Friday morning
THE MOMENT HER NEIGHBOR LEFT, RANNIE TIPTOED INTO NATE’S ROOM, where he was still asleep, and which reeked in a distinctly teenaged boy way, a pervasive testosterone-loaded scent of perspiration, greasy hair, dirty clothes. The mountain under the quilt moved. “Ma! I’m sleeping.”
“Tell me where the yearbooks are. The ones from teachers.”
A groan. “Look on my desk.”
They were on the floor near his desk. Close enough.
Rannie found the Palo Alto Pennant and returned to the living room where she searched for the picture she remembered, the one of Jem using the back of a girl as a desktop. When she found it, Rannie studied it closely. The girl was glancing over her shoulder, smiling, as if trying to make out what he was writing. From the body language and smile, Rannie suspected the girl was interested in Jem.
Rannie’s eyes remained fixed on the page, her field of vision narrowing in on the detail that popped out at her like a broken mattress spring. It didn’t compute. He was writing with his right hand. She blinked as if to clear her head and searched for a mistake that would explain away the disconnect. But in the photo, a map of France on the wall made visual sense. The girl’s sweatshirt was only partially visible, the letters “TO” all that could be seen, the others blocked by her position and the piece of paper Jem was writing on. Reversed, those two letters would still “read” correctly but “TO” was the more likely correct sequence—part of Palo Alto High School.
In the sports section another photo showed Jem in the outfield, mitt outstretched with no scoreboard sign or other detail to erase the same disturbing contradiction. The mitt was on his left hand. She flipped to his senior portrait and again was struck by the ineffable difference between the young boy staring out at her, a half-smile on his face, and the buttoned-up man she saw at school. Then she grabbed her barn jacket, barely noticing the tip of one of her lethal blue pencils poking through her pocket. A hole, dammit.
In ten minutes she was at Chaps. Today the new guard made her sign in as well as present her Chaps I.D. The ground floor of the Annex was empty. On an upper floor she could hear the voices of policemen who, she guessed, might be in Ms. Hollins’s office. Rannie looked in the boardroom, checked the doors to other offices—all locked and empty. Mrs. Mac’s spiral-bound phone log was on her desk; Rannie took it to her own and began leafing back to the messages written on the Monday Tut was murdered, searching for the one from Stanford.
She dialed the Stanford number; the three-hour time difference meant it was just past nine o’clock in California. The admissions office picked up right away.
“May I speak to Byron Richards, please?”
“Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Who” not “whom” the grammar cop, never off duty, silently corrected. Rannie gave her name. “I’m from Chapel School in New York City.”
“Please hold. I’ll see if he’s available.” A moment later, Rannie was asked to leave her number, he’d get back to her. She jumped when the phone rang barely an instant after she’d hung up.
“Hello, Chapel School,” she said.
“Ms. Bookman? This is Byron Richards.”
“Thanks for returning my call so quickly.”
“I don’t take any calls directly anymore. This week alone, two parents called pretending to be high school guidance counselors putting in a good word for their child. We computer check phone numbers now.”
Rannie laughed and hoped it didn’t sound like nervous laughter crossing three thousand miles of telephone wire. “Can’t be too careful, I guess.”
“So what may I do for you?”
“You know of course that Mr. Tutwiler is…is gone. Our director of college admissions.”
“Gone?”
Wonder of wonders, not all New York news was automatically national news. She was surprised, then encouraged—that meant Byron Richards was unaware of the circumstances. “Yes, Mr. Tutwiler died recently.”
“Sorry to hear that—I spoke to him only a week or two ago.” Byron Richards’s appointment as Stanford’s Director of Admissions was a recent one. Before that he’d been Associate Director for the West Coast and thus wasn’t familiar with all the East Coast schools or people. Still, he had known Tut by reputation before their recent conversations.
“I’m following up on Mr. Tutwiler’s last phone calls,” Rannie explained, “to make sure there are no loose ends, that everything’s up to speed.” Rannie mentioned the name of Tut’s interim replacement and her start date. “There’s a message in the phone log from you to Mr. Tutwiler. Actually on the day he died. We didn’t know if he had returned the call.”
“Yes, he did. One of your seniors is applying early.”
“Nate Lorimer, I believe,” and she managed to refrain from adding, “Wonderful boy! Stanford would be lucky to have him!”
“During an earlier conversation Mr. Tutwiler had brought up that your new headmaster is a Stanford grad.”
Something in his tone of voice made Rannie swallow hard. Suddenly she felt as though she were in the front car of a rollercoaster, climbing up, up, reaching the top of a steep hill. “Yes, Jonathan Marshall.”
“I’m an alum. The name sounded vaguely familiar so later I looked him up in our records.” Then he related what Rannie had witnessed herself while in the Admissions Offices at Stanford: Jonathan Marshall’s name was followed by an asterisk, meaning “deceased” or “MIA”—whereabouts unknown. A computer glitch had been Byron Richards’s initial assumption as well, so he pursued the matter further. “I didn’t know him but turns out we graduated the same year. So I got in touch with our class agent who did remember him. She called him John-o Marshall.”
