Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  “That’s right. Did you know him?” Kaz gave her an inquiring look.

  She nodded quickly, her mouth a taut line, and I asked, “Why did he leave his job?”

  “Not here,” she replied in a hiss, glancing left and right exactly as if we were in a cartoon spy movie. “Follow me.”

  She led us down a labyrinth of corridors, slinking nervously past classrooms in active use, her crepe-soled shoes making not so much as a squeak against the flooring. Finally, she ushered us through a stairwell and out of the building. We stood in the doorway alcove of what appeared to be a side entrance to the school, looking out at an expanse of leaf-strewn lawn that stretched between Hazelton and what looked like a small wedge of forested land. It reminded me uncomfortably of the Walkers’ backyard. The clouded sky was darker now, smelling unmistakably of impending rain, and a cold wind hurled itself at us, scraping our faces from time to time with missiles of dried leaves.

  Klara stared out at the treetops with pensive, worried eyes, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, while we waited for her to speak. At last, Kaz prompted her, “What can you tell us about Professor Hoffman?”

  “Why are you asking about him? What has he done?” she countered, her gaze shifting between us interrogatively. Then she shook her head, putting up her hands. “No, never mind. I think I … I’d rather not know.” Her face was pale and heart-shaped, her eyes massive, and with her tortured expression she was an Emily Brontë character come to life. “To begin with, he did not exactly leave his job here. Not the way that it sounds, at least.”

  “He was fired?”

  Klara shook her head, frustrated. “Not exactly that, either.” With an anxious sigh, she added, “I should tell you how it was. How it happened.

  “Professor Hoffman taught English here—British literature to the underclassmen, and the history of drama to older students. He was nice, but strange. He would comment all the time about how ‘lovely’ the girls at Hazelton looked in their uniforms, and every day, at the beginning of class, he would compliment specific girls—always the same ones—telling them how pretty they were.” Her voice was soft, but her tone was grave, as though she were reciting an elegy. “Three years ago, there was … an incident. One of the girls was down in the stacks, a sort of spillover library in the basement, doing research for a paper; she had a workstation set up, with her books and notes and a cup of iced tea, and she was listening to music—her iPod. She was alone.

  “At one point she simply … fell unconscious. She said that one minute she was writing in her notebook, and the next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor, and Professor Hoffman was there, with his hands on her … her skirt. He said he found her like that, exposed, and was trying to cover her up, but she didn’t believe him. She was in some pain and insisted on a medical examination, but the doctor found nothing. There were some bruises, but there was no … DNA, if you understand me?” She blushed at her own inference, and we nodded. “She was convinced she had been interfered with by Professor Hoffman, but she couldn’t prove it. There were no witnesses.”

  “Had she been drugged?” Kaz asked, and Klara nodded.

  “She suspected the tea, but by the time she thought of it, it was too late.” Anticipating our next question, she continued, “It was from a café in the city, but she had been away from her workstation often to look for books, so anyone could have gone in and out of the library without her being aware.”

  Kaz and I exchanged a black look as I thought about my conversation with Reiko. The guy slipped her something so she was unconscious when it happened. It made me sick to realize that Cedric might actually be a serial rapist, moving from school to school. “This occurred three years ago.… What happened prior to last year?”

  “The same thing, more or less. Another student of his, this time in one of the classrooms. She was working on a makeup test after regular school hours. Professor Hoffman brought her a cup of coffee and then excused himself from the room. She woke up on the floor, again with him kneeling over her. She had been … well, this time there was no doubt she had been … attacked, but once again, there was no DNA, no witnesses, no actually incriminating evidence.”

  “What about the coffee?” I demanded. “He brings her coffee and, whoopsy, she mysteriously blacks out? Isn’t that evidence?”

  “It was her word against his,” Klara said, a spark of anger glimmering in the depths of her brown eyes. “He poured it down the sink before she could stop him, so there was simply no way to test it.”

  “Fucking asshole!” Kaz exploded.

