Special Topics in Calamity Physics (59 page)

"That's breaking news," I interrupted. (I couldn't help myself; I was Dad's daughter and thus prone to blowing the whistle on Hypocrisy and Double-Talk. ) "Last I heard, you thought she was responsible for estranging you from mint chocolate chip ice cream. You were also worried she was a member of the Manson Family."

Jade looked so enraged, I wondered if she was going to fling me to the linoleum and rip out my eyes. Instead, her lips shrunk and she turned the color of gazpacho. She spoke in pointy little words: "If you're so dumb that you can't understand why we're upset beyond all possible
belief,
I'm not having this conversation. You don't even know what we went through. Charles went out of his mind and fell off a
cliff.
Lu and Nigel were hysterical. Even Milton broke down.
I
was the one who hauled everyone to safety, but I'm still traumatized by the experience. We thought we were going to die, like those people in the movie when they're stuck in the Alps and forced to eat each other."

"Alive.
Before it was a movie, it was a book."

Her eyes widened. "You think this is a joke? Don't you
get
it?"

She waited, but I
didn't
get it—I really didn't.

"Whatever," she said. "Stop calling my house. It's annoying for my mother to have to talk to you and give you excuses."

She leaned down and picked up her bag, heaving it up onto her shoulder. Primly she smoothed back her hair, displaying the self-consciousness of the Ones Making an Exit; she was well aware that a great deal of Exiting had been done before her, for millions of years and millions of different reasons, and now it was her turn and she wanted to do a decent job. With a prim smile on her face, she picked up
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
and
How to Write a Poem,
took great pains to tuck them neatly into her bag. She sniffed, pressed her black sweater over her waist (as if she'd just completed a first round of interviews at Whatever Corp.) and began to make her way down the hall. As she walked away, I could tell she was considering joining the elite subgroup within the Ones Making an Exit, a sect reserved for the wholly unsentimental and the completely hard-boiled: The Ones Who Never Looked Back. She decided against it, however.

"You know," she said smoothly, turning to look at me. "None of us could figure it out."

I stared back, unaccountably afraid.

"Why
you?
Why Hannah wanted to bring you into our little group. I'm not trying to be rude, but from the beginning none of us could
stand
you. We called you 'pigeon.' Because that's how you acted. This grimy pigeon clucking around everyone's feet desperate for crumbs. But she
loved
you. 'Blue's great. You have to give her a chance. She's had a tough life.' Yeah,
right.
It didn't make sense. No, you have some weirdly dreamy home life with your virtuoso dad you blather on about like he's the fucking second coming. But no. Everyone said I was mean and judgmental. Well, now it's too late and she's dead."

She saw the look on my face and did a
Ha.
The Ones Making an Exit had to have a
Ha,
a truncated laugh that brought to mind videogame Game Overs and typewriter dings.

"Guess that's life's little joke," she said.

At the end of the hall, she pushed open the door and was illuminated for a second by a puddle of yellow light, and her shadow was tossed, elongated and thin, in my direction like piece of towrope, but then she stepped nimbly through the doorway, and the door slammed and I was left with the carnations. ("The only flower that, when given to someone, is only marginally superior to giving dead ones," Dad said.)

26

The Big Sleep

The next day, Saturday, April 10, The Stockton Observer finally published a terse article on the coroner's findings.

LOCAL WOMAN'S HANGING DEATH RULED SUICIDE

T
he death of Burns County woman, Hannah Louise Schneider, 44, was ruled a suicide by Sluder County Coroner's Bureau yesterday afternoon. Cause of death was determined to be "asphyxiation due to hanging."

"There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play," said Sluder County Coroner Joe Villaverde yesterday.

Villaverde said there was also no evidence of drugs, alcohol or other toxins in Schneider's body and the manner of death was consistent with suicide.

"I'm basing my ruling on the autopsy report as well as the evidence found by the sheriff's department and state legislators," Villaverde said.

Schneider's body was found March 28 hanging from a tree by
an electrical cord in the Schull
's Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had accompanied six local high school students on a camping trip. The six students were recovered without injury.

"This can't have happened," I said. Dad looked at me, concerned. "My dear—"

"I'm going to be sick. I can't take this anymore."

"They just might be right. One never knows with

"They're not right!"
I screamed.

Dad agreed to take me to the Sluder County Sheriffs Department. It was astonishing he actually consented to my outlandish, fitfully proposed demand. I assumed he felt sorry for me, noticed how pale I looked of late, how I could barely eat, didn't sleep, how I sprinted downstairs like a Beat junkie looking for a fix to catch
First News at Five,
how I reacted to all questions, both ordinary and existential, with a five-second transatlantic delay. He was also familiar with the quotation, "When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk" (see
Rearing the Gifted Child,
Pennebaker, 1998,

p. 232).

We found the address on the Internet, climbed into the Volvo and drove for forty-five minutes to the station, located west of Stockton in the tiny mountain town of Bicksville. It was a bright, chipper day, and the flat, sagging police building sat like an exhausted hitchhiker on the side of the road.

