by M. E. Kerr
Since Lasher’s death it hadn’t been fear of seeing my old self in that face. It was more the feeling that if I did take a good look at it, I’d see Lasher in those eyes of Cyril Creery’s. I’d see Lasher
f
a
l
l
i
n
g … the way a certain old girlfriend of mine — Delia — always used to write my name:
F
E
L
L
Chapter 6
Did anyone else see Creery trip him?” Dib asked.
“I doubt it. I was the only one looking at Rinaldo’s feet.”
“Then what happened?”
“Rinaldo picked himself up. He and the other waiters cleaned up the mess, and they brought out more cake. You know The Sevens: The good life always goes right on.”
“I don’t know The Sevens,” said Dib. “I only know you.”
“You know what I mean, though. If there’s a soul mourning for Lasher, I don’t know who that’d be.”
Dib was tearing the wrapper from a Milky Way. “How does somebody get into Sevens when no one even likes him?”
I let the question hang there.
Dib said, “Got any instant coffee?”
“Help yourself.”
I didn’t live in a room — Dib was right when he said that earlier in the day. I lived in a suite. Dib got off the bed and went into the other room, where there was a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a leather couch, a coffee table, some chairs, and a view of The Tower from the window. Private bath on the right.
I stretched out while I listened to an old Talking Heads song and thought about the reason Creery would be gunning for Rinaldo. Because of what Lauren had told me, I supposed. Because Creery thought Rinaldo’d spread the rumor Lasher’d been murdered.
If someone had spread a rumor about me being a kleptomaniac, I wouldn’t react unless I’d had a habit of walking out of stores with things hidden in my pockets.
Creery had always looked for a fight with Lasher. He was our resident cynic. He’d named his tree Up Yours. He’d slap his knee and laugh hysterically when Lasher’d speak about Sevens in the same way someone in a cult would drool over their guru. I remember how he cracked up once when Lasher had explained the habit old grads had of meeting for drinks only at hotels and restaurants with seven letters in the names. The Ritz, in Boston. Laurent, in New York. Creery’d almost wet his pants over that one.
Lasher had hated him, too. Everyone in the Sevens House was familiar with the scent of incense wafting from Creery’s room, masking the marijuana smell inside. He was not the only pot smoker on The Hill, or in Sevens, but he was the only one who took advantage of the freedom we enjoyed in Sevens House, where there were no proctors or faculty, and Mrs. Violet, our housemother, rarely came above the first floor.
He flouted our self-regulatory system flagrantly. There was always one. Some grumbled about it; most minded their own business.
It was the kind of thing Lasher would lose sleep over.
He’d dog Creery’s footsteps, whistling “Twilight Time” and promising to get Creery.
Lasher’d been in Sevens since he was fourteen.
Lasher used to get tears in his eyes when he’d hear the song The Sevens sing to let guys know they’re in. The one we sang at the memorial service. Creery’d ride him about it, put his knuckles to his eyelids and mimic him.
I didn’t know much about Lasher’s life before he got to The Hill, but he’d named his tree Suicide.
Even after he was in the club, he wrote all these plays about Death, and he kept a noose in his suite at Sevens, too. Creery always asked him why he was stalling, why didn’t he pee or get off the pot.
Still, it didn’t seem like old cool-head Creery to care whether or not there were rumors Lasher’d been murdered. Unless he’d had something to do with the murder.
Dib came back with some Taster’s Choice, turned down Talking Heads, and asked me point-blank if I thought Creery was capable of murder.
“My dad used to say anyone’s capable of it, but not many are sufficiently provoked at the same time they have a weapon handy. That’s why he was against ordinary people having guns around.”
“What about being sufficiently provoked by someone while you’re at the edge of a cliff … or standing on top of that tower?”
“Same thing, I guess.”
“What about defending yourself when someone’s about to murder you … and there you are at the top of that tower?”
