Those Who Favor Fire (15 page)

“No, I didn’t,” she replied. She had never heard them speak about such things.

“Well, they did, Miss Hearn. The types of policies that don’t mature. In other words, your parents could never have cashed them in.” He looked down at the table. “And, if your parents had died of natural causes, the policies would not have paid all that much. But your parents wanted you to be in good shape if they died suddenly, accidentally, as they in fact did.” After a moment he looked up at her, clearly uncomfortable with everything he had said but just as clearly anticipating her reaction to his next words.

“In a nutshell, Miss Hearn, each policy stipulated that, in case of the accidental death of the insured party, the beneficiary would be awarded one hundred fifty thousand dollars. And in both cases, the beneficiary is you and you alone.”

Which meant that Rachel Hearn was not only a twenty-year-old orphan but a relatively wealthy one as well.

The news of her inheritance had so startled Rachel that she’d found it easier not to think about it at the time. She had thanked Mr. Murdock and said she’d be in touch, shown him to the door, told him that she had to get ready for the funeral. He nodded, disappointed with her reaction, and went away. When he returned later that afternoon to pay his respects, he had the grace to keep his peace, certain that in time she would want to hear more about her inheritance and to claim it.

As Rachel sat on her porch, her feet aching from the cold creek
water, waiting out the night, her unsought windfall still seemed so unreal that it didn’t bear close scrutiny. She thought instead about what she was going to do now that she was on her own.

No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn’t feel any kind of kinship with the good, clean girl she’d been only days before. Until Sunday afternoon, she had been a thoughtful daughter. A good friend. Well-groomed, upright, and honest. She had worried about the welfare of others, concerned herself with their happiness, and thought herself fulfilled along with them. She had been touched by everyone and everything in her immediate world. She had anticipated the needs of others, the repercussions of her every action, the consequences of her words, her deeds, even her thoughts.

My God,
she thought.
What a waste of time
.

She remembered one day when she was maybe ten or eleven and her parents had taken her to a fair over on the far side of Randall. She had wanted a second hot dog and been willing to wait in a long, unruly line to get it while her parents sat on a bench, resting. When she finally reached the hot dog stand she found herself wedged between far bigger people. The hot dog vendor was running with sweat. His hands looked like meat from reaching into the steam after hot dogs. The smell of mustard was so strong it made Rachel’s eyes water. One after another, people who came up beside her reached for the hot dog that was meant for her, took it, paid, twisted away, and were gone.

She could have pushed right back. Summoned her parents. Made a fuss. But for many long minutes she simply stood there, mute, holding up her hand now and then as if she were in school, feeling oddly virtuous. She would not make things harder for the hot dog man. She would not—she would
not
—be rude. That these other people had no manners was no reason she should abandon hers.

A man who had squeezed past Rachel and dressed his hot dog now said to her, as he turned to leave, “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you don’t learn to speak up, girl.”

Rachel remembered feeling torn, then, between the urge to follow his advice (and start by speaking up to
him
) and her long-held conviction that being a good and patient girl was worth its price.

Sitting on her porch, Rachel thought about this decision. It was one she had made over and over and over again: to be the way she had always been. Even as an adolescent, curious and impatient, she had changed little, for she had really had no choice: everyone knew
her as a certain kind of girl, and there was simply no way she could disappoint them. No worthy opportunity arose. No reason seemed good enough. And, in truth, she seldom felt the need to challenge the rituals she had practiced for so long. Until now. Somehow, the boys she’d known at college, and the death of her parents, and every other mean thing that had ever touched her life became twisted together and made it easy for Rachel to strip herself down and start all over again.

Her neighbors had noticed the change in Rachel as soon as she stepped off the bus early that Monday morning. She had not been rude or unkind in any way. But she had not reacted to them as they had expected she would. She had not cried on their shoulders. She had not bravely smiled. She had sought neither solace nor advice. She had been unmoved by the casseroles that they had tucked away in her fridge. She had been entirely too reserved for their liking.

What a waste of time
, she thought again, sitting on her porch, her parents on their way to the sea.
And energy. Who has the energy to keep all that up for long? Better to say what you think, mean what you say, do what you think is right, live how you want to live. No need to be cruel, she amended. Say the cruel parts to yourself. Or don’t say them at all. Do the cruel things in your head. Or keep still. Be disciplined
.

It was a start. An anchor of sorts. One she carried with her back to school after she’d dealt with her parents’ remains and the tangled business of surviving them. When she arrived back on the familiar campus, she found that it took some effort to avoid backsliding into the rabbit girl she had been before, but clinging to this anchor, Rachel held her ground. Old friends, thinking she was still grieving, made allowances for her lack of social graces. Paul kept his distance and she hers. She made no new friends. Every now and then she went alone to the movies, consumed a sack of M&M’s, and wondered where her parents were.

At one point, on a beautiful spring morning when everything seemed suddenly to have changed for the better, Rachel did slip, although at first it felt so good to relax her guard that she did nothing to resurrect it.

Forsaking the library for the campus green, she chose a spot under a maple tree and began to read the sonnets that had seemed such perfect work for a morning like this one. But the breeze and the smell of new grass plucked at her attention, and finally she shut the book and
set it aside. The sun felt wonderful on her bare arms. The grass was soft. She closed her eyes.

“Rachel.”

She opened her eyes. Adam Greenway, her history professor, had come up quietly and was crouching next to her. “I didn’t want to startle you,” he said, smiling.

“You didn’t,” she said. “How are you, Professor?”

“Just fine. You?”

“Okay. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have come out here to study though. It’s too hard to concentrate.”

