How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  Or maybe they’d cut an overnight deal for yet another instant crime-of-the-week movie and were already using the room as a set. I wondered who was playing Sasha. Cher had the right spirit, but was too short. Sigourney Weaver was the right size, but insufficiently wacky….

  There had to be something more profitable to do with my time than casting the film of my friend’s worst moments. I thought about Dunstan—or was it Edgar—and I checked the clock. It was early morning in Trueheart, Wisconsin, and most public schools, unlike their private cousins, were still in session.

  After several conversations with robots who knew phone numbers, I reached an actual human being, who identified herself, rather merrily, as “School office, Jean speaking.”

  I was immediately suspicious. Not only did she not sound computerized, she also did not sound angry, grudging, or particularly wary. My experience with the guardians of attendance records and supply cabinets had not prepared me for civility. Maybe it was true what they said about the Midwest’s friendliness.

  The unexpected cordiality made me stumble and stammer. “This is—I’m—This is so embarrassing!” I squealed. “I’m with Photos R Us here in New York. We’re a clearinghouse, you know, and—”

  “Just one moment! With whom am I speaking?” So much for geographical differences. All school secretaries are sisters under the skin. They don’t burn out the way teachers do; they calcify.

  “My name?” I decided to tell the truth. “Mandy Pep—” But why tell the truth about that when I was lying about the rest of the call? “—salt.” I never claimed to have much imagination.

  “Mandy Pepsalt?”

  “Right. So this man sent us photographs of Trueheart. Absolutely brilliant, and we want to hire him and use them for syndication, you know? Except—this is the humiliating part. Someone who shall remain nameless spilled her coffee all over the cover page, and the man had written in ink, and his address just floated off in a mess of coffee. We are beside ourselves here.”

  “I’m quite busy, Miss Pepsalt, and I can’t really follow why you’re calling me from New York.”

  “Because he’s one of your graduates. Grew up out there. His pictures are a photo essay called ‘Hometown,’ and I’m hoping against hope that you keep up-to-date alumni records and that you’ll know how we can contact him. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what year he graduated because the, ah—”

  “Coffee?” Her tone was disdainful. She would never spill her coffee on an important document. She would never ingest anything spillable around an important document.

  Dunstan had looked in his forties. “I think I see a six in that blur,” I said. “So he graduated mid- to late sixties, I suspect. I must assure you this has never, ever happened before. I don’t want you thinking we are anything less than meticulous in our care for our clients’ portfolios.”

  “Miss Pepsalt! This is a small high school. I’m the entire clerical staff. If students contact me, fine. If they come in and visit me, fine. But this isn’t like a college that has a regular alumni news. If you knew his exact year—”

  “Oh, if I had only taken proper precautions with my coffee! There! Now you know who the clumsy culprit is. Can’t you help me?”

  “—and if that class had a reunion lately, the chairman of the event might have traced the man. That’s who does that kind of thing, calling parents and last known addresses and asking other people for information. I certainly can’t. I’m too busy with the current crop of students to bother with somebody who was here a quarter of a century ago!”

  Now she sounded like a school secretary. It simply took longer to get up to speed in the Midwest.

  “I know the ones who come say hello,” she said, “bring in their children and, a few times now, their grandchildren. But the others, no, so if that’s all you—”

  “It sounds as if you’ve been there awhile. Perhaps you’d remember this man.”

  “Only if he was exceptional. Good or bad. If I had to order engraved awards or trophies for him—or put him on the detention roster a lot of times. Otherwise, the hairdos change, the music gets worse, but all the same, they blur, Miss Pepsalt.”

  “Does the name Dunstan Farmer strike a chord?”

  She gasped. The chord had been struck. Would it be trophies or detentions she recalled?

  “So you do remember him? The boy who moved there from England when he was young?”

