Vanishing Act

by Barbara Block

  Too bad I wasn’t progressing as well.

  I felt a twinge of guilt, thinking about how Mrs. Hayes had sounded on the phone. Her voice had been a faint whisper, an echo of herself, when I’d spoken to her earlier that morning. I wasn’t looking forward to having to tell her, when I saw her that evening that I hadn’t made any progress, and I especially wasn’t looking forward to asking her about her relationship with Tommy Hayes’s father. But I put those concerns aside for the moment and concentrated all my energy on thinking about my upcoming interview with Professor Fell. I was curious to hear what he had to tell me. Hopefully it would be worth my time.

  Fell glanced up from the journal he was reading and put his pencil down as I came in. He had bags under his eyes. Tufts of hair were sticking out from his head at odd angles. He laughed self-consciously and smoothed them back down with the palm of his right hand.

  “I had trouble sleeping last night,” he said, alluding to his appearance. “I’m told that happens when you get older.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” I took the seat in front of his desk. The chair really was uncomfortable. He needed to requisition a new one.

  Fell fiddled with his pen, then put it down. “I’ve been thinking about our last conversation,” he began. Then he stopped talking and picked up his pen again.

  I made encouraging noises. I seemed to be doing that a lot this morning.

  “The last time we spoke, you asked me about Jill Evans. About whether her death could have affected Melissa?”

  “Yes?” I thought back to the clipping about Jill I’d found in Melissa’s nightstand.

  “And about how I said it probably hadn’t.” Fell combed his mustache with his fingers. “I think I was wrong.”

  I told him about the poem I’d just found.

  “Plucked wings,” he murmured, his face composing itself into a thoughtful expression. “Evocative phrase. I didn’t know Melissa wrote poetry, but then, everyone does when they’re young, don’t they? I wonder when we all give it up?” He picked up his pen once more, put it down, and leaned back in his chair.

  “I think the question is: Who plucked her wings?”

  “I’m inclined to think of that phrase as metaphorical myself.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Jill had a drinking problem. I think the plucked wings refer to alcohol or the demon rum,” said Fell, making quote marks in the air with his fingers around the words demon rum, “as we liked to say in the old days.”

  “I take it Jill Evans was a student of yours?”

  “In a manner of speaking. She was in my introductory psych lecture, but that’s a large class. The T.A.’s take—”

  “I know how it works,” I told him.

  He gave an apologetic smile. “I’m sure you do. No. The reason I know is that Melissa and I had a number of conversations about alcoholism and the courses of action open to people who are dealing with friends or significant others who are grappling with that type of issue.”

  “I take it these weren’t hypothetical discussions.”

  “I thought they were in the beginning, but then she broke down and told me the truth.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I suggested she inform her R.A. and talk to the psychologist at the health center.”

  “Did she?”

  Dr. Fell chewed on the ends of his mustache for a few seconds before replying. “She said she was going to, but I don’t think she ever did. Actually, I’m sure she didn’t.” He sighed and pushed himself away from his desk. “It’s a hard thing for someone her age to do that kind of thing. At that point in your life you see it as ratting out your friend. Then, of course, when something happens, you feel all that guilt, all those if-onlys.”

  “Actually it’s hard for someone of any age to do,” I said, thinking back to my dead husband. “You don’t want to lose a friend or a lover. You’re afraid if you say anything, they’ll get mad and stop talking to you. It takes a lot of courage.”

  “Exactly.” Fell shook his head enthusiastically, seemingly genuinely pleased that I’d gotten the correct answer. I could see where he would be a good teacher. He seemed to have what the best ones do—a generosity of spirit.

  “Can I ask why you didn’t?”

  “Speak to her? Oh, I did. No. That’s not true. What I did was tell her if she ever had a problem, she should come speak to me.” A regretful expression flitted across his face. “I should have done more. Made more of an effort to reach out.” He constructed a steeple with his fingers and touched the tip of his nose with it. “If I had known what was going to happen, I definitely would have, but at the time I felt it wasn’t my place. After all, I didn’t really know the girl. We’d never really spoken. For all practical purposes, as far as I was concerned, she was just a name on a class list.” He combed his mustache with his fingers again.

