Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  That seemed too much for Zachary to contain. He stood up and paced the front of the room. To the windowsill and back toward the door. I was fairly certain he didn’t even know he was in motion.

  “He called me names, in that I-don’t-give-a-damn-how-you-feel voice he has. All flat, slowing down like he didn’t have the energy to talk to me, or like I was about as important as whatever he had for lunch, and I just—I don’t know—I saw red, like they say. I really did, like things were exploding inside me, and I did shout that time, and he pushed me, pushed me away. Grabbed my arm, so I punched him with the other one. That was the only thing he’d ever taken time to teach me, how to punch somebody really hard. Except, see, the cast hit his face and I heard this noise—it was awful—something breaking, and he backed off from me, out the door, and he was shouting, and then I heard more shouting and I panicked. I turned around and ran down the back stairs and outside, and then I went back into the auditorium. Mr. Summers was awake then, but I said I’d only been gone a minute and he believed me.”

  “And then what? You came here later in the day insisting you were innocent?”

  He stopped pacing, and looked at me with what seemed true regret. “I’m sorry. You deserved better.”

  My turn to stand up. “I’ll tell you what I deserve—the truth and what you just told me was not it. That story is so full of holes I’m angry you’d think I’d believe it.”

  “The police must.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll be here soon—I’m going outside. I thought that was decent of them, waiting till the day was over.”

  “No scene in the school?”

  “No scene here. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. About the lying part.”

  What a waste. If any of this was true, what a waste. He’d finally recuperated from his father, gotten past whatever fury and despair had driven him for too long. He’d been able to let the true Zachary emerge and grow strong until, if this was true, his father reappeared in his life and now what? A prison sentence?

  But it couldn’t be true. Small details sounded possible—the punch on the cheek, perhaps—but as a whole, it did not make sense. Why would he lie this way? “You ran away while he was standing outside the room?”

  He nodded.

  “Alive, then. You forgot the falling down the stairs part. The fatal part.”

  He stared at me, visibly working to keep all emotion to himself. “He must have—he must have been falling, but I didn’t see because I turned away and ran to the back, down the back stairs.”

  This was infuriating. “When did your father have a chance to drink the drugged tea?” I asked quietly.

  His face first blanched, then turned scarlet. I had a sick sense that if he was hellbent on taking blame for something he hadn’t done, I’d just shown him the raggedy patches he had to repair the next time he told his story.

  “Has your mother gotten you a lawyer?” I asked. “You need one immediately.”

  He shrugged, and turned to go.

  It wasn’t hard to translate that gesture. “Wait a minute. Does your mother know what you’ve done? Does she know about your suddenly recovered memory? This bizarre confession? Did you tell her?”

  He turned halfway around and looked at me briefly, his eyes wide and dead-looking. “I don’t see why I’d have to ask permission to tell the truth. It’s what she’s always told me to do.”

  “Then why didn’t you listen to her? It was good advice!”

  But he was already out the door. He didn’t hear me.

  WHATEVER MY MASTER PLAN—or even my sketchy and improvised idea of a strategy—had been, it was now gone, trashed before I could recall it. I stared at the afterimage of Zachary, hurrying away to a doom he’d orchestrated, hoping for a revelation or insight that never arrived.

  I finally roused myself. Mackenzie would be here in a half hour and in the meantime, Zachary needed a lawyer. He needed his mother and his mother needed to know about this.

  I stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Students’ home numbers were treated like state secrets. Staff was not given easy access to them, as if we were likely to abuse the privilege, to have pajama parties and phone the students in the middle of the night with silly jokes.

  I entered the office ready to do battle with Mrs. Timidity who, in fact, greeted me with an expression so alarmed, I had to slow down and force out a smile.

  She pointed toward the cubbies. “You didn’t check.”

  Counting to ten to get calm would take too long. “I’m in a rush and—”

  “You’re supposed to.”

  “Mrs. Wiggins!”

  “There’s a message for you, that’s why.”