“Which is why I no longer allow my teaching assistants to hold discussion groups outside, under the trees. It’s hard to pay attention when you’ve got spring fever. My students were writing exams without much meat to them. They were just giving me back what I’d dished out during lecture or what they memorized from the reading assignments. Not much original perspective. Disappointing.”

Rachel nodded, bemused. This was unlike Professor Greenway. He had never said so much to her outside of class before. He was watching her intently.

“Rachel, do you remember much about your midterm exam last semester, the one you wrote for me?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said slowly. “Do I remember the questions?”

“Your responses. Do you remember what you wrote about U.S. foreign policy during Turkey’s ’74 invasion of Cyprus?”

“I remember, more or less.”

“Do you remember quoting Henry Kissinger?”

“Yes, briefly.” The sun behind him made Rachel squint. “But it seems strange that
you
remember. There were over a hundred kids in that class, and we took that exam almost six months ago.”

Professor Greenway sat down next to Rachel. “Of a hundred and forty-two students, seven wrote similar exams. Disturbingly so. They all presented the same information, all within the same basic structure and, to a limited extent, even used the same wording. Your exam was a bit different—the structure of your essay was unique, but the information was basically the same and all eight of you quoted Kissinger in exactly the same way. Or almost: you punctuated the quote differently, but the other seven were identical. No one else in the entire class quoted Kissinger. Just the eight of you.”

“Are you accusing me of cheating?” Rachel said, blinking with
surprise. “On an essay exam? In a class I loved and studied for until my eyes nearly blew out of my head?”

He put up a hand. “I know, Rachel,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’ve waited six months to bring this up because I wanted to investigate all other possibilities. But the same thing happened when I gave the
final
exam for that class. All seven exams were nearly the same.”

“The same as mine?”

“No. Not at all like yours.”

“So you realized I wasn’t cheating, even if they were.”

“I never thought that you had cheated, Rachel.” He smiled at her, as if to prove it. “But I’m sure that you were somehow involved for a while last semester, without your knowledge.”

They were both silent for a time. Then, “That was a long time ago, Professor,” Rachel said. “What made you decide to bring this up now?”

“Four of those seven students are in my class this semester, too. All four of their midterms were too much alike. So were two other exams written by students I’ve never had before. But I’m still not sure what’s going on, and I was hoping you could give this some thought.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “Let me know if you come up with any ideas.”

“It would help if I knew who the other students were,” she said.

He thought about that one for a moment. Then he told her. All nine suspects were boys. One of them was Paul.

Rachel had been in such a wonderful mood that morning, felt the first bit of joy since her parents had died. If Paul had been the one to approach her as she sat under the maple tree, drowsing, she might have forgiven him, found a way to patch things up between them. She had begun to feel, recently, as if she had judged Paul too harshly. When she tried to put herself in his shoes, to feel the sort of pressure exerted by his peers, she did not entirely succeed, but this new willingness to see things through his eyes had made Rachel vulnerable to the sight of him walking across the campus green or sitting in one of her classes, intentionally removed. Lately, she had reminded herself of Paul’s warnings, admitted that he been right about Harry all along. She began, as well, to miss having a best friend, as Paul had been right from the start.

They had met before classes had even begun, their first year, during orientation week, when herds of freshman had been rounded up,
driven down to their dormitory lounges, and forced to play the kinds of parlor games that make more ice than they break. Paired by a ruthless upperclassman, Paul and Rachel had been told to get acquainted and then, when it was their turn, to introduce each other to the rest of the group. “You have five minutes,” he said.

All around them, paired strangers were looking at each other in horror. But Paul looked at Rachel, Rachel at Paul, and with the kind of minute, flickering signals known to timber wolves and deaf-mutes, they made up their minds to escape. It was easy, really. The escalating panic of their classmates made good cover. And within moments the two of them were running along the corridor outside, twisted with laughter, free. They had gone for pizza, survived the inevitable, occasional awkwardness of strangers, and become fast friends. Living in the same dorm that year had made it easier for them to be together at all hours, studying, escaping the relentless companionship of roommates who would never be friends, laughing at anything and everything, eventually baring portions of their souls.

Even after they had spent a summer apart, even after Paul had joined his fraternity and breathed its medieval air, even after Rachel had made other friends and found other diversions, the things that tied them to each other had not frayed. But much had happened since then. Everything had changed. And the things that Professor Greenway had told her that morning stiffened the softening regions of Rachel’s heart and sent her off in search of Paul for the first time since November, grim and suspicious.

She found him sitting on the concrete porch of the fraternity house with several other boys, an aluminum washtub stocked with ice and beer, an enormous can of tomato juice, and a few mangled lemons. They all wore crumpled shorts and sunglasses, nothing else. Behind her, on the grassy plot enclosed by the fraternity houses, other boys were playing breakball, taking turns batting a baseball at windows. Whoever broke the most windows won the game. The losing team paid to replace them. The game had always struck Rachel as senseless and inane. Today it seemed to her nearly criminal. She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and glared at Paul.

“Rachel,” he gasped, as if she had come back from the dead. He didn’t seem able to say anything more.

“Hi, Paul. I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. The others watched silently. Paul worked his
mug into the ice and grabbed his shirt from the back of his chair. “You want to come up here, have a red-eye?”

“No, thank you. Could you just come with me for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” he said, buttoning up his shirt. He looked around for some shoes but found none. There were millions of shards of broken beer bottles and window glass on the sidewalk that looped through the quadrangle. “You sure you don’t want a red-eye?” he said, smiling. At which Rachel turned and walked away.

Paul caught up with her before she’d left the quad. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Slow down.” She stopped but did not turn around. “My car’s right up the street. We can talk there.”

The sight of the Impala made Rachel’s heart hurt, but she opened the passenger door and slipped inside.

“I didn’t think you’d ever speak to me again,” Paul said, his hands on the steering wheel.