Chapter 41
Hadassah was on the computer when her father came into her room. She thought he would be angry. “What are you doing out of bed?” he asked. “Are you feeling better?”
She heard surprise in his voice, and hope. So she told him yes, she was better, and maybe tomorrow she would go outside to get fresh air. She wasn’t ready to go to school, not yet. She wasn’t ready to face everybody, her classmates and teachers. Or even Sue, who was warm and loving and would hug her and tell her, “Thank God, you’re okay, that’s the most important thing, Hadassah. Thank God it’s over.”
Hadassah knew that it wasn’t over.
Something must have happened today. Her father sat on the side of her bed and held her hand, not the bandaged one. He was careful about that. “Dassie,” he said, his voice so serious, so heavy, so filled with sadness, just like seven years ago, when his mother died, so Hadassah knew that he was going to prepare her, that the police were coming to arrest her. But he said, “Dassie, I have to ask you a question.” And she thought,
Molly told him.
“Look at Dassie’s arms, Rabbi Bailor, don’t you see the scars?”
It was right after Batya died. Hadassah was confused when she heard, how could somebody be there one day, sitting next to you in class? And the next day she was dead? Hadassah’s father told her it was a heart attack, but Hadassah knew that wasn’t true. Batya wasn’t sick, she looked like everybody else, like Hadassah. That was a frightening thought, that you could go to sleep at night and not wake up the next morning. Although that was what Hadassah said every morning after she rinsed her hands and her eyes.
Thank you,
Hashem,
for returning my
soul, for returning souls to dead bodies.
Like Batya’s. Everybody was crying, “Oh my God! It’s so awful.” Hadassah thought it was awful, and frightening, but she didn’t cry. For a long time, even before Batya died, Hadassah felt as if she were watching the other Hadassah on a television show. Sometimes she thought people didn’t really see her, so maybe she wasn’t real.
Blood was real. Blood was life.
The first time Hadassah cut herself, after Batya’s funeral, she used a soda can tab and ran it along the inside of her wrist. Just a small cut, just a few beads of blood. The pain was sharp for a few seconds, and then it was gone. But pain was good. So was blood. Pain meant Hadassah was alive, real, not like Batya, and Noah and Lisa, who felt no pain.
Hadassah didn’t think Batya cut herself. But she knew Tara did. Hadassah saw her arm once when they were changing for gym. “My cat scratched me,” she told Hadassah. Mrs. Morton, who taught them Jewish laws and was their senior advisor, was so pleased when Tara starting wearing long sleeves, even in the late spring and early fall, when it was so warm. “I think you’re having a positive effect on her,” she’d told Dassie. There were probably other cutters in the school. There was one in Bais Rifka, Sara had told her. And maybe there were more. Hadassah was careful when she was around Sara. They used to get undressed in front of each other, but now when Hadassah slept over, she made sure to change into pajamas in the bathroom. “You’re getting so
frum,
Dassie,” Sara teased. A few weeks ago Aliza had come into their bedroom unexpectedly, right after Hadassah had showered. “You’re bleeding!” Aliza had said. “Look at your legs and your arms!” Hadassah had told her she’d started itching like crazy all over. Maybe it was something she ate, or something in the detergent. So she’d started scratching and scratching and all of a sudden she was bleeding. Aliza said, “Maybe you should tell Mom.” So Hadassah said, “I told her. She said I should take Benadryl.” And her sister said, “You better take a lot, Dassie. You look gross.”
Hadassah had shown him the cuts. She had worried that he would be disgusted, but he’d said, “Everything about you is beautiful, Dassie. I will kiss the hurts away.” And he had showed her
his
scar, on his right wrist. “In the end I couldn’t do it,” he told Hadassah. “I was waiting for you.”
She knew what her father would say. “Why didn’t you tell us, Dassie? You know it’s against the Torah, Dassie. You’re not allowed to do anything to hurt yourself. You’re not allowed to mutilate your skin, not even for a tattoo.” Hadassah had thought about that when she cut herself. Each time, she told herself, This is the last. On Yom Kippur when she stood next to her mother and Aliza, and beat her breast with her fist, “For the sin that I have committed before You,” she had made a silent promise to stop. But she couldn’t stop.
That’s why she had told Dr. McIntyre. Dr. McIntyre had wanted to tell her parents, but she was eighteen, an adult. He couldn’t tell them without her permission. He had advised her to keep a log. “Write down every time you cut yourself, Hadassah. Write down what you’re feeling before you do it, and when you do it, and how you feel right after.” So she wrote everything down in a small notebook. The notebook was in her purse, along with her car keys. Someone had taken her purse and all her other belongings from his apartment.
Her palm throbbed.
