“Hi,” she said in a cheerful voice as Kate approached.
“Hello.” Kate paused, pretending to admire the flowers. Her heart raced with leftover adrenaline. “How much are the carnations?”
“Four-fifty for a bouquet.” The girl plucked a rubber-banded bundle from the bucket and held it out, stems dripping in dots on the dusty concrete. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” Kate took it from her and feigned interest in it, touching the soft petals, the weight of the woody stems heavy in her hands. “Have you worked here long?”
“Just a couple of weeks.” The girl shifted one pot of mums out of the shadow of the awning.
“You’re a student at Wickfield?”
The girl looked up at Kate. “Yeah, why?”
“No reason.” Kate tried a smile, but the girl’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you want those?” She nodded at the flowers in Kate’s hand.
“Sure.”
“You have to pay inside.”
Kate approached the door, knowing she was being watched. She’d forgotten the bell, and jumped as it jangled above her head. Feeling like an idiot, she stepped inside and the door closed smoothly behind her.
Color overwhelmed her. Flowers in every imaginable variety and hue filled the shop. They were standing in buckets, arranged in vases, and woven into wreathes. Their perfume was overpowering in the humid air.
Something reminded her of Terrence Simnic’s house, and Kate realized it was the gloom. Two old fluorescent light fixtures hung from the ceiling, and one of the bulbs was flickering.
Kate stepped around a jungle of hanging baskets and saw Terrence Simnic standing behind a counter. It was just like she’d pictured, only he was engrossed in arranging roses in a Styrofoam ring. He looked up as she approached, pruning shears in one large hand, a pink rose in the other.
“Hi.” She extended the bouquet of carnations.
“Good morning.” He met her eyes, but showed no sign of recognition. He moved slowly, setting down the shears and the rose, but when he reached under the counter, Kate panicked.
“I’m your neighbor, Kate Corbin,” she said, taking a step back.
“Yep.” He held up a piece of green tissue paper and wrapped it around the carnations. It reminded Kate of how she’d swaddled Grace as a baby.
He carried the bundle to the cash register. “That’ll be four-fifty.”
Was that all he was going to say? She dug in her purse for the money.
“Have you owned this shop a long time?”
“Over thirty years.” There was no inflection in his voice. She handed him a five-dollar bill and he rang it up without comment. When his large fingers dropped fifty cents into her palm, she felt revulsion.
“Do you always have college students working for you?”
“Why? Do you want a job?”
“No, um, I was just wondering.”
He stepped back over to his project, picking up the rose and pruning shears again. With sure fingers, he neatly snipped the stem off the rose and then cut a section of wire off a spool, inserted one end in the base of the flower, and stuck it into the foam ring.
Up close, Kate could tell it was a funeral wreath. Several more arrangements were propped against a stool behind him. One of them was a half circle of tightly packed white flowers. It looked like the arrangement placed around Lily Slocum’s head in the pseudo antique photo.
Kate swallowed and stepped back toward the door. “Well, good-bye.” He didn’t look up from his work.
Heart pounding, Kate took her flowers and walked swiftly out the door. She listened, feeling as if all her senses were on high alert, but there was silence behind her. Only afterwards did she think how odd it was that he hadn’t even offered a “Thank you” or “Come again.”
The girl was still outside, crouched alongside a pot of mums, picking off dead heads.
“Did you know Lily Slocum?” Kate asked without preamble. It was no good pretending; she couldn’t think of any subtle way to ask.
“No.” The girl stood up. “I mean, I knew who she was, but I didn’t know her.” She tossed the dead flowers in her hand. “Why?”
“Did she work at this store?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t think so, but I’ve only been here a few weeks.” She looked at Kate with frank curiosity. “Are you related to her or something?”
“No.”
“So why are you asking about her?”
“I thought she disappeared around here.” The lie came to her and she went with it.
“I think it was on the other side of campus,” the girl said. “Is that why you were sitting there?” She nodded at Kate’s car. “I thought you were waiting for someone.”
