No luck.
I went back to the oldest volume and tried again.
The photographs were arranged by class, of which there were only three since the local district was on a three-and-three system—seventh, eighth, and ninth grades comprising junior high, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth making the senior high. Even so, there were a lot of pictures, the school being big, and each volume was noticeably fatter than the last, indicating an increasing student population. I moved through the books more slowly, scrutinizing the Ws for each of the three classes in each of the ten books.
Still no luck.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed to myself. Luckily there were no students nearby. They would never have heard such language, and I would hate for their first exposure to vulgarity to be from me. It looked like the bastard had sucked me in. And I should have known. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It sounds like the kind of town Clark Kent grew up in.
I closed the latest volume, stood up, and leaned over the mezzanine rail. No matter how old you get, you still always feel like spitting when you do that, don’t you?
Why would Thomas Wayne have lied to me? To throw me off the scent, sure, but to what end? It wasn’t as if he could disappear on me. The police would have other ideas. And it wasn’t as if he could obscure his past forever. As I had told him yesterday, people leave a trail whether they want to or not. The most he could do would be delay me. What would be the point?
I went back to my table and idly flipped open the topmost book. There was an index in the back. Two, in fact: faculty and students. Naturally! The official mug shots aren’t the only pictures in a high school yearbook. There are the requisite building-the-float and falling-asleep-in-class and acting-sober-at-the-dance shots, too. If Thomas Wayne had avoided the portrait photographer for three years running—unlikely—maybe he had been inadvertently caught in the act of being himself, as Alan Funt used to say. Or maybe there was a listing of “not pictured” students.
There was. He wasn’t in any of them.
Nor was he in the student index.
Okay, maybe Wayne was older or younger than thirty-nine. You could put it past me: The older I get, the harder it is for me to judge people’s ages, especially if they are younger. I had only Alexander Wayne’s say-so for his son’s age. I couldn’t see why he would have lied about it, especially since he’d provided me that information before he decided he didn’t like me. Still, I had subsequently decided Wayne was untrustworthy …
I went for the yearbooks from eighteen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five years back. Thomas Wayne couldn’t have been much younger than me, and if I had to guess—as, apparently, I did—I would have guessed that he was a couple-three years older.
But I guessed wrong on all counts. No Thomas Wayne in those books either.
I was at the point where I had to decide whether to chuck it or go through still more yearbooks. Then, on a hunch, I quit looking for Thomas Wayne and started looking for Stacy Eitrem.
Shazam.
I found her in the twenty-one-year-old volume, the one that should have featured Thomas Wayne’s senior picture. The picture of the Eitrem girl wasn’t the kind of formal portrait that seniors usually go for. It had the assembly-line look of the pictures snapped by the photographers who come to the building and set up on the auditorium stage and process nine hundred kids an hour. I guessed that this was a rerun of Stacy Eitrem’s junior-year shot, that she had been killed before she ever sat for her senior-year picture. The yearbook staff dolled up this leftover, though. They gave her a page to herself, blowing up the photo to twice the size of everybody else’s and printing it in the middle of an otherwise black page, with a brief, sincere little eulogy reversed-out beneath it. She had been a pretty girl, blond, with an oval face and black-rimmed cat-eye glasses like girls wore two decades ago. She wore her hair high on top, long on the sides, curving out into stiff-looking wings over either shoulder. She had been active in drama, band, and chorus, the book said, and was the president of the Spanish Club.
I tried again for Thomas Wayne—the button’s always there the third time you look for it—but still no luck.
Then I went through the whole damn book page by page, picture by picture. Wayne had definitely said he and Stacy Eitrem had been in high school together. He had definitely said she had been killed “our senior year.” If she was there he should have been too. But he wasn’t.
Odd. If Wayne had been blowing smoke, where did the Stacy Eitrem story come from? If he had been telling the truth, then where was his picture? Odd, odd, odd.
Something even odder: Going through that book page by page, I came across one of those inevitable “candid” shots. Some kids cutting up in what appeared to be a math room, from the half-unfocused scribblings on the chalkboard, clowning for the camera. In the distance, near the board, also not well-focused, the teacher smiled tolerantly. The smile was familiar.
So was the name, when I went back to the faculty index and looked for it.
Alexander Wayne.
He was twenty-some years younger, twenty-some years thinner, and his hair was twenty-some years darker, but he was definitely “the” Alexander Wayne. Somewhat stunned, I checked all of my books for him; he was in every volume up to that one, the twenty-one-year-old book. The one carrying Stacy Eitrem’s obituary. After that year, no more Alexander Wayne on the faculty.
The library, which had not been jam-packed, was virtually deserted now. It was past four-thirty, and I doubted they stayed open later than five. I stacked my yearbooks on the returns cart and hunted down the librarian.
She was helpful, but no help. Having been on staff only nine years, she didn’t have the vaguest idea who Alexander Wayne was. I asked whether there was anyone on staff who might have known Wayne, some long-hitter I could get in touch with. She thought about it. A tall, pimply-faced kid behind the counter, who had been checking in books and checking out our conversation, which was not confidential, said, “What about Mrs. Kjellsen?”
