Dark Rooms (3 page)

Oh, those endless, bleached-out hours going over my story with Detective Ortiz. The stale air of that box of a room at the back of the station, the hard plastic of the chair, the can of Coke gone warm and flat from sitting out too long, me saying the same words in the same order again and again, telling Detective Ortiz everything Nica told me the day before, skipping only the part about the new guy—an omission for Jamie's sake, it would hurt him to know she'd moved on so fast—just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even my face was numb, and none of the talk mattering anyway because she was already dead dead dead.

Her sophomore year, Nica was named homecoming queen. The victory was a fluke. Not that she wasn't one of the prettiest girls in school. In fact, she was probably the prettiest. Which should've all but killed her chances. A word about Chandler: Chandler, as a school, thought it was too cool for school, too cool for a lot of things. The only way it would deign to participate in any of the traditional rah-rah teen rites of passage was ironically. And Nica, as it so happens, lost the vote. She came in a distant second to Quentin Graham, a Mississippi boy who showed up to class several days a month in a Chanel suit and pillbox hat. But the administration refused to recognize a male, no matter how chicly turned out, as a legitimate contender. (Refused, basically, to recognize the other meaning of the word
queen
.) And Nica won by default.

It was an utterly forgettable event in her life. She sat next to Mr. McFarlan, the assistant headmaster, wearing a crown—a Burger King one, borrowed for the occasion from Maddie's boyfriend, Ruben
Samuelson—for five minutes at morning chapel the day before alumni weekend. That was it. The only reason the title rates a mention is because it was a detail so seized upon by the media after she died. It put, I think, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on her loveliness, made it official. Officially poignant, too. And pretty soon it started to seem as if her full name actually was
Homecoming Queen Nica Baker
.

Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (Studies in American Literature: The Rise of the Supernatural, Ms. Laine, sophomore year), stated that, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” And Nica was not just dead, she was murdered. Raped, too. Her story thus offered up the most potent narrative combination known to man, everybody's favorite set of lurid extremes: sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, kiss kiss and bang bang. The public couldn't get enough.

Once Nica's identity was released, our house was besieged. TV news crews, journalists, and photographers were all camped out on our lawn, waiting for a whimper, a tear, a twisted feature—some scrap they could wolf down, some tasty little bite that would tide them over until the real meat came: a break in the case. Trespassing on private property was illegal, so the police set up a barricade, pushing the motley crew back, forcing it onto the sidewalk and street, which made its presence feel no less oppressive, and getting in and out of our driveway near impossible. I'd say the experience was surreal except I hate that word. It was surreal, though, the merciless intensity of those people calling out my name, my mom and dad's names, the flash cameras constantly going off, giving the scene the queasy, too-bright, side-tilted quality of a hallucination.

Mom, Dad, and I fought back the only way we knew how. By withholding. After that first day, the police pretty much left us alone. They were very polite, deferential almost, less because of who we were, I think, than because of what Chandler was, the influence it wielded in Hartford. And once they were done probing us, our stories and our
alibis, we returned to the house, retreated to our rooms to cry. Well, Mom and I to cry, Dad to I don't know what. His eyes were bone-dry, as if they were unable to weep or didn't see the point. But mostly we retreated to our rooms to wait. Eventually, we reasoned, boredom would set in or another sensational crime would be committed—a murder victim who was even younger than Nica, who was actually rich, not just by-association rich, who got violated more egregiously, more bloodily, more kinkily—and the restless pack would move on, leave us to grieve in peace.

Five days passed. Six days. A week. Then two weeks. And, still, the case was no closer to being solved. All the statistically likely guys—Dad, Jamie, Ruben, the two or three male students with a documented history of aggression toward female students, even several of the male teachers who were on campus that weekend—had been ruled out as suspects. Plus, my family was staying mum, giving up absolutely nothing. Sections of the crowd, I noticed, were starting to break off; there were fewer news vans parked along the curb. The strategy seemed, finally, to be working.

And then, Dad got careless.

