The Books of Fell (21 page)

Outside, in the hall, Outerbridge was singing the hymn he’d sung in chapel.

Rinaldo stood up. “I don’t fear you, Fell. Warn me if I should … I have always feared your curiosity, but not you. You have not been in Sevens long enough for that.”

He didn’t wait for reassurance.

And I was thinking back to a day on Long Island when a stranger offered to pay my way to go to Gardner, posing as his son. It was how I’d gotten there. My own chance to eat at the table. Never mind all the foul-ups that had come as a result — I’d made quite a trade, too, for a better life.

The afternoon of The Charles Dance, I felt as though I was carrying Nina’s entire closet when I lugged her garment bag into Sevens House. She said I wasn’t that far wrong. She’d brought a lot of changes, because she wanted options in case things she tried on looked awful.

“At home I always change at least three times before I go anywhere important. Do boys?”

“Not boys going to The Charles Dance. One costume is enough.”

I’d already rounded up a handlebar mustache and a monocle, to go as Damon Charles. The rest was easy: a rented tux and a pair of evening shoes borrowed from Dib.

He wasn’t going. He was dorm campused. Last Sunday Little Jack had been pulled over for drunken driving. He and Dib had spent Sunday afternoon in Cottersville Tavern. Dib wasn’t charged with anything, claimed he hadn’t been drinking. But the place was off-limits to Hill boys, so Dr. Skinner decided, finally, to suspend Dib’s privileges.

We were on the kind of speaking terms that just barely spoke. When he got the dusty pumps out of the bottom of his closet, he threw them at me. I wanted to apologize for not calling him from Nina’s, after I’d left Playwicky that morning, but he gave me the finger.

“Cork it, Fell! You got what you came for! Take them and get back to your Sevens!”

“We’ve got to talk sometime, Dib.”

“About what? How wonderful you are?”

“Let’s talk about how wonderful Little Jack is!” I said. I could see a Charlie Chaplin costume in the rental box on his desk, the cane and derby on top.

He saw me look that way, and he snapped, “Little Jack did me a favor! I’m not into kids’ parties. You guys ought to grow up!”

I took the damn shoes. Then I was out of there.

I’d managed to get Nina assigned to my room, with Outerbridge’s sister and Kidder’s date, while I bunked downstairs, dorm style, with six other Sevens.

When I met Nina in the reception room that night, I was glad girls couldn’t wear costumes. She was a knockout in an ankle-length white silk dress, hiding the blue-winged dragonfly but leaving her arms and back bare.

She had on white sling-back shoes that made winter seem like June, and made her look like a bride.

She was nervous and excited. I helped her into her coat.

“Let’s not say anything on the way there, Fell. I’m too hyper.”

I said okay with me, slipped the monocle into my pocket, and put on the blue half mask all Sevens wore until intermission.

It was about fourteen degrees out, but we didn’t have far to go. The walk to the gym was clear; so was the weather. There was a slipper moon rising. I wished Mom could see us. I’d called her that morning. She had a job as hostess in a restaurant at the World Trade Center; she wasn’t due there until noon.

“You never told me if you liked the gold 7,” I’d said.

“I called you and got Mrs. Violet. You never called back.”

“You don’t like it, hmmmm?”

“I like it well enough, Johnny. Of course, our apartment number’s seven, and I feel like some old lady who’s wearing something that’ll tell the neighbors where she lives if she’s found running around the neighborhood babbling.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“I do. I’m going to get some head charms to hang on it — a boy’s head for you and a girl’s for Jazzy. Macy’s will engrave names on them.”

Mom never wore one of anything except her wedding ring.

She said, “People are always asking me what’s 7 mean.”

“Well? Do you tell them?”

“What can I tell them? I’ve got a son in some club I don’t even know how he got into?” She laughed. “I tell them it’s in case I forget how many days there are in the week.”

Jazzy got on the phone to tell me her favorite doll, Georgette, was in love with a doll named Mr. Mysterious, who wore a mask, cost $32.75, and could be purchased at most shopping malls.

In the background I could hear the fashion channel on television. A woman’s voice was describing a polka-dot sundress with a bolero top and spaghetti straps underneath.

“Johnny?” Mom said when she got back on. “Are you meeting any nice girls?”

