Twenty

I INTERCEPTED A NOTE THAT ANNOUNCED MISS PEPPER HAS A HICKEY ON HER forehead! I tried to imagine the passionate scene that would result in a bruise in that locale, but the only kind I could think of was a Wynn Teller kind of passion that left a woman as disfigured and discolored as Lydia had been. Which more or less ended the post-Snuggles euphoria.

I wanted to make sure the note writer understood that bruises weren’t signs of love, but she was anonymous, her sex known only because teensy open circles dotting i’s are not yet an androgynous affectation.

The morning plodded ahead normally, as if all was right with the world.

Maybe it was, or as all right as things can be in a not all right universe. The morning Inquirer chortled WIFE CHARGED IN TLC MURDER with salacious, unhesitant delight. Everything was settled to everybody else’s satisfaction, justice meted out.

But I wasn’t satisfied about who shot me or why. I wasn’t satisfied about why Lydia—the goodie—lied. I wasn’t satisfied about Adam and Eve and Fay. Or Neil.

Everybody was crazy except me.

But that’s exactly what crazy people thought, wasn’t it?

Except if I was aware of the manner in which crazy people thought, I wasn’t crazy, was I?

I grumped my way down the stairs, past the office, toward the faculty lounge. “Yo!” Edie Friedman said. “News update.” She gestured back toward the office. “I eavesdropped. Angela’s still in labor. She’s setting the all-Jefferson varsity hard labor record.” Her expression turned wistfully hopeful and I tensed. “Did you see Neil’s sub?” she asked. “Kind of cute and literary, with the beard and the glasses.”

We were nearly in the lounge when I realized what she’d said. “Jefferson?” I asked. “Jefferson Hospital? Are you sure?”

She nodded and opened the lounge door.

“Not Lankenau?”

“Jefferson. The humongous brick place where they take sick people and ladies having babies? Want me to walk you down there? Honestly, Mandy!”

I replayed yesterday afternoon as best I could. The odd visit, the phone call from a strange woman, the offer to take my car—but I had made the offer, hadn’t I?

I had thought the person in the car on my street left me alone because Neil was there, but perhaps Neil had been there because of the person in the car. As in a setup. A cohort with a gray car. Why else take me miles away?

Because the right hospital was in the city, crowded, obvious. The wrong hospital was in the green, rolling suburbs, on a quiet campus with outdoor parking. The better to shoot somebody and get away.

I shuddered. It was also possible that Neil could have gone out another exit from the hospital, could have raced to that car, waiting for him with his cohort.

I’d fallen into a lethal farce, one with real guns. And when I noticed what was going on around me in the teachers’ lounge, the farcical feeling persisted.

Déjà vu all over again. Only today it wasn’t schnecken, but turkey and lettuce on pita with a side of tomato. “I bought two on purpose,” the biology teacher said. “I didn’t want to have to go out and buy anything today. What is this, some kind of revenge because you thought I snatched your mother’s cookies?”

“I didn’t take your sandwich!”

This was too boring for an encore.

“My cup has been moved again,” Potter Standish—Doctor Potter Standish—pronounced. There is always a natural hush after his inane edicts, because his uninflected tone mimics a newscaster with major late-breaking news.

“This is no longer a trivial matter,” he intoned.

Pompous Potter, but all the same, the disappearing acts were getting creepy. Formerly amicable coworkers suspiciously eyed each other and held on to their food stocks like peasants in a famine.

“Jean Valjean’s back to his tricks,” I said. “Only now he’s stealing the sandwich filling, too.” Only Charlie Pickles, fellow English teacher, snickered, and Charlie Pickles was a pedantic oaf.

“Where is this John fellow?” Potter demanded.

“In Les Miserables,” Charlie said from over in the corner. “He’s the poor sap sentenced to nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread.”

“Is he out yet?” Potter asked.

“It’s fiction,” I said.

“No wonder.” Potter turned back to study the coffee cup arrangement. “Fiction,” he said with as much contempt as a monotone can muster.

The lounge felt overheated, overcrowded, and overexcited. Everyone looked on the verge of screaming “J’accuse!” I decided to do something useful with my lunch hour. There was a whiz of a seamstress a few blocks up, and perhaps she could perform first aid on my coat. A flesh-toned Band-Aid was not very subtle or secure on a navy sleeve.

Without its downy contents, the injured sleeve was scant protection from the cold, but the rest of me felt decently insulated, and there was nothing like a walk to encourage thinking.

I checked for the gray car, but to tell the truth, I was no longer positive of its color. There seemed a lot of near-possibilities: blue-silver, or taupe, or beige. I wondered if Edie knew what color car Neil drove. I wished I paid more attention to those things.

The square’s Formerly Taller Women were meeting elsewhere this noon, but there was a full contingent of homeless souls waiting on benches until shelters opened. I can never resist a moment’s worry that they were once English teachers in private schools with no tenure or pension plan.

I was nearly across the square when I saw her. Her pretty royal-blue coat made her stand out because it didn’t fit the general attire or the bruised and defeated rest of her. “You’re out, then,” I gasped.

Lydia Teller looked chronically frightened.

“What are you doing here?” I sat down on the empty portion of her bench.

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“For…ummm…you. To thank you. For your kindness. I forgot how schools are, though. All the people. I decided to wait until afterward.”

