The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  She arrived with her usual gustiness, slamming the door without quite meaning to. Briefly, the men in the booth swiveled to assess the noise and the fact of a woman in their bar; with their usual disinterest, they turned away, though a bit slowly. She looked pretty tonight, flushed and dark-eyed. “Hey,” she called, “sorry I’m late. Got accosted by Grace Face. And it’s raining hard again.” Everyone had nicknames, usually not just one but several, often nonsensical, sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes incredibly apt. Scary Mary, for instance, suited the librarian perfectly. An acid-tongued math teacher named Marcus Lyle was known as Mr. Vile. Fred didn’t know what his was and hadn’t heard one for Madeline, either, though he knew they’d been dubbed. Everyone was. It was prudent to be unaware of some things.

  “What did she say?” Fred asked after making room at the bar for Madeline and helping her with her raincoat. “This coat is about nine times too big for you.”

  “I know,” she sighed, gesturing to the bartender to order her Guinness. “It was my dad’s. I’ve had it forever. It’ll have to shred before I admit it’s had its day.” Even disentangling herself from a cloud of damp khaki cotton, she was so vivacious. It was getting harder and harder to ignore that. But what had emerged between them first was good conversation. They liked talking to each other. He badly wanted to tell her what had arrived in his in-box today. He might, with more beer in him, even tell her about looking in the archives for information about Llewellan. Madeline could be trusted with dark moments in people’s characters; she confessed her own with such disarming, attractive frankness. “As for Grace, she told me she didn’t think it was an appropriate time to go and amuse myself. We had the students to think of. Then she got all purple when I told her I realized that, but that there weren’t any students left in our dorm, so who could it hurt if I got off campus for a while.”

  Fred smiled. He could imagine how well Grace took that, but then Madeline jumped and grabbed Fred’s arm. “Oh, my God, this just happened, too. I bumped into Joyce Phelan in the parking lot and she said Scotty Johnston got taken in by the police again.”

  Fred was ashamed at the flush of pleasure that coursed through him, at both Madeline’s touch and at the news she’d just relayed. But he was also surprised. That wasn’t right. Scotty was too controlled for killing and too oriented toward his own success. And Fred had this intuition as well. The boy had really been in love with Claire, not that that would prevent someone from doing fatal damage in the grip of red rage. But Scotty had been solicitous of the girl, a quality distinctly lacking in the way he treated everyone else. Fred had seen them together last spring and been astonished at the gentle way the boy helped her get up from the lawn, touching her outstretched hand with unfeigned care. Fred knew, too, that he had far less information than the police and that boyfriends were more often than not the culprits in these cases. The dark detective seemed intelligent, although there were rumors about him, too. Another Armitage student gone wrong.

  Madeline grabbed a plastic menu, glanced at it, and politely asked the bartender for a burger, medium rare. “What do I know, but I don’t think he did it. I think he’s really bad news, but not a murderer.” She slurped her beer.

  Fred said, “Ditto,” and then told her what he had seen on the Quad. Madeline agreed and sipped more beer. “He used to stare at her in chapel,” she said. “But almost everyone did. Fred, can you believe we didn’t notice? These days, people are so proud of being pregnant; women wear Spandex to show off their bumps, and here was Claire, tucking herself under boys’ oxfords to hide hers. If she had much of one. Porter looks devastated.”

  “I know,” Fred said and spun a cardboard coaster on its edge. “He’s taking it personally. But everyone else looks like they’re”—and here he searched for a word—“shuffling. Dodging blame.”

  “I know,” Madeline said morosely. “And that’s what’s eating me. All this rhetoric about honesty and responsibility, and here they are, kids and adults, subtly not honoring one bit of it.” It was what got her every time, Fred knew. The contradiction between Armitage’s lofty mission and the far more political and practical aims of the students and their parents. But there’s Porter, he’d say, and Sarah, and that brilliant kid from the South Side and this one from Guatemala, and she would agree and say, I know, but I still can’t quite justify all the self-congratulation. She slumped a little further. The smell of her grilling hamburger rose from the small kitchen. The group of three men in the booth ordered another round. “And then Claire. She did something really unusual. She wanted to deceive everyone around her, but she kept that baby when it would have been a lot easier not to. Fred, what I can’t help thinking is that she was operating with some strange if misguided notion of integrity.”

