“A phone call from Hugh, she said.” Glenda implied that she was too smart a cookie to believe that. Actually, she was.
“I wish I could meet Hugh,” Eve Wholeperson said. “It’s unnatural to have this half brother you never ever saw. I mean it’s weird meeting my father for the first time, too. It’s all been weird since Mom called, actually.”
“Oh,” I said softly. Now it all jelled. The crazy lady. Fay, who said she was the mother of Wynn Teller’s children. But Wynn had so successfully dismissed her as a crank, I hadn’t stored her words carefully.
Intriguing, but this portion of the family was not, however, my problem.
“Hugh called you?” Wynn asked. “Why? When? About what?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten mired in so many levels of untruth. “Today. A message,” I finally said. “On my phone machine. About applications for school. About a recommendation. I was surprised to hear from him. But—maybe I misunderstood. I must have.”
Teller raised his eyebrows, held them there, then lowered them. “But he—he left town last weekend.”
I caught myself before I admitted surprise that he’d been around at all.
For a moment, Teller sagged, his face aging, going slack. He looked almost afraid. Or defeated. And then, so quickly I thought I’d imagined that there’d been any change at all, he was back, everything in place and smooth. “Of course, he’s a hard one to track. Once they leave the nest, you know. Maybe we should band them, like they do with birds.”
“Sorry for the confusion,” I said.
“So he’s considering college after all, is he?” Wynn Teller wore the sour look of one who’d won a victory, but who possibly preferred the defeat.
“Guess so.” I felt as if I was betraying Hugh’s rebellion. I extended my hand. “Very nice to have met you,” I told the twins. This was certainly my day for saying it was nice to have met people it wasn’t particularly nice to have met.
This was also my day for not getting what I came for.
I reentered my mobile wind tunnel, sneezed, and decided that perhaps humans were too much trouble. There was a lot to be said for inanimate objects. They couldn’t lie or have scruples or say you were crazy or unwise.
I therefore directed myself toward the most inanimate of objects, Philly Prep. The fortress of learning was locked and battened against the night, but not against me or pilfering for a good cause.
I was going to find Lydia Teller. And I was going to find her today.
Ten
ONE OF THE FEW WAYS IN WHICH PHILLY PREP TREATS FACULTY AS professionals is in granting whoever might need one a key to the side door. The sports and drama coaches have them, and so do I. As faculty sponsor of the school paper, I have an unfortunately frequent need to use mine. Not that a monthly high school paper is besieged with late-breaking scoops, but our reporters write their stories with the same urgency they bring to their academic work. Brenda Starr didn’t go to Philly Prep. Which is to say that every month, for too much of the month, I stay after school to goad and coerce.
But I am never alone at these sessions, and I never enter a locked and silent building.
The side door had probably once been where tradesmen entered or trash was put out. It was at the end of a long, dark passageway between the school and the residential apartment building that butted up to it. It had never looked as formidable or lengthy.
Something skittered, claws scraping cement as I approached the door. I didn’t look down to check what it was.
I am saving somebody’s life, I reminded myself. The end justifies the fear. My hand fumbled with the key. Besides, I could be coming back for papers I forgot. Or a book. Innocent, plausible motives.
I finally opened the door, then closed it behind me. The side door brings you in downstairs, near the science rooms, locked and hazy in the antiburglary lights casting long shadows along the corridor. The staircase loomed, all unfamiliar angles. I tiptoed up, holding my breath, although I couldn’t hear a sound.
Schools at night are unnatural, like postapocalyptic visions. During the day, they burst at the seams with raw life. But vacated and silent, the books and desks and lockers seem artifacts of a lost civilization, remembered only through the indelible aroma of adolescence, tennis shoes, and chalk dust.
I checked the auditorium, but Wednesday’s Not-a-Garage Sale team had gone home, leaving tagged doodads behind. The gym was silent. Our basketball team was playing in Chester County. The game was supposed to be a romp.
I felt intrusive and a little lost, and I touched my purse, reassured by the book inside it. My talisman, my admission ticket to Lydia, my press pass, my credentials.
