The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  That quelled the elder Johnston for a moment and allowed Matt to ask, “What about the Reign of Terror? Were they involved in all this?” Vernon pursed his mouth; he’d had the group explained to him and added it to a growing list of reasons why he’d never send his own girls to private school. Mr. Johnston merely looked confused, as if wondering what the French Revolution had to do with Claire’s death. But the question appeared to alarm Scotty not at all, and for once, he just answered. He shifted his large shoulders forward and said, “No. Claire was sick of them all. Sick of all the stupid shit they got up to.” Matt wondered when parents had stopped minding if their children swore in front of adults. His own father, Joseph, had slapped him in the face once for swearing in a parking lot after Matt slammed his thumb in the car door. Even extreme pain didn’t justify that kind of slackness.

  “And what kind of shit did they get up to?” Vernon asked, still tilted, arms behind his head.

  Scotty shrugged. “Idiotic things like telling girls what they could and couldn’t wear. Where they could sit in the Commons or the library. Claire could have cared less. She didn’t want to be Robespierre. But if they pick you, it’s hard to refuse. They tried to boss her around, tell her what she had to do as head, but she didn’t listen. It pissed them off.” Mr. Johnston was clearly not following a word of this, though for the moment he refrained from barging into the conversation.

  “Enough for them to kill her or take her baby?” Matt asked. Since Madeline had told him on Tuesday about the possibility that the Reign was involved, he had tried to corner each of the girls she’d named, as well as the new recruits Claire had initiated. But three of the four new ones were still under a doctor’s care; the fourth had been whisked off campus. Of the other girls, two had had their parents retain lawyers and two had left early, citing stress.

  Scotty shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know how it happened, but I don’t think it was them.” His eyes looked glazed, and he hunched farther forward. Claire’s death, its utter realness, kept striking him at unanticipated moments, Matt suspected.

  “So who does, Scott?” Vernon said. The front legs of his chair hit the linoleum with a clang, and he stood up slowly to his full height. “That’s what we need to find out. More precisely, what we need is for someone to tell us who fucked Claire. Because my guess is that the same guy who fucked her also killed her.”

  No one in the room, probably not even Scotty, expected what happened next. In a flash, the boy stood, grabbed the desk where he was sitting, and hurled the entire sizable piece of furniture at Vernon’s head. It was mostly plastic, but some of it was steel and it came very close to connecting with Vernon, who, lucky for him, had excellent reflexes and got out of the way. The desk crashed into the wall, and its metal legs vibrated as if it were an ungainly, robotic insect stuck on its back.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Scotty shouted. He was standing, dark red in the face and neck, chest heaving, hands open and ready to grab. Matt stood as well and walked deliberately to the other side of the room to right the desk. Vernon adjusted his tie, quite collected given that a large piece of office equipment had just been flung at him. “Just shut the fuck up,” Scotty roared.

  For once, Mr. Johnston appeared subdued. He went over to his son and tried to comfort him, but Scotty swatted away his father’s hand. “Let’s go home, Scott,” Mr. Johnston urged, and Scotty screamed, “No fucking way. I am not going anywhere but school.” His volume was impressively constant.

  “We’ll let you resolve Scott’s destination,” Matt said, “but please tell us where we’ll be able to find him. We’ll need to talk with you both again sometime soon.”

  Vernon and Matt went slowly down the hall toward their office. Vernon was sending a text. “What are you doing?” Matt asked.

  “Getting you some lunch. We’re taking twenty minutes outside before we go back up there. Your turkey sub will be here momentarily. I even got you Diet Coke,” Vernon said, though he shuddered slightly as he admitted that detail. He reached into the short fridge he had brought in from home and took out his brown-bagged meal. The office icebox was a far too scary and carnivorous environment to which to entrust his clean food.

