The Ghosts of Lovely Women Read online

  “It relates to the poem. This person that she thinks of as 101—she was going to confront him. She wanted him to step down. Did Jessica come to see you here? She visited the school on the day she died.”

  Fred opened his drawer and searched out a box of mints, which he made a show of opening while he wore a quizzical expression. “Here? Where did you hear that? I never heard that.”

  “Some students saw her car.” Only one; I was hedging my bet.

  “Really? Huh. Well, I was not here that day. I mean, I was here, but I left before—” He stopped and laughed, then said, “before I would have seen any visitors. Now if that’s all?”

  “That’s not all.”

  Derek touched my arm. “Teddy, maybe we should just go. Fred’s a busy man.”

  “I would like some answers, actually.”

  Fred seemed to billow to a slightly larger size, like a toad. “Teddy, I don’t have to answer your questions. I’m your superior, and you are being insubordinate.”

  “Was Jessica blackmailing you? Did you give her money?”

  Fred laughed, appealing to Derek with his hands out, palms up. “What is going on with you today, Teddy? You’re unprepared with your writing proposal, you’re hallucinating about Jessica Halliday. Do you need to take a leave of absence? You told me you’re upset about her death. Maybe more so than I realized.” He closed the mints and dug in his middle drawer for a pencil, which he then tapped on his blotter. “I mean, get real, Teddy. Next you’ll be saying I killed the girl.”

  He almost pulled that off. He was in his own territory and starting to feel more comfortable, but his mouth did a curious thing when he said the word “killed.” Normally when people make the “k” sound their lips purse outward and their tongue touches the back of the roof of their mouth. Linguistics 101. But Fred’s lips curled inward in an almost impossible way. He was trying to make light of the word, to breeze it out, but instead it came out with an almost strangled sound.

  I pictured Fred strangling Jessica Halliday. I stared at the hand that was tap, tap, tapping away with the pencil. It was large and somehow formless. Fred was large, too — probably six feet tall. “I’d like to get Anthony in here,” I said.

  “No. This meeting is over!” The anger in his eyes was no act. “I’ve put up with enough of your insinuations. This is a serious thing you’re doing, Teddy — a serious thing. I hope you know what this can mean for your career.”

  “Fred, calm down,” Derek said. “Teddy hasn’t been well. The fact is that she hasn’t been sleeping much since Jessica died. Insomnia. She—” He looked apologetically at me. “She’s gotten some very weird notions into her head.”

  “Such as?” Fred wanted to throw me out, but he also wanted to know just how much I knew. I had told Derek all of my suspicions on the stairway as we walked toward the office. Now he pulled some of them out.

  “She thinks you stole her house key,” he said. “She thinks you broke into her house and ransacked it. Kathy Olchen’s house, too.”

  Fred went for supercilious. It was all he had. “Teddy, this is beyond ridiculous. Breaking into teacher apartments, stealing their things. When will the accusations end?”

  “Did you find what you were looking for, Fred? Did Jessica tell you she’d left clues with us? Or evidence, maybe? There’s a certain piece of paper that is missing. Many people want to find it. I’m guessing you want to find it most of all. And in my apartment? Maybe you were looking for the journal, too. Rosalyn told me you hadn’t known of its existence until she mentioned it, when she got called down. That must have surprised you to know the journal was there, to know that I had read it.”

  He sighed, shaking his head and grinning at Derek. “Unbelievable. You read too much fiction. Now I think I will send you home. A leave of absence to help you cure your insomnia.”

  “How did you know I lived in an apartment?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Derek said house. House key. You said “apartments.”

  “I assume all teachers live in apartments. We don’t make much money, now do we?”

  Derek laughed. “Come on, Teddy. The man has a school to run.”

  I shook my head. “Fred has something to answer for. I won’t stand for this. I want you to step down, Fred. It’s the right thing to do.”

  I was trying to echo Jessica’s words as closely as I could. Fred shifted in his chair and said, “I do not need some girl telling me what to do. I have a position of great responsibility here.”