I walked to the office and again used the key, thanking whatever frugal or thoughtful soul had decided that both doors could logically have the same lock.
And then I was inside, the door clicking shut behind me as I headed for the files that covered the back wall of the main room. Current Enrollment: A-D, E-H, etc. I moved to the right, past the W-Z file to the previous year, then the year before it, and on until Hugh’s year.
Only then did I notice, or allow myself to notice, the keyholes that topped each bank of files. Small and round, they had nothing to do with the nice key that opened the side door and the office.
Permanent records were legal documents needing protection. I should have realized that. I probably did.
I wanted to yowl with frustration.
I sat down, guiltily, on the Office Witch’s chair. Think, I advised. Think, I cajoled. Think, I demanded, but I was as unresponsive as my students generally are. The files sat behind my back, their treasures locked tight.
I put my head down on Helga’s desk, or tried to, but it landed on a thick book. I recognized its logo from the staff computer training workshop. That was about all I remembered. That and the fact that you had to turn the thing on and that it didn’t have a carriage return to slam with your palm. It appeared that Helga wasn’t very far ahead of me. Her user’s manual had stickums strategically placed. MOVING THE CURSOR, one said in her crabbed handwriting, MOVING FILE BLOCKS. BACKUP FILES. Gibberish.
Useless manual pushed aside, I put down my head in despair and saw, behind my eyes, a face like a cameo, contorted with fear. Still, I couldn’t think of what to do. Perhaps in the morning I could figure an excuse for requesting Hugh Teller’s old records, or I could wedge something into the file cabinet while Helga was around and it was unlocked, then retrieve the file later. Kind of a Watergate-inspired break-in.
But what if Hugh’s records were gone? He hadn’t completed even one school year with us. He was history, gone and forgotten. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.
Don’t…something nagged, tickling inside my brain where I couldn’t scratch. Don’t call…
Of course. Hugh might have left, but even if he was forgotten, his parents never would be. Not only diamonds were forever. So were private school requests for contributions. No stay at our school, no matter how brief, was too insignificant to put a parent on the permanent hit list.
“Yes!” I shouted. It was difficult calming down, because I was sure that now I had it.
I had listened to that lecture enough to know that lists and labels were the computer’s justification for existence. I just hadn’t listened long enough to figure out how to extract them. “Open Sesame,” I whispered, but that didn’t do it, so, with a sigh, I approached Helga’s operation manual. Part of my computerphobia is caused by the manuals theoretically explaining them, the only printed material that gives me hives.
I flipped the toggle that said
Power
and felt insanely proud as the machine whipped open like a flasher and showed its contents.
Or something. It took a while to translate
physplt
and
mhpercor
into
physical plant
and
Maurice Havermeyer’s personal correspondence,
but once I had a handle on the code, the list seemed more like a game of hangman or that TV show where you fill in the blanks. I wondered if this meant I was now computer literate. I scanned the list for something called
sukrlist,
but Helga wasn’t that obliging or obvious. I reached the end without finding anything, and panicked until I saw a funny little key with an arrow pointing toward me. I was reluctant to admit that there might be some logic attached to computers, but I pushed it, and the file miraculously lowered its eyebeam and showed me more of itself. Computers were a cinch.
And so were Helga’s peculiar headings.
Facevals
made me think of noses and eyes for only a moment, and then it became
faculty evaluations.
I was tempted to sneak a look, but it was probably only blank forms Havermeyer and department heads had to fill out.
Computerwise, I had peaked. I stared without comprehension at
tchrec, reqsupp, nxtclndr, misccorr, mhtrvl, mlnglst, subac, flrwrngs,
and my favorite,
ogzmic.
That last item produced a great deal of speculation and wasted time. By the time I optimistically pushed the little arrow and got nothing but
end,
I resumed full-fledged despair. Or
flflgd despr,
as Helga might have had it.
Take them one by one. The Twelve-Step computer program, one imponderable at a time.
With effort, some unraveled into sense.
Tch
was obviously teacher;
clndr,
calendar; and all
mh
’s,
Dr. Havermeyer’s. I wondered whose initials were
ml.