She hadn’t cut herself since coming home Friday night. There had been too much blood. On her palm, on her clothes, on the floor of his apartment. And he was dead. Her father had told her.
The shard was there, between the mattress and the box spring. She had checked to make sure before getting up to sit at the computer. She thought about using it. Just a scratch. She would be careful, it was so sharp.
What the hell!
he’d yelled.
Now her father stroked her hand. “Dassie, did he ever tell you why? Why he tricked you, why he did this to you? Did he say he was angry with me? Is that why?”
So her father didn’t know.
Hadassah lied, because what was the point of telling him? “Your father,” he had told her, “breaks people’s hearts and pretends he doesn’t see them. He’s being honored at an educators’ conference, but what he’s really teaching is that you care about yourself and don’t think what you’ve done to other people. Your father doesn’t want to see that—oh, no, not Rabbi Bailor.”
Anyway, it didn’t matter. Because that wasn’t why. It was Hadassah’s fault that a man was dead, that a little girl would never see her father, would never feel his arms holding her, kissing her scrapes, telling her everything would be okay. Hadassah had seen her in the photos. She had seen the picture books and puzzles in the box in the closet. And when the police came back, as Hadassah knew they would, her father would say, “I did it, Detective Drake.” He had told Hadassah he would protect her. She had heard in his voice when he had burst into the room that he was ready to do it right then. But even if he had done something, which Hadassah didn’t really believe, not her father (and not Gavriel, though Dinah’s brothers had killed the entire male population of a city for her), even if he
had,
that was Hadassah’s fault, too.
And it wasn’t over.
Chapter 42
Wednesday, November 24, 8:24 a.m. Along Sunset
Boulevard and Vista Street. The suspect approached
a 39-year-old man in his car and asked for the time.
The suspect then held a knife against the victim’s
chest, demanding money and his cell phone. The
suspect later fled the scene in an unknown vehicle.
I had promised to make squash quiche for Thanksgiving dinner, which my parents were hosting. Almost twenty adults and seven kids, so I picked up three butternut squashes and two quarts of soy milk at the market.
While the rinsed and pierced squashes baked in the oven, I did an hour’s worth of crime data entry and talked to Edie, who phoned during a break in the Israeli dance class she teaches, to find out whether I’d learned anything new about Hadassah and Greg Shankman. I told her I hadn’t. When the squashes were soft, I scooped out and mashed the flesh. I whisked in flour, sugar, softened margarine, soy milk, and three eggs, and poured the mixture into three quiche pans we’d received as wedding gifts. It’s a simple recipe, but my mind had been on Shankman, which is why fifteen minutes after the quiches were in the oven, I remembered the cinnamon I hadn’t sprinkled on top of each quiche. I took out the pans, sprinkled the quiches with cinnamon, and set them back in the oven.
The quiches needed another hour of baking. I checked my e-mail, deleted forty-three offers to meet “cheating housewives,” and visited J Spot. Some of the regulars were there, and several new names. I lurked for a few minutes and logged off.
Since talking with Melissa, I had thought again and again about Adam Prosser and his father, and the phone call Greg Shankman had placed to the father’s law offices. I wondered what the father looked like. Then I remembered the copies I’d made on Friday of the Prosser family photo and Adam’s photo.
The copies, in my purse, were folded in half. I took them out, unfolded them, and moved aside the top page, with Adam Prosser’s smiling face. Mr. Prosser was standing in the center of the family photo, his arm around the waist of a woman I assumed was Mrs. Prosser. On either side of the parents was a son. Adam and his brother. Mr. Prosser was a large man. Large enough to lift a body and haul it out of an apartment into an elevator that would take him to a car in the garage?
I picked up the photocopy to take a closer look at Prosser and realized I was holding two sheets of paper. Maybe I’d accidentally made two copies of the family photo.
But the second page, I saw, wasn’t a copy of the photo. It was a copy of an article. For a second I was puzzled. Then I remembered that Dr. McIntyre’s photocopied material had been underneath the copies I’d made of the Prosser photos. While separating our photocopies, I’d obviously kept one of his.
The article was from a website and was titled “SMART CHAT.” I skimmed a few paragraphs of text that discussed the appeal of chat rooms. The rest of the page contained safety tips for parents to pass on to their children:
Never give a real name or location.
Never meet anyone you talk to in a chat.
Remind your child that people you meet in chat can give false
information, including age and gender.
Never use a sexually suggestive screen name.
Don’t give out your e-mail address in a public chat.
There were more tips for children, followed by advice for parents: to monitor their children’s chats, to communicate regularly with their children about who they talk to online, to move computers from their children’s rooms to a public area.
