You Should Have Known (17 page)

The differentness of the school could be gleaned the moment she and Henry turned the corner off Lexington, with the addition of a news van (NY1) and a few clear media types on the pavement beside it. Certainly, there were parents—lots of parents, or, more accurately, lots of mothers—because who would let the nanny bring the children to school on such a momentous occasion as this? The mothers wore yoga gear and sweats, and held dogs by leather leashes, and were locked everywhere in intense communication, all over the sidewalk and in the courtyard. There were so many of these women that the sight of them pulled Grace back from her private distress and reminded her what was happening in the real world—a dead mother, injured children, psychic overflow for their own kids and the school as a whole—and she felt, for a moment, almost a little better. This situation with her husband would work itself out, of course, but there would be no restoration for Malaga Alves and her son and daughter. She gave Henry's shoulders a discreet squeeze and sent him off, then allowed herself to be enveloped by Sally Morrison-Golden's group.

“Oh, my God,” said Sally as Grace approached. “This is so awful.”

She was holding an oversize cup from Starbucks, alternately shaking her head and blowing over the surface.

“Anyone met the husband?” said a woman Grace didn't know.

“I saw him once,” said Linsey of the Birkin bags, who looked even younger and fresher today than the day she'd dispatched Grace from her son's birthday party with the helpful information that the doorman could hail her a cab. “I didn't realize he was a parent at first. I thought he, you know, worked for the school. I think I told him they were out of paper towels in the ladies' room.”

Remarkably, this was said with no self-consciousness whatsoever. Grace, notwithstanding the fact that this missing Mr. Alves had apparently bludgeoned his wife to death, was offended on his behalf.

“Parents' Night?” someone asked.

“Yes. And then he came in the classroom and sat down and I thought: ‘Oh! The janitor's kid is in Willie's class!'”

Evidently, this was still amusing to her, because she rolled her eyes.

“Y'know, I'm from the South. It's just how it is down there.”

“It” meaning…what?
Grace thought. She decided it really wasn't worth pursuing. Instead, she thought she might as well ask if anyone had any real information.

“Where are the kids?” she said, and they all turned to her.

“What kids?” said a preschooler's mom.

“Malaga Alves' kids. Miguel and the baby.”

They looked at her blankly.

“No idea,” somebody said.

“Foster care?” someone else said.

“Maybe they'll get sent back to Mexico,” said a woman Grace didn't know, one of Sally's regular crowd.

“They're having a counselor come in this afternoon,” Amanda said. “For the fourth grade. To talk to them about Miguel. I don't know, shouldn't they have asked us first?”

“They did ask,” said the woman whose name Grace didn't know. “Didn't you get the e-mail? They said if anyone had an objection, they should call the headmaster's office.”

“Oh.” Amanda shrugged. “I hardly ever look at e-mail anymore. It's Facebook for everything.”

“Did they bring in counselors for all the kids?” asked Linsey. “I don't think Redmond mentioned it.”

Redmond, Linsey's older son, had become the seventh grade's reigning Internet tormentor and generally a vile young man. Which was hardly surprising.

“No,” Amanda said somewhat importantly. “Only for the fourth grade. Only for the kids in Miguel's class. Like Daphne,” she reaffirmed. “Daphne said they sat in a circle and talked about Miguel and what they could do to be especially nice to him when he comes back.”

“If he comes back,” said Sally, stating the obvious.

“God,” said Linsey, who had fished a pair of sunglasses from her Birkin of the moment (a fuchsia ostrich) and was looking up toward the school steps. “Did you see those guys?”

Grace looked. Her two friends from yesterday, the Irish and Hispanic duo from the lobby, were talking to Helene Kantor, Robert Conover's second in command, just outside the main door. Neither of the men was taking notes, but they were doing a lot of nodding.

Mendoza
, Grace said, though not aloud. Mendoza of the neck fat.

“You talked to them?” Grace asked instead.

“Yesterday morning,” Sally said. “They called to ask about the benefit, and the committee and whatnot. Of course I would have called them, but they came to me first.”

The friend whose name Grace didn't know said: “What did you tell them?”