“I’ve met one named Nina.”

“I hope she’s not your usual type.”

“What’s my usual type, Mom?”

“Someone who can run circles around you. Someone who’s older and wiser, like that Keats person.”

Even Mom knew better than to mention Delia.

“This Nina person isn’t like that Keats person,” I said.

“Watch out, Johnny! You’re a cream puff when it comes to the ladies!”

At the dance I’d nab the photographer and have a picture taken for Mom. One look at Nina in all white, and Mom would start fantasizing the wedding, the house we’d all move into, and the grandchildren she could buy more head charms for at Macy’s.

I spared Mom the news about Creery, just as I had the Lasher story. The
Cottersville Compass
was already hinting that a suicide on The Hill was purportedly tied into the death earlier of another student. I didn’t know how long it would take the news services to pick it up, or if Mom would even see it when they did. She probably wouldn’t unless it was on the same page announcing a white sale or 50% Off Everything.

On the phone that week, I’d told Nina what I knew.

“Boy, does my shrink have egg on her face!” she’d said, the moment we’d sped away from her house in the BMW Mr. Deem had lent me. “Her groat-hormone theory was shot all to pieces!”

“Did she say anything Thursday?”

“I told you, Fell. I quit. Dad calls it a hiatus, but it’s over. From now on I’m on my own.”

She was, too. Or
I
was. As soon as we started dancing, the stag line began descending on us.

I lost her to Charlie Chan, Charles Dickens, Charles Bronson, three or four of the Charlie Chaplins who were there in force, and Charlie Chan again.

I began to feel as though I was ready for grief counseling with HEADOC, whose red Maserati had been in the faculty parking lot all week.

There was a seven-piece band playing, blue-and-white 7’s hanging from the ceiling, where seven golden angels swung from fluffy clouds in Seventh Heaven. (It had seemed like a good idea when we were planning the decorations, but there was something slightly macabre about it in view of Creery’s death … or maybe I’d just spent too much time reading Lasher’s writings about heaven.)

The seven chaperones wore white dresses or blue suits.

“Fell?” Nina said at one point, when I’d wrenched Charlie Chan’s white-gloved hands from her shoulder a third time. “If I don’t remember to thank you for this, thank you now.”

She put her fingers up on my cheek lightly, and we looked at one another for maybe six seconds. That was all it took for me to see the wisdom and the heartbreak of chaperones and separate quarters for overnight visitors.

Some of Charlie Chan’s greasepaint had come off on Nina’s dress.

“Thank heavens I brought a change, Fell!” she said to me at intermission. “Look at me!”

We were heading to Sevens House for the intermission ceremony. Mrs. Violet presided over the punch bowl there, while dorm boys served their dates from the bowl in the gym.

This was the time when the Sevens unmasked. The lights went off in the reception room, and our faces were illuminated by tiny gold flashlights shaped like 7’s, CHARLES engraved down their sides. Each girl was given a corsage of white roses and blue ribbons, and most kept their dates’ flashlights as souvenirs.

For the first time I saw Lauren and The Lion. He was in seventeenth-century costume as Charles II of England.

“That’s my shrink’s daughter, isn’t it?” said Nina. “She looks enough like her to make me shake! … Let me go up and change before I meet her!”

• • •

“Nina
who?”
Lauren asked me after I explained my date was “freshening up,” and as The Lion strutted down to the john.

“Deem. Nina Deem.”

“Oh,
Fell!
How did you get roped into that?”

She passed me an envelope marked
Photograph. Paul, sometime last autumn.

“Wait till you see her!” I said.

Lauren was in a red wool dress, her hair pulled up on her head, pearls dangling down the front. Red shoes. The smell of Obsession.

“That’s the smiling picture of Paul,” she said.

I was getting it out of the envelope.

“I know Nina Deem,” said Lauren. “She was mother’s client. Past tense, so I can tell you watch out for her, Fell. She’s needy. And that’s a
nice
way to put it.”

“I like her. You will, too.”

“Fell, she’d get on my mother’s answering machine and use up all the tape whining about this married dope pusher she had a crush on. Of course,
she
claimed he’d been framed. She was obsessed with what his wife was like,
convinced
he didn’t love her. She’d go on and on about him, on the tape! Paul and I called her Screaming Nina. When we were home, we’d tune in to her and howl!”

