The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  Angela called from her bedroom, “Who was that, Jimmie?” and when he went upstairs to tell her that Kayla wouldn’t be coming back until at least next week, his mother’s face crumpled. But when Jim asked if she wanted to talk to Kayla herself, Angela said no. “She’s got her reasons, I’m sure of that,” his mother said, making much of polishing the lenses of her already spotless glasses. Jim came close to offering to take her to the nail salon and Starbucks himself, but Angela would have refused. It was Kayla’s company and the atmosphere of serious fun she brought with her that made all the difference. It was having a girl around and not her fussy old son. It was a friendship where none had been expected. “I want to sleep now, Jimmie,” his mother said and sat on the smooth white coverlet of her bed.

  Dismissed, Jim returned to the kitchen and started to pace. There was nothing left to clean, and he was too restless to sit down. He realized that the person he actually wanted to talk to was Nancy. It was just nine fifteen and not too late to call; he could check with her about that crack he’d seen in the window of the dorm. She answered on the first ring and was clearly happy to hear from him. Listening to her voice, he thought instantly of the boiler room’s steamy warmth.

  “Where am I catching you?” he asked, and she confessed that she was still at work. There was so much to do, what with graduation so close and Claire’s memorial service coming up on Sunday. It was getting harder and harder to get home at a reasonable hour. “Sorry, Jim. I don’t want to complain. How’s your mom?”

  Despite their encounter in the basement, they settled easily into conversation. About Angela and her testy frame of mind. About the impending visit from Jim’s sister Andrea, who would be driving up this weekend. She would come, Jim told Nancy, to make sure he still knew he was the youngest in the family, though given that he was fifty, it was news she didn’t really need to reinforce. Two years ago, Angela had broken her ankle, and Andrea had made the same trip. Within moments of her arrival, his sister had looked askance at the steep stairs and glanced suspiciously at Angela’s car keys hanging on a kitchen hook. By the end of her visit, she had arranged a conference call with two other siblings and everyone had started to mention assisted living with not such studied casualness. Angela and Jim had fended her off, but this time it might be different.

  “My brother tried the same thing with my dad,” Nancy said thoughtfully. “But Dad was as stubborn as your mom sounds, and he died eight years later in his own bed.”

  “And my mother is not only stubborn, she’s competent,” Jim said.

  “Like you,” Nancy said, laughing, and even though she was his boss, even though their school was in the midst of a crisis, he stopped, gathered his courage, and asked her out to dinner. “Yes,” she said with obvious enthusiasm. “Absolutely,” and despite their kiss, they both seemed to get terribly shy and he switched the topic to work, ostensibly the reason he had called in the first place.

  He told her then what he’d seen on the TV. “Oh, you saw that,” Nancy said. “No one knows how the reporter got in, but security whisked him off pretty quick.” She paused and then said, “You sure it was the third floor? I’ll go check it out and call you back.”

  To pass time until Nancy rang him, Jim settled in to watch a Nova show about Ernest Shackleton and his miraculous feat of rescue on Antarctica. He vaguely recognized the narrator’s voice and knew that when he read the credits at the end he’d be disgusted with himself for not realizing who it was. When Nancy called back, ten minutes later, he switched the sound to mute and watched the grainy photographs of Shackleton’s crew roll steadily across the screen. “You’re right, Jim,” she said. “It’s the third and the second. The one on the second comes from a Frisbee. The kid who did it was really sorry and offered to pay. The one on the third looks different, like someone threw something at it, a rock or stone. And it’s Scotty Johnston’s room.”

  “Big surprise,” said Jim. “I’ll fix it first thing and see if I can figure it out.”

  “And there’s something else,” Nancy said. Jim listened and kept looking at the pictures of the dogs on the ice and the serious men in their peacoats. “Porter just texted me to ask to have the locks changed on his and Tamsin’s offices. Could you handle that tomorrow morning?”

