The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  He stood in the threshold. “It’s like a physical slap, walking around that campus. It just jolts me, the memories. The smells. And it’s hard to believe I was part of it and that the old guys still hang on to everything that’s happened.” He paused. “I keep wanting to think I’m different. That I’m not like them. That I might have gone there but I’m not of it. But that’s not entirely true. And now they’re vulnerable and I feel like protecting them.”

  She got it, she said. Her thesis had been called “The Ambivalence of Patronage in Renaissance Italy.”

  “You glad you took the job?” she asked, holding open the door. Since he’d returned, she’d asked him that almost every time she saw him, as if taking his spiritual temperature.

  He paused. “No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not what I should have done.” He looked at her more closely. “What’s up?” he asked, then, “Inge?”

  Barbara looked down, suddenly unwilling to meet his eye. “She’s not certain about having a baby. I think it’s time.” She frowned and said, “We’ll talk. Hit the road.”

  He promised to come to Connecticut to see her when the case was finished. She said, “Go get the evildoers, honey,” and shoved him out the door, trying to smile.

  On the way to the station, he couldn’t stop imagining her lovely face. She was the one he told everything. That same Thanksgiving, Matt had mentioned to Barbara his doubts about continuing in Philadelphia. He’d confided in her about Ann. He had heard the entire paltry story come out as they shared a glass of wine on the cold screened porch, their breath arriving in rounded puffs of fog, their voices low so as not to wake their light-sleeping father. She had listened and then said, “Don’t walk entirely. There’s a reason you do what you do. Could you get a job here?”

  “Greenville?” he’d objected. “Why here?”

  “For Dad. For me. For you. It’s peaceful. It could give you a place to think. It’s an idea,” she said and swallowed the last of the wine. “I miss Mama,” she said, and he had held her until they were so cold their hands and feet began to go numb. He kissed her good night and said, “No one has a better sister.” She laughed and answered, “You’ve got one thing right at least.”

  He was still thinking about her when he pulled into the parking lot and saw Vernon pacing there. “How are the kids?” he asked when he saw his partner’s face. Vernon shrugged. “Screaming, crying, Daddy, don’t leave, blah blah blah.” He turned toward the back entrance of the station. “And that is why I do white-collar crime, because white-collar criminals are nine-to-fivers, just like me.” Matt could imagine the scene. The tearful girls, Vernon’s guilty crankiness spilling over everything. “We finish this this week,” Vernon said, “and then you stop drinking coffee and I take my personal days.”

  “We’ll finish,” said Matt. How, he wasn’t sure, but it was nearly over. But he wasn’t the one to start the meeting, which was chaired by a black-browed Captain Angell and attended by three tall men from the FBI who looked like bricks, and the rest of the ragged team as they sat around the laminated table in the conference room, tubes of lights buzzing their nasal song overhead.

  One of the bricks discussed how not a single one of the more than four hundred serious leads about the baby’s whereabouts had led to a single concrete outcome. The sheet they had found in the tunnels had been used by some handyman to staunch a cut someone had gotten repairing a pipe. Norm Parker’s forensic evidence was muddy, slow in coming, going to be very hard to use. Autopsy results ditto. A case could easily be made that Claire had slipped and gotten those bruises in labor. Another of the bricks discussed Scotty Johnston ad nauseam. They had grilled his supposed friends, but he had no one he’d really confided in. They were all scared of him. No roommates. No one wanted to live with him. Still, in spite of his parents’ urging that he come home and rest from his ordeal, he had stubbornly insisted that he needed to stay to finish out the year. “He’s in the midst of it, and his lawyer won’t let him say a thing. His attorney’s hourly is a thousand dollars. It’s hopeless.” Rosalie Quiñones refused to talk. Stymied all around. And the DA practically brokering settlements already. A mood of gray and total gloom descended over the table.

  Matt looked at the men gathered there shuffling their papers and picking at the foam rims of their cups; the surface of the table was flecked with the stray white crescents. He felt impatience surge through him. “No, it’s not,” he said. He described what Betsy Lowery had seen and how Porter had reacted to their questions. He talked about Harvey Fuller and Tamsin Lovell. He told them about Claire’s French diary again and passed out Marie-France’s translation. He told them in even greater detail what Madeline had learned from Sally Jansen, Maggie, and Rosalie, and the group that called itself the Reign of Terror. And he shared his own view on what might have happened.

