The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  Matt walked over to Claire’s bulletin board and examined for the fifteenth time the array of notes and photos and papers that the girl had pinned there. But Vernon’s comment had unmoored him slightly, and he was abruptly back in Philadelphia, in the middle of that part of his life. He had spent twelve years there, the first four at Penn resolutely avoiding people like Scotty Johnston and wondering what he could do that would keep him away from that kind of world for the rest of his days. Then, senior year, a cop had come to talk to his urban policy class, and within the span of an hour, he had made a choice, exercising an openness of mind he’d first discovered at Armitage. But whatever that man had—some sort of cool mixed with intensity; a grasp on some of the world’s true, dark workings—Matt wanted it. Something direct, clear, and difficult. A job that wasn’t based at a desk, wrapped in a million different words and not a scrap of social nicety. Something no one would have expected of him, certainly not his parents, who had dreamed of law school and clerking for a famous judge, public service, something sleek and admirable. But he had seen that cop, another Italian, and listened to him describe what cops did and meant to big cities as all the blond girls took notes, and he’d known precisely where he was headed with all his fancy education.

  And despite his parents’ disappointment, police work had at first seemed like exactly the right choice. He had begun in burglary, which was full of people behaving with both courage and terrific stupidity and meanness. Those early years, when he had worn a uniform and then with a speed that irritated his colleagues moved to murder and become able to wear a suit, had had a kind of drama that made his daily life a blend of confessions, scuffles, and satisfying if often partial successes. He had never been bored and felt grateful to have work in which he felt filled to the edges of his own skin, even though, according to his father, he had turned back the immigrant’s clock.

  And then, over the course of a few bad years, he had felt the beginnings of the decision’s drawbacks. There’d been a series of gruesome cases that had gotten twisted in mistrials and plea bargains. Yet another relationship had ended with nothing more substantial than a milk frother. His mother had gotten ill and very quickly died. He had felt confidence begin to leak from his bones. Vernon had been right about it all, even Matt’s telling one person, his sister, Barbara.

  Whom had Claire confided in? He riffled through the notes on the cork again and looked at her small, neat handwriting. Whom had she trusted? Scotty, but she had held the upper hand in that relationship. Every photograph of them together betrayed that, and all the witnesses had confirmed it. Not her parents. Not her siblings, who were all half brothers or sisters, and quite a bit younger. Not her teachers. Not her peers. Then who?

  Vernon came in. “Kath says hi, says you’re coming to dinner when this is all over.”

  “Vernon,” Matt said, thinking of something he had finally understood about the bulletin board. “Claire didn’t take French this year, did she?”

  “No,” said Vernon, as he stooped to put what was left of his lunch back in the fridge. “She’d tested out. Nothing left for her but an independent study, and that would have brought too much attention to her. Why?”

  “But when we looked through her books and notebooks in her room, wasn’t one of the binders labeled ‘French’?”

  Vernon straightened up and noticed a particularly persistent yellow jacket on his shirtsleeve. He walked over to the window and carefully blew the insect into the breeze. “Maybe it was from last year. Why does it matter?”

  “Because,” Matt said, hastily gathering his phone, notepad, keys, and sunglasses, “she wrote in French all the time. It’s all over the bulletin board. She preferred it to English. And she may not have told somebody what was going on, but she might have written it down. I want to see that notebook.”

  “All right,” Vernon said, a little skeptically. “It should still be there. Unless, for reasons unknown, Harvey Fuller has decided to nab it.”

  They walked quickly through the station, both because of Matt’s desire to find Claire’s notebook and because they wanted to avoid conversation with anyone asking how the case was going. As they opened the door to the parking lot, Vernon said, “You know, you’re braver than I am. I never even tried to do something like murder in the first place. Knew it would ruin me. The problem with seeing is you can’t unsee.” They blinked in the bright light as they hurried toward Matt’s car. “By the way, when this case is finished, you should ask out that Madeline girl. She’s a keeper.”

  “Oh yeah? I think the art teacher has his eye on her already.” Admitting that he’d noticed Madeline and her potential suitor caused Matt a certain pang.