  “I did pursue the subject a little further anyway, or at least I tried to, but as soon as Melissa found out I’d talked to Jill, she began backtracking. Telling me maybe she’d made a mistake, maybe she was overreacting. It’s a common form of behavior when people are afraid to act. If I don’t see it, then I don’t have to do anything about it.”

  “I’m not unfamiliar with the process. I know what denial is.” In fact, I could have said I was the queen of it.

  Fell gave a dry little laugh. “I’m sure you do. Everyone does.” He shook his head. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know I tend to become incredibly pedantic.” He picked up the pen, began gnawing on the tip, then put it back down. “I stopped smoking two weeks ago,” he told me. “I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I went back.” I watched two trucks roar their way up the access road toward the construction site, blue exhaust fumes trailing behind them.

  Fell swiveled in his chair to the left and followed my gaze out the side window. “They say they’re going to be done in another month, but they said that two months ago. I really can’t stand this anymore. I’ve complained. Everyone has. For all the good it’s done.” He snorted and swiveled his chair back in my direction. “Sorry, go on.”

  “Thanks. Bryan told me Jill was having guy problems.”

  Fell rested his hands on his belly. “Melissa mentioned something about that, but she didn’t go into much detail. Mostly we talked about Jill’s drinking problem.”

  “What did she say?”

  “About the boy?”

  “Yes.”

  Fell scratched his cheek reflectively while he thought. “As near as I can remember, it was your classic unrequited-love story. Jill was involved with some kid on campus. Then the kid decided he’d rather be involved with someone else, and she couldn’t accept that. I thought her drinking was her attempt at self-medication.”

  “Do you know who the kid was?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t, but I can try to find out if you think it’s important.”

  “It isn’t really.”

  Fell sat up and planted his elbows on his desk. “As I said, most of the conversations Melissa and I had were hypothetical.” He made a clucking noise. “Tell me, by any chance, have you talked to Bryan recently?”

  “I just came from his house. Why?”

  “I wondered how he was doing.”

  “Not well.” Suddenly without meaning to I found myself telling Fell about the conversation I’d had with him.

  Fell leaned forward when I got to the part about the gun. He shook his head sadly. “I should be shocked. Ten years ago I would have been. It’s frightening how many people today choose to carry weapons,” he continued. “Frightening. The NRA has a lot to answer for. I will never understand why someone would want to own a gun. Never.”

  I don’t think it said a lot about me that I did.

  Chapter 25

  The sun had finally come out. The clouds had thinned and the gray sky was laced with bands of blue. As I got into my car I watched a gray and a black squirrel chas
e each other up and down the branches of the maple across the street. At twelve o’clock we were probably at the high for the day. Forty-five degrees. People were walking around with their jackets open. As I drove over to where Jill Evans had died, I spotted groups of students decked out in shorts, T-shirts, and Dock Siders. Two black Labs trotted beside their Frisbee-toting master. Everyone was waiting for spring.

  I should have been at the store filling out order forms and figuring out where to put the new bird toys I’d ordered instead of pondering the house Jill Evans had taken a header off. I didn’t know what I was hoping to find. Over a year had gone by since the accident. And although in the cosmic scheme of things a year is nothing, it’s a lot if you’re looking for evidence. Not that I was. I just wanted to be able to picture what had happened.

  Besides, the house was close by. Ten blocks away at most. Smack-dab in the middle of student-apartment heaven. Or hell. Depending on your roommates. And your landlord.

  Two hundred seven turned out to be a large, dilapidated yellow and brown colonial with green trim. Gingerbreading festooned the two attic dormers. A porch that would be good for sitting out on in the summer faced the street.

  Two old cars were parked in the driveway, and a third one sat, ticket affixed to its windshield, half on, half off what had once been grass in the small patch of lawn that constituted the front yard. Typical absentee-landlord property, the paint was peeling off the wood, the garbage cans were still standing out by the curb, and the foundation plantings, five scraggly arborvitae, looked as if they might not make it through to enjoy the coming spring.

  I walked up the steps and pressed the bell. It gave out two anemic rings and stopped, as if it were too tired to continue. I tried again. A minute later a tall, skinny guy in his mid-twenties answered. The sounds of flamenco guitar spilled out through the open door. The guy was wearing jeans and a ripped black T-shirt. His hair was in a ponytail, he had three rings through his eyebrow and his hands were stained with ink. He had a pen tucked behind one ear and an annoyed expression on his face. I’d obviously interrupted him in the middle of something.

