The Admirer

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  The theater had an eerie, after–hours feel, as though a calamity had emptied the space. As indeed it had. She joined Wilson on the stage, and Wilson shook Helen’s hand, holding it a second too long, like a telepath reading her subject’s mind.

  “Patrick said you didn’t find anything,” Helen said, extricating her hand.

  “No.” Wilson looked defeated. “I knew we wouldn’t.”

  “How did you know?”

  Wilson’s eyes were an unnatural pale blue, the color of a winter sky just above the horizon where the atmosphere thins.

  “Come up to my office.” Wilson gestured toward the back of the stage, where a spiral staircase led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. The staircase was painted black and nearly disappeared into the black wall behind it. Helen climbed the stairs, feeling every vibration. Ahead of her, Wilson pushed open the trapdoor and leapt from the top step into the room above.

  The office, lit by several Tiffany lamps, appeared to be a retrofitted attic. It ran the length of the theater, with dormer windows every few feet. The furniture was not the usual assortment of Pittock antiques. It even smelled rich, as if mahogany had a scent. But it was not the roll–top desk or the sumptuous leather furniture that caught her attention.

  On the wall, hung a family portrait in a gilt frame. Four men, ranging in age from octogenarian to twenty–something, stood around a white settee on which posed two exquisite women, a mother and a young daughter, both in black evening gowns. It took Helen a moment to recognize the child, her swan–like neck accentuated by an elaborate twist of blonde hair. Wilson. On the opposite wall, hung two enormous nudes.

  “That’s you,” Helen said staring at the flawless oil–on–canvas.

  Wilson cocked her head so her pose matched one of the nudes. “It’s art.”

  On another woman, the gesture would have been coquettish, but in the portrait, as in life, Wilson’s shoulders rippled like the muscular back of a panther and her face was stern.

  Helen sat without invitation. “What the hell are you doing?”

  There was something liberating about the dim light and the giant nudes. There was no need to be politic.

  “I’m glad you came.” Wilson stood with her back to the darkened window. “We need you. I need you. No one stands up to Drummond. No one questions him, and we have to.” She shivered. “We can’t trust him. Listen…”

  “Sit down.” Helen pointed to the chair across from her. “This has got to stop. If you have information, you need to tell the police. You can’t drag your students into a murder investigation. We went forward with the search today because you had already started. I couldn’t call those students back. The whole town was watching.”

  Was it only PR? Had she only let them go because of the reporters? It was not the whole story.

  “I have complete faith in Mr. Drummond and the police.” She seized the arms of her chair to lend force to the lie. “I want to make that clear.”

  “Nothing is clear.” Wilson slid into the chair across from Helen and folded her legs underneath her.

  “You cannot terrorize your students like this. You cannot tell them stories. You cannot make them wonder. We don’t have any information. We don’t know.”

  “I’m not telling them anything. I’m asking.”

  Helen felt the first pulse of a migraine behind her left eye. “Your questions are going to tell them everything they know.”

  “I’m asking about Carrie Brown,” Wilson said, as though Helen had not spoken. “I’m asking where she is. I’m asking who’s seen her. I’m asking what happened to her. We are standing on the edge of a precipice.”

  Wilson sat cross–legged between the two paintings. Helen felt like she had stumbled onto the set of an avant garde performance. Death and the Two Nudes. Despite Wilson’s rhetoric, her voice was earnest and she chewed on her lower lip, then ran her hand repeatedly through her short hair.

  “I’m worried,” she said. “Please. Listen to me. I’m worried about Carrie. She hasn’t been to rehearsal for two days.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “I have.”

  Wilson must have sensed Helen’s doubt. “I told them. I keep telling them. But it’s summer. Half the students who are supposed to be here are at the Cape. They’re all missing. The whole campus is missing.”

  “Students do skip classes,” Helen ventured. “They drop out. They go home.”

