The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  “Because that’s how I take mine, too,” said Jim. But when he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t told Nancy that. She must just have been watching. She had been paying attention during all the other times they’d taken breaks together.

  The young doctor came in then, without the take-out chopstick in her hair this time, and ushered Jim out, but not before giving the coffee an accusing look. He waited in the hallway. His head was dense with fatigue, but he was alert enough to remember the exact texture of Nancy Mitchell’s hand in his. He sat down in the waiting room, surrounded by the clamor of the hospital, the ringing of phones and elevator doors, and tried to relive the feeling of her strong hand.

  CHAPTER 16

  Admittedly, the mouse and its surgically severed head had frightened Madeline. It was Lee’s handiwork, she suspected. As the department’s prize student, Lee would have unparalleled access to the bio labs. And the department itself was pleased to possess a complement of instruments and animals more impressive than most universities’. The academy’s apparent need to aspire to the status of colleges was something Madeline had always had trouble understanding. A rival school had just raised funds for an electron microscope, and Armitage was jealously trying to marshal the means to build one for itself. But did high school students really need to investigate the world of subatomic particles quite so thoroughly? Couldn’t they wait until they were graduate students in physics, just like everybody else?

  It was easier to think about this than to figure out what to do with the poor creature Lee had sacrificed in her campaign—quite successful, Madeline was forced to confess—to intimidate the intern. Finally, she settled on rolling it gently in a paper towel and then placing it in an empty tub that had once held hummus. Sealed, the mouse went into the trash barrel outside the dorm. Then Madeline did two things: she left a long message with Sarah Talmadge and another with Matt Corelli. She thought about calling Fred, too, but decided against contacting him until he’d made a choice about Brooklyn. There was just so much vulnerability a person could stand.

  Returning from dinner, Madeline had thought that it would be an early night. But finding the mouse on her doorstep had kindled a nervous energy that she knew would not allow her to work or rest easily. Instead, she investigated the rest of the bottles she had scavenged from the second-floor bathroom but found no other Ziploc bags that contained threatening notes. Then she checked her watch and realized she still had a while before study hours were over. She could probably find Maggie Fitzgerald and see what she had to say about Rosalie, the Reign, and other facets of boarding school life that had escaped Madeline this year. Scanning her memory, she remembered that the girl had relocated to Fallows, a dorm two over from Portland on the Quad.

  Each dorm had a dedicated study hall; a nice idea, thought Madeline, except that they were uniformly dispiriting, with their bald lighting and threadbare chairs. Few students used them, preferring the comfort of the common room, their own bunks, or the whispery sociability of the library. But in Fallows’s bleak basement, Maggie was bent over an open textbook detailing the history of ancient Egypt. Madeline did not think she had interrupted the amassing of critical details about the building of the Great Pyramid. Maggie was clearly paying no attention to the lines of text in front of her. Fortunately, she was also the only person in the room.

  “Hi, Miss Christopher,” the girl said. “Why are you here?” She wore tiny round spectacles, and her spine seemed unusually limp. It didn’t have much to hold up, that was true enough, but even so, Maggie’s body had very little vital energy about it.

  Madeline pulled up a chair next to her. “To talk to you, actually,” she said, assuming a direct approach would be fairest. “I want to ask you about Claire, and those girls in the dorm”—she still couldn’t bring herself to call them the Reign without sarcasm—“and also about Rosalie.”

  Maggie took a sip from her can of diet iced tea. She was delicate to the point of translucence and had need of even the empty calories that regular iced tea would have supplied. “Did you know there are some people who think that the Pyramids and Machu Picchu were built with alien technology?” She played with the tab on the can as she spoke.

  Madeline smiled and said, “No, I had no idea about that. But I don’t really believe in aliens. Do you, Maggie?”

  The silver tab broke off in the girl’s spindly fingers. “Nope. I think life is creepy enough on this planet without inventing people from outer space.” She looked up then, and Madeline was struck by the directness of her gaze and the narrow ferocity of her face. She had been the girl who kept saying about Claire, “But she was so pretty,” as if beauty were all Claire had needed to invoke to stay alive.

