The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  “Just a few more questions, Rosalie,” Madeline said and pitched forward so that the plastic rim of the table cut rather sharply against her ribs. Again, she could have lobbed a hundred more queries at Rosalie, such as why did she call Harvey Fuller a perv? To Madeline, he appeared as sexless as one of the frogs over whose dissection he presided each year. “Did Claire tell you who the father of her baby was and why she decided to keep him?”

  “No,” said Rosalie. “But you know what? I never asked. That was her business. All she said was that she had to have the baby and that it was going to change what everyone thought about Armitage. And why wouldn’t she want to keep her baby? It’s the right thing to do.” Barring Rosalie’s strong philosophical stance on the topic, it was much the same thing Sally Jansen had said. Claire had felt that her baby would shift everything at Armitage, but no one understood why.

  “One more thing, Rosalie, and then I’ll drive you home, if you’d like a ride, of course. Why, if you had something like this against Lee and the others, did you leave? Did they keep harassing you?”

  Rosalie didn’t answer immediately. She got up, put her soda can in the trash—no recycling bins were offered—and threw away the remnants of the sausage roll. The old man had finished his slice of pizza but was still leafing through his newspaper. The scrubbing sounds in the kitchen had started again. The place smelled of spilled soda and old cheese. “They posted one they said was of me. They used my name. That boy I told you about showed it to my parents, and the next day, I had to withdraw. I didn’t tell Claire what had happened, but she might have figured it out. I was too embarrassed. But then they spread the rumors that I’d had a breakdown, that I’d flunked out.” Madeline wanted to reach toward her, but Rosalie stood up, her hands in fists, her arms tense in her St. Patrick’s sweater. “I didn’t want to come back here. I am going to be a doctor. But my parents said that was it. They never wanted me to go there in the first place. They said, good riddance, let them do evil things. They said, say nothing. Leave with your dignity. You’re coming back where you belong.”

  Madeline stood and cleared her own food away, too ill at ease to save the sausage roll. She asked Rosalie, “Are the pictures still up there?”

  Rosalie said wearily, “Of course they are. Once something’s on the Web, it’s almost impossible to get off.”

  Madeline inquired again if she might give her a ride, and the girl looked out at the rain and at the boys rolling up and down the sidewalk and gave a quick nod. She was very good, Madeline felt, at assessing risks and potential dangers. Madeline felt a kind of awe at Rosalie’s steady awareness of who she was and her sureness of direction. She believed Rosalie when she said she was going to be a doctor. The girl was silent except for providing Madeline with the briefest of directions about how to reach her home. It wasn’t far. Madeline braked to a stop on a side street in front of a modest frame house with a porch light on. A dog barked from inside. Madeline could see its indistinct outline through the glass door.

  “Rosalie,” Madeline said just before the girl leaned over to open the door, “I know you don’t want anything to do with Armitage anymore, but I’m still worried that Lee and the others were involved in Claire’s death. Do you think you could tell the police about this?”

  Her response surprised Madeline. “They already called twice today. I am not talking about this to anyone else. I’m done.” The dog’s barking gathered force. How had the police heard about Rosalie, too?

  “Then why did you see me?” Madeline asked, genuinely taken aback.

  “Because,” Rosalie said as she stepped onto the driveway and into the rainy night, “you should have noticed. You should have seen something was wrong. You were there.”

  Madeline sat still, her heart making unsyncopated thumps as she watched Rosalie walk up the steps to her house, not bothering to use her umbrella. The door opened, and the dog, tail flailing, and a young woman came out, a baby on her hip. Madeline kept watching as she saw Rosalie, with evident pleasure, take the child from its mother and hold it close to her chest. The dog wove happily around their legs. Then all of them went in and someone quickly shut the door. A moment later, the porch light snapped off, leaving the drive in a gray gloom.

  Finding her way back to the highway, Madeline found herself going far more quickly than she ought to have. Rosalie was right, she kept thinking. I should have noticed. If I’d been less ham-fisted and less worried about myself, I would have. She was almost weeping, she realized, but that still didn’t mean she wasn’t heading straight to the Armitage police station to find Matt Corelli.

