by Kate Flora
He held up a hand to ward off Basham’s protest. “The press will call it a scandal, Mr. Basham, even if we don’t. But this event calls our whole approach, our philosophy of an open and responsible community, into question. It also reflects on our ability to take adequate care of our students, which is very important to any boarding school’s parents. We have to meet these issues head-on and deal with them honestly and openly. Under the circumstances, Heidi’s interests may differ from ours.”
Basham stared at the floor, his knotted hands resting on his knees. “Are you saying you might ask Heidi to leave?”
Gareth nodded.
“Heidi is happy here,” Basham said, shaking his head as though shaking off a burden. “It’s a good place for her. It would break her heart if she had to leave. And I can’t…she really can’t come live with me.” He sighed. “I travel too much. She’d be alone too much. And I don’t see how I can send her back to…to them.”
He stared down at his hands, which were decorated with intricate, heavy silver rings. “You can’t send her away, Gareth. It would be too cruel.”
Gareth stared out a window where there was nothing to see. He was such an admirably decent man. It was rare that people told each other the truth.
I was noticing that despite their very limited acquaintance, Basham had used Gareth’s first name in a most familiar way. Were those pauses genuine searches for thoughts or consideration of the next manipulation? I had the uneasy feeling Basham was hiding something.
And we were no closer to understanding what had happened to Heidi.
“She has no idea how this pregnancy happened?” I said.
He raised his arms in a helpless gesture. “She’s never had sex. She couldn’t possibly have gotten pregnant. If that’s what she says, that’s what she believes. Heidi is no liar. This isn’t something she’s faking or asserting to cover up bad behavior or some secret relationship.” He shrugged like this was all beyond him. “That’s not the kind of person Heidi is.”
“Her mother says she spent a couple weeks with you last summer—”
“Five days,” he said bluntly, cutting off my question. “Just five days. That’s all that miserable bitch I used to be married to would allow. The agreement says two weeks, and she futzed around and changed the plans so many times I only ended up with five days. Not because Lorena was too attached to Heidi to be apart from her, but simply because it was another opportunity to jerk me around. Like I said, she doesn’t really care about Heidi.”
I bit my lip, because my smarty mouth wanted to say, “And yet, knowing that, you left her with her mother.” He talked a good game, but I wondered if he’d really put up much of a fight, given the demands of his own life. I wanted him to prove me wrong.
“And in case you have some crazy idea that this might have happened on my watch,” Basham continued, “I can assure you that that’s impossible. We went on a four-day sailing cruise up the coast of Maine that Heidi chose. Small boat. Lots of people. Tight quarters and no time when she could have gotten together with anyone, even if there had been someone to get together with. Which there was not.”
He dusted his hands together, a startlingly loud noise in the quiet room. “We all…anyone who’s thinking clearly and doesn’t want to evade responsibility, that is, understand this pregnancy couldn’t have happened here at Simmons. It happened before she got here, so it must have happened on Lorena’s watch. Not that Lorena was paying any attention. Self-centered doesn’t begin to—”
We were not going down this road again. “So you have no idea who…” I interrupted.
“No idea about who, Ms. Kozak, and no idea about how. When. How could I? I wasn’t there.”
He raised his head and his eyes were blazing. Eyes can be the mirror of the soul and they really can blaze. “Lorena should. She was there. She was supposed to be taking care of Heidi. I support her so that she can take care of Heidi. But I don’t suppose she—”
“She says she has no idea.”
“She has an idea, all right. She’s just not deigning to share it with us.”
I was inclined to agree with him. Lorena Norris had claimed to know nothing, but her indignation had been as much at the necessity for obfuscation and self-protection as it had been genuine indignation. I’d met Lorena Norris’s type before. The independent school world was full of them. Women—and men—glad to offload their children and the responsibility for raising them onto the shoulders of institutions. Often children they’d abdicated responsibility for years before they sent those children to boarding school. Children who’d been struggling to raise themselves. It was rarer that such parents would choose a place like Simmons. They’d go for prestige, name recognition, schools that might get their kids into good colleges. But then, they hadn’t chosen Simmons. Heidi had.
Time was passing. My anxiety was increasing with every minute that I wasn’t on the road, and we were getting nowhere. Better to wait ’til the morning. I had one more question, though, a random one I didn’t expect him to answer. “Is there anyone you can think of who might have been in and out of the Norris’s house on a regular basis, someone Heidi might have trusted? Or someone who might have taken advantage of her?”
Basham looked startled by the question. Then his fists clenched. “In and out of the house? Someone she would have trusted? Maybe not trusted, because they aren’t trustworthy, but I can think of at least three people who were in and out quite frequently. Two of the general’s junior officers and Lorena’s slimy cousin Dennis. And there’s that guy, Will, who taught Heidi to play the guitar. Only I think he doesn’t come to the house anymore because all that noise bothers The General.”
Just when you think you can fold up your tent and slip away. I wasn’t surprised. People often came out with the important stuff when I thought I was done. Usually I left time for it in my interviews. Not tonight. Tonight my concentration was already leaving this room and driving way. And dammit, this needed to be followed up.