  Maggie dropped the tab of the can into the drink, and Madeline hoped she’d be careful when she took her next sip. She closed the textbook and something shifted in her face. She appeared to reach a decision. Taking a pen from the desk, she scribbled on a page in her notebook, tore it out, and said, “Here is Rosalie’s number. She might talk to you. She doesn’t live too far from here. But I can’t. I promised not to.” Here her voice began to fray slightly. Fallows’s basement smelled damply of laundry and lint. What an unproductive atmosphere in which to try to learn anything.

  Madeline leaned forward. “Are they hurting you and other girls, Maggie? What are they doing to you? I can help you stop them if you want. I promise to help.” Madeline was surprised at the depth of her concern and the intensity of her response. But I shouldn’t be, she reminded herself. They’ve been trying to scare me, too, and they’ve done a pretty good job at it.

  “They don’t do it directly, Miss Christopher. Well, mostly,” Maggie said softly, lowering her voice. “They just like to let you know they’re watching,” she said. “They create a climate of fear. They try to make themselves like the pharaohs. They want to appear invincible.”

  A climate of fear. It sounded like a phrase from Orwell. Though clearly on loan from another source, the phrase was quite accurate. “Maggie, did they hurt Claire?” But Maggie was looking around her now, as if talking about the Reign might call them out. The girl shook her head and wouldn’t say more. “I’ve got to go, Miss Christopher.” She gathered her books into a flimsy tote bag and scurried from the room. A slightly larger mouse than the one Madeline had found on her doorstep. And fortunately, she still had her head on.

  Madeline glanced at the piece of paper. A local area code. As Maggie had said, the Quiñones family lived nearby. It wouldn’t be that hard to find out exactly where, and it was only 7:30. Madeline went back to the dorm, dialed, and a woman, sounding weary, answered on the third ring. When Madeline asked to speak to Rosalie, she merely bellowed, “Rosie, it’s for you,” and then the handset clanked on a counter.

  Madeline barely remembered what Rosalie looked like. Short, dark-haired, slight. She’d given off an air of seriousness. And then, before Thanksgiving, she was gone. Madeline vaguely recalled Grace saying something about her not cutting it, or some other expression that meant Rosalie just wasn’t Armitage material.

  When she answered, Rosalie sounded bored, but as Madeline made her nervous introduction, she could sense the girl slowly standing taller, straighter, listening harder. All of a sudden, she said, “I know who you are. I know what you want to talk about. Can you come over now? It’s like twenty minutes away. We can meet at Antonio’s,” a pizza place on the main street in her town, she explained. She lived in Westerfield, a factory town much like Greenville as far as Madeline knew. Rosalie gave her directions, said she’d be there in a half hour, and that Madeline should order the sausage roll. It was really good.

  This is foolish, Madeline told herself, I shouldn’t do this, as she started her car in the drizzling rain and rolled toward the great iron gates that surrounded Armitage. The police officer still stationed there gave her ID a thorough looking over, then ushered her on. Driving through the gathering dark toward the highway, Madeline wondered if Lee and her cohorts actually had the steel in th
em to kill a classmate. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel, and sweat ran a bit down her neck as she realized the answer was yes.

  She found the town easily. It could have been Greenville that she was exploring, though an even seedier, less prosperous version. The sidewalks of the main street were lined with empty stores plastered with For Rent placards that Madeline guessed had been in place for months if not years. The lampposts weren’t the period wrought iron that lined the brick streets of Armitage but the tall, buzzing variety that fit better along interstates. Several of them had dead bulbs. No one was out, which you might be able to blame on the weather, but even on a clear evening, Madeline suspected, the streets would be close to empty. Below the canopy for a discount shoe store lurked a group of boys in slouchy jeans and tank tops, their hands propped on the handles of their bicycles as if they hoped the battered ten-speeds would turn magically into Harleys. Madeline found Antonio’s easily. It was one of the few businesses still open, and its red-and-white marquee swung in the stiffening wind.