  “I know what you’re getting at, Madeline, but Claire was darker than that. Meaner. She was up to something,” Fred said.

  “That’s for sure,” Madeline and told him about her visit from Lee, the Reign of Terror, Claire’s transgression, and then the spool of thread and the Robespierre quotation that had shown up in her car. She tried to sound jaunty about the whole thing, as if treating it all like a prank would make it less menacing.

  “That is really creepy, but I don’t know much,” he said. “The girls clammed up about it. It was something they took really seriously.”

  Madeline’s burger arrived with a full complement of fries, which she hadn’t ordered but accepted anyway.

  “Did you know anyone involved?” Madeline was listening very carefully, so absorbed she wasn’t even nibbling at the fries.

  “Everyone knew who the Robespierre was, but that was about it,” Fred said uncomfortably.

  Madeline finally picked up a potato and munched it. “Maybe Claire actually dying really frightened them. Maybe they realized they were going to be uncovered—who knew what Sally and those other girls were going to say—and they decided to act preemptively.” She ate another fry, paused to plonk out the ketchup, and added, “With me, the intern, as their confessor. They had to know I’d have to divulge what they’d said. But that quotation.” Madeline shivered. “That is really unnerving. It means they’ve been watching me. I’ve been locking my windows since.”

  “Have you told the cops?” Fred asked, thinking of the detective who had been looking at Madeline. He sounded a little sharper than he meant to.

  “Yes,” she said, “I talked to the police, but not about the thread in the car. I’m hoping they get bored with trying to intimidate me and find someone else to bother. But I did think about telling Rob or Sarah.”

  Rob Barlow, the dean of students, blocky and desperately by the book, was ostensibly the person she should turn to. But neither of them thought for a moment that he’d respond effectively, which left Sarah Talmadge, a person everyone liked and respected. She was absolutely the person to tell, but after a moment, Madeline shook her head no. “Poor woman. She’s totally overwhelmed right now. I’ll talk with her about it later. And maybe they’ll stop.”

  For a moment, they were silent and focused on the fries. They were salty, greasy, bad for you, and entirely delicious. “I’m ravenous these days,” Madeline said, tucking now into her meat. “I feel a little guilty about it. It seems wrong. Victorian heroines lose their appetites when dramatic things happen. I’m just the opposite. I start to chow down. It is so good to get out of there.” She ate another fry and peered at him. “How are you, Fred? You’re hunched over like someone might try and steal that Guinness,” she said and made a false swipe at his mug.

  He batted her away playfully, but she was right. He was feeling self-protective, scrutinized, not sure what was next. Without quite meaning to, he blurted, “I got some interesting news today. Seems sort of wrong to be excited about it, given everything going on, but I am.” A friend from graduate school had written, he explained. He needed a roommate in a Williamsburg loft, starting late June. It was unbelievably cheap. If Fred could get permission from his dorm head, he was going to go down later this week
.

  He looked at Madeline. She had stopped chewing. Was he wrong or did she look downcast? She put down her burger and nibbled the wan pickle. That was definitely a sign of distraction. Madeline always gave him her pickles. “And?” she asked, crunching away.

