And these days—his youth—were supposed to be the best ones of his life? If these were the best days of his life, then he didn't see himself surviving past the age of twenty-one.
Sitting in the third seat down, the fourth row from the door of Mr. Jarvis’s second period World Civilizations class, David Vennekamp was now watching an exchange between Mr. Jarvis and Brittany Spurlock, one of the Mydale cheerleaders. It was a game day, so Brittany was wearing her cheerleading uniform, just as the football players were all wearing their jerseys. (As if that crowd didn't get enough attention, they had to play this ridiculous dress-up game throughout the football season, hogging even more attention for themselves.)
Mr. Jarvis was staring at Brittany with unabashed male interest. The teacher didn't even try to avoid being obvious, David observed.
But what really incensed David (although he barely admitted it to himself) was the way that Brittany was returning the teacher’s stare. She wasn't looking at him exactly as she would look at one of the jocks on the football team—not quite. But she wasn't exactly discouraging him, either. It would have made David feel much better if Brittany had curled her lip at Jarvis and called him a creepy old man.
That was exactly the look Brittany had given David less than an hour ago, minus the old man part. David had bumped into Brittany in the hallway, quite accidentally, with no intention of copping a feel or anything, and Brittany had recoiled as if David were covered with cow dung.
Why did she have to give him a reaction like that? And why did she now have to stare at Mr. Jarvis as if the two of them met up after school every day for a romp in the sack?
Had Jarvis ever slept with a student? David wondered. There were vague rumors and innuendos to this effect, though they had yet to crystallize around any girl in particular. There was simply a widespread acknowledgement that Mr. Jarvis was a “hound”, and that many of the Mydale girls seemed to manifest a certain admiration for him.
Besides, Jarvis really wasn't that old, not in the big scheme of things. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, which would have made him approximately the same age as Tom Cruise. And didn't plenty of high school girls find Tom Cruise to be attractive?
This counter line of reasoning did nothing to diminish David Vennekamp’s loathing for the man at the front of the room.
Jarvis asked Brittany a softball question about the French Revolution, which the World Civilizations class was currently studying. The question was: Were the other European monarchies threatened by the French Revolution? Well, duh—he’d might as well ask Brittany if the French Revolution took place in France.
The answer, of course, was that yes, the other European monarchies regarded the French Revolution as a threat. Before long, revolutionary France was at war with Austria and Prussia, not to mention Britain, Spain, and Russia as well.
But don’t expect Brittany Spurlock to know that, Mr. Jarvis.
David found most of his classes at Mydale High School to be dry and boring, but he had to admit that he had enjoyed the past few weeks’ discussion of the French Revolution, Mr. Jarvis’s meandering, self-congratulatory teaching style notwithstanding. (When Jarvis lectured, he always seemed to be showing off—no doubt for the girls in the class.) David liked their textbook’s descriptions of the guillotines erected in cities and towns throughout France, of how blood had run ankle-deep down the cobblestone streets on particularly sanguinary days.
In David’s estimation, the spirit of the French Revolution was something that ought to be revived and applied here at Mydale High School.
He allowed himself to indulge in a little fantasy in which he was appointed to decide who at Mydale would go to the guillotine. On the other side of the classroom were three members of the football team, arrogantly sporting their game day jerseys.
You three, David imagined himself saying. Off with your heads!
Then: Mr. Jarvis, time for you to kneel before the guillotine.
And finally: Brittany Spurlock, I sentence you to death for being a snoot, for treating me like shit, and for making eyes at that windbag Mr. Jarvis. Off with your head!
It was at that point that David grasped that Mr. Jarvis had spoken his name, and that the entire class was looking at him, snide smirks already appearing on at least a third of their faces.
Off with your heads! David thought futilely, and forced himself to abandon the gratifying fantasy.
“I asked you, David,” Jarvis repeated. “If you would be so kind as to tell us what happened to Maximilien Robespierre. Was he thrown in jail? Did he become the next king of France?”
David felt his throat go dry, as often happened when so many people were staring at him.
He knew the answer, of course: Robespierre, the chief ringleader of the revolution’s most violent phase, had been sent to the guillotine himself. But how extensive an answer did Mr. Jarvis want? While the French Revolution had a violent and sensational side, David had also noticed that the politics behind each phase of it were complicated—so many factions and so much infighting.
“The answer,” Jarvis said, preempting him, “is that Maximilien Robespierre made many enemies who colluded against him; and Robespierre himself became one of the Terror’s last victims.”
It was humiliating enough that Jarvis had cut him off before he could formulate his answer. David thought that the teacher was going to let the matter drop, but then Jarvis said to the class: “Poor Mr. Vennekamp here isn’t very fast out of the gate, is he?” Jarvis turned to the three jocks on the other side of the room and said, “I don’t think you need to worry about David taking over any of your running back or tight end spots.”
This prompted a guffaw from one of the football players, contemptuous snorts from the other two, and looks from around the class that mingled contempt and grudging pity. Then Jarvis turned back to David and said, “Come on, Vennekamp! You’ve got to stay awake in my class.”