It was three o'clock in the morning. The street was quiet, almost staged-looking, the houses that lined it resembling props on a movie set, all lit by a moon that was high and round and bright as a lamp, casting a soft golden glow. And Dad, convincing himself that all was as harmless as it appeared, decided to take the garbage out for Tuesday morning pickup.

From a window in Nica's room I watched him as he carried the bags to the curb, one over each shoulder, seeming to stagger under their weight, three or four pounds at the most. He'd just finished stuffing them into the blue plastic can, was standing under the streetlight, lid still in hand, eyes turned to the ground as if he were trying to remember where he was and how he got there, when a woman emerged from behind the Wheelers' hedges. She was older than any
of the media people I'd seen so far, and sadder, her soft brown eyes baggy, tired-looking, her camera-ready makeup smudged and starting to fade, ending abruptly at her jawline. Heavier, too, her bosomy flesh making her appear almost maternal.

“Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!” she said. “Do you have time to speak with us?” She was out of breath from running the ten or so yards across our lawn. It put funny spaces between her words. And her skirt had hiked up. I could see the control-top portion of her panty hose, her chubby thighs. I felt sorry for her.

Dad turned wearily, gave his back to her and the denim-shirted man with a camera trailing in her wake.

“It's been two weeks and the police still have no suspects,” she said. “Care to comment?”

Slowly he started making the trek to the front door.

“Do you think they're doing everything they can to find your daughter's killer?”

He kept walking, maintained his plodding pace, like he didn't even hear her. He was almost at the porch steps.

A little desperate now, “You want to know what I think? I don't think they are. I think they're too scared to conduct a real investigation. I think they're afraid to go after any of the kids at this school—your school, Mr. Baker, the school you and your wife have devoted your lives to—because they believe that if they do, the kids' fathers will come at them with a team of high-priced defense attorneys, make sure that the only jobs in law enforcement they'll be able to get after this case are at the mall.”

This time he heard her, and what she said stopped him cold. My dad's always been a gentle guy—mild, slow to anger, unconfrontational in the extreme, rarely yells and never swears. So it was something of a shock when I saw him do a sharp one-eighty, march back to where the reporter was standing. He was still holding the garbage lid, and now had it thrust out in front of him like it was a shield and he
was charging into battle. When he reached her, he shoved his face in hers. Said, “You want to know if I think one of these rich kids is getting away with murder?” She craned her neck to give herself room but managed to get the microphone in front of his mouth. “The answer is, yes, I do. Jamie Amory. My daughter dumped him months ago and he couldn't handle it, couldn't handle being said no to, so he decided to make her pay.”

“But Jamie Amory has an alibi,” she pointed out.

“His alibi's shit! He's shit! A rapist and a murderer!”

Hearing these words, the reporter's sympathetic cow-eyed expression vanished and she smiled. When she did, I saw her teeth, and my heart sank. They were small and sharp and inward-sloping: the teeth of a predator. The smile didn't last long, though. Was wiped off her face when Dad threw down the garbage lid, wrapped his fingers around her wrist.

“Shit!” he said, squeezing. “Do you hear me? Shit, shit, shit!”

She began to arch backward, a panicky look in her eye.

“Hey, pal,” the cameraman said, “hands to yourself, okay?”

Dad spun around. “Who are you calling
pal,
asshole?” And, letting go of the reporter's wrist, he swung out.

Unbelievably, he connected with the cameraman's jaw. There wasn't much force behind the punch. It probably didn't feel too nice, though, and, once the cameraman shook it off, he carefully placed his equipment on the ground and threw a punch of his own. He was a middle-aged guy and out of shape. Still, he had a good three inches and thirty pounds on Dad. But as he pitched forward his suede boot slipped on the grass, so that his punch ended up being even weaker and more off-target than Dad's. Until that moment, I'd thought all violence was agile and sure-footed, almost balletic-looking, as it was in the movies. I was surprised to see how awkward it really was, how clunky and no-rhythm. The two men, panting and grunting, taking time out from combat to bend at the waist, wheeze and suck air, exchanged
graceless blow after graceless blow until, finally, Dad fell on the sidewalk with a thud, not because the cameraman landed a KO, but because Dad took a wild overhand right that missed everything and lost his balance.

