Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  Janice idly pulled open a couple of Maurice’s dresser drawers. The T-shirts were neatly folded and stacked. All the socks were paired and rolled. His briefs—all black Calvin Kleins—were tightly folded with waistbands up. Only when Janice lifted the stack of T-shirts to peek beneath did she realize that she was unconsciously looking for something. What, she had no idea.

  Thirsty. She was thirsty. She went to the refrigerator, supplied as always with fat-free cottage cheese, high-energy smoothies, and Rolling Rock beer. Toward the back was a half-gallon orange juice carton. Janice pushed the bottles aside and pulled the carton out, but something was funny. As she tilted it slightly, its weight didn’t shift. Whatever was in the carton wasn’t liquid.

  Janice folded back the pour spout and tipped it toward a glass. Nothing came out. She peered inside. It was nearly full of something black and rubbery looking. It was creepy, and she didn’t know if she wanted to see inside or not. And there was something else: The pour spout had been opened on both sides, so she could pull back both flaps and reach inside.

  She reached inside.

  What she felt was rubbery and tightly balled up. She took hold and pulled. When it popped free of the carton, the rubbery substance seemed to expand, and come to life. Janice suddenly saw two great white eyes, a nose, a face.

  It was a rubber pullover mask of a bald African-American male, a mask, only a mask, but still, it was creepy. Why would Maurice have it? And why would he hide it in an orange juice carton in his refrigerator?

  A shadow passed the kitchen window.

  Quickly Janice stuffed the mask back into the carton, slid the carton back in the refrigerator, and was replacing the bottles in their position in front of it when the front door opened. She grabbed a beer, closed the refrigerator, and began opening kitchen drawers.

  “Hey.” Maurice’s voice, behind her, calm and low.

  “Oh,” Janice said, turning. “You’re back. Now you can tell me where the bottle opener is.”

  Maurice glanced at the beer she was holding, then fixed her with an even stare. “It’s a twist-off.”

  Janice’s face, already flushed, flushed further. “Oh.”

  “And you haven’t finished your first beer yet.”

  “It got warm,” Janice said. “And kind of flat.”

  Maurice went to a window, pulled back the shade, and stood staring out. Janice’s heart was pounding wildly, whether from excitement or fear, she couldn’t tell. She walked over to him and stood quietly for a few seconds. He’d seen her through the window with the mask. She was almost certain he had. She took an actual deep breath. Then she said, “So what is that thing, anyway?”

  Without surprise Maurice said, “What thing would that be?”

  “The mask hidden in the juice carton.”

  She was watching his face. A faint smile appeared. “It’s a Shaq mask. Shaquille O’Neal. I wear it Halloweens.”

  Janice just stared at him.

  “It’s more fun than you’d think. I say things like, ‘Dayam, Shaq be superhumanic!’ ” He made a little grin. “You just don’t get that many chances to say that.”

  Janice nodded uncertainly. “So why do you need to keep it in a juice carton in the fridge?”

  Maurice seemed slightly annoyed. “Look. I used to have it hanging on my closet door in more or less plain sight as kind of a joke, but then with all these break-ins by black guys, it suddenly didn’t seem so funny. I was going to throw it away, but I didn’t really want to, so I just stashed it.”

  He waited a few seconds, staring forward, then turned slowly to Janice. His face had changed. The annoyance was gone. He was serious now. In a low voice he said, “I wouldn’t care if someone else believed me or not, but I care whether you do. It’s important to me that you believe me.”

  Janice looked at him. His eyes were different. They seemed suddenly soft, almost gentle, and vulnerable. She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. Then in a whisper she said, “I believe you.”

  Because she did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Retrieval

  Early Thursday evening, Mick was home staring out at the nest when the phone rang. The phone was on his desk, and without taking his eyes from the nest, he picked it up. It was Reece.

  “Mister, you’ve been on the phone.”

  Mick had been exercycle talking to Lisa Doyle. “There a new rule about talking on the phone?” he said.

  “There should be. Especially when I’ve got breaking news.”

  Mick was still watching the nest. The female was sitting. She’d laid four eggs so far. “What news would that be?”

