The Admirer

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  “It is sad.” Helen paused for a few beats. “The city police force is slim. Drummond says the chief is a good guy because his father was. Hornsby doesn’t trust his rookies. It’s all very small town.”

  Terri interrupted. “What about you, Helen? How are you?”

  “I’m worried about this professor.” She outlined Wilson’s role in the past 48 hours, including her search for the legs.

  “That’s brave, I guess. It’s ballsy.”

  “I know. Marshal doesn’t like her, and I can’t find her.”

  “She’s probably with a friend.”

  “Why wouldn’t she answer her phone?”

  “There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to check out after seeing something like that. She might be with friends or her family. Maybe she went out of town.”

  The tenderness in Terri’s voice grated on her.

  “She has responsibilities here.”

  There was a long silence on Terri’s end. “You have to talk to someone about Eliza,” he said finally.

  “I’m not going to go to some Birkenstock–wearing therapist so she can tell me to breathe deeply and get in touch with my anger.”

  Usually Terri would have laughed. This time, he was serious. “You won’t talk to me. You won’t talk to a therapist. How about a friend who lives in your zip code? I don’t know what young career women do for fun, but I know you don’t do any of it. How about you reach out to somebody?”

  “You want me to join a bowling league? A book club?” Helen poured another shot of vodka and knocked it back in one gulp. The comment about her zip code hurt. “This campus is in financial ruin and, as of two days ago, that’s the absolute least of its problems. This is a murder investigation, and I’ve got to handle it.”

  “Listen,” Terri said. “This is a murder investigation, but it’s not your investigation. Your job is to spin the PR, keep the students out of trouble, and raise a hell of a lot of money. And to live Helen. To live.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Self Help.”

  Helen hit END and stared at the vodka.

  ****

  Upstairs in her bedroom, she peered into a distorted antique mirror, pulling her cheeks back with her palms. She was attractive. Helen understood that like she understood her 401K. Anyone who had worked in politics—and college administration was politics no matter what people said—knew the value of a handsome face. Still, the last year had left permanent circles beneath her eyes, and her face looked puffy, the product of too many fast food meals eaten at the onset of a migraine. Helen rubbed at a smear of makeup on her cheek.

  “Good enough?” she spoke to the silent house. The only answer was the creaking of the roof.

  She shook three sleeping pills and swallowed them dry. Then she broached the mirror again. With the pills and the alcohol softening her vision, she looked downright pretty. She allowed herself to wonder if there might be someone in Pittock—a stranger at that moment—who would someday come to love her face.

  Chapter Seven

  In Helen’s dream, she was on a date at a restaurant, but when she looked over her date’s shoulder she saw Eliza’s face pressed against the galley doors of the kitchen. “Help me, Helen,” Eliza screamed. She was going to do it again. Helen ran and wrenched open the galley doors. She was met by a wall of garbage: magazines, junk mail, TV dinner cartons. From somewhere deep inside, Eliza called out. “I don’t want to take the medication. It’s killing me.” Helen began clawing at the wall of trash. The more she pulled down, the more there was. Near her face, a threadbare stuffed toy of indistinguishable species stared with human eyes.

  Helen’s own eyes flew open. She lay in the four poster bed, in the Jedidiah Pittock House. A down comforter protected her from the blast of a window–mounted air conditioner. She sank back into the pillows. Then her phone buzzed again. It was the phone that had woken her. She fumbled for it, knocking a bottle of pills off the bedside table and sending them scattering under the bed.

  “Helen Ivers,” she answered, hoping the poor connection hid the roughness in her voice.

  “It’s Patrick,” her secretary said.

  Helen glanced at the window. The sunlight shining through the curtains barely illuminated the room. It couldn’t be later than 6:00 a.m.

  “What is it?”

  “Well...” Patrick did not seem inclined to expand on the thought.

  “Well what?”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  Sleeping. She wanted to pull the covers over her head and disappear. But Eliza would be waiting on the other side of her dreams. Help me, Helen!

  “Can you come to the office right now? It’s important, and once I talk to you, you’ll want to be here anyway.”

  Helen hung up and got out of bed. The room smelled musty. There was dust on the headboard, scrapes in the hardwood floor, a black line, like an incision, where two panels of filigreed wallpaper failed to meet properly. “Pleasantly rustic,” was how the board had described it to Helen in an email.

  “Fucking House of Usher,” Helen grumbled as she made her way to the bathroom to splash water on her face.

  ****

  A few minutes later, Helen was dressed in a navy suit and pink ascot—serious but not funereal. A group of reporters met her on the steps of her office building. She paused, turning away from the sun, so she would not squint into the camera. She wanted her expression to convey confidence.

  “We continue to come together in the face of this tragedy. Thank you. My office will send out regular reports as we learn more.”

  “But what about the search, ma’am?” one man called out. “Can you tell us about Adair Wilson? Bloggers are saying you’re using students.”

  “I have great confidence in the Pittock Police Department.”

  The reporters followed her up the stairs, nudging her with their microphones like eager dogs. They had to be the locals, up early before the Boston Herald arrived. What big city reporter referred to their subject as ma’am? Helen let the door close on the reporters’ questions. Inside, Patrick stood behind his desk, looking worried. His computer screen was black, the overhead light dark. He had the air of a man poised for action but uncertain of what to do.

