12

More folks than usual strolled the late night streets, seeking relief from the heat, wearing minimal clothing, several—probably on the way home from Steve’s in the Square—licking ice cream cones. Mooney’s warning had made me extraordinarily conscious of passersby. I watched. I listened. I cataloged their attire. No footsteps seemed to dog my own. At a quick march, I made it to Avon Hill in seven minutes.

The porch light was off. I didn’t get a chance to bang the huge brass knocker. The door opened, eerie creak and all, as soon as I lifted my foot to the first step.

“Miss Carlyle?” He’d been waiting.

“Yes.”

“So you have no students to place with us?” he said, his mouth twisting in a rueful grin.

“If I did, they’d need full scholarships.”

He shook his head regretfully while I wondered if the school rested on firm financial ground.

“Have you a license?” he asked, still blocking the doorway. “Any document that would assure me that you really are an investigator?”

I gave a sigh. “Look, you invited me over to talk, Mr. Emerson. I had my exercise. I can make it a quick round-trip.”

He hesitated only briefly.

“Please,” he said. “Come in.”

He was a slender man, hiding inside a well-tailored suit too heavy for the heat. His hair, a sleek blond pelt, was so fine that, despite attempts at a ruler-straight part, strands escaped every which way. His long, beaky nose looked like it might twitch at any moment. I’d expected his eyes to be cool blue, but they were brown, dark and deep, nestled in creased pouches that made him older than he appeared.

He’d be thirty-nine if he’d been Thea’s classmate.

We walked down the ill-lit trophy corridor toward a room I took to be his office. Large, imposing mahogany desk with matching bookshelves. Persian rugs in reds, oranges, and browns, a leather sofa. Walls hung with gilt-framed diplomas. An airy sanctum in which to greet parents willing to drop large sums in exchange for the cachet of saying, “Yes, our daughter is at Avon Hill. Yours?” Knowing Avon Hill could be equaled but not one-upped.

Perhaps the headmaster kept a more casual workroom elsewhere. This office would do nicely for cadging checks from parents. And for discipline. Scare a kid to death in here. Afraid he’d knock over a vase.

One book sat on the desktop. A yearbook, an elaborate endeavor in a tooled leather binding. A gold satin ribbon marked one of the middle pages.

I showed Emerson my investigator’s license. As if offering an even exchange, he asked if I’d like to see Thea’s picture.

“Sure.”

He waved me toward a plush armchair. “She wasn’t the sort who did clubs and sports and rah-rah events. But someone shot a candid. Here. You can see her profile.”

The gold ribbon marked the yearbook page. The snap showed little in the way of facial delineation. Thea’s breasts jutted assertively. At fourteen, fifteen, she’d had a woman’s body, a woman’s stance.

“Is this the only photo of her in the whole yearbook?”

“Yes,” he said, a bit defensively. “Like I said, she wasn’t into clubs, and she never showed for her homeroom picture. It’s not as though she were a senior.”

Thea’d never made it that far in life, I thought. Never gotten to be a lousy high school senior.

“You were her classmate?”

“As much as anyone,” he said.

I wished he’d been home earlier in the day. I’d have preferred questioning him while I believed that Thea might be alive.

“We would have graduated the same year,” he continued, “if she hadn’t—run off.”

“Why do you say ‘run off’? Why not ‘if she hadn’t been murdered’?”

His disapproval showed in the tight line of his lips. “I suppose because early speculation centered on with whom she had, uh, eloped.”

“Was there a clear favorite?”

Seated in his towering leather chair, behind his wide mahogany desk, he steepled his hands and looked pensive. I wondered if his feet touched the ground. I also wondered how he’d come to rule at his former prep school. Had it been a lifelong ambition?

He said, “At the very beginning, every boy in school probably whispered to his best friend—you know, in complete confidence—that Thea was waiting for him at his parents’ summerhouse. That kind of talk stopped quickly.”

“What about the teachers?”