The librarian looked from him to me. She was a sawed-off thing, narrow in the shoulders and wide at the hips, with graying dark hair and a serious expression and a soft, measured voice perfectly suited to a library. “There’s a thought,” she said. “Vera Kjellsen. She retired last year after forty years with the district, most of them here. She taught civics.”
I didn’t care if she taught small engines. “Do you know where I can reach her?”
The librarian went behind the counter and pulled out a saddle-stitched booklet with a pink cover. The school district phone book. She flipped through from the back, stopped on a page, and said, “You’re in luck. A lot of our retired teachers move away. But Mrs. Kjellsen still lives in town, according to this.” She spun the book around the counter, holding her place with a short-nailed forefinger, so I could copy the address and telephone number.
There was a pay phone in a closet by the office. I sank a quarter into it, called Vera Kjellsen, used the magazine-article dodge, and got invited over.
Mrs. Kjellsen was a wizened, emaciated wisp of a woman with bad posture, almost transparently white hair, and bright pale-blue eyes that danced in a lively fashion behind the thick lenses of her eyeglasses. She was the type of person who doesn’t so much die as disappear. Frail as she was, though, her voice was clear and so was her mind, and I guessed it would be quite a while before she disappeared.
She lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the west side of town, as tiny and friendly and just-so as she was. There was a pot of coffee on the stove and a plate of frozen cookies that she gave a shot of microwaves, and then we situated ourselves in a living room that overlooked the five o’clock traffic on Forty-first Street.
“I remember Alexander Wayne,” she said in response to my question. “Not very well, I’m afraid, but I remember him. Why did you say you were interested in him?”
I repeated the line I had told her on the phone, a variation on the theme I had sung for the vice principal and the school lib
rarian. “Alexander Wayne built a very successful commercial real estate business down in Omaha. He’s more or less retired now, and his son is running the show. I’m doing research for a possible magazine article about them—you know, father and son build a business empire in America’s heartland, that type thing.”
Vera Kjellsen nodded, and I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was being graded. “What,” I said quickly, “can you tell me about Alexander Wayne back then?”
“Well, he was one hell of a good-looking man.” She giggled. “When you called me, I went into the back room there and looked in the old yearbooks. I remembered Alexander as a good-looking man—we used to talk about it, the women teachers—but I had forgotten how good-looking. Other than that …” She turned one thin, clawlike hand. “He was a friendly man. And funny—he always had a joke or a funny comment of some sort. I think he got along with everybody. I don’t remember any run-ins. Mostly, I guess, he just did his job, like the rest of us.”
“Did you know him socially?”
“No, not really. My husband and I didn’t really see much of any of the other teachers on what you would call a social basis. He was in insurance, my husband, and somehow most of our friends were insurance people or people he met through his work. We’d see Alexander at the faculty Christmas party, of course, but that was about it.”
“Was he a good teacher?”
“I’m sure he was. I don’t remember him being otherwise, and that’s the kind of thing that sticks with you—the ones who had trouble managing a class or who had other kinds of problems. He must have been.”
“Do you know why he got out of teaching and left town?”
She giggled. It was a girlish giggle, not fitting at all the wrinkled old woman it came from. “Do you have any idea what kind of money a schoolteacher in this state earned twenty years ago? Or today, for that matter? By nearly every yardstick, we’re the lowest paid teachers in the country. People like to point out that we get three months off during the summer, but they conveniently forget that it’s without pay. Well, anyhow, now you know what union I belong to. My guess is that Alexander Wayne reached a point where he had to, or wanted to, make some money for a change. A lot of teachers are forced to make that kind of decision, and not just in this district. Especially the men, for some reason. I suppose there’s more pressure on them to be successful, to make money. Alexander always seemed like a bright fellow; I’m not surprised he’s been successful in business. Real estate, did you say?”
I nodded. “He never told you his reasons for leaving?”
She shook her white head. “I don’t think he told anybody. If he did, I never heard about it, and that would be unusual. Sooner or later you hear everything.”
Sooner or later you would hear everything, I silently amended. Not that I felt Vera Kjellsen was a gossip or a busybody. Certainly no worse than anyone else. I just had the feeling that she liked to know what was going on, and that she kept her eyes and ears operating all the time. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m much the same way myself.
Switching gears, I said, “I understand there was a girl, a student at the high school, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. It apparently happened that last year that Alexander Wayne was on the staff …”
“Really?” She thought a moment. “I remember the girl, of course—she was a student of mine, a beautiful girl. And I remember the accident. It was horrible. But I didn’t remember it being Alexander’s last year. Of course there’s no reason to link the two in my mind. There’s no connection.”
It might have been a question, though she put no question mark at the end of it and neither did I. If it was, I ignored it.
“Was there anything suspicious about the girl’s death?”
“Suspicious?” She acted like she had never heard the word before. “I wouldn’t say suspicious. Tragic, yes. She was walking home from school when she was struck and killed, killed instantly, by a car that had jumped a stop sign. There’s nothing suspicious in that.”
Maybe. “The driver was never found? No one was ever charged with the crime?”