  They were listening, he could tell they were listening. Even the bricks couldn’t pretend that they didn’t hear him. As he spoke, he saw Vernon watching him with a combination of admiration and suspicion, but Matt continued to talk with articulate clarity, outlining what he felt needed to happen and how the case should proceed from here in a concise and orderly way. He didn’t speak long. He didn’t need to. He saw Angell lean back and saw as well the relief on his face. Matt was living up to his end of their agreement. Over the next few minutes, they allotted tasks, and then, earlier than expected, he and Vernon found themselves in the warming light of the parking lot, the sun making the puddles steam as if they were miniature hot springs.

  Vernon began to applaud in slow, heavy claps. “Bravo. Did you mean one word of that?”

  “I hope so,” said Matt as he walked toward his car. “We going in mine?” They were off to talk to Porter.

  “Sure,” said Vernon. “You have a better CD player.” But he wasn’t finished. “That’s what those places do,” he went on. “They make you very, very good at sounding like you know what you’re talking about. They make you sound like you’re in charge.” He opened the passenger side of Matt’s car. “What was scary was that you sounded like him. You really did.” And Matt knew that he meant Porter, because that was exactly who had flashed through his mind as he’d been speaking, laying out his version of the case. A man who to all appearances had everything under control. A man people trusted with what was deepest to them.

  “What I am having trouble squaring with myself,” Vernon said as he fussed with his seat belt strap, “is if I’m jealous or merely seeing things accurately. I could have used a better education,” he said. “And I wanted to learn to play jazz piano.”

  “Jazz piano?” said Matt, and he started the car, then realized he needed sunglasses. Pausing to put them on, he said, “I can see it, Vernon.” And he could. Vernon loved everyone from Charlie Parker to Coltrane, and he had a loose grace and impossibly wide, long-fingered hands.

  “They teach that up there?” his partner asked.

  “Of course they do,” Matt said, slowly accelerating.

  “But even if I had the money, I wouldn’t send my kids,” Vernon said. “I don’t believe in what they’ve got. I don’t want it. I don’t buy it.” He readjusted his seat belt. “Do you? Do you really?”

  Matt had braked at a stop sign and paused to look at his partner. What was there to say? What could he tell Vernon now other than he’d tried to take what was best from Armitage and step away from what was less appealing. But could anyone do that? Could you participate in a place like the academy without being of it in some essential way? “Vernon, the short answer is that there isn’t one. Privilege exists. It’s real. It’s unjust. There’s no way to reconcile that with poverty or lack of opportunity. And I profited from it.”

  Vernon chewed on that for a moment and said, “You’re proud of what you got up there.”

  Matt considered Vernon’s choice of words and said, “Yes, I am.”

  Vernon appeared to think about that for a moment, then said, “That authoritative-voice business. Where’s it from?”

  �
�It’s a WASP thing, I think,” Matt said. “They’re masters at it. That and real estate they do really well. Comes from centuries of being the only show in town.”

  “I’ve seen it in movies, but I didn’t know it actually happened,” Vernon said and slumped as far as it was possible for someone tall to slump in a bucket seat. “It’s goddamn creepy,” he added, and with that, they drove up the hill and through the iron gates, down the light green corridor of maples to begin Porter McLellan’s day on a very, very difficult note.

  CHAPTER 19

  Late Friday afternoon, Jim followed Nancy down the tunnels that led to the main furnace for Nicholson. For some reason, the great black beast had been switching on and off since last Saturday night, sending waves of heat through all the offices, despite the fact that it was almost eighty degrees outside and obviously well past the season for piped-in warmth. Nancy had reached him at Angela’s, where he was staying while his mother recovered. She had insisted on being released from the hospital by lunchtime, and her doctors had reluctantly let her go. “I’m sorry to ask, but no one knows Big Bob like you do, Jim. Would you mind?” They’d had a tech look at it, but the problem wasn’t resolved. Jim hadn’t minded at all; in fact, he was looking forward to seeing Nancy again as soon as possible. And Angela herself looked relieved to have him gone for a time. She’d sleep, she said. She was tired after that inedible food in the hospital. She had almost laughed then and sent him off with a wave of her hand.

