Flowering Judas (14 page)

Since it was seven o'clock, it was all right for her to park at school. She drove in and put her car in the second best space in the Frasier Hall faculty lot. It was always empty when she got there in the mornings. Nobody ever got there earlier.

She got out and carried her tote bag up to the third floor to wash. The building was as close to empty as it ever got. It was more empty than it was at night. At night, it was full of cleaning crews.

She got undressed and washed everything and then washed her hair. It was hard to do with the faucet being this far down over the sink. She got the soap rinsed out only by turning her neck back and forth in a way that made her think she was going to break it. She got clean clothes out of the tote bag and put the dirty ones in the plastic bag she'd been given at the grocery store. She'd have to hit the laundromat this weekend, just to make sure. It was important to keep everything about herself as clean and neat as possible. It was too easy to let everything go, and then what would happen to her?

She left the third-floor bathroom, went down another floor and crossed the enclosed bridge to the Students Building. She had no idea why this was called the Students Building and nothing else was. Wasn't every building at a college a “students” building? Or most of them? She hadn't had enough sleep. She was making no sense, even to herself.

The Students Building had a cafeteria in it, right on the other side of the bridge. The cafeteria was subsidized by the state. That meant she could get a pretty decent breakfast for about three dollars. That was more than she would have had to pay for it if she'd had a kitchen to cook for herself, but she didn't have a kitchen, and under the present circumstances, three dollars was doing very well.

She got to the cafeteria to find that she was just a hair early enough to get breakfast at all. It was nearly nine-thirty. She must have taken forever to do what she was doing this morning. It hadn't felt like forever. She put a hand up to her hair and felt that it was still heavily wet. She didn't understand that, either.

She got waffles, sausage, syrup, orange juice, coffee, plastic utensils, and a big wad of paper napkins; paid out at the cashier's desk; and then found an empty table along the wall of windows between the two main eating rooms. She didn't like to be out in the middle of those rooms. It made her feel too exposed.

She put her tray down on the table and her tote bag on the chair closest to the wall. She sat down and rummaged through the tote bag for her correcting: folders full of student papers; grade book; red pen. She laid all these out next to her breakfast and got her good glasses so that she could see. She was starving. If there was one good thing about this living in the car business, it was definitely that it was helping her lose some weight.

She opened the plastic syrup pack and put the syrup all over her waffles. She mentally kicked herself for forgetting to get butter. Then she opened the first of the folders and looked down at the latest paper from Haydee Michaelman. It was a good three times as long as it was supposed to be, and it would be a chaotic mess of incoherent thoughts and angry declarations—but it would be readable, and one of the best in the class, and Penny was looking forward to it.

She sensed someone standing next to her and looked up. It was Gwendolyn Baird, holding a cop of coffee the size of a small inflatable pool and looking down at the waffles like they were diseased. Penny almost said something, but there was no point. Gwendolyn was twenty years younger than she was, and head of the Writing Program.

“God,” Gwendolyn said. “I don't understand how you can eat that stuff.”

“I fell asleep last night before dinner,” Penny said mildly. It was a lie, but she lied a lot to Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn put her cup on the table. “I thought you taught night courses this term,” she said. “In fact, I'm sure you teach night courses this term.”

“I teach late, yes,” Penny said. “Is there something? I mean—”

“Oh,” Gwendolyn sat. She sat down across the table. “There is. It's about Chester Morton. Do you remember Chester Morton?”

“Of course I do,” Penny said. “It's not like it happens every day, one of your students going missing in the middle of a term. At the beginning of one. You know what I mean. And I'd probably have remembered him anyway. You don't get that many of them tattooed up like that, and, you know, the hair.”

“Yes, well,” Gwen said. “What we hear is this—the police are going to want to talk to all of his teachers from the term he disappeared. To see if they know anything. They say that that man they called in, that consultant? They say he says that Chester could not have committed suicide.”

