by Mindy Mejia
A week later, Hattie cornered me in the middle of class. I had the students working in pairs and she left her partner talking in mid-sentence, strolled casually up to the front of the room, and leaned against the stack of essays I’d just collected.
“Do you want something, Hattie?” I didn’t look up from my computer, but somehow I could still sense the curve of her hip and the tilt of her head. I knew she was wearing the wide-necked blue top that was too loose and sometimes fell off her shoulder. Her fingers tapped a beat into the desk; she always had nervous fingers. She didn’t say anything for a minute and I felt her gaze, waiting for me to look at her. I refused.
“I had some questions about the essay.”
“Yes?” I kept typing.
“I wasn’t quite sure how you wanted it structured.”
She was lying and not even bothering to lie well. The essay was a simple comparison paper between the Jane Eyre book and the play. Hattie never had a question about homework and the tone of her voice was all wrong. It was too quiet, subdued. Finally I looked at her and tried to keep my face and voice impassive. She was close enough to smell, her eyes wide and serious. Her fingers fell still as our eyes met.
“I’m sure your essay’s fine.” The words were hard to get out.
“I was worried about the third paragraph in particular. I hope you’ll think it’s okay.”
God, why was she so young? Why was she my student? Why was I still compelled by this attraction when any worthwhile human being would have stopped thinking about her as anything but a felony?
“I’ll look at it. Go finish up with your partner.” I glanced at the clock, then turned back to the computer. “There’s only a few minutes left.”
That night after dinner I put the stack of essays in the middle of the kitchen table and dug in with a red pen. I muttered comments to myself about some of them and wrote with loud, scratchy handwriting, making sure Elsa and Mary could hear me, not that either of them cared. Since the cardiologist’s diagnosis, Mary had spent every possible minute with her mother and it seemed pointless to bring up the idea of going on a date again. It felt like I was the one fading out of this house.
When I got to Hattie’s paper I was tempted to stuff it in the bottom of the pile or, better yet, just mark it with an A and move on to the next, but the perverse Humbert Humbert in me couldn’t resist reading. It was a fairly standard analysis, nothing too in-depth. She thought the book did better with character backgrounds, although the play gave them living, breathing vitality. Her words, not mine. I flipped the first page over and skimmed ahead to the third paragraph.
. . . in the case of Mr. Rochester’s wife. Due to time constraints, the play couldn’t address her moral ambiguity or even her history. Peter, if you’re reading this, meet me at the old Erickson barn on the lake at 8:30. I have to talk to you. However, the play allows Mrs. Rochester to be a three-dimensional character . . .
I did a double take, read it twice more to be sure, and then looked at the clock. 8:39 p.m. My heart began pounding. I glanced through the door to the living room where Elsa and Mary were watching American Idol from their matching rockers, cheerfully critiquing the contestants like every other Thursday night. The paper suddenly felt like a billboard in my hand, even though neither of them even glanced in my direction. I folded it twice over and stared at the white square. Perspiration broke out on my armpits and back.
I didn’t think. I walked upstairs and changed into sweats, then came back down and pulled on my running shoes, all with that white square of paper burning through my palm.
“Where are you going?” Mary asked.
“I’ve got some heartburn from dinner. Going to try and jog it out.”
“This late? It’s already dark.”
“I’ll take a flashlight.” I grabbed one from the front porch and ran down the driveway and over the hill toward Winifred Erickson’s farm. I clicked the flashlight off after the house disappeared from sight and picked up my pace, running blindly over the gravel, sprinting into the faint edge of the horizon, hoping I’d hit a pothole or land wrong and twist my ankle. I pushed harder, crushing the paper into garbage, sharpening my breath, cold muscles stiffening, then I veered off the road into the woods, praying now for a root to trip me and knock my teeth out or at least give me a nasty concussion on a tree stump. But nothing touched me. I was a ghost runner, inviolate, racing into the clearing with insane luck burning through my legs and then the barn was in sight. I stopped dead and stood there, chest heaving. A giant oak tree stood next to the barn, shadowing it from the moon. There was nothing to do except face her now.
The door gave way with a deep croak. It was dark inside, except for the glow of a small camp lantern on a stool in the corner. I didn’t see her at first, but as my eyes adjusted I found her silhouette leaning against the window underneath the oak tree. She must have watched me approach. Her hair was pulled up and she wore a red plaid jacket. I crammed my hands in my pockets. I probably should have thought about what to say before I got here.
“Hello, LitGeek,” she said softly into the darkness.
I swallowed. “Hello, Hattie.”
“Why don’t you call me HollyG?”
“Because that’s not your name.”
“Neither is Hattie. Hattie’s a nickname.”
“But that’s who you are. You’re Hattie Hoffman. You’re a teenage high school student and I’m your married English teacher.”
She didn’t say anything or move from the window.
“You have to understand that it’s over. Whatever it was is over and I should have never—I shouldn’t have . . . Christ.”
I turned back toward the door, frustrated beyond words. The floorboards creaked.
“No, you shouldn’t have. But you did.” Her voice trembled slightly underneath the vowels.