  “Art teacher? You’re worried about competition from an art teacher?” Vernon said. They settled into their seats, strapped themselves in, and headed up the hill. Matt realized his headache was gone. Maybe it was the Diet Coke, but more likely, it was this: the eerie way that present life, the sheer force of it, kept walking right alongside disaster. Turkey sandwiches and death, bad memories and bees, Vernon advising him on romance just before they went to investigate a murder. The relentless forward motion of experience that made it hard for anything to stick, even bad headaches. “So you’re my partner, my confessor, and now my yenta?”

  “You need all three,” said Vernon, jabbing a finger at him.

  Claire’s room was as they had left it, the books and binders in a rough row on the lower shelf of her bookcase. Matt stepped past the yellow tape and quickly found the one dedicated to French. As Vernon had speculated, it was from last year. On the first ten pages were clearly notes taken in a literature class. Assignments were written down, page numbers were marked. She’d done a precise caricature of Marie-France in the margins. Quotations from Baudelaire covered another page. He was just about to turn to Vernon and admit defeat when he opened a page at random in the middle. Suddenly, Claire was writing in dated, single-spaced paragraphs: 10 Octobre. 14 Octobre 2009. He tried to decipher the French, but his languages had been Latin and Spanish. “Vernon,” he said, “I think we’ve got something here.” He knew that all the plans to see Harvey, Betsy, Porter, Claire’s parents, and all the others they were slated to speak with this afternoon would have to be put off.

  “You understand this?” Vernon asked.

  “No,” Matt told him, “but I know who will.”

  Marie-France greeted them at her door with a cigarette in her hand. “I know I am not supposed to smoke in here,” she said, “but who is going to stop me?”

  “Not us, Miss Maillot,” said Matt, “especially when we have a favor to ask you. Could you help us translate this?”

  Marie-France let them in, and Matt saw Vernon, despite his disapproval of the tobacco, admiring the large window boxes filled with rosemary, oregano, and thyme. The windows were wide open, and though the smoke was an acrid, lingering presence, the room itself was full of the colors of the French south. A yellow and blue tablecloth. A bowlful of lemons. Handsome botanical prints of sunflowers and lavender. A comfortable white sofa that she invited them to occupy. She herself was narrow and tall, with gray hair pinned in a tight chignon and skin deeply damaged by cigarettes and sun. But at one time, he suspected, she had been pretty, and her eyes were dark brown and full of inquiry.

  “As I said, Miss Maillot,” Matt said, “we have a favor to ask you.” He showed her the notebook, turned carefully to the pages with which he wanted help. But she leafed through it from the beginning, finding, as Matt had hoped she would not, Claire’s rude drawing. To his surprise, she took a deep draw on her cigarette and laughed, exhaling smoke in a raucous, twisting cloud. “Claire,” she said. “I taught her for three years. She was a little méchante, that one.” She looked up at them. “A little mean. But she spoke the most beautiful French. She spoke like a native.” Matt understood for a moment how Marie-France had survived here for so long. She just didn’t take any of it particularly seriously, except for her own subject.

  “You were Spani
sh,” she said to Matt, still remembering—and disapproving—after all these years, as if the pursuit of any tongue but her own was an affront, an indication of reduced intellect. Matt could imagine how she’d taken the introduction of Mandarin to the curriculum.

  He said yes. Her reputation had been too formidable for someone like him, and again she laughed and it was like listening to a dragon. “She wouldn’t pursue the independent study,” Marie-France said. “I know why now. Stupid girl.” Blunt words tinged with tense regret. She continued turning the pages. “I would have helped her. It has happened before.” She turned another page and said, “What no one understood about this girl is that she was angry. She had every advantage in life, but no one took her seriously. I tried, but she had given up on adults. This is what you want, no?” she said and showed them the dated passages. Matt said yes and watched the woman read. She ground out her cigarette and did not immediately light another one, a rarity, he guessed.

  “It’s a journal, or part of one,” Marie-France said, still looking at the pages. “Notes she wrote. I will translate them for you. There are only three or four pages and then she stopped.” She glanced up and said, “It will take a bit of time. I will send them on e-mail. Can you give me your address?”

  Matt nearly said, “You have e-mail?” thinking that someone who still hoped French would return as the lingua franca would have shunned such an innovation. But he jotted his address on a card and passed it over to her. “Is there anything you can tell us now?”

