Dark Turns (7 page)

T
he rain waited behind an ashen curtain. Nia considered escape options. The path beside the lake was quickest, but she would have to pass Lauren’s deathbed in the near dark. The lake would look like a black mirror, reflecting the blue girl in her nightmares.

She reassured herself that the long way made more sense. If it started to pour, she could take shelter in the boys’ dormitory or the school store.

Nia hurried down the path. Droplets smacked the base of her neck. She increased her speed to a jog, but her soft-soled shoes couldn’t keep pace. They slipped on the wet brick path. Her Achilles shivered. Her ankle wobbled. She slowed to a walk.

Just as the boys’ quadrangle emerged beyond the hill, thunder cracked open the sky. Curtains of rain unrolled onto her. Water poured from her forehead and stuck on her eyelashes, clouding her vision. Her heels skidded on the walk. She yanked off her soggy leather shoes and ran.

The boys’ residences loomed like a mirage. She scanned the gothic structure for an archway or a balcony, some overhang capable of shielding the worst of the rain. A wall of blurred gray stone stood in front of her. She fumbled toward the entrance. The rain couldn’t keep up like this for long. She needed someplace dry to stand for a few minutes, lest she slip and do more damage to her injured tendon.

Nia stumbled up the steps and dug her free hand into her sweater pocket for her photo keycard. Wet fabric clung to her fingers as she pulled the slick plastic tag into the open. She pressed it against the black keypad and slammed her weight against the entrance. The door didn’t even jostle in the frame. No click or beep sounded. She pressed her key to the pad again. Still nothing.

Water overwhelmed the fabric band holding her hair in place. The bun tumbled loose. Strands stuck to the side of her face. Why wasn’t her keycard working? Was it too wet?

She shoved her shoes beneath her armpit to free both hands. She rubbed the plastic on the inside of her soaked sweater and pressed it to the keypad again. No beep. She wiped the back of her hand against her eyes to better see the magnetic strip. It was just like the one in the girls’ dorm: tap to unlock. Why wasn’t it working?

The door clicked open. Peter stood in the frame. His muscled arms swelled from a fitted white T-shirt. He pulled her inside.

“Wow. You really got caught in it.”

Water dripped from her clothing onto the stone floor. “I didn’t check the forecast this morning. I thought I could make it to the school store before it really came down. Then I tried to get in here, but my keycard didn’t work—”

“Yours won’t open the boys’ residences.”

She peeled the sweater from her arms. “Why?”

“Safety precaution. Boys’ cards don’t open the girls’ residences and vice versa. The school thinks it cuts down on inappropriate fraternizing.” He chuckled. “It doesn’t do much, but I guess it makes the parents feel better.”

Nia draped the sopping sweater over her slick forearm. The rain had soaked through to the tank top underneath. Peter’s eyes fell upon her chest. The wet tank clung to her breasts. She folded her arms over her top, hiding the nipples that the cold rain had called to attention.

His gaze fled to her bare feet. “I’ll get you a towel. Follow me.”

She walked down the dim hallway. Her wet toes squeaked on the cold stone floor. “But I’m a teacher. Shouldn’t my card work?”

“The rule extends to teachers. My card won’t open the girls’ residences.”

He pushed a door open. Light poured from the room into the dim hallway. “It’s in case any perverts make it through the interview process. There was that case at Granger a couple years back. A gym teacher—volleyball coach, I think—got caught with a sixteen-year-old girl. Kids got pulled. The girl’s parents sued. That school still hasn’t recovered.”

He held the door open. She stepped onto a mat just inside the doorway. The rough fabric scratched the soles of her exposed feet. More droplets ran down her legs onto the burlap.

The door shut behind her. Peter crossed the dark wood floor to another door. He’d changed out of the business
casual outfit he’d worn at breakfast into basketball shorts and a Wallace T-shirt.

He ducked into the other room and then emerged with a folded white towel in his palm. Nia dropped her shoes on the welcome mat and extended her forearms, careful to keep her dripping body centered on the two-foot square beneath her bare feet.

“Thank you.” She pressed the terrycloth to her face, rubbing her eyes. Her cheeks dry, she shook open the towel to wipe down her arms and legs. Finally, she squeezed the damp rag around the hair clinging to her exposed shoulders.

“You came from the gym?” she asked.

“I was thinking of heading there before it started to pour.”