  Rosalie was already there, perched in an orange booth, a neatly folded compact umbrella on the tabletop. She had a can of Coke and what looked like one of the sausage rolls she had recommended in front of her on a paper plate. With sudden clarity, Madeline remembered her on the first day of school. While almost all the other girls had sported expensive jeans and flimsy T-shirts that nonetheless cost forty dollars apiece, Rosalie had worn a blue skirt and a long-sleeved shirt, something almost dowdy about it, practically Amish in its sobriety. Poor thing, Madeline had thought at the time, she’s missed the code, not quite realizing that it might be something far more basic dictating Rosalie’s style. Maybe those plain clothes were all her family was able to afford.

  Now Rosalie greeted her with a rather severe nod, in keeping, Madeline felt, with that modest choice of dress. Madeline ordered a sausage roll and a Diet Coke from a man in an apron vivid with the stains appropriate to his work. When her food was hot, she went to join Rosalie, whose own roll remained untouched.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Madeline said. “I’m sure you’ve got schoolwork you need to do. I won’t take up much of your time.” She thought it best to approach Rosalie frankly. The girl looked so stern sitting there, her hands folded one on top of the other. She was wearing, Madeline saw, a uniform. A shirt with a Peter Pan collar and a gray cardigan, buttoned at the neck. But the clothing only reinforced the impression of primness. Most of that emanated straight from Rosalie and her squared shoulders and serious face, which was now coolly assessing Madeline.

  Then Rosalie shrugged. “I get my homework done in twenty minutes most nights.” Her school, St. Patrick’s, was hard for Westerfield, but nothing compared to Armitage.

  It seemed best to get right to the point. “You know what happened to Claire,” Madeline said, “and what I’m trying to figure out is if those girls, Lee and her friends, were involved somehow.”

  The girl took a sip of her drink and a bite of sausage roll. “So you’re the detective now?” Madeline noticed that Rosalie hadn’t once addressed her by name. She flushed a little. It was decidedly unlike her to take on such a responsibility and to involve herself so directly in difficulty. It must be one of the ways she was stuttering toward adulthood. And why should it take this particular form, sitting across from this dark, plain girl in a pizzeria in a close-to-derelict mill town?

  “No,” Madeline said, “it’s not exactly that.” And she explained what had happened with Lee and the other girls after Claire’s death. The way they had confessed the existence of the group then demanded silence, and then the signs that they were watching that had arrived in the last few days. She even talked about the Ziploc bag with the threat that targeted Maggie, though it meant admitting she had taken the leftover shampoo.

  Rosalie considered this and said, after another bite of sausage roll, “They set you up. When Claire died, they knew the Reign would come out. They didn’t trust Sally and the others to keep quiet, so they went on the offensive. They told you and then started to intimidate you. But they figured no one would listen to anything you had to say, and in the long run, they’d be safe. No one would look too hard. You were new. Anyone new, they thought they could scare.”

  Madeline digested this stark assessment of her status at Armitage and then said, “Rosalie, this all started long before Claire died. What happened? What did they do to you and why did you leave?”

  For a moment, Rosalie said nothing. Madeline was conscious of sounds coming from the kitchen as the man in the apron started scrubbing a pan and the boys on the bicycles rolled past, hooting at a joke one of them had made, apparently oblivious to the rain. “I didn’t flunk out. I had really good grades. Even from the hard teachers. That’s what they said, but you can check it. It’s not true.” Madeline believed her. Her shrug of indifference at the mention of homework, the strict glitter in her eyes, the fact she still wore her uniform even though it was almost 8:30 at night.

  Madeline said, “I understand.” She took a bite of her own roll and was amazed to discover it was delicious: flaky and light, the meat gently but well spiced. She watched Rosalie’s face and saw an expression travel across it that was similar to the one Maggie had worn when she decided to give Madeline Rosalie’s number.