  The young man in uniform at the front desk told her she was in luck. A minute later, Matt was walking down the corridor, saying, “Madeline? I’m so sorry I haven’t called you back. Are you all right?” with such genuine concern she thought she might burst into tears. He steered her toward his office, and fortunately curiosity got the better of weepiness as she realized this was the first time she had ever been inside a police station.

  Matt poured her a glass of water, sat her down in a comfortable chair, and asked her why she was there this time of night. For a moment, Madeline sipped and looked around, trying to gather some of the threads of the story. The room held two desks, both very neat, a small refrigerator, some computer equipment, and several of these well-padded chairs. It could have been an office anywhere, and it even had a rather large window, though the view was only of the parking lot.

  “I thought,” she said, “it would look a lot more English and nineteenth century in here.”

  “Oh, that’s downstairs, where we keep the criminals. We reserve the mold and chains for them,” he said, and she thought again how disconcerting it was to discover what a good man the detective obviously was. Still, his clear concern made it that much easier to talk about the Reign of Terror, Sally, Maggie, and Rosalie. It took a rather long time and was also rather embarrassing to admit that she had been set up, taken advantage of because she, too, was new and unskilled in the ways of managing at Armitage.

  “Rich Girls?” Matt said. Madeline had thought that work as a police officer would have inured him to such realities, but apparently not.

  “I know,” Madeline said. “It’s revolting. But I don’t think Rosalie was making it up. It can be checked, of course,” she went on, but she didn’t want to suggest they look at it together. That would be far too awkward.

  While Madeline had been talking, Matt had taken notes, asking questions only to clarify times and the spelling of names. He’d obviously already known something about Rosalie; the girl hadn’t been lying about being contacted by the police. Madeline didn’t get the sense that, despite his uneasy reaction to the name of the website, he was tremendously surprised, either, though at the end of her story, he said, “Would you ever have thought Claire capable of or interested in protecting others? Because what you’ve told me suggests that she was far more compassionate than most people have implied.”

  “Yes,” said Madeline, leaning forward and in the process spilling a bit of her water. “I’m just glad that wasn’t cranberry juice like it usually is,” she added as she tried to mop up a damp spot. “This protective streak she apparently showed toward vulnerable kids. Her disgust with the Reign. And then all this interest in families. Wanting to know about them.”

  “Thanks, Madeline,” Matt was saying now. “Thanks for coming down here. What’s even better is that you got these girls to talk to you. They saw us coming and they ran.” He was escorting her, he said, to the parking lot. Now that she’d done what she had set out to, Madeline could actually notice how sleepless he looked.

  “Where’s your partner?” she asked, thinking someone ought to be around to support him. Off putting his kids to bed, Matt said, but he’d be back pretty soon.

  They stood in the lot for a moment, despite the unsettled weather. She was suddenly reluctant to say good-bye to him. The thought of being alone in the dorm all night wasn’t particularly appealing, either.

 
“Madeline, if they get up to something very bad or you’re frightened in any way, call me, please,” he said.

  She thanked him profusely and got ready to head off. “Thanks again for your help,” he said kindly. “See you on campus.” He stood there as she slid her car into reverse. She got the feeling without his saying anything that he was close to knowing what had happened. That he was aware of how it would end and that, in spite of himself, it made him sad.

  CHAPTER 17

  Getting off campus was surprisingly easy; the police had been told faculty could come and go, though a uniformed officer peered at Fred with ostentatious suspicion before he waved him through the gates. It was only ten in the morning on Friday. The shortened classes Porter had devised meant he was finished exceedingly early, and a quick chat with his dorm head had secured him time off until the next morning. What a relief it was to be away, to be on a highway going somewhere other than Armitage. The weight of the last days began to lift when he crossed the state line into Connecticut, and by the time he reached New York and saw the city’s spires glinting, he was almost buoyant. Fred even found a parking space without much trouble, between a battered pickup and a spotless Mini Cooper, a pairing that seemed to summarize the gestalt of the neighborhood quite neatly, then located the building one block over. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at its five gray stories and nondescript door decorated with the usual urban hieroglyphics. A smell of asphalt and baking bread wafted through the air. As un-Armitage an odor as he could have imagined and, to his surprise, strangely nourishing.

