Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  God help me, he thought. I just titrett, tize gauntlet down.

  10

  Broken

  Dreams When he phoned Monika and told her what he'd done, she was startled and also a little angry. "Why did you do that, Frank?" "to unnerve her."

  "I understand. But look what happened. You also unnerved yourself." "Yeah, well, I think it was worth it."

  "Listen to me." Her voice was urgent. "She's a dangerous woman. What if she comes after you?"

  "With an ice pick and a pot of glue? Don't worry about that. She's the most contemptible type of criminal, a coward. There's nothing she can do to me now. Without her hatchet woman, she's impotent."

  There was a pause at the other end. "I wonder if you aren't too close to this." "Spare me, please, Monika. You sound like Kit."

  "Maybe Kit's right. You despise Beverly Archer, don't you?"

  "Let's say I don't like her very much." He paused. "Okay, I despise her," he admitted.

  "Is that a healthy way to relate to someone you're trying to prove committed a crime?" "I don't know whether it's healthy, Monika. But I assure you I'm under control. Anyway, there's no law that says I can't have feelings about my work."

  "No one objects to your feelings, Frank," she said quietly. "I just don't want to see you hurt yourself over this."

  On New Year's Day Aaron called from Cleveland: "Time for you to come out here, Frank."

  The next morning, the first workday of the new year, Janek flew to the Midwest. Gray skies, a vast frozen lake, plumes of industrial smoke, a furious late-winter storm. His plane circled Hopkins Airport for three-quarters of an hour. Concerned stewardesses with glossy brows and frozen smiles paced nervously. After numerous unctuous announcements from the captain, the plane started down through impenetrable sleet, an endless descent, it seemed to Janek, until finally, unexpectedly, it landed hard. When it jerked to a stop, the relieved passengers applauded and shook their heads. The captain, face red, collar tight, stood nodding at the door. The collected crew wished everyone a happy New Year, a safe continuing journey, and, in the event Cleveland was the final destination, a most pleasant stay.

  Aaron was waiting for him by the gate. He hustled Janek into his rental car, then drove into the city on an elevated highway.

  "What kind of town is this?" Janek asked, looking down at gas stations, commercial strips, snow-crusted parking lots, endless blocks of drab gray buildings. Aaron pondered the question. Then he looked up. "Mind if I wax poetic, Frank?" Janek laughed. "Be my guest."

  "Cleveland," Aaron intoned sonorously, "is a Rust Belt town of broken dreams." I Janek nodded; he liked that. And staring out the window, he also decided he liked the town. Perhaps because of the deliberate lack of any appliqu6 of glamour, he found it oddly glamorous.

  Aaron laid out their schedule. He'd arranged three interviews for the afternoon. In his preliminary meetings with the people he hadn't told them much, just that a lieutenant of detectives was coming from New York to ask them questions about Beverly Archer. The case, he'd told them, was important and at this stage, highly confidential. As there were as yet no indictments, informants had been assured their cooperation would be held in confidence.

  Something about the way Aaron was talking signaled Janek that he was holding back. "You find something?"

  "Yep." Aaron grinned.

  "Going to keep it a secret?"

  "I think you're going to be surprised," was all Aaron would say.

  Their motel, a standard low, sprawling complex, was situated beside a remote shopping mall. Janek checked in, unpacked his stuff, washed his face, then examined himself in the standard motel-room mirror. His tan, acquired in Mexico, had all but disappeared. What he saw was a middle-aged man in an inexpensive business suit with lines in his forehead and bags beneath his eyes. But he noticed something special about this man. He looks like a guy who doesn't give up. The idea of that made him feel good. He descended briskly to the lobby, then out to the portico.

  "Okay, Aaron," he said, getting into the car, "I'm ready. Let's toll."

  Their first stop was the Ashley-Bumett School for Girls. they drove awhile, entered a posh suburb of impressive homes, then came to an open gate which Janek at first took to be the entrance to a park. A discreet sign pointed the way down a winding, treelined drive. The campus extended on either side, athletic fields and lavish lawns covered with snow, crisscrossed by wellshoveled paths. Finally the school proper came into view, an impressive vine-covered red-brick building with two extended wings.