“It could have happened that way…. I remember the night I got in Sevens: Suddenly Lasher was right behind me at the top of that thing. He said, ‘Look down there at the ground and tell me if it makes you want to jump.’“
“You never told me this.” There was always a slightly resentful tone when Dib would discover I wasn’t reporting back to him the way we used to tell each other everything, anything, before Sevens, when the two of us were new on The Hill.
“He was holding me near the edge of the wall, and I thought, He’s crazy. I’m up here by myself with this maniac.”
“What did you do, Fell?”
“There’s an elevator in The Tower, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Not many people outside of Sevens do. Creery came out of it at that point and told Lasher to knock it off…. Lasher was just trying to scare the hell out of me. All of Sevens knew I was up there with him, but I didn’t know they did.”
“Fell,” Dib said, “Creery killed Lasher. I’m positive of it.”
That was when a new voice was added to the conversation. Lionel Schwartz’s. You could have said he was the president of Sevens, except president had nine letters in it instead of seven. So Schwartz was our captain.
“Sidney Dibble,” he said, “you’ve got a wild imagination.” He was chuckling like a lenient parent who’d just heard his three-year-old say the F word.
We called him The Lion. He wanted to be an actor. He had on a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches, a red bow tie against a blue-and-white-striped shirt. Dark-brown hair cut short and parted down the center. John Lennon spectacles. He always looked like a lot of planning went into how he looked.
The Lion was the kind of guy you didn’t get next to easily. You saw him in all the school plays. You couldn’t miss him strutting around campus while everyone called out his name and hoped he’d remember theirs. He had SPECIAL written all over him.
He was also the kind of guy Dib envied and resented. I would have too, if I hadn’t made Sevens. But propinquity changes your view of people. In Sevens we knew his mother was a madwoman, in and out of institutions. We’d hear him trying to reason with her on the house phone, reassuring her that the doctor wasn’t from the CIA, that the neighbors weren’t making bombs, and telling her no, he couldn’t come home, not in midterm.
We knew certain Sevens’ deepest secrets, guarding them as if they were our own.
But to Dib Lionel Schwartz was arrogant and vain. Worse, he was patronizing. I could feel Dib losing ground facing him down. “There’re a lot of unanswered questions,” Dib muttered.
“There always are when someone kills himself.” Schwartz was still smirking, rocking on his heels with his hands stuck in the pockets of his trousers. He told Dib, “I’d like to talk with Fell, if it’s all right with you.”
Dib jumped to his feet and said it was fine with him, he’d see me tomorrow.
“How long is the talk going to take?” I asked Schwartz. I figured Dib could sit it out downstairs in our reception room.
But Dib didn’t wait for The Lion’s answer.
“I’ve got a paper to write tonight anyway,” he said.
He was out of there.
Chapter 7
Schwartz sat down in the captain’s chair next to my bed.
“Seven,” he said to me. So he was there on Sevens business, following the formalities. This ritual was to seal our conversation as confidential. P
robably they did it at The Ritz and Laurent, too. Maybe someday years from then I’d be meeting someone, leaning on my cane, my hair white, starting off “Seven.”
I came up with seven things that went together, as I was expected to do.
“Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth,” I said.
“The Seven Deadly Sins. So be it…. Fell, you’re about to receive an honor.”
“I am?”
“An old member is asking for our help, and you’ve been chosen for the assignment.”
“I see,” I said.
“Were you expecting the Croix de Guerre or something?” he asked. He laughed and swung his legs up on my bed.
“What kind of an assignment?”
“Tutoring. That’s part of it.”
“I just got a D- in English.”
“That’s a fluke, isn’t it, Fell? After all, you won the New Boys Competition last fall for your essay, and you wrote a rather remarkable paper on Agamemnon’s death … Dr. Skinner reminded me of all that when I discussed this with him.”
“I didn’t know Skinner was told Sevens’ business.”
