“Tina, tell me you’re not going to go back to him!”
She said nothing, and I read a lot of bad things into that silence. I sighed. Another thing I couldn’t fix.
“Will you let me interview you for the
News?
” I asked. “I won’t use your name or anything. I’ll protect you and the kids.”
“You want to talk to me for the paper? Why me?”
“I’m doing an article on domestic abuse. That’s why I was talking to Stephanie when you called on Saturday. I’d like to have your perspective on what it’s like to be in your situation.”
Tina stopped crying as she thought about the interview.
“Think of how you could help other women caught in situations like yours. Maybe something you say would help one of them be as brave as you and leave.”
“I’m coming to Freedom House tomorrow,” she said. “I could see you then. Is that too late?”
“No. That’s just right.”
“I have a black eye,” she said suddenly, a touch of anger in her voice. “He clipped me last night when I tried to protect my father.”
I thought of Curt holding me in his lap, comforting me even though I had been the foolish one.
Dear God, I don’t even know how to articulate my thanks
.
“Mac, I’d like to go to Audubon, New Jersey, and see what I can find out about Tom Whatley.”
It was early in the day yet, not even ten. Audubon was a small town just across the Delaware River, and there should be plenty of time to get there and back before Sherrie showed up at 4:00 p.m.
“Why Audubon? I thought Camden was where he came from.”
“That’s the official line, but Edie told me that Tom once let slip that he had graduated from Audubon High School. He later denied he’d said any such thing. I looked in the Camden County phone book, and there are three Whatleys listed, all with the Audubon exchange. I called the numbers. One was an answering machine, but the other two claimed they didn’t know anything about any Tom Whatley. They were awfully belligerent for not knowing him. Maybe in person they would talk to me.”
Mac didn’t even need to think about it. He just got a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. “You’ve got good instincts, Kramer.”
I hugged the rare compliment to myself.
He nodded. “Why don’t you try the high school while you’re there? Check the old yearbooks. Talk to the teachers.”
I could feel the excitement thrumming. “Sure. There have got to be some who remember him.”
An hour and a half later I climbed the front steps of Audubon High School, a solid-looking tan-brick building, went to the office and signed in. I had to show both my press card and my driver’s license. I felt like I was trying to get through security at the airport. The school secretary directed me to the library.
“You want Mrs. Russo. She’s been here forever, she never forgets a student and she’d love to help you. Just look for the lady with the curly hair.”
When I walked into the library, several students were sitting at tables reading and several others were tapping away at computer terminals. I looked around and found Mrs. Russo immediately, a short, thin lady of indeterminate years. Hennaed curls stood out all over her head. Her red dress fought with her hair, but her personality beat both into submission. She was lecturing a linebacker-sized student, her finger wagging under his nose. He stood, patiently enduring, eyes on the floor.
I approached her, arriving just in time to hear her say, “You’re a good boy, Jay Knowles. A bright boy. Don’t you go doing something stupid like trying to get by on
Cliffs Notes
again. Read the whole thing, young man.
Never
settle for the easy way out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jay mumbled. He turned and walked to the table she pointed to, a sheepish grin on his face as the other kids smirked at him. He reached in his bookbag and pulled out a paperback copy of
Moby Dick
and began to read.
“Senior honors class,” Mrs. Russo said to me, her sharp eyes watching the room to see if anyone dared challenge her lecture to Jay or tease him about receiving it. “They come in here each week for some sustained reading. Can’t have them taking the easy way out. No, sir, we can’t. They’re too smart for that.”
They don’t make them like her anymore, I thought as I studied Mrs. Russo. And these kids don’t know how lucky they are to sit under someone like her. Her eyes sparkled with a zest for books, for kids, for life in general. And she was definitely old enough to have known Tom.
“I’m trying to trace a man I think went to school here about twenty-three or-four years ago,” I explained after I introduced myself and showed my press card.
Her eyes lit up at the idea of tracing someone. I was looking at a woman who thrived on research. “What was the man’s
name? I’ve taught here for almost thirty years, so I might well remember him.”