  "This is one ritzy setup," Aaron aid as he drove into the visitors' lot.

  "I didn't know real people sent their kids to joints like this."

  As they walked to the administration building, Janek could hear the shrill cries of girls and the scampering of little female feet through the windows of what he took to be the school gym.

  "How long did Beverly go here?"

  "All twelve grades," Aaron said. "Old Bertha Parce was her high school English teacher." He glanced at Janek. "But later Beverly came back. It was just after she got her Ph.D. She spent a year in Cleveland trying to build up a practice. She was just starting out. Referrals were few and far between. to keep herself busy and make ends meet, she wangled herself a part-time job at her old alma mater as student counselor and school shfink." The headmaster's secretary, a pretty young woman in a naw skirt. asked them if they wouldn't mind waiting a few minutes in the reception area.

  Aaron sat on a soft leather couch, while Janek inspected the display of school memorabilia on the walls.

  There was a glass case full of trophies, most of them for arcane sports such as field hockey and equestrian dressage. There was an ornately framed wooden plaque emblazoned with the words "Head Girl" and the names of young women, student leaders in their respective years. There were also numerous class photographs. Janek asked Aaron what year Beverly was graduated. Aaron checked his notebook. "Class of '68," he said.

  Janek found the picture, inspected it closely. Two dozen girls, all wearing the same school uniform of white blouse and blue and red tartan skirt, were posed in two rows before the main building of Ashley-Bumett.

  He discovered Beverly in the second row on the end. She was standing slightly apart from her classmates. There was something separate, distant about her, something slightly alienated in her posture. But her face bore the same half-smile he had come to know so well, the thin-lipped half-smile that said "I have superior knowledge" and "Don't get too close."

  "Mr. Bramhall will see you now."

  Janek turned. The pretty secretary motioned them toward an inner door. Janek and Aaron followed her across polished parquet floors into a spacious creamcolored office. A handsome man in a beautifully tailored tweed jacket rose from behind an antique partner's desk.

  "You must be Lieutenant Janek. I'm Jud Bramhall," he said, extending, his hand.

  Janek studied @hini while they made small talk about the brutal Cleveland weather. He and Bramhall, he decided, were about the same aae, but there the resemblance stopped. Bramhall had the patrician good looks and arched eyebrows of an affable old-fashioned WASP politician, the kind that can't get elected in an American city anymore.

  He had the same kind of old money voice as Stanton Dorance, a voice that spoke of a fine eastern education and all the privileges attendant thereto.

  "Sergeant Greenberg tells me you want a briefing on Bev Archer's sojourn here as school psychologist."

  Janek was pleased by Bramhall's crisp announcement that it was time to discuss the matter at hand.

  "A certain confidentiality implicit in our relationships with former staff precludes my getting too specific. But after counsulting with our attorney, and based on the gravity of the matter, as explained by the sergeant here, I'm prepared to fill you in on a background-only basis. For anything more than that I'll require a subpoena."

  Janek nodded. "That's fine. We're just trying to get a sense of what she was like."

  Bramhall pulled a pipe from
a rack on his desk, stuffed it with tobacco.

  Then he leaned back, a signal he was going to be expansive. Watching him, Janek had the feeling Bramhall would tell his tale well.

  "It was a strange thing that happened with Bev…

  The events he described occurred in 1977. The school, Bramhall didn't mind admitting now, was then a fairly troubled institution. There were drug problems, student pregnancies, a general breakdown in discipline. Nothing that wasn't going on at other independent schools at the time, but he, Bramhall, had been appointed headmaster only two years before, he was the first male head in the history of Ashley-Bumett, and he was anxious to make innovations and turn the school around. So the idea came to him that a trained psychologist ought to be available to any student needing help. He took it to the board of trustees, the concept was approved, and then someone brought up Beverly Archer's name. She was qualified, she had just gotten her degree, and, best of all, as a fairly young alumna she would be in a position to identify with the particular problems of Ashley-Bumett girls, pertaining to the school and also to their social lives outside.