  Matt smiled, and they headed toward the parking lot and the picnic bench there to wait for Matt’s sandwich. “What I like about you, Vernon, is that, for a vegetarian, you’re not that judgmental.” The temperature was verging on uncomfortably warm, and the leaves of the linden trees had unfolded to their full, heart-shaped green. The air was flecked with insects. Still, it was a far better idea to talk outside the station. Vernon dusted a yellow jacket off his sleeve. “I’m a vegan, not just a vegetarian, and you’re wrong. I am totally judgmental. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what you need to function.”

  They sat at the picnic table. Vernon was glancing into the paper bag and removing a series of complicated little glass pots with tight lids that Kathy had assembled for him. Unsnapping a lid, Vernon peered in and said “Quinoa” without a lot of enthusiasm. There were days, Matt knew, when despite his most recent statement, it would have been quick work to steer Vernon toward a cheeseburger. Nonetheless, he gamely started to munch away on his whole grains, and Matt said, “Delicate choice of words back there. Scotty remained so relaxed, so in control.”

  “I think he broke the desk. Can we send a bill to the father?” Vernon asked. “I was actually very proud of the fact that I resisted the temptation to arrest him for harassing an officer.”

  “Yes, that showed real strength of character. And I think it was a move that allowed us to learn some interesting things. One, Claire didn’t take the Reign of Terror seriously but the other girls did. Why was that?”

  Vernon shrugged. “She was already queen of the world, the real Marie Antoinette, and she didn’t think they could do anything to her.” He began to eat some celery sticks. “Your lunch is here,” he said, looking behind Matt. A uniformed officer had brought it out, and Matt thanked him and gave him the cash needed to pay the delivery kid at the entrance to the station. “May I point out another benefit to the meat-eating life?” Matt said. “It’s a lot less noisy.” Vernon made no effort to stop crunching his pale stalks.

  Matt unwrapped his sub and popped open the Diet Coke. After a sip, he said, “There were two other items. Scotty said he didn’t know how she had been killed. How it had happened. But he didn’t say he didn’t know who had done it. And he had no intention of going home. He plans to stay put.” He ate some turkey and looked at the brick cube of the station. People passed in front of windows, a human hive of industry tracking clues and mapping patterns and looking just as primitive as the bees beginning to huddle around his soda. FBI in their shiny shoes clacking up and down halls. If anything, Matt had more faith in the efficacy of the insects. Vernon took off his jacket, folded it under his head, and stretched out on the bench. Matt did the same on the opposite side and immediately felt better. It was good to be horizontal, and the overhanging edge of the table provided some relief from the sun.

  They both knew this reprieve was limited. But it was necessary to take short breaks, think through things aloud, and plan small, concrete next steps. They didn’t need, however, to discuss how much they didn’t know, a point the media in every form had insisted on making repeatedly. Even after three days of exhaustive searching, the case had turned up remarkably little hard evidence. The laptops and phones were still being scanned but so far had revealed nothing. These kids, savvy as they were, must have realized how easily traced all these electronics were. This might be the rare case that didn’t have an Internet shadow, though Claire could have had and probably did have accounts under assumed names that they hadn’t yet found. Scotty was stonewalling, an effort that almost everyone at Armitage had joined him in, along with the doctors and lawyers and parents intent on preventing access to their sensitive charges. The autopsy results had yet to be completed, and the one alluring clue, a bloody rag a handyman had found in the basement, was still at t
he lab. Norm Parker was taking his usual endless amount of time. The computers that the art teacher had told them about in the basement had already been removed by the time he told the cops; they’d been hauled out the next morning to Paul Revere, glad for the donation of barely used technology. All the rain had made it difficult for a complete search of the campus to go forward, and it had wiped out remnants of footprints and smells. As for the baby, it was so disheartening that it was almost better not to think about it. Despite calls coming from New Jersey to the Bahamas, the FBI had not found one viable lead. For all intents and purposes, the infant had disappeared. Matt looked over at the government cars. The black vehicles the federal agents preferred winked in the steaming lot. They were everywhere, but they were facing the same slow slog as he and Vernon.

