The Yearbook (25 page)

Lola flung open the car door, and grasping the hammer jumped up on the low wall to the reserve room. She felt sick when she saw that the window had been boarded over with several wooden planks. In two seconds she was back behind the wheel, circling the building, hunting for another point of entry. And then it hit her. Why not the main entrance?
It's our school.
We'll walk right in the front door.
Right in through the front like anybody else
. She stopped the car and rushed up the steps with the hammer. There were double glass panels on both sides of the door and she went to work on them, smashing again and again. With each hammer blow, the sirens seemed to grow louder. The police were behind the school. Avoiding the jagged edges, Lola finessed herself through the window frame and into the dark interior. She leaned on the long push-bars across the middle of the doors and they banged open. Frozen air blasted over the threshold, carrying snow. Lola could hear voices, faint but urgent, on the wind. The police appeared to be on foot now, coming across the campus. Lola dragged the wheelchair out of the car and shoved it open. When she turned again, she saw that Whoopsie had managed to open the car door a few inches and had stuck one of her pitiful legs out. Lola lifted the ancient lady from the car and placed her in the wheelchair. She forced the wheels through a stretch of snowy ground and started up the concrete ramp to the door. The ramp was slick with ice and the chair skidded sideways. Lola's half-frozen fingers cramped over the handles. There was no traction. She backed down the ramp and tried again. This time the chair flew over the ice, and in two seconds was at the top. Lola looked over her shoulder as she pushed the wheelchair into the school. The silhouette of a man had appeared against the field of white, and as she watched, several more men materialized. A whole posse was jogging toward her with searchlights, eight or nine people at least. She doubted they could see her yet, or even the car. They must have been following the tracks.

She pulled the heavy front doors shut and heard the click that meant they had locked behind her. She took off running, past the metal detector and the payphone and the long banks of dented lockers, past the principal's office and under a team-spirit banner. Somewhere behind her she could hear a kind of banging at the doors she'd just shut. The police couldn't get them open, and the officers were too big to get through the hole in the glass. Lola herself had barely fit. But she was sure they would find a way in. The question was, how long would it take? How long did she need?

Lola ran faster and now her chest burned. One of her shoes, lacking its laces, flew off. She pulled off the other one and her socks, too, and kept on running toward the library. Her feet slapped on the cold floor as they had the night of the dance. She'd never run so fast. The walls seemed to blur with the speed. Lola turned a corner and came to the library door. She tried the handle. It was locked. She would have to smash the glass in the door, and realized with horror that she'd dropped the hammer at the main entrance. She looked around for something else she could use, then thought of the fire extinguisher that was kept a little farther down the hall. She ran for it. In seconds she was back, lugging the heavy red tank. She moved Whoopsie out of harm's way and heaved the extinguisher. The crash was loud, and glass flew. Lola stuck her arm through and opened the door. At the same time she became aware of lights bouncing along the walls. The men with the searchlights were in the building now, and close.

Lola wheeled Whoopsie into the library and smelled burning. She looked toward the reserve room. The door was ajar and smoke spilled from the gap.

“It's through there,” Lola said.

Whoopsie coughed and peered into the smoke. “That's the way back?”

“Yes,” Lola said.

“I want to walk now,” Whoopsie said. “Help me up.”

Lola took Whoopsie by the arm and felt her rise to her feet with a kind of superhuman last effort. Whoopsie took a step, but there was no force left in her. The legs buckled. Lola lost her grip as the old woman stumbled forward into the dark room.

“Whoopsie!” Lola screamed, starting blindly after her friend. The room was full of smoke and shadows. Lola's groping hands found a bookshelf, then a wall. Where was Whoopsie? She pivoted around. Her foot touched something on the floor. It was a body. She dropped to her knees.

And then she saw him, lying unconscious by the long sofa.

“Peter!”

She grasped him under the arms. He was a dead weight, too heavy for her. Then she felt someone lifting Peter's legs. She looked up. Through the smoke she saw Whoopsie, dressed in an old lady's nightgown blackened with soot and two sizes too small for her. Lola was stunned. The trip had stripped most of a century from Whoopsie's odometer. She would not be the old, old lady on the park bench after all.

“I got my end,” Whoopsie said. “Ready?”

Together they carried Peter out of the room, out of the library, back out of the school, and into the hot summer night.

Peter's car was still waiting where Lola had last seen it, getaway style, in the alley. And then she heard his voice, weak but clear.

“Put me down, girls.”

Whoopsie dropped the legs and Lola lowered the top half. Peter landed in the grass with a sneeze.

“What happened?” he asked.

Lola didn't answer but leaned down and kissed him over and over, and he kissed her back.

“Don't kiss. Breathe,” Whoopsie ordered, pushing her brown curls back from her sweaty brow. “Lola, can't you see the man's all oven-roasted and hickory-smoked?”

Lola collapsed onto the grass beside Peter, her hands still frozen but sweating with the August heat, her lungs expelling fumes and frost. Whoopsie sat down, too. She pulled off the big red bed socks and flung them off over the lawn.

“I always hated these damn things,” she said.

“Are you wearing a nightgown?” Peter asked Whoopsie. “And when did you get back from New York?”

“A lot happened while you were unconscious,” Lola said.

“A century, professor,” Whoopsie added.

Peter sat up. “I've got to write this down,” he said, patting the pocket of his vest. “Where's my notebook?”

Rising over the chirp of the crickets came the thin wail of a solitary siren. The volunteer fire engine was on the way. The three teens scrambled up from the ground and made for the car.

