Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “Two. ‘What do you think is most important to your man: (a) great sex (b) great conversation.’ Janelle has circled (a). Uh-oh, a little strife there.”

  “All that proves is she has a normal boyfriend,” Edwin interjected.

  “You men all stick together. Three. ‘Do you ever feel pressured to keep up with you man’s sexual desires?’ God, who writes this stuff? The choices are ‘always, sometimes, never’ and Janelle has circled ‘sometimes.’

  “Four…this is the last one she’s answered. ‘If you could call a one-month moratorium on sex, what do you think would happen to your relationship: (a) it would improve (b) we’d break up.’ And Janelle has circled (b). What do you think, Frank…is it significant?” Lucy asked.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, all it proves is that her boyfriend was hornier than she was. Show me a teenage boy who doesn’t fit that profile,” Edwin objected.

  “I didn’t ask you, I asked Frank.”

  “I think it gives me some background to use when I talk to her boyfriend. But what about the books? What are they about?” Frank asked.

  “About? About? They’re what all great art is about—the human condition.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Come on, Edwin, give Frank a break. He wants the Cliff Notes plot synopsis.”

  Edwin grimaced. “Oh, all right. “Portrait of a Lady is about an idealistic young heiress who’s manipulated by her husband and his former lover. Anna Karenina is a woman who sacrifices everything for love then throws herself under a train when it doesn’t work out. Dorothea in Middlemarch is another idealist who marries an old intellectual only to find out he’s a fraud. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a poor girl raped by a nobleman. And in the Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne takes the fall when the holier-than-thou preacher knocks her up.”

  “Geez, there’s as much sex in these classics as there is in the magazines,” Frank said.

  “Oh, nineteenth-century novels are brimming with it. It’s just all right beneath the surface. What else is there to write about? Love and sex, greed and ambition, that’s what all great novels boil down to.”

  Frank nodded. “That’s more or less what’s behind all crimes, too.”

  6

  HIGH PEAKS REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL, a squat, red-brick legacy of a Depression-era work program, sent out buses for thirty miles in every direction to round up three hundred students to fill its classrooms. Its students were largely the children of 1970s alumni, and in twenty more years the desks would be filled by the sons and daughters of those who sat in them today.

  Frank planned to spend Monday morning in the teachers’ lounge, catching Janelle’s instructors as they came in for coffee on their free periods. The project began without much promise—the only information Frank gleaned from Mr. Felson, the stern-faced trig teacher, was that Janelle would probably not excel at college-level calculus. Mr. Unckles, the history teacher unaffectionately known to his students as “Cry Uncle,” nervously assured Frank that Janelle had never given him any trouble. The women who taught Janelle French and chemistry also insisted that they had not seen anything amiss with their student; had never noticed her talking to any strangers, young or old, male or female; had never suspected personal problems of any kind.

  Frank paced restlessly around the stuffy little lounge. “Who else do we have left to see, Earl?”

  “Mrs. Carlstadt. She had Janelle for American Studies—that’s an advanced humanities elective,” Earl said, clearly marveling that Janelle would have chosen to take this class rather than a study hall.

  “Do you know where her classroom is? Let’s go there.”

  In Mrs. Carlstadt’s class, Frank sensed an encouraging atmosphere. The students pulled their desks into a circle, and Mrs. Carlstadt, petite and plump, sat among them. Her benign, rather rumpled appearance belied a keen perception as she skillfully wove threads of history, politics, and economics into a discussion of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

  When the bell dispersed the kids, Frank said, “That’s quite a class you run there.”

  “They’re a great bunch of kids, but you didn’t see them at their best. We’re still in shock over Janelle.” The teacher shook her head. “A kidnapping—I never thought I’d lose one of my kids that way.”

  “What kind of student was Janelle?” Frank sensed the possibility of tears and headed them off with practical questions.

  “She cared passionately about the material we were covering this year. She was quite vocal in the class discussions—always leading us into deeper waters.” Mrs. Carlstadt sighed and shook her head again. “Janelle was one of the finest minds I’ve encountered in ten years of teaching here.”

