Stones and Spark

by Sibella Giorello

  The bad news? My throat’s closed. I can't speak.

  "It's okay," the detective says. "I talked to your headmaster. He says you can show me that quarry."

  ***

  The detective drives a Camaro, black and shiny as obsidian. But it smells worse than Teddy's van.

  I hold open the door, coughing.

  "Sorry, clove cigarettes," he says. "I'm trying to quit smoking."

  "By smoking something else?"

  "I never claimed it made sense."

  The smell is so ghastly that I take my time getting in. Well, that, and I don't want to get in.

  "Did you call my parents?" I ask.

  "Mr. Ellis talked to your dad."

  Oh, crap.

  I sit in the bucket seat; so low I'm eye-level with the dash. The detective fires out of the parking lot, slides through two stop signs and guns the engine between stoplights. The trip seems to take two minutes, yet he manages to ask dozens of questions. What is Drew like, how did she feel about moving to New York, how did I happen to find her shoe yesterday? He even asks me about Burgers & Brains—our Friday nights at Titus's place. The detective knows so much about us that when we pull up to the quarry, I feel spooked, like he might know about me trespassing in the tunnel, too.

  He parks the shiny car at the far edge. "You alright seeing this again?"

  "Fine." I open the door.

  There are so many people here it almost doesn't look like the same place as yesterday. Dusty-looking guys wearing ball caps stand beside the big equipment. They look like quarry workers. But there are also two police officers near a Richmond cruiser, and a woman stepping out of a white panel van that is unmarked, except for the seal on the door that shows Blindfolded Lady Justice holding her scale. Richmond's motto runs around her in Latin.

  Sic itur ad astra.

  I know Latin, and I know that motto because it's in my dad's courtroom too.

  Thus one goes to the stars.

  For the first time, those words make me shudder.

  The other huge difference from yesterday is yellow crime-scene tape has been staked around the mound of quarry soil. Which isn't a mound anymore. The soil’s been spread out. I see one plastic marker, right about where we found her shoe. It has the number ‘one’ on it.

  I follow Detective Holmgren over to the tape. I see another person, a guy with a camera. He wears hospital scrubs over his clothing. The woman from the van also wears scrubs. She is kneeling near where we found Drew's shoe.

  "Mary Wade?" Detective Holmgren calls out.

  She looks up, an annoyed expression on her face. But as soon as she sees me, she smiles.

  The detective introduces us. Mary Wade Cavanaugh. She is with the Evidence Collection Unit.

  "Mary Wade used to be a detective," he adds. "Now she does honest work."

  She ignores his comment and starts asking me a bunch of questions. Some of them are repeats from the car ride over. But she seems way more interested in where, exactly, the shoe was found. Naturally, if she's collecting evidence.

  Only by the fourth or fifth question, I realize she's more interested in how I found it than where.

  "The soil looked unnatural," I tell her.

  "Unnatural." She glances at the detective.

  "Not like the rest of the soil around it," I add.

  "So you've been to this quarry a lot?"

  "No."

  "Then how did you know something looked . . . unnatural?"

  I don't want to get Teddy in trouble. Or DeMott. So I say, "I study a lot of geology. I know a little about rocks and soil."

  Mary Wade smiles again. I don't like her smile.

  Detective Holmgren opens a notebook, just like the one Officer Lande wrote in when listening to Jayne and Rusty.

  I tell myself that I am not paranoid.

  “Raleigh,” Mary Wade Cavanaugh says, "does Drew have a boyfriend?"

  "What—? No."

  "How about online? Does she meet guys online?"

  “No!”

  "But you really wouldn't know if she was in some chat room, would you? She could've met some guy. Romantically."

  "Drew's interested in one guy."

  Mary Wade's eyebrows shoot up. "Name?"

  "Richard P. Feynman."

  "How do you spell that?" asks Detective Holmgren.

  "Don't bother," I tell him. "He's dead."

  They both looked stunned, so I explain who Feynman is, and that Drew is, in fact, totally infatuated with him.