Whoopsie got there first and slid in behind the wheel. “It's my turn to drive. First stop's Thumbtack's house,” she said, and pressed the button labeled
START
.

Miss Bryant was used to getting crank telephone calls. The worst were the ones in which you answered the phone only to be addressed by a robot who wanted to sell you life insurance or inform you you'd won a sweepstakes you hadn't won at all. So when a “Mr. P.R. Donaldson, attorney-at-law” telephoned two days after Christmas with his “exciting news,” she was not inclined to believe it. “Is this a real person talking?” Miss Bryant said.

“Yes,” the voice said. “As I indicated, I'm P.R. Donaldson, attorney-at-law.”

“And you say I've won a house?”

“Not won. Inherited.”

“Somebody left me a house, you say?”

“A Dr. and Mrs. Hemmings of Palo Alto, California.”

Miss Bryant sat down on her celery crate and scratched her wig. She could not remember anybody by that name. She did not believe she knew a soul in Palo Alto. And yet, it stood to reason that she knew these people. Otherwise, why in the world had they left her a house?

“Are you still there?” Donaldson said.

“Yes, I'm here. Is it a historical home?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Donaldson said.

“They've left it to the society, I believe you mean to say, to the Ashfield Historical Society, of which I am the current president.”

“No,” Donaldson said. “To you. To you personally. You are Miss Jean Bryant?”

“Yes. But I'm not sure I can accept an entire house from some people in California I never met. It's a bit strange, wouldn't you agree?”

“Do you at least want to come and look at it?” Donaldson asked. “Then we can move forward from there.”

That afternoon, Miss Bryant found herself riding in Mr. Donaldson's car to an old neighborhood near the high school. The day was bright but clear, and the sun sparkled on the high snowdrifts that hemmed in all the roads of town. Mr. Donaldson's radio crackled softly with Christmas music. They passed the high school and continued down the block. Mr. Donaldson turned onto Elm Street and stopped at Maple.

“Here it is,” Donaldson said, jerking up the emergency brake.

Miss Bryant looked at the turn-of-the-century cottage, white, neat, and framed by pines. Donaldson guided her up the icy walk. It did not take long for them to tour the six empty rooms. Mr. Donaldson mentioned a sort of a shed, or small barn, that was part of the property.

When they finished, he pulled an envelope from his briefcase and handed it to Miss Bryant.

“This came with the bequest,” he said.

Miss Bryant opened the envelope. It was a portrait of a young couple.
Brown Portrait Studios
,
San Francisco
, it read, and it was stamped May, 1938. Miss Bryant put on her glasses and the blurry faces came into focus. By gum, if it wasn't Lola Lundy. So she'd done it. She'd seen that train passing on the parallel track and she'd jumped.

Miss Bryant turned back toward the lawyer.

“It's a charming little house,” she said. “I believe I have just the right period furnishings for it.”

“So you do want it?” Donaldson said, looking up in surprise from some documents he'd been organizing. “I figured you'd want to sell it. I could arrange that for you.”

“Oh no,” Miss Bryant said. “I shall live right here.”

Mrs. Hershey hadn't even packed up, and a guy in overalls was already scraping her name off the door with an X-Acto knife. She had taken all her files out of the cabinets. The old ones were destined for the shredder. The newer cases would all be computerized. The department was cutting down on paper and improving efficiency. But she wouldn't be around to see it.

She bent down to clear a stack of files out of the lowest cabinet. She flipped through, and the names on the files brought faces into her mind that she had not seen for a long time. Danielle Anderson. Yes, the skinny girl. She'd be almost thirty now, if she hadn't starved to death. She'd married some basketball player and gone south. The boy's name wouldn't come to her. Brett? Bart? Buddy? She flipped to the next file. Jared Fantino. Twenty-five to life for first-degree murder. She fed it into the shredder and picked up the next one. Sienna Martin—a porn actress, last she'd heard.

She set aside the stack and leaned over again to make sure the file drawer was cleared. But no, something was still there, a package, caught in the drawer runners. She yanked at a corner and out it flew, throwing her off balance. She found herself seated on the floor with the package in her lap. It was from a bookstore, addressed to her, but unopened.

Then she remembered: It was something she'd bought for Lola Lundy, that book Lola had wanted so much, all those years ago at Hillside. It had come in the mail a few weeks after Lola's disappearance.

Lola. They'd never found her. Or the old woman. Where was Lola now? In jail in another state, more than likely, or maybe not even alive anymore. Mrs. Hershey felt sad and heavy there on the floor and wondered if she had done anybody any good at all in her entire life. She tore open the package. Yes, she'd been correct: There it was,
ASHFIELD HIGH: 1924
.

She paged through, trying to imagine what it contained that had so captivated Lola. She smiled at the stiff-collared staff of Ashfield, and the billowing bloomers on the girls' basketball team. She read the students' outdated names, listed in a column beside the class photographs:
Edith, Hershel, Mabel
—she'd had a great-aunt Mabel herself—
Ruby, Edna, Virgil.
She came to the junior class.
Lucille
,
Clarence, Thelma, Herbert, Lola. Lola Lundy
. Mrs. Hershey took in a breath. She adjusted her glasses and looked again: No, she hadn't been mistaken. It did say “Lola Lundy.” Her eyes sought out the photo that went with the name. A terrible confusion came over her as she found the picture. It was Lola. It was Lola Lundy, the girl she had known, suspended in an oval frame, smiling at her in shades of gray.