  No one else, not even her father, had spoken this glowingly of Janelle’s intelligence. “Funny, this is the first time I’ve been given the impression that Janelle was so smart,” Frank said.

  A flash of annoyance crossed Mrs. Carlstadt’s kindly face. “Janelle went to great lengths to hide it. It’s very common with teenage girls. Their brains are at odds with their hormones—they’re afraid they’ll scare off all the boys if they come across as too smart. Luckily, there was no one Janelle was trying to impress—or perhaps I should say not impress—in this class, so she let herself go.”

  “Janelle’s boyfriend, do you know him?” Frank asked.

  Mrs. Carlstadt nodded. “Craig Gadschaltz. Nice kid. Decent student.”

  “But not in Janelle’s league.”

  Mrs. Carlstadt ran her dainty fingers through her already disheveled hair as she attempted to explain. “Janelle wasn’t considered one of the brains—there were other kids who had better averages. She just loved knowing things for the sake of knowing them. To my way of thinking, that made her an intellectual.” Mrs. Carlstadt’s eyebrows disappeared under her curly bangs. “Of course, there’s not much room for that at High Peaks High School.”

  “So you think she kept that part of herself hidden most of the time so she’d fit in?” Earl piped up.

  “Exactly.”

  Frank nodded slowly and gazed at the drab walls and tattered window shades of the classroom, apparently the only place in which Janelle had felt free to be herself. Janelle, who had been rather generic up to this point, began to take shape as someone more complex, a real person with ideas and dreams and fears of her own.

  “I found some books in Janelle’s room.” He turned to a page in his notebook. “Was she reading these for your class?”

  Mrs. Carlstadt barely glanced at the list; clearly she knew the books Frank was referring to. “That’s an example of Janelle when she was knocking herself out. We read The Scarlet Letter in class last semester and Janelle was so fascinated by the theme of—well, I guess you’d call it the woman betrayed—that she wanted to read other novels that dealt with the same issue. So I recommended some, and as she read them she would come and discuss them with me after school.”

  “Would you say those talks were …”—Frank searched for the right word—“… revealing … in any way?”

  Mrs. Carlstadt rose from her seat and began packing books into a canvas tote bag as she thought about her answer. “Janelle was a very astute reader,” the teacher replied eventually. “She was quick to pick out that in all these books, the heroines’ lives are shaped by men—that their successes and failures are all controlled by the men in their lives.”

  Frank straightened up in his chair. “Don’t you think that’s kind of an unhealthy fascination?”

  “I wouldn’t call any student’s interest in great nineteenth-century literature ‘unhealthy,’” Mrs. Carlstadt said laughing. “She simply identified with the heroines. Show me any seventeen-year-old girl who doesn’t feel stifled by her parents and paralyzed with love for her boyfriend.”

  “I suppose.” Frank slumped back. “So did she ever confide in you any of her problems with her boyfriend? Could there have been another man in her life besides Craig?”

  “I have no idea. We never talked about her love life. I think she liked t
o think that our relationship was loftier than all that.”

  Frank untangled himself from the student desk. “So if she were in trouble, she wouldn’t necessarily have come to you?” he asked, stamping life back into his numb right leg. “She didn’t think of you as a mother substitute?”

  “Oh no, certainly not that. Although she did ask my advice about the problems she was having with her father about college.”

  Frank snapped to attention again. “What problem? All I keep hearing is how she and her dad were devoted to each other.”

  “I think they honestly were,” Mrs. Carlstadt replied. “That’s what made this disagreement so difficult for Janelle. You see, she wanted badly to go straight to the State University in Albany, but her father wanted her to go to Mount Marcy Community College for two years, and then transfer. He said he couldn’t afford four years at SUNY, and he was adamant that she not take out any student loans to pay for her education.

