“Oh yes, Mrs. Rodney.”
“I wondered—”
“Sorry. Nothing new.”
“He hasn’t been back yet?”
“Nope. And nothing on the BMW, neither.”
Jessie gave him her number at the 1826 House and hung up. Then she lay on the bed, pulled the spread over her body and closed her eyes. She wanted sleep, not because she was tired, which she was, but because she had to get away. After only a few moments, she knew that sleep wouldn’t come. The powerful inertia that had seized her body had no control over her mind. Broken images reeled in it: Reeboks with blue stripes, wraparound sunglasses, curling eyelashes, graying ponytails. She opened her eyes. Help me, she thought. She almost said it aloud.
But there was no one to help. Barbara was dead. Philip wouldn’t help, even if he could, which she doubted. Philip was the wrong type. DeMarco was the right type—tough, a man of action—but he lacked the imagination to share her fears; he had just enough to doubt her.
Jessie gave in to temptation. She opened her wallet and took out the picture of Kate making a silly face at the beach. It had been taken at the class picnic. They’d played Botticelli—Kate had stumped everyone with Yosemite Sam. Jessie looked at the photograph until it stopped making sense. Then she looked at it some more.
Jessie got off the bed. She opened the phone book and found a listing for McTaggart, M. R. She stared at the name until the letters lost their symbolic meaning and reverted to the mysterious shapes illiterates see. Go on, she had to tell herself. As long as there’s another step to take, take it. She dialed the number.
“Yes?” answered a man on the other end. He sounded impatient. A piano played in the background.
“Professor McTaggart?”
“What?” The piano playing stopped. “Keep playing, keep playing,” McTaggart shouted, his voice partly muffled. The piano playing resumed. “No, no, from the third bar.” It sounded like Bach, maybe not played very well. McTaggart might have been thinking on parallel lines. He groaned, then said, “Yes, what is it?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Jessie said, “but it’s important. I’m looking for information about someone who was a Morgan student in the sixties. You were his faculty advisor, and I thought you might be able to help.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” McTaggart said. “Who?”
“Hartley Frame.” McTaggart said nothing, so Jessie added, “He was in the class of ’sixty-nine.”
Jessie heard nothing but the piano, tinny as a child’s toy instrument. Finally McTaggart spoke: “You’ve got the wrong number.”
“But—”
“You want my ex-wife. Good-bye.” He broke the connection.
“God damn it,” Jessie said. The next moment she hurled the phone across the room. It hit the wall with a ringing sound and fell to the floor. Jessie lay on the bed and buried her face in the pillow. She’d never done anything like that in her life, and people who did disgusted her.
But nothing she tried brought results. Each logical step led to something grotesque. Putting up posters led to Mr. Mickey and the bag lady. Tracing Pat’s friend led to unpleasant, incomprehensible phone calls. None of it brought her any closer to Kate.
Kate had been in Bennington on Monday. Fact. Pat had told Buddy Boucher he would return for the BMW. Fact. But Buddy Boucher hadn’t seen Pat, and the BMW was gone. Facts three and four. What was logical now? To return to Bennington and wait? To go home? To keep trying to find Pat’s friend?
None of the choices seemed especially logical. But only the third meant doing something. She couldn’t just sit and wait: that she’d known from the start.
Jessie reopened the phone book and again found McTaggart, M. R. The next listing, and the only other McTaggart, was Erica, 15 Mariposa. Jessie didn’t dial the number. Phone calls about Hartley Frame didn’t work; perhaps a personal visit would. She went into the motel office, got directions, and drove.
Mariposa Street was a little cul-de-sac that ended at a marsh. The clapboard houses were small and rundown; they might have been cottages at one time. Number 15 was the last one. It had a narrow lawn at the front and along one side, covered with a thick mass of soggy leaves. The other side—a tangle of undergrowth and stiff yellow bullrushes—marked the edge of the marsh. The drizzle had almost stopped; it hung in the air now, wetting Jessie’s face as she walked to the door and knocked.