  “Is this a prank call? Because I don’t find it funny at all.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “Of course I remember Dunstan Farmer. Everybody in these parts would. We knew his parents, too, since they were born. They didn’t move here from any foreign country. They’ve lived here forever, for generations, except for when the family moved South and the tragedy happened. Atlanta, or Mobile—one of those places. They came back after. And stayed.” She sighed, twice. “Broke the town’s heart, how bad we felt for them.”

  “How…what happened?” I whispered.

  “Broke his neck in one of those freak accidents during a practice scrimmage down in Atlanta—or Mobile. I never can remember. He was a junior in high school. He was a good young man and it was a hard loss when he died. Family never got over it, either. Whoever you met, whoever sent you those photographs, was most certainly not our Dunstan Farmer.”

  When I hung up, I was dizzy, light-headed. The man who’d borrowed the identity of a dead teenager could be anybody—Edgar from Yorkshire, that married man who’d made himself seem dead. Or he could be a murderer. And where did Sasha fit into all this?

  I felt as if I were in that Poe story where the walls contract and crush their inhabitant. Something dreadful had happened and was continuing to happen, and I wanted desperately to do something about it, but I had no idea what that something could be. In lieu of action, I accepted motion.

  I left my room and walked down the hall toward the elevator bank, pondering the past twenty-four hours spent in the Twilight Zone. Nothing whatsoever made sense, yet it had all happened, starting with the mysterious motives, methods, and identities of the people who’d used Sasha’s and my room as their killing ground. And how the devil had they gotten in?

  And then I stopped in my tracks. At the other side of the elevator bay, a chambermaid’s cart piled high with towels and cleaning apparatus propped open a door. The most ordinary of hotel sights—but now it looked like one of the puzzle pieces.

  I tested my hypothesis by rushing through the open door. “Oh!” I said to the startled woman making up the bed. “I’m interrupting, sorry! I had wanted to use my bathroom, take a shower, but I’ll come back later.”

  “No, no. Is fine.” She waved me toward the bathroom. “Has clean towels already.”

  I went into the bathroom, closed the door, ran the taps and flushed. I went back into the room, sat down, picked up a book on the desk, flipped through it, then smiled at the chambermaid, who was nearly finished. “I’ll come back later,” I said. “No problem. Thanks for making the room look so great.”

  And that was how it could be done. Nobody had needed a key to our room. Chambermaids couldn’t be expected to know the ever-changing guest faces. So anyone could enter, look as if she belonged, and wait out the maid. And then later, after propping the door to make sure it didn’t lock, reenter along with an accomplice and a future victim.

  And the entry technique was possible twice every day. The same open-door policy held in the evenings, when towels were replaced and bedspreads removed. Sasha had mentioned that throughout the carnage, my bed had remained pristine, turned down, a chocolate on its pillow.

  A good thing to know if I ever wanted to murder or even simply ambush somebody. A bad thing to know if I ever again wanted to feel entirely comfortable or safe when entering a hotel room.

  It was only after I was downstairs and out on the boardwalk that I inventoried what I’d seen at the site of my room experiment. A pair of men’s shoes near the bed. A technothriller as leisure reading. A man’s leath
er toiletry kit in the bathroom. Not a sign of a female inhabitant. I tried to imagine what the chambermaid had made of my intrusion.

  I walked briskly past a woman standing by her storefront fortune-telling parlor under a sign reading KNOW THE FUTURE. I might have been tempted—the future was certainly something for which I needed a clue—but she was talking on a cellular phone. It seemed to me that people with extra powers should not need to rely on Ma Bell in order to find something out. I walked on.

  I paused at the wide-open front of a raucous arcade. I could see a Skee-Ball game that I remembered from years past, although that was the only manual, nonelectronic game in sight, almost a fossil. The aisles were packed with loud machines. A talking tic-tac-toe was nearest to me. This, then, was casino prep school, or the really poor man’s casino, where a quarter would buy a chance. More likely, this was where the people who had my room and a losing streak came to get rid of their spare change.

  I wandered inside and saw that if you took chance after chance and won, you were eligible for the world’s sorriest collection of prizes. A life-sized moose head made of polyester plush. Almost life-sized plastic figures of the Brady Bunch. Garishly painted plaster carousel horses.