  “I figured out that Claire was pregnant. It was October. She was throwing up in the bathroom and she was crying. She was the same color as my sister when that happened to her.” Rosalie said her older sister had had a baby, and she knew the signs. “I helped her out. Got her food she could eat. And she tried to protect me.”

  “From Lee?”

  Rosalie, in spite of her considerable composure, looked pained at the memory. “Yes, but they all do it. Make a list of where you can sit in the library and which tables you can eat at in Commons. Paths through the woods that are off-limits. Stuff like that. And you have to do chores for them. Go to town and get them snacks. Clean out their closets.” Rosalie scratched a bite on her arm.

  “And I said I wouldn’t do it. I said they couldn’t treat us like their maids. I said I didn’t go there to be some servant to rich kids. I said I’d tell Miss Peters and they laughed, and I said I’d tell Miss Talmadge and they laughed even harder.” They didn’t really think, Rosalie said, any adult could stop them. They felt they were that good at hiding their tracks, and the girls they bossed around, Rosalie said, almost liked the abuse of power, because it made them feel a part of things. “Some of their sisters had been in the group, and those girls were the worst. But even the new kids tried to make each other do what the older girls wanted.”

  Madeline was nodding like a maniac, saying nothing, hoping Rosalie would just keep talking. And as with Sally, confession did appear to offer her a kind of relief. But then her face hardened. “And Claire was on my side. Because I’d helped her. Because my sister didn’t give up her baby, either. Because Claire was sick of them, too, and tried to tell them to stop picking on kids.” And then something else had happened. An accident.

  Another customer came in, an elderly man with a cane and a raincoat. The owner entered from the kitchen, his hands cloaked in a damp towel. The old man ordered his food, eased himself down in a booth, and opened a newspaper. Somehow, the presence of another person in the otherwise empty pizzeria made it that much more lonely. Rosalie lowered her voice even further.

  “There was this freaky kid at my old school. One of these jerks.” Her eyes moved to the street, consciously or not, Madeline couldn’t tell, to the boys drifting on their bikes through the gathering twilight. “He used to IM me, and I never answered. Made fun of me for leaving here and going to Armitage. Said I thought I was better than the kids here.” She took another sip of Coke, and her face implied that she knew she indeed was better than the other kids or at the very least smarter. “But one day he sent me these pictures. And I recognized people in them. It was them.” They took showers in the same bathrooms, Rosalie explained, and in some of the pictures, you could see parts of their fac
es. And they mentioned Armitage in the captions. The photos were from a website called Rich Girls. Rosalie was almost whispering. Kids took gross pictures of one another, usually on cell phones, and sold them there. “And they were on it.”

  “Except for Claire?” Madeline asked, her head spinning with yet another way in which the students she had lived and worked with for the last year continued to shock her. There were another thousand questions to ask, but it was also becoming clear what these girls really didn’t want exposed and why Claire and Rosalie had been such threats.

  “No,” Rosalie said, shaking her head. “She wasn’t part of it. I don’t know how the pictures got there, but they were real. You could tell who they were. It was disgusting. I didn’t want to tell Claire, but she knew I was hiding something and she made me. And she told them we knew and that they had to lay off the new kids and me in particular.” Although they were physically rooted in this shabby restaurant, Rosalie was clearly reliving those days. She wouldn’t meet Madeline’s gaze, and her voice had almost disappeared.

  “Rosalie, Maggie was your roommate. Did you tell her, too? And who was your adviser?” Madeline was still reeling with the knowledge that these sophisticated girls had done something so demeaning to themselves. Nor could she imagine having the audacity or skewed confidence at seventeen to want to expose her body to the stares of millions. It was another way of sensing her own adulthood: awe at the presence of alien worlds and experiences that people younger than she belonged to.

  Rosalie said yes. “Maggie’s a lot weaker than I am. She needed something to fight back with. I told her not that long ago, when they started to get worse. And my adviser was Mr. Fuller,” she added with obvious disdain. “Perv.” The girl glanced at her watch. She didn’t appear to have a cell phone. She was going to need to get going soon, she said.