  She might have been a painted backdrop with a movable mouth and a tape that would run until I clicked it off for all she looked likely to give up and listen to me. I nodded and went to the rows of open mailboxes.

  “Your friend, she said.”

  I reached for the “while you were out” slip and saw “S. Berg” at the top of the pink square.

  “Call me,” it said in Mrs. Wiggins’s careful but loopy hand. “I am asking her to put three exclamation marks because it’s important. About the not so dear departed.” Mrs. Wiggins had seen fit to write every word of that down, plus Sasha’s number, which I knew by heart.

  If I had had more time, I’d have been more annoyed. Here it was—another message that didn’t include a message. Instead of making exclamation mark demands, couldn’t she have said what was so important?

  “I need to make a call,” I told Mrs. Wiggins.

  She nodded and reached out for the message slip. “No, not to her. I’ll call her later, from the office, or she can reach me there,” I said. “I need to call Zachary Wallenberg’s mother. Could I have his home phone and emergency numbers?”

  She tilted her head, chin up and to the side, as if posing for a coin. “Not allowed,” she said. “Those numbers are confidential.”

  “They’re for emergencies. This is one.”

  “Is he hurt?” She elevated, standing on tiptoe, to look out the door at the entryway as if expecting to see another paramedic crew in action.

  “In trouble. It’s important. It’s an emergency.”

  “I’ll phone,” she said, fumbling for and then nearly dropping the telephone.

  “Please,” I said, reaching for it. She was going to mess up the message—she didn’t even know the message—and meanwhile Zachary was efficiently destroying his life.

  She snatched the phone away from me and her eyes reminded me of photos I’ve seen of horses trapped near a fire. “I’ll get in trouble,” she said. “I—you’ve been nice to me, so I’m sorry, but—I’m in trouble already.” She rolled her eyes toward the office door. “He—after what happened last week and I wasn’t there. I mean here! He, Dr. H., he’s very angry and he said he was giving me one more chance.”

  “That isn’t fair. You didn’t have anyone to cover for you. And by the way—did you hear somebody shout?”

  “I wasn’t here!”

  “I mean on your way back, maybe?”

  “No,” she said. “No. Nobody shouted.”

  So that part of Zachary’s tale was also a fabrication.

  “Why? Did Dr. H. say I was here? He’s pretty angry about the way I wasn’t—”

  “I’ll talk to him, I promise. It’ll be fine, but not now. Right now, I need to—”

  She held the phone to her chest with both hands, protecting it from me. “I can’t. I’m in trouble, and I need this job!”

  She wasn’t moving, and yet she was spinning, working herself into a frenzy about the phone and the danger it presented to her. I wondered if there was any validity to the old movie technique of a slap on the face.

  “I don’t have anybody in the world, and I need to work!” Her voice was high and close to keening.

  So there was no Mr. Wiggins. I couldn’t blame him for cutting out. Nor could I comprehend why he’d ever cut in.

  “So let me, let me!” />
  And then instead of merely facing her, or worse, facing her down, I actually looked at her, saw her, a doughy woman of indeterminate age clutching a phone to her bosom, terrified that I was destroying her livelihood. I knew she had gotten this job because the term had already begun and all the superior secretaries were elsewhere. Nobody wanted the job, which was as underpaid as were all the positions at Philly Prep, except for Mrs. Wiggins, who desperately needed it.

  I was ashamed of myself. Yes, Zachary was having an emergency, but I had the sense that Mrs. Wiggins’s entire life was lived in a state of emergency—frightened, confused, and unfathomably desperate. That didn’t make for a good school secretary, but it did suggest that a measure of compassion was called for.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You can dial. Please do. Hand me the phone when you reach her, if that’s all right.”

  She stood frozen for a moment of thought. “I think it would be,” she eventually whispered, and then she dialed. She listened. She frowned. “Oh, dear,” she said. “An answering machine. She must not be home.” She was halfway to hanging up when I reached for the receiver.

