The Twisted Thread (14 page)

“Vernon, will you uncover your eyes?”

“No,” said Vernon.

“All right,” said Matt, still lying on his back. “To a certain extent you're right. But it's not because I think the townies will screw it up. It's because I do actually understand it there; I lived it. It doesn't mean I liked it. It doesn't mean I approve of it. And I don't think, despite it all, we're far off. More of us will scare them worse. More of us means they're surrounded. We need to make them feel that we're barely watching, that we're as incompetent as they hope.”

Vernon said nothing for a moment. And then he commented, rather darkly, “You may not have liked it there, but it doesn't mean it didn't have its influence on you.”

“Point taken. Give me two days,” Matt said. “And can we please think now about Claire? She's the key; we know she is.”

Vernon finally uncovered his face. “All right. Two days, and then we ask for help. And now I'm hot and want some cold water. We talk Claire inside.”

They pulled themselves off the bench and took the remains of their lunch back to the relative cool of their office, where Vernon spread out his files on Claire. He'd found out that second semester she had taken a reduced load. A calculus class with Alice Grassley, biology with Harvey, physics with a guy who wore the thickest glasses you'd ever seen, and an English course with another geezer. “And she switched them all around just before she started in January. She knew what she was doing. She was going to plant herself in the last row in classes that were relatively large and run by old bats or the blind.” She had also, Vernon explained, missed just the number of assignments she could: not so many or so frequently as to cause comment but far more than she ever had before. Her grades, too, had slipped a lot, but everyone had said the lapse was blamable on senior slump, a kind of academic mononucleosis. Grace was Claire's adviser, and she and Harvey were old and practiced collaborators. They were the last people to badger a girl who was in early to Yale and whose family endowed squash courts and scholarships at Armitage. In fact, when Alice Grassley, the teacher of the one course in which Claire had made really no effort, started to complain, Grace and Harvey told her to stuff it. At least that was the story from Alice, who was, according to Vernon, a sharp old gal and a Sox fan. Grace and Harvey had of course denied it all.

Scotty was in three of Claire's classes—physics, English, and biology—but he'd been planning on taking those since the year before. Otherwise, all four of the girls Claire had trusted to care for her were in at least one of the courses with her. Thread or no thread, she had done a good job creating her network of coconspirators.

Scotty had emerged time and again as the person students and teachers named as the possible father. Although Matt and Vernon sensed that Scotty had an extremely flexible notion of truth, they thought he was in this instance telling it. Scotty hadn't seen Claire all summer; it was hard to refute the fact that he had spent almost three uninterrupted months in Canada training with an Olympic rowing coach. “Timing,” Matt said to Vernon. “It's the timing.”

“Yeah,” Vernon said, “I'm doing the numbers for the hundredth time. By
timing
I assume you mean when she got pregnant and with whom. The girls say the baby was late. Most likely, if we can count on her having regular periods, she got pregnant over the summer, in early or mid-August. That chronology means she could have slept with anyone from the pool boy at the father's house to some French guy on a barge.”

“On a barge?” Matt asked. Vernon, with his aggressive notions about staying true to one's roots, had sometimes curious notions about life in other countries. But Matt took his point. Claire had spent August shuttling between Paris, Long Island, Maine, and New York, visiting her parents and friends. Her mother and father admitted that, even when she was home, they hadn't seen much of her. “She kept her own counsel,” Mr. Harkness said with stunning lack of necessity. Those who had hosted Claire said that she had seemed much as usual: distant, self-possessed, and poised. No one said, What a tragedy, though they all mentioned what a shock her death was. And no boyfriends in particular had been noted. No, she hadn't been dating anyone, just seeing her half brothers and sisters when she'd been in New York and France, the parents both insisted. Then again, both were forced to admit—the father with anger, the mother with regret—that they hadn't always been available during the day to see what she had been doing. East Hampton or Damariscotta were more likely possibilities; the friends had been classmates from Armitage, the parents entirely vague about how the girls had spent their time. Just out, they kept saying. Doing this and that. You know. Teenagers. Impossible to keep track of. The other issue had been speaking with the actual friends. One was on a semester program in China, the other volunteering at an orphanage in India.

