The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  Madeline said, “I’m confused. Lee told me that she had done a lot of the work of looking after Claire.”

  Sally shook her head. “Claire didn’t want anything to do with them anymore. They just wanted you to think that. Me and Anna and Margaret and Kelly, we did most of it. Claire wanted us to help, not them.”

  There was more, Sally said in a rush. The Reign had been picking on Maggie, and Maggie and Rosalie had been close. There was some connection there, but Sally didn’t know what it was. The voices were indeed getting louder. Clearly, someone was now at the reception desk.

  “Sally, one more thing,” Madeline said, leaning forward. But the girl interrupted her. “You want to know if Claire told us who the father was. She didn’t. She never said. Just that it was important she have the baby at school. That it would change things here.” Then she continued hotly, “Claire wasn’t like everyone thought she was. She wanted to know about our families. She wanted to know if we were close to our parents. If we had brothers and sisters we liked and talked to.”

  Madeline sat up straight. That was interesting, yet another layer to Claire. “She did? And what did you say?” By “we,” Madeline assumed Sally meant the other girls with whom Claire had broken tradition.

  Sally gave a small shrug. “Well, of course we are. I mean, my parents would do anything for me. We all had families like that.” She looked a little bewildered, as if unable to imagine any other possible reality. “Claire said we couldn’t tell them about the thread or about her, but she wanted to know all about them. About what we did and where we went on vacation and if anyone had told us about our periods and stuff like that.” Now Sally blushed a little and looked flustered. “She wasn’t as mean as she looked. She was even kind of lonely,” Sally started to say, and then a light clicked on in the hallway and Madeline knew she had to scamper out of the McFarlane Wellness Center or face either Sally’s parents or some fearsome nurse.

  She quickly thanked Sally and zipped down another corridor that branched off the solarium. Fortunately, it held the school’s meditation room, and Madeline gratefully opened the door. No one could accuse her of any wrongdoing in here, and it was a better option than the cleaning closet that had been the other choice. It was far less cramped, too, and rather inviting, with its low Japanese cushions and creamy wall color. Even so, merely being around the suggestion of meditation made her both restless and drowsy. Still, Madeline sat for a moment, trying to reframe Claire in her mind, propping what Sally had said about her next to what she had known, all of it having to fit somehow with those chilly, disturbingly handsome parents. None of it made sense. All of it had to be discussed with the police.

  She rose, conscious of gnawing hunger. After slipping out of the infirmary without encountering anyone other than a cafeteria worker delivering meals to some sick children, Madeline had a quick dinner at the Commons. There were few teachers around and not many students. Her silverware echoed off the edge of her plate. It was a bit disappointing, she thought as she chewed some rather tasteless pasta, that Porter hadn’t made more of an effort to be in the dining hall this drastic week. Unlike his predecessor, she had been told, Porter and his family had made a habit of eating with teachers and faculty. He and Lucinda and Miles had often been the humming center of a lively dinner table. If Armitage needed anything right now, it would be the compelling presence of its head and his handsome family. Fred, who was teaching the boy this semester, had said he hadn’t seen Miles in class. Apparently he was now staying with his parents.

  She didn’t have time to think about that, she reminded herself as she deposited her tray. She had some schoolwork to finish, and she had to call the detective. She also needed to find out a lot more about Rosalie Quiñones and Maggie Fitzgerald. But she also knew she didn’t have a lot of energy left tonight; she could already feel exhaustion trickling into her muscles. Then she reached her doorstep and shock pulled her back to full attention. What was lying there? Madeline squatted down to examine the small white twist of fur. A mouse. A dead mouse. And at first, she thought it was an offering from Virgil, Grace’s cat and an unusually resourceful hunter for a male. He had left her a chipmunk and once a small gray squirrel. But Virgil tended to gnaw the heads off of his prey, leaving only mangled stumps low on the neck. This wound was clean, sharp, and precise, and the mouse was white, not wild. A creature bred for a lab. It was then Madeline saw a smaller lump on the doorstep: it was the mouse’s head, complete with pink nose and now-stilled white whiskers. Looking more closely, she saw the mouse hadn’t merely lost its head: it had had it surgically removed. The word, Madeline thought, was guillotined.

