Dead and Gone

by Norah McClintock

  “Oh,” she said, her voice as tight as the arms she had crossed in front of her chest. “You were talking to Mr. Riel on the phone?” She turned her head a little and nodded toward the door to the cafeteria where Riel was standing, talking to another teacher or being talked at by another teacher.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. I just—”

  “You just don’t feel like being honest with me,” she said. “Okay.” Meaning that it was not okay. “Fine.” Meaning that it was not fine. “If that’s the way you want it.” Meaning it sure wasn’t the way she wanted it. “I have to go.”

  “Hey, Rebecca.” I made a grab for her and caught her arm. She gave me a sharp look and jerked free of me.

  “I have to go,” she said again, and then she was off across the cafeteria, elbowing her way out the door, not caring who she shoved, not even seeming to hear when some kid said, “Hey, watch it!” and Riel looked to see what was going on and saw it was Rebecca. He frowned. He kept on frowning while he swept the cafeteria to see what had provoked her and found me, still standing beside the pay phone. Probably still looking guilty.

  Susan came over just before I left to go to the community center. She had a bag of groceries in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other when I opened the door for her.

  “I’m making chicken tikka,” she said. Susan was a good cook, always putting together something interesting and never making a big deal about whether or not it was organic. “I’ll save you some.”

  “He isn’t home yet,” I said.

  She looked—what?—disappointed? No, that wasn’t it. They’d been spending time together since before I knew Riel. So she didn’t act like she thought he was standing her up. No, it was more that she looked worried.

  “He’s running late, I guess,” she said. “I’m going to get things started. Okay?” Like I had any say in the matter. It wasn’t my house. Still, I followed her into the kitchen and watched her put the bottle of wine into the fridge to chill. I thought about talking to her about what had happened last night. She was smiling when she closed the fridge and turned to unpack the groceries she had brought. When she looked at me, her smile faded. “Is everything okay, Mike?” I wasn’t sure why she had turned so serious all of a sudden.

  “Yeah,” I said. I decided right then not to say anything. It was none of my business. If Riel wanted to talk to Susan about it, he would. Maybe she already knew, maybe that’s why she was here and why she had that look on her face. Maybe she’d known the whole story all along. “I better get to work,” I said.

  While I was walking to the community center, I didn’t think about Riel. Instead I thought about how I was going to find out where Mr. Henderson lived and what Emily was going to do with that information. She was a weird girl. She looked nice and sweet and normal, but she wasn’t. She was bossy and edgy and a little bit scary. Mr. Henderson had been staring at her. He had gone into her wallet. But instead of doing what any normal person would have done, instead of telling her dad or telling the cops, Emily wanted to get back at him herself. She wanted to teach him a lesson. What was that all about?

  Mr. Henderson was standing in the main-floor hall when I got to the community center. I tried the direct approach first—well, as direct as a person can get with someone like him. He looked at me, not smiling—I don’t think he ever smiled—when I came through the door. I asked him if he had anything special he needed me to do, any rooms to set up for events the next day, any special cleaning assignments.

  “Mop the third floor,” he said. “Then the second floor—”

  “Then the ground floor,” I said. “Got it.” Same old same old. I followed him upstairs.

  “You know,” I said as I climbed the stairs with him, “I think I’ve spent more time here because I had to than I ever did because I wanted to. This place is all right. There’s always something going on. You live around here, Mr. Henderson?”

  He turned to look at me. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just wondering,” I said. Jeez, he was prickly. “You know, because I live pretty close and I never realized this place was so—” So what? “So busy.”

  He gave me another look, like maybe I wasn’t too bright. “I work here. I can see how busy it is by how busy it keeps me.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t going to tell me where he lived. “You married, Mr. Henderson?” I said. “You have kids?”

  He didn’t answer. He reached the top of the stairs and limped down the hall to the utility closet. He unlocked it and then paused to glance at me before he turned the knob.

  “That guy I saw you with the other night,” he said.

  What guy? Had he seen me with Sal? Or—wait a minute—did he mean Riel?

  “What guy?” I said.

  “Tall guy. Dark hair. He’s not your father, is he?” He asked the question like he was pretty sure of the answer already.

  “No.”

  “But you live with him, right?”

  He must have asked about Riel. Maybe he had talked to Teresa Rego. She knew that Riel was responsible for me. It was the only way I could think of that Mr. Henderson already knew about Riel and me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s my foster parent.”

  “Where are your own parents?”

  “Dead.”

  He looked at me but didn’t say anything. He opened the closet and stepped aside to let me go in. I felt him watching me as I lifted the bucket from its frame, set it into the sink, measured out some soap, and turned on the hot water tap.

  “Dead how?” he said after a while.

  “My father in a car accident,” I said. Then, because I didn’t want to talk about it, I said, “My mother too.”

  I guess nobody had told him that. Surprise registered in his eyes. He looked at me a little longer, and I looked right back at him. Then he said, “I’m not married. No kids. No family at all.” I had the feeling that he was thinking, Just like you.