Kate felt her face flush. If the girl had noticed her, then Terrence probably had, too.
“The owner’s my neighbor.” At least that was the truth, just not all of it.
“Mr. Simnic?”
Kate nodded and the girl seemed to accept this, though Kate thought it raised more questions. The owner’s my neighbor so I thought I’d stalk him. Or better yet, I think my neighbor’s a killer.
“Do you like working for him?” she asked. The girl shot her a strange look, and for one moment Kate thought she was going to divulge something.
“He’s okay,” the girl said instead. “He’s a little shy, but he’s not a bad guy.”
It didn’t seem like much of a recommendation, and the girl must have thought so, too, because she added, “I need the money.”
The bell jangled and both Kate and the girl flinched. Terrence Simnic stood in the doorway. “I need you inside, Josie,” he said to the girl. He stared at Kate without speaking, but held the door for the girl. She shot another look at Kate and scurried inside, sidling past his solid girth. The door closed with another ring of the bell and Kate was alone.
Before she identified as an artist, before Kate knew the word, she’d been adept at identifying patterns. Her parents used to tell the story of how, as a three-year-old, she’d helped her father when he got lost en route to a friend’s home by telling him to turn where there were four houses in a row with pointy roofs.
Before she could read, she arranged the cans in the kitchen cupboards by size and color, and could identify different foods by the patterns on their labels.
Beginning drawing classes taught budding artists to look at the world in a way that she’d always viewed it—to see everything reduced to shapes. Square, circle, triangle, oval. Within every portrait of a nude, every still life with fruit, was an arrangement of shapes. Draw the shapes and the portrait emerged from it. Beneath everything was some arrangement, some pattern.
She could see the pattern emerging behind Terrence Simnic and it was dark and disturbing. Only just like her childhood, she was the only one to see it.
Chapter Sixteen
The man was thirteen when his father died. It was a gradual thing, this death that started with a cough that wouldn’t go away.
His mother had warned him about his smoking. She’d said that no good would come of that and wasn’t it bad enough that he’d had to take care of miners all these years, hadn’t he seen enough black lung to teach him anything?
The cancer took him in less than a year, shriveling his body so that at the end the boy could support his weight as he hobbled down the halls of the county hospital.
He’d go there after school, coming in to the dim room to see his father’s wan face light up and listen to him ask, as he did every day, “Do you feel like some Jell-O?”
It was the only thing he wanted to eat anymore, and the boy wasn’t sure that he could even taste it. The boy’s mother clucked her tongue over this when she visited.
“You’ve got to eat more than that or you’ll never get your strength back.” Though she’d been right there in the room when the doctor said that there was nothing they could do and it was just a matter of time.
Sometimes, she sent the boy to the hospital alone, cl
aiming that she couldn’t bear to see her husband like that, though the boy noticed that she didn’t seem overcome with grief.
Through his father’s last winter, the boy’s mother made him keep up with schoolwork, music lessons, and the deportment classes offered by the only woman more socially conscious than her. On Wednesday evenings, he put on a pressed shirt and his Sunday suit and learned to waltz and speak properly along with fifteen other unhappy children. On other evenings, he sat alone at the piano in the front room while Poe worked alone in the basement beneath him.
His mother drilled good manners into the boy, practicing with him at the scarred Formica table in the kitchen, teaching him the proper placement of silverware and how to hold it. “Don’t clutch your spoon like that,” she said angrily, adjusting his hand. “If you act like a convict, you’ll be treated like one. Manners make the man.”
And he knew without her saying it that she didn’t like the way his father had sometimes chewed with his mouth open or reached for the bread without asking for it to be passed.
It was June when his father died. His body was brought back to his own funeral home and Poe prepared him for burial.
“Here, take him this suit.” His mother thrust his father’s Sunday suit, the black wool shiny with wear at the elbows and knees, into the boy’s hands.
