In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  I didn’t get it. A lot of taggers used their neighborhood, their street number, for example, but there wasn’t any Eighty-eighth Street that I knew of.

  “It’s part and parcel of the evil encircling us,” Lowell said. He was obviously fond of that image.

  I wondered if Aunt Melba knew what a sicky her nephew was. Worse—I wondered if my mother knew, and was so desperate about my single status that she didn’t care.

  “It’s their mark.” Lowell’s voice trembled with emotion. “H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Two eights represent two H’s.”

  My irritation with his pseudodrama, with his entire being, must have been visible at this point, because Lowell pointed at me and with still-greater dramatic flair. “I am not crazy!” he shouted, or as close to a shout as you can get in a tremulous, whiny voice.

  “Of course you’re not,” Sasha said. “But you’re not comprehensible, either, sweetie. Aren’t you going to tell us what’s the big deal about those two eights that might also be H’s?”

  “Aitch, aitch,” he yelped, like a yappy dog. “It’s code! It stands for, ‘Heil, Hitler.’”

  I stopped laughing, even silently, at him.

  The shadows of the recessed entryway of Mother Bethel, symbol of human dignity, reached out to the sidewalk, blotted away the sun and spread darkness over the street. And deep in its shadow, I thought I could see Flora, screaming.

  I backed off from the building, from the bloodred loops on its doors, before they encircled me as well.

  Eleven

  “I STUDY THE PHENOMENON,” LOWELL SAID.

  Sasha was still trying to document the outrage on the church’s front doors, twisting to the left and right, moving in for closer angles, back for the play of light and shadow.

  “This is the fourth recent eighty-eight sighting,” he went on. “Previously, there was a rash in Bucks County, but it’s spreading, growing ever more powerful. And you, Mandy Pepper, could be in danger because of your open friendship with one of their targets.”

  “Flora?”

  He nodded. “You appear a sympathizer. You put your arms around her today. You comforted her. Everyone saw.”

  “Please.”

  Lowell’s zealot’s eye and mouth were not to be stopped. I was being punished for hypocrisy. I vowed to never again try to be nice to anyone I instinctively disliked. Even if they were shaving-impaired.

  “Or perhaps this is a new group,” he said. Sasha clicked a few more times. I wondered how many shots of a door one person could take. “A more subtle, and therefore more dangerous cadre.” I was no longer sure what Lowell was talking about, only that I didn’t want to hear it. “After all, nothing is signed per se, and there are none of the indications that it’s one of the groups with which I am familiar. Still, the defilement of graveyards, the harassment, the abduction—”

  “April’s abduction doesn’t fit,” I said, rather snappishly. “It doesn’t make sense in your context.”

  “In what context does it make sense?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. But it only makes sense in the way that nothing makes sense today. In the sense of urban crime, in the sense of bad things happening to good people, as random, senseless violence. That’s where it fits. Nobody left a note, or made a phone call or gave it any symbolic, larger meaning, the way they did on the doors.”

  “That sort of naïveté lulls people like you into a sense of false complacency,” Lowell said. “As your friend, I have your best interests at heart, and I’m warning you: be alert. Sometimes, their only goal is chaos, so of course, you can’t figure out the sense of it.”

  He gave me the creeps, and I wondered if he wasn’t like the pyromaniacs who started fires and even fought them, like the preachers who railed against the very sins of the flesh that occupied their free time. Lowell doth protest too much. What made him obsessively interested in hate groups? Was he really only a worried observer? “There isn’t a single skinhead at school, if you’re saying that the business with Flora’s classroom is a—”

  “They’ve gotten craftier. You can’t identify a neo-Nazi by a look or an outfit anymore,” he said. “It could be the clean-cut young man next to you, the ordinary-looking—”

  Sasha snapped the cap back on her lens. It sounded like a sonic boom. “I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Lowell,” she said loudly, “or frivolous to think of food given the state of the world and the many plots against its people, but Mandy arid I, we had this date and I’ve made us late already, so if you’ll excuse us?”