  Once again Mary Wade Cavanaugh is giving me that condescending smile. "You girls sure sound smart."

  "Drew's smart."

  "And you're humble," she says. "Do you remember what time you came back?"

  “Back where?”

  “Sorry.” Her smile's probably supposed to look friendly, but to me it looks more like she's trying to cover up a toothache. "Officer Lande's report said you went looking for Drew on Friday afternoon. You checked the school. Then you came back that night."

  "That's right."

  "And you saw Drew's bike when you came back the second time?"

  I nod.

  "So what time did you come back?"

  "Exactly?"

  She smiles. "As close as possible."

  "I left my house around eleven thirty, I think," I tell her, skipping right over the sneaking out part.

  "On foot?" she asks.

  "I ran."

  "How far is it from your house to St. Catherine's?"

  "Two miles."

  Holmgren asks, "How long does it take you to run that?"

  "I was tired, it was late. So probably fifteen minutes."

  "Fast," he mutters.

  Mary Wade smiles. "And then what happened?"

  "The dance was going on. You know, Homecoming. I saw her bike. And it wasn't there before. And I knew she wouldn't go to the dance."

  "Because she's infatuated with a dead scientist," Mary Wade says.

  I hesitate, not sure of her tone. "I asked for, uh, permission to go into the school to find her." This is not a lie--I did ask. "When I got to the Physics lab, I saw her jacket and stuff. But I couldn't find her anywhere. I came back outside, and her bike was still there. And that's when I noticed the lock wasn't right."

  "Not right, how?"

  "Drew always twists the cable twice, to make the sign for infinity. You know, a figure eight?”

  She smiles. "I'm aware of what the sign for infinity looks like."

  Right.

  "But the cable only looped once through her spokes. Plus the combination's numbers weren't set at zero. Like she always does."

  When I glance at Detective Holmgren, he stops writing. I get that paranoid feeling again. If life is like this for my mom, I really feel sorry for her.

  “And you're positive her bike wasn't at school when you came by in the afternoon?"

  "Positive." I describe the plumbing truck.

  "Did you get a license plate?"

  "No."

  Mary Wade says, "Funny you would miss that, being so observant and all."

  "What time was that?" the detective asks. "When you saw the truck?”

  “Around five-thirty.”

  Mary Wade asks, "Five-thirty—exactly?"

  “Five-thirty-ish.”

  She smiles. The time seems really important to her. And with each question, she smiles even harder. The questions start making me doubt my own memory. Maybe it was closer to six p.m. Maybe I didn't come back around 11:30. Maybe earlier. Or later.

  “If you need the exact time," I say, "you should check the time logs."

  "What time logs?"

  "In the limousines. Everybody rents those things for the dances, and I'm sure the drivers have to report where they are and what time. I saw a white one pull up right after I got there. A girl named MacKenna Fielding was riding inside."

  They look at each other. Mary Wade stops smiling.

  "Is something wrong?" I ask.

  "Oh, no," Mary Wade says. "It just
goes along with what we heard about you two."

  I feel that cold thing icing my spine. "What did you hear?"

  "Your headmaster says the two of you like doing experiments."

  The cold thing sinks deeper.

  "Raleigh," asks Detective Holmgren, "why do you say Drew didn't run away?"

  "Because she didn't."

  "She's run away before."

  "Just because somebody does something once, they don't automatically do it again."

  "No," says Mary Wade, slowly, "but that behavior is what we call precedent. You might not know what that—"

  "I know what precedent means. For a crime. But whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Doesn't that rule higher than precedent?"

  Detective Holmgren laughs. Mary Wade shoots him a look. He stops.

  "Sorry," he says. "I just think Raleigh would make a good detective someday."

  "Yes." Mary Wade smiles. "In fact, maybe she wants to be one now."

  I freeze. Totally freeze.

  "Wouldn't it be fun," she continues, "to see how long it took the silly adults to figure out what you two did?"

  "No."

  "You're keeping secrets.”

  My blood betrays me, flushing into my face. I have secrets—just not the ones she thinks. And I can't tell her that. So I stand there, my face getting redder and redder.