  “I figured out where you got Alexander Selkirk.”

  These words sent a shock wave slamming through Mick. “What do you mean, where I got him?”

  “I’m doing a report on Moll Flanders, so I was reading about the author, Daniel Defoe, who also wrote Robinson Crusoe.” Reece waited expectantly.

  Mick said, “Okay, I’m lost so far.”

  “You are? Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “Well, it turns out Robinson Crusoe was based on an actual guy, and his name was—” Again the expectant pause.

  “No idea.”

  “Alexander Selkirk!”

  Mick couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Alexander Selkirk. “But how—” His voice tailed off.

  “So you really didn’t know that?”

  Mick said he hadn’t.

  Reece worked up a quick theory. “Maybe you’d read the name and thought you’d forgotten it, but actually filed it away. Supposedly we file everything away—it’s the retrieval that’s tricky. I guess something clicked and you retrieved it without knowing it.”

  “Maybe,” Mick said, and fell silent. He was chasing behind all this. If Alexander Selkirk was the real name of somebody dead, then why was Nora calling her e-boyfriend that? Or could it just be coincidental? Maybe there were two Alexander Selkirks. Or this one was some distant relation to the dead one.

  “You there, Mickman?”

  “I am,” Mick said, “but you know what? I gotta go. Thanks for the revelation, though.”

  He punched the off button and sat staring at the nest. He stared a long time, so long it was as if his mind went empty. And then with a sudden, calm, certain clarity it came to him.

  If Robinson Crusoe was based on Alexander Selkirk, then Alexander Selkirk was based on Mr. Cruso.

  The happy bachelor.

  Who’d been in the mall the day Mick had lost Nora.

  Whose room Nora had been hovering near that day in the hall.

  Who drove a fancy emerald green Porsche.

  So it was Mr. Cruso, and some new raw emotion within Mick clamped hard on this fact and would not let go.

  He went to the backyard shed and found an empty gas can. He filled it with the silica sand his father had used when mortaring their brick patio.

  Mick hated Mr. Cruso, he hated his fancy emerald green Porsche, and he had a plan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Home Park Gardens

  Twenty blocks away, at 1331 Nottingham, Lisa was hatching her own little scheme. She was going to drop off a farewell present for Elder Keesler. He’d given her a book, so surely it was okay to give him one. She’d decided that A Farewell to Arms, which was her actual favorite book, was no good because it was clearly a love story, but Out of Africa, which she’d read after seeing the movie six times, would be fine. It was African, for one thing, and even though the movie was chock-full of men loving Isak Dinesen and men leaving Isak Dinesen, the book itself made no mention of affairs or kissing under mosquito nets. So she strapped her copy on the back of her bike and rode to Home Park Gardens. She was going to leave it by the door and go away.

  In some apartments, yellow lights were on. The air was heavy and greenish and made everything glow supernaturally.

  There was no light in the missionary apartment. No bikes out back, either, and no Corolla. A bird was singing urgently, a
long complicated tune. She looked up and saw that it was a cardinal, who took note of her, stayed put, and sang some more. She wheeled her bicycle warily toward the entrance of Elder Keesler’s building. There was his mat, the meaningful mat. She leaned down and placed the book faceup on it. Then she paused before the meaningful door. Should she knock? Maybe she just missed seeing the car. Maybe the bikes were inside. She gave the door three raps, but nothing happened. She knew she should be relieved, but, heart still racing from the thought of seeing him once more, she knew she wasn’t relieved.

  Slowly, she mounted the bike again and rode under the cardinal, past the mailboxes, to Janice’s building, where a third-story light was on.

  “Hi,” Lisa said, smiling as usual when Genevieve opened the door. From the climb up, Lisa felt glazed with sweat. “Is Janice home?”

  Genevieve’s expression was quizzical. “I thought she was meeting you at the library.”

  “Yes!” Lisa lied, throwing her hand up to her mouth. “That’s what I meant. I was supposed to meet her, but I was late and by the time I got there she was gone. She might’ve thought we were meeting at the college library, because we talked about that, too.”

