The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  When Madeline voiced that concern, Lee said, “This is something we’ve talked a lot about. I think it was too late by the time she figured it out. A second- or third-trimester abortion is an entirely different kind of procedure,” she said sternly. “She just couldn’t believe it was true,” Lee finished.

  Suzy pressed her lips together firmly, then said, “But Lee and I disagree about this.” She glanced respectfully at her friend, and Lee dipped her head, acknowledging Suzy’s dissent. Again, Madeline sat listening in amazement. The range of the girls’ awareness stunned her. They were involved in a secret society of intimidation yet could cultivate a diplomacy worthy of the negotiation of nuclear treaties. All this politic language and astonishingly adult comprehension. Then she remembered that they all had to take Conflict Resolution and do ropes courses through sophomore and junior years, one of Porter’s innovations. Perhaps this conciliatory vocabulary had been acquired while hanging twelve feet above a forest floor on a length of nylon. But what was more real to them? The Reign or that? What aspect of their experience said most about who they really were?

  Suzy continued, “I think Claire knew from the start.” Holding her mug tightly, she added, “I know it sounds unlikely, but I think she wanted the baby. Not like she wanted to be a mother, but she wanted the baby for some reason. And that that was why she stayed in school, too. She refused to go home or leave. Being here mattered to her, but she wouldn’t say why.”

  “And she never said who the father was?” Madeline inquired, trying hard not to put too much emphasis on the question. She even looked away from the girls as she and they considered that that single detail—the paternity of Claire’s baby—would be the most important piece of information the girls might have access to. “She never told the group? Or the other girls?”

  They all shook their heads, whether in lack of knowledge or in a refusal to divulge it, Madeline couldn’t quite tell. “Lee asked her outright, but she refused to say. She just smiled that smile of hers and said we would never force it out of her,” Portia said.

  “No,” Lee confirmed. “She refused. She said it was no one we knew, but of course that’s probably not true. She would have told us otherwise. And last year, at least, she hooked up with Scotty Johnston all the time. And a few times she said something about an older man. It could have been anyone, a friend of her father’s, a teacher. But she never did more than hint.”

  The other girls paid close attention as Lee spoke. They’d discussed this issue many times before, Madeline suspected. Yet they kept glancing at one another. They were still being cautious with what they admitted. They did add that, despite Claire’s betrayal of the Reign’s trust, they had loaned her their brothers’ shirts to cover her belly as the pregnancy progressed, though she barely showed. They helped her with homework—“but no one plagiarized, Miss Christopher,” Olu insisted, in what struck Madeline as a slightly misguided application of ethical niceties given the circumstances. They returned her library books.

  “We weren’t there when she had the baby. She was overdue, but we don’t know by how much. We don’t know where she had him. We didn’t even know she’d gone into labor. She just came back to the dorm late Saturday with this baby wrapped in a sheet. But I think she had him alone,” Lee said. Madeline closed her eyes for a moment. At some point in the pitch-black night, Claire had staggered up the stairs above Madeline’s head with a newborn in her arms. It seemed close to unbelievable.

  “She promised she would take him to the doctor on Monday. She was tired and scared, and she promised,” said Olu. In the meantime, for the day she and her baby were in the dorm, the real and faux members of the Reign looked after Claire. They fed her, fed him, cleaned the baby, turned up music when he cried, which wasn’t often. They organized an almost round-the-clock schedule of care. The last anyone had seen her was Monday morning around 4:00 A.M. Sally, slated to go to her at 6:30, found her dead and the baby gone.

  “He was beautiful, Miss Christopher. He was tiny, but he was perfect. A little boy,” said Suzy, and slowly, all the girls lowered their eyes. Madeline sat very still, trying to take in the facts of what the girls had done. Of their competence in the face of a situation none of them had ever dealt with before. Of the stern ring of silence they had maintained. Of how much they actively distrusted most of the adults around them.