  Fred rang the buzzer, trying to dampen his hopes, wishing for a moment for an easy way out. But the space was perfect, raw and open, with excellent ventilation. The building was an old lighting factory, with high windows, higher ceilings, and inspiring views of Manhattan and the river, which glinted richly in the warm spring light.

  His friend Hal was delighted to see him, and they stormed back into good conversation as if it had been days and not months since they’d last seen each other. But most of all, with an abruptness and intensity that rattled Fred, his desire to make paintings returned. He looked at Hal’s tall canvases in the unsparing light and thought, I want to do this again. The smell of paint and turpentine he was used to. Those permeated his studio and his own skin and had come to seem emblems merely of his job and grading, the mechanics of school. But smelling them here in a working studio, and seeing paintings, real paintings, in the process of being thought over, studied, and created—that was exciting in a way that made his skin prickle. Separate from Armitage, he realized how much the academy’s daily routine had helped him suppress that longing. There simply wasn’t time to experience it, much less express it. It was folly, he knew suddenly, to think that he could achieve much as an artist simply by painting in bits and pieces, with the cushioned net of Armitage right below him. He had lived a bit long without risk. He had lived a bit long without being his own authority, deferring to the older, wiser assertions of the institution that had done so much to form him. But what was holding him back? He was young, with no dependents, and this was the moment to step out into the air and see what happened. Within ten minutes of talking to Hal, the fantasies began to unroll: heated discussion with other painters, parties where they fought about influence and meaning, openings rife with gallery politics and gossip.

  And then there was the lunch Hal threw, and some of the dream wove into real life. For food, there weren’t just cold cuts and sliced tomatoes, but juices of exotic fruit and champagne and all kinds of pastries and spreads that apparently existed only in small, exquisite shops all over New York. Instantly, the talk was sharper. And then there were the women. Alluring, smart, well dressed, quirky. Dangerously attractive. All urban edge and irony. Most of them lived in the building, which held artists on every floor, creating in every medium you could imagine, which accounted for their availability in the middle of the day. None of them, Fred suspected, were tied down to jobs so mundane they required you to be there on Friday at one in the afternoon. He didn’t mention Armitage; he didn’t want to hear what they’d have to say. Claire’s death was still all over the news—they’d certainly recognize the name and have pointed questions and comments. Today, he wanted no connection to that life, that place. Today, he was happily untethered. And there were plenty of other topics available. Through the haze of talk and smoke, Fred watched the women and the artful tilts of their wrists and smiles, and they watched him back.

  When the guests left, he and Hal sat in the midst of the mess, flutes half-golden with champagne, knives smeared with tapenade, some piece of spiky jazz still playing. Fred leaned back on the sofa. “Well?” Hal asked, and Fred said, looking straight at him, “Yeah. I’ll do it. Yes.” Hal smiled. “I knew the minute you walked in.” They rose and began to clean up the party’s remains. Fred left at five, telling Hal that he would have to arrange for leave from Armitage and then he’d be back down by the first of July.

  Driving to Massachusetts, he kept telling himself he was going to launch himself back into what everyone at Armitage called the real world, real life. He needed to say it aloud, to the windshield, to the dashboard, to be sure he actually meant it. Painting in New York, living in Brooklyn. All through the journey, he tested the coal of ambition that had sparked into being in the city and began to trust it because, even in cool, verdant New England, it wouldn’t fade.

  It was barely nine o’clock when he got back. The officer at the gate had changed but performed the same ID check, as if he and his colleague had learned it at exactly the same time. The dorm was subdued, and his dorm head said he’d missed little. The police had still come up with nothing. “I’m glad you’re back, Fred,” he’d said, and Fred had given him a guilty smile.