  “The girls tried to bring charges, but what they had was all circ-circ-”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “Yes. So when they couldn’t get anywhere with the police, the girls’ parents threatened to sue Hazelton. The administration tried to dismiss Professor Hoffman, but because the accusations against him couldn’t be proved, he sued the school instead. Wrongful termination. In the end, Hazelton paid him to go away—and they paid the girls’ families, too, to make sure they would not talk to the media.”

  It explained why I’d found no mention of scandal associated with either Cedric’s name or the school’s, why the man had abandoned his prestigious job and title, and why he was still allowed within a country mile of any occupation involving teenage girls. What it didn’t explain was what I should do next. If there was truth in what I was being told, then Cedric was a predator who had gotten away with the same crime at least twice before, leaving nothing behind to convict him.

  He had been extremely careful in the attacks on his victims at Hazelton—perhaps he’d even used condoms—but if he was the one who’d assaulted January, I was determined she would be his downfall. All I had to do was somehow find solid proof of a crime I only knew about because I had heard it from a dead girl. No sweat, right?

  “He’s done it again, hasn’t he?” Klara’s tone was flat and resigned, and when I nodded my confirmation, she looked away, cursing under her breath. “Scheißkerl.” When her eyes returned to mine, they gleamed with moisture. “One of those girls was a friend. A good friend. Even after they bought that arschloch off, she still couldn’t bear to return to school. She had nightmares and panic attacks.…” Klara took a shaky breath. “Whoever he did it to, tell her to make him pay.”

  “He’ll pay,” I promised. “You can count on it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “I THOUGHT THE drama kids at Dumbass would be more fun and, like, laid-back—the way they are at Riverside,” January remarked morosely one early fall afternoon. The summer heat was taking its time dissipating, fingers of humidity still gripping the city with uncomfortable intimacy, and we were having ice cream at a local place not far from downtown. January’s flavor of choice was lemon custard—a nice enough pick, if you go for things that don’t have chocolate in them—and my cone was Mackinac Island fudge, a Michigan specialty. “I thought they’d be kinda alternative, you know? Cooler than the rest of the assholes who go there? Instead, they’re just more … dramatic.”

  “Sounds like you fit right in.”

  “Fuck you,” she retorted good-naturedly. “I’m serious, though. I’m starting to feel like I’ll never have any friends again. You should hear the shit they talk about, Flynn! Fashion magazines and Caribbean vacations and dressage horses … like, what in the actual fuck is a ‘dressage horse’?”

  I made a face. “It sounds like a French horse drag queen.”

  She cackled. “I made the exact same joke, and this girl glared at me like I’d just spit on her grandmother’s corpse! So you see what I’m dealing with.”

  “No one is nice at all? Not even a little?”

  “Oh, no, they’re all super ‘nice.’” She gave a hugely fake, toothpaste-ad smile with the word. “That bitchy-girl kind of nice, where they say something that should be friendly and still manage to make it sound like ‘fuck off and die.’ Like, ‘Wow, January, I wish I had the courage to wear something like that to school!’”

 
; “Yikes.”

  “And the guy who runs the drama club is a total freak.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. For one thing, he always wants to explain scenes in their ‘original historical context,’ which he couldn’t possibly make sound less interesting, and he’s also a perv. The other day, he spent twenty minutes talking about Louis XIV and the Duke of Orleans, and the entire time he was looking me straight in the boobs.”

  “Gross. Didn’t you say he was, like, old?”

  “Yes! He’s like sixty! It’s like … it’s like having Santa pat his lap and then lick his lips at you.” She performed a parody of this, folding her lips to mimic toothlessness and then slurping her tongue around like a golden retriever while stroking her thigh with her free hand. I couldn’t help myself and started laughing. “Yeah, it’s really funny when you’re not the one Santa wants for his little ho-ho-ho!”

  She was laughing, too, though. I nudged her. “Tell him your boyfriend will beat him up if he keeps staring at your bazooms.”