  Wilson rose and paced the sitting area, then leaned into a dormer window, her back to Helen, her shoulders tense. “Theater was her life. It was all that kept her going. The play is in weeks. She wouldn’t leave.” Wilson turned. “It’s not just a school play. It meant more to her. It’s Voices from Within, a collection of stories from patients who spent time at the Pittock Asylum. Carrie did some of the interviews. She knew those people and she… had problems.” Wilson’s voice grew quiet. “Real problems. It was her story too. There is no way she would skip rehearsal.”

  “You think it’s her body?”

  Wilson nodded.

  “And you told the police that?”

  Wilson crossed the room and knelt beside Helen’s chair, one hand on the arm rest, almost touching her hand. “Hornsby said he’d follow up, but he’s going to find a reason not to pursue this. He won’t look. How do you think the police missed the body the first time? It was by the train bridge. It was right there. They said they searched and found nothing.”

  Wilson’s voice sent shivers down Helen’s spine. Suddenly, she wanted out of the grandiose office with its trapdoor and garret isolation. Out from under the nudes and the gaze of the delicate child Wilson had once been. Away from Wilson’s aggressive beauty and her bare shoulders and the bedroom light of the Tiffany lamps.

  “I have to go.”

  Her head pounded. An aura formed around the lights and Wilson’s blonde hair.

  “Hornsby’s not going to find who did this. There’s more. I have to tell you…”

  Helen hurried out of the office, her footsteps echoing in the silent theater.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was late when Helen climbed the stairs to her bedroom in the Pittock House. How could she have handled Wilson so poorly? She knew professors like Wilson: big personalities in small departments, used to working on their own, watched only by the adoring eyes of their students. Egos. There was practically a script. She should have reprimanded her firmly and specifically, the first step in progressive discipline. The meeting should have been followed up with an email, copied to HR and Wilson’s dean.

  Hell, she should have comforted her. The woman had begged the police for help, been dismissed, and then found the remains of a body in the woods. There were no words for what Wilson had seen, no way for the mind to hold that picture and go on as though a chasm had not opened up under the feet of everyday life. Helen knew. Of course Wilson was on edge; she was in shock. In Wilson’s office, her paranoia had seemed sinister. Now that Helen thought about it, calm reserve would have been stranger. Carrying on as though nothing had happened would have been worse. Wilson loves her students. Naturally, she was upset. The least Helen could have done was listen to her story. Instead she had fled, haunted by the image of Wilson quadrupled: the sumptuous nudes, the delicate girl, and the woman, sitting in front of her, who was both of those and neither.

  Was it attraction? Helen had sometimes wondered what her sex life would have been like without Eliza. Her sister’s care had consumed every spare minute and more. Worry had eaten away at her personal life. Even in death, Eliza haunted her dreams. Her childhood and adolescence were no better. If it were not for Eliza, would she have had those seminal experiences people talked about at intimate dinner parties? The woman I met in Paris. My first coach. That night at sea. Would she simply walk up to Wilson and say, “I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner?”

  Helen pulled the gold hoops out of her ears, dropped them on the bedside table, and sat on the edge of the bed. It was too late to know now. You weren’
t going to do this again. She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, then stood at the mirror combing her hair for several moments. Never again. She took off her makeup with a damp tissue, carefully removing every trace of mascara.

  Then she reapplied it. She dropped the tissue in the sink, retrieved her purse, and walked back down the creaking staircase.

  A half an hour later, Helen sat in a hotel bar. She’d driven past several dive bars, including one attached to a seedy motel called the Cozzzy Inn. Finally, she’d opted for the Best Western off the freeway. The voice in the back of her mind had been replaced by Terri’s. I don’t know what you young career women do. Helen scanned the room. He was right. He did not know.

  It was midnight, and there was only one reason to linger in the drab sports bar. A dark–haired man leaned on the bar, fiddling with his cell phone. He wore the uniform of middle management: blue shirt, pressed khakis, bright red tie. She smiled at him when he looked up.

  “You see this?” he asked.