  "We are, after all, a fairly special group." Bramhall finally lit his pipe. "We have minority students, and we hope to recruit more as times goes on. But basically our function is to educate the daughters of Cleveland's older families. I make no apologies for that. Ashley-Bumett is an elite school. We consider ourselves the equal of any young women's academy in the East."

  He made this last statement with uncondescending pride, a pride Janek could not help admiring. The man carried the torch for a world he must know was increasing irrelevant, yet he did so without apology.

  "That first autumn, when Bev came on board, I thought I'd made a pretty smart move. Here was an intelligent, well-motivated young woman eager to help her old school get back on track. And I have to admit that in the beginning at least things did seem to improve. As troubled kids turned to her for guidance, student and faculty morale tilted up. I got some calls from parents, too, always complimentary. A staff psychologist was a reat idea. Why hadn't we thought of it before?"

  But then, Bramhall admitted sadly, the euphoria of autumn began to turn.

  The winter term was always the hardest, he said, always the low point of the year. Cleveland's harsh climate was partially responsible. The gray skies and miserable cold forced everyone indoors. Kids caught the flu. Corridors resounded with sniffles and coughs. All educators are familiar with the phenom enon, a species of cabin fever that leads inevitably to a lowering of morale. But that particular winter, the winter of '78, seemed worse than usual. There was something indefinably miserable in the air. Bramhall, naturally concerned, called a number of staff meetings. Beverly, he remembered, kept fairly quiet. At the time he attributed that to shyness; she was new to the school and possibly intimidated by older staff. Then one weekend in late February disaster struck. A senior girl, a very popular one, too, hanged herself at home.

  The suicide turned what had been a very dark winter term into a totally black one. In such a situation extensive counseling was called for, and Beverly seem to rise to the occasion. But then, ten days later, a second girl hanged herself, this time in the school gym. Her dangling body was discovered by a group of eighth graders, all of them deeply traumatized by the sight. And then the truth came out. Two other girls came forward and admitted to the existence of a "suicide club." Bramhall moved quickly to break it up.

  "I still don't know exactly what it was about," he said, relighting his pipe. "Were the two hangings actually suicides or the result of a strange sex practice called autoerotic asphyxia that was then finding its way into various Ohio schools? But what did come out-and to me this was the most shocking aspect of the whole affair-was that not only had the two dead girls been seeing Bev Archer for counseling, but other members of the 'club,' in fact, a majority of them, had been seeing her as well. I want to make something clear. There was an understanding that if a girl wanted to see the quote school shrink unquote, she was under no obligation to tell anyone, nor would Bev report the consultation to either the school or the girl's parents.

  Total confidentiality was to apply; that was the whole idea. But I never expected Bev would take the ruleso literally, especially after a girl who was in her charge took her own life. When I found out that both dead girls had been her patients, I couldn't believe my ears. The way it looked, Bev was the common thread in the affair. Bramhall angrily tapped his pipe against the top of his desk. "She might as well have been that damn suicide club's faculty adviser." Janek could see that the shock of that revelation had still not abated, even after so many years.

  "Bev was quite broken up by the suicides, of course. 'My fault,' she told me. 'Those girls were in my care, and I let them down.' She wept a lot and beat her breast. I felt she was sincere. But still, with her arrival, it seemed something almost… evil entered Ashley-Bumett. Well, whether she was responsible or not, I couldn't countenance her not keeping me informed. She clearly wasn't up to the job. I told her to take leave and that at the end of the term I'd have to let her go, as, of course, I did…

  Bramhall fell silent for a time. Then he opened a file folder on his desk and removed a sheet of paper. "That spring Bev left Cleveland and moved to New York to start her career again. A couple of years later I received a letter from a Dr. Carl Drucker at a psychiatric hospital in Derby, Connecticut. He wrote that Bev had given my name as a reference and asked if I could recommend her for a part-time staff position."

  Bramhall handed Janek the sheet he'd been holding. "Here's a copy of my response. I'm ashamed to admit it. Lieutenant. but as you can see. I recommended her."