Basham was surprised, though. As if, despite what we’d been talking about, and despite the dramatic events that had brought him here, he’d never seriously considered the possibility that someone had taken advantage of his daughter in a way that violated all the rules of decency, and he couldn’t conceive of such a betrayal of trust and seduction of innocence. It was almost as though, despite having been told about the baby and being made aware of Heidi’s condition, he, too, believed that his daughter was still an innocent virgin and an unexplained pregnancy and delivery hadn’t really happened.
He needed to get himself over to the hospital and see that baby for himself. If Lorena was a grandma, he was a grandpa. There was an innocent newborn in this situation that no one was thinking about. I wasn’t supposed to be, either. I was supposed to be thinking about my client, the Simmons School.
Eager as I was to be gone, I dropped back into my chair. “Tell us about them,” I said.
“Which one?”
“All four of them.”
Though he tried to hide it, I could tell Gareth wished I hadn’t asked the question. He was tired, too, having been up much of the night, and had other things to deal with besides Ted Basham. And a family that probably wanted some of his attention. Morning would come just as fast whether we were prepared for it or not.
“If you’d prefer, Mr. Basham, we could pick this up again in the morning,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve had a tiring day.”
I shot him a look. Didn’t he understand how important this was? It needed to be followed up now, before Basham had time for second thoughts, but he and Gareth were on a different page. With relieved sighs and the downing of the last of their Scotch, they shook hands, and Basham crutched out to his car to head for Gareth’s house.
When the door had closed behind him, Gareth gave me an embarrassed look. “I know,” he said. “We risk losing momentum. But it would have taken time. There are other things I have to deal with. And you’ve got your father.”
I thought he�
�d made a bad call. This might have been our only chance to get those spontaneous revelations. Often, people talked more freely under stress and disclosed things they otherwise wouldn’t. It sure looked like that was the case with Basham. But Gareth was the client so he got to decide.
So many other things—crafting a press release and a message to be delivered by phone to the parents—would take a long time. But he was toast and I had a family emergency. We would meet again early in the morning. As though just remembering it, Gareth scooped a file off his desk and held it out. “Copies of Heidi’s records,” he said. “Not much there, but I thought you should see them.”
I stuffed the file and my notes in my briefcase and headed out to my car. Before I started driving, I quickly checked my phone. No updates from anyone. Did their silence mean news too bad to tell me over the phone? My anxiety filled the car like a cloud. I could almost smell the ozone from my snapping nerves.
As I hit the road, I told Siri to call my brother Michael. I went directly to voicemail. My mother didn’t answer. Uncle Henry didn’t answer. The night was spookily dark as I drove far too fast toward a hospital south of Boston, imagining the worst.
Eight
I couldn’t help calling one more time as I raced through the night. I needed to know what was happening. It was only when I looked at the speedometer and saw I was going 95 that I forced myself back under control. I didn’t want to get stopped for speeding. I slowed down, even though 80 felt slow as molasses, and called someone I hoped would answer—Andre. He picked up on the first ring, his usual calm and control replaced by a flurry of questions. “What’s going on with your father? Have you seen him yet? How’s your mother doing? How are you doing?”
I tried to answer them calmly, but I’m not so good at calm when the issue involves me. I guess I save my calm and control for my clients. I got as far as, “I don’t know anything yet, except that it’s a heart attack and he’s in the cardiac care unit. I’m on my way to the hospital now. And no one is answering their phones,” before I dissolved into tears.
“Do you want me to come down there?” he asked.
Of course I wanted him. But I hated to drag him out into the night for a long drive if everything was fine. “Let me see what the situation is when I get to the hospital,” I said.
“Call me when you know. I’ll come if you need me.”
“I will.”
We didn’t disconnect, though we didn’t talk. Sometimes I think we do our best communicating when we’re just silently together, listening to each other breathe. After a while I said, “I’m scared.”
“I’m sure you are.” And then, because he knew me so well, he said, “But don’t drive like a maniac, okay. Little MOC wants to stay safe. And I want both of you to stay safe.”
MOC. Mason, Oliver, or Claudine. A child in grave danger of going through life being called Mock no matter what name we chose or what sex it was. Unlike most couples, we hadn’t wanted to know the sex of our child. We wanted the surprise. Never mind that it meant our friends didn’t know whether to buy pink or blue. We didn’t have a baby’s room to paint, so that wasn’t an issue. And we would meet whoever it was when the time was right. All we knew so far was that we were definitely going to be the parents of a nocturnal acrobat, quite possibly a kickboxer, and someone plagued by hiccups. That sure was going to be fun. Which made me think about Heidi again. How was it possible to have missed her baby’s kicks and hiccups? Were there babies that were quiet and still?
“Thea? Are you still there?”
“Still here. Thinking about the situation at Simmons and wondering how that child could not have known she was pregnant.”
“It happens.”
“I know. It happened. So how are things there? All quiet? No one has been murdered today?”
“If they have, no one’s told me. So, tell me about your student. Wait. Check your speed and then tell me about your student.”
