Hard Rain (24 page)

He swiveled around to Jessie. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” Jessie said. “I'm trying to find the present address of one of your alumni.”

“You've come to the right place,” the man said. “What's your connection to the college?”

“None, really. It's my … husband. I think he's visiting the alumnus I'm looking for. I'd like to find the address.”

The last twinkle of merriment left over from his conversation with Tad faded from the man's eyes. “Is your husband an alumnus too?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“But it's important.”

“I don't doubt that. But we can't just give out alumni information to anyone who asks for it. School policy. I'm afraid you'll have to apply in writing.”

“Apply to whom?”

“To this office.” He held out a card: Curt Beringer, Alumni Affairs.

Jessie got off her chair and approached him. “Please listen to me, Mr. Beringer.” She said it again, leaving out the please. “I've come all the way from Los Angeles. I've got a ten-year-old daughter. She's a week overdue from a visit with her father. I know they're in the area, and I'm pretty sure they're with a friend of his from this school. I need your help.”

Curt Beringer listened. His eyes didn't leave her face. But the expression in them didn't soften as she spoke; it became quizzical instead and a little put-off, as though she'd raised the curtain on something distasteful.

“You're divorced?” he said.

“What does that have to do with it?” Her voice rose despite her efforts to keep it even.

“This sounds more like a police matter to me,” Curt Beringer said. “Of course, if you've got authorization from them, it's a different story.”

“I don't. But—”

“Then I'm very sorry.” Beringer turned to the monitor. He touched the
ENTER
key. “Name?” asked the screen. Beringer checked a list. “Wallis,” he typed. “Newton E.” The disk drive spun. Beringer dialed the phone as information on Newton E. Wallis lit the screen. “Newt?” said Beringer. “Hey, how are you. Curt Beringer up at Morgan. Fine, fine. Still whalin' that killer forehand? Ha ha. Say, I'm calling on behalf of the Field House Fund.… You haven't heard of the Field House Fund? Oh boy. Listen, Newt—”

Curt Beringer glanced up and frowned at Jessie. That look made her want to hit him; instead she felt tears welling in her eyes. Before Curt Beringer noticed, she hurried out of the Alumni Affairs Building and started to cry. Then the image of the young woman from Vassar sprang into her mind; that stopped her. She didn't have time for tears. This wasn't a bad date.

Jessie began walking, with no destination in mind. Morgan College had a human scale. Even under a gray, drizzling sky it calmed her. Think, she told herself. She was letting anxiety grow wildly insider her for no good reason. Look at the facts. She was close to finding Kate, much closer than she'd been in California. And if Buddy Boucher could be believed, nothing like kidnapping had happened. Kate was with her father, and they were in the company of an old friend, possibly Hartley Frame. That meant she still needed Hartley Frame's address. Curt Beringer mentioned police authorization. Fine. Instead of losing her self-control, she should have played by his rules: simply picked up the phone and called Lieutenant DeMarco. Jessie started back toward the Alumni Affairs Building. She was running by the time she got there.

Jessie knocked on the door. No answer. She turned the knob. The door opened. Jessie went through the front hall and into the office, expecting to find Curt Beringer at his desk. But he wasn't there. “Hello?” she called. “Hello?” No answer. Jessie poked her head around a corner and saw a corridor leading to a door at the back of the house. “Mr. Beringer?” she called down it. Silence.

She'd have to come back later; turning, Jessie was about to leave the room when she saw Beringer had left his monitor on. “Kinsley,” it said. “Forrest J. Class of '56.” Jessie went closer. Her hand moved toward the keyboard, a normal keyboard, with an
ENTER
key on the right side. She glanced once around the room. Then she lowered her index finger onto the
ENTER
key and pressed.

“Kinsley, Forrest J.” vanished from the screen. “Name?” it asked.

“Frame,” Jessie typed. “Hartley.”
ENTER
.

Words scrolled down the screen. “Frame, Hartley E. Class of '69. Father: Edmund S. Frame. Class of '43. U.S. Senator, Virginia. Mother: Alice (Sangster). Faculty advisor: Prof. M. R. McTaggart, Dept. of Music. Academic Record: SAT: Verbal-670. Math-640. Achievement Tests—”

A foot crunched on the walk outside. Jessie's hand jerked away from the keyboard. She heard the front door open. Now was the moment to assert her self-control. It was embarrassing, that's all—she hadn't committed a sin. Just tell Mr. Beringer exactly what happened; he'll understand.