  CHAPTER 14

  Marie-France was as good as her word. Matt was hurrying across campus on his way to knock on Harvey Fuller’s door when his phone pinged with a message. He stopped in the shade of an elm to read it as students, freshly showered after sports, made their way to the library or the Commons. The campus was bathed in tender early evening light and looking unusually benign. It was a small file, Marie-France said, and she didn’t think it would be very useful. It provided, she wrote, a “picture of the distress of Claire, but nothing about the question of the paternity.”

  The gist of what Claire had written concerned her intense morning sickness and the fact that a girl, a freshman named Rosalie Quiñones, had helped her. Rosalie had apparently had an older sister in much the same situation as Claire, and she knew how to keep the nausea at bay. Saltines and ginger ale, weak tea and lots of rest. Rosalie was competent, Claire wrote again and again, competence apparently a quality Claire admired. Her sister, too, had decided to keep the baby. Claire had expressed appreciation for someone else making a similar choice but noted darkly, “My reasons are probably different than hers.” Matt paused for a second. It was hard to read more than the most cursory e-mails on this tiny screen. What of this would be admissible evidence if this case ever came to trial? Vernon had been skeptical from the start. “Start thinking settlement today. These kids will never see the inside of a courtroom, much less a jail.” The DA, a nervous man sensitive to the point of idiocy on the divide between Greenville and Armitage, had hardly pressed the parents of the students involved. To a degree, Matt took his point. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of an argument when the academy was involved. The school’s own lawyers, a polished team from an old Boston firm, had made their insistent presence known within minutes of Claire’s death.

  Matt forced himself back to Marie-France’s translation. Rosalie continued to be helpful but reported to Claire that girls were out to get her because she refused to remain cordoned to certain tables in the Commons. She didn’t like the view, she told Claire. “I told her to get used to it. This was how it was, for almost everyone here. But she was stubborn.” A bit later, Claire noted that she had talked to “other members,” among them, presumably, Olu, Lee, Portia, and Suzy. “And they wouldn’t relent. But Rosalie said she knew something that would get them kicked out. Something they would always be ashamed of. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. I told her to. I told her she had to. And she finally did, and it is as disgusting as they are.” What had it been? Matt checked his watch. There was so much to do. He should have been at Harvey’s twenty minutes ago.

  Then, Claire wrote, “They did something disgusting to Rosalie. She left today. I can’t really blame her, but she just left. Like everyone else. But they won’t tell me what they did to her. It’s over with all of them. I am starting over.” That meant, Matt assumed, that Claire had severed her connection with the other girls and felt free to break with tradition altogether and choose new members. It was practical, Matt saw—Claire needed help to support the choice she had made to stay at school while pregnant—but it was also political. She had finished with the nonsense of the Reign. The entries had spanned a period of three weeks, from mid-October to early November. “Find Rosalie Quiñones,” he wrote in his notebook and quickly forwarded Marie-France’s attachment to Vernon. Vernon texted back: “Nothing else in any of
the other notebooks. Autopsy results coming in later tonight.”

  Matt sighed and went as fast as possible to Harvey Fuller’s apartment. The man had a lot of questions to answer, given how much was happening in his dorm. When the biology teacher answered his door, the air trapped in his apartment made its way for a moment into the hallway. Its smell spoke of extreme neatness, but it was also stuffy. Clean without any of the positive associations of that word. It was rare for a person’s living space to reflect so little of his character, but Harvey Fuller possessed an abrasive plainness, as if he had sheared off unnecessary edges in everything from his speech to his quarters. Even the backs of the drawers in his kitchen would be scrubbed according to a strict schedule, Matt guessed. He had had him as a teacher and remembered Fuller’s spartan lab. It was curious that the man was a biologist and not a mathematician: for someone who considered himself an authority on life and its origins, he was almost devoid of animating spark. His hair was colorless, as were his eyes, a shade that wavered between gray and brown without settling on either, the only indecisive notes in his personality. He had barely aged in fifteen years; his skin was slightly drier, his eyelids a bit more crinkled. He even wore the same style of eyeglasses, horn-rims that had been outmoded for several decades but were now enjoying a resurgence of popularity, giving Fuller an anomalous whiff of hipness.