He looked out his window as he spoke, perhaps unwilling to watch her drag the towel across the slick cleavage spilling from her tank. His politeness pleased and embarrassed her. She wrapped the damp towel around her like a tube dress, covering her breasts.

“I teach that poetry elective I mentioned on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I don’t teach again until third period.” Peter’s eyes returned to her face as he spoke. “I find it’s easier to go work out when I’m already up.”

The weight of the wetness pulled the towel down her torso. She fought it up. “I only teach during the morning elective period and on Sundays, but I have choreography meetings every other evening this week. When we start rehearsing for the fall performance, I’ll get some more after-school hours.”

“I think that towel’s had it. Let me grab you another one.” He dipped back into the bathroom.

Peter’s studio had the same layout as her dorm, but the décor was far richer. A tufted-leather sectional separated the living area from the rest of the apartment. A long, wood
coffee table sat in front of it. Several books lay on the surface. She caught the title of the top one:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. To the right of the couch, a pair of matching bookcases reached toward the ceiling. Volumes filled each shelf. She could just see the bed to the left. It was at least double the size of the extralong twin that came with her room.

He strode from the bathroom with a thick white towel. “I found this. Not just washed, but not just used.” He handed it to her. “I haven’t gotten around to the laundry yet.”

She shed the damp cloth and wrapped the new one around her torso. The dry, fluffy fabric drew the chill from her skin.

“Sorry to wash up on your doorstep like a drowned rat.”

She regretted the adjective as soon as it slipped out of her mouth. She couldn’t get Lauren out of her head.

“Don’t mention it.” He collected the used towel and tossed it over the back of the couch, apparently unconcerned about staining the leather.

“Do you want some tea? Warm up your insides?”

The scene outside Peter’s window appeared dark and dashed, like a fuzzy television picture. She didn’t want to go back out there, especially not when an attractive, apparently educated man was offering her tea in a comfortable, dry apartment. But the wet hair sticking to her face and her towel dress made her want to hide.

“I’ve put you out enough already.”

“Not at all. I was just going to make some tea for myself.” He walked into the kitchen. “The rain won’t let up for a bit. Why don’t you sit?”

Nia stepped onto the hardwood. “Thanks a lot. I’m sorry for showing up like this.”

“Stop apologizing. Really.”

Water clinked into a metal kettle. He pulled two mugs from the cabinet. Etched crystal glasses lined the shelf above the school-issue coffee cups.

She perched on the edge of the couch, folding her knees at a ninety-degree angle to minimize contact between her wet pants and the leather.

“Your place is really nice.”

“Well, it’s not exactly my place. But it’s my furniture—whatever I could fit.”

“You have good taste.”

“Yeah, well . . .” He placed the mugs on the counter and joined her on the sectional, several cushions away. He crossed his foot over his knee. His exposed calf muscles looked long and bowed. Swimmer’s legs. Nia traced the curve of his leg to the firm thigh, visible through the wide shorts.

Peter brushed the hair from beside his eyes. The gray weather had turned them an oceanic blue. He sipped his tea.

The silence unnerved her. Nia struggled to come up with some other compliment to pay for the hospitality. “Well, your apartment looks torn from a design magazine.”

His foot jiggled against his knee. “My wife bought this stuff. She has expensive taste and she had an expensive decorator.”

Of course he was married. Her luck with men demanded that he be somehow unavailable. Everyone that sparked her interest was either married, gay, or too young to get serious.

“Oh. Well, your wife has good taste, then.”

Peter’s nose wrinkled as if blasted by an offensive odor. “I meant ex-wife. Ex. Ex. Ex. We divorced over a year ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Peter tucked away the blond strands that had fallen into his face. “We weren’t right for each other. I met her when I still worked on Wall Street.”

The kettle whistled, a soft hiss like a distant train. It grew louder as Peter walked into the kitchen. “She came from money.” He yelled to be heard above the spitting kettle. “Her dad owned a hedge fund. I think she thought I would follow in his footsteps.”

“You didn’t want to?”

“No way.” He transferred the kettle to a cool burner and then opened a cabinet. “I’ve got lemon, chamomile, Earl Gray.” He smiled over his shoulder. “And plenty more.”

“Lemon would be wonderful. Thank you.”