I pulled Lauren to one side, away from the punch and the girls in the gowns with their Charleses.

“Tell me more, Lauren. She
knew
he was married?”

“She knew, all right. She was dying to get a look at his wife. I hope you’re not involved, Fell!”

“What else?”

I was holding the photograph of Lasher in my hands while I listened.

“Are
you involved with Screaming Nina?”

I hardly heard the question. I was looking at the picture of her brother. Lasher was dressed up in a gay nineties costume, sitting on a bench, the waterfall, the old mill, the weeping willow behind him.

“This was taken at Dragonland,” I said.

“I don’t know where it was taken. It was in a thingamajig and I pulled it out, because look at him smile! Paul never smiled unless he was up to something.”

“Then he knew Eddie Dragon,” I said.

Lauren looked at me. “That’s the name of Screaming Nina’s boyfriend,” she said. “How would Paul have known him?”

I didn’t answer Lauren, not only because I didn’t have an answer but also because of what I saw suddenly across the room.

Charlie Chan was leaving Sevens House, putting on his coat over his costume, his gloves off, and there was something on his wrist I’d seen before. A dragonfly.

I started running, down the hall and up the stairs, the voice of the Sevens shouting after me “Off-limits to males tonight!”

Someone grabbed my coattails to stop me.

Kidder.

“Your date’s not up there, Fell. She just went out the side door.”

I got out in the parking lot in time to see them take off in a white Isuzu jeep.

Nina hadn’t changed clothes. I could see her pulling her coat around the white dress. She must have used the time to lug her garment bag down to his car.

I didn’t have the BMW keys with me, but I remembered Mr. Deem telling me about the spare in the ashtray.

I got in fast and went after them, picking the jeep up in my headlights near the traffic light at the top of the hill.

They made a left, heading into Cottersville, and I followed a few car lengths behind them.

My mind was spinning like the BMW’s wheels: recalling how Nina’d said she’d begged her father to let her go to The Charles Dance … then how she’d come up soon after with the idea to stay overnight. I thought of Nina telling me she’d brought a lot of changes in her garment bag, and I remembered the way she’d thanked me for the evening right before intermission.

And of course I was remembering the afternoon at Dragonland, the way she’d pretended to be shocked by the idea Eddie was married. She’d known that all along, used me to satisfy her curiosity about Ann Dragon.

Lauren had laughed at the idea Nina’d claimed Eddie didn’t love his wife. But my money was on Nina.

I was learning the hard way: Nina didn’t
get
surprised as much as she surprised. And calculated. Nina went after what she wanted, even if it involved flirting her way along and giving little innocent-sounding speeches about how she was going to learn to take control of her life.

She didn’t need any lessons in that.

What had Nina said to her father that first night I’d had dinner there? Something about the word “elope,” after Mr. Deem said it was a word we didn’t hear much anymore. Those who have a reason to use it do, Nina had said.

In Cottersville I inched up until I was right behind them.

Dragon wasn’t doing any fancy driving. He was keeping to the forty-mile limit, heading out toward the shopping center.

What I couldn’t figure out was how Lasher fit into the puzzle, what he was doing at Dragonland last fall.

I pushed the heat up all the way. They had coats, I didn’t. I had an idea I wouldn’t be getting out of the BMW for a long time, anyway … and that as soon as we hit the highway past the mall, I’d be in a race.

That was where I was wrong.

The Isuzu pulled into the shopping center’s large lot, almost empty at that hour.

I followed.

Dragon headed toward the only parked car down in front of the Food Basket. It was a black Pontiac, its lights beaming up suddenly as the jeep came near it.

Then Dragon stopped.

When I pulled up, Dragon got out and stood there waiting for me. He’d ripped off his mustache and the rubber skin from his head. His hair was blowing in the wind, face streaked with greasepaint.

As I cut my motor, I saw the gun pointed at me.

That was when the driver of the Pontiac got out too, crossing to the jeep, reaching to help Nina with the garment bag she’d pulled out onto the asphalt.

It was Ann Dragon.

I could see Nina’s face, tears streaming down it, while Ann led her toward the Pontiac.

“Get in the jeep!” said Eddie Dragon.