“I’m only going eighty,” I said.
“Only?” he said, and laughed. The man was so scarily competent he could drive eighty miles an hour in reverse.
“My student? The poor girl insists she’s never had sex and that the baby isn’t hers. Her mother and stepfather are clueless. Or indifferent. Her mother says the girl is too unattractive to have a boyfriend. I think the two of them are hiding something, though I have no idea what it is.”
“What the mom said about her daughter? Bet that got your back up,” he said.
“It did. Then it turns out that the mom failed to notify the dad, even though she said she would. He got word anyway and showed up on crutches, absolutely furious. Now mom is stonewalling, while the stepfather says ‘not my problem,’ and the dad is angry and flailing. He may have something for us, though. The dad. We were close to getting it, but then Gareth ended the meeting, and who knows whether he’ll still be forthcoming in the morning.”
“And you were angry about that.”
“You bet. Frustrated, anyway. When someone is willing to talk, you don’t shut them down. Guess who I learned that from?”
He made an affirmative noise and asked, “When will you be coming home?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping for tomorrow night. It depends on what happens here. On the parents and the press and how the situation develops. And of course, what’s going on with my dad.”
He made a comforting sound.
“Boy, do I wish you were here,” I said. “You would understand how to get to the bottom of things. This girl didn’t have a boyfriend. Mom says there’s no time where she can’t remember what happened to her. Or came home from a party intoxicated or didn’t come home at all. Or where she later seemed upset or distant or depressed or showed any signs of trauma or changed behavior. You’d be able to get more out of her. The mom, I mean. She really needs to be leaned on by a tough guy like you.”
“While you have to be polite.” He sympathized, then moved on to the essential question. “Any thoughts about what she’s hiding? Or why?”
He had a lot more faith in me as an observer than I had in myself, but I considered his question. Had I noticed anything? Things I might have dismissed because of her overall demeanor? There was something. When I asked about people in and out of the house, Mrs. Norris was going to say something, but the stepfather shut her down. I told him about that. “And the stupid ass of a stepfather just keeps saying ‘She’s not my daughter,’ like none of it is his concern.”
I paused while I skimmed around someone in the fast lane going fifty-five, and realized what his questions had just led me to. “He, or they, are definitely hiding something. I’m pretty sure they have an idea what happened.”
“Wish I could help,” he said.
“At least I’ve been trained in Detective Lemieux’s school of interrogation.”
“Interviewing,” he corrected, then said, “Give ’em hell.” It was there in his voice, the sound of a detective who’s intrigued by a case. “Get the mother alone and try again. And the stepfather. Sometimes those military tough guy types can be disarmed by a pretty woman.”
“If I ever get the chance.”
“Getting back to the girl. She could be lying,” he said.
“No one who knows her thinks she’s lying. It sounds more complicated than that.”
But I hadn’t met her. She could be lying. Lying to protect someone she cared about? I wasn’t sure how we’d find that out. Dr. Purcell? Heidi herself? Her friends?
I slowed down to weave my way through a clot of cars poking along in all three lanes, wishing for the zillionth time that I had a carpoon—my fantasy device for punishing annoying drivers—mounted on my hood. Then I could have some fun out here. Recently, I’d resolved to have more fun, live a more normal life. So far, it wasn’t working. Crisis and dysfunction continued to be my normal.
“Dr. Purcell, the psychiatrist, says trauma can do this, can make a person repress something so deeply they genuinely believe it never happened. She’s thinking this is a psyc
hological reaction to trauma or extreme fear. My money would be on a date rape drug, or extreme intoxication, some situation where she could have been unconscious and raped and have no idea that it had happened to her. Or on someone who terrified her into repressing an assault. Either way, without more information to explain it, Heidi’s version of the story sounds dishonest and improbable, which is a big deal in this community.”
I realized that he didn’t know anything about the Simmons School. “Her having a baby and abandoning it. Her denying that she had a baby at all. It’s a bigger deal here, I mean, because this school is all about personal responsibility and being an honest member of the community. If they think she’s lying and has betrayed their values, she’s going to be asked to leave. And if she leaves, she has to go back to her awful mother. The dad travels and is never around—”
“Thea, calm down,” he said. “You work for the school, remember, not the student. And check your speed.”
I’m pretty independent and not so good at taking advice, but over time, I’ve learned to listen to Andre, so I slowed down a little and made myself stop gripping the wheel like it was someone’s throat. Sometimes I don’t realize how wrapped up in things I can get. But Andre knows. He also knows how attached I can get to some of these kids.
“Good,” he said, as though he was watching me via a hidden camera. “Wish I could put my arms around you.”
“Me, too.” Despite our crazy lives, and the dangerous things that have happened to us, being with Andre was the safest place I knew.
Rain began splatting against the windshield. April showers. Except these April showers looked more like sleet. I flipped on the wipers and slowed a little more.
“What about the stepdad?” Andre said. “Could that indifference be a pose? You think he could have done it? He’d certainly have access, and he wouldn’t be the first man to marry a woman so he could get at her child.”