No use. I wasn’t Mata Hari, even with a stupid Helga-designed code. I’d never find
patsies
or
bleedmdri
or whatever the woman called her damned mailing list.
And then I looked again at
mlnglst
and laughed out loud.
Now there remained the problem of getting into it. I wished I had paid more attention to that lesson, but I’d been preoccupied wondering in what century I could afford a computer, and whether by then, I’d have figured out why I needed one.
But what I did remember was that the answers, garbled and barely intelligible though they be, were inside the bulging, daunting user’s manual. I took a deep breath and opened it up.
For once, luck was on my side. Or maybe it was stupidity, or ignorance. In any case, this book was dedicated to rarefied processes—desktop publishing and mass mailings and footnoting and indexing and I don’t want to know what else, but my problem—how to look at what was in a file—was so primitive it was answered on page one, in the “How to Start, Idiot” section.
And in I went, pushing my trusting
down
arrow through the alphabet until I got to the T’s, and then, to Wynn and Lydia Teller.
Columbus couldn’t have been more excited than I was, discovering my own new world of mechanical wizardry.
A squeak somewhere outside the office ended the elation. My pulse rate doubled as I strained to hear, and my hand trembled as I pulled a sheet off a pad embossed with from the desk of helga putnam. Another squeak. Closer. Did buildings still settle after one and a half centuries?
My hand shook even more as the noise changed. Feet scuffed on the marble foyer now. Just outside.
I scribbled the address in a handwriting I’d never seen before. The writing of a trapped woman.
A shadow darkened half of the closed, frosted glass door to the hallway. I shoved the paper into my bag, then stared at the computer screen, mind as blank as I wished it would become. I was about to be caught illegally using Helga’s computer. I was about to be fired. Soon, Macavity and I would be living in the car, sleeping under the ripped convertible top, hoping for a dry spring.
I glanced at the manual as the shadow inserted a key, turned it, and shook the door in vain.
I’d left it unlocked and the shadow had just locked it. Which gave me maybe ten seconds.
No time to find out how to exit gracefully. The instructor had said something about saving, about not destroying disks, but it was too late for niceties.
“Sorry,” I told the machine, hearing bits and bytes scream in agony as I eradicated them by simply switching the power off.
I stood up and tried to activate my innocent
who, me?
facial muscles. But they didn’t hold when the door actually opened. “Why—what are you doing here?” I asked, one millisecond after it was asked of me.
Neil Quigley looked terrified. His gangly body gangled more than usual. “I…I…I forgot my roll book. Failure warnings due, and I couldn’t…well, I couldn’t come sooner, you see, because, um, because I couldn’t.” He tried for a laugh, but missed by a mile. “It was a shock seeing you here.”
Our mutual terror agreed upon, we left. A needle-sharp, icy rain threatened sleet, and when I got into my damp car, I sighed and hoped that I was projecting and that Neil was not as crazed and frightening as he’d looked to me tonight.
* * *
The pilfered address led me to a pleasant two-story house not far from my sister’s. Philadelphia and environs are a medley of brick: weathered and new, rose, yellow, tomato, rust, brown, wine, and pink. Even wet, and in the dark, the Tellers’ house was on the rosy end of the spectrum. It was two stories and square, with a peaked roof and chimney, its green front lawn split by a walkway to the front door. It looked like a child’s drawing of home. A separate garage, to the left and rear, was a miniature peaked-roof replica.
Carefully laid-out flower beds lined the walk and foundation of the house. They were mostly empty now, except for bushes carved and coerced into unnatural egg shapes and oblongs. The topiary, plant abuse if there was such a thing, confirmed all my suspicions.
It was eight o’clock. Dinner should be over by now, and if Glenda had been honest on the phone, Wynn was back at the office.
I walked the path between the frozen bushes, rehearsing my spiel. I had the hotline number of the shelter. I could get her there, and they could get her to a safe house. By the time her husband returned, she’d have disappeared without a trace.
A chill crept through my bone marrow, and it had nothing to do with the freezing rain.