It isn’t really a question but I say, “Sure,” anyway.
The two of them begin walking across the street. I watch until the hospital swallows them up. I’m about to tuck the receipt back in my wallet, start the car, when I notice that the receipt isn’t a receipt. It’s the torn-off piece of blank paper, folded in half—the one Mr. Tierney wrote the note to Nica on. There’s another thing I notice. Apart from the note itself, the blank paper’s not blank. Not quite. Along the ragged edges of the tear-off is the lower quarter of a line of print. I study it. It appears to be the last bit of the Chandler honor pledge, the “in accordance with school regulations” from the “This represents my work, solely my work, in accordance with school regulations,” words that students are supposed to copy onto the bottom of every quiz, test, essay and project. Supposed to but rarely do because no teacher enforces the rule except at exam time. Well, other than Mr. Fowler.
Mr. Fowler, largely deaf and wholly senile, left eighty in the dust long ago, is Chandler’s oldest faculty member. Not that he’s really faculty these days. His duties have dwindled down to a single class, Hamlet and the Ghost, which he’s been teaching since the 1960s. I never took it. Nica did, though, was taking it, in fact, when she died. Of course she was. It’s rumored to be incredibly easy, only two two-page papers in an entire semester. Papers Mr. Fowler doesn’t even grade, has an assistant grade for him.
It’s as I think the word assistant that I remember with a jolt: Mr. Wallace was the assistant for the English Department last year. A second jolt comes when I remember something else: Mr. Wallace’s first name is Christopher, nickname Topher.
The dark horse.
Chapter Sixteen
Mr. Wallace opens the door to his room on the top floor of Minot House. He’s got an uncapped red pen in his hand. His gaze is quizzical but polite. I hand him the note. As his eyes skim over the six lines, the color drains from his face like a plug inside him’s been pulled. Without looking at me, he steps aside to let me pass.
The room I enter is neat and spare. On the arm of the one chair is a pile of papers he must’ve been grading when I knocked. He moves it so I have a place to sit. Then he arranges himself on the edge of the narrow bed. For a minute or two we contemplate each other in silence. He’s a homely man, there’s no denying: bony-featured and Ichabod Crane skinny. His eyes, though, are nice—large and clear and slow-blinking—and seem to bespeak a nature both gentle and serious. Looking into them, I realize that, whatever happened between him and Nica, I’m glad he’s the one she chose, not that vain jerk Tierney. And then I remember that it could have been him who killed her or was responsible for getting her killed. Manny too. My attitude hardens.
At last Mr. Wallace gestures toward the note and says, “I didn’t expect to see that again. Actually, I did. When the police were investigating your sister’s death. Then I lived in fear of hearing their knock on my door.”
“Yeah, well, the prospect of jail’s a scary one,” I say flatly.
He looks at me, confused. Then he laughs. “Jail? You’ve been reading too much Hawthorne. What we were doing might have been unethical, but it wasn’t illegal.”
“Nica was sixteen.”
Another confused look. “So?”
“So where do you think guys convicted of statutory rape go?”
He opens his mouth. Knowing what he’s going to say, I cut him off before he can say it: “Yes, the age of consent in Connecticut is sixteen, but not if one party is in a position of authority over the other. In that case, the age of consent is eighteen. I looked it up.”
Mr. Wallace lifts the note. Reads it. Reads it again. Then he just holds it in his hand, realizing, no doubt, that I have him dead to rights. Finally he takes off his glasses. “I made a mistake.”
I snort. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“I mean a grammatical mistake.” He puts his glasses back on, reads the note yet again, this time out loud: “Does Bill know about us? I thought we’d been so careful, but maybe not careful enough.” Transferring his eyes from the sheet of paper to my face, “The us and we make it sound as if I was referring to me and Nica, when I was in fact referring to me and Jeanne. Vague pronoun reference.” He laughs, shakes his head. “Some English teacher I am.”