  The television behind the bar was replaying Helen’s interview from earlier in the week. The man didn’t seem to recognize her. Like Wilson, Helen felt she’d been split in three: the picture on the television, the woman leering at the middle manager, and someone who scanned the rearview mirror for beautiful Adair Wilson.

  “That’s some crazy shit,” he said. “Come here often?” He winked. “Doesn’t that sound like a line? But I do come here often. I travel for work. You look like you travel.”

  The man sidled over and stuck out his hand. “Charles.”

  Helen examined the pinpricks of beard dotting his cheeks.

  “I’ve just come for a drink,” Helen said.

  “Yeah. Me too. Couldn’t sleep.”

  The man leaned over her table, blocking her view of the television. “What’s your name?”

  “Susan.”

  “That’s a pretty name. I always liked ‘Susan.’”

  “Really?” Helen purred. “What a coincidence.”

  I’m not going to do this again. But she already was. Her martini glass sweated against her hand. She could smell the man as he whispered in her ear, a blend of nervous perspiration and aftershave.

  “You’re real pretty.”

  He had to be fifteen years her junior, but neither of them was there for a lasting relationship. She felt Charles’s eyes travel the length of her body, finally arriving at the diamond solitaire above her breasts. Helen’s ring finger was bare, and she drew her hand across her throat.

  She leaned toward him, so her lips almost touched his. “I’m a woman who’s interested in a good time.” She kept her eye on the television where her own image replayed again without sound. At the bottom of the screen, the ticker announced other tragedies. “I want to do something with you. All this talk. Are you going to buy me another drink or should we just go upstairs?”

  As soon as they entered the hotel room, she produced a condom from her purse. She pulled Charles’s pants down and slid the rubber over his penis. Then, throwing herself on the hotel coverlet, she urged Charles into her, spreading her dry labia to make way for his penis.

  “Don’t you want to wait for…?”

  Charles’s question died as she contracted her muscles several times in quick succession, her hips urging him on until there was nothing left but the anonymous weight of their bodies pulsing together. When his legs began to tremble, Helen pulled away from him, her hips retreating into the pillow-top bed. The small tease was too much for him. He fell on top of her, his face pressed into the coverlet. His legs shivered. His hands convulsed, as though shaking off unseen stickiness.

  “I’m gonna…gonna…oh God! Yes!”

  Helen lay still. Her eyes drifted across the ceiling as Charles’s breathing returned to normal. She listened to the hum of the air conditioning, trying not to think of anything, because as soon as she let her mind open up she was back in Eliza’s house. Whole rooms filled with garbage salvaged from the streets of Pittsburg, and on the kitchen floor… so much blood she couldn’t make sense of what she saw.

  Finally, Charles let out a musical whistle. “Whew! That was good. Hello, Susan! That was amazing! Did you…?”

  “Yes,” Helen said, her voice slow and deliberate. “And now you have to leave.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The following morning, Helen drove straight from the Best Western to her office. Drummond, Hornsby, and the two junior officers were already seated in conference, the table covered with topographical maps, presumably of Pittock forest. Some areas had been shaded pink, others blue and yellow.

  “There you are,” Drummond said.

  Helen checked her watch. Exactly 8:00 a.m. She straightened her jacket and took her seat at the head of the table. “Let’s get this over with.”

  After Charles had left, she’d watched television until the images blurred. It was Eliza hawking jewelry on the shopping channel, and she could not tell if she was awake or asleep. Now her eyes were raw and her mouth pasty.

  Drummond and Hornsby exchanged a glance, which Helen noticed but ignored.

  “You see here, we have a map of the Pittock area,” Hornsby began.

  He explained the maps and their markings. They were, as Helen had guessed, a representation of the search and its findings, which he went over in detail. She wondered if he mocked her. Here they found a shoe lace. Here they found a Pepsi bottle.

  Beside Hornsby, Thompson and Giles looked as impatient as Helen felt. Thompson leaned forward, his long fingers curled into two fists. Giles slouched in his chair, scanning the room. Neither said anything.