“Well, obviously, that she came to a committee meeting at my house, and what happened at the benefit on Saturday.”

What did happen?
Grace thought, frowning.

“What do you mean, ‘what happened'?” Amanda asked helpfully.

“Well, don't you think it matters that she had about ten men inhaling her at the Spensers'? I don't think that's insignificant. I'm not saying she did anything to invite it. This isn't ‘Blame the Victim,'” Sally said defensively. “But if it helps them figure out who did this to her, isn't it important?”

“Who did it?” Linsey looked appalled. “What are you talking about? The husband did it! He's vanished, hasn't he?”

“Well,” said the woman whose name Grace didn't know, “you know, it could be a drug thing. Maybe some drug cartel was after the husband and they came looking for him and found her. So he's in hiding somewhere. He's from Mexico! That's all drug violence down there.”

Not Mexico
, Grace thought grimly.  
Colombia.
But if it came down to drug cartels, she wasn't sure any of them knew the difference.

She had had about enough, and she started to look around for an escape. The courtyard was covered by these knots of mothers, all—she supposed—exchanging similar shards of non-information. There was very little of the usual merriment going on—that was good. But at the same time, there was something definitely off-putting about the general mood. Note had been taken of the tragedy, concern had been expressed over the needs of their own children, and now, with those preliminaries behind them, Grace was detecting a whiff of actual excitement. The news van was outside on the street; it had to stay outside the school enclosure, but they—the mothers—were inside. As a group, of course, they were not unused to being insiders. They were accustomed to being ushered to their tables and having their phone calls taken. They were accustomed to getting their kids accepted by the city's best schools, and circumventing the waiting list by ordering through a personal shopper, and driving through the gate of the high-security development with just a friendly wave at the guard. But Grace supposed that very few of them had ever been on the business end of a criminal investigation, and now they were—close enough to the action for the frisson of attention, but not close enough to be, themselves, of interest to the police. It was a rare opportunity for them, a rare…perspective. They were making the most of their moment.

Then someone was saying her name.

Grace turned. Sylvia was at her elbow. Grace had not noticed her in the crowd.

“Did you see Robert? He was looking for you.”

“Oh?” she said dully. “What for?”

But she realized that she knew what for. Robert, understandably, was reaching out to the mental health professionals in the parent community, for advice. She wished he'd done it before calling in the counselors and alarming the entire community with his cryptic e-mail.

“I don't know,” Sylvia said. “
This
, I imagine.”

“I imagine,” she agreed. “Well, I can talk to the kids if he wants.”

“He said he might open up the back alley tomorrow,” Sylvia said.

The alley ran between the street and the playground area behind the school and was sometimes used during fire drills. Grace had never known it to be deputized as an alternate entrance.
Desperate times
, she thought.

“Oh, I'm sure things won't get any worse than this,” she told Sylvia. “It'll calm down. It's not about the school.”

“I hope you're right.” Sylvia shrugged.

Grace left the scrum of mothers and went into the lobby, then upstairs to the administrative floor. The walls of the stairwell were covered in student artwork, framed class photographs, and posters from the musicals and plays dating back to Grace's own time at Rearden. Passing one, she glanced automatically at a preadolescent version of herself in costume for her seventh-grade production of
The Gondoliers
(she had been in the chorus), and she noted for perhaps the hundredth time how sharply the straight line of her middle-parted hair stood out, very white against her very dark braids. She could not remember the last time she had braided her hair. Or parted it.

His heavy oak office door was open a bit, but she knocked on it anyway. “Robert?”

“Oh—” He nearly leapt up from the desk. “Good. Oh, good, did Sylvia find you?”

“Downstairs.”

“Oh.” He looked a little confused nonetheless. “Why don't you shut the door.”

She did, then sat in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. Inevitably, she thought of being summoned to the principal's office. Though she never had been, either as a student or as a parent. She had always been dutiful and rule-abiding, and so had Henry.

After a moment in which he seemed, weirdly, to have forgotten what he wanted to see her about, she said, more to help him out than anything else: “This is a terrible thing.”

“Awful.” He sat, oddly not looking at her. “How are you?”