Poe was washing the body when the boy came down the stairs. His father looked desiccated, his face hollow. The boy was suddenly frightened, but then Poe took the suit from his hands and held out a cloth, and once the boy touched it to his father’s skin he was okay. He placed his own hands on the body, the coolness of the skin exciting and centering him, bringing him more fully alive than he ever was without it.
Together, they washed the body. When the boy looked up, Poe was weeping.
Two weeks after the funeral, the boy left the town with his mother. She smiled and laughed, flirting with the taxi driver as he loaded their bags into the trunk of the car she’d hired to take them to the train station.
“This is a new start for us,” she said as the whistle blew. The train chugged slowly out of the station, and she squeezed his arm. Her touch repulsed him. She was standing next to him and he was taller now, tall enough to see the vein throbbing against the side of her chicken-like neck.
He felt his hands itch to circle it, to press against her windpipe until she stopped talking. They were passing a vacant lot, and he thought about what it would be like to hurl her from the train, leaving her broken body to rot in a bed of weeds and broken glass.
Chapter Seventeen
There was something depressing about being in a high school on a Friday after school was out. The last of the student cars rushed out of the parking lot as Ian and Kate arrived. Ian parked the Toyota next to a cluster of teachers’ cars, all huddled together in one corner as if in defense against the student body.
They found Grace slouched against the wall outside of the principal’s office. She affected a look of unconcern and cool, looking hip in her jeans and T-shirt while listening to her iPod with a fierce scowl on her face, but she kept picking at a spot on her jeans and Kate knew that the “who cares” attitude was just a pose.
“I don’t like having my workday interrupted for a meeting to discuss your behavior,” Ian said in greeting. Grace hunched her shoulders, but didn’t respond.
“Why, Gracie?” Kate thought she’d try a gentler tone, but wasn’t surprised when that didn’t get an answer.
It wasn’t the first time they’d been summoned to school to discuss their daughter’s misbehavior, but it was a more recent phenomenon. As Kate watched Grace, she remembered an earlier version of her daughter, the elementary school student who’d proudly marched off to school each morning with a neatly arranged backpack, who’d been bursting with news every afternoon, and who’d been traumatized by getting any grades lower than As or Bs.
How fast kids changed. Last year, at the pricey private school where she’d been a scholarship student, multiple meetings had been called to discuss their daughter’s “failure to thrive” in the “nurturing environment.” It had been humiliating.
At Wickfield High School, things operated a little differently. For starters, there was no secretary to greet them with offers of coffee or tea, nor a tasteful outer office decked out in rich woods and expensive art. There was no hint of Ivy League at Wickfield High and no outer offices.
A broad, puffer fish of a man stood in the front hall wearing jeans and a T-shirt that seemed too young for his age, which was probably mid-fifties. He had close-cropped graying hair and a broad smile that was so smarmy that Kate exchanged looks with Ian.
“Mr. and Mrs. Corbin?” He stuck out a plump, surprisingly strong hand for them to shake. “I’m Harold Trowle. I thought we should meet alone first and then Grace could join us after we’ve talked.”
Grace looked indifferent, and sank onto a bench along the wall as if she’d run a marathon instead of having spent two minutes in the company of her parents. Harold Trowle ushered Kate and Ian through his office, a small space crowded with laminate office furniture including floor-to-ceiling bookshelves overflowing with college catalogs, and into another room that he referred to as the “lounge.” This was a large, open room that looked like it had been decorated to establish the guidance counselor’s coolness factor with his teenage clientele.
Large beanbag chairs took up one corner. Kate couldn’t imagine Harold Trowle settling into one of them. There was a motivational poster of sculls on the river next to a poster of the Ramones.
In the center of the room was a table that reminded Kate of a peanut. “This is where I like to dialogue,” Harold said, making Ian wince. The guidance counselor straddled a plastic chair at the top of the peanut, his boots resting on either side of it, and offered Kate and Ian seats around the bottom. He opened a folder resting on the table in front of him.