I stare at him, confounded. Can this be true? That it was Jeanne Bowles-Mills and only Jeanne Bowles-Mills that he was sleeping with? I look into his eyes, calm and unflinching, and my gut feeling is: yes. It makes sense, actually. Explains why Mr. Tierney got so emotional when I showed him the note. Mr. Wallace was double-crossing him, sneaking around with the woman he was already sneaking around with. It explains, too, why he didn’t try to stop me when I threatened to take the note to the Millses. Why would he have? I’d be doing his dirty work for him.
Still, I can’t let Mr. Wallace off the hook so easily. Keeping my tone disbelieving, sarcastic even, I say, “If your relationship with Nica was totally aboveboard, why were you afraid of the police knocking on your door?”
“Because it wasn’t totally aboveboard. She was a student and I was her—well, not teacher, but the assistant to her teacher—and I was telling her the sordid details of my affair with a married coworker. If the police knew, they’d want an alibi for the night she died and I couldn’t give them one.”
Still sarcastic, “At home with a good book?”
“I was at a bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires with Jeanne. The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. Under the name Mellors.” A sad smile. “It was a joke.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Oliver Mellors is a character in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. One of the most famous adulterers in the canon.”
“Funny joke,” I say, stone-faced, making him really smile. Then seriously, the impulse to be sarcastic having spent itself, I say, “That’s a good alibi, though, easy to check out.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t count on the police to be discreet.”
“Oh, right. Your job.”
“I was afraid of jeopardizing that, of course. Teaching’s what I’ve always dreamed of doing. But there are other teaching positions. It’s Jeanne I was worried about. Bill’s an angry man. He doesn’t love her anymore but he doesn’t want to hear that someone else does. He could make life difficult for her, fight her for custody of Beatrice. She’s only a U.S. citizen by marriage, which complicates matters.” He sighs, then sinks into silence.
I sink with him, trying to work things out in my head. Finally I say, “I don’t understand. How did Nica figure in any of this? Why were you confiding in her?”
“It wasn’t some regular thing. It just happened twice and the first time was by accident. Bill belongs to the National Model Railroad Association. The local branch of the club meets the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Jeanne always gets a sitter on those nights and we spend a couple hours together at the Econo-Lodge in East Hartford. You probably don’t know it. It’s pretty sleazy.”
But I do know it. I’ve been driving past it enough lately. It’s half a dozen blocks from Damon’s grandmother’s house. Sleazy is right. The kind of place where everyone who checks in is named Smith or Jones.
Mr. Wallace continues: “That night she stood me up. Bill had too much paperwork to do, decided to skip his meeting last minute. She texted me but by the time I got the message, I was already there. Sitting on that ratty bedspread in that room that reeked of disinfectant, I started to get pretty down about the entire situation. So I wandered into a dive bar around the corner to get good and drunk. Only I couldn’t because I’d rushed out of Minot with my money, but not my wallet. The bartender refused to serve me without proper ID. And not just me. There was a young woman having the same problem.”
“Let me guess. Nica.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know it. She was all the way at the other end of the bar. I almost fell off my stool when she walked up to me and said, ‘You left your fake ID at home, too, Mr. Wallace?’ I started apologizing, making excuses, talking a million miles
a minute. She waited until I was done babbling, then told me to relax, that she was the one doing something wrong, not me.”
I grin. “That sounds like her.”
“I walked her out of the bar, was going to take her straight back to campus. But we made a stop first—a liquor store. They didn’t want to see my license, just my money. I bought a bottle of Absolut. Then Nica and I sat in my car, talked, and drank. Correction, I talked and drank. Didn’t let her do either.” He laughs, then falls quiet. A minute or so later he says, “I’m sure I seem old to you, but I’m only twenty-three. Last year I was twenty-two, a couple months out of college. Jeanne’s my first girlfriend.” He looks at me, his face reddening. “That’s probably hard for you to believe. It’s true, though. It was—is—an incredibly intense experience for me. Not just the newness of being in love, but being in love with a woman, not a girl. A woman with a husband and a daughter and twelve more years of life lived. It’s a lonely experience, too. Because of Jeanne’s situation, the tough spot she’s in, I can’t talk to anybody about what I’m going through. Least of all my closest friend.”
“You mean Mr. Tierney?”
