Dark and Stormy

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  She referred, of course, to how I managed to get Isaac to follow me to France in the middle of the school week and how the natural consequence for that was his getting demoted but being allowed to stay on as a volunteer. Not my brightest moment, but still, it had worked out rather well for me. My face was on fire. Nothing spelled guilt like a good blush, but maybe she’d take it as vulnerability and want to open up to me. “That situation did not work out the way I had planned it to.”

  “Yeah…”

  “So it’s not about a boy then?”

  “I didn’t come her to meet boys.” She whispered. Her voice broke like she was holding the tears back with effort.

  “But you can’t help meeting them. There are a lot of them just lying around.”

  She laughed a little bit, but didn’t say anything else.

  “Was it a boy back home?”

  She sniffled, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I just wish…” She took a deep, ragged breath. “I just wish my mom were here.”

  I pulled out my phone. “Call her. Use my minutes.”

  She flopped back on her pillow. “Mom wouldn’t understand.”

  Interviews were supposed go to better than this, I’m pretty sure. Gretchen was vague and emotional, when I wanted her to be concrete and effusive. In fact, if she would break down into a full on sobbing fit, full of remorse, and confess all right now, I would call it a win.

  “Mom’s understand everything.” This was the kind of statement my mom would make, in a straightforward but loving tone of voice. I would not have believed it, but the girls she counseled did.

  “She didn’t send me to Sweden to have boy problems.” Gretchen rolled to her side and rested her head on her elbow. “I just need to keep praying about it, that God would take my troubles away, but it’s hard.”

  I shut my eyes, because babies weren’t the kind of problems God just took away. “So…”

  “Would you mind letting me have just a few minutes, maybe?” Her question, soft spoken, and tender, masked a deep annoyance at my intrusion. I could tell.

  “Nope.”

  “Garret is going to ruin everything for me.” She whispered, but clearly, the cat was out of the bag. She was mad in love with Garret, he had knocked her up, and now she’d have to go back home in shame. I was so right.

  It was awful, and I felt terrible for her, but at the same time, it was awesome to finally get her talking about it. I bit my tongue to keep myself quiet.

  “He hounds me. And he’s not a nice person about it.”

  I shook my head in a way that I hoped indicated I agreed. He was such a guy’s guy. I couldn’t imagine him with someone as introverted and nervous as Gretchen. “What’s he been doing?”

  “He hounds me. Follows me. He won’t let up.”

  “You’re being kind of vague.” I didn’t want to sound more judgy than I already had, but she needed to get to the point.

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “No. I do! I mean, here you are, clearly not feeling good, trying your best to work hard and learn and stuff, and someone you aren’t interested in just won’t give up.”

  She looked at me from under lowered eyelids, her lips trembling.

  “Someone you are interested in?” All the boys in the world were right. Understanding girls was impossible.

  “No.” She pressed her face into her pillow.

  “I understand that you are a wreck and that Garret is the cause. Am I right about that much?” I was getting impatient. Just tell me you’re pregnant, already!

  “Close enough.” I barely heard her from under the pillow.

  “I’m going to give this one more guess, but you aren’t making the being a listening friend thing easy. Is there some guy at home and that’s why you are messed up? And Garret has really complicated the relationship?”

  She sat up and looked at me, her eyes big, wet, and sad. “That is exactly it.” She held up her left hand. I stared at it, and then registered the thin silver band with little pearls on her ring finger.

  “Purity ring, right?”

  She chewed her bottom lip and blushed.

  “Promise ring?”

  She exhaled slowly.

  “Well? Say something. There’s a boy back home, and Garret is here, and you are trying to decide between the two?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Wedding ring.”

  “Wedding ring.” I repeated the words, but they couldn’t possibly mean what they sounded like they meant.

  “My parents don’t know.”

  “I need more details.” I stood up and started pacing. I suddenly had a pregnant runaway bride on my hands who was crushing on a jerk. This was not the situation I had come prepared to handle.

  “My parents wanted me to come here, because they did when they were my age. But…”

  “But you had a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they not like him?”

  She let her hair fall over her face, hiding from her answer. “They didn’t know.”

  “Okay.” Obviously, it wasn’t okay. It was…weird. And I didn’t know what to do with the information she was giving me, but rather than saying that, I went with okay. She didn’t offer anything else, so I decided to dig a little deeper. “You had a secret boyfriend. Why keep him a secret?”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Pretend I’m an idiot.”

  She sort of laughed, quietly, and under her breath. I didn’t appreciate it. “He’s…”

  “Black?” Were her parents some weird, racist, throwbacks? I sincerely hoped not.

  She shook her head.

  “Old?” Which would be gross, but make some sense, anyway.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “A bad boy?” This, I could wrap my mind around.

  She exhaled in a rather impatient way, considering what she was putting me through. “He’s Catholic.”

  “So?” I swear I wanted to take it back as soon as I said it.

  She frowned and turned away from me again.

  I waited a few moments. I counted to five. She didn’t say anything else. “So, I’m gonna go, I guess.” She clearly needed to talk, so I thought that I would try reverse psychology. Threaten to leave so she would beg me to stay.