  As they followed a freshly shoveled path back to the visitors' parking lot, they ran into a group of AshleyBurnett students walking the other way. The girls, redcheeked, bundled in goose down coats, their tartan hats powdered lightly with snow, smiled demurely as they passed.

  "Aren't they gorgeous!" Aaron exclaimed. "Aren't they the healthiest-looking kids!"

  Janek nodded. The girls did indeed look healthy. The thought that Beverly Archer had brought her sickness into this academic Eden filled him with a sad and poignant fury.

  Back in the car they didn't talk much. Bramhall's tale spoke for itself. Now they knew about two more young lives Beverly had screwed up. How many others, Janek wondered, could there be?

  Aaron's next stop was a handsome slate-roofed, stuccowith-inset-timbers house on the edge of Shaker Heights.

  "Beverly's kid sister's place," Aaron explained, as he parked in front.

  "Mildred Archer, now Mildred Archer Cannaday. Nice gal. Very informal. Two teenage kids. Local tennis champ. Call her Millie, Frank; she likes that. Her husband's a big shot cardiologist."

  Millie Cannady looked so different from her sister that at first Janek couldn't believe that they were siblings. He was persuaded only when he heard Millie speak; then he recognized Beverly's accent.

  Millie was a tall, robust, handsome woman in her mid-thirties who moved with the light, liquid grace of an athlete. In certain ways she reminded Janek of Fran Dunning: her relaxed, friendly manner, so unlike the tense guardedness he'd observed in Beverly, and the straightforward way she made eye contact. But above all, there was a pervading aura of good health and of being comfortable within. After only two minutes in her presence, Janek knew that Mildred Archer Cannaday was not and never had been a wallflower. The interview took place in a gracious, wellproportioned sunken living room with tall leaded windows at either end. French doors led out to a terrace with a view over a park behind the house. The furnishings consisted of twin chintz-upholstered couches, dark wood side tables, old-fashioned lamps, framed family photos displayed on the top of a baby grand piano, and fine Oriental rugs spread on a polished chestnut floor. Janek felt he was in the home of successful well-adjusted people, so unlike the effect of Beverly's minimalist office and her medieval bedchamber, dominated by the shrine to her mother.

  When finally they settled down and Aaron brought up Bev
erly's name, Millie Cannaday sadly shook her head.

  "Poor Bev. Such a miserable, unhappy woman. When I think of what she could have been… It's been a pretty long time since the two of us have really talked. It's not that we've become estranged. It's just that in the last few years she's become so weird. Oh, we exchange Christmas cards and call each other on our respective birthdays, and she usually remembers my kids' birthdays, too, and sends them a little check, four dollars or something ridiculous like that. I think last year she actually sent each of them five."

  Millie's eyes twinkled. "It isn't that she's stingy, you understand. Bev can't help herself She was always tight, ungiving, retentive-isn't that the word? Well, I'm no psychologist, Lieutenant. I don't know the terminology. But I do know what happened to my sister and whose fault it was. Our mother's. Mama was the one who ruined Bev's life."

  As Millie Cannady launched into an extended monologue, Janek could feel the interview slipping into the kind of deeply felt reminiscence by which a speaker dredges up old memories and purges conflicts from his past.

  "It's sad to say. But I'm afraid it's just that simple. Our mother was a totally self-centered person. Oh, she was beautiful. Everyone thought so. 'Victoria Archer's the most beautiful woman in Cleveland,' people used to say. And talented. Mama was very talented. At her height she was probably the best nightclub singer in town. With the right kind of luck she might have gone on to become a national star. God knows, she had the ambition for it, but I think underneath she was afraid of going up against the best. So she stayed out here, a nice enough place, as I'm sure you've noticed, Lieutenant. We actually have it pretty good in Cleveland. Great orchestra. World-class art museum. Fine university. But still, it's Cleveland, isn't it?" Millie's eyes twinkled again. "We can get pretty defensive about that. We don't like it when our town gets a cheap laugh on a talk show or when someone calls it the mistake on the lake with a knowing little sneer. Mama always said she hated it here. Funny, isn't it, that she stayed here her entire life? She was born here. And this is where she died."