“Confided? No, I taught him reading. Look, I’m not sure I can be of much help here. I already told the other policemen everything I know.” She folded her hands. Outside the office window, Florence walked past with Randall, and SJ could feel them straining to keep their eyes forward.
“But you do know him . . . personally?” Detective Rodriguez spoke again, looking directly at SJ. Her voice was soft. SJ felt her legs start to shake again. She pushed down on her thighs.
Florence stood at the checkout desk with her back to the office, pointing out things. You’re a doll, SJ thought. Getting Randall to cover. Twice, Randall turned his head around to peek at what was going on in SJ’s office. What could she say, that she didn’t know Mickey personally but that he had kissed her when she had driven over to his garage?
His garage.
They knew.
“Look,” SJ said, “he didn’t show up on Friday. So I went looking for him. He comes to his lessons on time. Early even. He’s polite and friendly. The things he’s accused of doing—I just don’t see it. The guy who sits with me sounding out his words, that is not the same guy who . . . who assaulted . . . who raped Leo Rivera and stuffed his body in a plastic box to sink to the bottom of the river. It just isn’t.” SJ was aware that she was trembling. Her whole body felt tense, worked up. “That monster,” she said, pointing at Detective Rodriguez, her voice quivering, “is not the same person who grins when he reads whole sentences on his own, who shows up like an eager puppy dog . . .” Who kissed me the other night. “I don’t see it. I don’t.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Detective Rodriguez stood and offered SJ a tissue from the box on the desk. “Sara Jane . . . is it alright if I call you that?”
“SJ,” she said and blew her nose. “Everyone calls me SJ.”
“SJ,” Detective Rodriguez smiled, “you’re not in trouble here. You’re not. But we have pretty good reason to suspect that Mr. Gilberto is involved in this murder.”
“Or we wouldn’t be here,” Detective Mahoney added, pushing his chair back onto its hind legs.
“That’s right. We wouldn’t be here. But we are here because we know—we’re certain—that Mr. Gilberto is involved.”
“Involved?” SJ said, tossing her tissue into the wastebasket. “So you’re not sure he actually did it, then?”
Detective Mahoney tipped his chair back down. “Let’s just say we’ve got some strong evidence against him, okay? What we want to know is what he might have told you.”
“Leo Rivera,” Detective Rodriguez said, sitting back down in her chair, “he was in the after-school program here. You knew him?”
SJ shook her head. “Not in the program. But he stopped by sometimes after school.”
“Cute kid? Nice, wasn’t he? Sweet?”
“I knew him,” SJ said. “I knew who he was. He—”
“You’d like to find his killer, wouldn’t you? Figure out what kind of a person—what kind of, as you said, monster—would do that to a little kid?” That soft voice. Dark, intense eyes. Bloodred nails on the desk.
SJ was suddenly exhausted. “Absolutely. I’m just saying—”
“Then whatever you can tell us about Mickey Gilberto would be very helpful.” Detective Rodriguez stood back up. “We would appreciate it very much, SJ.” She handed SJ her card. “Call us if you think of anything.”
Detective Mahoney stood and rebuttoned his suit jacket. He extended his hand to SJ. “Thanks for your time.”
The detectives let themselves out, shook hands again with Florence as they passed by the front desk, and headed for the door. Randall peered back once more at SJ then pretended to be looking for something on one of the shelves.
What kind of monster. SJ slumped in her seat. She knew that she’d come across as terribly naïve to the detectives. Silly, even. She just couldn’t explain what she meant. How she knew that reading was not the pastime of criminals. Did child murderers go in for self-improvement? But she saw again the metal desk in Mickey’s garage, its surface littered with newspaper articles, all about Leo Rivera. And she heard again that voice, What if he wanted it?
Chapter Thirteen
After leaving Brandywine, Deirdre walked home. Now that she was here, she didn’t know what to do. Her daily schedule revolved around school. Even on the first day of summer vacation, Deirdre always needed to spend at least one entire day doing nothing, flopping onto the couch, wandering about aimlessly, stunned into a kind of inertia without the routine of work to structure her days. She wasn’t a soap opera fan, and at her own insistence she and SJ didn’t have cable. She didn’t feel like taking a run. She tried reaching SJ, but Florence insisted that SJ couldn’t be interrupted and promised that she’d call back just as soon as she could.