  “Okay. Why are we here?” Helen did not mean to sound curt, but she was tired, and she could still hear Eliza’s voice in the back of her mind.

  Patrick raised an eyebrow. “You better appreciate this,” he said.

  “I’m appreciating. What is it?”

  “Adair is my friend. We’ve been friends since senior year of high school. I would never have made it through English lit if it wasn’t for her.”

  “I’m happy for you both.”

  “Hell, I would never have made it through college if it wasn’t for her.”

  Helen waited.

  Patrick wore a purple polo shirt. He twisted a matching purple lanyard around his hand. “Addie likes to be helpful. But past administrators haven’t always appreciated her help.”

  “I’m getting déjà vu. What did Dr. Wilson do?”

  “The Pittock police department is understaffed. They need more than three officers. I guess the Chief felt like they covered a lot of ground yesterday. He said they covered every square foot. He said he’d send a few more men today, but basically they’ve got no leads.” Patrick pursed his lips. “Addie doesn’t think it’s enough.”

  Helen knew what was coming next.

  “You can’t do a search with only one person,” Patrick said.

  “Who went with her?”

  “Where do you get twenty people with nothing to do at 5:00 a.m.?”

  Students. Helen didn’t have to ask.

  “They’re at the scene now.” Patrick cleared his throat. “They’re going to search the forest around the asylum.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Drummond?”

  Patrick shook his head.

  “Well call them! Call them right now and tel
l them to meet me out there.” Helen headed for the door. “Why didn’t you call all of us immediately?”

  Patrick shrugged.

  Helen waited a beat. “Why?”

  “I called you. I figured Addie had it under control.”

  “She’s a theater professor. She teaches kids to enunciate their vowels and, I don’t know… find their inner Hamlet. What about that says ‘I can lead a murder investigation’?”

  “Hmm.” Patrick turned back to his desk. “Don’t shoot the messenger. There’s more to Adair Wilson than you’d think.”

  Chapter Eight

  Helen had to hand it to Wilson; her search seemed as well organized as anything the police had mounted. She’d gathered her students on the path near the railroad tracks and was pairing them off when Helen arrived. Everyone, including Wilson, wore blue latex gloves. One student in each pair carried a fistful of orange marking flags. Some students had already planted flags in the ground near the path. A few more stood in the woods.

  Wilson projected her voice like a drill sergeant. “I want a line from there to there.” Wilson pointed.

  The students giggled as they jostled into line.

  “This is not a joke.” Wilson pulled a whistle out of her pocket. The students fell silent. “Imagine you have a box around you, twenty feet on each side. This is how far you can be from your neighbor. Do not go in or near the asylum.”

  Turning to survey her crew, Wilson caught sight of Helen. Their eyes met for a second, then Wilson turned away.

  “It is not safe to go in or near the asylum,” Wilson repeated. “What did I just say?”

  The students answered loudly in unison.

  On the wooded path swarmed the reporters who’d earlier talked to Helen. Someone tried to maneuver a van past the search party. Boom mics bobbed among the trees like flora. Cameras flashed. Pittock’s PR problems had gone from bad to worse.

  Footsteps signaled the arrival of Hornsby and Drummond. They had clearly come at a run. Hornsby doubled over, panting. Drummond touched his forehead with a pristine handkerchief. He had not taken off his blazer.

  “Helen, why haven’t you stopped her?” Drummond asked by way of greeting. “They’ll destroy the evidence.”

  Helen ignored him for a moment. “Why wasn’t this scene taped off?” she asked Hornsby.

  “We searched the area,” Hornsby gasped. “We took evidence. It’s done. That’s how crime scenes work.”

  “How confident are you in yesterday’s search?” Helen looked around. The students were setting off in a line. Every few yards, they planted an orange flag.

  Drummond answered for Hornsby. “That search was conducted with absolute precision. If there had been a shoelace, they would have found it.”

  Hornsby added, “You can always search more. We did a five mile radius. We could do twenty, or forty, or a hundred. We could drive to Pennsylvania and search there. New Jersey. New York. Everyone knows, you’ve got 48 hours to find an abductee and you’ve got five miles to find a body. After that, you might as well throw darts at a map.”

  “Hornsby has been the Chief of Police for twenty–two years.” Drummond beckoned to Helen. “Walk with me.”

  They took a few steps. On the side of the path, one of the students had placed a flag next to a silver gum wrapper.

  “This isn’t Pittsburg where people come and go. His father was chief of police. Hornsby knows his business.”

  Helen kept walking. She did not particularly care that she’d offended their hometown pride. If she called off the search in front of the cameras, she’d be sending a clear message: the woods were not safe. In an instant, she’d populate those woods with every serial killer imaginable. If there was someone in the forest, however, she was sending students out with only a renegade professor to protect them.

  “Those students are not going to find anything if Hornsby couldn’t,” Drummond said.

  “You said they were destroying evidence.”