  Vernon had draped his arm over his eyes. “You asleep?” Matt asked.

  “No, just getting my dose of vitamin D and thinking about all the people we have to see up there today.” He ticked off the names. Harvey Fuller, who had yet to account for why he’d been skulking around the third floor. Claire’s parents, who were doing quite a job of being both antagonistic and incredibly unforthcoming. Scott’s adviser and dorm head.

  Vernon’s phone beeped with a text. He raised himself partially and looked at the screen. “Lady named Betsy Lowery needs to see you and only you. Urgently. Who the hell is she?”

  “The Barfmobile,” Matt said and explained the phenomenon of the stinky car to his partner. He reached up for the Diet Coke, nearly inhaled a bee, then finished off almost the whole can. When he was done, he sank back into the gloom below the table. He had been trying to pretend that he had not had a headache for three days, low and deep in his skull, in almost precisely the same place where Claire had sustained the blow that killed her.

  “We could use backup,” said Vernon, his eyes draped again with his arm. “Lots of people up there. And we need to make some progress or Angell is going to destroy us. Oh, and I forgot. We’ve got a meeting tonight with the headmaster, too.” Vernon sounded weary. Neither of them had been off for more than three hours since Monday morning.

  “It’s local. It’s worse than local. Some of those kids know exactly what happened,” said Matt to the underside of the tabletop, through which bright lances of sunlight were streaming.

  “But that does not tell me precisely why you’re so unwilling to let a few uniforms help with the interviews,” Vernon prodded. “I have my guess, however,” he added.

  “Which you are now pleased to share with me.” Matt knew what was coming.

  Still speaking with his arm over his eyes, Vernon said, “You’re worried some townie won’t get it up there. You think they’re not going to pick up the nuances and that the snobs will walk all over them. You think you’ve got that angle covered.”

  Matt sighed. It was partially true. Armitage was hard to translate if you hadn’t experienced it. He knew exactly how the people up there talked about the town, the police, the villagers of Greenville, conversation that ranged in tone from polite acceptance of the fact that people of different origins actually existed to open disdain.

  “Vernon, will you uncover your eyes?”

  “No,” said Vernon.

  “All right,” said Matt, still lying on his back. “To a certain extent you’re right. But it’s not because I think the townies will screw it up. It’s because I do actually understand it there; I lived it. It doesn’t mean I liked it. It doesn’t mean I approve of it. And I don’t think, despite it all, we’re far off. More of us will scare them worse. More of us means they’re surrounded. We need to make them feel that we’re barely watching, that we’re as incompetent as they hope.”

  Vernon said nothing for a moment. And then he commented, rather darkly, “You may not have liked it there, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t have its influence on you.”

  “Point taken. Give me two days,” Matt said. “And can we please think now about Claire? She’s the key; we know she is.”

  Vernon finally uncovered his face. “All right. Two days, and then we ask for help. And now I’m hot and want some cold water. We talk Claire inside.”

  They pulled themselves off the bench and took the remains of their lunch back to the relative cool of their office, where Vernon spread out his files on Claire. He’d found out that second semester she had taken a reduced load. A calculus class with Alice Grassley, biology with Harvey, physics with a guy who wore the thickest glasses you’d ever seen, and an English course with another geezer. “And she switched them all around just before she started in January. She knew what she was doing. She was going to plant herself in the last row in classes that were relatively large and run by old bats or the blind.” She had also, Vernon explained, missed just the number of assignments she could: not so many or so frequently as to cause comment but far more than she ever had before. Her grades, too, had slipped a lot, but everyone had said the lapse was blamable on senior slump, a kind of academic mononucleosis. Grace was Claire’s adviser, and she and Harvey were old and practiced collaborators. They were the last people to badger a girl who was in early to Yale and whose family endowed squash courts and scholarships at Armitage. In fact, when Alice Grassley, the teacher of the one course in which Claire had made really no effort, started to complain, Grace and Harvey told her to stuff it. At least that was the story from Alice, who was, according to Vernon, a sharp old gal and a Sox fan. Grace and Harvey had of course denied it all.