“He wasn’t told very much about the assignment, but I wanted his recommendation because it takes you off campus.”
“And he recommended me?”
“He said you could use the money, which amounts to six dollars an hour … and he thinks you may have overreacted to Lasher’s death, that it would be good for you to be busy.”
“Is that also why I’m on the committee for The Charles Dance?”
Schwartz smiled. “No. I chose you for that. You haven’t been on any of our committees.”
Lasher’s manuscripts were in the envelope on my desk. As curious as I was, I hadn’t had a chance to glance at them.
Dib was going to offer Rinaldo three hundred for the word processor, one fifty apiece. I needed money — Skinner was right. I wasn’t sure I needed Skinner telling everyone I needed it.
“This assignment concerns a girl who lives right here in Cottersville,” Schwartz began. “Her father’s a benefactor of Gardner — a very generous one, particularly to Sevens. Her name is Nina Deem.”
“As in Deem Library?”
“Exactly,” said Schwartz. “It was donated by the Deem family.”
“Does she go to school in Cottersville?”
“Yes. She’s a junior at Cottersville High. She’d probably be over in Miss Tyler’s, except two years ago her mother died. There aren’t any other children. She’s all David Deem has…. She’s a good writer, wants to be a professional, plans to go to Kenyon College. They have a whole writing program there.”
“You can’t tutor someone in writing. You mean help her with her grammar and her spelling and stuff like that?”
“Help her get back to writing. She’s lost interest.”
“Because I don’t know anything about grammar and spelling. I need help with that myself.”
“I said help her get back to writing…. The hidden agenda is more important than the tutoring, anyway.”
“What does that mean, the hidden agenda?”
“It means there’s another part to the assignment.”
He reached inside his sport coat and took out a photograph. He passed it across to me.
“Edward Dragon,” he said.
Dragon looked about my age, seventeen. He had a certain clean, American-boy quality, the kind models for Ralph Lauren’s clothes have when they’re shown in ads riding around in the family jeep with Dad, Sis, and the dog. He wasn’t in a jeep, though. The backdrop was almost comical, as though he’d posed for it at a carnival or a fair. Behind him was a fake waterfall, an old mill, and a weeping willow tree.
He was seated on a real bench in front: brown suit, white shirt, and maroon-and-white-striped tie. His hair was the same dark brown, short and straight, slicked back. He was holding a Siamese cat on his lap.
I started to hand it back to Schwartz.
“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll need to know that face.”
“What does he have to do with Nina Deem?”
“I’m coming to that. Last summer Nina enrolled in a writers’ workshop held at the Cottersville Community Center. Dragon did, too. The Center isn’t far from the Deems’ house, and Dragon would walk her home nights after class. He told her he was from Doylestown, and that he was a freshman at Penn State. Told her he was nineteen, and told Mr. Deem he was premed. That really appealed to Deem. He never went to college, never had a profession. You know Sun and Surf?”
“The sporting goods store?”
“That’s his.”
“How’d he afford to give us a library then?”
“That store’s a little gold mine, Fell! Apparently he’s a genius when it comes to money. He started from scratch, right out of Gardner. Like a lot of men without a formal education, he’s in awe of doctors, lawyers, et cetera. He thought Dragon was the perfect guy to escort his daughter around.”
Schwartz took his legs off my bed, crossed them, and tipped back in the chair. “Deem really liked him, too. He trusted him like a son. Nina was under a shrink’s care since her mother’s death, shutting herself off from the world, depressed, that sort of thing. Dragon got her out and about: tennis, swimming at the club, the movies. He was her first real boyfriend, too. So….” The Lion shrugged his shoulders.
“So they fell in love and were miserable ever after,” I said.
Schwartz held up one hand. “Hold your horses, Fell. It’s not really a love story, though she was certainly in love. Whatever he felt, he was lying to her. He wasn’t going to Penn State at all. Then one night late last fall the Cottersville police arrested him. The age on his driver’s license was twenty-three…. They picked him up for selling cocaine.”