  “But if you ask me, I think he just couldn’t bear to think of her leaving home so soon,” the teacher said with conviction. “He saw community college as a two-year reprieve. But Janelle would have just withered there, stuck with a bunch of kids studying hotel management or wildlife preservation. She would have been bored and probably would have done badly. I was worried that she’d drop out and never finish college at all. I offered to speak to her father about it, but she said no. That it might make things worse.”

  Frank nodded. A father who wanted to keep his daughter close to home; a girl who wanted to stretch her wings—hardly a new story. But Jack hadn’t seen fit to mention it. Was it because he considered it too trivial, or too significant? “When did all this happen?” he asked Mrs. Carlstadt.

  “Let’s see, it was the beginning of March, because that’s when Janelle heard she’d been accepted at the State University.”

  “And did she mention it to you again—like in the week or two before she disappeared?”

  “No, she seemed sort of resigned, so I assumed she had given in on going to community college.”

  “But she didn’t tell you one way or the other? Didn’t you ask?” Frank demanded.

  Mrs. Carlstadt spoke emphatically. “No, I didn’t ask. I figured it would just upset her to bring up something that she couldn’t do anything about. When I first started teaching I was always rushing off on my white horse, trying to save one student or another. But I soon learned that you really can’t do much to change the way parents choose to raise their kids. So now I make myself available to my students if they need me, but I try to stay out of the middle of their relationships with their parents.”

  Frank had wandered over to a bulletin board and was engrossed in the display entitled “Ordinary Americans Who Changed History.” “What if you suspected a child was being abused?” he asked casually as he crouched to read the bio under Rosa Parks’s picture.

  “Well, that’s a different story. Of course, then I would be obligated to intercede.”

  “But you didn’t think that was the case with Janelle?” Frank continued, now absorbed by a photo of Woodward and Bernstein.

  “Heavens no!” Mrs. Carlstadt jumped down from her seat on the table and marched across the room to confront her questioner. “Do you have any reason to think her father abused her?” she asked, drawing herself up to her full height, which still put her head level only to Frank’s shirt pocket.

  Amused by the teacher’s terrier ferocity, Frank suppressed a smile. “I don’t know what to think,” he said with a gentle shrug. “Right now I’m just trying to figure out a good reason why Janelle should disappear. That’s always a possibility.”

  Mrs. Carlstadt’s tone grew frosty. “I have to tell you, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Well, Mrs. Carlstadt, I’ve found that if you start off an investigation ruling out all the trees you’re not going to bark up, pretty soon you’re left with no trees at all. Thanks for all your help,” he said as he shook the teacher’s reluctantly offered hand. “We’ll let you get back to work now. Come on, Earl.”

  In the silence of the empty school halls, Earl lowered his voice to a throaty stage whisper. “Why did you tell her you thought Mr. Harvey was abusing Janelle?”

  “I didn’t say I thought he was. I just said it was a possibility.”

  “What if she goes and tells Mr. Harvey that?”

  “What if she does? I’ll probably be able to tell quite a bit from the way he reacts to the news,” Frank said.

  Earl was still baffled. “I thought you liked Mr. Harvey?”

  “There were people who liked the Boston Strangler. There were people who liked Ted Bundy. What the hell’s that got to do with it?” Frank lashed out. There had certainly been lots of people who had liked Steve Balsam. Like all the people he’d worked with at his fancy corporate office. And all the people he’d ushered with at church. He’d been so likable, so respectable, just so damn nice, that he’d flown right under Frank’s radar. That wouldn’t happen again; he’d already had one of Meyerson’s men check out the emergency room records at the small hospital in Elizabethtown and talk to the Harvey family doctor in Verona. Janelle had been exceptionally healthy, but that still didn’t rule Jack out.

  “You’d be surprised at the people I liked that I’ve arrested,” Frank told Earl in a gentler tone.

  Earl accepted this silently. “Where are we going now?”

  “To get some lunch,” Frank said as they arrived at the door of the cafeteria.

  “Here?”

  “Why not?” Frank grabbed a plastic tray and started sliding it along the metal rails in front of the steam tables.

  They took a table in the far corner of the cafeteria and watched as, thirty seconds after the bell rang, a tidal wave of teenagers rushed through the doors. Earl picked at his turkey gingerly, but Frank made short work of his.