“I’m married, Hattie.” Maybe repetition would help the idea sink in. “I have a wife.”
The barn creaked again and her voice was closer this time, stronger. “You were married a week ago, too, but that didn’t stop you from wanting to see me. It didn’t stop you from becoming the chicken whisperer.”
I laughed before I could help it. That’s what she’d nicknamed me after that first night of cyber sex, when it was all under the ridiculous pretense of seducing a chicken. The laugh died, though, as the words came back, with full-color images now of things we’d done, places I’d told her to caress, imagining my lips there instead of her fingers. The boards groaned underneath us and I spun around before she could come any closer. She’d crept most of the way across the barn and was near enough that I could read the longing and hesitation in her eyes. They were open wide and her mouth was parted and she looked so damn young. A child with a woman’s body. She didn’t even know how young she was. She probably thought she was grown up and ready for the world, with her acting career and her endless quips and comebacks and that brain that soaked up everything around her. She probably thought there were only a few years between us, but it was a lifetime—dark, undiscovered caverns of disappointment and compromises. She was the adult idealized. I was the adult that really happened.
“I’m your teacher, Hattie. Can’t you understand how wrong this was?”
The corner of her mouth tipped up. “What have you ever taught me?”
She took another step forward and my hands went up automatically, holding her back by the shoulders, keeping those last two feet of sanity between us. “I can teach you a few things about statutory rape laws.”
She looked down at my hands on her. “So you’ve thought about it.”
Christ, she wasn’t even listening to me. She was on a completely different planet having a completely different conversation.
“No. Well, yes, but only in terms of how long my prison sentence would be. You’re a child, Hattie.”
That got her. She stepped back, crossing her arms. “I’m seventeen.”
“Exactly.”
We squared off for a minute in silence. Ag
itation made her chest rise and fall and the movement squeezed her breasts against her arms. The fact that I even noticed only made me angrier.
“Look, Hattie, I only came here to tell you in person that I made a horrible mistake, but it’s done now. Over. You’re a good student and—”
“Good?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Great student, all right? You were my favorite student in class before this.”
“And what am I now? Your favorite what?”
I gritted my teeth. “You’re still my favorite student, or at least you will be if you drop this right now.”
Her face changed, became vulnerable. The arms crossing her chest looked more like they were hugging her body now for support. She dropped her face to the floor and her words were just above a whisper. “I don’t think I can, Peter.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Not to you it isn’t. Open your damn ears. You’re the child. I’m the”—I barked out a laugh—“responsible adult and this?”—I waved a finger between the two of us—“will never fucking happen. I should be home right now grading papers while my wife and her mother watch bad TV, not running off to meet children in vacant barns in the middle of the night.”
“You keep calling me a child.”
“That’s because you are.”
She looked up and her face had changed again. She was like quicksilver, how fast she processed information and emotions and moved on. Now she had a speculative, smug look, like she’d figured something out. My body tensed up, wary at the lightning change.
“I think you’re calling me a child so much because you’re trying to convince yourself of it.”
“No, that’s just the fact of the matter.”
“I’ll give you some facts, Peter. Fact one: You’re unhappy in your marriage. You don’t love your wife anymore and you’ve realized that you chose the wrong woman.”
“You don’t know what—”
“Fact two: We met online and you found someone who shares your interests, who excites you and makes you think and laugh. And now that you know who I am you’re scared, because I could make you lose everything.”
She stared with an intensity that bore right through me and her voice fell to little more than a whisper. “But I would never do that, Peter. Because I’m the right woman.”
She was so close. I could reach out and touch her again, but this time to pull her in and kiss her. I could tip her head to the side and run my mouth down her neck, taking bites out of her, tasting the skin that smelled so fresh and sweet against the rotting wood of the barn. She would let me. She would let me do more.
I backed up two quick steps until my heels hit the door, opened it, and walked outside, breathing deep. The wind had picked up, and the swift muddy scent of the fields and lake cleared my head. Hattie walked out and stood next to me, facing the same horizon.
“I could transfer out of your class, if that’s the problem. You wouldn’t be my teacher.”
“I teach basic English for seniors, too. You’d still be my student, just surrounded by idiots.”
She laughed. “No, thank you.”
“How can I make you understand?”
She waited, and I sensed a satisfied silence, as though she’d rather stand next to me arguing than be anywhere else.
“You’re too young. You’re too innocent.”
She laughed again, but it was a different laugh, edgier. “I’m not a virgin.”
“That’s not what I meant.” It was what I meant, but I couldn’t concede any ground. My resolve weakened the longer we stood here, where even the shadow of the oak seemed complicit. I silently counted all the reasons I couldn’t kiss her, shouldn’t even think about kissing her.
“I’m good at being what people want me to be. Watch me, Peter. You’ll see. I’ll become the last girl in the world who would be having an affair with her English teacher.”
I swallowed and when I finally spoke, my voice was hoarse. “That’s because you’re not having an affair with your English teacher.”