Then the door closed and a board creaked in the front hall, as if under a heavy weight. The sound made Jessie bolt across the room, down the corridor and out the back. She didn't stop running until she came to a small quadrangle with a statue of a judgmental-looking man in the center. Colonel Morgan, said big letters carved on the base. Jessie turned. A woman with an armful of books was walking the other way. An Irish setter was chasing a bouncing ball. No one followed her.

Jessie returned to the 1826 House. Step one: completed—not smoothly, or even with dignity, but done just the same.

Step two: Jessie picked up the phone and called information in Washington. Information gave her Senator Edmund Frame's office number. Jessie wrote it down. She looked at the number for a while. She'd never called a U.S. senator before. But it was the next step. Jessie dialed the number.

A man answered immediately. “Yes?” he said. Saturday, but he still sounded pressed for time.

Jessie felt the pressure. It made her condense what she had to say and bend the facts a little. “Hello. I'm an old friend of Senator Frame's son Hartley. I wonder if you could tell me how to get in touch with him.”

“The senator?”

“No. Hartley.”

There was a pause. Then the man said, “If that's supposed to be a joke, it's not a very funny one.”

Click.

21

“Boucher's Dodge and Dodge Trucks. Buddy here.”

“It's Jessie Shapiro, Mr. Boucher.”

“Who?”

“Jessie Rodney.”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Rodney.”

“I wondered—”

“Sorry. Nothing new.”

“He hasn't been back yet?”

“Nope. And nothing on the BMW, neither.”

Jessie gave him her number at the 1826 House and hung up. Then she lay on the bed, pulled the spread over her body and closed her eyes. She wanted sleep, not because she was tired, which she was, but because she had to get away. After only a few moments, she knew that sleep wouldn't come. The powerful inertia that had seized her body had no control over her mind. Broken images reeled in it: Reeboks with blue stripes, wraparound sunglasses, curling eyelashes, graying ponytails. She opened her eyes.
Help me
, she thought. She almost said it aloud.

But there was no one to help. Barbara was dead. Philip wouldn't help, even if he could, which she doubted. Philip was the wrong type. DeMarco was the right type—tough, a man of action—but he lacked the imagination to share her fears; he had just enough to doubt her.

Jessie gave in to temptation. She opened her wallet and took out the picture of Kate making a silly face at the beach. It had been taken at the class picnic. They'd played Botticelli—Kate had stumped everyone with Yosemite Sam. Jessie looked at the photograph until it stopped making sense. Then she looked at it some more.

Jessie got off the bed. She opened the phone book and found a listing for McTaggart, M. R. She stared at the name until the letters lost their symbolic meaning and reverted to the mysterious shapes illiterates see. Go
on
, she had to tell herself. As
long as there's another step to take, take it
. She dialed the number.

“Yes?” answered a man on the other end. He sounded impatient. A piano played in the background.

“Professor McTaggart?”

“What?” The piano playing stopped. “Keep playing, keep playing,” McTaggart shouted, his voice partly muffled. The piano playing resumed. “No, no, from the third bar.” It sounded like Bach, maybe not played very well. McTaggart might have been thinking on parallel lines. He groaned, then said, “Yes, what is it?”

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” Jessie said, “but it's important. I'm looking for information about someone who was a Morgan student in the sixties. You were his faculty advisor, and I thought you might be able to help.”

“Oh for God's sake,” McTaggart said. “Who?”

“Hartley Frame.” McTaggart said nothing, so Jessie added, “He was in the class of 'sixty-nine.”

Jessie heard nothing but the piano, tinny as a child's toy instrument. Finally McTaggart spoke: “You've got the wrong number.”

“But—”

“You want my ex-wife. Good-bye.” He broke the connection.

“God damn it,” Jessie said. The next moment she hurled the phone across the room. It hit the wall with a ringing sound and fell to the floor. Jessie lay on the bed and buried her face in the pillow. She'd never done anything like that in her life, and people who did disgusted her.