  “Okay, first of all? I will never use the word ‘bazooms,’ and if you value your testicles, you won’t, either. Number two? You tell a guy you have a boyfriend, and he just ogles you even more, because now you’re ‘a challenge.’ And third, you have nothing to worry about.” She made like she was going to touch my nose with her cone, but then she pulled it back at the last second. “Anyway, he’s harmless. Just weird.”

  “If you say so.” I shrugged. “I just don’t want you to ditch me so you can become the next Mrs. Claus.”

  She did her gross-old-man impression again, adding in a wink for good measure. “You’ve gotta be a little naughty this year if you want to get on my Nice List, Mrs. Claus!”

  I laughed so hard I almost dropped my ice cream. “Ho-ho-ho!”

  * * *

  The mood inside the Lexus was subdued, to say the least, on the drive back to Ann Arbor. I couldn’t stop thinking about Klara’s account, what it meant, and how frankly helpless it made me feel. The images gathering in my mind were even darker and more ominous than the storm clouds that finally opened up over I-96 as we were passing the exit to Northville.

  “That fucking bastard,” Kaz finally hissed, his jaw clenched so tightly I could see a muscle fluttering under his ear. He snapped the windshield wipers on with more force than necessary, and they swung wildly back and forth, throwing the rain across the glass in ropy streaks. “He even joined the search party! What kind of a … a monster…” He stopped and sucked in air, his arms ramrod straight in front of him, hands gripping the wheel. “We have to go to the cops with this. Right now.”

  “With what?” I asked, giving a pessimistic snort. “They already know about all this, remember? There’s no way to prove any of it.”

  “But it’s a pattern.” Kaz refused to back down. “I mean, it has to be enough for them to at least take him in for questioning, right?”

  “At which point he would deny everything and then threaten another lawsuit, for harassment.” Frustration made me sound condescending. “Kaz, I don’t think they took me seriously when I told them there’d even been a rape!” I exclaimed. “They’re not going to bring anyone in for questioning about a crime they don’t even think happened. And anything I tell them that Reiko told me that January told her is all hearsay, anyway, and it doesn’t count for jackshit!”

  “So … what, then? We just let it go?” Kaz was incredulous and angry. “We just sit on our asses and wait and hope that the police eventually get around to investigating Cedric as a potential suspect? Fuck that!”

  “I don’t want to give up either, but unless you want to go and threaten him—the same move that might have gotten both January and Reiko killed, by the way—then what other choices do we have?” I wasn’t trying to argue with him; pointing all this out only made me feel more useless and miserable.

  “We can … we can…” Kaz fumbled for an idea and then lapsed into silence. The rain was coming down in sheets, cars racing past us at speeds way too fast for the slippery roads and diminished visibility, and he compensated by slowing down. I’d been distantly hoping we could get back to town in time for me to catch my last class and minimize the extent of my truancy a bit, but it was far too late for that. Finally, Kaz spoke again. “It all fits, Flynn. Everything. We know she stayed late that day; he could have killed her right after rehearsal and then dumped her clothes in her own backyard to divert suspicion from the school, knowing Dumas would be the last place anyone would have seen her alive. Then he put her body in the river somewhere, or buried her in the woods, or … who knows, but somewhere so no one could ever find it and test the fetus for DNA. He had the motive, the means, and the opportunity, and damn it we need to figure out how to get the cops to pay attention!”

  “Wait,” I said, the beginnings of a terrible idea taking root in my mind. Kaz was absolutely right that we couldn’t simply sit around and hope the police eventually heard and lent credence to all the same gossip we had—it felt wrong, and betrayed every sense of justice I had—but I also wasn’t anxious to phone in tips that they would be unable or unwilling to explore, due to a lack of evidence and the fact that I was probably still technically a suspect. Garcia and Becker seemed to automatically doubt everything that came out of my mouth, and a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors that conveniently implicated somebody else probably wouldn’t be received with any more credulity than the last unsupportable tidbit I’d shared with them. But if I managed to get my hands on something concrete …

  I pulled out my phone, connected to the Internet, and did a quick search. “Change of plans—we’re not going back to Riverside. I need you to take me somewhere else instead.”

