachel’s other students. Although she’d taught hundreds of teens over the years and taken special time to help more than a few of them, the bond she had built with Lee went beyond anything she had ever experienced with anyone not blood related. She’d thought many times that if she ever had a son, she would want him to be a lot like Lee.

  “What do Lynn and Ann have to say about your latest adventure?” Lee pushed up his glasses with a knuckle.

  “Oh, plenty.”

  “I’ll bet.” He chuckled. His gaze flicked back and forth between the X-ray and the cast. The uneven lines slowly took the shape of bones. “I’m just going to outline this for now,” he told her. “You’ll have to fill in the rest later.”

  “Oh, you’ve got some place you need to be?” Rachel waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “Like, maybe the coffee shop?”

  Lee did not rise to the challenge. He kept working steadily, eyes moving back and forth.

  “Don’t you have to pack up and move your entire apartment soon?”

  “Don’t remind me. I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “Well, you need to think about it. Especially now that you’re damaged.”

  “Thank you, Lee. That’s very helpful.”

  “Hey. I am being helpful. I’m drawing an X-ray of your bones on the outside of your cast just like you asked me to do, when I could very well be over in D Wing grading art projects.”

  “Ha! You hate grading art projects, so it sounds like you owe me a thank you. But whatever. I’ll pay you back.”

  “You will,” Lee agreed. While he applied and re-applied the thin white lines, Rachel told him about the previous day’s strange encounter at the doctor’s office, sparing no detail. As laid-back as Lee generally was, Rachel knew how to get a rise out of him; she enjoyed watching his bushy eyebrows go up and down at critical moments in the story. He frowned when she described the over-the-top come-ons of Call-Me-Matt, but this was only to be expected. Even as a teenager, Lee had been strangely protective of her.

  When the bones were outlined completely, Lee capped the correction pen and sat back, running his fingers through his beard as he contemplated his latest masterpiece. “Do I get to sign it?”

  Rachel snorted, and her phone pinged. She reached for it quickly, hoping for an automated alert about the Memento Killer murders, but it was just a text from Lynn informing her that she’d stopped by the apartment and dropped off dinner. It’s in a blue container. Instructions on the sticky note.

  Lee handed the X-ray back to Rachel. “Better keep the original out of sight.” He stood, stretched, and reached for his frayed jacket and messenger bag.

  “Why? Did you do a bad job?” Rachel lifted her leg from the desk and slowly set it on the floor, cringing as all of the blood in her body instantly rushed into it. She looked down and turned the X-ray upside down beside the cast for a comparison. The outline of bones corresponded almost exactly. She set the X-ray on the desk and looked up at him quizzically.

  Lee rocked back on his heels, looking down at her with an infuriating almost-smile. “I did an excellent job. You should keep it out of sight because it’s got your age printed on it.”

  Rachel squawked, snatching up the X-ray and scanning it in a panic. Sure enough, there was her date of birth, stamped in tiny letters in the corner. She groaned.

  “How the mighty are fallen,” Lee said in lofty tones. He shrugged into his jacket and adjusted his nerdy vest of art supplies. His eyes glinted at her from behind his hipster glasses.

  Rachel sighed, lifting her aching leg back onto the desk to let some of the blood drain before attempting the long drive back to her apartment. “You know what?” she huffed at him. “Consider that your payment.”

  Lee smiled at her, a warm smile this time, and without irony. “Totally worth the effort.”

  ~*~

  Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, shortly after Rachel arrived home from work that afternoon, she was among the first to learn that twenty-seven-year-old Elaine Harris, a scheduling assistant at Singh’s Orthopedic Associates, had been strangled to death with the cord of her own laptop charger. It would still be days before she would be confirmed by the FBI as the Memento Killer’s fourth victim.

  8

  Ann stood in the middle of the living room over a half-packed box, frowning down at Rachel. “I can’t believe you just invited him to church,” she said. “What if he’s crazy?”