  Matt had learned what he knew of genetics and evolution, Mendel and Darwin, from Harvey Fuller, and for that he was grateful. But of all the teachers he had had while at Armitage, none had caused him the unease that Harvey Fuller had. It was the unblinking stare, the impression he gave of remembering even the scantiest details of your history that made Matt uncomfortable. If he were honest, he had to admit that he had sometimes called upon memories of Harvey Fuller when he was interrogating suspects. That precise command of information, the creation of a mood of icy authority, had proved helpful with all manner of liars. Harvey had created, whether it was accurate or not, an impression of austere integrity.

  Which was why it was odd, Matt thought, to find himself almost entirely certain that Harvey Fuller was not telling the truth about what he knew of Claire Harkness. He’d taken the proffered seat, a thinly upholstered armchair, and found himself looking at the walls, pristine white and covered in matted prints and watercolors of coastal scenes. Matt remembered that Fuller owned a cottage in Maine, where he repaired without fail every summer. When he’d been a student, the joke had been that it was never officially spring until Harvey changed from wide-wale cords to khakis.

  Fuller’s pants now, Matt noted, were without a wrinkle or a stain and neatly cuffed. But he plucked at them as he answered every question Matt asked, revealing a nervousness his voice did not. Yes, he had taught Claire twice. Last year in AP Biology and this spring, in an elective. “An excellent student—she scored a five on the AP, as a junior—but that’s quite common here.” He knew her, of course, from the dorm as well. He had duty Monday nights, as he had for the last twenty years, and would see her when she came to let him know she was back for the night, as all students were required to do. Those encounters were brief. Claire was not, Fuller said, a chatty sort. Matt couldn’t imagine even the most talkative and sociable of girls wanting to chat with Mr. Fuller. Why had he been allowed to live for so long in a dorm? And a girls’ dorm at that? Especially after the incidents that Porter McLellan had mentioned. He could have used his seniority to request one of the freestanding houses coveted by anyone who’d survived more than five years living with students, but he’d chosen, as he primly acknowledged, to stay in the same place the last eighteen years. It suited him, he said, with an affronted air, implying he considered it beneath him to be interrogated about anything at all. He had already reminded Matt that he’d answered exactly the same questions before.

  He hadn’t seen much of Claire all semester, he insisted. Monday nights, for a few moments, and perhaps at the biweekly dorm meetings, and in class, of course. But she always sat at the back of the room and he at the front. “I’ve got labs to correct, Detective. How much longer do you think this will take?”

  Matt found his jaw tensing. A child was killed in your dorm, he wanted to say sharply to the older man. This isn’t an investigation into some prank. You might have seen something. You might be willing to be helpful. Matt leaned forward in his chair and said, a little more pointedly than he intended to, “Mr. Fuller, did you notice that Claire was pregnant? Did she or any of the other students tell you?” You taught her when she was about to give birth, he was thinking. Did nothing give away the fact something had changed?

  Fuller’s face contracted slightly. “I’m not in the habit of observing the bodies of my students, especially my female students. It’s something that tends to be frowned on in my position. We stay focused in my classes on the tasks at hand.”

  In spite of himself, Matt flushed, even as he remarked that Fuller’s fingers were hard at work smoothing out a nonexistent crease. He tried another tactic. “What can you tell me about Rosalie Quiñones?”

  “Rosalie was a student of only moderate talent. She simply couldn’t manage the workload. I sat on the admissions committee last year, and I argued strenuously that we not accept her. I don’t think it’s fair to invite students of not quite adequate intellect here. It’s a recipe for failure.” He paused to adjust his pants again.