Grace frowned. “Oh, fine. I barely knew her, but you were right to try to get on top of this right away.”

She did not mention the e-mail. If he wanted to know whether he should have handled things differently, he would ask her.

He didn't ask her. In fact, he didn't seem to be asking her anything.

Finally, she said: “Do you want me to talk to the kids? I don't normally work with children, but I'd be glad to help if you need more hands.”

Robert looked at her directly for the first time. “Grace,” he said, “you know, the police were here.”

She sat up a little in her chair. “Well, I assumed. I assumed they came to tell you what happened.” She said this very carefully. Very deliberately. But he still looked at her as if he were grasping for some basic meaning.
Is he losing it?
she thought. He was so altered from the easy, triumphant, slightly drunk Robert she had chatted with on Saturday night. How many days ago was that? She counted back. Not many. He looked traumatized. Well, she reminded herself, of course he did.

“We've had a number of conversations, actually.”

“About her son?” Grace frowned. “Miguel?”

He nodded. A ray of morning sun happened to catch his hair in just the wrong way, making his scalp shine through.
Poor Robert
, she couldn't help thinking.
It's going to go fast. And you have such a pretty face.

“They were very interested in Miguel's financial arrangement with the school,” said Robert. “About his scholarship.”

“Well, that's bizarre,” she said, thinking:
And so is this conversation.
“I mean, why should they care about his scholarship?”

He pursed his lips, looking at her. He seemed genuinely at a loss.

“Grace,” he finally managed, “I hope you understand that I need to cooperate fully with the police. I may not understand the methodology, but I'm not in control of this situation.”

“Okay,” she said, baffled. “I'm…I can't imagine how the school's system of awarding scholarships is relevant, but like you said, they're in charge.”

“Miguel's scholarship was not a conventional arrangement for us. It wasn't set up through the usual channels.”

Oh, my God
, she thought wildly, abruptly locating her inner adolescent self:
Ask me if I care!
Then, because she had no rational response to this, she just put up her hands.

Now he was merely looking at her. He looked and looked, as if he, too, had lost the very slender chain of logic in this unutterably strange conversation. She had been in his office now for how many minutes? And she still had no idea why he'd wanted to see her. And the atmosphere was getting murkier by the second. Frankly, she preferred it downstairs, even among the other freaked-out moms.

“So…,” she said finally, “did you want me to talk to the students? I have a pretty full morning today, but I could come in the afternoon.”

“Oh…” He sat up straight and attempted a very strained smile. “No. That's kind of you, Grace. But I think we have enough.”

She shrugged again and thought:
Well, all right, then, I'll just…

And she just went out. And wished she had spared herself the entire episode. Now she was far from sanguine about Robert and for the first time concerned with how he was holding up under the obvious pressure. Maybe he had wanted help for himself, it occurred to her, passing again the photo of herself as a braided gondolier. Maybe that was what he had found so obviously difficult to say.
I'm overwhelmed by what's happening. Can I talk to you?
All at once, she felt so concerned for him and so guilty that she stopped, her hand on the handrail, and looked back up the way she had come.

But she couldn't go back. More than anything, she just wanted to get away from here. And air. She wanted air.

She left by the front gate, turning east along the tree-lined street and then south on Third, heading, she supposed, to her office on 76th. But in fact her first patients weren't due for nearly an hour, and when she thought about going there and sitting alone in silence (or, worse, opening up her computer again), she understood that she was afraid. Her cell phone, which she had been checking every ten minutes or so, still showed nothing, or nothing that wasn't maddening. A CNN news alert about an earthquake in Pakistan, an offer from a store she had never heard of for a product she didn't want, an “update” from Rearden letting parents know that counselors would be available to meet with them in the K/pre-K dining room after three p.m., to “discuss any concerns about your children's well-being.”  
What narcissists we've all become!
she thought, mystified and enraged.
What terribly sensitive, terribly important people we are! I have a concern about my child's well-being? My concern is that there are people in the world who murder women and leave them in “blood-strewn” apartments for their children to find. I think this might be bad for the children. It might give them “issues.” It might signal “dysfunction” in the family and be “traumatic.”