Jarvis thereby accomplished two aims: He maintained his place as the class’s oldest and chief adolescent, and he gave himself plausible deniability should David have the temerity to file a complaint against the educator who had humiliated him. I was doing nothing more than gently scolding him, Jarvis could say. After all, the young man wasn't even paying attention.
Resigned to his momentary defeat, David slipped back into his fantasy: the guillotine, and a long line of his tormentors—both the active ones and the passive ones—mounting the steps of a blood-stained wooden platform.
Off with your heads! Off with your heads!
33
While Jennifer was driving home that afternoon, Clint called her.
“I’m going to be home late,” he said.
“Another tryst with your secretary?” she asked.
This was a private running joke between them. Glutz Machinery had a single administrative assistant, a fiftysomething, chain-smoking divorcee named Diane Patterson. A few years ago, a young salesman had made the mistake of casually referring to Diane as “the company secretary”. Diane had informed the young man, in no uncertain terms, that she was nobody’s secretary—least of all his—and that he would regret any further reference to her by that title.
“Not this time,” Clint replied. “I was on a sales call in Columbus, and it ran late. I won’t be back until eight o’clock, or thereabouts.”
“Take your time. I’ll see your mom off and rustle up something for Connor and me. Drive safely.”
“Love you.”
“You, too.”
“Bye”
“See you around eight.”
Clint had not brought up their recent “problems” with their home’s previous owner, and she saw no reason to do so, either. Deborah Vennekamp would not be allowed to dominate their lives.
And perhaps Deborah had no intention of doing so. Perhaps she was now distracted with other, more life-and-death matters. Maybe Jarvis was right, after all.
Her cell phone rang from the seat beside her. Her first thought was that it was C
lint, calling her back to tell her that he had run into traffic on I-71, and that eight o’clock would be more like nine o’clock or ten o’clock.
But this was not another call from Clint. The number she saw on her phone’s screen was a local one, though not one that she recognized.
Was it Deborah Vennekamp—calling her back to call her “shitbird” again? Last time Deborah had used a disposable, untraceable cell phone. Had she grown more brazen, unafraid of using her personal phone?
Jennifer was sorely tempted to let the call go to voicemail. But if it really was Deborah Vennekamp calling her, then she would only call again later in the evening. A woman persistent enough to appear on her lawn in the middle of the night would think nothing of calling back late in the evening.
So she answered the phone, and was greeted by an unexpected male voice.
“Mrs. Huber?”
“Yes. Who is this, please?”
The voice was very deferential, like a man who was not accustomed to talking to women he did not know well, and uncomfortable doing so. It was also vaguely familiar, though she could not place it.
“This is David Vennekamp. I hope I’m not calling you back at a bad time.”
For a moment she wondered how David Vennekamp had acquired her personal cell phone number. Perhaps he had done so through his mother. Deborah Vennekamp had called her, after all, in order to deliver her anonymous insult.
Then she recalled that she had called David Vennekamp in order to set up their meeting at the farmhouse on Stony Creek Road. Vennekamp was only using the number that she had, in effect, given him.
“No,” she said hastily. “This is fine. I’m heading home from work right now.”
She heard a few labored breaths from Vennekamp on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” she asked.
“I loved Josie with all my heart and soul,” Vennekamp blurted out. “And she loved me, too. But my mom broke us up.”
“That’s what you told me, more or less, David. I’m very sorry for what you must have gone through.”
“It might even be true to say that my mom wanted to see Josie dead,” Vennekamp went on, heedless of Jennifer’s pro forma attempt at comforting him. “But she didn't kill her. You mustn’t think that—”
“I didn't think—” This was a lie, she realized, even as she began.
“Sure you did. Everybody thought so at the time, too. My mom is nuts, after all—anyone can see that. And she’s so stubborn. And she can be so damned mean.”
He enunciated these last three words as if each were a distinct and separate sentence. So. Damned. Mean.
She heard another sound on the other end of the line. She couldn't be sure—but she thought that David Vennekamp might be sobbing.
“I’m sorry, David. I know how difficult this must be for you.”
“Why should you be sorry?” Vennekamp was definitely crying—she was sure of that now. “My mom’s bothering you, right?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“You don’t have to be sorry. But you need to stay away from all this. You’ll only make things worse. Please—quit talking to people. To my mom, to my sister. To everyone. Give me some time: I’ll work on my mother and convince her to leave you alone.”
David Vennekamp knew that she had talked to Marcia. That was obvious from what he had just said. This was further proof that Marcia had been lying when she said that she seldom talked to her brother. What else had Marcia been lying about?
Jennifer was about to respond, but Vennekamp preempted her.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Huber—I’ve got to go now.” The line went dead.
In his final words, the ones that ended their odd conversation, Vennekamp had sounded almost like a little boy—or a thirtysomething man who was temporarily in the mindset of one.
After Gladys left, Jennifer ordered a pizza to be delivered for her and Connor. Her son knew nothing of the troubles with Deborah Vennekamp; and neither she nor Clint had seen any point in telling him. While the two of them ate pizza, Connor went on about his routine at school—a new friend he had made, a boy named Jason—and a little girl who made faces at him when the teacher wasn't looking.