  She got up then to shake herself back to life and to replenish the cookies on the plate. She needed, she knew, to keep them talking. “So you really think she didn’t tell her parents?” Madeline asked. Portia looked at her and asked, “Have you met them?” and Madeline quickly realized the folly of her question. They were divorced, like 60 percent of the parents who sent their children to Armitage. But few matched the Harknesses for detachment. Most of the parents loved and pushed their children in equal measure, in Madeline’s experience. But Flora Duval was tall, beautiful, and lived most of the year in Paris with her third husband. She’d deposited Claire at school that fall, stayed less than an hour, and left Madeline with an abiding impression of long legs, indifference, and profoundly expensive taste in clothes. Her daughter, Madeline calculated, would have been a month or so pregnant at that point. The father lived in New York with the second wife and two small children. Just as imposing as Flora, he had missed parents’ weekend and had made a brief appearance near Thanksgiving, which would have meant that Claire was into her fourth month at least and no doubt aware of what was going on. Madeline remembered that he hadn’t even kissed his daughter good-bye, just tapped her on the shoulder. Where had she spent the holidays? Madeline couldn’t recall now, but not with either parent, she thought. Probably with a willing member of her secrecy team. But wouldn’t someone outside the Armitage circle have caught on and alerted the school? Madeline, she reminded herself, you didn’t notice, either. You had absolutely no idea. What else had she missed this year? What had made her so stubbornly unable to acquire critically important information right in front of her eyes?

  Madeline gently asked the girls, “Do you think any teachers here knew?”

  Olu shook her head. “We’re not sure. Probably not, but we couldn’t tell. Claire was really hard to read. You couldn’t just ask her things you could ask other people.”

  Madeline knew what she meant and then, unable to maintain her impersonation of a grown-up, blurted out her last question. “Why did you tell me all this?”

  “Claire is dead. It changes everything. People will find out a lot of stuff anyway. We wanted someone to know who wasn’t a student. And besides, Claire wasn’t like you, Miss Christopher,” Suzy said. “Someone you could just talk to. Someone ordinary.”

  Madeline smiled for the first time that day. She knew what Suzy meant. The comment had been intended as a kind of compliment. She did have something else she wanted to know, but it was nothing she’d dare ask the girls. It was about whether or not Claire had known her killer. In any case, Madeline was quite sure of the answer. She must have. The dorm was locked from the outside after 9:00 P.M., but kids could and often did let people in from the inside. Alternatively, students and faculty could enter any dorm with the swipe of an Armitage ID through a sensor. Madeline had seen Claire’s room: no robbery had taken place; either she’d let the person in herself or he or she had come in on his or her own. Madeline shivered. In any case, everyone here knew everyone else. Community connectedness. It was one of the reasons Armitage was supposed to be so safe, though this revelation about Robespierre and twisting threads and pacts of silence had permanently altered her own sense of the kind of protections the academy offered.

  It was midnight. The girls looked exhausted, their tea mugs were empty, but they showed no signs of moving. They were shocked and scared as well. But not, it occurred to Madeline, sad. Not one of them missed Claire. At least they weren’t hypocritical enough to pretend that. “Hey,” Madeline said abruptly. “I have an idea. Go get your sleeping bags and you can crash on the floor.” At first, she regretted her impulsive offer. It sounded like the
kind of treat you’d dangle in front of ten-year-olds. A slumber party! She cringed slightly, dreading some sarcastic rejection. But the girls smiled and said yes, relieved for once, it seemed, to be treated like kids. In a few minutes, they returned with down cocoons and pillows and settled in colorful lengths on her floor, fast asleep.

  Her hands were trembling with fatigue, but she couldn’t go to bed yet. Google cheerfully supplied her with thousands of potential sources to learn more about Robespierre, and she chose one, in rather rickety English, clearly translated from the French, to discover that he had been responsible with his colleagues for taking more than thirteen hundred members of the aristocracy and other enemies of the Revolution to the guillotine. But apparently his zeal or power grew onerous, even for his enthusiasts. And at the tail end of that hot and bloody July, his own head had landed in a basket much like the one which had received that of his former king, and he, too, could be claimed as a victim of the relentless violence of war.