  “And,” he said, “I’m thinking about it.” He’d saved enough the last four years to take the loft, live frugally, and not work for a year at anything but his painting. Although teachers at Armitage weren’t paid an enormous amount, it was possible to stash rather a lot of money when rent and food were covered. How these schools explained away all that unaccounted-for income to the IRS was anyone’s guess. Still, he’d squirreled away some cash. He’d done the math this afternoon, and there was no way to avoid the data. Having not spent much on anything but clothing, Saturday nights at Mackey’s, and a few vacations, he had enough. A year wasn’t long, but it was a lot better than trying to cram in his art during weekends, vacations, summers. He’d have to go and see for himself, and arrange for a leave from the academy, but the loft looked gorgeous from the pictures his friend had sent. Madeline, he noticed with a certain pleasure, continued to chomp on her pickle and stare in the mirror over the bar. Its surface was mostly covered with decals and stickers for the Patriots, Celtics, and Sox, but Fred could still make out the disconsolate cast of her mouth.

  “Oh, Fred,” she said, “you should do it. Get out of here. You know you should. I look at people like Forrest Thompson, and I think, Wow, he probably used to be a nice guy. But he stayed too long and he turned into a . . .” Here her hands started to flap and she dropped the half-eaten pickle. “A wing chair. He’s a wing chair. Not a person anymore, but something stuffed.” She noticed the pickle then and said, “Look at that. I was so upset I was eating a pickle. That never happens.

  “You probably don’t want this now, but here it is,” she said, tossing him what was left. Then she ordered another Guinness. “You may have to drive me home tonight, Fred. But what I’m thinking, very selfishly, is this. Jobs are designed to drive people insane. It is just how it is. I know,” she said, holding up her hand in protest, “I haven’t had many of them. But I’m aware of this. For instance, things would have been a lot worse this year if we hadn’t played faculty bingo.”

  Faculty bingo was something that Fred and Madeline had come up with one night in October at Mackey’s. It consisted of a grid with Porter’s initials at the center and a random scattering of initials belonging to other faculty members in the rest of the squares. If someone on your card spoke during the faculty meeting, you crossed off the name. You could, they’d agreed, provoke someone to talk with a bogus question, and it was delightful to see how teachers swelled with pride when asked to elaborate on, say, the value of the physics AP or an extended period for volleyball. When you achieved a row, you staged a coughing fit that meant you had won.

  It was juvenile. It was beneath them. It was hilarious. In any case, it had whiled away quite a few dull Friday afternoons. Then, after Christmas break, Harvey had nearly caught them, and they’d given it up. Madeline continued, “Sarah was hinting that she needed to see me. She might ask me to stay on. That’s what I think is going to happen at least, and, Fred, if you’re not here, it just isn’t as interesting. And after all the flak I’ve given you all year about this place, here you are thinking about going and I’m contemplating staying. But, you know, I like talking about poetry all day. Where else but a serious classroom would I get to do that? And I like a lot of the kids. A lot of them care about learning. There’s something pure about all that effort. And it’s better than what’s waiting in Boston.” She blushed hotly. “It seems horrible to be thinking about our futures after everything that’s happened, and I’m really being selfish because if I’m honest I don’t want you to go and enjoy yourself and do art and have a ball in New York because . . .” Here she stopped and ate another mouthful of burger to keep herself from saying something more revealing.

  Because they both knew she had been about to say “because I’m going to miss you,” and this was certainly not the time to be embarking on something as delicate as discussing feelings that might be mutual. Fred burned with happiness. But it was so confusing. There was nothing much either of them dared say right now. He drank down a gulp of Guinness, Madeline gloomily ate fries and ordered another plateful for them to share. Gradually, he became conscious that the men in the booth were speaking a language other than English in a soft, lilting rhythm that might have been Spanish but wasn’t.

  “Portuguese,” said Madeline, having noticed that Fred was listening to them. “My mother lives near New Bedford, and when I visit, all you can get on the radio are Portuguese stations. That’s what those guys are speaking.” Fred looked at the men a little more closely. Cape Verdeans, perhaps, workers in the last of the Greenville mills. They were neatly and simply dressed and drinking Budweiser from bottles. All of them had on Red Sox caps and appeared to be watching the game. Often, Fred and Madeline would stay out long enough to hoot Boston toward victory, but that wouldn’t happen tonight.