I assumed that McIntyre had been planning to share these tips with his students at Torat Tzion. A good idea, even if it had been too late to protect Hadassah. I put the sheet aside and pulled over my page with circles. I added a circle for PROSSER—Seth or father?—and connected it to Shankman’s.
Thinking about McIntyre reminded me that I’d intended to ask him whether the Bailors knew that Hadassah was cutting herself. I found his card in my purse, phoned his office, and listened to his recorded voice informing me that he would be out of town until after Thanksgiving. “In case of emergency, please call Dr. Hobart at. . . .”
I hung up. Hadassah’s self-mutilation was troubling, but I didn’t know whether it was an emergency. And McIntyre had probably informed the Bailors. I recalled how agitated he’d been about the possible danger Hadassah faced. He had seemed genuinely anxious to help. Anxious enough to talk to Connors, even though doing so would have put the therapist in legal and professional jeopardy. Sue Horowitz had mentioned that McIntyre had lost a child a few years earlier, that teaching at the school gave him hope and a purpose. Maybe that loss had convinced him to contact Connors.
I imagined McIntyre’s reaction when Rabbi Bailor told him Hadassah had run away. I wondered whether Hadassah had confided anything about Shankman to her therapist.
Even if I knew who he is,
McIntyre had said,
I couldn’t tell you.
Rabbi Bailor had mentioned that he’d asked the therapist to try contacting Hadassah, that McIntyre had explained that he couldn’t make the call, that Hadassah would have to call him.
Dassie has his number.
It occurred to me with a jolt that if Hadassah had phoned someone for help Friday night, maybe that someone was McIntyre. She was under his care. She trusted him. He didn’t have to worry about violating the Sabbath. . . .
I played the scene in my head. Shankman assaults Hadassah. She defends herself. If Jessie Drake was right, and the blood on Hadassah’s clothes was Shankman’s, Hadassah injures him. With what?
Jessie Drake had asked me if I’d touched the knives in Shankman’s apartment. I pictured Hadassah running to the kitchen, grabbing a knife . . .
Or maybe it wasn’t a knife. Saturday night, I’d found a sliver of glass on the floor near the closet in the living room. And one of the photos in the wall unit had been missing its protective glass.
Hadassah and Shankman fight. The frame is knocked down. The glass shatters. Hadassah picks up a shard and defends herself. She stabs Shankman. He falls down.
She’s terrified. She phones McIntyre.
McIntyre asks whether Shankman is alive. But if Shankman is alive, wouldn’t McIntyre instruct Hadassah to phone 911? Or would he tell her to leave the apartment, and contact 911 himself?
But from what I knew, there had been no phone call to 911. Which meant Shankman was dead when Hadassah phoned McIntyre.
So Hadassah leaves—either on her own, or because McIntyre tells her to. McIntyre arrives and finds Shankman dead. He removes Hadassah’s belongings, transfers Shankman’s body to Shankman’s car, and drives the car off the road.
I shook my head. It was a stretch to believe that the therapist would tamper with a crime scene by removing Hadassah’s belongings, even if he wanted to protect her. I couldn’t see McIntyre moving Shankman’s body and staging the car accident.
I rewound the scene and started again. Hadassah is worried by something Shankman says or does. She phones McIntyre.
Help me.
She struggles with Shankman and wounds him with the knife, or the shard. McIntyre arrives and finds Shankman assaulting Hadassah. She’s covered with blood. McIntyre steps in. Struggles with Shankman. Shankman is killed. Hadassah feels guilty about having involved McIntyre, so she refuses to tell the police what happened.
But if Shankman was killed in self-defense, why
wouldn’t
she tell the police?
Unless . . . Hadassah wounds Shankman and flees the apartment. She assumes McIntyre has responded to her call for help. She doesn’t know whether Shankman was alive or dead when she left. When she learns Shankman is dead, she wonders. . . . She’s afraid to ask the therapist, and he doesn’t say anything to her because he believes that she killed Shankman. So neither one says anything to the police.
McIntyre removes Hadassah’s belongings.
And then?
I shook my head again. I was up against the same wall.
“I’m going to have to charge y’all tuition if you keep coming here, Molly,” Sue said when I entered her office a little before noon. She smiled. “If you came to see Rabbi, you’re out of luck. He’s teaching a class and won’t be finished till twelve-ten.”
That suited me fine. “I was hoping to talk to Dr. McIntyre. I’m thinking of doing that article about teenagers and the Internet. I thought I’d get his views.”
“Oh, honey, he won’t be back till after Thanksgiving. He took ill Monday and canceled his classes, and he told me he wouldn’t be in his office today, so don’t bother trying him there. And if y’all are thinking about interviewing students, I don’t think that’s going to happen, not with all the media attention the school’s been getting. Dr. Mendes is in a
mood.”
Sue clucked. “I can’t say I blame her.”