  I mopped the third floor—again. The old part, where the fire had been, was boarded off. They were still cleaning it up. It had got to the point that I knew the halls of the community center better than I knew my own room. I emptied the bucket, rinsed the mop, and closed the third-floor utility closet. Then I went down to the second floor. Mr. Henderson was already at the door, unlocking it. He limped away without saying a word. The same thing happened when I finally reached the first floor. I mopped down one corridor and then started on another. I was coming around a third side of the big square when I saw Teresa Rego standing in front of a bulletin board. She smiled when she saw me and asked me how things were going.

  “Okay, I guess,” I said.

  “Mr. Henderson isn’t giving you a hard time, I hope,” she said.

  I shrugged. “He’s okay,” I said. “He sure has his own way of doing things, though.”

  She laughed and said, “I’ll say. But the place has never been cleaner than it has been in the past … let me see … I guess it’s almost six months now.”

  “Mr. Henderson has only worked here for six months?” I don’t know why, but he seemed like a lifer to me.

  “He started coming here as a volunteer,” she said, “working with the aquatic therapy group.” The Wednesday evening group. “He’d just arrived in town and was looking for work, and when our old janitor quit, well, I hired him on the spot. He’s gruff, but he’s thorough. And he’s great with the kids in aqua-therapy.”

  “Does he live around here?”

  She gave me a funny look. “That I don’t know,” she said. “He never said, and to be honest, I never asked. Mr. Henderson likes to keep to himself.” Now she gave me a teacher look, trying to see if I understood what she was saying. I went back to my mopping. I wondered if Emily would trade the wallet for the piece of information Teresa had just given me and the few tidbits Mr. Henderson had revealed. Somehow I doubted it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After work the next day I took the subway uptown, transferred to a bus, and then walked fr
om the bus stop to Emily’s house. This time, after Estelle the housekeeper buzzed me through the front gate and I rang the doorbell, it wasn’t Emily who answered. It was her dad. Even if I hadn’t run into him before, I would have guessed who he was from the way he looked—tanned, perfect teeth perfectly white, a not-a-single-hair-out-of-place-blow-dried haircut, chinos with a crease in them you could cut yourself on, a sweater that looked baby soft (my guess: cashmere), a wafer-thin watch that probably cost a couple of grand, a thick gold ring with a great big sparkly diamond on the third finger of his right hand. Oh yeah, and in his right earlobe, a diamond stud. Emily had said that on a guy his age, it didn’t look cool, it looked stupid. Personally, I liked it. He had style.

  He looked me over pretty good too. Looked at my navy blue parka that was hanging open, my Boca sweatshirt underneath, my faded jeans, my twenty-dollar watch, my scuffed sneakers instead of boots (I had boots, I just didn’t like to wear them unless there was actually snow on the ground). He reminded me of Jen’s dad. He used to look at me the same way, like he was adding up how little I was worth compared to him—and Jen’s dad wasn’t nearly as loaded as Emily’s dad.

  “May I help you?” he said.

  May. He didn’t sound stuffy, though. Instead he sounded, well, correct. Like he was trying to be polite, even though he didn’t look remotely like a guy who would ever dirty his hands helping someone like me.

  “I’m here to see Emily,” I said.

  He didn’t smile. He didn’t stand aside to let me in. He didn’t call Emily. He just stared at me. Yup, he was Jen’s dad all over again.

  “And you are …?” He acted like he didn’t recognize me.

  I told him my name.

  He peered at me again. I felt like something he had plopped onto a slide and slid under a microscope, the way we had to do in biology class. Something from a swamp, maybe, or a sewer. Some slimy little life-form.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  The question kind of threw me. Did he know me? I’d pulled him off a guy in the street. I’d told him someone had called the cops on him. But maybe he hadn’t paid any attention to me. He’d been pretty focused on Neil and had hardly even looked my way when I’d tried to grab his arm.

  “I’m a friend of Emily’s,” I said.

  “And may I ask how you know her?”

  “From swimming,” I said, which was true. “She invited me—”

  And then there was Emily saying, “Dad, you promised—no more third degree.” She reached around her father, grabbed my hand, and pulled me inside. “Mike and I will be out on the deck,” she said. She pulled me inside and away from her father.

  The deck turned out to be the deck of a swimming pool that was completely glassed-in.

  “Wow, you can swim here in the winter,” I said. If Rebecca had been there, she would have kicked me. I sounded totally in awe.

  “The roof retracts,” Emily said, “for when you want to swim outside.”

  “In summer, you mean?” I said.

  “In winter, too. The pool’s heated. You ever been swimming outside in a heated pool in February, McGill? It’s nice.”

  I bet it was.

  She sat down at a round table on the deck. Her wallet was sitting on it, still inside the plastic bag. “So,” she said, “what did you find out?”

  “Not much.” I told her the scraps of information I had gathered—that Mr. Henderson was relatively new in town, that he volunteered to help disabled kids, that he kept pretty much to himself, that he had no family.

  Emily listened. She seemed irritated by how little I was able to tell her. She looked at the wallet. “You really knocked yourself out, huh?” she said.

  She sounded exactly like half the teachers I’d ever had, teachers who think that if you don’t get an A-plus on a test or an assignment or an essay, it’s because you didn’t try. She made a pouty face and looked over at the pool.