He opened a yellow box and dropped a tea bag in each mug. Steam rose from the cups as he poured. He returned to the couch, a school mug in each hand. He put one on the coffee table in front of her before resuming his seat. She claimed it by the handle and blew away the wisps of white curling above the cup.

“What did you do on Wall Street?”

“Waste my best years.” He sipped the drink.

Nia wanted more detail. But her questions had imposed enough. Guests—particularly uninvited, drippy ones—weren’t supposed to give their hosts the third degree. She dipped her chin into the steam rising from the mug.

Peter sighed. “I always wanted to be a writer. I even got an MFA. But that’s worth zilch in New York, and grad school wasn’t cheap. So I took a job as an entry-level analyst, with the idea of paying the college loans off in a couple years and returning to writing. Flash forward nearly a decade and I’m married to a socialite, making a ton of money, and completely miserable.”

Peter leaned back into the couch. His foot dangled lazily from his knee. He seemed completely relaxed, as if he’d explained many times how he ended up thirtysomething and bunking in high school dorms.

Nia felt uncomfortable enough for the both of them. She hated that her presence in his room made him feel the need to explain his choices. She wasn’t anyone to judge.

“So, long story short, I quit four years ago, took a job here as an English teacher, and finished up a novel that I had started in grad school.”

“Good for you. And I understand all about chasing dreams.” She raised her mug in a show of camaraderie. “I’ve spent my whole life chasing a career that usually ends by forty.”

“I wish my wife had understood that. At first, I think she thought it was romantic. She had this idea of me becoming famous. We got a house in the country, which she furnished to fit Hemingway. But, a couple years later, as the rejections flowed in and the savings dwindled, she realized she didn’t want to be the wife of a high school English teacher, and she went back to her family.”

He gestured with his mug. “We sold the house at a loss, and I got the furniture as a consolation prize.”

Nia took a long sip. What could she say to that story?
Sorry? You’re better off without her? Thanks for the tea?

Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not bitter. I get it. I changed the game on her. And I’m happy here. I like teaching English and living on a campus and dreaming up imaginary people.”

“Sounds like a nice life.”

“So how about you? What brings a big-city ballerina here?”

Nia shrugged. “A downpour.”

He raised his eyebrows. His hospitality and honesty demanded a real answer. But she didn’t want to delve into the two-pronged reason that chased her to Wallace.

“I danced with a traveling company all last year. I overexerted myself a bit and my foot needs some rest and
rehabilitation. The company offered health insurance that I couldn’t afford. Wallace has a pretty reasonable policy, even for me.”

He raised his mug as if offering cheers for the school’s medical plan.

“Plus, I thought it might be nice to get a feel for teaching. Good dancers end up teaching at prominent schools, if they’re lucky.”

Peter reached his cup out toward her. She brought it down from her mouth. Ceramic clinked against ceramic. Peter flashed a naughty grin. “Here’s to getting lucky.”

D
ry ringlets framed Nia’s face. Her mug rested on the coffee table, long emptied of its contents. Peter had refilled it twice. When he last handed her the tea, he had settled closer than before, choosing the neighboring cushion rather than the bottom stroke of the L-shaped sectional.

Conversation had turned to classes and students. Peter discussed the work of several budding writers, beaming like a father. When you loved teaching, pride must stem from nurturing others.

He rolled his mug between his palms as he spoke. His hands were always in motion: pouring, patting, picking up, passing. His hairstyle provided a constant excuse for fussing with the long, slicked-back strands that continually
broke free from his crown. She liked that his hands fluttered about. It allowed her eyes to follow them to different body parts: high cheekbones, broad shoulders, defined forearms.

“Theo had a poem accepted to a literary magazine just last month. I sent it in for him.”

The arrest had been the elephant in the room during the conversation. Nia had avoided any mention of the morning, not wanting to upset her host. But now that Peter had brought Theo up, it seemed callous
not
to discuss the case.

“Have you spoken to him since . . .”

“Stirk doesn’t want me reaching out.” He bit his bottom lip and shrugged. “But his father says he’s alright. All they have on him is some text message and a trumped-up motive about losing it because Lauren didn’t want him back. I guess he was by himself on Saturday for a few hours too, so the police are claiming he doesn’t have an alibi.”