Deirdre wandered through the rooms downstairs. Think of this as a day off. Read that book, the one you left by the bed. Take a nap. Instead, she took inventory of her belongings, as if the knowledge that she owned this painting or that plant could shore her up, give her some confidence, lend some validity to her sense of self. It’s true that belongings did say something about a person. Who didn’t check out the books on someone’s shelves the first time you were invited in? Who didn’t immediately reassess the potential value of a budding friendship after discovering the new friend’s passion for collecting tiny glass animals or fuzzy velvet paintings of clowns? You looked for those things, those signs that let you know this person might not be someone you really wanted to befriend after all. At least Deirdre looked for those signs, and she assumed everyone else worked the same way. You knew what you liked, what constituted good taste, and the rest, well, the rest you hoped you never had to deal with.
Walking from room to room, Deirdre knew it was silly, but she could almost convince herself everything would be okay. Breathe. Breathe. Each room, like the houses on her walk to school, gave the appearance of undisrupted status quo. This room. This vase. This desk and chair. And because they were real, solid, unchanged, Deirdre could almost convince herself that nothing else had changed, and that she was the same person she had always been. The Deirdre standing now in the living room was the same woman who’d recently bought her first house, this house, a charming cape with built-in china cabinet and an unfinished upstairs. She was the same Deirdre who’d always gotten good grades, who’d read books in the adult library before she was twelve, who’d graduated from college with a 3.9. She was the same woman who so far had been offered every job she had applied for, had convinced the faculty development group to read Reviving Ophelia, had suggested Carol Gilligan, books by Theodore Sizer and Parker Palmer. She was not the kind of woman who could ever be guilty of . . . of molestation, if that’s what she was being accused of.
Deirdre was a teacher, a competent one, better than that. She was a good teacher with a solid reputation. And the problem that had her wandering aimlessly—besides the fact that it was still early morning (about ten o’clock, she guessed) and normally she would be teaching her fourth-period intro class, the girls who still muddled their greetings when Deirdre met them at the classroom door and offered each one a handshake and a bonjour—was that if she suddenly weren’t a teacher, she couldn’t imagine what else she might be. She couldn’t even really think about that very remote possibility, not for very long at least, without her stomach cramping. Nor could she think about the possibility that she might be someone who could be fired.
Fired. Worse, a child molester. Some kind of monster.
Deirdre knew how things worked in a school like Brandywine. News traveled faster than fast. By the end of the school day, everyone would know what had happened. If they didn’t already. She hadn’t discussed with Martin what he would say to the other faculty, but Deirdre knew he would have to say something, explain her absence. She wished she could call Forest to see how the other teachers had reacted.
Christ, if Forest reacted the way he did, what would the rest of the faculty think—the teachers who weren’t even her friends, the ones w
ho criticized the time she spent with students, who found her preparation excessive? Forest was the one who was supposed to understand Deirdre, to be on her side. Get her. She paced back and forth in the living room. Maybe she should call and leave a message on his machine. And say what? Deirdre stopped pacing and dropped onto the couch. She had nothing to say to Forest—that was the problem. He needed to apologize to her.
She got up and wandered into the kitchen. She pulled down a couple of her favorite cookbooks, and although it was still early, she poured herself a glass of chardonnay. At the table, she flipped through The Best of Gourmet. She decided to cook, to make something fancy, something more complicated than what she might fix on a normal weeknight, especially a Monday.
Maybe tonight would be the night she and SJ would patch things up; for whatever reason they needed to be patched up, Deirdre wasn’t exactly sure. She knew that SJ was frustrated with the amount of time she spent teaching and organizing projects at school. And of course this thing with Anna Worthington had taken up a lot of time. But in general, Deirdre didn’t understand how SJ seemed to dismiss the hard work—and time—teaching required. There were the lessons to plan, those alone required hours of creation, of figuring out the exact right method to engage her students. What nonteachers didn’t seem to understand was that you couldn’t simply get up there and explain things. Couldn’t, for example, just reinterpret the book, if you used one at all. You had to make your subject come alive, had to make it seem real for students, or else they couldn’t see the point of learning it. And then, of course, things kept changing, methods improved.