  She turned to me, her lower lip in her teeth, her eyes looking scared and young, despite the sort of derisive attitude she was using with me.

  “I’ll keep your secret.”

  She let out the breath she had been holding. “I’m afraid it’s going to come out, because of the murder.”

  I didn’t say anything, but personally, I thought it was going to come out because of the bun in her oven.

  THIRTEEN

  Isaac Daniels

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. There was a policeman around every corner. A black van drove Rolf’s body away. A low buzz of Swedish conversation between the police officers met me in every room.

  Troy took the boys back to the girls’ dorm, since their own rooms were off limits, but Nick and I went back to our miniature apartments above the kitchen to spend the night in relative peace.

  The next morning nothing was any clearer.

  I needed a quiet place to pray and think through the situation, so I went to my office.

  However, Dani had already commandeered it. I found her standing on a chair next to the wall, stapling strings to notecards.

  I pressed my hand to my forehead, anticipating a headache, I sat down. “What’s all this?”

  “The main players.” She waved her hands at my wall. “I’ve listed them all across the top, with lots of strings.”

  “So I see.”

  “We have room under each name to list whatever we know about them, and then the strings are to help us cross reference. So we can visualize the web of connectedness.”

  “Of course.” The major players, according to Dani, were us. Everyone who was on campus the day Rolf was here.

&nb
sp; “I’ve just got the names and the strings up, but now that you are here we can pool our knowledge to fill in the specific details.” Her face was flushed with excitement. She was pretty when she was excited.

  I sighed in relief. A pretty girl, standing on a chair in my office. There could be worse ways to start a murder investigation.

  “So what do we know so far?”

  “The cop implied that Rolf had a heavy hand with the ladies, so I think we should make a note that both Stina and Nea are locals and have known him a while. Small town and all that.”

  “But they weren’t here last night.”

  “That we know of. Let’s not eliminate anything until we are sure.”

  She stapled a lined piece of notebook paper under Nea’s name. She wrote, “local, woman” on it. She repeated it for Stina.

  I drummed my fingers on my desk. “We know that Troy, Nick and Cadence have been around the school for a while, and that Xavier was a student here before, so they may know more about Rolf than they are letting on.”

  “And Megan and Dr. Hoffen, of course.” She scribbled fast and stapled papers under the name-cards.

  “The rest of us are all kind of in the same boat.” I scratched my head. “Though I guess if Rolf was the type to offend women—which I think is what you were getting at—then we need to consider all of the girls as having a potential motive.”

  “And all of the boys who have a strong affinity to the girls.”

  I laughed. “A strong affinity?”

  “Si is in love with Bel, but Xavier is her brother, so they both have a reason to feel vindictive if he was putting pressure on her.”

  “And Garret would feel protective of Gretchen…”

  “Speaking of…” She grinned, her eyes narrowed. “The Gretchen situation is more complicated than we thought, but far less sinister.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Her parents sent her off to Bible school, and since she has less spine than a jelly fish, instead of telling them she’d rather stay and hang out with her secret, Catholic, boyfriend, she married him.”

  “What?” I sat up. This was news. And it brightened my whole day. The murder was enough, thank you very much. Gretchen being married instead of being an unwed mom was a massive relief.

  A gasp from the doorway made me turn my head.

  Gretchen.

  Gretchen was about five five and sort of round and soft, like she had never lost her baby fat. She was makeup free, and had the pale eyelashes and small, pale eyes of a natural blonde though her hair was on the dishwater side of the scale. She was pretty when she smiled, but overall, unremarkable. Not the kind of girl you expected to raise up ardent passions in young men, but apparently she had managed it twice.

  She stood in my doorway, her mouth bobbing like a fish, her naturally pasty complexion blanched like the papers stapled all over my wall. She wore a dumpy bathrobe and snow boots, having clearly thrown on whatever she could find for the trip across the campus. While I stared at her and gave careful detective-like observation a try, Dani moved forward, hands out, face fifteen shades of red.

  “I am so, so, so sorry.”

  “You promised you wouldn’t tell.”

  “But it’s just Isaac. I mean, it’s not like I told someone important.”

  “Er…” I was about to argue with her about that when it occurred to me that her version served my purpose better. “Gretchen, why don’t you come in for a minute? Dani, give her that chair, please.”

  Dani pushed the chair she had used as a stepstool toward Gretchen.

  I reached behind Gretchen and shut the door.

  Gretchen stared at the chair for a moment, then sat down.

  “So, you’re married?”

  She nodded. “But you can’t tell anyone.” She whispered.

  “Who would I tell?” I shrugged. “Why isn’t he here with you?”

  She chewed on her bottom lip.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Come on Gretchen, don’t leave us hanging!” Dani let her impatience show, but I didn’t blame her. If Gretchen was just going to sit there, chewing her lip, I was going to lose my patience as well.

  “He had to work. To save money for us.”

  “And you came because….your parents made you?”

  She nodded. “I had to. If I had stayed home…” She shook her head. “I guess I would just be at their house. I don’t know.”