Footsteps approached on the other side. The door opened. A dark, wiry woman stood in the doorway. She wore paint-stained jeans, a torn black T-shirt and a silver and turquoise Navajo pendant; she carried a palette on which glistened a single blob of oily red. “Yes?” said the woman; her voice sounded thick and scratchy, as though she hadn’t spoken for some time.
“Mrs. McTaggart?” Jessie said.
The woman nodded. She hadn’t let go of the door.
“I’m looking for a former student of the college. I was told you might be able to help me.”
“By whom?”
“Mr. McTaggart.”
“Doctor, please. Don’t let’s forget Ross’s precious Ph.D. That’s where the oh-so-generous alimony comes from, as he’d be the first to tell you.”
The bitterness spilled out so quickly and unexpectedly that Jessie could think of nothing to say. Mrs. McTaggart watched her; she had alert eyes, surrounded by smears of black makeup that might have been left over from the day before, and topped by eyebrows that had been almost tweezed away. “When did you see the lovely man?”
“I didn’t actually see him. We spoke on the phone.”
“Oh,” she said, her tone less sharp; perhaps Jessie, having only spoken to McTaggart on the phone, was free of contamination. What’s the name of the student? I haven’t been connected with the college for five years, by the way. Didn’t he mention that?”
“This student was here before that,” Jessie said. “He was a member of the class of ’sixty-nine.” Mrs. McTaggart’s eyes began to narrow. “His name is Hartley Frame.”
Mrs. McTaggart’s eyes narrowed a little more. Red patches rose to the surface of her pale cheeks. “Whose joke is this? Yours or his?”
Jessie’s voice rose, abruptly and angrily. “Why does everyone keep saying that? Every time I mention I’m looking for Hartley Frame I’m told I must be joking. Why?”
Mrs. McTaggart’s voice rose too. “Because Hartley Frame is dead.”
Suddenly Jessie felt very weak and very tall, far too high above the ground. “Dead?” she repeated. Her voice sounded disembodied.
“Yes,” said Mrs. McTaggart. “He died in Viet Nam.”
Jessie took a deep breath. “I—I’m sorry,” she said, backing away. She stumbled, regained her balance. “I didn’t mean to trouble you.”
“If you really didn’t know it’s no trouble. Didn’t the professor tell you?”
“No.”
“The prick.” Mrs. McTaggart said. Then she gave Jessie a sharp look. “Are you all right? You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine,” Jessie said. But she was too tall, and her voice was coming from somewhere else.
Mrs. McTaggart made a clicking sound of disapproval. “You’d better come in and sit down,” she said.
“That’s not ne—”
Mrs. McTaggart took Jessie’s hand and led her into the house. Fleetingly Jessie glimpsed a cramped front hall, a small living room, an easel, a worn velvet couch. She sat down on it, hard. Mrs. McTaggart brought her a glass of water. Jessie sipped. The wave of dizziness passed over her.
“That’s better,” Mrs. McTaggart said. “You were white as a sheet.”
Jessie drained the glass. The woman took it from her. “Thank you, Mrs. McTaggart.”
“Call me Erica. I don’t much like the McTaggart label. For personal reasons.” She went to put the glass down on a side table. Her route took her past the easel. It drew her like a magnet. She dipped a brush in the red pool on her palette, hesitated, dabbed paint on the canvas. From her place on the couch, Jessie could see the al
most finished painting: two misshapen naked men standing by a gas pump. They might have been arguing. It wasn’t a bad idea, but Erica McTaggart didn’t have the skill to make it work. Philip could have fixed it in ten minutes.
Erica saw Jessie looking at the painting and said, “I’m thinking of calling it ‘Pumped Up.’ It’s Exhibit One-A in my ‘A Man’s Gotta Be What a Man’s Gotta Be’ series—men at boxing matches, men in bars, men at urinals. Therapeutic, if nothing else.” She stepped back, laid down the palette and the brush. “I know what you’re thinking—to send a message call Western Union. Right?”
“Not at all.”
But Erica detected her lack of enthusiasm, if not its cause. She snorted. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, uh …”
“Jessie. Jessie Shapiro.”
Erica’s ruined eyebrows rose. “Jewish?”