SJ teased her about her pile of professional journals stacked by the bed. She complained that Deirdre hardly read the journals and they took up space, gathered dust. But Deirdre did read them. She was always on the lookout for new ways of thinking about grammar instruction. She had to keep them nearby, ready to be picked up and read again, gleaned for wisdom on those nights when she had trouble sleeping, worried, as she often was, about how to introduce a new concept—for example, the imparfait, or the indefinite pronoun on.
And, of course, it wasn’t just the lessons that required Deirdre’s time and attention. There were the students themselves, and their messy lives—their home troubles, some serious: sick parents, absent parents (the occasional one in jail), parents who couldn’t care less, and parents who smothered; upcoming divorces; and the parent who hit when drunk. And some less serious: the busy social calendars that kept the girls from studying enough; the parties they were or weren’t invited to; the boyfriend woes; the complicated dynamics of girl relationships; best friends and changing cliques; crushes they couldn’t always admit to. All of it mattered. And all of it required Deirdre’s time and attention.
She was not ready to accept the fact that she might not be a teacher any longer—or no longer a teacher at Brandywine—but if she had to take some time off, she might as well get something out of it. Right? She flipped a few pages and sipped her wine. For starters, she considered making a pâté but realized she had too little time. She wanted more than a salad, even one with warm goat cheese. There were soups—cream of mushroom, cream of broccoli, smoky pumpkin. Here’s what she wanted—lobster bisque. She would start with that.
Deirdre grabbed an envelope out of the recycling bin and started to copy down the ingredients. What next? Pasta? Chicken dishes seemed too ordinary. She didn’t really feel like eating beef, though she toyed briefly with the idea of Moroccan meatloaf. There were grilled dishes, but not after a lobster bisque. That didn’t seem right. She looked through a few more pages. Veal. Scaloppine. Parmesan. Picatta. That was it. Veal picatta. She settled on the idea, too, of serving risotto on the side, and steamed green beans. She already had a pinot grigio. Perfect. For dessert . . . hmmm . . . she didn’t know what to make for dessert. Normally, she and SJ didn’t have dessert, but Deirdre felt that tonight the occasion might call for one. Something . . . not necessarily elaborate, but substantial. Something chocolate. Yes, a cake, maybe, with a ganache.
Deirdre glanced at the clock. She didn’t have much time to get all this done. First she had to shop. Maybe a cake with ganache wasn’t the right thing. Maybe she would have to settle for cupcakes. Or a mousse. She’d make her decision in the store. For now, she wrote down the ingredients for all three possibilities.
* * *
Deirdre had the veal in the fridge and all the rest of the ingredients lined up on the counter. She had decided on the mousse and was making that first to give it time to set. In the grocery store, she had even gotten excited about the idea of this meal, of cooking. But back in the kitchen, her mind switched to school again. She wondered if any of her students would suddenly hate her. Or feel betrayed. Would they question her motives, or her behavior? Remember a time when she had touched them, maybe—in all innocence, of course, but now they might misconstrue every gesture. There were some girls who were certain not to care at all, but the ones Deirdre cared about most, they would have an opinion one way or another. She tied her apron behind her back.
Deirdre hoped that at least some students would rally to her side. That’s what she liked to imagine. A troupe of them storming Martin Loring’s office, demanding to know why he had put Deirdre on leave. Why couldn’t he trust her, they would want to know, when she was the best teacher they had ever had? Lydia would lead the charge. But then again, Lydia was Anna Worthington’s best friend.
Deirdre beat the egg yolks with a whisk, her hands shaky. Hilary would stand up for her. All those afternoons they had spent last year in Deirdre’s classroom, going over irregular verbs. The days they spent drilling disjunctive pronouns, practicing the passé composé. At least Hilary knew firsthand how hard Deirdre worked, how much she wanted to help her students succeed. But that was the most insulting thing—couldn’t Martin Loring see that? Didn’t he know how much effort she put into her teaching? How much love she had for her students? Because if he did, then how could he accuse her of wrongdoing?
