Dark Turns (3 page)

With Ms. V gone, the atmosphere relaxed. The class split into conversations as students swapped pointe shoes for slippers, stuffing the former into cubbies beside Ms. V’s office. Lydia introduced herself to Marta, Kim, and Suzanne.
Alexei joined the T twins and June by the windows in hushed gossip.

Joseph gravitated toward Aubrey at the barre. He announced that he had missed her over the summer. Aubrey didn’t respond. Instead, she slid to the ground in a split before leaning forward until her chest touched the floor. She pulled her legs together in a push-up stance and flipped onto her back.

“Stretch me.”

Joseph dropped to both knees and lowered his head, a boy begging mercy from a queen. He placed both hands on her foot. The pink ballet slipper disappeared in his palms. He pushed Aubrey’s long leg to a ninety-degree angle.

“You can do better than that.” Aubrey said.

Joseph’s hands moved to her calf. Aubrey’s leg ticked a few more degrees. Her lips parted.

“Harder.”

His hands slid to her thigh. He pushed the leg to her chest, splitting the girl like a scissor.

Nia clapped her hands. “Okay. That’s enough. Let’s all sit up and massage our feet. Come on, everyone. Sit up.”

Joseph’s hand recoiled from Aubrey’s thigh, as though burned. His eyes looked glazed.

“You don’t want those tendons to tighten up,” Nia continued, moving closer to the other groups of students. “That’s how injuries happen.”

June, Alexei, and the T twins sat in a circle. They obediently rubbed their arches and ankles without breaking conversation. When Nia neared, their voices dropped to whispers. But their words still pierced the air:
Dead. Drowned. Devastated.

Nia sat a few feet from them, massaging her own ankle as she eavesdropped.

“My little sister, Darya, hung with her,” Tati said. “Lauren’s dad just shows up outside Dar’s room last night, fucking furious. Ready to kill someone, you know? Totally freaked her out. He wanted to know if Lauren had problems with anyone.”

“She seemed so sweet . . . I just can’t believe it.” June’s tiny face fell into a cartoonish sad expression. Eyebrows slanted. Mouth turned down. She hugged her arms to her chest and rubbed her forearms.

“Did you guys know the girl that died?” The question slipped out before Nia had thought it through. The police had cautioned against talking about the murder. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. These kids had information, and knowing why the girl died might erase the horrific images in her head.

Alexei’s eyebrows raised at the interruption.

June reddened. “Um, yeah. I kind of knew her. We took Mandarin together. Did you know her?”

Eyes turned on her like spotlights. She had to say something. “Director Battle and I found the body.” She offered June a penitent smile. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Oh, you don’t have to be.” June waved off the condolences. “I mean, I didn’t really know her.” She turned back to Alexei. Her hands fell into her lap. “Poor Theo. He must be beside himself.”

“Maybe,” Tati mumbled at the floor.

“So you found the body?” Alexei’s wide-eyed expression lacked real concern. “Did it look like she’d been murdered or like she’d jumped into the lake?”

The necklace of red welts flooded Nia’s vision. Whatever had happened to that girl, she hadn’t just drowned.

Alexei continued to stare at Nia, willing a juicy detail to fall from her parted lips. Nia closed her mouth. The dean wouldn’t want her “speculating.”

“I wouldn’t know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t get a good look.”

Alexei frowned. His brown eyes continued to beg for more information.

Nia shifted her view to Lydia. The little prima stood in the center of the room, folded like a pocketknife. Her hands lay flat on the floor, elbows bent. Her head rested by her shins. Lydia was certainly limber. A few feet away, just in front of Ms. V’s door, Aubrey sat in a Russian split. She pointed and flexed her toes as Joseph talked to her—or tried to. It was impossible to tell from Aubrey’s expression whether she was listening.

“You must have seen something,” Alexei said.

Nia returned her attention to the boy. “Why do you think it wasn’t an accident?”

“The girl you found, Lauren, had problems with an ex.” Alexei glanced sideways at June. “Everyone knows about it.”

“No, she didn’t.” June shook her head. “They always seemed so happy.”

Alexei chuckled. “Come on.”

“They were totally into each other, always kissing and holding hands, giggling.” June turned to the T twins for support. “Totally in love, right? Romeo and Juliet style.”

Tati and Talia each fidgeted with their feet, stroking their arches without really working them.

“You’re kidding, right?” Alexei said. “You didn’t see it? I thought everyone did.”

“See what?”

Alexei laughed. Talia glanced over her shoulder toward Ms. V’s shut door.

“What?” June asked again. She wasn’t even pretending to stretch anymore. “I was in China for the summer, sans Facebook.”

Talia spoke like she wanted the whole room to hear. “China, really? What were you doing?”

“Um, oh, improving my Mandarin. My parents think I have an American accent.”

Alexei touched June’s arm in mock flirtation. “Oh my God. You have to see it.”