  I was on my way out when I saw a machine that promised to tell my romantic future. It wasn’t quite as valuable as finding out who the real killer was, but neither could I pass it by.

  I put in my four quarters and punched in my name and birthdate. And was almost immediately stymied, because next I had to enter Mackenzie’s name. Feeling vaguely ashamed, I pushed a C and a K. Let the machine figure out how to pronounce it.

  After a lot of whirring and flashing, a computer printout emerged. I took it onto the sunny boardwalk and read it en route. It wasn’t a real mood lifter. You’re a dreamy-eyed idealist, it said under romance. You become enslaved by negative situations.

  Mackenzie, on the other hand, seemed straightforward and to be envied. It’s sheer romance, it said. You love love.

  What did a machine know, anyway? You love school, or the learning process in general, it said for me. Okay, so it guessed well now and then. You are a workhorse, it said of Mackenzie. You can drive souls past their point of sanity. I cut to the quick and looked at our overall compatibility. It appeared that I needed distance, while Mackenzie needed partnership. Ridiculous.

  I tossed the printout in the next wastepaper basket I passed and focused on my fellow board-strollers, but that didn’t provide relief. The look of the place had certainly changed since its glory days. My mother sometimes reminisces about the times she paraded her new spring suits and hats on the boards. Today, white gloves and a flowered bonnet—except on the stunning woman Sasha had seen with the almost–Harry Belafonte—would be hooted off the place, and an elegant suit would be a shocker.

  When my mother talks about long-ago stays at the shore, the place sounds regal. Hail Britannia and all that. Her hotels had names like Marlborough, Blenheim, and Claridge. Now, in the cause of progress, or all-Americanism, it was de-anglicized. Bally, Caesar’s, and Trump this and that. A potpourri of nowhere.

  But that train of thought chugged into the station called Dunstan, the de-anglicized man. The thought of Dunstan still made me nervous, and nerves made me hungry. Besides, it was close to lunchtime, and breakfast had been a shared bagel en route to the arraignment.

  However, the boardwalk had never been an epicurean haven, and now it was a junk-food smorgasbord. Peanuts, saltwater taffy, pizza, hamburgers, assorted candies, and my secret favorite, a garlicky hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter and fried—just in case its innate fat content wasn’t sufficiently astronomical.

  I zipped over to the yellow and green stand. “A lemonade and a…a Dip Stick,” I said in the voice of a spy passing on information.

  “Miss Pepper!”

  A Philly Prep student. Eric Stotsle. He of the amazing Adam’s apple. He’d been in my homeroom, but not my class yet, and had seemed one of those ordinary people with a mildly annoying tic—his was an unblinking stare—who never receive attention until they take down an entire village from its bell tower. “He was a good kid,” neighbors and classmates tell the press. “Never would have suspected this. Stared a lot, sure, but otherwise…”

  You just didn’t notice Eric Stotsle, except for that bobbing apparatus in his throat. But Eric Stotsle noticed you.

  I looked plaintively heavenward, but saw, instead of a compassionate deity, the inflated Dip Stix lemon. I therefore asked a plastic citrus fruit whether this, too, was necessary. I already had a murder and a jailed friend. Did I also need to be observed by a Philly Prep student? The lemon did not choose to answer. Never ask a sign for a sign.

  “What are you doing here?” Eric stood, mouth slightly open, a lemonade cup in his hand.

  “You mean at a Dip Stix stand?” Wasn’t a teacher allowed to clog her veins?

  “I mean in Atlantic City!”

  Ah, yes. He, too, had the common student delusion that when school wasn’t in sessions, teachers were deflated and stored in trunks along with the basketballs. “Vacationing.” I took the lemonade out of his hand. “And you? Aren’t you a little young to have this kind of job?”

  “Look, I—don’t say anything, all right? It’s legal. Really.”