Her chest constricted and she had to stop, breathe deeply. What was Martin Loring thinking? Why wasn’t he relying on what he knew about Deirdre, not what Frances Worthington was accusing her of, the lies she was spreading? She stopped, sat for a moment, sipped more wine. He would come to his senses. He had to.
Deirdre put the cut-up squares of chocolate into a saucepan and stuck it over another of simmering water. Watching the chocolate melt was always her favorite part of making mousse, swirling the pieces with a wooden spoon around the bottom of the pan until they softened into smooth satiny ribbons.
Light streamed through the open shutters, speckling the red tablecloth, warming the wooden floor in pools of yellow gold. Deirdre tilted the pan and stirred the chocolate pieces. She breathed in the smell, rich and dark, and placed the wooden spoon on the spoon rest, turned off the flame, and wiped her hands on her apron. She clicked the metal bowl onto her standing mixer, the egg whites pooled together, pale and goopy. She hooked up the wire whisk attachment and turned the mixer first onto low and then higher, watching the egg whites increase in volume and froth. If she were—Deirdre glanced at the clock—in fifth period, she would be drilling the passé composé: Today I am reading a book; yesterday I read a book; Right now, I am singing; yesterday, I sang. She would be cold-calling the girls, starting with Lydia—because Lydia always caught on so quickly. She would start with the easy verbs, the regular ones ending in er, and move to the harder ones. Deirdre would go back to Lydia, or Alice or Courtney (if Courtney seemed to have the spark and didn’t look too mopey), every time she wanted to change things up, and introduce an irregular verb or shift the order of the questions. The fifth-period girls didn’t need too many overt explanations. They were the types of students who would actually read the textbook, study the grammar explanations, and come to class ready to see if they could pick up on Deirdre’s questions and model answers. They preferred class that way; they thought of themselves as quick learners, and for the most part, they were.
Deirdre
had to smile thinking of Ellie in their midst. She didn’t fit in, that was clear, but Deirdre had been proud of the way the other girls allowed her to be herself, and didn’t try to force her to be like them. They were good that way. Maybe because each had her own eccentric personality. They cultivated that in each other. Sometimes even for effect, Deirdre was certain.
Thinking of Ellie brought her right back to the field trip, back to the van and Anna. She replayed the scene over and over, her arms around Anna, comforting her, the girl looking up, the kiss sudden and unexpected. How had she responded? And what message had she given Anna that she thought kissing Deirdre might be okay?
Deirdre turned the mixer on low, hands still trembling. She stopped for a minute, then shook some sugar into the revolving bowl and scraped the sides of it with her rubber spatula to keep the sugar from clinging instead of mixing in with the egg whites.
The doorbell rang. She stood, spatula in midair. The doorbell rang again. Should she be very quiet and pretend not to be home? Who would come to her house in the middle of the day? A knock. Female voice: “Hello?”
The voice didn’t sound like SJ’s—and what would she be doing ringing the bell anyway—but it was hard to hear over the mixer. Deirdre turned it off, put the spatula in the bowl, and wiped her hands on her apron. The voice, a bit louder: “Ms. Murphy?”
Deirdre hurried to the front door and unlocked it. Beth Ann, in another pale sweater set, pearls around her throat, stood pressing her hands against the seam on her pant legs.
“Ms. Murphy. Am I interrupting? Forgive me. You’re cooking,” Beth Ann said, her voice soft like tapioca. She motioned to Deirdre’s apron.
“It’s fine,” Deirdre said and opened the door wide. “Come in.” She ushered Beth Ann into the living room. “Actually, do you mind coming into the kitchen? I’m making mousse.”
“I was . . .” Beth Ann followed Deirdre. “I was at Brandywine this morning. For the coffee.” She fingered her pearls. “The new-parents coffee?”
The Year of Needy Girls Page 12