“Already? Is he even here yet?”

“He got here first thing this morning,” Gwen said. “They say he got here and looked through some pictures and knew immediately that it wasn't a suicide, it was a murder. So now there's going to be a murder investigation. Can you believe that? They're going to come over here and interview all the teachers. They figure whatever it is that got him murdered, it must have been something from back then. You know, whatever the something there that had made him disappear. It could have been anything, really. He could have been dealing drugs.”

“I don't think so,” Penny said.

“Really? Do you think you'd know if your students were dealing drugs? I know they're taking them, sometimes, you know, because they come to class high and it's really impossible not to notice, but—”

“Chester Morton never came to class high as far as I remember,” Penny said.

“But there must have been something strange about him at the time, don't you think? There must have been something off. I mean, if he'd been murdered back then, it could have been anything, really. It could just have been a mugging. But for him to disappear for twelve years, and nobody knowing where he was, and then to come back and be murdered after all this time. Well. There must have been something.”

“Maybe there was.”

“Maybe there was and you just don't realize it,” Gwen said. She stood up again. “That's what this consultant will be for. He'll talk to all the witnesses and he'll be able to pinpoint what's important that they don't know is important.”

“Witnesses to what?” Penny said.

“Well, you must be a witness to something,” Gwendolyn said, “or nobody would be interested in talking to you. I've got to go prep for a class. Check your e-mail, all right? We'll get in touch as soon as we know when he wants to talk to you.”

“All right,” Penny said.

But there was no point. Gwendolyn was already off and away, stomping away in those skintight pants and those mile-high wedgies she always wore, her middle-aged ass bumping and grinding like a fully inflated beach ball being juggled on the top of two thin sticks.

Penny picked up her fork and started working her way through the waffles and sausage.

There was something, of course, from that term—there had been something that bothered her at the time, but nobody had been interested in listening to her.

It was too bad she didn't have a place anymore to keep her records.

3

If there was one thing that bothered Kyle Holborn about his relationship with Darvelle Haymes, it was that they weren't married yet, not even after all this time.

Except that that was not true, not exactly. It wasn't that they weren't married that bothered him, but the reason why they weren't married. Kyle was, he thought, a very steady person. He liked things to be simple and straightforward and sure. That was why he had joined the police force. There were never a lot of layoffs in the police force. In bad economic times, there might even be increases in force. Bad economic times meant people without money, and people without money meant more police needed to find them when they robbed the local convenience store. Police work was good, and steady, and not anywhere near as dangerous as people thought. Most of the time, all you were dealing with were kids being stupid. Having been a stupid kid himself once, Kyle knew how to handle that.

Kyle liked everything in life steady and straightforward, not just his job. He wanted to buy a house someday, or to move in Darvelle's, but it was a house
like
Darvelle's he wanted, not one of those big new things in the subdivisions in Kiratonic and Lakewood and Shale. Darvelle wanted those, and Kyle sometimes thought she wanted even more than that. She was always talking to him about what a good “platform” police work was. If he got a few promotions, he could run for the state legislature, and after that, there was no telling where he could go.

The problem was, Kyle thought he could tell where he would go. He didn't want to be in the state legislature. He didn't want to run for something even bigger, where people from news stations would go chasing around to find out if he'd ever been caught smoking marijuana in high school. He just wanted a quiet life, with a house and a wife and a baby. He wanted to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. He wanted to shop at Walmart on the weekend. He wanted to go to the movies and see Bruce Willis kick ass.

He did not want to be here, at the central station, wondering what his partner was doing with a temporary partner. Kyle thought it was both understandable and a little ridiculous that he had been pulled off patrol just because of the backpack.

“It's not like it was me that put that backpack in the field,” he said out loud.

Across the desk, Sue Folger looked up. “Did you say something?”

Sue Folger was a clerk. She never went out on patrol. She never did anything but shuffle papers. Kyle thought she looked old.