For a while he lay there on the asphalt, either resting or passed out with his eyes open. Whichever it was, he looked strangely at peace, his chest rising and falling gently. Then the cameraman leaned over to touch him, make sure he was okay, and he let loose with a howl, a gross moan so dense with pain and rage and sorrow that it just stopped time.

I yanked the window curtain from inside my cheek, belatedly aware that I'd been chewing the fabric. I ran downstairs and out the door, pulled Dad away from the cameraman in whose arms he was now sobbing, and brought him into the house.

Dad cried for five hours straight. Cried until his eyes dried out and he wasn't crying tears anymore. Cried until Mom turned on the TV to cover up the ragged, torn-off sounds he was making, after which he was too shocked to cry. There he was on the local morning news, cheeks clogged with blood, mouth frothy with saliva, eyeballs like the kind you buy in a gag shop, calling Jamie Amory a rapist and murderer. Mom and I exchanged sleepless, dread-filled glances. I flashed on a T-shirt that Ruben once wore to class, was ordered to go back to his dorm room and change. Scrawled across the chest in sky-blue letters was the phrase
SHIT, MEET FAN
.

Only for Dad it never got the chance to because later that morning Manny Flores was discovered in his room by a dorm monitor after he'd missed his first and second period classes. He was hanging from a beam, a ripped-up bedsheet cinched around his neck. Not quite hanging, actually. His room was in the attic, and the ceiling was sloped, making it impossible for his feet not to touch the ground. So he
improvised, thrusting his body forward, cutting off his air supply. At any point he could have stopped the strangulation by simply standing up. It was an agonizing—and agonizingly slow—way to die, which means he must have wanted to very badly. Lividity indicated that his death occurred between nine and eleven
P.M.
, several hours before Dad's run-in with the reporter.

Manny was a day student who'd been living in Endicott House since Christmas when his mother ran off with her boyfriend, basically dumping him on the school's doorstep. I didn't know him. Not many people at Chandler did. He kept to himself, didn't play sports or participate in any extracurricular activities. No gun was found in his room, but, as I said, he was a day student, a local, from the kind of neighborhood where getting your hands on a .22 wasn't a big deal. And since Chandler was less than half a mile from the Connecticut River, getting a .22 off your hands wasn't a big deal either.

The papers didn't print his suicide note, but the police showed it to my family as a courtesy. Here's what it boiled down to: he loved Nica, Nica didn't love him. Unrequited affection, the oldest one in the book. As an explanation it was both lucid and murky, coherent and incomprehensible, profound and banal. I wished he hadn't said anything at all.

The whole thing went to a fast fade from there. The publicity had already hurt Chandler. Several parents, feeling the environment unsafe, had insisted on yanking their kids out, midsemester or not. Something like twenty percent of incoming freshmen had rescinded their acceptances. The school wanted the case closed as quickly as possible. The police couldn't have been more cooperative. And just like that, it was all over. “Justice was served” when “confessed murderer” of “homecoming queen Nica Baker” acted as his own “judge, jury, and executioner.”

Sound of two hands slapping dust off each other. Done and done.

When I returned to Chandler, everyone was nice to me: students and teachers, administrators and maintenance workers. And all day long I sat in class, in the dining hall, in the library, hunched under that niceness, cramped and stiff. I expected things to be easier, or at least more natural, with Jamie, Maddie, and Ruben, but they weren't. The three of them rallied behind me, made a point almost of claiming me, of showing everybody at school that nothing had changed, that we were still best friends, though we'd only ever been sort-of friends, me never quite able to fit in or keep up. They loyally sat with me at lunch, walked with me to class, saved me a seat in the snack bar. Yet when we were alone, there was a tension, a hostility even—all of us trying to sound polite, but with an edge, my edge just as sharp as theirs—and it surprised me because I didn't know what it was or where it was coming from.