“That’s right.” Jessie’s father was Jewish, her mother Protestant, but she didn’t go into that rigmarole. Instead she repeated, “That’s right,” and added, “Jewish.”
“Hey,” said Erica McTaggart, “no offense.” She sat on the floor, crossing her legs in a modified lotus. Jessie watched her, but she was thinking about her parents. It had been the second marriage for both of them. Now her mother was in Costa Rica, working on her fourth. Her father, retired in Florida, had also retired from the marriage game. Now he just had girlfriends. Like a lot of people Jessie knew, they were their own children, still occupied with their own development, their own growing up. That put their real children in an awkward position. Jessie had resolved never to let that happen to Kate.
“You’re not offended, are you?” said Erica McTaggart.
“No.”
“Christ, my so-called maiden name was Rabinowitz. I don’t like that label, either. For aesthetic reasons.” She smiled. She had sharp little teeth. “But if you want to know the truth, I’m most comfortable in the company of Jewish women. Don’t you find that?”
“No.”
Erica’s smile hardened. The room was quiet. A fly buzzed between the double windows. “So,” Erica said, “you were looking for Hartley Frame. Can I ask why?”
“I thought my husband … my ex-husband,” Jessie began. The words trailed away. Thinking about her parents had knocked her off the rails. “When did he die?”
“Hartley?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember the exact year. ’Seventy-one, or ’seventy-two. Around there. You still haven’t explained why you’re looking for him. Does it have something to do with the memorial?”
“I don’t know about any memorial. I’m—I was looking for him because he was a friend of my ex-husband.” In a few sentences, Jessie described the disappearance and Buddy Boucher’s letter.
“What’s your ex-husband’s name?”
“Pat Rodney.”
Erica McTaggart tilted her head back, as though trying to see Jessie from a new angle. “You were married to Pat Rodney?”
“Yes.”
“You had a child by him?”
“Yes. What’s so odd about that?”
Erica looked away. “Nothing. People change, I guess, although I’ve never found that to be the case—you just gradually learn what they’re really like.” She turned back to Jessie. “You don’t look his type, that’s all.”
“So I’m told. Why not?”
“You’re too … classy.”
Jessie shook her head. “I’m middle class. So’s Pat.”
“I didn’t mean it quite so literally. Pat Rodney is—or at least he was—a bit … crude.”
“How do you mean?” Jessie said, at the same time hearing the edge in her tone and wondering why she was defending him.
“Well, he used to—touch me when I didn’t want to be touched. Things like that.”
“Did you go out with him?”
“Good God, no. I went out, if that’s the right expression, with Hartley.”
“I thought—”
Erica smiled a malicious smile. “You thought right. I was married to Ross at the time. He wasn’t pleased when he found out—took it like a man, you might say. Put fin to our mariage, in fact. Such as it was. The funny thing was that by the time Ross found out, Hart was already … Hart and I were starting to grow apart.”
“When was this?”
“The fall of ’sixty-eight. Hart and I were really all finished by the winter. That’s when he dropped out.”
“He dropped out?”
“Yes. Before he flunked out. He was failing all his courses, except for music. He always got straight A’s in music. Hartley was a real artist. I think that’s what Ross couldn’t stand. Ross was the first one to spot his talent—he even tried to persuade his parents to send him to Juilliard, but they had other ideas.”
“His father’s a senator, isn’t he?”
“Is and was. But they didn’t get along. Hartley had a complete rupture with his family sophomore year.”
“What about?”
“His life-style in general, I guess. Drugs. They didn’t approve. Ross came around to that way of thinking too, after he found out about our little fling. Then he started taking the line that Hart wasn’t really talented, just facile.”
“What instrument did he play?”
“Anything. He could play anything. He had a band. Sergeant Pepper.”
“That was the name of the band?”
“Yes. Sergeant Pepper. Hart loved that record, so that’s what he called the band. I sang in it sometimes. ‘Descartes Kills.’”
“What?”
“It was one of our songs.” Erica’s eyes brightened. “Do you want to hear it? I’ve got a tape.”
“Sure.”