But nothing she tried brought results. Each logical step led to something grotesque. Putting up posters led to Mr. Mickey and the bag lady. Tracing Pat's friend led to unpleasant, incomprehensible phone calls. None of it brought her any closer to Kate.

Kate had been in Bennington on Monday. Fact. Pat had told Buddy Boucher he would return for the BMW. Fact. But Buddy Boucher hadn't seen Pat, and the BMW was gone. Facts three and four. What was logical now? To return to Bennington and wait? To go home? To keep trying to find Pat's friend?

None of the choices seemed especially logical. But only the third meant doing something. She couldn't just sit and wait: that she'd known from the start.

Jessie reopened the phone book and again found McTaggart, M. R. The next listing, and the only other McTaggart, was Erica, 15 Mariposa. Jessie didn't dial the number. Phone calls about Hartley Frame didn't work; perhaps a personal visit would. She went into the motel office, got directions, and drove.

Mariposa Street was a little cul-de-sac that ended at a marsh. The clapboard houses were small and rundown; they might have been cottages at one time. Number 15 was the last one. It had a narrow lawn at the front and along one side, covered with a thick mass of soggy leaves. The other side—a tangle of undergrowth and stiff yellow bullrushes—marked the edge of the marsh. The drizzle had almost stopped; it hung in the air now, wetting Jessie's face as she walked to the door and knocked.

Footsteps approached on the other side. The door opened. A dark, wiry woman stood in the doorway. She wore paint-stained jeans, a torn black T-shirt and a silver and turquoise Navajo pendant; she carried a palette on which glistened a single blob of oily red. “Yes?” said the woman; her voice sounded thick and scratchy, as though she hadn't spoken for some time.

“Mrs. McTaggart?” Jessie said.

The woman nodded. She hadn't let go of the door.

“I'm looking for a former student of the college. I was told you might be able to help me.”

“By whom?”

“Mr. McTaggart.”

“Doctor, please. Don't let's forget Ross's precious Ph.D. That's where the oh-so-generous alimony comes from, as he'd be the first to tell you.”

The bitterness spilled out so quickly and unexpectedly that Jessie could think of nothing to say. Mrs. McTaggart watched her; she had alert eyes, surrounded by smears of black makeup that might have been left over from the day before, and topped by eyebrows that had been almost tweezed away. “When did you see the lovely man?”

“I didn't actually see him. We spoke on the phone.”

“Oh,” she said, her tone less sharp; perhaps Jessie, having only spoken to McTaggart on the phone, was free of contamination. What's the name of the student? I haven't been connected with the college for five years, by the way. Didn't he mention that?”

“This student was here before that,” Jessie said. “He was a member of the class of 'sixty-nine.” Mrs. McTaggart's eyes began to narrow. “His name is Hartley Frame.”

Mrs. McTaggart's eyes narrowed a little more. Red patches rose to the surface of her pale cheeks. “Whose joke is this? Yours or his?”

Jessie's voice rose, abruptly and angrily. “Why does everyone keep saying that? Every time I mention I'm looking for Hartley Frame I'm told I must be joking. Why?”

Mrs. McTaggart's voice rose too. “Because Hartley Frame is dead.”

Suddenly Jessie felt very weak and very tall, far too high above the ground. “Dead?” she repeated. Her voice sounded disembodied.

“Yes,” said Mrs. McTaggart. “He died in Viet Nam.”

Jessie took a deep breath. “I—I'm sorry,” she said, backing away. She stumbled, regained her balance. “I didn't mean to trouble you.”

“If you really didn't know it's no trouble. Didn't the professor tell you?”

“No.”

“The prick.” Mrs. McTaggart said. Then she gave Jessie a sharp look. “Are you all right? You don't look well.”

“I'm fine,” Jessie said. But she was too tall, and her voice was coming from somewhere else.

Mrs. McTaggart made a clicking sound of disapproval. “You'd better come in and sit down,” she said.

“That's not ne—”

Mrs. McTaggart took Jessie's hand and led her into the house. Fleetingly Jessie glimpsed a cramped front hall, a small living room, an easel, a worn velvet couch. She sat down on it, hard. Mrs. McTaggart brought her a glass of water. Jessie sipped. The wave of dizziness passed over her.