“There's a reason she stayed. She was planning something. An exposure, a scene,” said Matt. “There's an Armitage link, something very specific.” The shameful burst of schadenfreude that had graced the start of the week had faded; maybe its remnants were what was causing his headache. However this was resolved, it was going to be very, very unattractive.

Rearranging his papers, Vernon suddenly asked, “Why'd you leave murder?” And before Matt could respond, he said, “There's a connection, bear with me.” Vernon went on, “The guys in Philly, they were surprised you were going and pissed, like What's wrong with us? What I'm saying is, it's personal. I don't know. A bad relationship. A bad case. Your mother died, and you wanted to be close to your father. You missed the clean air of the country.” Vernon was readying his laptop now and zipping open its container to receive his notes. “You didn't broadcast it. But you probably told someone, and so did this girl. There is probably one person she let in because she had to be human. She had to be, though they talk about her like she's Athena.”

“Athena was ostensibly a virgin, but I take your point.” Vernon grunted and said nothing more, but Matt was impressed that he had gotten so much on the mark. It had been a case, a thirteen-year-old girl, raped and killed by her father. A family from South Philadelphia. Workable forensic evidence and even a confession that had taken a year to coax out, and then the entire case collapsed when a lawyer got the confession retracted and the mother wouldn't testify. Finally, what he hadn't been able to stand was that, in murder, you only saw and dealt with the end. You weren't part of anything that wasn't irrevocable.

Vernon sorted through papers and was preparing to close the laptop case when his phone rang. “Kathy,” he said and went into the hall to talk to his wife.

Matt walked over to Claire's bulletin board and examined for the fifteenth time the array of notes and photos and papers that the girl had pinned there. But Vernon's comment had unmoored him slightly, and he was abruptly back in Philadelphia, in the middle of that part of his life. He had spent twelve years there, the first four at Penn resolutely avoiding people like Scotty Johnston and wondering what he could do that would keep him away from that kind of world for the rest of his days. Then, senior year, a cop had come to talk to his urban policy class, and within the span of an hour, he had made a choice, exercising an openness of mind he'd first discovered at Armitage. But whatever that man had—some sort of cool mixed with intensity; a grasp on some of the world's true, dark workings—Matt wanted it. Something direct, clear, and difficult. A job that wasn't based at a desk, wrapped in a million different words and not a scrap of social nicety. Something no one would have expected of him, certainly not his parents, who had dreamed of law school and clerking for a famous judge, public service, something sleek and admirable. But he had seen that cop, another Italian, and listened to him describe what cops did and meant to big cities as all the blond girls took notes, and he'd known precisely where he was headed with all his fancy education.

And despite his parents' disappointment, police work had at first seemed like exactly the right choice. He had begun in burglary, which was full of people behaving with both courage and terrific stupidity and meanness. Those early years, when he had worn a uniform and then with a speed that irritated his colleagues moved to murder and become able to wear a suit, had had a kind of drama that made his daily life a blend of confessions, scuffles, and satisfying if often partial successes. He had never been bored and felt grateful to have work in which he felt filled to the edges of his own skin, even though, according to his father, he had turned back the immigrant's clock.

And then, over the course of a few bad years, he had felt the beginnings of the decision's drawbacks. There'd been a series of gruesome cases that had gotten twisted in mistrials and plea bargains. Yet another relationship had ended with nothing more substantial than a milk frother. His mother had gotten ill and very quickly died. He had felt confidence begin to leak from his bones. Vernon had been right about it all, even Matt's telling one person, his sister, Barbara.

Whom had Claire confided in? He riffled through the notes on the cork again and looked at her small, neat handwriting. Whom had she trusted? Scotty, but she had held the upper hand in that relationship. Every photograph of them together betrayed that, and all the witnesses had confirmed it. Not her parents. Not her siblings, who were all half brothers or sisters, and quite a bit younger. Not her teachers. Not her peers. Then who?