“As I think we discussed on the phone, Grace has unexcused absences for”—he perused the file, tapping with one broad finger—“six days.”
“Six?” Ian sounded aghast. “I thought it was only four. Why weren’t we notified?”
“You were, Mr. Corbin.”
“When? We hadn’t heard from anyone here until I got a call two days ago.”
“A letter should have been sent to your home.”
“Did you receive a letter?” Ian looked at Kate, who shook her head. She couldn’t remember a letter. “We didn’t receive any letter.”
“Let me see…” Mr. Trowle flipped through pages in his folder. “Yes, here it is. Letters were mailed on the tenth of September and the twenty-first.”
Ian frowned. “I’m telling you we never got them.”
Harold Trowle’s mouth quirked in an indulgent smile. “In cases like this, we find that the student has often intercepted the mail.”
Kate felt her cheeks flush, and saw that the color was high in Ian’s face, too, but before either of them could respond, Harold Trowle filled the silence.
“As you’ll see, her grades have slipped.” He fiddled with the papers in the folder, extracted a sheet, and slid it across the table with one pudgy finger. Kate got to it first, and Ian immediately pulled his chair closer. It was a computer printout of Grace’s classes and her current grades.
“She’s getting a D in English?” Ian said. “How is that even possible?”
“If you don’t attend class, then it’s very easy,” Mr. Trowle said. “English is an afternoon class and according to our records two of Grace’s absences coincided with exams.”
Kate skimmed over the grades once, then read the sheet again, more slowly, feeling shock give way to anger and anxiety. Their cheery straight As eighth-grader had metamorphosed into a surly, below-average tenth-grader. Grace currently had a C in Geometry, a C in Biology, C-in History and another D, this one in Spanish. “Her only decent grade is in Gym,” she said.
Harold Trowle nodded. “I’m sure you understand why we’re concerned.”
Ian’s laugh was short
and harsh. “You’re concerned?”
“I don’t know why she’s doing so poorly,” Kate said to Harold Trowle. “She’s very bright—you must have seen her test scores.”
He held them up and waved them. “Yes, clearly this isn’t her best work. Some students find the adjustment to high school very hard.”
“She’s had over a year to adjust,” Ian said. “This has nothing to do with adjusting—it has to do with effort.”
“She’s new to the school.” Kate knew even as she said it that she was making excuses for her daughter, and Ian pounced.
“So what? She was new last year, too, and every kid was new at that school. One of the best schools in the city, a far better education than I ever got, and what does she do with the opportunity?” It was a rhetorical question, but Harold Trowle looked as if he wanted to answer it. Ian didn’t give him the chance. “Squandered. All that effort and money—completely squandered.”
Kate felt the same anger, but now some of it was directed at Ian. Did he really blame Grace for all of this? “We know why her grades dropped last year. It was that creep.”
She couldn’t bear to say his name; it felt like dust in her mouth. Ian shifted his scowl from the grades to her face.
“That’s been over for some time and look at this.” He slapped the paper. “We made this move so she could have a fresh start and she’s not doing any work.”
Something occurred to Kate. “How is she getting off campus?”
Harold Trowle looked relieved at having Ian’s diatribe interrupted. “What was that, Mrs. Corbin?”
“Grace takes the bus to school every day, so when she skips school, how is she getting off campus?”
Wickfield High School was outside of town; there was nothing within walking distance except some suburban homes. Was she just pretending to get on the bus every day? No, because either Kate or Ian had seen her off and sometimes, if everybody was running late, Ian had driven her himself.
Mr. Trowle sifted through the folder again with a slight frown of concentration. “Students are allowed cars on campus, so my guess is that she’s leaving with a friend or friends who are also cutting class.” His face lightened as he extracted yet another sheet of paper. “Here it is—we had one report of Grace being seen leaving campus in a brown car, but that’s all the information we have. Sometimes teens act out because of things happening at home. Are there problems at home? Perhaps between the two of you?”
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