  She smiles. "Raleigh, is there something you want to tell us?"

  "I don't think so."

  "This whole place." She opens her arms. The latex gloves covering her hands are dotted with grains of soil. "We haven't found any more evidence. At all. But somehow you knew to look under that giant pile of soil. So maybe you could tell us: What should we do next?"

  My dad's courtroom has taught me a lot of things. I could say the same for dealing with my mom. Because among the most crucial, vital, important things a person can know is when to plead the Fifth.

  So I stand there, and say nothing more.

  Mary Wade Cavanaugh gives me another smile.

  Which really isn't a smile at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When the detective drops me off at school, seventeen minutes remain in fourth period. And wouldn't you know, Parsnip is waiting at the front entrance.

  "Straight to class, Miss Harmon," she says.

  I walk down the hall, slow as cold sap dripping down a tree. My Rossetti poetry book smells like the clove smoke from the detective's car. The musky odor wafts around me, telling me that what just happened wasn't a dream. Though it sure felt like a nightmare.

  At Sandbag's classroom, I peek through the side window. He stands front and center, pontificating. I know what will happen if I open the door.

  "Miss Harmon!" The voice skitters down the empty hall.

  I turn to see Parsnip, glaring from the other end.

  Somewhere in America, a prison is missing its warden.

  When I open the door, Sandbag is mid-sentence. He stops talking and I step inside, keeping my eyes on the polished floor, walking toward my desk, praying to become the definition of unobtrusive, obsequious, any of the vocabulary words he's thrown at us.

  But no.

  "Well, well, well," he says. "Miss Harmon. How lovely. But please don't take your seat. Come. Stand at the front of the class."

  Oh, God. Help!

  "Since you've inserted yourself into the classroom to receive full attention, I presume your homework is completed. Do give us the honor, won't you? Please recite Christina Rossetti's fabled lines of lyricism?"

  I know, I'm supposed to acknowledge alliteration—recite Rossetti/lines of lyricism—but my brain's first trying to recall the poem.

  Nothing.

  In the heavy silence that follows, Cassandra Jameson raises her suck-up hand. Sandbag lets her recites the lines.

  "Extremely well delivered, Miss Jameson."

  I fix my gaze on the empty chair in the back row. Drew sits there. Only now the chair looks so wiped down, so washed clean of every trace of her, it's like she never existed. Which would be fine by Sandbag. He probably hates Drew even more than Ellis and Parsnip. Suddenly I look at him. He was here Friday night. He saw her. And it was here, in this same classroom, that Drew showed him what she's made of—and he isn't. Three years ago. The Monday after she'd run away, and Sandbag, purposefully, made sure to post two new vocabulary words on the white board: impudent and vainglorious. He stood here in front of our then sixth grade English class and enunciated each syllable, all the while looking directly at the girl in the back row with the wild brown hair doodling out a math theorem on the pages of her Norton Anthology.

  "Miss Levinson," he had intoned. "You—more than anyone—should memorize the definitions of impudent and vainglorious.

  “Sure,” she said, not looking up. "And when you're done talking, I have a challenge word for you."

  Challenge words. Sandbag's way of showing off. We brought words to stump him. He always knew the meanings.

  "Oh, pray tell," he replied. "What could your challenge word possibly be, Miss Levinson?"

  "Catachresis."

  There followed one of the most significant silences of my life. Weighty and delicious. Like some Christmas fruitcake that could be used as doorstop. That heavy. We waited. And waited. And I remember looking from Sandbag over to Drew. Back and forth.

  The clock ticked.

  "At this particular moment," Sandbag replied, finally, "I cannot recall the definition."

  Drew looked up. "Catachresis."

  Then she spelled it—enunciating each letter like a champion at the national Bee. “Catachresis, the misuse or strained use of words, sometimes for rhetorical effect.”

  Right then, I knew she was great.

  Not good. Great.

  And now she is not here. Not anywhere.

  "Open your poetry book, Miss Harmon."

