by M. E. Kerr
“Some of it didn’t have to happen. Cyr didn’t have to put that letter up on the bulletin board for the whole world to see! Damn him! If he wasn’t dead, I’d — ”
I could hear the sob.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lauren.”
“We’re still going to do the memorial book, grim as Paul’s writings were. Mother thinks it’s like Jungian synchronicity, that he probably had a premonition of his early death…. We’ll talk at The Charles Dance, Fell. You’ll have time, won’t you?”
“I’ll make time.”
“Because we want to go ahead as soon as possible. Paul would have wanted vindication. Nobody at that school cared but you and that Dibble kid! You and he and Daddy were the only ones who gave Paul the benefit of the doubt!”
“There’re still some unanswered questions,” I said.
“FELL?” she said threateningly.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
But after chapel I did take care of one last loose end.
• • •
First, I tried to get Dib inside and make a date to talk. I hurried out of chapel after him. He waved me away and jumped into the old Mustang with Little Jack at the wheel. It was parked just a few cars behind Dr. Skinner’s long, black limousine.
I walked down to The Tower by myself then, the cold winter sun warming me. I couldn’t help think of Creery, seeing his face in my memory ways I’d never viewed it before. Sad ways of seeing the vacant eyes and silly punk paraphernalia. Alive, he’d angered me, reminding me of an old self maybe still around somewhere inside me … but dead, no longer any kind of threat to me, he made me think only of the waste, and how he wrote his stepbrother: I think I can kick this thing. … I thought of the dumb idea he had that he could be clean in just a week … and the stupid bravado bragging about having Lauren, getting laid … all the very personal things a guy could write, I could have written, never thinking it would get into someone’s hands it wasn’t meant for.
Rinaldo was in the kitchen, and the smell of rib roast wafted from inside as I called through the door.
While I waited for him in the empty library, I thought of the fear of The Sevens Revenge that Schwartz had spoken about that morning.
Maybe Lasher had delayed giving Schwartz those letters purposely, to feed that fear in Creery. Maybe Lasher had known The Revenge was fictitious but counted on the idea Creery would be left to wait for Sevens to act…. and the longer the wait, the worse the imagining of what would be done to him.
I could still picture Creery with the little rat tail behind his head, running around in his long gabardine coat and his Timberland boots.
Death brought it all back and colored it in softer hues, so even Creery seemed more human dead, and I felt differently about him. Sorry or something. But I felt for him, and it surprised me.
So did Rinaldo surprise me, coming up suddenly behind me, his hand over my eyes.
“Guess who?”
I took a chance while he was grinning down at me. “Lasher left something in the word processor about how he got Creery’s letter to his stepbrother.”
Rinaldo pulled out a chair. “Can I sit?”
I shook my head.
“And how he found out about Creery and Lauren.”
“What do you want, Fell?” He wasn’t grinning any longer.
“You took the mail from the CORRESPONDENCE box every night,” I said. “One of Creery’s letters for a watch? That was a fair price.”
“Now you’re going to try and do blackmail, Fell?”
“No blackmail…. Another letter, a pen. Right, Rinaldo?”
“I don’t play the twilight game. That’s for you guys.”
“Just tell me about the mail game. I promise you it’s just for my information.”
“I gave him nothing, and if he wrote I did, he’s lying.”
“But he got into the mail.”
“I turned my back and he got into the mail. He was looking for a way to connect Creery with dope, and he found a different connection. The sister. That ate at him until just before Christmas. Then the letter to the stepbrother was like butter on a burn. I knew from his reaction he’d struck gold. But I never saw any one of the letters, not one. He copied them on the Xerox machine over there. I never touched a letter, never handed one to him…. He showed up the last thing at night when I came here to unlock the box. I turned my back.”
“And accepted payment.”
“No money.”
“I’m not saying you took money.”