  Jim waited before he spoke. He could hear that Nancy was walking across the campus, to her car, he hoped. It was close to ten. “Why does Porter need the locks changed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Seemed odd to me, too.”

  “I’ll get to it right away.” Looking at Ernest Shackleton on a ship near South Georgia Island, Jim said, “Go home, Nancy. You need to take a break.” He himself felt abruptly tired and knew the next day was going to be a long one.

  “Thanks, Jim, for everything,” she said, and he didn’t think he was imagining the energy in her voice. She liked him, this woman liked him. And he liked her back. It was uplifting, even in the midst of all that was happening. “Nancy,” he said, “when this is all over, remember you agreed I could take you out to dinner?”

  “Just as long as it’s not a restaurant in a basement,” she said, and he laughed and promised her that it would be somewhere well aboveground. They wished each other good night, and Jim hung up feeling more alert than he had in a very long time.

  He then crept down the hallway to Angela’s room. She had fallen asleep with her lamp on. She barely moved as he pulled the book from her hands and tucked the blanket under her chin before clicking off the light.

  He slept in his old room downstairs, which his mother had converted to a study of sorts. Her books and files lined the space, and all night he dreamed of librarians with fierce grins and rings of keys. When he woke at 4:30, he knew instantly he was up for good. He looked silently in on Angela and, for a few minutes, sat by her side and watched her breathe, the way he had his girls when they were babies, as if they needed his presence to remember to keep pulling air into their lungs. Then he showered, dressed, made his bed, and ate an egg and coffee. He did his dishes and laid a place for Angela at the table. He wrote her a note saying he was leaving early but would be back by three. “Call if you need anything, Ma.”

  Even after all this activity, it was only 5:30. But he couldn’t read or sit still, his mind caught in a fruitless circle of topics that rolled from Angela to Nancy, Kayla to Claire, and back again. The only solution was motion. He backed up his car as quickly as possible so as not to wake his mother and drove off to campus as the sun was rising over the edge of the green hills.

  The morning was utterly tranquil, and this early, not even the dog walkers or the most masochistic of runners were up yet, much less anyone else on his crew. The shop smelled of oil and well-used tools, warm metal. He found what he needed for the locks at Nicholson and gathered a few other tools. He liked his work. He liked that he got to do it on his own and that no one really interfered with him because he was good at it. He could do it for years to come. But Armitage was changing. Looking at the barrels of the new lock he was about to load in the old doors of Nicholson, he knew that the intuition he had first had the morning he’d learned of Claire’s death was coming true. Nothing would be the same afterward. And as he shouldered his satchel full of tools, he knew, too, that, for the first time in a long time, this job wasn’t going to be quite enough to satisfy him. You old goat, he told himself, part of what you’re saying is that you want to pursue this woman. And that you don’t want to be dating your boss.

  He almost laughed as he walked from the shop across campus to Nicholson. Well, it was respectable as far as motives went, and his mother would certainly be happy that he would consider leaving the academy. But he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until he had something else in hand. As for what might possibly replace working at Armitage, he had no idea. Going back for a graduate degree kept tugging at his mind.

  He had just arrived in front of Nicholson and stood for a moment looking at its stained glass, its third-floor turrets. For all the silly flourishe
s of its architecture, it was the school’s center, the setting in which its most important decisions unfolded. It was where the board met, the faculty gathered, where students were disciplined or expelled, where teachers were hired or let go. Finally, he walked into the long dark hall and stopped still. He had always liked this first scent of Nicholson, its smell of school: soap and paper. The hall was wide and dark, the marble floor smooth and polished. The whole structure was so firm and solid, crafted when materials were better, when workmanship took time and everything from tools to bricks was made by hand. The slates on the roof had been shaped by chisels well over a hundred years ago. When the tiles needed work, Jim always marveled at how well formed they were, how delicate the edges of each one were. The work had required remarkable care, time, attention and had been done with the intention of making it last.