  “Please,” I said. “A message?”

  Her mouth opened slightly, then she nodded, as if this were a new and amazing concept. I spoke quickly. “Zachary needs to be in touch with you, Mrs. Wallenberg. He’s at police headquarters. He—he—he apparently has confessed to killing Tomas Severin. He needs a lawyer and probably more than that. Call me if you can.” I left my cell phone number.

  Mrs. Wiggins never looked robust or vigorous, but she now looked ashen, as if all her blood had sunk to her feet. She took back the receiver with her mouth half open and I feared she was having a stroke.

  “Are you all right? Mrs. Wiggins?”

  She took a sharp breath. “Yes,” she said, “I’m—but that boy! He said he killed him?”

  I nodded.

  “How?”

  “Pushed him down the stairs. You remember.” Of course, Zachary had skipped over that part, but I was willing to bet he wouldn’t when he talked to the police. In any case, she knew how Tom Severin had died, and surely she didn’t have to be told that part of it. “Do you have a work number for his mother?”

  She didn’t seem able to focus on two things at once, and she still looked numb. “He—why would he?”

  “Do such a thing? Or say he’d done such a thing? I don’t know. I’m as baffled as you are, and as upset as you seem. Now, the emergency number, or her cell phone? I think she works and goes to school. There might be . . .” She still looked glazed. “What is it?” I asked quietly.

  “Why would he lie? Say he’d done such a thing? He’s a nice boy. He was sometimes the aide in here, and he had such good plans and was very polite to everyone.”

  “That’s why we have to get him out of . . . Mrs. Wiggins, if you saw something that day, something that didn’t seem important at first, or you didn’t remember it for a while, it could matter, even if it doesn’t make particular sense to us. I don’t think Zachary did it. His story is full of holes, but I’m afraid the police are going to believe him. It’d be easier than looking for somebody else because he’s confessing. So if you saw something, anything—”

  “No!” she said. “How could I? I was in the bathroom. I told you that! I told the police that! What are you saying?”

  I put my hands up in a position of surrender. “Nothing—I only hoped that you said that about lying because you knew something, saw someone leave, had an idea that might help.”

  She held her head high, but she didn’t meet my glance. “I would have said so if I had.”

  “You aren’t afraid of anything, are you?”

  “Me? Why would I be? Of what?” Her skin was putty colored so that she looked no more than half alive. How could I have asked that general a question? Mrs. Wiggins was afraid of everything. Including me.

  “I meant—nobody’s frightening you, are they? Telling you what you can say and what you can’t?”

  “Oh.” She took a deep breath. “That. No. No. Who would? Why would anybody?”

  “Right. Never mind. But about that alternate number, do you have one?” Every one of her responses was half a step off point, as if she were actually answering an entirely different set of questions, as if my words were translated into a new language before they reached her ears. I did not, however, have any idea what to do about that without frightening her still more.

  “It’s just that he wrote that lovely article in the paper—I saw it, even though I wasn’t working here last month. And once, he was office aide and there wasn’t much to do, and he told me about the book you were reading—East of Eden, isn’t it, and about how the father liked one of his children more than the other, and—well, it was so sad I started to cry.” She looked down and away and I was afraid she might be about to cry again. “And then he said he knew how that could be, and I cried even more. I felt like he was a friend. Do I sound silly? It was terrible, but he was nice to me. Kind. I mean . . . I must have looked pretty foolish, but he was . . .” She looked up at me again. “He isn’t the type to lie, Miss Pepper.”

  “Amanda.”

  She blinked several times, then stared at me.

  “Call me by my given name,” I said. “We’re colleagues, after all.”

  I had dumbfounded her, but she didn’t respond in kind, and so Mrs. Wiggins she remained and, I, Miss Pepper. She obviously felt safer hiding behind the formality of surnames. Or simply basking in the memory of when there’d been a Mr. Wiggins.