“I do.”
“I’m kind of surprised to hear you call him that. Obviously I know you two hang out but it’s hard to believe you’re friends—real ones.”
“Maybe if we’d met in another context, college or something, we wouldn’t be. In fact, I’m certain we wouldn’t be. It’s different, though, here. At Chandler we’re so cut-off. And he and I are the youngest teachers by a pretty wide margin. We live in the same dorm, neither of us is married, so we’re thrown together a lot. I know Nick seems like a self-involved guy, wrapped up in his looks, the things he’s going to accomplish when he leaves Chandler—and he is—but underneath it all he’s a sweet person.”
“Why couldn’t you talk to him then? Is it too weird that you were sleeping with the same woman?”
Mr. Wallace looks at me, startled. “We weren’t sleeping with the same woman.”
For the first time it occurs to me that he might not know that there’s another Other Man. “Well,” I say awkwardly, “not at the same time maybe, but Mr. Tierney was sleeping with Mrs. Bowles-Mills, too.” When this gets no response, I joke, even more awkwardly, “I know, I know, I wouldn’t have thought she was his type either with those earth mother skirts and that Heidi braid.” Then, realizing how insulting this sounds, conclude lamely, “Not that she’s not perfectly nice looking.”
“Nick never slept with Jeanne. And she was his type. He wasn’t hers.”
“I hate to burst your bubble, but Jamie Amory saw Mr. Tierney knocking on the Millses’ back door in the middle of the night. Mrs. Bowles-Mills let him in.”
I’m expecting anger or dismay—shock at the very least—but I get none of these reactions. “When was this?” Mr. Wallace says, calm as can be. “March?”
I nod, surprised.
“She let him in because she didn’t want him making a scene. But he never got past the kitchen.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I was there, in the upstairs bedroom. I heard the whole conversation, all three hours of it. That’s when I realized how strong Nick’s feelings actually were. I knew he’d been interested, of course. But he’d played it off to me as a casual-type thing. Like he was just looking to get physical with a lonely, sex-starved housewife in a bad marriage.”
It takes me a few seconds to phrase my next question. “If you’d known how Mr. Tierney felt, would you have still gotten together with Mrs. Bowles-Mills?”
Mr. Wallace closes his eyes and lifts the frame of his glasses. I can see my interrogation is tiring him out. He’s going to answer me, though, patiently and thoughtfully, same as he’s been doing. And as he rubs the pink patch of skin above the bridge of his nose I think what a good teacher he must be. “I probably still would have,” he says with a sigh. “Scummy, I know.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“Honestly scummy. Well, that’s something, I guess.”
We share a smile, and then I say, “But back to my sister.”
Mr. Wallace lets out another sigh. “Right, your sister. She was a good listener. She was so young, but she seemed to understand things—the complexities of relationships, how you sometimes end up in them with people you wouldn’t expect, in circumstances that are less than ideal, how arbitrary the rules of attraction are, how you have no control over who or what excites you.”
I’ll bet she understood, I think. Better than anybody she understood. “So you spilled your guts?”
He laughs. “Basically. The next day in class, I could barely raise my head I was so embarrassed. And hungover. Mostly, though, what I was was nervous. Would Nica treat me like a peer now, a buddy? Show that she no longer viewed me as an authority figure? And how could you view the guy whose car keys you’d wrestled away the night before, poured into a cab, as an authority figure? But when I finally did make eye contact, she just gave me a blank look back and I knew I had nothing to worry about. Later I found my car keys in a plain white envelope in my faculty mailbox.”
So cool, I think admiringly. Always so cool.
For a while Mr. Wallace stares at his hands, resting on his wide-apart knees. Then he says, “You’ve seen the note. Obviously it was me who approached her, who couldn’t keep my distance even though I swore to myself I would. It’s just that Jeanne was being cold and I thought I saw Bill give me a loaded look and I started to imagine all sorts of awful things. I wrote the note on the bottom of Nica’s paper, the one I was grading for Fowler. It was stupid and it was risky. But I was desperate.”
“Did it work? Did she meet you?”