“I made an error in judgment, yes I did. He knew my weakness: nice things I could never afford. I learned to like those things from Sevens. Everything but your taste in clothes. I live surrounded by the good life.”
“How many Sevens have Gstaad watches and apartments in town?”
“You know what I mean, Fell. You all live like you have them. I am part of Sevens, and I’m not. I have my steak on Wednesday nights, but I eat it in the kitchen on a stool. You get a chance to eat at the table for once, you take it.”
We could hear other Sevens arriving at The Tower for Sunday lunch.
“I know Creery suspected me, too. Maybe he didn’t know I let Lasher see the mail, but he believed Lasher told me things that Lasher never would. So-o-o — ” He turned up his palms. “I was afraid too, for a while. I thought always that Creery killed him. We were the only ones here that day. I was sure of that…. Can you erase this thing in that machine?”
“There isn’t anything about It in there. It was just my hunch, Rinaldo.”
Outside, in the hall, Outerbridge was singing the hymn he’d sung in chapel.
“Ride on! ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.”
Rinaldo stood up. “I don’t fear you, Fell. Warn me if I should … I have always feared your curiosity, but not you. You have not been in Sevens long enough for that.”
He didn’t wait for reassurance.
And I was thinking back to a day on Long Island when a stranger offered to pay my way to go to Gardner, posing as his son. It was how I’d gotten there. My own chance to eat at the table. Never mind all the foul-ups that had come as a result — I’d made quite a trade, too, for a better life.
Chapter 21
The afternoon of The Charles Dance, I felt as though I was carrying Nina’s entire closet when I lugged her garment bag into Sevens House. She said I wasn’t that far wrong. She’d brought a lot of changes, because she wanted options in case things she tried on looked awful.
“At home I always change at least three times before I go anywhere important. Do boys?”
“Not boys going to The Charles Dance. One costume is enough.”
I’d already rounded up a handlebar mustache and a monocle, to go as Damon Charles. The rest was easy: a rented tux and a pair of evening shoes borrowed from Dib.
He wasn’t going. He was dorm campused. Last Sunday Little Jack had been pulled over for drunken driving. He and Dib had spent Sunday afternoon in Cottersville Tavern. Dib wasn’t charged with anything, claimed he hadn’t been drinking. But the place was off-limits to Hill boys, so Dr. Skinner decided, finally, to suspend Dib’s privileges.
We were on the kind of speaking terms that just barely spoke. When he got the dusty pumps out of the bottom of his closet, he threw them at me. I wanted to apologize for not calling him from Nina’s, after I’d left Playwicky that morning, but he gave me the finger.
“Cork it, Fell! You got what you came for! Take them and get back to your Sevens!”
“We’ve got to talk sometime, Dib.”
“About what? How wonderful you are?”
“Let’s talk about how wonderful Little Jack is!” I said. I could see a Charlie Chaplin costume in the rental box on his desk, the cane and derby on top.
He saw me look that way, and he snapped, “Little Jack did me a favor! I’m not into kids’ parties. You guys ought to grow up!”
I took the damn shoes. Then I was out of there.
When I met Nina in the reception room that night, I was glad girls couldn’t wear costumes. She was a knockout in an ankle-length white silk dress, hiding the blue-winged dragonfly but leaving her arms and back bare.
She had on white sling-back shoes that made winter seem like June, and made her look like a bride.
She was nervous and excited. I helped her into her coat.
“Let’s not say anything on the way there, Fell. I’m too hyper.”
I said okay with me, slipped the monocle into my pocket, and put on the blue half mask all Sevens wore until intermission.
It was about fourteen degrees out, but we didn’t have far to go. The walk to the gym was clear; so was the weather. There was a slipper moon rising. I wished Mom could see us. I’d called her that morning. She had a job as hostess in a restaurant at the World Trade Center; she wasn’t due there until noon.
“You never told me if you liked the gold 7,” I’d said.
“I called you and got Mrs. Violet. You never called back.”