Somehow I knew her comment was mere modesty. I bet she remembered just about everyone who had gone through this relatively small school since the day she arrived.
“Do you remember a student named Tom Whatley?”
Immediately she smiled and began shaking her head in the reminiscent way some people have. “Who doesn’t remember Tom Whatley?”
I grabbed my tape recorder out of my purse. “Can you tell me about him?”
“Come on into my office where we can talk.” She indicated a small closet of a room off to one side. She faced her readers and announced, “I’m stepping into my office with this young lady. I expect to hear no noise whatsoever while I am absent.”
She walked ahead of me into the office, confident that the students would obey. I glanced over my shoulder and thought that they probably would. Nobody wanted a dressing down like Jay had gotten.
“Everybody knew Tom,” Mrs. Russo said from her seat behind her desk. “He was one of those kids who was into everything. Football, basketball, track, National Honor Society, yearbook, class plays, choir. You name it, and Tom seemed to be involved.”
Football? Basketball? Tom Whatley? Not only was he short. He was slight, even as an adult. As a teenager he would have been as substantial as dandelion fluff.
“All the girls had crushes on him, you know. So handsome. If I’d been a few years younger, he would have turned my head too.”
I stared at Mrs. Russo. Maybe she wasn’t as sharp as she seemed.
“Do you have old yearbooks that I could look at?” I asked.
“I’d like to see what he looked like back then.” I’d like to show her she wasn’t talking about the right person.
She got up from her seat. “Wait until you see how handsome he was.” She shook her head. “I haven’t thought about Tom in quite a while, though it must be about ten years, mustn’t it? You doing one of those recap pieces?”
I mumbled something noncommittal as she led me to a shelf where years of books sat, the pictorial history of the school. A recap piece? Ten years? What was she talking about?
She went unerringly to a yearbook, flipped to the senior pictures and thrust the volume into my hands.
“There he is.” She pointed to the picture of a young, handsome, very large kid down in the lower right-hand corner of the right page. I blinked and looked again.
The name read Thomas John Whatley, but he definitely wasn’t Edie’s Tom.
NINE
C
omments like Class Everything, Ladies Man, Prom King, and Three-Letter Man were inscribed next to the picture of Tom Whatley. He had lots of dark, wavy hair and a killer smile. Hunk was the word that came to mind.
“Tell me about him. Anything and everything you can remember.”
“Well, he was definitely a star in our little firmament.” Mrs. Russo reached out and ran a finger across the picture. “And he was a nice kid too. I think he was as popular with the faculty as he was with the kids.”
“What did he do after he left high school?”
“He went to Annapolis and played football for them. He did well his first two years, and then the trouble began.” For the first time since we began talking, she wasn’t smiling.
“What trouble?”
She looked out the window, squinting against the bright light or against the memories, I wasn’t sure which. “From what I heard and read in the paper, he got caught up in drugs somehow and lost his place at the Academy. After that, he bounced around for several years, taking jobs but never sticking with anything for very long. It was quite sad.”
“Did you ever see him during this time?”
She nodded. “Just once. I bumped into him down the shore one summer walking on the boardwalk. He was as charming as ever, but I realized for the first time that he was only charm, no substance. I remember wondering whether he’d always been that way and we’d all been blind to it, or whether he’d become that way as life got away from him. I still remember how sad I felt that night. The only time I felt sadder was the night I heard he’d died.”
“He’s dead?” My heart paused midbeat, though why I should be surprised, I didn’t know. No one usurps the name of a living individual. The living individual tends to complain. “How did he die?”
“Again I don’t know all the details, but it had something to do with a drug bust gone bad. I just remember that his best buddy was somehow involved.”
“His best buddy?”
“Tom Willis. They were like brothers all through school. The kids used to call them the TomTom Twins.” She shook her head and her hennaed curls bounced. “Most unlikely pair of friends you ever saw.”
I pulled my fascinated gaze from her head. “Why?”
“Well, there was Tom Whatley, king of the school, and there was Tom Willis, nice little guy, but not even a princeling, let alone a king.” She flipped the yearbook page. “There. That’s Tom Willis.”