  “Of course he’s crazy. He thinks we were fated to meet.” Rachel sketched air quotes around the phrase and rolled her eyes. She sat on the floor amidst wobbly stacks of books that Ann had pulled from bookshelves and piled around her. Pushing a handful of curls from her face, she grabbed a stack of dry-rotting paperbacks and wedged them into a box.

  “You don’t think that’s just a line he uses on all the ladies?”

  “Possibly,” Rachel said, considering. “He seemed fairly sure of himself.” She straightened and began patting the floor around her. “Where’s the packaging tape?”

  “I think you’re sitting on it.”

  Rachel hitched up a hip and found a roll of packaging tape partially stuck to one of the pillows beneath her. As she pulled it loose, the free end of the tape came unstuck from the pillow and glued itself to the rest of the roll. While Ann crammed stacks of paperbacks into a shallow box, Rachel set about trying to unstick it, with very little success.

  “What are you going to do if he actually shows up for church on Sunday?”

  Rachel tilted her head to the side. “Run?”

  Ann looked pointedly at Rachel’s casted leg, stuck straight out in front of her. “I’d like to see you run.” She folded the flaps of the box shut and held out her hand toward Rachel. “Tape.”

  “Keep your pants on.” Rachel had managed to get a sliver of thumbnail under the edge of the tape, but when she pulled, only a small shaving peeled away from the roll, sticking to her thumb. She pulled the tiny strip free and pressed it directly into the center of Ann’s outstretched palm. “Here you go.”

  Ann picked the tape off her hand. It stuck to her fingers. She pulled it free, and it stuck to the fingers of her opposite hand. She exhaled a long, slow breath through her nose. “Rachel,” she said, trying to scrape the tape off her hand against the side of a box, “if we’re going to get this stuff packed up in time, we’re going to have to focus.”

  “I’m so sorry for slowing you down with my inferior tape-unsticking skills.” She scraped her fingernails over the tape roll ineffectively.

  Ann shifted the box against the far wall and started filling the bottom of another with a layer of hardbacks. “You have too many books.”

  “First of all, there’s no such thing as too many books.” Rachel yanked another sliver of tape from the roll and growled at it.

  “There is when it comes time to move them.” Ann shoved another half-packed box across the floor toward Rachel. “You’re going to have to put something else in the top half. Another layer of books would make it too heavy.”

  Rachel gestured toward
her open bedroom door. “I was thinking clothes.”

  “Great,” Ann said. “Good luck with that.” She stood, stretched, and disappeared into her bedroom.

  Rachel worked her fingernail under the edge of the tape and began peeling slowly, careful not to let the strip tear away from the roll. She knew better than to ask for more help than Ann willingly volunteered. After all, Ann had her own stuff to pack, and she juggled a schedule that allowed much less time for packing than Rachel’s.

  Once the tape flap was successfully unstuck, Rachel leaned back amidst the rubble in the middle of the living room and closed her eyes.

  Life was rather unfair.

  She had broken her ankle in the most ridiculous way possible and at the worst possible time. She wanted sympathy, comfort, and someone to wait on her hand and foot. She wanted Ann to tell her that she was going to do everything she could to get them both ready to move out on time.

  She also wanted Ann to notice that she was thirsty and bring her a drink. Alas, these were not the ways of Ann.

  Rachel texted Lynn. Friday night packing. Wish you were here.

  Wish I could come help tomorrow. Lynn texted back. Maybe later next week, so save some for me. A moment later, the phone pinged as a separate text came through. And lock your doors tonight!!

  It was on the tip of Rachel’s brain to rehash her arguments about the Memento Killer not being a home invader, but at the last second she thought better of it. Despite her aching leg and sore lower back, Rachel crutched around the apartment twice, checking and double-checking the locks on the doors and windows. The Memento Killer might not be a home invader—that anybody knew of, that is—but Lynn was right. It didn’t hurt to take precautions.

  ~*~

  On Saturday morning, Rachel intended to get up early, cook a real breakfast, start her laundry, clean her bathroom and the kitchen, and then spend the rest of the day packing. Instead, she woke to the dim light of a stormy morning. Nothing could be less inspiring to productivity.