“You don’t like it, hmmmm?”
“I like it well enough, Johnny. Of course, our apartment number’s seven, and I feel like some old lady who’s wearing something that’ll tell the neighbors where she lives if she’s found running around the neighborhood babbling.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do. I’m going to get some head charms to hang on it — a boy’s head for you and a girl’s for Jazzy. Macy’s will engrave names on them.”
Mom never wore one of anything except her wedding ring.
She said, “People are always asking me what’s 7 mean.”
“Well? Do you tell them?”
“What can I tell them? I’ve got a son in some club I don’t even know how he got into?” She laughed. “I tell them it’s in case I forget how many days there are in the week.”
Jazzy got on the phone to tell me her favorite doll, Georgette, was in love with a doll named Mr. Mysterious, who wore a mask, cost $32.75, and could be purchased at most shopping malls.
In the background I could hear the fashion channel on television. A woman’s voice was describing a polka-dot sundress with a bolero top and spaghetti straps underneath.
“Johnny?” Mom said when she got back on. “Are you meeting any nice girls?”
“I’ve met one named Nina.”
“I hope she’s not your usual type.”
“What’s my usual type, Mom?”
“Someone who can run circles around you. Someone who’s older and wiser, like that Keats person.”
Even Mom knew better than to mention Delia.
“This Nina person isn’t like that Keats person,” I said.
“Watch out, Johnny! You’re a cream puff when it comes to the ladies!”
At the dance I’d nab the photographer and have a picture taken for Mom. One look at Nina in all white, and Mom would start fantasizing the wedding, the house we’d all move into, and the grandchildren she could buy more head charms for at Macy’s.
I spared Mom the news about Creery, just as I had the Lasher story. The Cottersville Compass was already hinting that a suicide on The Hill was purportedly tied into the death earlier of another student. I didn’t know how long it would take the news services to pick it up, or if Mom would even see it when they did. She probably wouldn’t unless it was on the same page announcing a white sale or 50% Off Everything.
On the phone that week, I’d told Nina what I knew.
“Boy, does my shrink have egg on her face!” she’d said, the moment we’d sped away from her house in the BMW Mr. Deem had lent me. “Her groat-hormone theory was shot all to pieces!”
“Did she say anything Thursday?”
“I told you, Fell. I quit. Dad calls it a hiatus, but it’s over. From now on I’m on my own.”
She was, too. Or I was. As soon as we started dancing, the stag line began descending on us.
I lost her to Charlie Chan, Charles Dickens, Charles Bronson, three or four of the Charlie Chaplins who were there in force, and Charlie Chan again.
I began to feel as though I was ready for grief counseling with HEADOC, whose red Maserati had been in the faculty parking lot all week.
There was a seven-piece band playing, blue-and-white 7’s hanging from the ceiling, where seven golden angels swung from fluffy clouds in Seventh Heaven. (It had seemed like a good idea when we were planning the decorations, but there was something slightly macabre about it in view of Creery’s death … or maybe I’d just spent too much time reading Lasher’s writings about heaven.)
The seven chaperones wore white dresses or blue suits.
“Fell?” Nina said at one point, when I’d wrenched Charlie Chan’s white-gloved hands from her shoulder a third time. “If I don’t remember to thank you for this, thank you now.”
She put her fingers up on my cheek lightly, and we looked at one another for maybe six seconds. That was all it took for me to see the wisdom and the heartbreak of chaperones and separate quarters for overnight visitors.
Some of Charlie Chan’s greasepaint had come off on Nina’s dress.
“Thank heavens I brought a change, Fell!” she said to me at intermission. “Look at me!”
We were heading to Sevens House for the intermission ceremony. Mrs. Violet presided over the punch bowl there, while dorm boys served their dates from the bowl in the gym.