“I did try phoning Dr. McIntyre this morning. A recording told me the line was disconnected,” I lied. “Do you have another number where I can reach him?”
“Just his office number.” Sue flipped through her Rolodex and read off a number. “Is that the number you tried?”
“That’s it.” McIntyre’s office number had a 310 area code. That could be Pico-Robertson, Beverly Hills, Century City, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Carson. “What about a home number, Sue?”
She frowned. “That would be in his file. But I couldn’t give you that information, Molly.”
“I understand. Well, maybe I dialed wrong. I’ll try his office number again. By the way, I know that the Prossers are unhappy with Rabbi Bailor, because he put Adam on probation.”
“Rabbi told you?” Sue nodded. “Rabbi did what was right. Like I said, it doesn’t matter to Rabbi how much money a family gives the school.”
“I met Seth Prosser the other day. Adam’s brother? He definitely didn’t seem happy with the rabbi.”
Sue grimaced. “Seth has a temper. He barged in here one day when all this was going on, demanded to see Rabbi. He was yelling. ‘He won’t get away with this. He’ll be sorry.’ Stuff like that. I told him to come back when he learned some manners. That boy was always high strung.”
“Is he an attorney, like his father?”
“He was going to law school, but I heard he took a year off.”
The phone rang. Sue answered. “Torat Tzion. No, Ariella didn’t mention a dental appointment, Mrs. Linzer.” Sue listened. “Right now? All right, I’ll get her. Do you know which class she’s in right now?” Sue sighed. “Okay, I’ll find out. But please make sure she brings a note tomorrow. You’re welcome.”
Sue hung up. “You’d think I had nothing better to do. It was nice seeing y’all again. Good luck with your article.”
“As long as I’m here, Sue, I can ask you a few questions for my article, too. You can give me your perspective.”
“Well, I don’t know what I can tell y’all about teens and the Internet, except that, judging from my kids, they spend way too much time on it.”
“I’d love to hear some details.”
She smiled. “All right, then. Let me find out what class this girl is in and tell her that her mom’s waiting outside.”
Typing on her keyboard, Sue accessed a document and found the information she wanted.
When she left, the door was open. I shut the door and walked to the filing cabinet. The multicolored birds squatting on top of the cabinet glared at me. With a silent apology to Sue, I opened the top drawer and thumbed through the folder tabs. No MCINTYRE.
His folder wasn’t in the second drawer. Or the third. I found a folder for PROSSER. I wrote down the Beverly Hills address.
I didn’t know where Sue had gone, but it couldn’t have been far. She would be back any minute. Any second, for that matter.
I tabbed through the folders of the fourth drawer. Nothing.
The ringing of the phone startled me.
I turned and looked at Sue’s desk. There was a shallow top drawer on the left. Below that was a deep drawer. A filing cabinet?
The phone was still ringing. I wished the answering machine would pick up. I hurried to the desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and there it was: McIntyre’s file. The drawer was crammed with files, and I had to jiggle the manila folder to get it out.
The phone stopped ringing.
Inside the folder was a single sheet of paper. McIntyre’s photo, passport size, was stapled to the upper right corner. On the sheet were his home address in North Hollywood, and his home phone number, with an 818 prefix. Another address and phone number, also in North Hollywood, for the person to notify in case of an emergency. Nancy McIntyre. I wrote that down, too.
I heard footsteps.
My heart thumped. I closed McIntyre’s folder and jammed it back into the drawer.
I was shutting the drawer as the door opened.
I sprinted to the black filing cabinet and was holding a parrot when Sue entered. Thank God this one couldn’t talk.
“These are cute,” I said. “You collect them?”
She nodded. “They are, aren’t they? Some people do salt shakers or ashtrays. I like birds.”
I put the parrot back on the filing cabinet. “By the way, Sue. My mom teaches at Sharsheret. She says the AP course instructors proctor their own AP exams. Is that how it works here?”
“Sometimes. But if a teacher isn’t available, someone else will do it. Usually, Dr. Mendes.”
Interesting. “I’m surprised Dr. Mendes would have the time.”
“Well, she’s very much a hands-on principal. I have to say I admire that about her. She’s a stickler for detail, too. She wants to make sure everything is right.”
“And I guess she makes sure all the information the students have filled out is correct, huh?”
“Oh, yes. She collects all the AP exams and mails them back to the testing center. And she goes over every teacher recommendation before it’s mailed out. All right then, Molly Blume. What would y’all like to know?”
“Actually, Sue, I had a call while you were out, and I’ll have to take a rain check. Maybe we can talk next week?”
“Whenever.” She smiled. “You’re a breath of fresh air, Molly. I can see why Rabbi likes you.”
That made me feel worse.