  As Mrs. Bledsoe stared at her, new sweat seemed to rise from Lisa’s every pore.

  Finally Mrs. Bledsoe said, “Okay, Lisa. What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Lisa said, and quickly turned away. “Just tell Janice I’m sorry I goofed up and missed her.”

  Riding home fast, standing up so she could pump harder, feeling the black roads beneath thin whirling tires, Lisa felt a strange confusion of disappointment and anger, disappointment that Joe Keesler wasn’t there, that Janice wasn’t there, anger that she’d been caught in Janice’s lie, and—this was the strange one, the unexplainable one—anger that she hadn’t gotten to see Joe Keesler. Why hadn’t he been there? Was he already gone, without her knowing? He’d said he was going, of course, but he hadn’t said which day.

  She stopped for a red light and felt suddenly certain that Elder Keesler was already gone, and that she had just done something ridiculous, something that would make Elder Pfingst and his new companion stare oddly at her on Sunday.

  Which made her angrier still.

  Lisa pumped harder and, once home, the first thing she did was find the Village Greens business card. There, underlined in red, was Maurice’s cell phone number.

  Maurice answered. “Village Greens,” he said.

  “Hi,” Lisa said, not even trying to sound polite. “This is Lisa Doyle. Is Janice with you?”

  “It’s your twin,” Lisa heard him say, and then Janice said, “Hi, twin.”

  “Don’t ever tell your mom you’re with me when you’re not!”

  “Just fine, thanks,” Janice said. “And you?”

  “Did you hear what I said? I went to your apartment, and your mom asked me why I wasn’t with you at the library.”

  “Oh,” Janice said. “Whoops.”

  “Whoops?”

  “I’m sorry you got mixed up in it, but, I mean, what can she do? Lock me up?” Then, “Besides, Genevieve isn’t my priority anymore. Maurice is.”

  Lisa took this in. She wondered if Maurice was sitting there, or, worse yet, lying there. He was a predator, a regular Visigoth, but this clearly wasn’t the time to point it out. After a long second, she said, very softly, in almost a whisper, “Are you crazy?”

  Janice laughed easily. “Maybe. But no more than the next gal.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Penal Code

  Last period, Friday.

  It was Mr. Cruso’s class, but Mrs. Stallings had been sitting at his desk when the period began. Mrs. Stallings was all business. She’d noted that Mr. Cruso had been called away on urgent business, written an assignment on the board, and explained that students “should hold any questions, concerns, or feeble ideas about leaving the classroom until Mr. Cruso’s return.” When Dale Deckert in his most polite voice asked Mrs. Stallings if she “was a distant relation to Joseph Stalin,” she’d promptly written him up for Saturday school, and the classroom had thereafter fallen silent.

  At 2:30, Mr. Cruso walked in and exchanged places with Mrs. Stallings. But something was different about his manner. There was a strange stiffness to his face. He looked almost mad, but nobody had ever seen him mad before. He stared silently at the students for a few moments, scratching his neatly trimmed beard with what almost seemed like agitation. Then he silently went to the chalkboard and wrote $2,375.00 in large numbers.

  He turned around and scanned the room, where everyone sat waiting for whatever was coming next.

  Finally Brittany Allen said, “What’s that number for, Mr. Cruso?”

  “Ah,” Mr. Cruso said. “That number represents the large sum of U.S. dollars I have had to pay to repair my Porsche after running it with sand in the gas tank.”

  For a less popular teacher, this statement would’ve drawn smirks and possibly even sneering laughter, but Mr. Cruso was popular, so nobody made a sound and Mr. Cruso continued. “You might wonder why a reasonably intelligent man would run his Porsche with sand in the gas tank.”

  Mr. Cruso began slowly to prowl the room, letting his intense black eyes fix on one student after another as he went. Mick sat watching him with interest. Mr. Cruso was mad, all right, mad and hungry for revenge. Mick knew he ought to be afraid, but he wasn’t. He felt nothing but a strangely giddy pleasure in Mr. Cruso’s seething anger. Mick was wearing his leather jacket and began idly to slide the interior zipper back and forth.