  She scuttled back to her desk, and opened a file drawer, but I saw her pause a second to put her hand on her heart and take a breath. I wished I had a way—a gentle, humane way—to find out why I was now terrifying her along with Dr. Havermeyer. He was holding her job over her head, but what was the weapon she envisioned me carrying?

  She dialed another number and listened. “Her cell phone, I think. She’s a student at Penn, did you know that? She told me.” She listened, frowning, as it rang, then suddenly rushed to the divider and passed the phone to me. “She’s answering!” The tinge of hysteria had returned to her voice.

  I took the phone. Carole Wallenberg panicked immediately, and my first job was to reassure her that Zachary had not been hurt.

  “Then—did he—are you calling because he did something?”

  I knew she meant a minor offense: insulting a teacher, failing to hand in an assignment. She most assuredly did not mean that he’d announced he was a murderer. “He did something stupid, I’m afraid,” I said. “He called the police and confessed to the murder of Tomas Severin.”

  I heard small and not so small explosions, staccato bundles of words that imploded one on the other and didn’t make sense except for their emotional freight, which was clear enough. “How could he!” she said. “He’s so—he’s—I know why he did that—I know! He’s so—” And then she was crying with small hiccupped sobs, so I waited again, watching Mrs. Wiggins’s basset-hound eyes as she tried to comprehend what was going on.

  “Do you have a lawyer? Know a good criminal lawyer?” I asked.

  “He’s doing this to spare me,” she said in such a low, rushed voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

  “Did you say to spare you?”

  “To—to protect me. Yes. He’s a kid, he has a code of gallantry, he—”

  “Mrs. Wallenberg, do you have a lawyer? Because I’d suggest you call him right now.”

  More verbal explosions. “Oh, God, the only one I know was from my divorce, but no, she’s not a—I’ll find out—oh God.”

  “I think it would be good, if you can leave work—”

  “School. I’m here at school, cleaning the lab. My grant hinges on my doing this.”

  “Can you leave?”

  “I—yes. Of course. Soon. Why not? This stupid job—he’s where?”

  I told her again. “Would you like me to meet you there?”

  “He—I . . . No, thank you. I need to, I want to talk with
my son. I need to be with him. Do you think they’d believe him? No, never mind. I—he—thank you, but no. I’ll—I’ll—can we talk later?”

  I thought we needed to talk right now, but my opinion wasn’t going to carry the day. “Of course,” I said. “I have some appointments first, but I’ll be at the office later on—maybe five P.M.?”

  “That detective place. Yes,” she said. “I saw it in the paper. Zach told me, too.”

  “We’re on Market Street, but you can reach me through my cell phone—”

  “Fine,” she said and hung up before I was able to tell her the address, the cell phone number, or even say that both were on her home answering machine. I’d been dismissed, except emotionally. I still felt very much entwined in whatever was going on. I handed the phone back to Mrs. Wiggins.

  Not a piece of it made sense or, worse, it did make sense and I didn’t because I was so prejudiced in Zachary’s favor. I didn’t want to believe, in fact felt nauseated by the thought that Zachary, no matter how understandably furious with his father, would push him to his death. And why would his mother think he was doing this for her benefit? To spare her what?

  Was it possible I wasn’t being any more rational than Carole Wallenberg, and that I couldn’t bear to think of Zach as guilty because I believed he was my gold-star pupil, my vindication, my personal triumph?

  How does a possibly irrational person establish whether or not she’s rational?

  Looking for Nina Severin’s wayward brother seemed at best a detour at the moment, but at least it would allow time for talk with Mackenzie.

  Mrs. Wiggins regarded me with a tight smile. I must have been standing there, inert, distracted, for too long. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I just . . . I was lost in thought.”

  “A lot to think about,” she agreed, nodding.

  “Are you sure he’s lying?”

  She nodded again.

  “Would you be willing to say so to the police?”

  She backed away from the center divider, her hands slightly raised, as if I’d trapped her. “Ohhh—no. I’d be too . . . I’m not good with words, I couldn’t—”