  “By girl do you mean me? Or Jessica?”

  He wasn’t trying to laugh anymore. “What is it that you want, Teddy?”

  “A whole lot more than two thousand dollars,” I said softly, leaning toward him.

  “What? What? This is unbelievable!” he yelled, going red.

  Derek turned to me in mock disbelief. “Teddy, are you asking for money? What is this? Are you trying to blackmail Fred?”

  “Fred has paid blackmail before.” I stared at Fred and he stared back at me, with hate. “Or money, at least. Did Jessica even ask for it? I don’t think she did. I think she started receiving it in her mailbox with the drama mail. I think she kept it because she wanted you to suffer, to lose something. It was just an extension of the money men spent on that website. But in the end she had to give it back. It didn’t sit right with her own convictions.” I stared at him.

  He looked away first.

  “Derek, I suggest you take Teddy out of here, along with all of her allegations. Teddy, you are dismissed. I will have someone escort you from the building.”

  Derek swung back to Fred. “Why would you fire her? She obviously needs help. I thought this was a Christian institution. It’s not like you actually feel threatened, right?” He was half laughing, both at my audacity and Fred’s overreaction — that was what his face said.

  Fred’s voice was wooden. “Next time I will be sure to hire a man for this position.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see now why Jessica would have resented you so much. You dislike women, and yet you visited her website. Is that what women are for, Fred? And not even women, girls. You typed in those search terms. You had to look for a site that showed teens undressing, naked girls.”

  Fred stood up. “I never visited that girl’s website! What a disgusting allegation!”

  There was a knock at the door. Rosa opened it, her expression bland. I could only imagine what she’d been hearing. “Teddy, you had an urgent call. Mrs. Baxter said that she found the sheet you were looking for.”

  “Ah,” I said, looking at Fred.

  He was blank, waiting for my move. “Well?” he asked.

  “That sheet would be what, Rosa?”

  Rosa looked at her memo pad. “She said it had names of men who had visited Jessica’s website. She wants you to call her.”

  “The missing page,” I said, staring at Fred. “Number NR1415. Thanks, Rosa.”

  Rosa left with great reluctance. The three of us sat together in Fred’s office like islands.

  “Your name is on it, Fred, I’ll bet my job on it. I’ll bet Jessica told you she hid it, just like she told you, what — that she had given clues to two of her teachers? And that was why you targeted Kathy and me, why you monitored me so closely. Did Kathy find out? Did she confront you?”

  Fred cleared his throat. “Derek, can you help me out here?”

  “I don’t think I can, Fred. I saw your face when you heard about that sheet.”

  Fred laughed. “You two understand nothing. The fact is, yes, Jessica received money from me. Just small amounts. I paid her because I felt sorry for her. I thought if I gave her some money, bits at a time in her mailbox, she might be persuaded to stop her little witch hunt. I certainly didn’t kill her.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “More importantly, the police won’t believe you,” Derek added. “But I’m going to call them now.”

  Fred nodded. He went back behind his desk and sat down, playing
absently with his Altoids box. “Teddy, you shouldn’t judge me. All men look at pornography. All men. It’s the most common thing on the internet. It’s not illegal. It’s big business, big money, and that’s because looking is simply human nature.”

  “Looking at teenagers? Girls the age of the ones you teach? The ones you lead?”

  “We all do things at home that we wouldn’t tell our students about. Don’t we, Miss Thurber?” He looked significantly at Derek and then back at me. “No one should have to apologize for having a sex drive.”

  “But they would have to apologize for murder,” I said.

  Derek went to the door and opened it. “Rosa, call the police,” he said.

  Fred laughed. “This is funny, really. Just one obnoxious whore of a girl, and my whole career is in jeopardy. I’ve been in education for twenty-five years. I am a man of significance.”

  I thought of Agamemnon in the Underworld, complaining about the fact that his wife murdered him without ever acknowledging the murder he himself committed. The murder of a child who hadn’t mattered, because she had been a girl. A man of significance.