  “And,” Matt asked, “what about a group known as the Reign of Terror?”

  “That group died out years ago, around the time you yourself graced us with your presence here. They are no longer functioning. The academy no longer tolerates such idiocy.”

  For an unpleasant moment, Matt thought about how satisfying it would be to deck Harvey Fuller. But this was exactly what the older man wanted, for Matt to lose his composure. Again, a shift in angle was necessary. “There’s another concern, Mr. Fuller. You were observed coming from the third floor of the dorm two days after Claire died. What were you doing there? I’d also be interested if you had any idea who the father of the baby might have been.”

  “Who saw me?” Fuller sputtered, and Matt knew he was thinking of the recent accusations, of Porter’s warning. He was suddenly intensely vulnerable, and that thinness of skin triggered something Matt had never seen in Harvey Fuller: a boiling rage that masked, he guessed, an all-consuming fear of jeopardizing what he held most dear—his position and authority at Armitage. “That ridiculous intern? That girl who can’t keep her hair combed? Claire was my student. I was doing nothing more than registering the fact that she was no longer here. I touched nothing.” The biology teacher looked as if the air had left his lungs. His skin turned a deeper shade of gray. “And as for the father of her child, I have no idea whatsoever. The genetic evidence hasn’t been made available to me,” he went on in an attempt at jauntiness that the sudden deadening of his complexion belied. “Isn’t that something the police should be able to figure out on their own?” He was standing now, a furled flag, his cold composure restored. He walked toward the door and opened it.

  Matt stood in the corridor and caught his breath. He wouldn’t see Fuller again without Vernon; it had been foolish to think he could handle the man alone. On the other hand, if Vernon had been there, Fuller might have been that much more cautious and not let slide the fact that he was most certainly hiding something. All that plucking at his pants. He had been lying about the Reign, Rosalie, and knowing the identity of the baby’s father. It was time to secure a warrant to search that apartment. If nothing else, it would give Matt satisfaction to disrupt Harvey’s obsessive tidiness.

  Vernon called then and said that Betsy Lowery was driving him nuts. Matt had to go over and see her now. But he expressed true pleasure when told to get working on the warrant for Harvey’s place and on finding a girl who’d been harassed by the Reign, Rosalie Quiñones. Once again, Matt was filled with gratitude that he had had the luck to stumble onto Vernon as his partner, and then he started to walk across campus toward Colebrook, the sprawling Victorian that hous
ed most of the freshman boys and the Lowery family.

  They lived on the first floor, which gave them access to a fenced-in yard, where a low, shrieking cyclone of dust announced the presence of the kids who inhabited the Barfmobile. Most of the faculty mothers worked hard to keep up appearances: well-cut hair, trim figures even after multiple pregnancies, polite smiles, and children schooled to reflexive good manners from infancy. Careful women, alert to their husbands’ positions, the status of certain students; the need to be friendly and circumspect in equal measure. Betsy Lowery had none of these qualities. Her hair, brown and gray and wiry, flew about her shoulders. Her figure, disguised by a sweatshirt and baggy jeans, was lumpy with unshed pounds and unexercised muscle. But her face was open and genuinely friendly. And the children, when called from the yard, were scruffy but sweet: all but the littlest shook hands and said hi and stood there squirming in the dish-strewn kitchen until their mother released them back to their play. “Four kids in four years,” she said, sounding at once proud and profoundly tired. “I wouldn’t change it for anything, except more sleep and my body when I was thirty. Oops. Should be more cautious talking to the police, I guess,” she said and offered Matt some coffee.

  He expected hers would be good—she actually needed it—and he was right. They were in the kitchen with the door open to the yard. So far, the kids were whooping with the pleasure of children returned to sun after heavy rain. The two oldest were girls, five and six, and they took care of the two youngest, a boy and another little girl. “I’ve got about three minutes before someone bumps a head or an elbow and starts to scream,” Betsy told him. It was almost time to get dinner on the table. People started drinking now not because it was the end of the workday, she sighed, but because that was when children most reliably fell to pieces.