  I had found an address, which I punched into Kaz’s GPS, and we followed the directions all the way to an apartment building on Ann Arbor’s north side, not far from the neighborhood where Tiana’s family lived. It was a boxy, nondescript edifice that had probably been built in the sixties or seventies: three stories of stone and plaster, roughly twelve units to a floor, and each unit with its own tiny balcony. It wasn’t a slum by any stretch, but I was still willing to bet that the place had been a huge step down for the guy who lived there.

  “Are we here to see someone?” Kaz asked dubiously, looking up through the rain at the orderly balconies with their dark wooden pickets.

  “The exact opposite, I hope,” I answered, jumping out and sprinting for the entrance. A twenty-yard dash, I was nevertheless soaked by the time I reached the door, but I hardly noticed the chill of my drenched hoodie sticking to my arms and back; for this part of my shaky plan I was flying entirely by the seat of my pants, and unless January’s ghost were really out there somewhere, pulling strings from beyond The Veil, this detour might well have been a wasted trip.

  I was in luck, however. Someone had wedged a chunk of wood between the security door and its frame, propping it open so tenants wouldn’t have to bother with their keys every time they came and went, and a rectangular bank of mailboxes on the wall just inside the vestibule gave me my next piece of vital information: The box for apartment 2D boasted a hand-printed label with the name C. Hoffman.

  “Why are we at Cedric’s apartment building?” Kaz asked nervously. I had barely been aware that he’d followed me in.

  “We need evidence, right? Can you think of a better place to look?” I made the equation sound simple enough, even though I well knew that what I meant to attempt was anything but. It was as hazardous as it was foolish, and there were a dozen or more ways for it to go horribly wrong—or to simply fail before it even got off the ground—but, on the other hand, what did we have to lose?

  “We’re going to break in to Cedric’s place?” Aghast, Kaz still had the good sense to whisper this horrified question as he tailed me up the stairs to the second floor. The carpeting was threadbare and smelled like mothballs and butt, the wallpaper weirdly thick and textured, but the ugly insulation deadened the sound of our steps and voices. “Flynn, that’s insan
e!”

  “Technically, only I’m going to break in,” I corrected him, still pretty optimistic, all things considered. “One of us needs to keep watch.”

  A single hallway ran the length of the second floor, jogging a little to either side to accommodate support beams, a trash chute, and flights of architectural whimsy. Number 2D was easy to find; a solid wooden door fitted with a peephole, a knocker, and a little bell. I had just put my hand on the knob when Kaz grabbed my wrist and pulled me back. “I’m not kidding, Flynn—have you lost your mind? What if he’s home?”

  “He’s not,” I assured him confidently. “They have rehearsal after school every day until six. He won’t be back for hours.” Kaz was still looking at me like I’d just volunteered to join the bomb squad as I gently removed his hand from my arm. Unable to resist, I let my fingers glide slowly across the back of his hand when I released him; just the feeling of his skin against mine sent sparks popping and sizzling up my spine, and I got the guilty rush of an addict stealing one secret gulp of wine. “It’s our only shot, Kaz.”

  He set his mouth in an unhappy line, but didn’t argue, so I tried the knob again. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. I’d figured it as a long shot, but if I hadn’t at least tried, I’d have felt even stupider. Letting out a breath, Kaz asked, “Now what?”

  There was no welcome mat to conceal an extra key, and no spare hidden above the doorframe, either. It was disappointing, though not totally unexpected, and I devised an even stupider plan B on the spot. Taking a look up and down the hall, I made a mental note of where 2D was located in the building’s layout; then, just as quickly as we’d come up the stairs, I went back down, darting through the vestibule, out into the parking lot, and around to the back side of the building.

  The balconies were arranged one atop the other, and Cedric’s faced the rear lot. Luckily, we were out of sight of passing traffic back there, and owing to the foul weather, there were no people hanging out, either. Looking up at the building again, taking in the tidy grid of apartments that contained so many human existences, I counted up and over until I found the one I wanted.