“I was talking to myself,” he said.

“You ever intend to get back in a patrol car, you'd better watch that,” Sue said.

She was old, really old. She was probably over forty.

“It's not like I did anything wrong,” Kyle said. “I mean, I didn't tamper with evidence, or anything. And I wasn't even a part of all that. All I did was answer a call, right there with Jack, because we were the closest ones to it.”

Sue took her glasses off. Nobody ever wore glasses anymore. People wore contacts. “It's the Morton family,” she said, sounding so infinitely patient Kyle wanted to punch her. “You know what Charlene Morton is like. She's screaming to high heaven. Not that I blame her. All this time, and now her son's here and he's dead like that.”

“Murdered,” Kyle said.

“That seems to be the word,” Sue said. “Don't ask me what it's all about, though. The man hasn't even seen the body, and the next thing you know, he's on the telephone saying Chester couldn't have hung himself off that billboard. You have to ask yourself where that sort of thing comes from.”

“They've got stuff,” Kyle said vaguely. “You know, in bigger places. They've got stuff we don't have to help them figure things out. He's from Philadelphia.”

“I still say you don't throw around things like that if you aren't sure about what you're saying, and I can't see how he's going to be sure about what he's saying. What if he gets here and sees the body and decides he was wrong? What then?”

“The body isn't here, is it?”

“No,” Sue said. “It's over at Feldman's Funeral Home, locked in a freezer or something. I don't know. Howard was absolutely losing it this morning, running around, making sure of I don't know what. And Charlene's called three times. Why Howard thinks you can keep anything secret in this town is beyond me.”

“Shouldn't the body be in, like, a morgue or something?” Kyle asked.

“We don't have a morgue,” Sue said. “The last time we had a murder in this town was in 1948. We've had dead bodies before. All those kids drinking and driving in the springtime, you're going to have bodies. And Dade Warren committed suicide a couple of years back. Okay, maybe twenty. I forget how fast time goes. Didn't you ever hear about Dade Warren?”

“Twenty years ago, I was ten,” Kyle said.

“Oh, well. It was famous around here for awhile. It wasn't like this. There wasn't any mystery to it. Dade Warren ran a drugstore, a little independent mom-and-pop drugstore. He'd gotten it from his parents when they died. Anyway, Rite Aid wanted to come in, and Dade fought like crazy at the zoning board, but you can't keep businesses out of a community just because somebody already living there doesn't want the competition. Dade took a bunch of sedatives from the pharmacy and drugged the hell out of his wife and children during dinner. Then he took his rifle and shot them all in the head. Then he shot himself. He left a note, but it was more like a letter. A really long thing. It's like I said, there wasn't any mystery about it.”

“Damn,” Kyle said. “You'd have thought I'd have heard something about that sometime.”

“We don't talk about it around here,” Sue said. “It was Howard's last case before he became a detective. It drives him crazy to talk about it. So we don't bother.”

“Chester Morton was Howard's case, too,” Kyle said. “That's got to be odd.”

“Chester Morton wasn't anybody's case,” Sue said. “Nobody but Charlene ever thought he'd been murdered, and as it turned out, nobody was right. I wonder where he's been all this time, don't you? Twelve years. He had to be somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I don't think of it that way, though. It's like he vanished under an invisibility cloak, or something.”

“People ask why I never let my children read
Harry Potter,
” Sue said, “and there it is, that's it. It's not that
Harry Potter
encourages witchcraft. It's that it encourages nonsense. Don't you have work to do, or something?”

“Wait,” Kyle said. “I think this is it.”

All around the big room, people were sitting up, heads were turning to the door. It was too quiet. Then the door swung open and a man came in, tall without being as tall as Howard Androcoelho, slightly heavyset without being at all like Howard Androcoelho. Kyle was disappointed. He'd expected to recognize the man from the pictures he'd seen, and the pictures on television especially, but he could have passed this man on the street and not given him a second thought.