  “What’s your plan?” I leaned forward. I really did wonder. This kid had no apparent backbone, and yet she had run off and gotten married. Which seemed a thing Tillgiven girls were into. I would need to be praying about that. It couldn’t be a good thing.

  “Oliver—that’s my….that’s him. He’s going to meet me at the airport when I come home and take me to our new apartment.” She wrapped her hands in her bathrobe sleeves. “I changed my ticket. So I’m coming home a week earlier than my parents are expecting me.”

  I did some quick math. “Are you staying through spring school?”

  “No. My, um, my parents expect me to stay for the spring break mission trip, but I’m going to go home instead.”

  “That’s about four months from now.” Dani seemed to be doing the same math I was. If Gretchen was going to have a baby, it wasn’t going to be while she was here at school.”

  “I’m just afraid that if it comes out because of…of what happened to Rolf…my parents will find out.”

  “What if they did?” I kept my tone as neutral as I could. We were getting somewhere with Gretchen, I thought, which was good for my Bible-teacher goals, but wasn’t helping us solve the murder this morning,

  “I expect they’d make us get it annulled.” Her eyes started to water.

  Dani narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. “Would they have a case for it?”

  “I don’t know what it takes.”

  “You can’t get annulled if you have been sleeping together, I know that much.” Dani’s tone changed, gone was the sympathetic friend.

  “Dani…”

  The tears spilled out of Gretchen’s eyes and rolled down her round cheeks.

  “I think annulments vary state to state…” I said, but what did I know?

  “We got married at the airport. The day I left.” She spoke between sniffles, the kind a person does to hide that they are crying, or to try and stop crying. Really wet sniffles. “So they can probably get it annulled. Because it was only a couple of hours before the plane took off, and we…um…we didn’t have a chance to leave the airport.” She started chewing her lip. Again.

  Dani clasped her hands behind her back and turned away. She took a step, and then turned back. I assumed this was her best go at pacing in my tiny office. I would have joined her, had there been room. A marriage that hadn’t been consummated had just made the probably-pregnant-Gretchen situation much, much worse.

  “But isn’t an annulment what you’d really like?” Dani lifted one eyebrow. “Wouldn’t that make the situation with Garret much, much better?

  “Dani!” This time I yelled at her, in my most professional teacher-voice.

  Gretchen jumped, knocking the chair over behind her. “I don’t. I never. I didn’t say that…” She swiped at her wet cheeks with her bathrobe sleeve.

  “Dani, pull yourself together or I am going to ask you to leave this office.”

  Gretchen’s eyes flew open, like she was more scared of that prospect than of Dani keeping up her interrogation.

  “I, I…” Gretchen took a deep breath. “I think getting married was a dumb thing to do.” She plopped back down in her chair.

  “Do you want to call your parents and ask them to help you get out of it?” I wasn’t trying to suggest that—I’m a man that has a high regard for marriage vows, even if they were made in haste. But I was trying to work out what this kid actually wanted.

  “Isaac!” This time Dani yelled at me. “Marriage vows are sacred!”

  “That’s it.” I stood up. “We’re all getting out of th
is office, right now. We’re going to see Dr. Hoffen.”

  “No! Don’t ask me to do that.” Gretchen’s voice had shrunk to a whisper, and this time she pushed past the folding chair, scrabbled for the door knob, wrestled the door open, and ran down the hallway.

  “Great job, Professor.” Dani shot her accusing eye at me this time.

  “Go back to the dorm, Dani. I think Gretchen has had enough of you for the day.”

  Dani flipped her hair over her shoulder, shook her head at me, a look of disappointment firmly in place, and left.

  Gretchen had made it outside. I watched her stumble through the snow to the main building, maybe to use the school phone. Maybe to find a quiet place to hide.

  A familiar little green Saab pulled into an empty parking space in front of the main building. Johanna had come for the day.

  She hadn’t heard about Rolf yet, I bet.

  Johanna popped open the trunk of her car, and hefted a cardboard crate from it. Then she seemed to notice the squad cars parked up and down the long curving driveway onto campus.

  She scratched her head under her woolie hat, but she shrugged the crate onto her hip, and went around the side of the building to the kitchen door.

  I grabbed my coat and headed out. Someone was going to have to talk to Johanna, and better me than the very shaken Gretchen.

  I caught up with her at the door to the kitchen, and held it open.

  “Good morning.” Johanna’s face lacked the cheerful sparkle that it sometimes had. I assumed that was due to the expense of replacing the ruined salmon.

  “We need to talk.” There was no use beating around the bush. I took the heavy carton from her and carried it into the kitchen. “Last night Rolf Vaarland was murdered. He was found this morning in the hall of the boys' dorm with his head smashed in.”

  Johanna exhaled sharply. The color drained from her features, only the pink on her nose from the cold wind remained. She leaned heavily on the edge of the stainless steel counter. “Not Rolf.” Her voice was strained.

  I cleared my throat. I hadn’t expected a real grief reaction, but I ought to have. “I know you have a big to do list, but if you feel like you need to go home…”