“Outside the same bar. Me telling pretty much the same story.”
“Was she helpful?”
“Oh yeah. I was about to march over to the Millses’ house to I don’t know what—challenge Bill to a duel, throw Jeanne over my shoulder caveman style—something idiotic. Nica calmed me down. A good thing, too. I talked to Jeanne the next day. Turned out she was just preoccupied because Beatrice had come down with an ear infection. And Bill’s a hostile guy in general. Probably shoots everyone bad looks without even realizing it. Nica saved me from blowing my cover. Blowing Jeanne’s and my cover both.”
“Your covers are blown now,” I say, not knowing how else to say it, so just blurting it out.
He looks at me.
“With Mr. Tierney, anyway.”
“What?” he finally says.
I take a deep breath, tell him about my initial misidentification of T, the scene that took place in the studio, Mr. Tierney’s near-successful attempt to trick me into revealing the affair to Mr. Mills.
“Now I know why he’s been avoiding me for the last few days,” Mr. Wallace says when I’m finished. And then, “So Bill doesn’t know yet?”
“No,” I say, uneasy at the hopeful note in his voice, “but it’s only a matter of time, don’t you think? I mean, rightly or wrongly, Mr. Tierney feels deceived. Vengeful, too, obviously.”
Mr. Wallace’s head drops, like it’s suddenly too much of a burden for his neck to bear. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I better warn Jeanne.”
I shouldn’t feel guilty. I’m the only participant in this drama besides Beatrice who has nothing to feel guilty about. But I do.
Mr. Wallace and I sit in silence for a long time, watch the last of the day’s light shrivel and recede from the room. Finally, I stand and say something about having someplace to be. He looks at me briefly, nods. When I’ve reached the door, opened it, I turn back to wish him good luck, but he’s staring at the note in his lap, neck limp, off somewhere in his mind. I close the door quietly behind me.
Chapter Seventeen
I haven’t had more than a catnap in what feels like weeks, so I skip dinner, head directly to my room. Climbing the stairs, I write a text to Damon, asking him to check to see if a Mr. and Mrs. Mellors stayed at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge the night of Nica�
��s death. I hit Send as I open the door. My bed has never looked so inviting—rumpled comforter, unwashed sheets, caseless pillow and all.
I’m just tugging on my pajamas when, on impulse, I reach for Mom’s camera with the telephoto lens. As I take it over to the window, about to aim it at the Millses’ house, I see Jeanne and Beatrice on the sidewalk below. The strap on Beatrice’s sandal has come undone and Jeanne is trying to refasten it. Beatrice is looking down at what her mother’s doing, sucking her thumb.
Mr. Mills’s voice calls out, “Bedtime!” From half a block away I can hear his irritation. “Coming!” Jeanne shouts back. She tries once more to fasten the strap. When she fails, she slips the shoe off Beatrice’s foot and into her pocket. Then she stands, gently but quickly lifting her daughter off the ground. Beatrice is a little big to be picked up like that. She doesn’t fight it, though, keeping her thumb in her mouth and settling into her mother’s body as if it had been made for her to rest on, the breast formed to pillow her cheek, the arm crooked to support and protect her head. Jeanne starts walking hurriedly, sidestepping the stroller Mrs. Wheeler forgot to bring into the house. Beatrice looks up from her mother’s shoulder. When she sees me in the window staring down at her, she returns the stare, her eyes large and grave. Her mouth shapes the word Hi around her thumb.
The days of this little girl’s happiness are numbered, I think as I mouth a Hi back. She’ll be separated from the mother who adores her, maybe permanently, and all because of me. The guilt that descends is crushingly heavy. But I feel something else, as well, something lurking beneath the guilt that’s even more troubling: a sense of wonderment, of awe almost, that a thing I’d done—me, quiet, passive, lives-in-my-thoughts me—is having such an impact on other people’s lives. It’s as if a power I never dreamed of possessing is suddenly mine, and having it fills me with a kind of weird elation.
Ashamed now on top of guilty and whatever else, I shut the curtains with a violent yank. Then I jump into bed, pull the covers over my head.
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