  He looked around his bedroom and felt a sudden pang of loss at the thought of leaving that small space behind. Its low eaves, the meager double bed into which he had only very occasionally managed to lure a girlfriend—the presence of thirty curious teenage boys had definitely hampered his romantic adventures. He kept thinking of the loft. The light that had poured through it. The sense, fragile, preposterous, and vital, that art still mattered to the people he had talked to. He stopped pacing and looked around. He was indeed going to leave. It was the end of that period of his life, the end of a self-imposed monasticism. Even Armitage in crisis wasn’t enough to hold him. Even the disruption that he’d cause his dorm, his department couldn’t persuade him otherwise. His loyalties, he had to admit, were more flimsy than he’d realized. Llewellan would have been horrified. Not even that Fred would choose art, but that he would let Armitage down at the last minute. Llewellan had waxed grandiloquent on the need to honor commitments and be a man of one’s word. Fred could imagine his leonine head and a frown across his wide brow. He would have reminded Fred that he had signed a contract and that such an act should still mean something. And it did. But this was a truly unusual opportunity. He felt in himself a small but decisive shift away from the man who had done so much to shape his sense of what was right and good. He also had to confess that not even Madeline, whom he liked more and more, was making him regret the longing to go. If something were going to evolve with her, it would have to withstand his need to return to painting.

  His body surged with energy. He couldn’t sleep, even though it had been an incredibly long day. He nearly called Madeline but thought better of it. This might be the night, however, to return to the tunnels and the archives. No one would be down there. He tried to push the idea aside and failed. All he had to do was locate that one file. Thank God he had that scrap of handwriting to hold on to. If the records had been computerized back then, he’d have almost nothing to go on. He felt a momentary tug of sympathy for people like Mary Manchester and those who fought to preserve the old ways.

  He rummaged around his desk and found the old catalog card and the skeleton key he had guiltily copied a few towns over so as not to bump into anyone he knew at the Greenville Agway. He grabbed his Maglite and headed off to
the tunnel entrance below Nicholson. The grounds were profoundly still, and no moon hung in the sky. The air was heavy and warm, and only Forrest Thompson was out, walking his ancient greyhound on the far side of the Quad, too distant to be spoken to. But seeing Forrest and the old, stiff animal only reinforced the rightness of his choice. Fred had known it was Forrest and Milton from the sheerest fraction of a glance; that was how familiar he was with this environment. They implied, that silhouette of dog and man, what happened when you stopped running.

  The tunnels were even warmer than the grounds, almost stifling. He paused at the bottom of the stairs that led to them and listened, head cocked. Scotty Johnston was the last person he wanted to run into at this moment. But there was nothing, barely even the chugging of machinery. The tunnels were full only of stale air and darkness.

  He crept down the hall, fingers trailing the wall, knowing that he had to turn to the right and that the door would be the first on his left in the new corridor. After a moment’s struggle with the flashlight and the key, he slipped inside the small room, which was even hotter than the hallway.

  It smelled, as before, of stale paper, suppressed histories. Heading straight to the filing cabinet that he’d had to abandon thanks to Scotty, he felt a flicker of fear run through his bones. For a while, he discovered nothing but manila folders with typed labels from the 1940s, though the dates were gradually heading into the next decade. And then he saw it again: that strong but delicate hand. “Files of a Personal Nature, 1950s.” It was at the back of the cabinet, at the farthest recess, in a brown accordion file. It might even have been placed below the other papers and only with the pressure of Fred’s searching and rearrangement of folders been thrust partially upright.

  Pulling it out and training his flashlight on the label, he placed it on top of a dusty table piled with yearbooks from the 1960s. He didn’t dare turn on the lamp there in case someone saw the line of brightness below the door. Even the flashlight was a risk. For a moment, he imagined wildly what he would do if he were caught. There’d be nothing for it but to tell the truth, and the truth would sound absurd. And it all depended on who caught him. A random police officer on patrol as part of the investigation into Claire’s death or one of the academy’s security guys. Fred realized he actually didn’t have it in him to bluff much right now. Admitting nakedly what it was you wanted apparently made it harder to lie about other activities as well.