  Fred was about to ask Madeline if she wanted to go back when the door to the bar swung open with almost as much violence as it had when Madeline arrived. A girl with long hair flew in and brought with her a gust of hard rain. She glanced around the room and found the three men at the booth. Darting over to the oldest of them, she spoke rapidly in Portuguese. Then the girl happened to spin around and see Fred and Madeline looking at her. There was no reason they shouldn’t have; she had burst in so suddenly. But when she returned their glance, all that filled her face was terror. For some reason, she was frightened of them. She ran out of the bar as fast as she’d arrived, followed by the man she had spoken to so urgently. He threw a few bills on the table, murmured what was probably an apology to his friends, and turned to follow the girl without casting a look at anyone else. Fred saw that Madeline was staring at the door, and she was frowning. “Do you know who she was?” she asked.

  Fred shrugged. “Never seen her before. But she was pretty upset to see us. How about you?”

  Madeline pulled on her baggy raincoat. “No,” she said. Fred asked Bill Price for the check. He and Madeline fished out the money each owed. Passing him the cash, Fred asked the owner if he knew who the girl and the man were.

  Bill said, “No clue. He and his buddies come in once in a while to watch baseball. Never seen the kid before.” He wiped down the bar, cleared their plates. Madeline had eaten every fry.

  Outside, the wind blew loudly, whipping Madeline’s raincoat into a series of tan sails that threatened to fill and whisk her off to the next county. She waved to him, said good-bye. They wouldn’t talk tonight; the weather was too disturbed and their moods as well. There was no sign of the girl or the man.

  Fred didn’t sleep well, tossing as he thought about the Brooklyn loft, Madeline and the spool of thread, the wild fear in the girl’s eyes. He thought, too, about Llewellan and Edward Smith until he finally slept near dawn and dreamed in what he later remembered as the hiss of Portuguese.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was the third time that Matt had sat in a room with Scotty Johnston, and each time he liked him less, which was quite astonishing given that he had really disliked him the first time he met the kid. Scotty looked a great deal like his father. Tall and aggressively fit, with a shock of blond hair, a lean jaw, and blue eyes notable for their lack of humanity. What a trait to pass on, Matt thought, contempt for the human race. If you really felt it that strongly, it would be hard to choose to have children, who would also be forced to deal with all the inferior people occupying the world. But Mr. Johnston, as he frequently reminded Matt and Vernon, was the father of four boys, which was very different, Vernon had noted at one point, from saying you had four kids you really cared about.

  They had chosen the smallest, most claustrophobic interrogation room. Vernon and Matt were tall, but Scott and Mr. Johnston were of the looming sort of huge, and the room felt clammy and tight. The white walls were scu
ffed, the plastic chairs deeply uncomfortable, and the fluorescent lights gave you a new feeling for the word institutional. The décor, such as it was, was intended to remind everyone that outside the day was beautiful, hot, and clear after the rainstorm. How much more pleasant it would be for Scott to simply admit what he knew and get back outdoors to enjoy this gorgeous Thursday morning. Vernon lounged on a chair, almost getting it to the point where it tilted on two legs into the wall. Matt’s chair remained firmly grounded, but he knew how Vernon felt. It was hard to take the self-important bluster of the man in front of them entirely seriously. Yet it was also very clear that in his tightly bunched fists Scotty was holding on hard to quite a bit of necessary information.

  “Scott, Mr. Johnston,” said Matt, trying to sound equable. “We know Scotty has been through a lot. By all accounts, he and Claire were close. And we don’t want to interrupt his return to classes.” Was this laying it on? Vernon lifted an eyebrow, but Matt thought he could probably get away with it. Irony was a quality to which neither of the Johnstons appeared susceptible. Perhaps that, like their height and Nordic coloring, was genetic. “We also know,” he continued, holding up a hand to block the oncoming train of protest Mr. Johnston was about to release, “that none of our discussions are taped, recorded, or otherwise on record because Scott is a minor until September. But Scott knew Claire better than anyone, and we feel it’s important to be sure we understand her from his perspective.”