Old School Bones (18 page)

SHE’S sitting at a table in the food court of the Hyannis Mall outside the Barnes & Noble. Been waiting for an hour when she sees him appear around a corner, search the crowd for her. She almost doesn’t recognize him at first in the blue, three-piece suit, starched white shirt, gold tie. Fresh from meetings with Lou Votolatto and the U.S. attorney who will be prosecuting Ronnie. And she can’t help herself. She gets up from her plate of shrimp fried rice and runs to him. Throws herself into his arms. Kisses his jaw, his cheeks.

“Thank god,” she hears herself say three times. Then, “I feel like I’m drowning.”

He holds her, lets her float against his chest. Says don’t worry. Everything is going to be alright. Lou has convinced the D.A. that Ronnie could be telling the truth, that he was set up with the brick of coke. An anonymous caller dropped a dime on Ronnie. Twice. Maybe someone who wants to create a distraction … or get even.

She’s still holding onto him, breathing deep. “So now what?”

Everything with Ronnie is all set. The U.S. attorney has agreed to a continuance. She won’t set a trial date at Ronnie’s arraignment tomorrow in Boston. And bail’s reduced to $20,000.

“I’ve already contacted a bondsman I know.”

“Ronnie’s going to be out tomorrow?” She lets go of him, stares around at the food court, the corridors of the mall, the shoppers. As if she’s seeing everything for the first time. This culture that has hijacked the Cape from the People of the First Light.

“We got lucky. The U.S. attorney on the case is new to the district. She has no history with me.”

“So now what?” She takes his hand, leads him into the bookstore, totally forgetting her plate of noodles.

“Did you get that list of names of the members of Club Tropical from Gracie?”

“Yeah, but I’ve been so distracted that.” She is not looking for books, really. Just suddenly has this urge to be somewhere with this man where they are not such a spectacle. Not Pocahontas in a Disney mall. Somewhere that feels private. Safe.

“I forwarded the list to Lou.”

“So?”

“There’s a guy named Thomas Merriweather on there. I should have recognized him. He got Lou’s attention right away.”

“Who?”

“Merriweather’s a judge.”

“Really?”

“Middlesex Country Superior Court.”

She drops his hand, turns to face him. For the second time in five minutes, she feels dazed. The lights in this bookstore way too bright. Suddenly she hugs him to her chest. Wishes she could just take him back to the bait shack … and make like seals.

“I should be happy, right? Why do I still feel like I’m being sucked down by a whirlpool, Michael?”

Lou Votolatto is walking with Michael on the seaside promenade in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel, their trench coats flapping in the early April breeze. Ronnie Patterson’s arraignment over. Water Bear released on bail. His weeping sister has dragged herself off for yet another required audience with her headmaster.

The defense attorney and the cop are heading from the Moakley federal courthouse toward the North End. Lou’s niece Adela has a bistro that serves up some wicked good lasagna. A little Compari on the rocks, too.

“Your Chinese sidekick. Amazing kid, huh?”

“A bloodhound. She calls herself Ninja Girl.”

“She already knows shit the FBI never had a clue about in the Magic Airplane case. Merriweather’s not the only heavy hitter on that list is he?”

“Not a chance.”

Gracie hacked into the T-C alumni files last night. Turns out everyone on the list graduated in 1975. Back then Marcus Snyder was a nerdy Jewish boy from the Philadelphia Main Line, nicknamed “Brainiac” in the yearbook. Now he’s a neurosurgeon with a house and office on Beacon Hill. His daughter Rebecca is an eleventh grader at the school.

“This Jason Su. A venture capitalist?”

“Has a house in Back Bay. Summer place on the Vineyard.”

“A muckity muck.”

“Last year Merriweather got the Massachusetts Bar Association’s lifetime achievement award or something. Like African-American scholarship kid from Roxbury makes good and scores a house in Brookline.”

“Jean-Claude Rausche?”

“A sculptor in Provincetown. Never married. Gracie thinks he’s probably gay.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What?”

“A bunch of things.”

“Like?”

“Like what these guys had in common back in the Seventies? They come from different planets.”

“Didn’t you say this Club Tropical was some sort of short-lived rebel entity? These guys had a feud with one of those other secret societies?”

“Red Tooth.”

“That one. You said the headmaster, the Singleton boys and their old man, whose some big deal on the faculty, are all part of that operation.”

“You make it sound like we’re talking about gangs here.”

“Aren’t we?”