The gossipy tone of the conversation made Nia uncomfortable. She cleared her throat, and Alexei’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Over the summer, Theo met up with a certain someone I won’t name right now. He made a video of him and this person being . . . amorous.” Alexei wagged his eyebrows. “He then texted said video to his buddy, which of course got forwarded to the whole crew team. Then the school. Then the world.” Alexei stifled a giggle. He elbowed June. “You can probably even search that shit in China.”

Nia frowned at the boy. A girl was dead and he joked as though he’d seen an embarrassing celebrity story on TMZ.

Talia rolled her eyes. “Some people can’t shut up about it, even when they should.”

“A sex tape?” June more mouthed the words than said them. “Theo’s not
that
type.”

“Add alcohol and every guy is that type,” Alexei said. “I always thought he was a jerk.”

“He’s always been nice to me.”

“Because you’re a pretty girl. He was never so nice to me.”

“I would have been, like, utterly devastated if I was Lauren,” Talia said. She dragged her lower lip beneath her top teeth. Sad eyes looked up at Nia. “Some people think she committed suicide after she found out that he cheated.”

“People jump off bridges for less,” Alexei said.

“Who was the tape with?” June whispered.

Alexei trapped his left tricep in a bent elbow and turned behind him, as if stretching his shoulder. Nia traced his gaze. He stared straight at Aubrey.

“Little Miss Perfect,” he chuckled. “In the flesh.”

N
ia limped down the hall toward her apartment. The pain that had nibbled at her heel during her demonstration of fouetté turns was now chomping on her swollen tendon. She shouldn’t have taken the long way home, but she’d wanted to avoid the lake.

Her fixation on the drowned girl was aggravating her injury. She felt anxious. Jittery. Tight. And the conversation in class had only made things worse. Rather than soften yesterday’s images, knowing the girl’s name had sharpened her mental pictures. The bluish face hiding behind her eyelids no longer seemed an out-of-focus photo from the nightly
news that had flickered into her real life. The face belonged to Lauren.

Nia hoped a long soak would soothe both her mind and body. She thought of the box of Epsom salt in her vanity while feeling for the key in her sweater pocket. As the metal jangled in the lock, she noticed a letter tacked to her door with a yellow pushpin. She examined the note. Wallace’s script monogram was stamped in the left-hand corner of the cream-colored card stock. She flipped over the paper to see words scrawled in blue ink:

Pain relief would have to wait. First period started at nine, following morning electives, which only some kids opted to take. There was a twenty-minute window between the end of dance class and the first academic lecture, enabling her students to change into their uniforms and head to the main campus. But the time had already expired thanks to Nia’s lumbering walk back to the dorms. She was late.

Nia hustled back down the stairs as fast as she could. Dean Stirk’s office sat above the registration building, across the courtyard surrounding the girls’ dorms and back up the hill to the main campus. She had never been inside, but she’d seen signs during move-in weekend when she’d collected her orientation packet.

The sun beat down on her bare neck like a broiler. She was baking in her sweater. Still, she didn’t remove her cotton pullover. The microfiber tank beneath hugged her body, and while form-fitting attire was appropriate for the studio, it wasn’t for a sit-down with the big boss.

By the time she reached the registration office, sweat beaded beneath the tight bun affixed, like a button, to the top of her head. It dripped behind her ear and on her forehead. Her underarms felt damp.

She dabbed at the perspiration on her face with her sweater sleeve. Nia regretted not bathing for the umpteenth time. An hour of dance instruction followed by a half hour of dragging a bum foot across campus in eighty-degree weather would make anyone sweat. Still, she doubted Stirk would give her appearance a pass. The woman took pains to look proper.

Nia entered the building and ascended a wide staircase that led to an open second floor. The architecture reminded her of a television courthouse. Greek columns framed a waist-high bronze banister, enabling visitors to look over the railing at the checkered tile below.

She scanned navy walls and white wainscoting for an office. Bright white double doors marked the center of the room. A bronze plaque mounted above them read Stirk’s full name and title: Martha Elayne Stirk, Dean of Students and Faculty, Principal of Academics.

A secretary’s desk stood outside the dean’s office. The accompanying chair sat empty, as did the blue upholstered seats pressed against the banister. Nia hesitated before knocking and then went ahead, rapping firmly on the door. She didn’t need to sit outside. She’d been summoned.

The knock reverberated in the high ceilings. A voice came from behind the closed doors. “It’s open.”

Nia stepped inside like a mouse peeking from a hole in the wall, unsure of what she’d find. The office looked like a formal living room. French blue walls. More wainscoting. A pair of linen chesterfield sofas flanked a dark blue Persian rug with a white-and-pink starburst pattern at its center. At
the far end of the room, Dean Stirk sat behind a masculine, mahogany desk.

The dean looked over the top of her frameless glasses. Her gray-and-blond bob shook around her cheekbones. “Ms. Washington. Good. My secretary delivered my note.”

The dean put down a pen atop an open book in front of her and gestured to one of two slipper chairs facing her desk.

“Please shut the door behind you.”

With the door closed, Nia realized how cold Stirk kept her office. Air conditioning blasted from vents in the floor and the ceiling. Her sweat turned icy against her skin. She pulled her sweater tighter around her chest and sat on the edge of the indicated chair.