  I open the pages. The scent of cloves rises and suddenly I see the quarry, the sand, Mary Wade Cavanaugh smiling at me.

  "Begin at the third stanza," he says.

  My throat is closing. I force out the words. “’Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before.’”

  "Continue."

  "'Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?'" I clear my throat.

  "Continue!"

  "'They will not keep you standing at that door.'"

  I stare at the page. My eyes sting. The words are suddenly blurry.

  Do. Not. Cr—

  "Look at me, Miss Harmon."

  I squint, holding back the water in my eyes.

  He peers over his half-glasses.

  "We, in the royal sense of the plural pronoun, would appreciate your assenting to join our conversations at their appointed times. Your tardy arrival now means you will explain this stanza's enigmatic envoys."

  "Assonance," I whisper for enigmatic envoys.

  "Correct. I've used assonance. Now what is Miss Rossetti telling us?"

  I run my eyes over the words. The words shift. Pop up. Rhymes out of context. Night. Before. Call. Door.

  "Hellooooo," he says. "Earth to Miss Harmon, come in, Miss Harmon!"

  I hear their giggles.

  "I think," I clear my throat. "I think Rossetti is saying if you want something done, do it yourself."

  I hear laughter now. His face is filled with merriment, mockery.

  "What a prosaic interpretation, Miss Harmon, particularly given this poem's powerful lyricism."

  Stuff your alliteration, you windbag.

  He lifts the book of poetry over his head, holding it like some holy sacrifice.

  "What Miss Rossetti is saying is an admonishment—Ask! And she says it shall be given. Seek! And you shall find. Knock! And the door will be opened—"

  I walk toward my desk. Sandbag keeps crying out, giving one of his all-time hysterical performances. Everyone is scribbling, committing his words to their notebooks because the best grade goes to whoever can repeat exactly what Sandbag says. Not what Rossetti wrote.
/>   "Seize the opportunity—"

  I sit down and open my own notebook, scribbling down one line:

  That's what I said.

  ***

  When the final bell finally rings, I head straight for the bathroom, slide into a stall and wriggle out of my uniform. Changing into jeans and a t-shirt, I dance around to avoid all the toilet paper on the floor.

  As I open the stall door, I see that somebody's left another giant lipstick kiss on the mirror. Once again, it feels like some kind of personal jab, a joke about kissing my life goodbye. Then again, maybe I really am paranoid.

  I don't find Teddy in the Earth Sciences lab. But judging by the crystallized white foam on the counters, he just finished teaching middle schoolers about erosion rates for calcium carbonates. I sweep up the gritty aftermath produced by dripping vinegar and lemon juice on marble and limestone, and empty the dustbin in the trashcan. I bang the bin on the can's side, over and over again.

  It feels so good to hit something.

  Then I twist my hair into a ponytail, rip off a sheet of butcher paper, and lay it on the counter. I am digging through my backpack for the film canister that holds the soil from Drew's shoe when Teddy rolls into the room.

  "Okey dokey." His red hair lifts off his forehead, unfurling like a stiff flag. "You know what to do, right?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "Then I did too much last time."

  "Bullcrap."

  His eyebrows shoot up. "Well I'll be a horse at the races—Raleigh Harmon speaks an unvarnished word."

  "I've had it."

  "Good!"

  "Stop it—you know something's wrong. You knew we needed to get this soil from her shoe. So stop teasing me and start helping."

  "Anybody ever tell you deduction suits you?"

  "I mean it." I snap open the film canister, grab the tweezers, pour the soil on the paper.

  "Let's consider your hypothesis," Teddy says, rolling closer. "In fact, let's consider your scatoma."

  "My . . . what?"

  "Blind spot. Drew's got every reason to run away. You heard her mom. They're moving. The woman isn't changing her mind."

  "The woman's a drunk."

  "More unvarnished words. It's good. Just don't get biggidy with 'em."

  Biggidy. That's Hillbilly for "prideful."

  I scrap the canister with the tweezers. Less than an ounce of soil, and the grain sizes all over the place.