Vernon came in. “Kath says hi, says you're coming to dinner when this is all over.”

“Vernon,” Matt said, thinking of something he had finally understood about the bulletin board. “Claire didn't take French this year, did she?”

“No,” said Vernon, as he stooped to put what was left of his lunch back in the fridge. “She'd tested out. Nothing left for her but an independent study, and that would have brought too much attention to her. Why?”

“But when we looked through her books and notebooks in her room, wasn't one of the binders labeled ‘French'?”

Vernon straightened up and noticed a particularly persistent yellow jacket on his shirtsleeve. He walked over to the window and carefully blew the insect into the breeze. “Maybe it was from last year. Why does it matter?”

“Because,” Matt said, hastily gathering his phone, notepad, keys, and sunglasses, “she wrote in French all the time. It's all over the bulletin board. She preferred it to English. And she may not have told somebody what was going on, but she might have written it down. I want to see that notebook.”

“All right,” Vernon said, a little skeptically. “It should still be there. Unless, for reasons unknown, Harvey Fuller has decided to nab it.”

They walked quickly through the station, both because of Matt's desire to find Claire's notebook and because they wanted to avoid conversation with anyone asking how the case was going. As they opened the door to the parking lot, Vernon said, “You know, you're braver than I am. I never even tried to do something like murder in the first place. Knew it would ruin me. The problem with seeing is you can't unsee.” They blinked in the bright light as they hurried toward Matt's car. “By the way, when this case is finished, you should ask out that Madeline girl. She's a keeper.”

“Oh yeah? I think the art teacher has his eye on her already.” Admitting that he'd noticed Madeline and her potential suitor caused Matt a certain pang.

“Art teacher? You're worried about competition from an art teacher?” Vernon said. They settled into their seats, strapped themselves in, and headed up the hill. Matt realized his headache was gone. Maybe it was the Diet Coke, but more likely, it was this: the eerie way that present life, the sheer force of it, kept walking right alongside disaster. Turkey sandwiches and death, bad memories and bees, Vernon advising him on romance just before they went to investigate a murder. The relentless forward motion of experience that made it hard for anything to stick, even bad headaches. “So you're my partner, my confessor, and now my yenta?”

“You need all three,” said Vernon, jabbing a finger at him.

Claire's room was as they had left it, the books and binders in a rough row on the lower shelf of her bookcase. Matt stepped past the yellow tape and quickly found the one dedicated to French. As Vernon had speculated, it was from last year. On the first ten pages were clearly notes taken in a literature class. Assignments were written down, page numbers were marked. She'd done a precise caricature of Marie-France in the margins. Quotations from Baudelaire covered another page. He was just about to turn to Vernon and admit defeat when he opened a page at random in the middle. Suddenly, Claire was writing in dated, single-spaced paragraphs: 10 Octobre. 14 Octobre 2009. He tried to decipher the French, but his languages had been Latin and Spanish. “Vernon,” he said, “I think we've got something here.” He knew that all the plans to see Harvey, Betsy, Porter, Claire's parents, and all the others they were slated to speak with this afternoon would have to be put off.

“You understand this?” Vernon asked.

“No,” Matt told him, “but I know who will.”

Marie-France greeted them at her door with a cigarette in her hand. “I know I am not supposed to smoke in here,” she said, “but who is going to stop me?”

“Not us, Miss Maillot,” said Matt, “especially when we have a favor to ask you. Could you help us translate this?”

Marie-France let them in, and Matt saw Vernon, despite his disapproval of the tobacco, admiring the large window boxes filled with rosemary, oregano, and thyme. The windows were wide open, and though the smoke was an acrid, lingering presence, the room itself was full of the colors of the French south. A yellow and blue tablecloth. A bowlful of lemons. Handsome botanical prints of sunflowers and lavender. A comfortable white sofa that she invited them to occupy. She herself was narrow and tall, with gray hair pinned in a tight chignon and skin deeply damaged by cigarettes and sun. But at one time, he suspected, she had been pretty, and her eyes were dark brown and full of inquiry.