“That’s hours from now. You can’t sit out here all that time, and anyway, there’s no need to thank me.” No reason, either, if we were honest.

“I was just going, actually. To have coffee somewhere and wait,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. Here, she blended in with the lost people. In a coffee shop, her mustard and mauve and gray-green bruises would attract attention. The poor cameo face had a Richard Nixon five o’clock shadow of bruises, not quite as livid as they’d been, but still sufficiently horrifying.

I touched her hand, hoping to comfort her. “Are you upset about going back to that house? Do you want to stay with me awhile?”

She shook her head, her lips tight.

“Then is there some other way I can help you?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “You’ve already done too much.”

I didn’t dare ask what that meant. Instead, I offered to hail a cab for her.

“Oh, no, I drove. I’m parked right there.” She waved without looking. There were three vehicles at the curb, a tangerine Trans-Am, a white and green van with MICKY’S DRY CLEANERS stenciled on it, and a sedan the color of fog.

I changed the subject even though she didn’t know it. “Was it very terrible with the police?” I asked while my eyes reverted to the narc car.

“It would have been without your brother-in-law. If he and his colleague hadn’t taken care of everything so well, I would have had to stay there all night.”

“And you didn’t?” I took a deep breath of the hostile air and tried to make my question sound innocuous. Girl talk. “And how quickly did that brother-in-law of mine get you released?”

Her eyes wandered vaguely, pausing only when they looked up at the bare branches arching over us. “I’m not sure. It was almost dark. When would that be?”

Afternoon is when that would be in darkest February. Early enough to toddle down to my street then trail me out to the suburbs and avenge herself on the woman who had ruined everything for her.

I wondered if I saw madness along with bruises on her battered face. I also wondered whether there was an antique, but lethal, weapon in the commodious purse on her lap. She clutched its handle with both hands, like a woman waiting for a bus.

Perhaps it was time to stop protecting her and begin protecting myself. Push her a little, test her. “I saw the young man who says he’s Adam Teller, Wynn’s son. Right here, actually. And his sister.”

“Wholeperson,” Lydia muttered.

“They said they were at your house the night Wynn…Wednesday night.”

Lydia stared at me blankly.

“They said you were upset, too.”

“How couldn’t I be?” she said, surprising me. “They act like they’re his only children—if they’re his children at all!”

“I thought you were upstairs the whole time,” I said quietly.

“After that. After them, I ran upstairs. They put Wynn in a fury. He hurt me. I ran upstairs.”

“And their mother was there, too, wasn’t she?” I said, testing it out. “Fay…Elias.”

“Her. You’d think a family could decide on a last name, wouldn’t you? Who does she think she is, barging in on our dinner hour with those two oafs, claiming to be his true family, like I wasn’t real, like Hugh wasn’t real, making things worse than they already were!” Lydia began to cry. “First the man with the lawsuit, then them! One fight after another!”

Oh, I wish, I wish she had stuck to her locked-in-the-bathroom, don’t-know-a-thing story, had remained my unsullied, blameless heroine. I wish, I wish I could find the person to believe.

She tightened her lips and looked out from exhausted eyes. I felt terrible, for both of us.

“Actually,” she said, “I was upstairs just about the whole evening, like I said. Up and down for a while, then just up there. I knew I was safe until the people left. He never hurt me when people were around.” She scowled and clutched her purse even more tightly. “Except if the person was Hugh,” she added in a whisper. “But of course, that’s different. Hugh’s family.”

That went right up there among the most chilling sentences I’d ever heard.

“So I’m sorry if I confused you before by saying I was in the bathroom, because of course I was, but not maybe every minute. Not exactly.”

I thought of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who’d traveled with a lantern in search of an honest man, and who’d then founded the Cynic sect in Athens. Lydia was probably one of the people he interviewed along the way.

“If they hadn’t descended on him like locusts, none of this would have happened. You had to know how to handle him.” She looked very sad again. “Not that I did.”

She needed counseling, needed to get it straight where responsibility and guilt should be assigned. As soon as I was positive she wasn’t going to kill me, I’d mention it.

“Like vultures, they were, after his flesh. Picking, picking.” She looked at me carefully. “That’s another reason I went into the bathroom. I couldn’t stand them, and I knew Wynn couldn’t and that he’d be furious.”

“Was anybody still there when you went upstairs for good?”

She nodded. “All of them. Except maybe the teacher about the lawsuit.” She wrinkled her forehead in thought. “No, maybe he was there, too. I can’t remember. I was barely downstairs at all.”

“Was your husband for sure still alive when you locked yourself up?”

“Please.” Again her eyes welled up and over. “This feels like the police again. When I came downstairs way later, he was…” She shrugged and released the pocketbook long enough to brush away the tears. “You believe me, don’t you? I thought you believed me!” Her voice was low, but with a desperate edge of hysteria.

“You never heard the gun go off?”

“Please.” She shook her head.

Of course she’d heard it. I simply couldn’t figure why she wouldn’t say when, or by whom, unless as I increasingly feared, she had herself fired it. “Go home,” I said softly. “You need rest. And I need to get back to work.”

She nodded.

But next period, while my class had a pop quiz on “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I looked out my window and Lydia was still there, out among the homeless waiting for shelter. Or for me, she’d said. I automatically leaned forward and opened my mouth, as if to call out, although whether to warn her or to frighten her away I couldn’t have said.