“We called them ‘masters,’ then, because Avon Hill was fighting hard to keep up the old traditions, to ignore the rebellious times. The campus was seething underneath, but on the surface, all was extremely proper.”

His pronunciation was faintly British, as though he’d taken classes in the U.K. The accent could have been pure pretension served up for the bill-paying parents, but I didn’t think so.

“The ‘masters,’ then,” I said. “Was there talk that Thea’d ‘eloped’ with one of them?”

He shrugged. “I shared a single class with her. The teacher was a woman.”

“Rumors? Speculation?”

“There were rumors about Thea and every man or boy in the entire school.”

“Why?”

“She was … unusual,” he said, fiddling with a shiny fountain pen as he spoke. “For her age. For any age. For this extraordinarily conservative school. My God, the simple fact that her parents sent her here is beyond belief. She was so out of place she could have come from another planet.”

“But she managed to communicate with the natives.”

“Her disgust, mainly.”

“How?”

“By refusing to do whatever anyone in authority told her to do. She was our rebellion poster girl. The rest of us didn’t have a clue. We were all so terrified we might be expelled, shame our families forever. And that’s what she seemed to want most. She courted expulsion. She was so free …”

“Free,” I repeated.

“Gloriously free,” he said. “In many ways.” He fidgeted in his chair and refused to meet my eyes. He seemed caught between wanting to tell me something and wanting to keep it to himself. I wondered how many of his students responded to questioning in the same shifty way, torn between the mingled joys of confession and secret sin.

“Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked, trying to keep anger and impatience out of my voice.

The anger and impatience weren’t aimed at him. I was my own target. I shouldn’t have come. Why was I there, making inquiries about a dead woman? What did I hope to learn? There was no case, no cause. Just curiosity. Because of a single chapter, some poetry.

“We had rather strange visitors the other day,” he said, his manner abruptly casual. The business with the visitors wasn’t what he’d been tempted to confess.

“We?” I said.

“I,” he said with a smile. “You’ve caught me in my headmaster ‘we.’ I’ll do my best to avoid it. Promise.”

“And the other day was?”

“Wednesday last, the eighth.”

“What made the visitors strange?”

Standing, he wasn’t more than five-eight, but he cut an elegant figure. He kept his hands clasped behind him as he paced. His stride seemed mannered, studied: This is the way a headmaster walks and talks. Maybe he’d read a book about it, taken a course.

He spoke. “It’s summer. Almost everyone’s away. If my wife weren’t feeling so poorly, we’d be at our cottage in Maine.

I let him take it slowly, ramble on. I had time to kill.

He said, “They were street urchins. Beggars.” He pursed his lips around the words, made his visitors sound like characters from a Dickens novel.

“Street kids,” I said.

“The boy was older than a kid—a man, I suppose, under all that … hair. I’d put him in his early twenties. He had a walk, a strut, an attitude, if you know what I mean, but the girl was very young, twelve, possibly thirteen. She was carrying a blanket, a tablecloth, some piece of fabric. I assumed they were looking for a place to fool around. I went to order them off the property before they went at it underneath the trees or in the shrubbery. None of the gardeners was present and I thought someone ought to remind them that they were trespassing.”

I nodded. I’d seen the lush backyard. The gardeners were probably given orders to keep the overhanging foliage to a minimum during the school term.

“They weren’t the least bit fazed by my approach. I admit, I’m used to a certain respect from students. I don’t know, maybe I’ve gotten used to cringing cowards. I have power over the teens in my charge. The young man was positively brazen. I couldn’t stare him down. I considered calling the police, and believe me, I would not do that lightly. Several parents live close by and I wouldn’t like them to think I can’t handle any situation that might arise. But I didn’t like the way he looked at me. I didn’t like his grin. It seemed—predatory. And then, out of the blue, they asked about Thea. Whether this was the school that Thea Janis, the writer, the famous writer, had attended. They wanted to know if there were a memorial dedicated to her, a ‘shrine.’ They were laughing, stoned or high on something, drunk, but they used the word ‘shrine.’ And then they asked if I could give them a photograph of Thea. Like Avon Hill was a Grade-B movie studio, and I was some flak who made the rounds to hand out glossies.”