Again my heart gave an irregular little beat. Smiling up at me was Edie’s Tom, younger, slighter, full of innocence, but definitely Edie’s Tom.
The comments beside Tom Willis’s picture ran to the generic phrases reserved for the nonroyalty of high school, things like Nice Guy, Pleasant Personality, a Twin, Good Student.
I stared at Tom Willis and wondered how he got from being Tom Whatley’s best friend to being Tom Whatley. What had
possessed him to drop his own name? What had happened that night of the bad drug bust? Did any of this history have anything to do with Tom’s present disappearance? And what would Edie say when she learned about this?
“Tom Willis surprised me,” Mrs. Russo said. “I admit that I was so blinded by Tom Whatley’s glory that I didn’t see what, or I should say who, Tom Willis was. And he turned out to be quality. He didn’t win any scholarships or appointments to prestigious schools. He went to Rowan University, a fine school but not in the same category as the Naval Academy. I think he studied psychology. After he graduated with honors while working two jobs to pay living expenses and help support his widowed mother, he went to the police academy and became a cop right here in Audubon. I ran into him around town not long after that time I saw Tom Whatley down the shore. Suddenly I realized what I hadn’t seen earlier. Tom Willis was the man with substance.”
I thought of all he was to Edie and nodded. But where was this man of substance?
“You know what saddens me?” Mrs. Russo was looking out her office door at Jay, who was diligently reading
Moby Dick
. “For some students high school is the peak of their lives. Tom Whatley was one of those.” She turned to me. “Isn’t that one of the saddest things you ever heard?”
I’d never thought about that fact before, being only eight years out of high school myself and just starting to find my place in God’s scheme of things. Still, the thought that everything could be downhill from here was very sad.
Please, Lord, don’t let it be true of me!
I looked back at the yearbook picture of Tom Willis. “How was he involved with Tom Whatley’s death?”
Mrs. Russo grew thoughtful. “Again the details are hazy, but it had something to do with him being one of the cops in
the drug bust, and Tom Whatley being shot and killed in the process.” Mrs. Russo pondered a minute longer. “You know, now that I think of it, I’ve never seen Tom Willis since that time so long ago, not even at Tom Whatley’s funeral. I know he quit the force, but he must also have left town.”
And I knew where he’d gone, at least up until last Thursday. “Do the families of both or either of these men live around here still?”
Mrs. Russo turned, walked to a reference shelf and pulled a phone book off a shelf. She flipped to Whatley, then Willis.
“There are three Whatleys in the area, and they’re probably related to Tom. And Mrs. Willis, the other Tom’s mother, still lives right here in Audubon.”
I shook Mrs. Russo’s hand and thanked her for her help.
“It was nice to have you drop in,” she confided. “It gets a bit dull when the high point of your day is confiscating
Cliffs Notes
.”
“I want to be like you when I grow up,” I said.
“You should be so lucky.” And she winked.
I was still smiling when I climbed into my car and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed the three Whatley numbers. This time I got three answering machines. It was disgusting how no one stayed home these days waiting for phone calls from the press, specifically me. I dialed the Willis number, and a lady answered. I hung up without speaking and immediately drove to the address I’d gotten from Mrs. Russo. As I might have expected, her directions were perfect.
The Willis house was a typical Audubon bungalow, gray with white trim, the front porch closed in to make a sunroom. The sparse grass in the front yard was in need of a good lawn service, and the globe yews hadn’t been trimmed in forever. The only bright note was a fat azalea full of plump buds just waiting to burst in spring’s warm sun.
I rang the doorbell and waited. Finally the inside door
opened, and a little bird of a woman peered out at me. She must have decided I looked safe because she came across the sun porch and opened the door a mere crack.
“Can I help you?” she asked with a tremulous smile.
I gave her my best smile, the one that Curt loved and Mac hated. “Hello, Mrs. Willis. I’m Merrileigh Kramer and I think I know your son, Tom. And your daughter-in-law Edie.”