This was the time when the Sevens unmasked. The lights went off in the reception room, and our faces were illuminated by tiny gold flashlights shaped like 7’s, CHARLES engraved down their sides. Each girl was given a corsage of white roses and blue ribbons, and most kept their dates’ flashlights as souvenirs.
For the first time I saw Lauren and The Lion. He was in seventeenth-century costume as Charles II of England.
“That’s my shrink’s daughter, isn’t it?” said Nina. “She looks enough like her to make me shake! … Let me go up and change before I meet her!”
• • •
“Nina who?” Lauren asked me after I explained my date was “freshening up,” and as The Lion strutted down to the john.
“Deem. Nina Deem.”
“Oh, Fell! How did you get roped into that?”
She passed me an envelope marked Photograph. Paul, sometime last autumn.
“Wait till you see her!” I said.
Lauren was in a red wool dress, her hair pulled up on her head, pearls dangling down the front. Red shoes. The smell of Obsession.
“That’s the smiling picture of Paul,” she said.
I was getting it out of the envelope.
“I know Nina Deem,” said Lauren. “She was mother’s client. Past tense, so I can tell you watch out for her, Fell. She’s needy. And that’s a nice way to put it.”
“I like her. You will, too.”
“Fell, she’d get on my mother’s answering machine and use up all the tape whining about this married dope pusher she had a crush on. Of course, she claimed he’d been framed. She was obsessed with what his wife was like, convinced he didn’t love her. She’d go on and on about him, on the tape! Paul and I called her Screaming Nina. When we were home, we’d tune in to her and howl!”
I pulled Lauren to one side, away from the punch and the girls in the gowns with their Charleses.
“Tell me more, Lauren. She knew he was married?”
“She knew, all right. She was dying to get a look at his wife. I hope you’re not involved, Fell!”
“What else?”
I was holding the photograph of Lasher in my hands while I listened.
“Are you involved with Screaming Nina?”
I hardly heard the question. I was looking at the picture of her brother. Lasher was dressed up in a gay nineties costume, sitting on a bench, the waterfall, the old mill, the weeping willow behind him.
“This wa
s taken at Dragonland,” I said.
“I don’t know where it was taken. It was in a thingamajig and I pulled it out, because look at him smile! Paul never smiled unless he was up to something.”
“Then he knew Eddie Dragon,” I said.
Lauren looked at me. “That’s the name of Screaming Nina’s boyfriend,” she said. “How would Paul have known him?”
I didn’t answer Lauren, not only because I didn’t have an answer but also because of what I saw suddenly across the room.
Charlie Chan was leaving Sevens House, putting on his coat over his costume, his gloves off, and there was something on his wrist I’d seen before. A dragonfly.
I started running, down the hall and up the stairs, the voice of the Sevens shouting after me “Off-limits to males tonight!”
Someone grabbed my coattails to stop me.
Kidder.
“Your date’s not up there, Fell. She just went out the side door.”
Chapter 22
I got out in the parking lot in time to see them take off in a white Isuzu jeep.
Nina hadn’t changed clothes. I could see her pulling her coat around the white dress. She must have used the time to lug her garment bag down to his car.
I didn’t have the BMW keys with me, but I remembered Mr. Deem telling me about the spare in the ashtray.
I got in fast and went after them, picking the jeep up in my headlights near the traffic light at the top of the hill.
They made a left, heading into Cottersville, and I followed a few car lengths behind them.
My mind was spinning like the BMW’s wheels: recalling how Nina’d said she’d begged her father to let her go to The Charles Dance … then how she’d come up soon after with the idea to stay overnight. I thought of Nina telling me she’d brought a lot of changes in her garment bag, and I remembered the way she’d thanked me for the evening right before intermission.
And of course I was remembering the afternoon at Dragonland, the way she’d pretended to be shocked by the idea Eddie was married. She’d known that all along, used me to satisfy her curiosity about Ann Dragon.
Lauren had laughed at the idea Nina’d claimed Eddie didn’t love his wife. But my money was on Nina.