  For this, Marie-France did stop and light a cigarette, and when she had it tucked into her fingers, she said, “She doesn’t say who the father is. That’s what you’re looking for, of course. It’s about this girl who was helping her. Rosalie Quiñones. A new girl here this year. She didn’t last.” At this, Marie-France blew out a perfect cone of smoke and looked at her flourishing beds of herbs.

  “What happened to her, Miss Maillot?” Vernon asked, and for the first time, Marie-France looked directly at him.

  “I am not sure. But if Claire was telling the truth, it had to do with those ridiculous girls and their group. Robespierre,” she spat. “An abomination. Grace will know.” She tapped ash into a clamshell. “No, don’t bother talking to Grace,” she said, rising. “She will tell you nothing. Talk to Sarah. She will be honest. And I will get the notes to you within an hour. You can download them on your phone, no?” she asked, and her smile was tilted. What was interesting was how delightful it was to hear her say download in that undiluted accent and how effortless it was for her to flirt well into her sixth decade.

  “Jesus,” said Vernon as they walked down the stairs. “She could teach a class on how to stay true to your native culture in the midst of infidels. Now I never have to go to Paris.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Madeline made it to class about thirty seconds before her students arrived, relieved as she left her apartment to find no more emblems of the Reign of Terror on her doorstep. She was off to teach the sophomores, her favorite kids, who for some reason had thrown themselves into American poetry with a fervor most teenagers reserved for online chatting and Cheetos. Porter’s instincts had been right; it was better to start up the routine again. He had ridden through a wave of protest from parents and faculty, arguing for the cancellation of the remainder of the school year. He’d stated that sending students off without giving them even a short time to come to terms with their shock and grief would backfire. The emotional consequences were too extreme, he said, not to mention the financial ones. Those, he was quick to point out, would not redound to the school; the time to return deposits was long past. Despite the hit to their wallets, quite a few parents were withdrawing their children for the end of the year and the next. Even by last night, the campus had indeed seemed emptier—the lines in the dining hall were thinner, and there were leftover strawberries for once. The kids who had stayed had a grim set to their faces, evidence of a kind of courage of which Madeline wouldn’t have thought them capable. They were going to tough out a difficult situation. She’d thought such cosseted children uniformly allergic to that degree of discomfort.

  Madeline looked at the kids flopping into place around the oval table. They seemed relieved to have something to do other than mope about the dorm. Emily, Carter, Max. Stuart, Eddie, Cordelia. From all around the country, all around the world. In this high-ceilinged room ringed with wispy spider plants and curling posters from Stratford-upon-Avon—as the intern, Madeline didn’t merit her own classroom and she shared her digs with Forrest, the English chair—she had coaxed them into reading a wide variety of work and writing experimental sonnets. But today, she realized with rising panic, she had almost nothing prepared for them. Merely getting here had taken all her effort. “Why are we talking about poetry when this tragic thing has happened?” she asked them. Better to admit to the horror than to hide it, she’d assumed. But they looked at her, blank and more than a bit confused. And then she launched into the ways that poetry could teach you to structure thought and language and expounded on its ability to provide succinct, precise ways to capture feelings. Her hand motions were getting bigger and bigger, which was always a bad sign; it was not an effective teaching tool to imitate someone waving semaphores from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Then she found herself pressed up against the whiteboard, a marker clutched in her fist, and absolutely nothing to write there, so she rubbed her nose and said, with open desperation, “Well, that’s what I was thinking about. How about you?” And Emily, a delicate redhead, raised her hand and offered tentatively, “Poetry is beautiful. And focusing on something beautiful when you’re really sad or upset puts the hard thing into perspective.” So they spent the rest of the period reading and discussing the poems they loved most in their Norton anthology. “That was nice, Miss Christopher,” Emily said on her way out, as if Madeline and not she had been responsible for salvaging the class.

  During her next class, Madeline let the juniors write in their journals for twenty minutes and then discussed a handout on a final, short analytical paper on dramatic structures. They looked gray but grateful for the full complement of work she’d dumped on them. At least they had something to complain about collectively.

  At lunch, she avoided the stares of Lee and Olu, and noticed that they sat with a few other imposing girls at a table near the front of the room. They must be what’s left of the Reign, Madeline thought, and though she was grateful that Portia and Suzy had decided to depart early, there were still enough of them remaining to cause more than a little trepidation. She was very happy that Sarah Talmadge sat down next to her.