He was indignant at such a slight to himself and his school. I moved on, asking, “Can you describe them in greater detail? What were they wearing?”

“The male was slim, almost emaciated. Height, well, he had a couple inches on me. Dirty T-shirt, ripped jeans stuffed into high black boots. His hair was quite dark, slicked into a ponytail, and his beard was straggly, like he hadn’t really intended to grow one, just forgotten to shave. Oh, and he wore an earring, a silver dangle. The girl was a wispy blonde, practically a child, like I said, but she was all over the man, rubbing herself against him, touching him.

“I outwaited them, just stood my ground until they took off on one of those horribly loud motorbikes. The seat wasn’t really big enough for two, but the girl snuggled up for all she was worth, wrapping her arms around his chest. She was wearing, well, it looked like a man’s singlet, cut off so her midriff showed, and cutoff jeans, too. Sliced so high you could see she’d neglected underpants. I mean, her entire ‘look’ had been manufactured with a scissors!”

“License plate?”

“Didn’t think about it.”

I’ll bet he didn’t; too busy thinking about the young blond chick on the back of the cycle, breasts pressed into the young man’s back, thighs clutching his butt.

“Color? Make?” I asked to snap him out of his reverie.

“Sorry. Red, maybe.”

“Did the engine sound okay?”

“The engine? I’m sorry, I honestly wasn’t paying attention.”

“Anything else about them. Their names?”

“We didn’t introduce ourselves.”

“Did they call each other by name?”

“He called her something. Dixie? An odd name.”

“Which one brought up Thea Janis?”

“The man.”

“Has anyone else come inquiring about Thea Janis?”

“No, and it’s not like these two were collecting data for a biography. She’s rather gone out of style, I guess, all that rebellion, and inner searching, and early death. I mean, she may be popular at other schools, but we certainly don’t teach anything so modern or so … sexual at Avon Hill. We’re very proper here. The board is quite concerned that my wife remain indoors during the latter part of her pregnancy. That’s how advanced we are.” One of his eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. His eyes twinkled to let me know that he found the behavior of the board inexplicable, but somehow amusing. Quaint. Like his British accent.

“I’d like to know why you’re interested in Thea,” he murmured. “Coincidence, two inquiries in one week.”

I ignored his question. Before I left I wanted to know his secret, the one he couldn’t quite decide whether to tell.

“How did your classmates react when they found out Thea had written a book?” I asked. He could have tossed me out, but he seemed willing, eager to reminisce.

“Well, at first, we didn’t know it was her book. It was Thea Janis, not Dorothy Cameron, after all. But we soon found out. It was in the newspapers. We bought every copy in the Square, trying to see if she’d nailed anyone we could identify.”

“Had she?”

“Not really. I mean, she used the school cleverly. Her characters had some of the traits of one master or another, but she’d done a good job of changing names and faces. I was just a kid, but I doubt there was talk of legal action. Thea was practically famous. Notorious. And she seemed suddenly different.”

“How different? In what way?”

“We stopped calling her Dorothy immediately, called her Thea instead.” He stretched out both vowels, gave the name a foreign caress. “It was so romantic. We started watching the way she moved. She was different from the other girls. We knew that.”

His eyes had taken on their naughty-boy look again.

“By ‘different,’ do you mean Thea was sexually experienced?” I asked. “Is that what we’re dancing around here?”

He sat in his chair. His lips moved as he considered what to say, how best to clothe his thoughts in words.

“She was certainly not a whore,” he said finally. “‘Make love, not war,’ was the slogan of the times, and free love had obviously found her. She was its exponent. She was—”

“Avon Hill’s free-love poster girl.”