"Do you want to wait in the car?" I asked Dad.

"No, no, I'll come in." He held up D. F. Young's
Narcissism and Culture Jamming the U.S.A.
(1986). "I've brought some light reading."

"Dad?"

"Yes, sweet."

"Let me do the talking."

"Oh. By all means."

The Sluder County Sheriff's Department was a single ransacked room that resembled the Primates section of any midlevel zoo. All efforts, within budget, had been made to lead the ten or twelve captive policemen to believe they were in their natural environment (bleating phones, cinder-block walls painted taupe, dead plants with leaves like tendriled bows on birthday presents, chunky filing cabinets lined up in the back like football players, Department star patches barnacling their clay brown shirts). They were given a restricted diet (coffee, donuts) and plenty of toys to play with (swivel chairs, radio consoles, guns, a ceiling-suspended TV hiccupping the Weather Channel). And yet there remained the unmistakable whiff of artificiality to this habitat, of apathy, of everyone simply going through the motions of being a law enforcer, as struggling for survival was no longer an immediate concern. "Hey, Bill!" shouted one of the men pacing in the very back by the water cooler. He held up a magazine. "Check out the new Dakota." "Already did," said Bill, coma-staring at his blue computer screen.

Dad, with a look of unmitigated distaste, sat down in the only seat available in the front, next to a fat and faded girl wearing a tinseled halter top, no shoes, her hair so coarsely bleached it resembled Cheetos. I made my way to the man behind the front desk flipping through a magazine and chewing a red coffee stirrer.

"I'd like to speak to your chief investigator, if he or she is available," I said.

"Huh?"

He had a flat red face, which, discounting his yellowed toothbrush mustache, recalled the bottom of a large foot. He was bald. The topmost part of his head was grease-spattered with fat freckles. The name tag under his police badge read A. BOONE.

"The person who investigated the death of Hannah Schneider," I said. "The St. Gallway teacher."

A. Boone continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a "power distender," a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.

"What's your business with Sergeant Harper?"

"There's been a grave error in judgment regarding the case," I said with authority. It was essentially the same thing Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry announced at the beginning of Chapter 79 in
The Way of the Moth
(Lavelle, 1911).

A. Boone took my name and told me to have a seat. I sat down in Dad's chair and Dad stood next to a dying plant. With a look of faux-interest and admiration (raised eyebrow, mouth turned down) he handed me a copy of
The Sheriffs Starr Bulletin,
Winter, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which he detached from the bulletin board behind him, along with a small sticker of an American Eagle crying an iridescent tear (America, United We Stand). In the section of the newsletter on p. 2, "Activity Report" (between Famous/Infamous and Bet You Didn't Know . . .) I read that Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper, for the last five months, had made the greatest number of Fall Arrests in the entire department. Detective Harper's Fall Captures included Rodolpho Debruhl, WANTED for murder; Lamont Grimsell, WANTED for robbery; Kanita Kay Davis, WANTED for welfare fraud, theft and receiving stolen property; and Miguel Rumolo Cruz, WANTED for rape and criminal deviant conduct. (In contrast, Officer Gerard Coxley had the lowest number of Fall Arrests: only Jeremiah Golden, WANTED for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.)

Additionally, Sergeant Harper was featured in the black-and-white team photo of the Sluder County Sheriff's Dept. Baseball League on p. 4. She was standing on the right, at the very end, a woman with a sizable crooked nose, and all other features crowded around it as if trying to keep warm on her arctic white face.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes later, I was sitting next to her.

"There's a mistake with the coroner's report," I announced with great conviction, clearing my throat. "The suicide ruling is wrong. You see, I was the person with Hannah Schneider before she walked into the woods. I know she wasn't going to go kill herself. She told me she was coming back. And she wasn't lying."

Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper narrowed her eyes. With her salt-white skin and bristly lava hair, she was a harsh person to take in at close range; it was a swipe, whack, a kick in the teeth no matter how many times you looked at her. She had broad, door
-
knobbish shoulders and a way of always moving her torso at the same time as her head, as if she had a stiff neck.

If the Sluder County Sheriff's Department was the Primates section of any midlevel zoo, Sergeant Harper was obviously the lone monkey who chose to suspend disbelief and work as if her life depended on it. I'd already noticed she narrowed her eyes at everyone and everything, not only at me and A. Boone when he escorted me over to her desk at the back of the room ("All right," she said with no smile as I sat down, her version of "Hello!"), but she also narrowed her eyes at her TO BE FILED paper tray, the exhausted rubber-and-metal Hand Stress Reliever next to her keyboard, the sign taped above her computer monitor that read, "If you can see, look, and if you can look, observe," even at the two framed photographs on her desk, one of an elderly woman with cotton-hair and an eyepatch, the other of herself and what I assumed was her husband and daughter; in the photo they bookended her with identical long faces, chestnut hair and obedient teeth.