“Was she with him?”
“No. Fortunately. It was around midnight. He was in a bar down near the train tracks. It was in the papers. That’s how David Deem heard about it … Dragon had a smart lawyer, and supposedly it was a first offense. He got off. But Deem told him he was never to see Nina again.” Schwartz looked at me. “That’s where you come in, Fell. You keep an eye out for him.”
“I’m supposed to go there under false pretenses?”
“What other kind of pretenses are there? … Didn’t your father do something like this for a living?”
“He was a cop and he was a detective. This is different.”
“Not that different,” Schwartz said. “Fell, this is a Sevens assignment. It’s not an unreasonable one. Deem has done a lot for us. Do you think we take and never give back?”
I just sat there.
“This is a nice girl,” Schwartz said. “Suppose you had a sister and — ”
“I have a sister.” She wasn’t in first grade yet.
“And suppose she was hanging out with some pusher who’d lied to her and your family?”
“My sister wouldn’t hang out with a known pusher.” I thought of the day my father’d told me the last thing he ever thought he’d find in his own son’s bureau drawer was shit. When he wasn’t making out reports and calling pot “a controlled substance,” he called it what we did on the street. Shit. He said that was the name for it, all right. He said, What in the name of God are you doing with this, Johnny? … What made me so sure Jazzy’d be invulnerable?
Back to Schwartz. “Suppose she fell in love with someone like Dragon and couldn’t help herself?”
“Is that the case with Nina Deem?”
“It seems to be. She’s promised Deem she won’t see Dragon again, but Deem’s not taking any chances.”
Then he said, “You’ve had all the benefits of Sevens without any responsibility, Fell. You haven’t volunteered once for any service to Sevens.”
I sat there. I hated pushers … It wasn’t that. It was going there as something I wasn’t, suckering some girl into trusting me when all the while she couldn’t if she tried to see this Dragon.
“You’ll be making fifty dollars a week.”
&nbs
p; Tiny mind that I admit having, it went to Mom’s birthday and the gold 7. It went to the word processor Dib and I were hoping to buy from Rinaldo.
“Mostly you’ll be a tutor,” Schwartz said. “She really wants help getting into Kenyon.”
“Have you ever met her?”
“Once. She was a sweet kid. After her mother drowned, I was part of the group Sevens sent to the funeral … Let me tell you something, Fell. I think this assignment will be good for you. I think you’ve overreacted to Lasher’s death, too.” I started to say something, but he held his hand up again. “Wait. Listen. I think the Fates arrange exits and entrances for us. When I came to The Hill, we’d just committed my mother to someplace. She’d look out her window through bars, with people around her who cawed like crows. My dad was telling me just get on with my education, but I was going to have to do it on a shoestring, we were so broke because of what she’d cost us. I had a scholarship, but I didn’t have a dime in my pocket … I couldn’t get her out of my head. I even named my tree after her, I was so guilty … Her name is Mildred.”
“Seven letters.”
“Exactly. Exits and entrances, Fell. I have a feeling this is an entrance for you.”
“Enter the two-faced tutor.”
“You’ll be helping her, Fell!”
“Her mother drowned?”
“In their pool. This poor kid needs rescuing.”
Schwartz was getting up. He knew he’d made the assignment without my even telling him. He’d used all his big guns: his mother, my sister, rescuing some innocent female, what I owed Sevens, the extra money I’d make. He’d shot me down.
“Oh, and Fell? She’s a jet crash now, thanks to Dragon. Don’t bring up Lasher’s suicide. She doesn’t need to hear about that sort of thing. You ought to forget it, too.”
He reached out and grabbed my hand. “A week from next Wednesday afternoon at four, Fell. Her address is outside on your coffee table. She’s expecting you.”
Chapter 8
The day that I was to go to the Deems’ to meet Nina, two strangers showed up on The Hill.