“That seemed to be one of her ambitions in life, yes.”

“You slept with her?”

He lowered his voice as though he expected his words to carry from the great stone house to the smaller Victorian nearby, disturb the dreams of his pregnant wife.

“We were an entire school of virgins waiting to be deflowered,” he said, avoiding the singular pronoun.

“And she was the experienced one. At fourteen?”

“Fifteen. She seemed to know what she was doing.”

“Who taught her?”

“It seemed to me she had a natural talent for it, as pronounced as her literary talent. A talent for sex.”

“Did her teachers grade her highly?”

“There was speculation. I have no idea what was true and what was fantasy, but the gossip didn’t seem to hurt her. She was beyond us, older than we were in some fundamental way. None of our lies and exaggerations seemed to touch her. We made up Thea stories. Thea and the aged algebra master. Thea and the gym master. That one was very popular. Thea and the gardener, Thea and the captain of Harvard’s football team. She was our group fantasy.”

“Was she promiscuous?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“She was fourteen when she wrote the book, fifteen when she died!” I said sharply, wanting to knock the self-satisfied grin off his face.

It only spurred him to self-defense.

“Not like any fifteen-year-old you’ve ever met, lady. I’m sorry, but you won’t make me feel guilty. I slept with her. She seduced me and not the other way around. She abandoned me and not the other way around. I didn’t drive her from this school. And none of us had anything to do with her death. That animal who slaughtered her had no idea …”

“Had no idea what?”

“He must have thought her an ordinary—”

Words seemed to fail him.

“An ordinary whore,” I supplied. “Tart? Wench?”

“Girl,” he said softly. “He couldn’t have known what a terrible loss, what a terrible thing he did.”

“Worse than killing the two other girls?”

“This may sound wrong; it may sound like elitist snobbery, it probably is. But Thea was special. I grieve for Mozart’s early death in a way I do not grieve the ordinary peasant’s death.”

“You were here, at school, when you found out she was dead?”

“It knocked the breath out of me. We had placed her center-stage in so many exotic locales, in so many bizarre fantasies …”

“And afterward? After her death?”

“What do you think? Thea became a living lesson to us. Don’t take rides from strangers. Don’t take walks late at night. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. In a way, her death marked the end of our innocence.”

“I thought she’d already stolen that,” I said.

“I never meant to say she corrupted me. She didn’t corrupt anyone. She was a wonderful girl. Troubled. Generous. Confused, and confusing.”

A helpful assessment, I thought.

I wished I knew more about the circumstances of Thea’s death. I should have grilled Mooney. As if he’d have kept his ear glued to the phone just to indulge me.

I said, “I understand Thea called home, said she was spending the night with a friend who lived near school.”

“Now that was a giant laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“Said she was staying with Susie Alfred, stuck-up little bitch wouldn’t have let Thea in her hallowed home.”

“Why not?”

“The prim and proper disapproved of Thea.”

“So why the phone call? Was it a hoax?”

He shrugged.

Kids don’t usually call home and set things up so they won’t be missed. Not kids who get killed.

I pressed harder. “So what did Thea do from the time she left Avon Hill till the time she died? What was it, two, three days? More?”

“No one knows.”

“No one knows,” I repeated.

I hate answers like that. Solemn, pompous, asinine. Emerson’s office seemed to close around me and choke me. I said my farewells as politely as I could. He asked for my phone number and I told him he could reach me at the number he had. Let him filter his salacious fantasies through Gloria.

I felt used, dirty. He’d wanted to tell someone that he’d had a fling with a beautiful girl when he was the same age as his incoming students. His pregnant wife was probably not an appreciative audience.

“Did you read her book?” I asked him as we walked toward the front door.

“Parts of it,” he said lightly.

I could bet which parts.

“If you hear from the kids again, the ones who asked about Thea, would you give me a ring?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said with an easy grin, opening the door to usher me out.

Lying, ten to one.