The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  “What were you wearing, Mr. McLellan?” Vernon asked.

  “I don’t recall,” he said more confidently and glancing up again at them. “I don’t pay much attention to what I wear. Lucinda is always trying to clean me up. Make me look more like a head of school, whatever that means.” He plucked at his handkerchief and folded it. “Is there anything else? I’m afraid I’ve still got a great deal to do tonight. May I ask if Scott Johnston is with the police again?”

  “You’re welcome to ask, Mr. McLellan,” said Vernon, “but there’s nothing to say at this point.”

  “I understand,” he said and rose. He shook their hands and left. It was time to get back to the station, but Vernon went to refill his green tea. “He’s talked to the wife.”

  “Yup,” said Matt and flexed his hands. “And he’s lying about the dog. I saw the leashes hanging in the kitchen. The kinds they use are almost nooses; there’s no way she could have slid out from one of those. Let’s check with the neighbors.” Remembering Betsy’s assumption that Grace Peters and Harvey Fuller would claim blindness when it came to protecting Porter, he didn’t think it likely the neighbors would have much to say, and their excuse might well be plausible. As in his day, the head’s residence was surrounded by a dense hedge of privet that gave the large white house an unusual measure of privacy.

  Vernon rubbed the back of his neck and held the door open for Matt. It was starting to drizzle again. “More goddamn rain. So bad for my tomatoes.” The head’s house loomed into view as they squelched along. They stopped for a moment, and the tall lampposts gave off a pinkish glow that the puddles on the walkway reflected in a thousand broken disks.

  But it was then they saw, through a window on the second floor, a woman in profile. It was Lucinda McLellan, and she was shouting at someone. Her face was contorted, and she was obviously very angry. Matt glanced at Vernon to see if he noticed the same thing. “Can’t hear a thing, can you?” Vernon said. “The dog could have been barking its head off and you’d have no idea. Who’s she yelling at? Can you see?”

  But Matt couldn’t, and whoever was at the receiving end of Lucinda’s rage was wisely staying at a distance from her. “Shall we knock?” Vernon asked. Then, just as they were walking to the door, it opened briskly and Tamsin Lovell came out of the house. She barely glanced at them. “Mr. McLellan’s not in,” she said. “He’s at his office.” She put up her umbrella as she spoke, making it impossible to see her face. But her voice, Matt noted, was unperturbed. If she had been the person Lucinda was screaming at, she seemed to have taken it remarkably in stride. “Good night,” she said, pulling the door tight behind her and picking up a large duffel bag that she had left on the step as she opened her umbrella. She hoisted it to her shoulder and set off down the path, toward, they assumed, a parking lot.

  “What was in the bag?” Vernon said, looking after her.

  “It didn’t look like something she would carry. It looked like something you’d take to a hockey rink,” Matt said.

  “It did, indeed,” said Vernon. Just then the door opened, and Lucinda strode out, both taken aback and exasperated that they were there. “Porter’s not here,” she snapped. “I have no idea where he is.” She stepped past them and walked down the path.

  By the time they got to the parking lot to see what Tamsin was lugging with her, the assistant had left. And when they drove to her house, a trim bungalow on the outskirts of Armitage, they found it dark and shuttered with no car in the driveway.

  CHAPTER 15

  Jim woke from a dream of roofs collapsing and buildings whose windows were all broken. The digital clock blinked 3:14 Friday morning. It was the phone. The phone was ringing and his heart began to pound—there was nothing about phones ringing in the middle of the night that did not mean an emergency. He lurched toward the extension and heard Angela’s frightened voice. She wasn’t breathing right. Her heart hurt. She had called the ambulance, and he needed to get there right away. She’d done everything in the right sequence, she even sounded fairly at ease. Yet Jim felt nothing but the purest fear flow through him. “I’m coming, Ma, I’m coming. I’ll be right there.”