  Before diving into a slab of cake encrusted with pink icing, Frank surveyed the room. He spotted Craig Gadschaltz at a table in the center of the cafeteria. Two boys and three girls sat with him as he received condolences—awkward punches in the arm or pats on the back—from a steady stream of students.

  Earl saw Frank scanning the crowd and made a contribution. “There’s Tommy over there at that table by the window.” The table was empty except for Janelle’s tall, lanky cousin. He ate steadily with his head lowered, as if to conserve the energy required to cover the distance from plate to mouth. His longish brown hair fell forward, practically dragging in the turkey gravy, and obscuring Frank’s view of his face. As he and Earl watched, another boy, this one wearing headphones connected to a small tape player, came up to the table and sat down. Tommy lifted his head briefly—the extent of his greeting—but the other kid was no friendlier, and sat silently, bobbing his head to a beat only he could hear.

  “Kind of funny that no one’s going up to Tommy to ask about Janelle, don’t you think?” Frank asked. “And he wasn’t in any of the search groups yesterday.”

  “He’s kind of shy. I don’t know him that well, but I don’t think he hangs around with the same kids Janelle does,” Earl explained. “Are we going to talk to her friends now?”

  Frank looked again at the table of Janelle’s friends and found Craig staring at him. Craig quickly dropped his eyes, and none of the others seemed aware of Frank’s presence. “No, I think we’ll wait and try to catch up with them after school. I don’t want to make a big production out of this.” He concentrated on systematically folding his paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares. “Who coached the cheerleading squad?” he suddenly asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The cheerleading squad. Janelle was a cheerleader, right? Who’s the teacher in charge of that?”

  “Oh. Miss Powell, I think.”

  “Let’s go talk to her.”

  They found Miss Powell in a tiny, glass-walled office off the gymnasium. Upon being introduced, she grasped Frank’s hand with a firmness that bordered on painful. Her palms were leathery and dry, but sm
ooth. Not the kind of girl you’d get a kick out of holding hands with.

  It soon became clear that Miss Powell considered cheerleading very serious business indeed. Her squad had been about to compete in the state championship and now Janelle’s disappearance had knocked them out of the running. Her tone seemed to imply that she thought it very inconsiderate of Janelle to get herself abducted on the eve of this big event.

  “She was the top of the pyramid,” Miss Powell said.

  “The what?”

  “When we formed a pyramid, Janelle was at the top. She was the lightest one. Aside from that, she was just an average athlete. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have made the cut except for her sparkle. She used to have loads of sparkle, and the judges do look for that.”

  “Used to?” Frank noticed that people had begun speaking of Janelle as if she no longer existed, and he wondered if that’s what Miss Powell was doing.

  But she wasn’t. “Janelle used to be brimming with enthusiasm when she cheered, but lately, it just wasn’t there. I used to say to her, ‘Janelle, we’re here in the gym. Where are you?’ Because she would just tune out. Go on autopilot.”

  “When did you first notice this?”

  “Well, let’s see. She was all right through football season. And even into the beginning of basketball. I think it was right after we lost that real close game in overtime to Lake George that she seemed to lose heart. We were all disappointed. There were only two games left after that, so I just let it slide. But she kept it up right into baseball season, so I had to speak to her about it.”

  “What did she say? Did she offer any explanation?” Frank asked.

  “No. She just promised to do better. And at the games, she did. She seemed to be making a conscious effort. But like I said, at practice sometimes she just tuned out.”

  “And that didn’t worry you? You didn’t try to find out what was the matter?”

  Miss Powell seemed to grow larger in her chair as she placed her hands flat on the desk and leaned forward to glare at Frank. Earl tried to shrink himself in his seat. “Mr. Bennett, I’m their coach. My job is to push them to be the best that they can be. I can’t do that if I’m forever letting them cry on my shoulder about some silly fight they’ve had with their boyfriend, or some squabble they had with their parents about their prom dress.”