  Still, Jim had driven with more enthusiasm than he really thought was seemly to go to fix the faulty furnace. They all had names, which was silly but useful. You could say, “Bob’s acting up” or “Bertha’s at it again,” and everyone knew exactly what you meant. And even though Claire had died, her baby had disappeared, and his mother had suffered a heart attack, the daily work of making the school run smoothly still had to continue. Stop for a moment, and cracks started to run through everything. Jim sometimes wondered if anyone—teachers, kids, staff—had any idea how much time, money, and effort went into keeping those lawns fresh and all those buildings painted. To keep everything looking as prosperous as possible. Porter knew, Jim thought appreciatively, as he followed Nancy’s trim self down the tunnel. Last year, at a gathering to thank people for work well done, Porter had said that Armitage could get by without him, deans, and most of the teachers. But what it couldn’t function without were employees like them, with solid practical skills and a serious work ethic, people who cared about what they did and didn’t shirk the tasks before them. “Thank you,” he had said, “for making us look so good.” It had been moving and it had been genuine and Jim knew it made a difference to everyone he worked with. Porter knew all their names and used them effortlessly. Afterward, Nancy had said, “That Porter is one in a million.” And Jim had agreed.

  They heard the overactive machine before they found it, and in the small room where it was clanking away, it must have been 110 degrees. Sweat sprouted instantly on his forehead, and he noticed that Nancy was turning a bright and pleasing shade of pink. Jim opened a box of tools and got out a wrench. He suspected the problem was a faulty temperature gauge; something had fooled Bob into believing it was actually close to freezing upstairs. Nancy watched him open up the main workings. He and she were in accord that, even though these old systems took some coddling and maintenance, they were still better made than most of the new stuff on the market and worth every cent of extra work it took to keep them going.

  There it was. The gauge had gotten stripped and was exposed to the air. No wonder it had gone wonky. He’d need some other supplies to replace the actual wiring, but for now, a few layers of duct tape, a resetting of the system, and a little luck were all that was necessary to make the whole system function properly. Poor secretaries. They were probably worried about what the unusual heat would do to their computers up there.

  Jim turned around then and saw Nancy looking at him. “What?” he said, thinking he’d done something wrong.

  She shrugged. “It’s just that you do your work well. I appreciate it.” But there was something else. It was that she’d been looking at him with another, far less abstract sort of appreciation. She turned to go, but he said, “Nancy?” and before he was quite aware of what he was doing, he walked over to her and gently put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her.

  In the boiler room. What a place for a first kiss. Which was exactly what she said when he stopped kissing her. “The boiler room? What are you, some die-hard romantic? Couldn’t you just wait until Saturday night like everybody else?”

  “No,” said Jim, “I couldn’t,” and he kissed her again. His boss. But at the moment, none of it—their professional relationship, his dirty hands, the impossible heat—seemed to matter much at all.

  Out in the clear light of the afternoon, they had grown shy as teenagers and found excuses to hightail it off in opposite directions, both of them, Jim suspected, grinning madly. That was what was wonderful about a kiss. It was terribly revealing about compatibility, and this one had been quite confirming.

  He went to the workshop and got the tools he needed for a more conclusive repair to Big Bob, finished the job quickly, and made it back to Angela’s by six. She was fast asleep, and he surprised himself by turning on her computer and doing a search of graduate schools in management. Maybe Angela had been right. Maybe it was time to set his sights higher and do something other than labor with his hands. He was good with people, he felt. It was something Nancy told him all the time.

  Around seven, he started cooking dinner: sautéed chicken, peas, even fresh baked rolls, whose smell he hoped would arouse his mother’s appetite. But Angela only nibbled at the food before her. He found himself watching her hands: when she got too lean, her rings rolled right off the joints. Briefly, he felt some chagrin at his own buoyant mood and experienced instead the return of worry over his mother. Angela continued to push around the peas on her plate as if arranging them in a geometric puzzle. Spearing one now, she sighed and said, “I know I should eat. But I can’t stop thinking about that poor girl.”