“More like just a bunch of Harry Potter hocus pocus.”

“But two kids are dead. And you and your little Justice-for-Liberty-Baker cabal are up to your eyeballs in nasty secrets some powerful people clearly do not care to share.”

“What are you suggesting we do?”

“Don’t start that
we
shit again.”

“Seriously.”

“Have you ever thought about moving to a little island in the tropics?”

The night scatters stars on her face. The beach a pale sugar.

He feels her arms tightening around his back. Holding him against her. The African body. Slippery. Tasting of salt, gin. A basket of limes. Her breath on his neck. Bare hips tugging against his.

Jesus Cristo.
Nipples hard against his chest.

“THAT’S it, Dr. Patterson. We are through here. School reopens tomorrow … and you will not be on board.” Malcolm Sufridge rises from the chair behind his mammoth desk, a smug smile on his thin lips. “The students and faculty will be told that you have been granted a leave of absence for personal reasons.”

“But you have no grounds. You …”

He says that if her personal effects are not out of her office and apartment by the end of the day, he will have a moving company pack them, put them in storage first thing tomorrow morning. At her expense.

She leaves her seat, stands up. As if she cannot help herself. As if her body is submitting as Bumbledork herds her out of his inner sanctum before she infects the place. Before she stains the butternut paneling, the trophies of football victories over Andover, Exeter. Splinters a pair of rowing oars crossed over the fireplace. Shatters the porcelain vases stolen from Chinese emperors by Yankee merchant captains in the nineteenth century.

And Danny. Standing there like a statue. Her advocate, friend. The woman she tried to love. With her fucking clipboard cradled in her arm. Saying nothing. Why?

Screw it,
she tells herself.
Why would a footloose and soul-torn Indian girl want to be a part of such an artificial, white, male-dominated, privileged world? Take your school, Bumbledork, and your secret societies. Shove ‘em! You sterile, priggish, Anglo piece of raccoon shit!

But then a calmer voice in her head reminds her that like it or not, some of her people are white, too. And there are a lot of good students and teachers in this school. That the Great Spirit, her own
manitous
and
tcipai,
have chosen her for vanguard duty. To stand up with other minority people to claim their places at the academic table. Seats on the best school buses. The freedom buses. She thinks schools like this, with all of their intellectual, historical, cultural, financial resources, must be brought—by hook or by crook—to acknowledge, respect and embrace diversity in all its forms. Not just by admitting token students of color or creating a titled position for a minority faculty member.

T-C and all schools like it have to become truly safe and nurturing for girls like Liberty Baker … Or they must be exposed for criminal neglect! Or worse.

“I said we’re finished here, Dr. Patterson. Now if you’ll excuse me …”

A knife scrapes the insides of her eyelids. “No … No, Dr. Sufridge! I will not excuse you. I know there’s blood on your hands, and my lawyer will—”

“Out! Get out! I’ll show you blood. You impudent, little …”

Strumpet, slut, squaw, nigger whore.
She knows he wants to call her these names. Just barely catches himself. His face flushes in odd, rosy blotches. He grits his teeth. The jowls beneath the corners of his mouth shudder, as he lurches around the desk, stalking her.

She’s reaching for a weapon to defend herself, the geode on Bumbledork’s coffee table, when Denise Pasteur suddenly comes alive.

Steps between the headmaster and the ex-director of minority affairs, takes her by the arm.

“You can’t fight this here, Awasha. Please … come with me. Let me help you find your balance. Maybe this is for the best. You can get another job in the blink of an eye, and he’s offering you a pretty sweet deal if you … Please …? For me? Let’s go.”

She knows what Danny’s trying to tell her. A year’s salary and a first-rate recommendation is quite an inducement to just fucking walk on this whole dirty charade. And she knows that Danny is trying to apologize, wants her back.

But all she can think about is how warm it felt when Michael held her. And how cold it must be for Liberty, dead in the dark earth.

“Denise!” Bumbledork’s voice cracks. “Must I call security? Or can you handle—”

“Come on, honey!” Danny takes her left hand between long, dry fingers.

She closes her eyes, lies, “OK.”

3:47 a.m. The wee hours of April tenth. The night before T-C reopens for spring term classes. A night so still and prematurely warm that Gracie has left her window open.

She half wakes in her new dorm, a single room at the end of a first floor hall, when she hears a soft chatter as the window sash rises. Smells something like jasmine. Or maybe a more manly spice.