  “I could walk you to Reading Market,” he said. “That’s where you said you were going.”

  “Well, see, the date includes…there are others involved,” Sasha said darkly.

  He didn’t get it. “This is a big, mean city. Sometimes, even in broad daylight, it’s smart to have a male escort.”

  “You don’t have to convince me of that,” Sasha said. “I’m a male escort enthusiast. Wherever. But today we have to stop off at my apartment and do girl-things, you know?”

  Lowell, master of evil, protector of womanhood, blushed so hard that even his unshaven facial hair took on a rosy hue. “Oh, yeah, sure.” But he didn’t move, except for his brow, which furrowed. Then he remembered what men said when taking their leave. “So I’ll see you tomorrow, Mandy Pepper, right? And a pleasure to have met you, Sasha.”

  We watched his stooped shuffle for a moment, then we turned and headed north, toward the market.

  “Is he by any chance your mother’s handiwork?” Sasha asked.

  “How did you guess? Her two latest suggestions have been Lowell and—get this—that I join AA to meet men.”

  “That idea finally reached Boca Raton?”

  “You’ve heard it already?”

  “Heard it, done it. It’s ancient. First you meet them in a bar and then in AA. It’s very Eighties, though. The bookstore’s the place this decade. Better pickings and more to talk about than his recovery. My advice? Don’t fix what ain’t broke. Mackenzie ain’t broke, except for his leg. Wait till he is.”

  “Speaking of which, want to come to dinner? The slightly broken Mackenzie is limping over.”

  A while back Sasha would have gagged before suggesting I stay with C.K., and I’d as soon have invited her to join us as I’d have brought home a strange cat to share Macavity’s Tuna Delite Dinner. Which is to say, Sasha and Mackenzie spent a long time snarling, hissing, and swiping at each other, albeit metaphorically, before bonding. But now they’d forged a grudging peace and respect which made hostessing easier.

  “Couldn’t you pick him up in your car, given that he’s crippled?” she asked. “Cut him some slack?”

  “Oh, please. Nobody’s crippled anymore. He’s ambulatorily challenged. And bullheaded. Insists his sweaty walks are aerobic exercise. I think he’s crazy,” I said as we walked toward the market.

  She knew I didn’t mean Mackenzie. “Scary, too,” she added.

  “Not that it isn’t creepy to see a reference to Hitler on a church door—if we can believe that’s what those numbers meant.”

  “I still think they looked like swirls. Or four of the five rings of the Olympic symbol. Lowell seems the kind who’d find evidence of the devil in a bad hair day.”

  “But even if those were eights, and even if they meant what he said, I can’t believe everything is linked. What would April’s disappearance have to do with Hitler?”

  We walked up Sixth Street and through the Historic Park, passing Independence Square and Hall, the glassed-in Liberty Bell, and the Free Quaker Meeting House. I loved this part of town in this season, with its grassy brightness against the weathered reds and oranges of the buildings. A brick city, built so as not to burn by colonists haunted by memories of the Great Fire of London. I watched an unashamedly hokey horse wearing a flower-bedecked hat pull a buggyload of tourists, clippety-clop along the cobblestones. There was a long line curling out of the Liberty Bell’s home, and park rangers talking to groups at I
ndependence Hall. The echo and sense of crucial events was so thick it became part of the atmosphere. Here, it isn’t the heat or the humidity that gets you, it’s the history. Splendidly. All that yearning and work and struggle to build something new, glorious, and free.

  Which made the graffiti on the church doors even more revolting.

  Then I thought about April, the wretched refuse paper. “What about Chinese food?” I asked.

  “Really? Of all the options at Reading? I thought—”

  “As in Chinatown. Let’s get it there.”

  “Too far.”

  “A few extra blocks.”

  “I’m lugging this camera and the temperature is five hundred degrees and…why?”

  “Because the missing girl worked there. And was abducted there.”

  She stopped walking. “That’s disgusting! Ghoulish! I never imagined you for one of those people who buys the maps of dead stars’ houses.”