  Madeline shut down the computer and slumped at her desk. Was this Revolutionary theme rampant at Armitage? Were there Royalists, Girondists, stormers of the Bastille lurking in the boys’ dorms? She was going to have to tell this all to the police, but she was too tired to move. Even so, she sat up for a moment, to look at the sleeping girls. Serious Lee, beautiful Olu, Portia’s pristine mouth, and Suzy’s lush, dark hair. Asleep, they looked much younger and far more vulnerable. Asleep, they couldn’t say things that would change for good how she looked at them and Armitage. She wondered if they knew that the real Robespierre had been destroyed by the very forces he so ardently believed in, and assumed they did. They all took European history. They were good at amassing important facts. Madeline wondered if the grotesque irony had struck Claire, too. And then she was abruptly so spent she went to bed without taking off her clothes, much less brushing her teeth.

  The next morning, on her way to breakfast—her run temporarily suspended because no one was allowed off campus—Madeline had to step carefully over the girls’ tangled bodies. They were even more lovely in the morning light. She was creeping out the door when it slid from her grasp and smacked the jamb with a bang. But they didn’t move an inch, like all children who sleep deeply.

  CHAPTER 7

  The campus had always been most beautiful at dawn. The sun rose over the river and streamed through a filigree of oak and maple leaves that fractured and spread the light across expansive tracts of grass and beds of flowers. In that scattered golden haze, Armitage wasn’t only a place of clean proportions and obvious ease. It could seem the embodiment of a sublime coherence. Matt was standing outside Portland and looking at the window of Claire’s room. The panes winked brightly. Her autopsy was scheduled for seven this morning, youth, beauty, and status assuring her a place on the gurney ahead of the victims of a drunk driver, a suicide, and a probable drug addict found near the tracks. Even in death, she was taking precedence.

  It was a shade too early to rouse teachers and students. Vernon would arrive soon, and they’d review the list of people they had to talk to and split the next ten hours into listening to stories that would, he hoped, coalesce into something harsh and simple by the day’s end. Angry boyfriend. Baby stashed somewhere in the woods. Something Greek and unvarnished about both the feelings and solutions. Coffee was ticking through his bloodstream, making his heart run a bit too quickly. Below an elm, he sat on a bench dedicated to Woodrow “Bully” Loftis, an English teacher at the academy from 1950 until 1995. A career bracketed by Shakespeare and comma splices, hymns and hockey games.

  He started to pace the Quad. Uniformed officers were stationed at the doors of several buildings. Muffled squawks from their radios troubled the gauzy silence. A few teachers and students stood blinking on the granite steps of their dorms. It was time for breakfast. Hunger rumbled on, even when students died and babies disappeared. A few boys, rather hangdog, walked down the path to the Commons, ignoring the police, on their way to bacon and omelets.

  Matt remembered that tangled combination of sensations. On the morning of his discipline hearing, he had woken both terrified and ravenous. He had not wanted to eat, thought he might throw up if he did, but it proved impossible to ignore the need for food. Eggs, sausage, juice, and coffee. Later, he thought all that ballast had been the only way to prepare for Gordon Farnsworth’s stark judgment. He’d been accused of cheating. If he was found guilty, Penn would be notified. It was May of his senior year.

  In his time, breakfast had been the best or at least most reliably appetizing meal of the day, and this still appeared to be true. More people were on their way to eat, but everyone he saw was subdued and tired. No Frisbees whirled along the path, there was no boyish jostling. A few obviously weepy girls joined the patchy stream. How many of them had stainless reputations? he wondered. His own had been spotless until that spring, when his roommate of three years, a boy from Beacon Hill named Charlie Pierce, had stolen an essay of his on Lear’s madness, and presented it, with a few key revisions, as his own, to the same Bully Loftis on whose bench Matt had just been sitting. Both Matt and Charlie were in separate sections of Shakespeare’s Late Plays. Bully Loftis had apparently discussed a few of the more unusual claims—that Lear’s insanity was psychedelically induced—with Matt’s teacher, Penny Weeks, a severe young woman, unadorned as a pencil. The papers were compared, the boys confronted, and to Matt’s total surprise, Charlie claimed that Matt had taken the work wholesale from him.