  “Hey, Emily?” I said. She turned her dark brown eyes on me. “You want someone to do errands for you, why don’t you ask Neil?”

  “Neil?” She sounded surprised. “Neil has nothing to do with me. Neil’s from before.”

  Before? “Before what?”

  “Before I came back here,” she said, “where I belong. I asked you to do something, McGill, for your own good.”

  “Do I look like a detective to you?” I said. And then, I don’t even know why, I glanced at the wall of glass that separated the pool from the house and I thought maybe I was seeing things, because there, on the other side of the glass, talking to Emily’s father, were two detectives. Police detectives. Detective Jones, who had been at Riel’s house a couple of days ago, and his partner, Detective London. What was going on? What were they doing in Emily’s house, talking to Emily’s father?

  Emily must have caught the look on my face, because she turned and looked through the glass and then turned back and looked at me.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said, which I now know is the exact wrong word to say to a girl, unless, of course, you want to convince her that you’re hiding something from her.

  She looked at the two strangers talking to her father—strangers to her, that is. “You know those guys,” she said. She was telling me, not asking me. I’d been around Rebecca enough to know there was no point in lying.

  When I told her they were cops, she took another look at them, really interested now.

  “What kind of cops?” she said.

  “Homicide.”

  Then, boom, just like that, her face changed. She didn’t look so tough anymore. She didn’t look so superior either. Instead she looked like a scared little kid. Who wouldn’t, with homicide cops in her house, talking to her father?

  “Homicide?” She didn’t sound snotty or even cool anymore either. Her voice was small and full of surprise. “You sure?”

  I nodded. Emily got up from the table. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t excuse herself, she just walked inside where her father was and then she stood there until the two detectives introduced themselves. For a moment, it looked like her father was trying to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. She said something to the detectives. It was Detective Jones who answered her, which didn’t surprise me. In my experience, he was the nice one. The one who played good cop. Detective London liked to lean on people. He liked to make people sweat, liked to scare them even more. Riel said it was just an act. I wasn’t so sure.

  Emily started to shake her head, slowly at first and then faster. I saw her father reach out for her and try to pull her to him, but she shook her head even harder and wriggled free. Then she ran away. I didn’t see where she went. She didn’t come outside again, so she must have gone somewhere in the house. Maybe upstairs to her room. Detective London turned in the direction she had gone. Detective Jones looked out through the glass and saw me. I know he did. He looked right at me, but there was no expression on his face. Then he shifted his attention back to Emily’s father and said something to him.

  I turned my head away from the glass and sat alone out beside the pool, wondering what I should do. There was a door that led out into the yard, but I didn’t know if there was some way to get around the house and back out to the street without passing through some impossible-to-penetrate high-security gate. I waited, wondering if the cops were still there and if Emily was coming back and, if she wasn’t, how I was going to get out of here. The wallet was still sitting in the middle of the table, still in its baggie. I looked at it. Then I picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my parka.

  After a moment I heard a door open behind me. I turned and saw Emily’s father standing on the deck.

  “I think you’d better go,” he said, but not in a mean way. His face seemed pale, even with the tan. He looked a little stunned. “Emily’s had—we’ve had—some bad news. She can’t see anyone right now.”

  I wondered what was going on. It had to be something bad—no, the worst—if homicide cops were there. But I d
idn’t get it. What had happened?

  When I followed Mr. Corwin back into the house, I saw that the two detectives were gone. Mr. Corwin led me to the front door. He didn’t say anything. He just opened the door and let me out.

  I hadn’t gone more than half a block when a car pulled up alongside me.

  “Hey, Mike,” Detective Jones said. “What a surprise, running into you in this neighborhood.” In that house, he meant. In Emily’s house. “Get in, why don’t you? We’ll give you a lift home.”

  I waited for him to unlock the door, and then I climbed in. Detective London was driving. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. He didn’t speak to me, didn’t smile at me the way Detective Jones sometimes did. I had the feeling he didn’t like me. I said that to Riel once, but he said, “Nah, I don’t think that’s it. That’s just the way Charlie is. Sees himself as one tough cop.”

  “Last I heard, Emily Corwin went to a private girls’ school,” Detective Jones said. “How come you know her, Mike?”

  I got a cold-all-over feeling, like he knew something I wished he didn’t. I wondered what Emily had said to him. Then I reminded myself that he was a homicide cop. Still, if Emily had told him that I’d stolen her wallet, he was guaranteed to be interested because he was a friend of Riel’s.

  “She’s on a swim team,” I said. “They have swim meets at the community center where I work.”

  “Where you do community service, you mean,” Detective London said. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

  “It’s still work,” I said. “I just don’t get paid for it.”

  “What were you doing at her house?” Detective Jones said.

  “Nothing.” Something I was making a career out of doing. “She asked me to come over.”

  Detective Jones turned in his seat to look at me. “I thought you were seeing that little redhead,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  “Rebecca,” I said. How did he know that? “I told you, I met Emily at the community center. She asked me over. Why? What’s the big deal?”