  Poor girl? Who was Angela talking about? “Do you mean the girl who was killed? Claire?” Jim asked. In a tone that was a little blunter than he usually allowed himself to be with his mother, he said, “I’m surprised, Ma. I didn’t think what happened up there mattered to you.”

  Angela acknowledged his skepticism with a flutter of her fingers. Usually, his mother could be counted on to rant about Armitage. She was unconscionably proud of the achievements of (most of) her children, all of whom had gone to public schools. Two lawyers, a doctor, a banker, and then Jim. A handyman, a divorced handyman. And the only one left in the area and probably the best parent among them, he said in his own silent defense. He wondered, a bit sharply and, he knew, inaccurately, if Angela could even name all her grandchildren; it was the graduate degrees and the colleges, all attended on scholarship, that she committed most firmly to memory. This concern of hers about Claire, a girl of what she would be sure to consider disgusting privilege, was decidedly unlike her. “I know, Jimmie. I don’t like that place and I think it’s time you found another job. But she was very young and she died. That’s different. And then there’s the baby. What do you think has happened to the baby?” His mother was indeed worried. She slowly spun her three gold bangles, something she did only when agitated.

  “They’re not saying.” Ever since the murder and the baby’s disappearance, he had barely mentioned the whole mess, fearing it would draw Angela’s scorn. She had referred to the events rather obliquely and with her familiar disdain for the doings of the rich. They’d mostly skirted the topic, for which Jim was grateful. He hadn’t wanted to recount the feeling of invasion and shock, how the students and faculty were skittering around the campus. If his mother was following what was going in the papers or on television, she was doing so privately, and after a brief mention at dinner each night, they’d stowed the topic as if it were something unsightly. And then she had gotten ill. B
ut suddenly, fresh from the hospital, she was taut with concern.

  “They’ve released some statements, all about ongoing investigations,” Jim said carefully. He himself had been a little disappointed at the terseness of Armitage’s response. All Porter had said to the staff was that Claire had died and that they were searching for a newborn who had disappeared in “suspicious circumstances.” Jim had thought that the head would handle it with a little more finesse, but he wasn’t going to give his mother anything else to fuel her long-nourished resentment of the academy.

  Angela glanced at the clock and said, “It’s time for the news.” She watched the show on the public station that aired at 8:00 and not the blond bobbleheads on the major networks. She went in to seat herself in her armchair, and instead of staying in the kitchen to wash dishes and listen to music, avoiding the day’s events, Jim joined her. As she listened to reports of carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, he watched her. Her face had grown veiled and tired. But then a repeat of the local segment of the broadcast came on, and there was Armitage displayed across the screen. It struck Jim how alien it must look to outsiders. The beauty of the grounds. The grandeur of the buildings. How gorgeous it was. You might do anything to be part of it, and you might feel terribly small if you weren’t. Then Jim sat up even straighter. The earnest reporter had managed to get on campus with his crew, and he was standing in front of Greaves. Jim wished he had Nancy’s list of repairs for the next day right in front of him. He could have sworn that the window he was supposed to fix was on the second floor, to the right of the main corridor. But the cracked pane he spied on the screen was on the third floor and to the left. He said nothing to his mother, who was staring at the television, though clearly not paying attention to the story unfolding in front of her.

  She snapped the set off and announced she was going to bed. “These drugs make me tired. I’m going to turn in early.” She rose stiffly but refused help with a cross look and slowly walked upstairs. Jim did the dishes and was mopping the floor when the phone rang. It was Kayla, obviously startled at hearing his voice. She had hoped, he realized, only to speak to Angela. But she gathered herself and told Jim she was sorry but she wouldn’t be able to come by for the next few days. She hoped Mrs. French would understand, and she was looking forward to seeing her soon. Jim thought about mentioning Angela’s heart attack and his mother’s desire to talk to Kayla, but he decided not to. The girl sounded so tired. Instead, he said he understood and thanked her for calling, knowing that the news would disappoint his mother.