  Three years of covering for each other when one of them was late for chapel, check-in, seated meal. Three years of loaning books, ties, money, personal goods overlapping in that feckless, teenage way, their room more of a raven’s nest than anything humans would want to occupy. And it had been a kind of bliss for Matt. A revelation. There was nothing in this secret, separate Armitage existence that had reminded him of his parents’ thrift, their self-conscious plotting of a life that steered itself away from Sicily and toward a safe, American perch of normalcy. Charlie had shown him how to have the fun of the entitled. To be careless. To treat money as something that flowed as naturally as the Bluestone. They’d met in Latin class freshman year, and that encounter had led to three years of drinking Charlie’s father’s bourbon, fantasizing madly about girls, staying up to finish college applications, watching the Celtics. It had led, Matt thought, to a friendship as steady as a bulwark. He’d been chosen, initiated. He belonged.

  But at nine in the morning, ten days before graduation, almost exactly this time of year, Matt had watched Charlie’s open, mobile face transform into that of a complete liar. In Gordon Farnsworth’s office, he had protested and emoted and even cried. It was a performance so convincing, Matt himself had nearly wanted to believe it. Charlie had sobbed, and Matt had had to steel himself against comforting his friend. Then, inside that wrenching sound, Matt understood something with total, sudden clarity.

  None of his history with Charlie mattered. His roommate, in a moment of apparent crisis, was content to scuttle a friendship, Matt’s reputation, perhaps his scholarship to college. Looking back, Matt knew there had been signs. Charlie often blurred the truth about small issues. He borrowed inconsequential sums of money that were never returned. He hurt girls’ feelings more than necessary. Charlie was not just casual with things, he was casual with people. But in front of adults, he maintained an impeccable politeness, great charm, and with all that floppy brown hair and his bright complexion, it was hard not to enjoy him. You felt grudging and small if you didn’t always want to forgive him his lapses. And Matt had. Matt had genuinely liked him and, even more, been grateful that someone like Charlie, someone with Charlie’s advantages, could find room for him in his handsome, well-appointed world.

  Sitting in the stiff chair, his palms sliding on its shiny leather arms, Matt knew it was only Charlie’s word against his. There’d be no way to clear his name entirely, and he grasped with sickening certainty the arc of what would happen. Charlie’s family had gone to Armitage for four generatio
ns. A playing field was named in their honor. Charlie was bound for Yale, where his brother, father, and grandfather had gone. Matt looked at Gordon Farnsworth. They’d let him in on a full ride, the local kid. They’d placed faith in him. They had expected him to fulfill it.

  It would have been so easy to bow his head and say, as Charlie clearly expected him to, “I’m sorry.” It might have led to the problem being handled in house, without Penn or Yale any the wiser. But Matt hadn’t chosen that course. Thinking of his parents’ stricken faces as he told them what had happened, he looked at the headmaster and said, “I didn’t do it. It’s exactly the opposite of what Charlie is saying. He knows it. He will always know it,” which was greeted with howls of protest (Charlie) and the slightest of hesitations (Farnsworth). Both of them had been punished, with a letter to Yale that affected nothing—Charlie’s parents were paying full tuition—and a letter to Penn, which reduced Matt’s financial aid package, a move that then required he take a twenty-hour-a-week job cleaning toilets; it paid better than anything else on campus.

  Matt had moved back to his parents’ house that morning and spent the last two weeks of school as a day student. He had walked in graduation, assiduously avoided Charlie, grabbed the diploma from Farnsworth’s outstretched hand, and promised himself never to come back. He’d never attended a reunion, returned to the area rarely to see his family, and stayed in touch only intermittently with a couple of friends who had belatedly taken his side against Charlie’s. From the alumni magazine, which he read against his better intentions, he learned that Charlie had married someone whose last name was Frelinghuysen and that he’d had twin boys.

  It was a relief to see Vernon trotting toward him. It wasn’t often Matt let himself think about what had happened in such precise detail—Charlie’s tear-streaked cheeks, the V of worry between Farnsworth’s brows—and it was troubling that the emotions the experience stirred were still so bitter. Vernon, whom Matt sometimes called his personal barometer, looked at him and said, “Caught in your tangled past?”