  I trudged on. Eventually she dropped the pose and caught up with me. “What is it?” she asked in an almost normal voice.

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re going to snoop? Give me a break! What do you expect to find? A vital clue that escaped everybody else, Sherlock? A matchbook from a notorious nightclub with a scribbled message only you can decode?”

  “That used to happen a lot more than nowadays. Everybody’s given up smoking. Not many scribbled-on-matchbook clues.”

  “Then what?”

  “I want to find out where she worked.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because the place she said she worked at doesn’t exist and they’re making it sound like she worked in the massage parlor, and I’m sure she didn’t.”

  “So this is to update her résumé?”

  “People search more intently for a lost student than for a lost sex worker.”

  Sasha turned left on Filbert, in the direction of the terminal, but sighed histrionically and turned right two blocks before it, toward Race Street. En route she decided that much as she loved both me and Mackenzie, she wanted to eat at her apartment and she wanted only soft pretzels with mustard as her meal. Feeling as if I were dealing with a toddler, I promised we’d go to the market for fresh-baked on our way back.

  “What now?” she asked as we crossed Arch and went through the gilded Friendship Gate that spanned the street.

  I didn’t know. The force and inertia of the walk ran out and I stopped. Two stories up, carved dragon heads looked down at me. Fool girl, they seemed to say.

  Star’s Café didn’t exist. What were the odds of finding a nonexistent place? We were on Race Street, near where Thomas used to drop off April. “Hey!” I said with a flare of anger. “How can they call the boundary of Chinatown Race Street? Talk about a lack of sensitivity—I don’t want to be the morality police, but honestly, in this day and age you’d think—”

  “What I think is that he really got to you,” Sasha said “That creep from your school. I happen to know why it’s called Race. Remember Harry from maybe two years ago?”

  I did not. It was nearly impossible keeping track of the male ships that passed Sasha in the night.

  “One of the pompous ones?” she prompted.

  “Which type?”

  “Pompous despite having achieved nothing special.”

  It’s sad when a woman has endured so many losers that she has given them taxonomic categories, phylum, class, family, genus, and species. In any case, I still didn’t remember Harry. I shook my head and continued to scan the restaurants dotting the street, as if I could X-ray them and find out which one held the afterimage of April.

  “No matter,” Sasha said. “Harry lived on Race Street, but being Harry, his stationery and his card gave his address as: Race (formerly Sassafras) Street. Which it was, but the name had been changed in the 1850s, so it wasn’t as if lots of hundred-and-sixty-year-old people who knew good old Sassafras Street needed that reminder. However, it was, as he said, a conversation starter. And since I therefore endured many a conversation about it, I know this street is called Race now because—are you ready?—races were held here. It was a track. Up Sassafras and around City Hall. Sorry. Nothing to do with sensitive issues. Just sensitive horses.”

  I guess Lowell had made me twitchy. Or Phyllis.

  “And that still doesn’t answer the question of which restaurant the kid didn’t work at,” Sasha said.

  “All I know is…she worked for a man.”

  Sasha whistled and clapped her hands. “Great!” she said, hands on hips, camera dangling from a thick strap. “That narrows the field, since it’s so unusual for a man to be the boss. Good gracious, we could probably just stand on the corner and ask the next passerby—‘Excuse me, do you know of a place where the supervisor or the owner is a man? And a girl works for him?’”

  “That’s all she said.”

  It’s amazing how little curiosity a lot of people have. An eighteen-year-old girl had disappeared in their neighborhood the night before last, and yet when Sasha and I entered a place and asked whether an April Truong had worked there, we were more often than not answered with a hostile stare, a head shake, and nothing more. Never a question as to why we wanted to know, or who April was. It was still early, not yet six P.M., and the restaurants were sparsely populated, yet there was always a great deal of plate-banging in the recesses of the dining rooms and a frenzied air to the proprietors, as if we were interrupting a particularly busy night with frivolous questions. We trudged from place to place, turning corners, exhausting a block’s possibilities and turning a corner again. “I’m sure she said it had to do with food,” I said. “She had cut herself one day. Slicing something the night before.”