  “They are meddling where they shouldn’t be. The sooner we get them out of here, the sooner the press loses interest. They. Will. Leave. Now.” Each word was a sentence.

  Helen took a few steps off the path into the trees. She could see the concrete abutments that carried the Berkshire-Western over a bend in the Barrow Creek. The bridge. The crime scene. Ivy tangled the ground. She shook her feet loose and kept walking. Several steps in, she stopped at another orange flag. Beside it lay a shred of fabric so dirty it was almost the color of earth.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Helen, it’s trash,” Drummond said.

  “Mr. Hornsby,” Helen yelled. She motioned for the chief to join them. When he arrived at her side she repeated the question.

  “Trash,” Hornsby said.

  Drummond’s mouth pulled into an irritated frown.

  “Why isn’t it evidence?” Helen asked.

  “Just because some kid stuck a flag on it,” Drummond said. “doesn’t make it evidence. They don’t know what they’re looking for. These woods are full of the homeless. If we picked up all their trash, we’d be out here for weeks.”

  “Someone died out here.” Helen’s voice was cold.

  She caught a glimpse of Wilson ducking behind a birch tree, listening. The reporters were watching too. Salivating. She couldn’t worry about them now.

  “I want every piece of anything that’s not a stick or a leaf put in a plastic bag and headed to a crime lab.”

  “Look, lady. I don’t know what you saw on CSI, but that’s not real police work. We’re not going to fingerprint every stick in the forest. We don’t have the manpower. We don’t even have the supplies.”

  Helen was close enough to see the shadows under Hornsby’s eyes, the broken veins on his nose. He looked as tired as she felt. That had never stopped her from doing her job. Or had it? What had she neglected at Vandusen? What had she missed that was so important they eliminated her position? Redundant. It would not happen again. It could not.

  “Every grocery store in America has plastic baggies,” she said.

  “We don’t have the facilities in inventory,” Hornsby interrupted. “We are doing the best we can. We will get to the bottom of this faster if you let us do our jobs and get these kids out of here.”

  “The chief is right,” Drummond said.

  Helen ignored him. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “Patrick? I need a crime scene team. Get online, find out who does that, and get them out here.”

  “I think the police do that,” Patrick said.

  “They’re not.”

  “Well if they’re not, who would you call?”

  Helen turned away from Hornsby and Drummond and cupped her hand around her phone. “Google it, Patrick.”

  He would find something. When Eliza died, she had searched for “human blood clean–up.” There were more than a dozen companies that provided that service in Pittsburg. “We beat competitors prices,” one advertisement read.

  “This is America, Patrick. You can buy anything,” she said. “Tell them cost is not an issue. I want them out here now.”

  Helen felt Drummond’s hand on her shoulder. The touch surprised her. She thought he only shook hands.

  “You don’t have to do this, Helen. Hornsby will help.”

  Hornsby was walking back to the path. His head hung down like a chastened boy. His shoulders stooped. Helen wondered what Drummond had said to him. She had the impression she’d just won a battle. Only time would tell if she’d won the war.

  “I’m going out there,” Helen said. “I presume I’m going with police escorts.”

  Chapter Nine

  “I would not send students to do anything I did not feel confident doing myself,” Helen told the reporters, stopping to allow them a shot of her calm, untroubled face. She recited something about cooperation between college and town, the two Pittocks. Then she dismissed the reporters and caught up with the line of students.

  Through the trees, the asylum ca
me into sight. Bars covered the windows. Metal lattices screened sagging porches. Turrets rose from every corner of the building, and a central observation tower loomed over an interior courtyard. Sloppy graffiti marked the walls, as if the perpetrators were hurried.

  In the clearing around the asylum, Wilson waited. Helen had the impression that Wilson was one of those beautiful women who tried to make herself unattractive, perhaps out of some misguided feminist sentiment, so her male colleagues would take her seriously. Her hair was cropped in a militant do. Her clothes bore an overabundance of pockets. In her ears she wore huge, cubic zirconium studs. Such earrings had been popular with the young men in Pittsburg. “Ice,” they called them. Ridiculous. However, the young professor had been pretty on television. She was gorgeous in person. Beneath her tank top, she had a dancer’s body, graceful from a distance but muscular as rebar up close.

  “Thank you,” Wilson called. “That was well done.”

  Wilson’s stance told her she would not tolerate a brush–off. Instead, Helen stopped at the edge of the clearing where she hoped no one would notice. She beckoned for the young professor to join her, then slipped behind a massive oak. A moment later, Wilson appraised her with such intensity that Helen looked away.

  “You had no right to take this on without consulting me,” Helen said.

  Wilson crossed her arms.

  On the other side of the clearing, the students had broken into groups and were filing around the asylum buildings. The sun caught in their hair like halos. Helen gestured toward them.

  “We have a duty of care to all of them. They shouldn’t have to see what they might find.” Helen knew. She had seen. “They’re young, and they have a right to be happy.”

  I had a right to be happy.

  “They are happy,” Wilson said, “because they’re alive. But they’re afraid, and nothing is ever going to be this real again.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Don’t worry. They won’t find her. Not out here in the open. But they have to do something, don’t they? They have to feel like they tried.”