  Mr. Cruso said, “I ran my Porsche with sand in the gas tank because I didn’t know there was sand in the gas tank. I didn’t know there was sand in the gas tank because some deviant put it there.”

  He slowed at Dale Deckert’s desk, and moved on.

  “Someone so slimy, so swampy, so shall we say primordial in intellect that he, and I use the male gender advisedly, might turn to vandalism to vent his diseased spleen over some offense that was itself probably only imagined.”

  It was a pretty good speech. Mick guessed he must’ve practiced it on the way in.

  Mr. Cruso was at the back of the room now, and as he stalked back down the next aisle he pulled a paper from his pocket. “According to the New York penal code, a person is guilty of criminal mischief in the second degree, when—and I quote— ‘with intent to damage property of another person, and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that he has such right, he damages property of another person in an amount exceeding one thousand five hundred dollars.’ End quote.”

  He stopped and again scanned the room, this time with a strangely unpleasant smile on his lips. “Reasonable ground, children, is not getting a B when you wanted an A, or an F when you wanted to pass.”

  Mr. Cruso resumed his slow, prowling walk toward the front of the class.

  “A Class D felony is punishable in the state penal and correctional complex for not less than one year.”

  He paused a second or two to let this sink in.

  “The good news is that the perpetrator was evidently unaware of the video monitors in the garage where my Porsche was parked. In those videotapes, the male perpetrator can be clearly viewed pouring something into my gas tank from a gas can. There was also an eyewitness who got a good look at the perpetrator, so it’s just a matter of time before the vandal is apprehended.”

  This worried Mick a little, but not much. He’d been wearing a no-logo sweatshirt with the hood up, so how much could a camera pick up? And, besides, this was a vandalism case—it wasn’t like they were going to call out the F.B.I. or anything.

  Mr. Cruso had again reached the front of the room. He pivoted slowly and let his eyes scan the entire class. This time his voice was softer, more sympathetic, almost caressing. “I’m sure the boy who did this isn’t a bad kid.” He paused, and for that moment he looked more like the old Mr. Cruso, the Mr. Cruso who liked people and brought out the best in everybody. Even mo
re softly he said, “The detective in charge of the case advises me the charges will be less severe if the boy presents himself voluntarily to me.”

  He waited. His waiting hung over the room, which felt suddenly small and close. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. It was almost as if nobody breathed. When Mick slowly ran his pocket zipper open, its low sibilant sound seemed almost loud.

  Mr. Cruso turned. “You have something to offer, Mick?” he said.

  “Not really,” Mick said. “I was just thinking how terrible it would be to have something you really liked get damaged like that.”

  Mr. Cruso’s eyes changed slightly. Hardened. “So?”

  “It just seems weird, you know, that somebody would go to that kind of trouble over something as puny as a grade.”

  Mr. Cruso was taking this in when the bell rang. All at once everyone stood and began quickly filing from the room. If this were a jail, the doors had just swung open.

  “If any of you know anything at all about this, contact me privately!” Mr. Cruso shouted after them. “Anything you tell me will be confidential!”

  None of the students even glanced back at him; they just kept filing ahead. Mick was himself nearly to the door when Mr. Cruso said, “Mick, can I see you for a moment, please?”

  Mick turned and let the others slip around him until the class was completely empty except for him and Mr. Cruso, whose eyes were fixed on Mick. “Sit down, Mick.”

  Mick sat on a student desk. He reached inside his jacket and began fiddling with the interior zipper. Open, closed, open.

  “So what was that question all about, Mick?”

  Mick shrugged. “I don’t know, it was just interesting to me.”

  “What was interesting to you?” His voice low and coaxing.

  “That somebody would go to all that trouble to do that to your car. I mean, it’s awful, but I was just sitting there thinking about it while you were talking. It didn’t sound like something casual, you know? I mean, when I lost my muckraker paper, you believed me and gave me an extension. That’s what made me wonder why whoever did it, did it. You’re pretty fair about grades, so, you know, maybe it’s not about grades.”