Mrs. Kjellsen was shaking her head. “They never had a clue. It was such a shame …”
I said, “The girl, Stacy Eitrem—”
“Yes, that was the name.”
“—had a boyfriend. Another student at the high school. He was Alexander Wayne’s son, Thomas …”
Vera Kjellsen frowned. It was a bad idea for her to do that. Her face, which was deeply lined anyway and crisscrossed with a network of pale blue veins under her almost colorless skin, became an ugly voodoo mask when she frowned. “You’re mistaken,” she said with finality. “Alexander Wayne never had a son, not when he was here, at least. He didn’t have any kids at all. He wasn’t even married.”
My turn to frown. “Are you sure, Mrs. Kjellsen? I was told—”
“You were told wrong. Alexander Wayne was the most eligible bachelor in the building. I can remember the unmarried women teachers—and even some of the married ones, too, if you want to know the truth—talking about him.”
“In what way?”
She giggled again. “The gist of it was that they wouldn’t mind ending his bachelor days for him.”
I sipped some coffee. It was a good excuse to be silent for a moment and do my award-winning impersonation of a man trying to think. No Thomas Wayne in the school yearbooks for the time he should have been there. I find his father instead. But according to someone who knew him, the father didn’t have a son at that time. And if Alexander Wayne had started his family after leaving Sioux Falls, his son, Thomas, would be twenty or more years younger than in fact he was. Adoption? Both Waynes clearly referred to Thomas’s mother and Alexander’s wife having passed away when the boy was very young. Could Vera Kjellsen be mistaken? She sounded awfully certain, but I know plenty of people who never sound more sure of themselves than when they’re dead wrong. You probably do, too. I mean, you probably know people like that. Maybe she had Wayne confused with someone else, or maybe she just didn’t realize that Wayne had a teenage son in the same school where he worked. If Wayne’s wife had died when the boy was small, and he never remarried, perhaps Vera Kjellsen and other teachers in the building mistakenly assumed he had never been married at all.
None of which explained why Thomas Wayne appeared to be the little-student-who-isn’t-there throughout his supposed high school years.
I wasn’t the only one in the room who had been using the brief coffee break to do some thinking. Vera Kjellsen’s face was still worked into a frown. “You know,” she said slowly in her clear, somewhat brittle voice, “I do remember that poor Stacy had a boyfriend. He wasn’t a student of mine, but I seem to remember the two of them together, her and her young man. What was his name?” She was talking to herself, to her memories, not to me. “Dark-haired boy, nice-looking … Thomas? Is that right?” She looked toward me, not at me. “But not Wayne. Thomas … Thomas … Cox? No, not Cox. Thomas … Cott. Yes, that’s it.” Her eyes, which had rested unseeing on my face, now came into focus and she was speaking to me, not the room. “Tommy Cott,” she said with certainty. “He seemed like a nice boy. It was too bad. I think he dropped out shortly after, you know, Stacy … Probably a combination of things. Stacy, poor grades, and—well, I understand his family life wasn’t the greatest.”
“I thought he wasn’t a student of yours.”
Mrs. Kjellsen smiled tolerantly. “I didn’t have him in a class, and I didn’t know him very well, but I knew him—I knew who he was. Not only was he Stacy’s boyfriend, but he was part of the theater crew and I was an assistant drama coach for a few years there. Besides, I told you, sooner or later you hear everything. I understood Tommy’s father was nowhere to be found and his mother had … something of a drinking problem. You see it happen, in cases like that—the student simply loses interest, loses focus, runs out of steam. Too bad, too … he only had a few months till graduation …”
I said, “Mrs. Kjells
en, you said something about having yearbooks in the other room …”
She was on my wavelength. A minute later she was back with one of the volumes I had been perusing at the school library. It was the twenty-one-year-old book again, and she had it open to the senior-class pictures. It required no more than a glance to see that the face above the name Thomas Cott was remarkably similar to the face that currently went around attached to a man who called himself Thomas Wayne.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sudden focus: Thomas Wayne, né Cott. People don’t up and disappear and change their names for a lark. Not even teenage people. They have reasons, usually compelling reasons.
Killing someone would qualify.
I didn’t understand the connection between Tommy Cott and his soon-to-be “father,” however. Vera Kjellsen confirmed that Wayne had been the Cott boy’s math teacher. I’ve known a lot of really dedicated teachers over the years, but I don’t think any of them would have gone on the lam with me just to keep me company. There had to be a stronger bond—complicity or something else but something just as powerful.
I wondered what ever became of Tommy Cott’s mother, and so did Vera Kjellsen. “I never met the woman,” she said, leafing through a telephone directory that had sat under the instrument on an end table. “I knew her by reputation, though, from a story of her coming to conferences so drunk she could hardly stand and so abusive they finally had to call the police.” She peered into the book, then closed it and returned it to its place. “No Cott in there that sounds like it could be her,” she pronounced. “Of course, she may have moved away …”
“Or she may be dead, or she may have remarried and changed her name, or she may just not have a phone.” I fell silent. I doubted whether the school itself would maintain twenty-year-old records, but there was a bare possibility that the local school district office would. It would at least give me a place to start looking. When you’re working a cold, cold trail, you take anything you can get.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 25