  He dressed in seconds, grabbed his wallet, his cell phone. His charger was in the car; he’d need to be in touch with his siblings, with Nancy Mitchell. Driving over to his mother’s, he prayed he wouldn’t run into any cops. But maybe they were distracted at the moment. Maybe speeding drivers meant nothing when there were a baby and a killer to find. They weren’t saying it was murder, but what else could it be? The streets were empty. Few lights shone from houses, and it was hard to see with the rain that poured down. His windshield wipers dragged across the glass; in the turmoil that had seized the campus, he’d forgotten to change them.

  At Angela’s, he found an ambulance, its harsh lights wheeling in the wild night. The nice neighbors, the young couple next door, were shivering in bathrobes on their porch, watching with concern as men in blue jumpsuits and yellow slickers tramped in and out of the house, walkie-talkies squawking. When they saw Jim, they waved and the husband shouted, “Please, Mr. French, just let us know if there’s anything we can do.” He waved back, too distressed to speak but grateful his mother was surrounded by people who cared about her. Kayla. That was another person he would have to call once they knew what was going on.

  In the living room, he saw Angela on a stretcher, an oxygen mask clamped to her face. What struck him most was how pale she was. Her face was white as paper, and wrinkled, as if someone had balled up a sheet and tossed it carelessly into the trash. A woman paramedic was at her side, monitoring her pulse and the oxygen flow. Angela’s eyes were open, and they were sharp, wet, and round with fear. Her fingers fluttered toward Jim, registering his arrival, and though she couldn’t speak, he saw her gratitude, her relief in the movement of her hand.

  “How is she?” he asked the woman, as he knelt by his mother, touching what he could of her arm. She’d gotten her nails done. Kayla had persuaded her to add manicures to her indulgences. She sported frosted pink polish, and it looked glamorous in spite of her pallor, her bathrobe.

  “We’re taking her to the hospital to find out. Are you her son? Are you Jim?” He said he was. “Good. She was worried about you getting here in the storm.” She adjusted the oxygen flow and made ready, with the help of a colleague, to roll the stretcher out to the ambulance. “He’s here now, Mrs. French,” the woman said gently. “You’ll see him again at the hospital. Just a few more minutes.”

  She looked so tiny lying there in the jumble of tubes and bags. Her hair, she would have been horrified to know, was in disarray around her shoulders. The driver motioned to his colleagues to hurry up. The woman turned to Jim and said, “Follow us there. She’ll be in the ER. They know she’s coming.”

  But before leaving, he wanted to make sure the house was locked and the lights were out. Very old habits of order asserted themselves, and he even spent extra time balling up the wrappers and Band-Aids and cotton balls the paramedics had strewn about in their haste to stabilize Angela and get her off to the hospital. He made her bed, smelled the fresh cleanness of her sheets, and hurried down, conscious of the need to see his mother again as soon as possible. A passing car briefly made the glass on the framed photos lining the stairwell dance with a thousand shards of brightness. Then it rolled on and Jim could no longer see the smiling faces of his relatives.

  Driving fast through the rainy streets, he didn’t care if cops spotted him. He didn’t even think about cops. What he thought about was his father’s death five years ago. When he’d locked eyes with his mother, he guessed that they’d both been thinking about the whole experience. About the sudden pain that had seized George’s face and arm, the trip to the same hospital, his dad’s initial improvement and then the final collapse. The day his father died, a Thursday in May, forty-eight hours after his first heart attack, Jim had known that his marriage to Carla was going to end. She couldn’t mask the fact that she was put out at having to take c
are of the girls that week and that she’d have to miss her history final. Once the girls were in primary school, Carla had returned to college, reigniting a love of learning that had eventually outdistanced her love of almost anything or anyone else. She was working now in Boston, at the Museum of Fine Arts. She had never been happier, something she made sure to remind him of every time they spoke.

  But at least she had been there. Now, driving through the familiar streets at an unfamiliar pace, Jim realized there was no one he would call for such support. There was no one he wanted beside him as he navigated these next critical hours. But then, pulling up to the ER of Armitage General, he realized he was wrong. He wanted to talk to Nancy Mitchell. He would have felt happy if Nancy were there.