Would a lovesick poet kill his ex-girlfriend for refusing him? It didn’t seem likely. But it did seem possible that Peter was romanticizing a favorite pupil. Everyone wanted to think the best of those they’d spent time with, if for no other reason than to excuse their own lack of observation. Every serial killer had some neighbor willing to volunteer as a character witness.
Nicest guy. Loved barbequing. Sports. A little quiet but in a pleasant way. No one could ever have believed he kidnapped young women and held them in his basement.

Nia never bought that nobody actually suspected. People sensed evil. Most were simply too hell-bent on politeness to dig it out.

“If you ask me,” Peter continued, “the police need to be looking for some weirdo in the area that might have sneaked onto campus during move-in madness.”

Peter seemed so sure Theo wasn’t guilty. But if rumors of the sex tape were true, then Theo couldn’t just be the nice, sensitive student that Peter knew. The kid had sent around an intimate video, presumably without his partner’s permission. That didn’t show much respect for women—or, at least, for Aubrey.

“Did you see him with Lauren much?”

Peter seemed to withdraw, as though her question had created a wall between them. Nia wanted to bring him back with some compliment or comment about the weather, but she also wanted to know what happened to the girl she had discovered.

He cleared his throat. “They were together all the time last year. I would see them outside on the quad holding hands and talking.”

Nia looked out Peter’s window. The sky had spent its fury, and sunlight was breaking through. Droplets still tapped the walk, but there were too few to tell whether they shook from the trees. She imagined Lauren alive, sitting on an iron bench beneath the sagging willow at the end of the courtyard, cuddling with the boy Nia had sat next to just the day before. Theo was a big kid with large rowing arms. Lauren had looked slight and young, every bit fifteen. Physically, he could have killed her. But mentally?

“I think he really liked her,” Peter continued. “But I don’t think that he loved her intensely in any crime-of-passion way. Theo told me that she was really religious. I think that was basically code for she wouldn’t sleep with him.”

“She was fifteen.”

He threw up his hands like a yielding soldier. “I’m not saying she should have done anything. But Theo’s a popular kid, and I guess other girls offered. It sounded like some of
the older rowers had ribbed him pretty hard last year about being a virgin.”

Nia sighed. “High school. I wouldn’t repeat it.”

Relief spread across Peter’s face. “I thought it would’ve been easy for a beautiful dancer. It’s the shy guys that get the worst of it.”

“Girls are worse than boys with bullying. They’re just subtle about it. They make pointed comments about weight or clothes. They don’t invite you to birthday parties or they tease you about your parents.”

“You were bullied?”

Nia shrugged. The truth was yes, but she’d had bigger problems, like trying to afford toe shoes. The snide comments from fellow ballerinas had never been more than petty annoyances.

“I’m surprised a big kid like Theo would be bullied.”

Peter picked up his mug and walked into the kitchen. “Bullied isn’t the right word. Just teased, I guess.” He placed the mug into the sink. “Nothing that would have made him angry enough to hurt Lauren. I think he was just done waiting for her and broke it off. He said he’d been seeing another girl.”

Aubrey? The girl was a teenager’s fantasy: classically beautiful, smart, and confident, with a contortionist’s abilities and an aggressive sexual presence. Any horny high school kid would have traded in the good girl for a chance with the badass ballerina.

“Was the other girl a student?”

Peter pushed out his hands as though directing a car to stop. “I don’t ask names. It was uncomfortable that he got into so much detail in the first place.”

He filled his mug beneath the faucet and then dumped it back into the sink. Doing the dishes was a clear sign that the
party was over. She unwrapped the towel. “Thank you for helping me warm up and dry off.”

Peter’s eyes darted to her cleavage, then to her face. “Anytime. Are you dry? Do you need a shirt or anything?”

She held out the towel to him. “If I leave in your shirt, the boys’ quad will have something new to talk about.”

Peter crossed the room to take the towel from her. “I can handle teasing.”

“I’ll change when I get back.”

“I’ve enjoyed talking with you. Maybe we can do it again? Trade the tea mugs for some food and drink?”

Nerves tingled through her body. Peter was attractive and interesting. Leaving Wall Street for a greater passion was admirable. But should she date a coworker? What if it ended badly?

“We can go to Siwanoy. It’s an Indian reservation just fifteen minutes outside of campus.” A charming grin crinkled his blue eyes. “They have a casino with a nice restaurant. No one will see us.”

Her body began to answer for her, nodding along to his words.

“Great,” he said. “How about tomorrow, around seven?”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll pick you up at your place.”