“John-o? Everybody calls him Jem now.”
There was an uneasy pause. “I’m afraid nobody’s calling him anything now. He’s dead.”
The rollercoaster plunged downward. A chilly sweat broke out on her body, trickling between her breasts. Dead. “Jonathan Edwards Marshall? Early forties? Grew up in Palo Alto.”
“Yes. Mr. Tutwiler’s reaction was the same as yours. Look, I’ll tell you what I told him. Our twentieth reunion’s coming up; plans are in the works for a memorial arboretum, a tree for every person who’s died. A list was mailed, which is why the name rang a bell. He was the first to die. The woman who knew him told me it was a plane crash, not even a month after graduation. Both parents were on the plane too. I tell you, it sent a chill through me.”
Nothing like the one going through Rannie right now. Was Tim right? Had Tut been murdered for stumbling on this information?
“That’s why I called Mr. Tutwiler a week ago Monday. He called me back, early afternoon your time. Look, Chapel School has an excellent reputation so I didn’t want to make any accusation unless I was a hundred percent sure. I checked every other Jonathan Marshall who went to Stanford, every Jon and John Marshall. Nobody was even remotely the right age. And nobody had the same middle name. More than that, I can’t tell you…. I don’t know who’s running your school, a clone?”
No, not a clone. But close, she suspected. After she hung up, Rannie willed her hands to stop shaking so that she could turn on her computer. The Marshalls were a local family. The newspaper must have run an article at the time. And obituaries. While her Mac booted up, she closed her eyes and mentally envisioned the name of the newspaper left on the hallway carpet outside her hotel room. The Palo Alto Record. That was it.
Once connected to the paper’s web site, she searched through archives, scrolling back to the year, then combing through issues from May and June, graduation time. A little hunting and she found it. June 29th. Franklin Marshall, age fifty-three, had owned a car dealership; Eloise Marshall (née Edwards), age forty-nine, was a homemaker and part-time bookkeeper for an accounting firm. Their son, Jonathan Edwards Marshall, twenty-two, a graduate of Palo Alto High School, had just received a B.S. in chemistry from Stanford. The plane, a flight from L.A. to San Jose, crashed almost immediately after takeoff, the cause attributed to wind shear during a summer storm.
It was all as Byron Richards had related, but there had to be more. An obituary offered up the missing piece, listing the time and date of the funeral service as well as the one remaining member of the Marshall family. Jonathan’s brother, Jeremy Elliot Marshall. Jonathan’s twin brother.
Somehow Rannie managed to force her trembling finger to hit the print icon. It felt as if lights—pinpricks of light—were suddenly flashing on and off in the outer corners of her eyes, and she wondered if she was about to experience a full-blown anxiety attack. Her first. Then her stomach decided to get in the act, roiling in a way that sent her running into the nearest bathroom off the Great Hall.
Behind the locked door, she felt safer and stayed in the stall until her heart stopped galloping and her vision cleared. She pressed a wet paper towel to her forehead. There had been no sign of a Jeremy Elliot Marshall anywhere in the Palo Alto yearbook. Photos of girls had flanked the one of Jonathan Edwards Marshall in the alphabetically arranged senior section. Rannie was positive of that. Where was this other twin while his brother was catching baseballs in right field, planning the senior prom, having cute girls flirt with him? Was Ms. Hollins aware of Jem Marshall’s concocted persona? Had she, like Mr. Tut, paid dearly for the knowledge?
Rannie dialed Sergeant Peratta’s number, leaving her home number and her cell number, asking him to call as soon as possible. A chapter in the Mengele manuscript had focused on the symbiotic relationship between twins, identical twins in particular, and how occasionally it went radically askew. What had gone on between these brothers?
The cops she’d heard earlier in the Annex didn’t respond when she called up to them from the stairwell. Far too spooked to remain a moment longer in the building, Rannie grabbed her bag, her jacket, and returned the log to Mrs. Mac’s desk.
In the Great Hall, Jem Marshall was at the security desk, hunched over the sign-in sheet, a pen clamped awkwardly in his left—“lyft,” “sinister”—hand. He looked up as she came through the entryway.
Rannie stopped cold; her lips twitched into an unnatural smile. Her eyes were open way too wide. “Hi,” she said, then erupted in a nervous titter. She tried to stop grinning although it wasn’t easy with her upper lip stuck to her gum. Then, as fast as her size five feet could carry her, she scurried outside and starting running, never once breaking stride until she was all the way home.
Phone message on Rannie’s machine at home
It’s Tim. I’m going up to Amherst with Chris today for his interview. Back tonight. Call. I want to see you. We need to talk.