Erica opened a drawer and rummaged through piles of cassettes. She muttered their names as she tossed them aside: “Tapestry, Best of Buffalo Springfield, After Bathing at Baxter’s. Here it is.” She snapped a cassette into a player by the wall. The room filled with tape hiss. Then a woman’s voice shouted, “Descartes Kills,” and a band began pounding behind her. The lyric that followed was unintelligible, the playing chaotic. Only one sound came clearly to Jessie, a ringing guitar that faded in and out of the background. When the song finished, Erica popped the cassette out. “A bit rough, maybe, but you don’t hear that kind of passion anymore.” Her face was flushed. “Sometimes I think rock music is like opera—all its great moments have already happened.” Erica stuck out her sharp, little chin, ready for an argument.
But Jessie let the invitation pass by. “Pat played on that song, didn’t he? Did he write it too?”
“Hart wrote all the songs,” Erica replied with annoyance. “It was Hart’s band. Different people played in it at different times, including Pat. Pat was a primitive—couldn’t read a note.” A veil slipped over her dark eyes. Her voice softened. “We used to drop acid and jam in the tunnels. The sound was incredible.”
“Tunnels?”
“There are miles of maintenance tunnels under the campus. It’s black as black down there. Sometimes we’d just drop acid and explore. But other times we’d take the instruments and jam all night. And … once in a while, just Hart and I would go down—we had a little room way at the end of one of the crawl tunnels. With a little mattress.” She lapsed into silence, her dark, veiled eyes on the past. “It was like La Bohème,” she said at last. Then she turned to Jessie, as though snapping out of a reverie. She saw the expression on Jessie’s face and misinterpreted it. “You know, the opera.”
“I thought all the great moments in opera were in the past,” Jessie said.
Erica didn’t like that. Her brow wrinkled as she searched for a cutting reply; for a second, Jessie saw how she would look as an old woman. “Pat wasn’t very good, to tell you the truth,” Erica said. “I think Hartley kept him in the band just because he felt sorry for him. The poor townie routine.”
Energy fluttered through Jessie’s body, as though an engine had started. “Townie? Does that mean Pat came from here?”
Eric
a looked surprised. “Not Morgantown specifically, I don’t think, but from somewhere around here, yes. Didn’t you know that?”
“Pat never spoke much about his past.”
“That’s probably because he didn’t have much of one, at least when I knew him. What did he end up doing?”
“He’s a studio musician in L.A.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.”
“But he couldn’t read a note.”
“So you said.”
Erica McTaggart’s dark eyes flickered around the room. “Maybe people do change, after all.”
Jessie leaned forward on the couch, but not with excitement at Erica’s psychological speculations. “If Pat came from here, he must still know people in the area.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Erica said.
“Do you know of any?”
Erica yawned. Jessie noticed for the first time how tired she looked. Maybe she’d been painting all night. “You could try across the Vermont line,” she said. “They had a commune—Pat, his sister, some others. Hart stayed there after he dropped out. I went up once. Not much of a place. That was the last time I saw Hart.”
Erica was sliding back into nostalgia again, but Jessie had no time for that; she was on her feet. “Pat has a sister?”
“You didn’t know that? How long were you married to him?”
Jessie ignored the question. “What’s her name?”
Erica thought. “Doreen, if memory serves. But in those days, she had a hippie nom de guerre.”
“Which was?”
“Blue,” Erica replied. “Preferable to Moonbeam, I suppose, or Sunflower. She was the one Hart left me for, in fact. One of the ones.” She rose, quite gracefully, from her lotus position. “But you know something? I don’t regret any of it. Not one minute. It was wonderful.” She paused; the light faded from her eyes. “Do you think that’s just because we were so young?”
Jessie didn’t know the answer. She thanked Erica McTaggart and hurried away.
22
Lacrosse sticks hung in the front hall. The house was silent. Quietly, Zyzmchuk shut the door and turned toward the inner room. A floorboard squeaked beneath him. He paused. From the inner room came the sound of quick footsteps. He got there in time to see the dark-haired woman run down a corridor and out the back door.
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