The dean folded her hands atop her book. “You’re a new teacher here. So I wanted to make you aware of the school policies relevant to yesterday’s incident.”

Incident
. Was that what the dean was calling a student’s death?

“We here at Wallace have a duty, not only to individual students, but also to the well-being of the school community as a whole. As such, we must handle any issue involving law enforcement with the utmost caution and care.”

The dean paused, waiting for some kind of agreement. Nia nodded. “Of course.”

“Tragically, the young woman whom you discovered yesterday was a returning student. Lauren Turek was fifteen and would have been a sophomore this year. Her parents have been notified.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Stirk cleared her throat. “Yes. We all are very sorry for her loss and our sympathies are with her family.”

The dean removed her glasses and folded them on top of her desk. She leaned forward until her shoulders hovered
above the book. Her body language said the time for pleasantries had ended.

“The police have not yet determined the cause of Lauren’s death. We must take care not to speculate and unnecessarily alarm the student body or parents.”

Nia shifted uncomfortably, glad she’d kept quiet when Alexei had asked about Lauren’s body.

The dean cast another grave look across the desk. “Unfortunately, I am aware that Mr. Turek’s grief-stricken actions have spurred discussion of his daughter’s death as a homicide or a possible suicide. But police may yet determine that what occurred was a terrible, freak accident.”

The dean’s brow wrinkled. Her chin lowered. The expression indicated that the most serious part of the conversation was yet to come. Nia braced for a scolding.

“I understand that you saw marks on Lauren’s neck and that you believe they indicate she was strangled. However, we do not yet know if the body was damaged in the lake or if the marks were from some other, unrelated injury.”

The dean took a breath, allowing her words to sink in. “We have, of course, increased campus security and tightened all exit and entry points onto school grounds as a precaution. But we cannot have faculty, students, or their parents jumping to false conclusions. The assumption that Lauren was murdered would be, in all likelihood, incorrect and could lead to mass panic.”

Stirk eyed her. Nia picked up on her cue. “I understand.”

“We will notify the student body as soon as the police release a cause of death. Waiting prevents undue alarm, should Lauren’s death prove accidental or,” Stirk cleared her throat, “self-inflicted.”

The dean rubbed her forehead as though the whole speech had given her a massive headache. For a moment,
Nia thought that the woman might become emotional. But when Stirk held up her head again, her gray eyes looked just as dry as before.

“To be clear, we do not want to discuss anything that we saw or didn’t see. I am in communication with law enforcement, and the school will release statements when appropriate. Do you understand?”

The question sounded patronizing. Of course she understood. She had to shut up lest the school be unnecessarily held liable or suffer damage to its reputation for what might yet prove to be an accident.

Nia doubted Lauren’s death would be ruled anything but homicide. Though she didn’t know whether she’d seen thumbprints or rope burns on Lauren’s body, the placement of the marks right above the girl’s clavicle couldn’t have been caused by random abrasion. Stirk had to suspect as much as well.

The dean cleared her throat for the third time. The sound demanded a response.

“Yes. I won’t say anything.”

“Good. We appreciate your discretion. More information is not always better.” The dean gave a weak smile. She put her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. “The students will, naturally, wish to discuss a classmate’s death as the news circulates, particularly in the cafeteria, where they have the opportunity to socialize without teacher oversight. I am asking all four resident advisors to take shifts in the student dining hall during meal times today and tomorrow. We need to monitor conversation and make sure rumors don’t get out of hand.”

Stirk opened a drawer in her desk, withdrew a sheet of paper, and passed it to Nia. It featured a long grid, constructed in Microsoft Excel or some similar data analysis
program. In the first column were four names including her own: two female, two male. Time slots topped the subsequent columns.

“I took the liberty of blocking out the cafeteria schedule and assigning monitoring duties that did not interfere with teaching or extracurricular obligations.”

The kids ate three times a day. Breakfast was three hours long to accommodate the students’ varied morning schedules. Lunch was one hour. Dinner was two. The row with Nia’s name had the first hour of breakfast and the first half of lunch highlighted.

Nia didn’t like trading her morning stretching time for cafeteria duty. She needed to loosen up her heel before class to avoid damaging it during demonstrations. But she doubted it would be easy to switch shifts. Most faculty taught or coached at least one extracurricular.

“This is how the RAs earn that free housing.” The dean sighed. “You and your colleagues are our eyes and ears and, often, the first adults that students turn to for guidance. Breakfast is already over for today. Your shift can start at lunch.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

Stirk’s expression darkened, as though concerned by Nia’s response. “Remember, it’s our job to protect both the student body and this institution.”

The dean again waited for some kind of affirmation. Nia managed a nod. The gesture seemed to satisfy. Stirk reclaimed her pen and resumed reading the book on her desk. Conversation over.

Nia picked up her new schedule, rose from her seat, and exited. The implication of Stirk’s parting words was not lost on her. All the teachers and students were responsible for student safety. They had all failed at their collective job.

They would all need to help cover the school’s butt.