  Scotty was in three of Claire’s classes—physics, English, and biology—but he’d been planning on taking those since the year before. Otherwise, all four of the girls Claire had trusted to care for her were in at least one of the courses with her. Thread or no thread, she had done a good job creating her network of coconspirators.

  Scotty had emerged time and again as the person students and teachers named as the possible father. Although Matt and Vernon sensed that Scotty had an extremely flexible notion of truth, they thought he was in this instance telling it. Scotty hadn’t seen Claire all summer; it was hard to refute the fact that he had spent almost three uninterrupted months in Canada training with an Olympic rowing coach. “Timing,” Matt said to Vernon. “It’s the timing.”

  “Yeah,” Vernon said, “I’m doing the numbers for the hundredth time. By timing I assume you mean when she got pregnant and with whom. The girls say the baby was late. Most likely, if we can count on her having regular periods, she got pregnant over the summer, in early or mid-August. That chronology means she could have slept with anyone from the pool boy at the father’s house to some French guy on a barge.”

  “On a barge?” Matt asked. Vernon, with his aggressive notions about staying true to one’s roots, had sometimes curious notions about life in other countries. But Matt took his point. Claire had spent August shuttling between Paris, Long Island, Maine, and New York, visiting her parents and friends. Her mother and father admitted that, even when she was home, they hadn’t seen much of her. “She kept her own counsel,” Mr. Harkness said with stunning lack of necessity. Those who had hosted Claire said that she had seemed much as usual: distant, self-possessed, and poised. No one said, What a tragedy, though they all mentioned what a shock her death was. And no boyfriends in particular had been noted. No, she hadn’t been dating anyone, just seeing her half brothers and sisters when she’d been in New York and France, the parents both insisted. Then again, both were forced to admit—the father with anger, the mother with regret—that they hadn’t always been available during the day to see what she had been doing. East Hampton or Damariscotta were more likely possibilities; the friends had been classmates from Armitage, the parents entirely vague about how the girls had spent their time. Just out, they kept saying. Doing this and that. You know. Teenagers. Impossible to keep track of. The other issue had been speaking with the actual friends. One was on a semester program in China, the other volunteering at an orphanage in India.

  “There’s a reason she stayed. She was planning something. An exposure, a
scene,” said Matt. “There’s an Armitage link, something very specific.” The shameful burst of schadenfreude that had graced the start of the week had faded; maybe its remnants were what was causing his headache. However this was resolved, it was going to be very, very unattractive.

  Rearranging his papers, Vernon suddenly asked, “Why’d you leave murder?” And before Matt could respond, he said, “There’s a connection, bear with me.” Vernon went on, “The guys in Philly, they were surprised you were going and pissed, like What’s wrong with us? What I’m saying is, it’s personal. I don’t know. A bad relationship. A bad case. Your mother died, and you wanted to be close to your father. You missed the clean air of the country.” Vernon was readying his laptop now and zipping open its container to receive his notes. “You didn’t broadcast it. But you probably told someone, and so did this girl. There is probably one person she let in because she had to be human. She had to be, though they talk about her like she’s Athena.”

  “Athena was ostensibly a virgin, but I take your point.” Vernon grunted and said nothing more, but Matt was impressed that he had gotten so much on the mark. It had been a case, a thirteen-year-old girl, raped and killed by her father. A family from South Philadelphia. Workable forensic evidence and even a confession that had taken a year to coax out, and then the entire case collapsed when a lawyer got the confession retracted and the mother wouldn’t testify. Finally, what he hadn’t been able to stand was that, in murder, you only saw and dealt with the end. You weren’t part of anything that wasn’t irrevocable.

  Vernon sorted through papers and was preparing to close the laptop case when his phone rang. “Kathy,” he said and went into the hall to talk to his wife.