The Ghosts of Lovely Women (28 page)

Fred nodded. He went back behind his desk and sat down, playing absently with his Altoids box. “Teddy, you shouldn’t judge me. All men look at pornography. All men. It’s the most common thing on the internet. It’s not illegal. It’s big business, big money, and that’s because looking is simply human nature.”

“Looking at teenagers? Girls the age of the ones you teach? The ones you lead?”

“We all do things at home that we wouldn’t tell our students about. Don’t we,
Miss
Thurber?” He looked significantly at Derek and then back at me. “No one should have to apologize for having a sex drive.”

“But they would have to apologize for murder,” I said.

Derek went to the door and opened it. “Rosa, call the police,” he said.

Fred laughed. “This is funny, really. Just one obnoxious whore of a girl, and my whole career is in jeopardy. I’ve been in education for twenty-five years. I am a man of significance.”

I thought of Agamemnon in the Underworld, complaining about the fact that his wife murdered him without ever acknowledging the murder he himself committed. The murder of a child who hadn’t mattered, because she had been a girl.
A man of significance
.

“Fred, I don’t know what to say to you,” I said.

“I paid that girl because she threatened to mislead people. To say that I was the sort of person who preyed on teenaged girls. What I do online is no one’s business.”

“She didn’t want your money. It was a burden to her. She brought it back here, I’m guessing. She told you to step down. And you got angry? You felt she would keep bothering you, demanding restitution that money couldn’t provide?”

Fred pounded the desk. “Restitution for what? What in the world did that girl think I had done to her? She’s the one who set up a website. She’s the one who was taking money from innocent men. A spoiled little mama’s girl who used her father’s hard-earned money to create her little internet embarrassment.”

I felt ill. “How did you get her to the car? It was in the lot. Did you have to drag her there?” A sudden image came to me: Mr. Hendy moving one of the giant cafeteria garbage cans on a little two-wheeled dolly. “Did you use a cafeteria can?”

Fred paled, glaring at me. “I don’t have to answer to you, Teddy. I don’t have to answer to anyone.” We heard sirens then. He smiled oddly and popped a mint into his mouth, an odd-looking one that wasn’t round like the others, but tubular — almost like a capsule.

“Derek—” I yelled, but Derek had already dived behind the desk to try to make Fred spit it out.

“Too late,” Fred said with a spiteful smile, pushing Derek away with surprising strength. “I prefer this to further interrogation.”

“What was that? What was that pill, Fred?” I cried.

Then there was chaos. Fred tried to bolt out of the room, but Derek tackled him. The first officer on the scene found the two men struggling on the floor; he was told about the pill, and ambulance attendants appeared minutes later. Fred was escorted out of the room. Later I heard he’d been forced to drink an emetic solution which had produced the white capsule — his escape clause — entirely intact.

We met with Kelsey McCall in the office annex and told her the whole story, starting with Fred’s visit to my room. She typed rapidly at her laptop, her face growing redder with each new detail. She spoke, looking at her keyboard.

“You can bet he had that poison waiting, just in case someone found out. Loaded up his own capsule with something he knew would do the trick fast. He didn’t want to face the music, but now he will.”

She made eye contact with us then. “I doubt he planned this murder. She got him angry. She threatened him. Cornered animal syndrome. The guy didn’t want to lose his job.”

“Not over a whore of a girl,” I said.

Derek looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Can we go?” he asked McCall.

She nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”

We left. My mind felt curiously blank as I walked past the police officers, past the crying office workers. The only clear thought that came to me was
I wonder how Anthony Fairchild is going to spin this in the p.a. announcement.

“Then leaf subsides to leaf; so Eden sank to grief…”

—Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

I thought I saw Jessica once, in an aisle of a gourmet food store in Pine Grove. I’d gone there determined, for once, to make dinner for Derek with the apparent ease and elegance that he always made it for me. I passed the baking aisle and then turned back, because I had seen her — small and blonde, one hip thrust out while she contemplated a bag in her hand. I almost called her name; then she looked up, and I saw that it wasn’t Jessica, but her mother. How alike they were after all… except that Jessica’s youth receded before me; as I approached I saw the reality of age and grief on Janet Halliday’s face.