  He had fudged some form somewhere, I was sure. But given that the purpose was to get himself an honest job, not to deal crack or run guns, who was I to squawk?

  It was Eric who squawked, actually. “Hey,” he said, flicking his wrist dismissively. “Get lost. Do I have to tell you again?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not you, Miss Pepper!” Various portions of his face flushed. He looked down and to his side. “You, out! I’m gonna get in trouble! You can’t stay here.”

  “I could pour lemonade,” the voice said. “Put in ice.”

  “You can’t even reach the spout. Besides, you’re too young to work.” Eric heard his own words and looked at me guiltily, then back down again. “Really illegal for you to work, understand, man?”

  A door in the counter swung open and a small child—I estimated five or six—walked out. Like Eric, he wore a baseball cap backward and attempted a serious swagger as he made his way to a three-legged stool, high enough to give him difficulty perching on it. “Then do you have like leftovers?”

  Urchin was the only word for him, with all its Dickensian overtones. “Are you lost?” I asked softly.

  He stared at me as if I were one of the deinstitutionalized his mother had warned him about, then seemed to decide I wasn’t dangerous. “I know where I am,” he said.

  “Your mom waiting for you?”

  He shrugged.

  I turned and tried to see if I could spot his mother, but I couldn’t find a woman watching the boardwalk stand.

  “You sure you don’t have food?” the little boy asked Eric. “Something that didn’t come out looking too good?”

  “Ask your mother for money, like I told you,” Eric said.

  “I can’t,” the boy said. “I’m not allowed in.”

  Barred from his home? What was going on here? It was lunchtime, and the child was hungry. “Here.” I handed him the sizzling hot dog Eric had given me. A cardiologist of the future would thank me for this. I ordered a second one, so my future cardiologist could also pay his mortgage. “What’s your name?”

  He took an enormous bite and answered unintelligibly, muffled by corn-battered hot dog.

  “Lucky,” Eric translated. “That’s his name, he says. You really shouldn’t encourage him.”

  Encourage him to do what? Eat? “Let me take you home to your mom,” I said. That was a definite action I could perform. It wouldn’t help Sasha’s mess or my pending romantic incompatibility, but I’d be doing something.

  Lucky shook his head and chewed away. “Plin.” He sounded like somebody talking through flannel.

  Eric translated. “She’s playing. He’s not allowed.” He wasn’t making sense. I imagined Lucky’s mother turning a ju
mp rope, covering her eyes for hide and seek, tossing a ball. “Have to be twenty-one,” Eric said, “to get in.”

  “She’s in the casino?”

  The little boy nodded and finished off his hot dog. “I’m dyin’ of thirst,” he said.

  I wondered how long he’d been on his own while his mother gambled. I wondered if she’d understand if I tracked her down and gave her whatever piece of my mind I could spare. I wondered if she’d remember her kid if I reported her to Family Services.

  Oh, God, but I didn’t want to have further doings with the police just now. I handed Lucky a lemonade.

  “She said she’d only be a while,” Lucky said.

  “He was here last night, too,” Eric said. “I made him go back inside the casino. It was like dark.”

  The hot dog smelled delicious, but suddenly my stomach didn’t feel up to it. I offered it to the boy, but he declared himself full, so I held it like a small pennant. “Come on, Lucky.” It felt indescribably sad calling him that, and even sadder that he was so willing to go with me, to trust me, to be taken care of. “Let’s find your mom.”

  I wished I had never come to this city.

  Seven

  “HEY!” IT WAS THE HOMELESS woman who lived under the boardwalk. Georgette. She raised her fingers in an almost military salute. “Who you got there?” She lounged on a bench by the stairs that led to the beach, her thin hair ruffling in the breeze. She wore a knee-length denim skirt with a ragged hemline over a long plaid skirt that touched the tops of her orange socks. A small and rumpled stack of newspapers was next to her, but she wasn’t reading them. I was glad of that, because the topmost page featured the portrait of Jesse Reese.

  There was no escaping the murder. There was no trying not to think about it.