  Inside, he quickly found the insanely young doctor who was in charge of Angela’s case and learned that his mother was on an EKG machine; they were reading the results now, but it looked like she had had a mild heart attack. They’d know more soon from the blood work, and the best thing he could do was to sit down and wait. The young woman looked tired but competent, her hair in a blond twist on her head, pinned with a single take-out chopstick. Angela’s arrival had probably interrupted her dinner, ordered a few hours ago from the Happy Palace down the street. Jim did not ask if his mother was going to be okay; doctors never answered that question, trained as they were to steer all information toward the factual, the known, the unsueable.

  But the young woman smiled at him and said, “Mr. French? I wouldn’t worry too much. Sit down, drink some water. I’ll be here all night. We’re doing everything we can.” Jim took her advice and watched the thin parade of the sick stumble through the doors. Parents with asthmatic kids, old men with bad diabetic reactions. A fender bender. Closer to dawn, he called his brothers and sisters, alerting them to what he kept calling the situation. There were gasps of worry, promises to come as soon as possible, polite expressions of gratitude for what they called being there. Jim knew he was fulfilling his role at last; the reason for which he’d stayed so long near his mother was finally becoming manifest. Slowly, the week would fill with his gathering family.

  It was six in the morning. He had reached everyone. His head was blurred with sleep and he had just folded his arms to make a bumpy pillow for himself when the young doctor came to talk to him. “First results are in, Mr. French. It looks like it’s what we thought: a minor heart attack. She’s resting now, but she’s out of immediate danger. We got there in time.” There was genuine warmth in her touch. She was new enough to her profession to believe in its most pristine possibilities. He was grateful to her. He couldn’t remember her name, but he was grateful to her. “I don’t want you to bother her now. She’s in cardiology for the time being, and you can see her when she wakes up. Get some rest.”

  Sleep proved impossible, and he paced until 6:30. Angela was always awake at first light. A few minutes later he found himself by her side, with the yellow sun pouring in through the slats in the closed blinds. The storm had finally cleared. His mother was still sleeping. Her arm was threaded with tubes, and nurses padded in and out in what seemed a constant, soft-footed procession. Bleeps and hums came from the monitors clocking her vital signs, but any fool could see she was better than she had been.

  He sat there and held her hand with its frosty nails. She breathed steadily on. He knew someone else he could call this time of day. Nancy. Like Jim and his mother, she was an early riser from both habit and preference. She answered her cell on the first ring. “Jim?” she asked, and he knew he wasn’t mistaking the mixture of alarm and concern, affection and worry. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  It was his mother, he explained. She was in the hospital. A heart attack. It looked like she was going to be fine, but he would need to stay here for the day. “I’m sorry; it’s a bad time to be out.” He’d be back as soon as he could. One of his sisters would be here soon from New York.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Armitage General? I’m coming now.” And she did. She was there in fifteen minutes, her hair fanned out around her shoulders; she hadn’t paused to put it in a braid or to comb it fully. She didn’t even have her ring of school keys with her. But she was there, with a bunch of daffodils. Pulled, she said, from her garden, but real flowers, the right kind, not chrysanthemums wrapped in foil. “Jim, I was just so upset,” she said. “I know how close you are to your mother.”

  She sat down next to him and looked at Angela, and very tenderly brushed a tendril of hair from her forehead. “She’s still so beautiful. How old is she, Jim?”

  “Eighty-two,” he said but almost absentmindedly. He was looking with amazement at Nancy. Here she was in her jeans and her work shirt, and he had never seen a more attractive woman.

  “You look alike,” Nancy said and then reached for his hand and held it for a moment. What startled him was that her palm was just as callused as his, as bumpy with work. Jim thought about Nancy and was aware of how little he truly knew of her life. She was single, but whether she was divorced or not, he had no idea. He didn’t think she had kids, but she was good with them. All he really knew was that she loved her job and that she kept the school in lovely shape.