  Finally, Helen interrupted. “What does this all mean, Mr. Hornsby? What should we tell our students?”

  “It means your students picked up a whole bunch of trash out there in the woods. It’s possible one piece of trash is the clue that brings this together. In the meantime, we’re waiting for the crime lab to get back to us, the medical examiner. There’s a backlog, especially with the hurricane.”

  The storm had dissipated and she’d almost forgotten it.

  “The chief is saying that it’s difficult,” Drummond said. “It’s hard to solve cases when no one is reported missing and there are no identifying marks on the body.”

  Helen jumped at this. “What about Carrie Brown?”

  “Carrie Brown?” Drummond’s face registered apologetic confusion.

  He’s putting me on. Helen said, “Wilson thinks she’s gone missing. She said she told Mr. Hornsby.”

  “Oh, that woman.” Drummond chuckled. “That’s Wilson for you.”

  “What?”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, ma’am,” Thompson interjected. “Your registrar gave us a list of all the students on campus. Everyone who is supposed to be here is here.” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket. “See?”

  It was a list of student names with checkmarks next to some of them. Thompson scanned his finger down the list.

  “Brown, Carrie. Transfer.”

  “She’s at UMass,” Drummond added. “I checked too. I even called their registrar.” Their eyes met and his face softened. “I do care,” he said, then resumed his usual patriarchal glower.

  Helen excused herself and hurried back to her office, where she dialed the Ventmore Theater.

  “Carrie transferred,” Helen said when Wilson picked up. “She’s at UMass.”

  “I know,” Wilson replied. “That’s what the records say.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “I know the registrar says she transferred, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Dr. Wilson, please.” Helen felt a wave of frustration and sympathy. “You need to believe this, for your own health, for your sanity. I know…” Helen reconsidered. “I don’t want to go into details, but I’ve been through something like what you saw when you found the body. Let me help you. I can get her transcript. I can get the registrar at UMass to call you.”

  Helen was about to continue when Wilson interrupted.
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  “Wait there,” she said. “I’m coming to see you.”

  The line went dead.

  ****

  It seemed like only a minute had passed when Helen heard the door to the administration building open and Patrick protest.

  “Adair. Wait. Let me call her and tell her you’re here.”

  Footsteps stomped past his desk.

  “At least let me pretend to do my job,” Patrick called after her.

  Wilson opened Helen’s door without knocking. She wore army–green and heavy silver bracelets on each wrist like manacles, a combination of beauty and militant dress.

  “Generally, one knocks,” Helen said.

  Wilson closed the door. “I’m sorry.” She seemed genuinely abashed, but also agitated, her body rigid. “And I’m sorry you have to go through this, Helen.”

  It’s Dr. Ivers.

  “I know how this sounds, but you have to listen. That was Carrie Brown I saw in the woods.”

  “She transferred to UMass.”

  “No. She didn’t. There’s more to this.” Wilson dropped her voice to a whisper and glanced at the closed door. “Carrie Brown was Ricky Drummond’s girlfriend. Did you know that?”

  “Ricky Drummond?”

  “Marshal Drummond’s son.”

  Helen stepped from behind her desk so Wilson could not corner her. She sat in one of the two ornate chairs and pressed her fingertips to her forehead.

  “Let’s pretend, for a second, that I’m going to entertain this. What are you implying, Dr. Wilson?”

  Wilson balled her fists in her pockets. “I’m saying towns like Pittock have their own laws, and one is that families like the Drummonds protect their own. They’re old money. They’re old power. They’ve been here forever, and they don’t let boys like Ricky Drummond go down for anything. I come from a family like that. It was sad,” Wilson continued. “Carrie was troubled, and she liked Ricky. I think she saw him as an adult. His mother had died. His father was the provost. He understood the college in a way the other students didn’t. She hung around him, and he used her in one way or another. She’s attractive, but not the kind of girl he would ever take home to Marshal Drummond.”