  Slowly, he headed toward Porter’s office and climbed a short flight. When he had first been hired at the school, caring for these stairs had been one of his jobs, but Nancy had pulled him off janitorial detail and given him tasks that let him use his real skills as a carpenter and a person who could fix almost anything.

  He paused on the landing, put his satchel by his feet, and looked out over the Quad, thoughts of Nancy intruding though he was trying firmly to keep her out of his mind. He hadn’t felt this way about someone since when? It was funny how it had sneaked up on him. He hadn’t, he had to say frankly, felt exactly this way about his wife. He had married Carla because she was pregnant, a decision he’d never regretted because it resulted in his lovely eldest daughter. And he had loved Carla, but it had never felt natural with her. Every speck of their marriage felt earned and built. With Nancy, there was an ease that it had taken years to achieve with Carla. But it terrified him, too. And nothing beyond a kiss in the basement had actually happened yet. They hadn’t even had a real first date.

  It was time to get started. Porter’s office was at the far end of the corridor, and Jim crept down it noiselessly. He had chosen his shoes for years for their ability to move without a chorus of squeaks or slaps along hallways and tunnels, which meant picking footwear with rubber soles. He could wear loafers in another life or running shoes or clogs. The thought was enough to make him smile, and then he heard a voice coming from the end of the hall.

  It was someone speaking rapidly and loudly, and at first he couldn’t place it because he’d never heard this person speak in anything but a moderate, steady tone. It was Tamsin Lovell, and she was yelling at someone on the phone. And it wasn’t just yelling, Jim realized; this woman whom he’d always thought of as composed and immeasurably dutiful was shouting. Initially, Jim thought she might be in trouble, but then he heard the anger in her words, and moving lightly along the corridor until he was just outside Porter’s office door, he heard the words themselves.

  “Colson, you don’t understand,” Tamsin cried with blind fury. “I have the boy, I have him.” Her voice was ragged, shattering. Jim heard the whir of a machine as well as the frantic rush of Tamsin’s words.

  The person on the other end obviously tried to interrupt her, but she cut him short again. “Colson,” she said. Tamsin’s rage flowed on: “You have to help, Colson.”

  Tamsin had to be talking to Colson Trowbridge, the head of the board. An influential Boston lawyer, an alumnus, a generous donor for whom the new athletic complex was named. Jim had often been the one in charge of preparing the boardroom for meetings, and he had seen Trowbridge on several occasions over the years. Tall, well groomed, the man had seemed the embodiment of clubby success. And self-confidence that bordered on arrogance.

  She said she had the boy. Was she talking about the baby? She was trying to get Trowbridge to step in to help somehow. Just as he was about to turn back down the corridor, to flee from whatever was happening in that room, Jim’s cell phone chirped, its signal for a low battery. In his distraction last night, he must have forgotten to plug it in. Tamsin paused, slammed down the phone, and the door flew open. She wore running shoes, athletic shorts, and a T-shirt. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she was flushed and breathing hard. Jim understood instantly that she had chosen an outfit that would give her a reason to be seen on campus so early in the morning. But she hadn’t expected to be caught here. And then the humming sound that had seemed to come from the office appeared to be rising from his own head, and it was the sound of pure fear. Because Tamsin, as she ran at him, was lifting high a fire extinguisher, ready to smash its red bulk at his skull, and then he realized where the sound really came from. A shredder. She was running a shredder. But then he saw her bared teeth and the shiny cylinder and then nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 20

  Track had just finished for Saturday afternoon, and Madeline wondered again why they were bothering with sports. The students need the exercise, Grace had insisted. It kept them busy and tired after class. It kept them out of trouble. Madeline wondered what kind of trouble Grace might be worrying about after the worst that could happen already had, though she allowed that tuckering teenagers out to whatever degree possible was most likely a good idea. The last three days, her group of athletes had thrown itself into punishing rounds of sprints and difficult cross-country runs. Still, she thought, all this activity is certainly not good for me. Dealing with troubling encounters with students and discomfiting news about their extremely extracurricular activities had left her more addled than usual. She was dreading leaving and returning to the dorm. God only knew what she’d find on her doorstep next. In addition, last night Owen had had the grace to send not a text but an actual e-mail saying that things seemed to have petered out between them and he was ready to move on. Meaning, Madeline thought, that he already had. Amazing how a computer screen could give off a whiff of new girlfriend, but it did.