  He thanked her for coming, and she dropped his hand and sat there in a slightly awkward silence. It was almost easier to turn the conversation toward the crisis of the moment, toward Claire and what had happened to her baby. It was so sad, Nancy said, and the worst was that she felt responsible. As if she ought to have put in measures that should have protected the child. It was almost impossible not to feel this way. The horror of what had happened was glaring, and all the people Jim liked or respected seemed somehow to feel they ought to have done something to prevent it. Nancy frowned and pinned her long hair with a clip she pulled from the pocket of her jeans. “I keep thinking about this, Jim. I want to believe that someone from outside got in, killed that poor girl and took the baby, but it doesn’t add up.” The reasons were these. As they both knew, she said, there was no sign of any door to Portland being forced open. Nor had the window locks been pried wide.

  A new system had been installed within the last year that allowed students and faculty to swipe their IDs as if they were credit cards through a little box attached to each major entrance. The system recognized each person as the holder of an Armitage ID, and the door clicked ajar. But these cards weren’t coded to individual users; it would have added another hundred thousand dollars to the cost to make the system that specific, and the board of trustees had decided against the extra expenditure, Nancy said. Why would it be that important to know where each student was at every moment of the day? Wasn’t that an invasion of privacy? What was the point of storing all that information? Jim remembered that Porter had argued for the extra cost, saying it kept kids safer, but he’d been narrowly defeated. And now, Nancy said ruefully, if he had had his way, we’d know exactly who had come in. “Or even prevented this from happening, because anyone aware of the process would understand how easy it would be to track the flow of people in and out of the dorm. But that just underlines the fact that it was someone who knew about the loophole and used it.” She said what had already been emphasized multiple times by multiple people: these kids were very smart and knew how to press on the slightest of advantages to gain what they wanted. In addition, the issue obvious to them both was that Claire had known her killer and either hadn’t been worried to see the person or had pulled the door wide herself.

  The other issue she had thought a lot about since Claire’s death, Nancy told Jim, was security cameras. The students spread these rumors that the whole campus was under surveillance. It was an image that suited their needs as adolescents for drama and intrigue. But the truth was, she said, leaning earnestly toward Jim, and she’d said the same thing to the police, “We don’t have a single one. One of the reasons I took this job,” she said, “was that I was going to have a chance to focus on what mattered to me. Taking care of beautiful old buildings. Trying to be a good manager. I wanted t
o help them get their wiring and their safety standards up to snuff. And I like kids. I like being around them. I didn’t want to be a part of some school that was mostly a police state.” But this had changed everything.

  All of a sudden, exhaustion overcame him. Jim could have gone to sleep right there. It was Nancy’s presence. Someone else was watching. He could relax. She noticed and said, “Coffee time. I’ll go get some. I think your mother’s waking up.”

  She was right. Angela was stirring, and soon after Nancy had walked off to the cafeteria, she woke up. She was clear-eyed but tired. “Jimmie,” she said. “I am so glad to see you. At least I know I’m not dead.”

  The spring sun spilled through where it could. The sterile room was almost cheerful, it was so full of tender morning light. But then Angela said, “Jimmie, remember to tell Kayla not to come to the house. But I want to talk to her, Jim.” Her nails flashed in the sun. What was so pressing about her need to see Kayla? He was about to ask his mother more when Nancy came back with a trayful of pastries and coffee and a smile on her face.

  “Who’s that?” Angela asked.

  “Nancy, my boss,” Jim said. “She brought these, from her garden,” he added, gesturing to the daffodils. He’d found a plastic vase molded to resemble crystal, but the flowers, exuberant and fresh, almost masked the ugliness.

  “Very pretty,” said Angela, but she was looking at Nancy, not the flowers, when she said it. “Everything’s changing,” Angela sighed. “I’m never ready for it. But it’s always changing.”

  Nancy smiled at Jim and signaled that she’d be leaving. He raised his hand, miming a telephone call.

  “She likes you. Finally, someone who likes you.” Angela sniffed. “I want some coffee.”

  “Ma, you had a heart attack,” he protested.

  “I know what I had and I want some coffee.” She sat up cautiously and reached for the cup. “How’d she know I like mine with milk and sugar?” she asked, having taken a careful sip. “And since when did they make decent coffee at a hospital?”