  “Fred, I don’t know what to say to you,” I said.

  “I paid that girl because she threatened to mislead people. To say that I was the sort of person who preyed on teenaged girls. What I do online is no one’s business.”

  “She didn’t want your money. It was a burden to her. She brought it back here, I’m guessing. She told you to step down. And you got angry? You felt she would keep bothering you, demanding restitution that money couldn’t provide?”

  Fred pounded the desk. “Restitution for what? What in the world did that girl think I had done to her? She’s the one who set up a website. She’s the one who was taking money from innocent men. A spoiled little mama’s girl who used her father’s hard-earned money to create her little internet embarrassment.”

  I felt ill. “How did you get her to the car? It was in the lot. Did you have to drag her there?” A sudden image came to me: Mr. Hendy moving one of the giant cafeteria garbage cans on a little two-wheeled dolly. “Did you use a cafeteria can?”

  Fred paled, glaring at me. “I don’t have to answer to you, Teddy. I don’t have to answer to anyone.” We heard sirens then. He smiled oddly and popped a mint into his mouth, an odd-looking one that wasn’t round like the others, but tubular — almost like a capsule.

  “Derek—” I yelled, but Derek had already dived behind the desk to try to make Fred spit it out.

  “Too late,” Fred said with a spiteful smile, pushing Derek away with surprising strength. “I prefer this to further interrogation.”

  “What was that? What was that pill, Fred?” I cried.

  Then there was chaos. Fred tried to bolt out of the room, but Derek tackled him. The first officer on the scene found the two men struggling on the floor; he was told about the pill, and ambulance attendants appeared minutes later. Fred was escorted out of the room. Later I heard he’d been forced to drink an emetic solution which had produced the white capsule — his escape clause — entirely intact.

  We met with Kelsey McCall in the office annex and told her the whole story, starting with Fred’s visit to my room. She typed rapidly at her laptop, her face growing redder with each new detail. She spoke, looking at her keyboard.

  “You can bet he had that poison waiting, just in case someone found out. Loaded up his own capsule with something he knew would do the trick fast. He didn’t want to face the music, but now he will.”

  She made eye contact with us then. “I doubt he planned this murder. She got him angry. She threatened him. Cornered animal syndrome. The guy didn’t want to lose his job.”

  “Not over a whore of a girl,” I said.

  Derek looked at me. “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Can we go?” he asked McCall.

  She nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”

  We left. My mind felt curiously blank as I walked past the police officers, past the crying office workers. The only clear thought that came to me was I wonder how Anthony Fairchild is going to spin this in the p.a. announcement.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Then leaf subsides to leaf; so Eden sank to grief…”

  —Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

  I thought I saw Jessica once, in an aisle of a gourmet food store in Pine Grove. I’d gone there determined, for once, to make dinner for Derek with the apparent ease and elegance that he always made it for me. I passed the baking aisle and then turned back, because I had seen her — small and blonde, one hip thrust out while she contemplated a bag in her hand. I almost called her name; then she looked up, and I saw that it wasn’t Jessica, but her mother. How alike they were after all… except that Jessica’s youth receded before me; as I approached I saw the reality of age and grief on Janet Halliday’s face.

  She smiled at me. “Hello, Ms. Thurber.”

  “Teddy.”

  “Teddy. And I’m Janet.”

  “How are you, Janet?” I asked.

  She sighed at the bag of coconut shavings in her hand. “I’m up and down. My therapist said death isn’t easy, and neither is life. She said a mouthful.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked back at me, this time unsmiling, her green eyes wide. “I uh— I understand you know about — about an argument my husband had with Jessica before she died.” She blushed as she said it. Who had told her? The police? Sam?

  “I did learn of it, yes.”

  “You must think… well, I don’t know what you must think. Or maybe I do.”

  “It’s not my business.”