  Approaching her apartment, looking forward only to the coldest shower, she saw something else that wasn’t good for her. Kate, her sister, had manipulated her way past security and onto campus. Her baby was in her arms, and he was screaming.

  “Tadeo,” Madeline shouted, glad in spite of herself to see the little boy. “Hi, baby, stop crying! Auntie Madeline is here!”

  “Oh, God, Madeline, you’re disgusting. You’re getting sweat all over him,” Kate complained. But Tadeo immediately stopped wailing and snuggled instead into Madeline’s arms. Even in the few weeks since she’d seen him, he’d grown. Kate, however, was the same as always: beautifully turned out and apparently immune to the effects of high humidity. A diaper bag that managed to be elegant was slung over her shoulder, and smooth dark blond hair flowed down her back. She wore a topaz necklace and unwrinkled linen pants and shirt. It dawned on Madeline that Kate was all in white. She had a just-nine-month-old baby and she was in spotless white. Yet Madeline, without a single child in tow, couldn’t wear a white T-shirt to breakfast without spattering cranberry juice in a crimson plume all over herself. Fred had pointed that out last week, and she had wanted to deck him. Thinking of Fred, where was he? She hadn’t seen or heard from him since his trip to Brooklyn, which was not a good sign.

  Tadeo, Madeline was glad to notice, took after her. He was covered in a fine layer of rice cereal and yogurt and needed nothing more than a dip in the tub. Madeline fished out her key from her shorts pocket and ushered them all inside. Fortunately, no signs from the Reign were immediately present. “I can’t believe you let them put you in this dump. It’s tiny,” Kate said. She collapsed on the futon sofa, and Madeline was glad she’d cleared it of her laundry this morning, depriving her sister of one more thing to criticize.

  She ignored Kate and went straight to the bathroom. Tadeo was pulling on her necklace and trying to bite it. “Are you teething, little man?” she asked him.

  “Glor,” he said, apparently meaning Yes, and it sucks. Drool streamed in twin rivers from either side of his mouth. Oh, how she loved this baby, his physical completeness, the seemingly poreless skin, the clear fire of his dark eyes. He was just beautiful. He gnawed some more on the silver chain.


  Kate had been astonished that Madeline wanted to be present at his birth. “Not in the room or anything,” Madeline had assured her, though she’d secretly hoped that her sister would invite her to be right there. She had always wanted to see a baby being born, and this one was going to be her nephew. “Just nearby, so I can help. So I can meet him right from the start.” She thought that would be nice, sisterly, auntly, something she should do when Isabelle and David so clearly weren’t capable of it. Kate had grudgingly agreed to have her at the hospital, and for that, Madeline would always be grateful. When she’d met Tadeo for the first time, he looked more like a large plum with a thatch of black hair than a person, and still, she’d been overwhelmed with joy and surprise, conscious of a deep, abiding mystery she had no idea existed. Kate and Nick had been too exhausted to notice that Madeline wept as she held the swaddled baby, welcoming him to the world.

  Now, as she let the water seep into the tub, making sure it was only tepid, Madeline thought of Claire’s baby. He would be about a week old. He would need constant care, constant feeding. Warmth and of course love. Where was he? Why hadn’t they found him or any trace of him? Madeline couldn’t say “body.” She refused to admit to herself that he might have been killed, too. Tadeo, squirming in her arms, said, “Glahglahglah.”