I'd have gotten there eventually. I mean, there were several threads leading to one particular Delphi door—Janelle said she'd talked to him, he said he hadn't yet had the pleasure; Debbie'd voiced suspicions about who the "other man" had been.
But it was the annual that did it. The senior annual that Benny had stolen to give to Janelle's daughter. The annual that had been published, as they all were around here, after the senior class graduation ceremony, and long after Janelle disappeared. She swore she'd had no contact with Delphi in the intervening years, and yet she possessed her own senior annual.
In small-town South Dakota, teachers wear many hats. The football coach is also likely to be the typing teacher, the study hall monitor, and back-up bus driver.
And the chorus director, junior high geography teacher, and senior class adviser can also advise the yearbook staff. For more than twenty-five years running.
"You lied," I said, angrily. "You knew where she went. You knew why she left. And you sent her a copy of the annual."
I'd realized Janelle had been more than reasonably reticent about the identity of the father of her child. Though the revelation of an out-of-wedlock baby could make life uncomfortable for both parents, especially if it hit the nightly news, grownups could, presumably, deal with the evidence of their adolescent mistakes.
There had to have been a very good reason for keeping the secret. Perhaps the information would put the individual's career and civic standing in some sort of jeopardy. Even many years after the fact.
"Oh, Hugh, how could you?" I asked him, heartsick, in the impeccably neat kitchen of the house he'd owned since he first started teaching in Delphi. The one right across the street from the school.
"I don't have many rules in my life, Tory," he said sadly. "But those I have, I take seriously. I try not to lie, and I keep the secrets that are entrusted to me. In this case, I had to break one rule to follow the other. It was not a particularly difficult decision."
"I imagine self-interest had a little do with it," I said harshly. It was probably easy to keep a secret that would have gotten him fired and ruined his teaching career.
"Keeping a confidence hardly qualifies as self-interest," he said gently.
"It does when the secret you kept also saved your ass. Not that there weren't suspicions all along. I just ignored them. We all did."
In high school, the guys mistrusted, and felt uncomfortable around, Mr. Kincaid. The girls loved him.
Evidently literally.
Del's affair with Hugh made me curious, if slightly queasy. But the notion of his having sex with students, while they were students, made me physically ill.
"How would knowing Janelle Ross's predicament in 1969 'save my ass,' as you so succinctly put it?" Hugh asked, brows knit.
"Keeping Janelle's pregnancy a secret is what saved your ass," I said vehemently. "Especially since you were the father! How many girls have you seduced over the years? How many lives have you ruined?"
I was near tears.
Hugh felt for a chair behind him, pulled it out, and sat the table, pale and shaky.
"You think that I fathered Janelle's baby?" he asked, incredulous. "That I slept students? Who told you this?"
"No one," I said. "It all adds up. Who else would still need protection after this many years? Whose life would be devastated? Who did Janelle, and all the rest of the girls, trust implicitly?"
Hugh rubbed his face and ran his hands through his hair. "It was bad enough when Mr. Nelson showed up, demanding to know where Janelle was. I was completely flabbergasted when he informed me that my daughter would be contacting me shortly."
"I can imagine that would be flabbergasting," I said, cold and aloof, leaning back against the kitchen sink as Hugh blew all his air out in a whoosh.
"It was. Completely," he said quietly, then looked at me directly. "Tory, I would never betray my students' trust. I am not the father of Janelle's child. I could not have fathered anyone's child."
I eyed him stonily. He was sleeping with Del, and her minimum requirement was that all male organs be in proper working condition. A claim of impotence would not wash.
"Are you trying to tell me that you're sterile?" I asked.
"No," Hugh said, sighing. "I'm trying to tell you that I'm gay."
The wheels turning in my brain ground to a screeching halt. I had to remind myself to keep breathing.
"But, but..." I said, weakly, sitting down.
But what?
The fact that he was so good-looking, that all the girls had crushes on him, that our minds were stuck in a conventional rut and no other option had even occurred to us?
"...you were married," I finished lamely.
"Not for long, if you remember. I put that sweet woman through hell," Hugh said sadly, "with a doomed attempt to rehabilitate myself. It was a miserable failure."
"What about Del?" I asked. "Is an affair with her another shot at rehabilitation?"
"I'm not having an affair with Delphine," Hugh said, mildly surprised. "though we do see each other socially and enjoy each other's company, Del and I are just friends. She understands that I'm not interested in a sexual relationship with her."
Del never understands when a man is not interested in a sexual relationship with her. "So did you spend all of Friday night together, talking about your mutual noninterest?"
"I didn't spend Friday night with Del," Hugh protested.
"Yes you did. Del didn't come home until morning" I said, annoyed with his protests.
"Well, Delphine may not have come home that night. But I did. Alone." He scratched his head. "If I remember correctly, Del left the river almost immediately following the scene between Cameron and his father."
And when Hugh told me who Del had left with, I nearly fell over.