  She shook her head. “My husband has never known — how to show his love. He loved Jessica, very much. But for some people — their love is like hate, or at the very least like anger. They feel something, but they don’t know what it is that they’re feeling.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, looking at my shoes. I could tell she was still watching me, though, so I looked back at her.

  “I thought of leaving him.” Her eyes beseeched me. Did she want understanding? Forgiveness? “But the fact is that the boys have been through enough. This — upheaval. The loss of a sister. I couldn’t do that to them, couldn’t tear their family apart anymore.”

  “You’re a good mother, Janet.”

  “Nathan is going to therapy with me. Couples therapy.”

  I must have looked surprised, because she laughed in a sad way. “Oh, he doesn’t want to go, but my husband does love me. He loved Jessica, and he loves me, and he doesn’t want to lose me. So he’ll go, and hopefully he’ll learn some things from the experience. Hopefully we both will.”

  “I’m glad. I think that you are important for your family.”

  “Yes.”

  She acknowledged this with a nod and a small smile, an echo of the secret smiles Jessica used to wear when she slouched in her desk and dreamed her dreams of the future.

  “I thought for a minute that you were Jessica. You look like her. Or she like you, I guess.”

  “Yes. The plan was that she’d bear that resemblance into the future while I faded into my comfortable old age.” She wiped at her tears with some impatience. “God, I’m tired of crying. The problem is, what else can you do? No recourse. No complaint department.”

  With a gesture of impatience she set her bag of coconut back on the shelf. “I’m keeping you with my maudlin talk.”

  “No. I like to talk about Jessica.”

  Janet looked at me gratefully. “Me, too. She was so beautiful, Teddy. So beautiful, my sweet daughter. Do you know the last thing I said to her? She was going off in the car, and I said, ‘Don’t go far — it’s almost dinner time.’ Don’t go far,” she mused.

  “She hasn’t gone far,” I assured her.

  “She promised she wouldn’t,” she said, and as she crumpled I took her into my arms.

  *

  It was graduation evening, and the faculty, black-robed, were processing in like an unki
ndness of ravens. St. James graduation was always a long ceremony, so teachers brought provisions for the evening. We counted on those with more extensive degrees: masters and doctoral robes had all sorts of natural pockets inside their hoods and sleeves. Most people slid some extra tissue (there were always tears), breath mints or candy, and my row, once we had all established ourselves in our seats and settled in for the valedictorian’s prayer, was like a confectioner’s shop. Lucia had crammed so many lemonheads into the tip of her sleeve she could have used it as a sap.

  I sat, squinting at the sour flavor of the candy I’d been offered, and contemplated the back of Josh’s head. The men had been allowed to remove their caps, as tradition dictated, but we women still wore them, painfully bobby pinned into our scalps. After the prayer there was much standing and sitting, typically ceremonial. Students read wise words, sang senior songs, presented senior gifts. The entire choir sang a song for Kathy Olchen and gave roses to her family.

  Danny Washburn walked onto the stage to much applause. He approached the podium and looked at all of us before he stared down at the paper in front of him. “We’ve all experienced terrible loss this year — the loss of a St. James teacher, and of an alumna who was very much a part of our lives.” His voice cracked only slightly. “In honor of Jessica Halliday, I read this poem.”

  He read “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. This was rather a cliché, I suppose, since it’s often selected as a tribute to deceased high school students. For Jessica, though, it seemed most appropriate. She had been the golden girl, for all of us.

  “So dawn goes down to day,” Danny was finishing, solemn and majestic. “Nothing gold can stay.”

  There was silence, then applause, as he walked off of the stage. Lucia handed me a tissue from inside her capacious sleeve. I dabbed at my eyes and sighed as Brenda James, our drama director, said, “And now, we shall issue diplomas to the class of 2009.”

  This was supposed to be Fred’s job; he had done it ever since I had been here. Perhaps everyone was realizing this — the strangeness of Brenda reading these names. “She does a better job than Fred,” Lucia whispered.