She walked out of the shadows into the moonlight at the edge of the clearing, her slim hips jutting from side to side, and paused at the walking path that led around the lake. It was the same spot where the boys broke out of rank for their mad dash to the front, where their order and steady pace turned into the chaos of shifting and merging bodies. She glanced back at me, her eyes shining with blatant confidence.
“Fact three, Peter: I’ll be eighteen on January fourth. See you then.”
And she disappeared into the night. I stood there for what felt like an hour, knowing I’d lost a key battle. I’d sprinted for the lead with no strategy and stumbled, giving up any chance of victory. My gut churned with dread and disgust at myself. This had to stop. If I had any decency at all, this affair had to be over.
From this point on, as far as I was concerned, Hattie Hoffman was as good as dead. She had to be.
DEL / Tuesday, April 15, 2008
TEENAGER STABBED IN PINE VALLEY. FRIENDS BELIEVE CURSE RESPONSIBLE
Just weeks before her high school graduation, an eighteen-year-old girl was murdered outside Pine Valley. The Wabash County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the identity of the victim as Henrietta Sue Hoffman, known as Hattie to her friends and family. The body suffered multiple stab wounds and was discovered in an unused barn near Lake Crosby on Saturday night. The Sheriff’s Department has no suspects in custody at this time, but confirmed they are following “all possible leads.” One such lead may be from an unusual source: a four-hundred-year-old curse. According to Portia Nguyen, a close friend of the victim . . .
“Hell.”
I threw the paper back on the table without glancing at the rest of the story. It was front-page news in the Minneapolis newspaper, and the County Gazette had run Hattie’s senior picture under the headline along with a two-page spread of other pictures from her high school yearbooks. Hattie’s murder was already big stuff in the local news—everyone demanded details when a young, pretty girl got killed—but now that this Macbeth nonsense had hit the wire, every nutcase and reporter in the state would be all over us. Pressure like that might make the killer nervous, and who knew what a jumpy murderer would do next.
It was 5:30 a.m., too early to go downstairs and pound on the Nguyens’ door, so I went over my suspect and evidence lists, ate my oranges, and tried to forget about the media.
The oranges were a birthday gift from my sister in Florida. She sent a huge crate every year and spoiled me for those pale, watery ones at the grocery store. I ate one from the crate every morning, peeling it right over the garbage, and watched the droplets spray with each rip of skin. The scent of it got on my hands and lingered all day, no matter how many times I washed. It was a good scent, bright and tangy, and I needed that this week. The further I dug into Hattie’s life, with the picture of her bloody, bloated-legged corpse waiting each time I closed my eyes, every bite of orange tasted sweeter, sharper.
I ate and read over my lists. We had two possible suspects now: Tommy and the person who’d signed that letter L.G., so Jake was working on ID’ing him through Hattie’s internet records. The guy was connected to her by two things, we figured from the messages Hattie saved. They both liked art—acting and reading and stuff—and neither of them cared for country life. They never mentioned names, their own or anybody else’s, or any places or events, so it was hard to pin him down. Boy was educated. Liked throwing the five-dollar words around and sounded pretentious as hell most of the time, but Hattie seemed to take to it. Girl like her probably would have. Probably thought he was refined. We knew they traded messages for about a month—talking books and then talking dirty—until they figured out who the other person was, somehow through Jane Eyre. That’s when he seemed to end it. In any case, that’s when Hattie stopped saving the messages. I couldn’t prove a relationship beyond October of last year, but the whole thing smelled wrong. So far he was the only person who’d cl
early wanted Hattie to disappear, and that was enough to land him on the suspect list.
The evidence list was a little more promising. I had the semen on Hattie’s underwear, and the forensic boys had emailed their report over last night, saying there was more semen in one of the used condoms they’d found at the bottom of the lagoon in the barn. I had them send it over for analysis along with the underwear and Tommy’s sample. No latent prints turned up on any of the other recovered items, which meant they’d been down there at least a few days and weren’t part of our crime scene. I included Hattie’s purse on the evidence list, and the business card from Gerald Jones that was inside it. His Denver alibi had checked out clean, but as a play director he was plenty arty. Not a bad candidate for L.G. He’d caught the red-eye into Rochester this morning and I planned to drive over there first thing.
What I really wanted was the damn murder weapon. We were four days away from the murder now, a hundred hours that the killer could have used to stash, bury, or clean it. Shel had finished dragging the lake yesterday and hadn’t turned it up. The farther away we got from Friday night, the less likely it was that we’d find it.
I heard the Nguyens stirring around six o’clock and gave them until 6:30 before I went downstairs. Mrs. Nguyen answered the door and waved me inside, calling something to her husband. Mr. Nguyen came out, all smiles and hospitality until I asked to see Portia, then his forehead creased and he paused before nodding and calling her out. While I waited I noticed the cat lounging on the sofa, facing away from me like we’d never met before in our lives. I turned my back on him, too.
Portia had her father’s height and her mother’s round cheeks, but the manners of neither. She barreled into the room in a pink robe with bare feet and hair flying out behind her, demanding, “Did you find out?”
Her father chastised her in their own language and she backed off a little.
“We’ve found out a lot of things, Portia. Which one are you thinking of?”