She smiled at me. “Hello, Ms. Thurber.”

“Teddy.”

“Teddy. And I’m Janet.”

“How are you, Janet?” I asked.

She sighed at the bag of coconut shavings in her hand. “I’m up and down. My therapist said death isn’t easy, and neither is life. She said a mouthful.”

“Yes.”

She looked back at me, this time unsmiling, her green eyes wide. “I uh— I understand you know about — about an argument my husband had with Jessica before she died.” She blushed as she said it. Who had told her? The police? Sam?

“I did learn of it, yes.”

“You must think… well, I don’t know what you must think. Or maybe I do.”

“It’s not my business.”

She shook her head. “My husband has never known — how to show his love. He loved Jessica, very much. But for some people — their love is like hate, or at the very least like anger. They feel something, but they don’t know what it is that they’re feeling.”

“It’s complicated,” I said, looking at my shoes. I could tell she was still watching me, though, so I looked back at her.

“I thought of leaving him.” Her eyes beseeched me. Did she want understanding? Forgiveness? “But the fact is that the boys have been through enough. This — upheaval. The loss of a sister. I couldn’t do that to them, couldn’t tear their family apart anymore.”

“You’re a good mother, Janet.”

“Nathan is going to therapy with me. Couples therapy.”

I must have looked surprised, because she laughed in a sad way. “Oh, he doesn’t want to go, but my husband does love me. He loved Jessica, and he loves me, and he doesn’t want to lose me. So he’ll go, and hopefully he’ll learn some things from the experience. Hopefully we both will.”

“I’m glad. I think that you are important for your family.”

“Yes.”

She acknowledged this with a nod and a small smile, an echo of the secret smiles Jessica used to wear when she slouched in her desk and dreamed her dreams of the future.

“I thought for a minute that you were Jessica. You look like her. Or she like you, I guess.”

“Yes. The plan was that she’d bear that resemblance into the future while I faded into my comfortable old age.” She wiped at her tears with some impatience. “God, I’m tired of crying. The problem is, what else can you do? No recourse. No complaint department.”

With a gesture of impatience she set her bag of coconut back on the shelf. “I’m keeping you with my maudlin talk.”

“No. I like to talk about Jessica.”

Janet looked at me gratefully. “Me, too. She was so beautiful, Teddy. So beautiful, my sweet daughter. Do you know the last thing I said to her? She was going off in the car, and I said, ‘Don’t go far — it’s almost dinner time.’
Don’t go far
,” she mused.

“She hasn’t gone far,” I assured her.

“She promised she wouldn’t,” she said, and as she crumpled I took her into my arms.

* * *

It was graduation evening, and the faculty, black-robed, were processing in like an unkindness of ravens. St. James graduation was always a long ceremony, so teachers brought provisions for the evening. We counted on those with more extensive degrees: masters and doctoral robes had all sorts of natural pockets inside their hoods and sleeves. Most people slid some extra tissue (there were always tears), breath mints or candy, and my row, once we had all established ourselves in our seats and settled in for the valedictorian’s prayer, was like a confectioner’s shop. Lucia had crammed so many lemonheads into the tip of her sleeve she could have used it as a sap.

I sat, squinting at the sour flavor of the candy I’d been offered, and contemplated the back of Josh’s head. The men had been allowed to remove their caps, as tradition dictated, but we women still wore them, painfully bobby pinned into our scalps. After the prayer there was much standing and sitting, typically ceremonial. Students read wise words, sang senior songs, presented senior gifts. The entire choir sang a song for Kathy Olchen and gave roses to her family.

Danny Washburn walked onto the stage to much applause. He approached the podium and looked at all of us before he stared down at the paper in front of him. “We’ve all experienced terrible loss this year — the loss of a St. James teacher, and of an alumna who was very much a part of our lives.” His voice cracked only slightly. “In honor of Jessica Halliday, I read this poem.”

He read “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. This was rather a cliché, I suppose, since it’s often selected as a tribute to deceased high school students. For Jessica, though, it seemed most appropriate. She had been the golden girl, for all of us.