  “Then she’d be a chef,” Sasha said, “and that doesn’t make sense. And why are we doing it this way, instead of asking her family?”

  “Because the newspaper said her parents knew she had a job—a respectable job, they insisted—but they thought it was at Star’s Café, and that doesn’t exist.”

  “Her brother, then? You said he picked her up.”

  “And dropped her, he says, at the corner of Tenth and Race. Where we’ve been.”

  “No wonder it’s assumed she worked at the massage parlor. To put it mildly, it sounds fishy.”

  “Are you saying we should try seafood restaurants?”

  The man who seemed our last hope was high-strung and less than hospitable. “You want to eat?” he demanded. “Come in. You want to ask questions? Go next door!”

  “He meant that metaphorically,” Sasha said.

  But he’d gotten me staring at his next-door neighbor’s establishment. BUDDY’S, it said. I went in.

  “Why?” Sasha asked as she followed me in. “It isn’t even a restaurant.”

  “Why not?” We were near the end of the grid of streets that comprised the neighborhood, almost back to the start point, the place where April had disappeared, and we hadn’t met with one friendly let alone helpful face.

  Buddy’s was a shabby convenience store, a hole-in-the-wall, with a few cans, boxes, and shrink-wrapped basics. Aspirin, salt and milk, white bread, peanut butter, and cigarettes. A store for people who couldn’t think far enough ahead to shop at a cheaper, better-stocked place, or who needed credit more often than not.

  Anywhere but in Pennsylvania, where all liquor is sold in State Stores, Buddy’s would have been well-stocked with cheap alcohol. Instead it featured bagel dogs, fried chicken, pizza, and enchiladas. Ethnic diversity meets the microwave. There was also a small copy machine, a check-cashing service, a case of canned soft drinks, and a row of periodicals, most of which featured cleavage or cars.

  A flat-faced teenage girl stood behind the counter, next to a tiny TV emitting squeals of canned laughter. “And what did you think when you saw her for the first time?” a host-type deep voice asked.

  “To tell you the truth, she wasn’t anything like the way she described herself,” another male voice said. “To s
ay she exaggerates…” The audience bellowed. “False advertising.” The audience gasped with laughter.

  “Yeah?” The girl behind the counter squinted and twirled a tendril of frizzed red hair, as if both bored and deeply suspicious of our motives for entering.

  “Mandy,” Sasha said, “this is most certainly not Star’s Café.”

  The redhead sniggered, as if that were a very funny remark, but only she knew why. Sasha and I reacted by swiveling toward her and tilting our heads in unison.

  Body language worked where direct questions might have failed. “It’s only that…” She shrugged and seemed to remember that she was supposed to be scowling. “Like my name’s Star. My last name, and this isn’t exactly a café if you haven’t noticed, more like microwave takeout heaven, which made what you said sound pretty funny.”

  “Did—do you know a girl named April Truong?” I asked.

  She squinted so fiercely she must have lost all vision. “You cops?”

  “Teachers. Her teachers,” Sasha said. I wondered what subject she was going to pretend to teach.

  Ms. Star didn’t ask. “She’s missing,” she said. “All over the news.”

  “But do you know her?”

  “Why should I? Just because maybe I did a favor for a friend who was until then my boyfriend and got her a job and then she gets like really palsy with my friend? My friend.”

  I could hear April’s voice reciting the exercise on what she had wanted. “Yesterday, I wanted to see my friend.” She couldn’t have meant this girl. But this girl’s boyfriend? I didn’t ask her to go on or explain more. This was a TV watcher, a person addicted to noise. Maybe she’d feel obliged to produce her own.

  She did. “I have this friend Woody and he asked me to find a job for this poor girl in his school. April. So, like I did. As a favor. I didn’t even know her.”

  “Here? She worked here?”

  She nodded. She might have been pretty, or at least interesting looking, if she’d added variety to her expressions, if she could reduce the storehouse of anger that blurred her features.

  “Did you tell the police?” I asked,