“Just ignore her,” Jennifer said, enjoying the comic relief that her son provided. “After a while she’ll get bored and start making faces at someone else.”
Then it occurred to her that she sounded a lot like Roy Dennison. Like Tom Jarvis. Like Clint, for that matter. Ignore the girl making faces and she’ll find another target; ignore the crazy lady and she’ll eventually go away.
“What do you want to do after dinner?” Jennifer asked. She had two slices of pizza and Connor had matched her. The boy’s appetite was growing—before long he would be eating more than she did.
“Watch Finding Nemo?”
The computer-animated Disney feature was Connor’s most recent obsession. The film had been released a decade ago, so it was older than Connor, but he loved the cartoon as if it were the latest and greatest thing. Clint and Jennifer had picked it up for him at Walmart on a whim one day—Clint gently overriding Jennifer’s concerns that the movie’s three sharks, Bruce, Anchor, and Chum, would be too intense.
Connor had watched the movie half a dozen times, and he had yet to grow even remotely tired of it. As entertainment dollars went, the Finding Nemo DVD represented the best $14.99 they had ever spent.
“Okay,” she said. The truth was that as much as she loved her son, and delighted in his sheer presence, she was distracted tonight. Her mind kept replaying her mostly one-sided cell phone conversation with David Vennekamp.
Why was he so eager to insist that his mother had had no part in the disappearance of Josephine Taylor, when she had not even leveled the accusation? (Though yes, she had been thinking as much.)
What was that quote from Shakespeare? "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Who had said that? Queen Gertrude—Hamlet’s mother—another toxic matriarchal figure. But Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude would have been no match for Deborah Vennekamp, Jennifer thought.
Nor had Queen Gertrude’s son been so eager to defend her:
“…She didn't kill her,” David Vennekamp had said. “You mustn’t think that…”
While Jennifer cleared away the remains of the pizza, she found her attention drawn irresistibly to the basement door.
The one real architectural quirk of the house was its dirt basement. Earthen basements simply weren’t common in Ohio, though this one seemed to present no problems with drainage or moisture retention. Barely a week after they had moved in, there had been a rare September downpour. Clint had checked the basement the morning after the storm and reported that it remained dry as a bone. “No water,” he’d said, relieved.
But if there had been water, what would have washed up from the floor? Jennifer recalled a documentary about flooding in the American Southeast, somewhere along the Mississippi. When the waters of the great river had overflowed their banks, the seepage had pushed old coffins up from the ground in a nearby graveyard.
Images from that documentary—the bobbing coffins of the Mississippi’s effluvial plain—were foremost in her mind as she walked down the stairs, the sounds of Finding Nemo audible from the living room. If the basement of this house were to flood, what would come to the surface?
There was one obvious place—the little makeshift room in the corner of the basement. The storage room was not only isolated, but enclosed. If you were going to bury something secret down there, the storage room would be the logical location.
Suddenly, Jennifer had an involuntary thought: The storage room was really a crypt. This irrational notion gave her a little chill, but she was committed now. Besides, she had been sleeping in the same house with it for weeks now—with whatever might be buried there.
Having turned on the overhead bulbs, Jennifer walked toward the door of the enclosure, flashlight in hand.
At the doorway, she clicked on the flashlight and used it to p
robe the sparse details of the confined space where she now half-suspected she might find the body of Josephine Taylor.
There was a small pile of ordinary red bricks, the type that would be found at any construction site. There was a collection of mismatched boards, and a few pallets that looked to be given over to rot.
She had barely noticed the little storage room during her initial tour of the house. Why had Richard Vennekamp even bothered to build it?
Then she thought: Vennekamp had been in the construction business. He would be a tinkerer by nature.
She shone the beam of the flashlight onto the floor, being careful to remain in the doorway. If her wildest speculations were correct—if there was in fact a body in here—she did not wish to walk atop it.
The floor did not appear to have been disturbed recently, but Josephine Taylor had disappeared almost twenty years ago. More than enough time for the dirt to resettle, to take on the appearance of ground that had never been disturbed.
What are you thinking, Jennifer? she chided herself. I mean really—a body in your basement? Aren’t you playing into Deborah Vennekamp’s hands, allowing your imagination to run away with you like this?
It was an absurd idea, of course: Even if Deborah Vennekamp had murdered Josephine Taylor—which she probably hadn’t, Deborah’s extremely dysfunctional personality notwithstanding—she wouldn't have buried the missing girl in the basement. That would have required the complicity of too many parties—not only her children, but also Richard Vennekamp.
Unless, of course, she found a way to carry out the burial in secret—when the kids were at school, and Richard was outside the home, running his construction contracting business…
Jennifer turned away from the room. Even if Deborah Vennekamp had somehow been involved in Josephine Taylor’s disappearance (and that was a big, big, if), the odds were against what she was now imagining. If you murdered someone, it made no sense to bury them in your own house.
1120 Dunham Drive: A Clint & Jennifer Huber Mystery Page 20