  The assistant head was compact and dark-haired, with an alert, sensitive face. Porter had hired her three years ago, and she, like her boss, was someone faculty and parents liked and respected. She worked hard, made difficult decisions fairly, and was utterly unpretentious. She had spent years at Armitage as a math teacher, gone to another school for almost a decade as a dean, then let Porter lure her back. What Madeline most admired in her, however, was that she managed to take her work seriously without losing a lightness of touch, a sense of humor that made her enjoyable to know. The best kind of grown-up, Fred said, and Madeline agreed. “I won’t pretend this is a social call,” she said now. She was drained, Madeline saw, and the skin on her face looked fragile. “I’ve got a couple of things to ask. First, can you set up an appointment to see me early next week? I want to talk to you more concretely about next year. I know it seems jarring, but we’ve got to keep focused on what’s ahead, too. And I have a big favor to ask.” She hadn’t touched a single one of the carrots on her plate, and Madeline doubted she would. The fish she had served herself was congealing in sauce. But Sarah pressed on. Claire’s parents were badgering the school for a chance to look at her room. Someone from the dorm needed to be there, just at the beginning. Would she mind?

  Madeline gulped and said, “Really? Why me?” Sarah looked at her and said, “Grace is entirely preoccupied with the police right now. As for Harv
ey and Marie-France, well, they might not offer the most reassuring presence.” She explained she would also come by, as soon as her 3:30 meeting was done. The parents wanted to be there at 4:00. “Okay,” said Madeline, wishing that Sarah looked a little less tired; she badly wanted to talk about this Robespierre business with her. Sarah’s thanks were genuine, and she lifted her tray and hurried off to her next task.

  Madeline got up to take her own tray off to the conveyor belt and knew that Lee and Olu were watching her. They were certainly not through with her yet, but what precisely they had planned and why they were bothering was unclear. In spite of her desire to appear nonchalant, to actually saunter, Madeline scurried past them.

  She limped her way through track practice and found herself back at the dorm, hot and smelly, with only five minutes before Claire’s parents were supposed to arrive. She didn’t want to greet them with wet hair or miss them altogether and chose instead to daub herself with a soapy washcloth. She dragged a comb through her hair and made sure there weren’t visible spots on her skirt. She plunked herself down on Kate’s old futon and waited, thinking that was the word she associated most with her parents. Waiting for her mother to pick her up from school. Waiting for her father to come by on one of his infrequent custody visits. Waiting for someone to call and tell her which parent she was going to spend Christmas with.

  At least, Madeline thought as she chewed her nails, they didn’t pretend that they’d done the most stellar of jobs in raising their children. “Darling, people just had babies back then. There wasn’t all this choice the way there is now,” Isabelle had said. As if nothing she had done had led to being pregnant the two times it had taken to produce Kate and Madeline. As if she’d woken one morning to find herself large-bellied and about, as she often put it, to “descend into motherhood,” as if parenting were no more than a dank basement in which she had to fold endless loads of laundry. Madeline’s father hadn’t exactly embraced his familial duties, either. Despite a solid career as a trusts and estates attorney, he had recently blown his fourth marriage, as heartbroken and reckless as Britney every time it didn’t work. Fortunately for him, the lawyerly side had kicked in early enough in these relationships that he’d managed to protect his assets before getting scalped by Deborah, Helene, or Jemima. The Hurricanes, Madeline and Kate called them, for the emotional if not financial wreckage that they caused. Unlike Madeline’s mother, her father seemed to know how babies were made and had resolutely avoided having any more since his girls had been born. The Fool for Love, Kate and Madeline called him, often shortened merely to Fool, though most people called him David. Still rakishly handsome, he was nursing the end of his latest union in Aruba. Isabelle was apparently happily settled with her third husband, a bland, rich man named Harry who carved decoys as an avocation. They lived on the coast of Massachusetts and cooked ornate meals to impress others with their kitchen equipment. Their stove was so powerful Madeline had singed her eyelashes the last time she’d tried to use it. Madeline sighed. What was there to prevent her from making exactly the same mistakes? What if marital haplessness was in her genes? How much choice was involved anyway? Owen was indeed breaking up via text, the end of a relationship captured in digital attrition, and she couldn’t even keep her eyelashes on.