“So dawn goes down to day,” Danny was finishing, solemn and majestic. “Nothing gold can stay.”

There was silence, then applause, as he walked off of the stage. Lucia handed me a tissue from inside her capacious sleeve. I dabbed at my eyes and sighed as Brenda James, our drama director, said, “And now, we shall issue diplomas to the class of 2009.”

This was supposed to be Fred’s job; he had done it ever since I had been here. Perhaps everyone was realizing this — the strangeness of Brenda reading these names. “She does a better job than Fred,” Lucia whispered.

Normally the families get a bit squirrelly at this time. Brenda read the standard warning about how they shouldn’t clap before all the names were read, but there were always people who ignored that, who felt they were exceptions to the rule of etiquette. Their kid had graduated. Their kid deserved special applause.

Tonight, though, that didn’t happen. Perhaps people realized that the occasion was more solemn than usual. Perhaps they were remembering Jessica had walked across this stage just one year before — or perhaps they were silent with anger that a trusted leader had taken the life of one whom he had sworn to protect.

The evening passed in a most dignified way.

We processed back out to the traditional pomp and circumstance, then watched the seniors file past us in their ethereal pearly robes. That was how they left us — white and angel-winged, to fly off to another place and bequeath us only our memories.

Several of my students slapped me five as they filed past. “
Crime and Punishment!”
said Carla with a grin. “I’ll never forget it, Miss Thurber!”

That had me closer to tears than most anything which had happened on stage.

I finally escaped the auditorium and made my way down the long dark hall, headed toward the teacher’s lounge where we had to turn in our rented finery. Josh passed me and gave me a high-five. He had informed me that day that he would, in fact, be returning to St. James, and he seemed genuinely glad of it. “Talk to you later,” I promised him as he jogged past. He and Tim, he had informed me, still had a late dinner planned. I entered the faculty room to see scholarly robes, collars, hats, hoods, flying through the air to land in various boxes placed there for collection. And then people whizzed out the door. No one lingered after the long ceremony.

Marnie Taylor, though, more pregnant than ever, was looking a bit shaky, sitting alone on the dusty faculty room couch. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah. It was just long, and I don’t think I ate enough protein, and these shoes are killing me!” She was near tears.

“Number one, take those shoes off. You’re about my size. See my comfy flats? Put these on, Marnie. I won’t have you walking to your car in those.”

She let me slide off her shoes and put mine on her feet. “Now I know how Prince Charming feels,” I joked.

“Ah. Oh, Teddy, thank you so much. I couldn’t find any black shoes but the heels, and they said it had to be black.”

“Number two, hang on.” I went to my locker where I’d stowed a little snack in case I left the ceremony starving. “Look what I have! String cheese. Eat this, now, or your poor baby will shrink.”

She did; she was beyond fake refusals. “Teddy, you are saving my life.”

“Someday you’ll do the same for me, assuming I ever decide to get pregnant. At this point I’m thinking no.”

“You are wonderful. I’m sending you a fruit basket or something.”

I pulled her up and escorted her to the door. “Do you need help to your car?”

“No. It’s right out front. Thanks, Teddy.”

I patted her hand and watched her leave. Then I turned to see that Derek had been watching it all from a corner by the broken copy machine. Tonight the sign said, “R.I.P.”

“Hey,” I said. We were alone in the room. Derek still wore his cap and gown, although the gown was unzipped and I could see that he sported black pants and a white T-shirt underneath. “Fancy clothes.”

“No one will know, except you.”

“True.”

We stared a bit longer, and then Derek said, “I’m in love with you.”

I knew this. But here is the reality of words: they are powerful. They have force. And those words lifted me like a strong wind, filled me up, made me smile with a giddy abandon.

I walked toward him. His cap had slid down his head so that it sat on the back like a square black halo. “Can I help you with this?” I asked. I took it off and tossed it in a box.

“Teddy?”

“I know, I’m just reveling in it for a minute. I love you, too.”

“Okay. That’s a relief. I didn’t get beyond the point in the script where I said it to you.”