Her eyes are not yet open, the comforter pulled solidly over her whole body and head, when the first blow strikes her with a thud. Across her chest, her ribs. The second grazes her head. Someone’s taking a bat to her. Blood seeps from her hairline, heading across her cheek to the corner of her mouth. Her tongue tastes the salt, the stickiness. She flails her arms, tries to throw off the covers as she leaps from her bed. And screams.

But almost no noise comes out. A strong hand is cramming a sock in her mouth, wrapping her lips, her eyes, in duct tape.

“This is just a warning, you little bitch.” A voice—distant, garbled, hoarse. “Go home! Or you die.”

By the time she tears the tape off her eyes, the room is empty. The only noise, the soft hum and chirp of her cell phone lying on her desk, signaling a missed call.

She presses a pillow to the side of her head, trying to stop the bleeding. Expecting that any second the pain will drive a spike through her brain and set her howling.

But the spike never comes, just a numbness, an odd vacancy of thought, that leaves her staring at the blinking light on her phone for who knows how long. When she finally gets off her bed, walks to the desk, flips open her phone, she sees that the missed call is from Doc P.

She turns on her phone, accesses the message.

Gracie—get out of that place. Now!!!!!!!!! Call Michael. We need help. He’ll know what to do. Hurry …

She hears a little pop. Message ended.

HE doesn’t remember even a minute of his drive north from Nu Bej. Doesn’t recall the jeep coming out of a sharp turn in a four-wheel drift, skidding, just missing two pedestrians, hitting a curb in front of the Braintree T-station. He only remembers the words of Gracie’s call echoing in his head during it all.

Michael. Doc P’s gone again. They fired her … and someone just beat the living shit out of me!

Now here she is in her Red Army coat and Doc Martens, throwing her backpack and two huge suitcases in the rear of the jeep even before he can get out of the driver’s seat. Then she is hugging him, pressing him against the fender. Her face fracturing into sobs. She flinches when he forgets about her head wound and strokes her hair. Dyed back to its natural black. Caked with blood.

Someone honks a horn, tells him enough with blocking traffic. Get a move on it, lover boy.

She releases him. “Fuck off!” Shoots the bird with both hands at the honker, her forearms low as if ready to neuter somebody. Ninja Girl.

“Let’s get out of here.” He’s glad to be free of her arms. This is not like hugging Awasha. Gracie is dangerous. A wild child with the body of a woman. Taller, even more curves, than her mentor.

She jumps in through his door, scrambles over the shifter. “I’m running away, Michael.” Her voice suddenly determined, giddy.

“You want to tell me where we’re going?”

“We’ve got to find Doc P. I think she could be in trouble!”

“You’re hurt,” he says. “First, we have to get you to a doctor. We need to contact your parents before the school does … so your folks don’t have a melt-down.”

“Not now. Listen. I heard this pop and then her phone just went dead.”

“She got fired?”

The news was all over school last night. Kevin said Bumbledork busted her for having an inappropriate relationship with a student.

“Her? Who?”

“Me.”

“What?”

“Exactly. Like Bumbledork is trying to make something out of our being stuck in that sauna together. Fuck, Michael. Nothing happened, you know?”

“None of my business.”

“Yeah it is. I know you guys hooked up. You want to hear about the sauna? It was kind of weird. But we never—”

“Cristo,
Gracie.”

“I mean she’s quite fit and all. Like everybody thinks she’s a hottie. But you’re a hottie too. And with her and me it’s all about the—”

He slams on the brakes, pulls over to the side of the highway.

“Jesus, listen to me, will you? I’m not your therapist or your big brother. We’re not going down this road. I really don’t want to hear about that stuff.”

“I make you nervous? Come on, Michael, you must think about sex. I mean—”

“Really! Have you no filter on what you say?”

She throws her head back, closes her eyes, squeezes her hands between her thighs. “I’m sorry … Sorry, OK? We just have to find her. She could be hurt. And she could be almost anywhere.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s scared. Threatened. And something happened to her cell phone … or she’s afraid to talk on it. Maybe she thinks someone is listening.”

“She said you would know what to do.”

“Maybe. But I think we should take you to a doctor first.”

“You want me to tell you about the sauna?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go find Doc P before someone beats on her too.”

“It’s a bit of a hike.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Huh?”

“We have to take a boat.”

“No shit?”

“Call your parents. Tell them why you left school. Tell them you’re safe. Tell them you are coming home.”

She coughs. “You mean you don’t want to know about the laundry tag I found?”