  When I told him why I was there, his expression softened a little. Yes, he said, he had heard about what had happened here, his mother had told him, but he hadn’t been in Syracuse then so he really couldn’t help me. For that matter, everyone else in the house was new too. They were all at class anyway. I was welcome to come back and talk to them later if I wanted, but he was in the middle of a project and had to go.

  As he began shutting the door, I asked him if I could see the room Jill Evans had fallen out of and he said that was up to the guy who was living there and that he’d be home around six tonight. Now, if I’d excuse him. He had work to do.

  He touched one of his eyebrow rings pensively. “You know,” he said to me as an afterthought, “it feels kinda funny living in a place where you know someone has died.” And he finished closing the door.

  He was right. It did. After I’d found Murphy dead in the garage, I hadn’t gone in there for months and I’d given the car he’d died in away. I hadn’t wanted it around. Come to think of it, I still parked the cab in the driveway, and it had been how many years now? Interesting. I stood on the sidewalk, lit a cigarette, and drew the smoke into my lungs while I stared up at the attic dormer and thought about the night Jill Evans had died.

  She’d gone to the party. According to the article in the Post Standard, she’d had way too many beers. Too much vodka. Then she’d gone up to the third floor. A student said she’d told him she’d wanted to lie down. Why the third floor? Because the other bedrooms were occupied? Because it was quiet? Because she was looking for someone? And she’d done what? I walked around the house.

  The fire escape leading up to the third floor looked as if it had been constructed from a child’s Erector set, but I was sure it was up to code. If it wasn’t, that would have been reported in the papers. Had Jill stepped out on it for a breath of fresh air because she was feeling dizzy, then felt even worse, put out a hand to steady herself, and gone over instead. It would be easy enough to do. The fire-escape railings weren’t very high. What was certain was that it had been her bad luck to land wrong. Instead of breaking a leg, she’d broken her neck and, according to the M.E., died instantly. Which was just as well.

  Because she’d landed in the back of the house, no one had seen her. She’d lain outside for a couple of hours before anyone had realized she was gone. By then everyone had assumed she’d gone back to the dorm. It wasn’t until the person who was living next door had come home that she’d been found.

  I thought about the quote Melissa had written in the margin of the newsapaper article detailing Jill Evans’s death, the one about “our responsibility to the dead.”

  What did she mean by responsibility?

  Responsibility for what?

  Keeping her memory alive?

  Why should she feel that way?

  Guilt.

  Why? For what? Not getting her to stop drinking?

  I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another one. As I watched the flame catch the paper, I thought of something else. Could Melissa have felt guilty for another reason? A more specific one. Where had Melissa been the night Jill Evans died? I always assumed she hadn’t been at the party. No one said she was. But then, no one said she wasn’t.

  Maybe she’d felt guilty because she was there when her best friend died.

  I studied my gold cigarette lighter for a minute, felt its satisfying weight in the palm of my hand.

  I had about ninety-seven hundred things to do. I went to find Beth.

  I found Holland Adams instead.

  Chapter 26

  Holland was sitting cross-legged on her bed, applying metallic green polish to her nails, when I walked into her dorm room to ask her where Beth was.

  “She’s in class,” she informed me, pushing a strand of blond hair off her forehead with the back of her right hand. “She won’t be back until five.”

  “Maybe you can help me.”

  Holland carefully coated her pinky, then leaned over and put the applicator back in the bottle before answering. “I already told you everything I know about Melissa.”

  She didn’t ask me to come in, so I stayed leaning against the door. “This is a little different.”

  “How so?” She blew on her nails. I wondered if she ever used them in place of a knife in case of an emergency.

  “You were suitemates with Jill and Melissa, right?”

  “I already said I was,” she replied, tilting her head slightly to the left and opening her eyes wide.

  Funny, I could have sworn they were brown, not green. I was about to ask her when the girl from the room across the hall came over and asked Holland if she had a Diet Coke.

  “Sure,” Holland replied, indicating the mini refrigerator sitting next to the desk. “In there.”

  As the girl got the soda, I marveled once again about how much stuff Holland and her roommate had managed to fit into their room. When I’d gone off to college, I’d brought my clothes, my typewriter, bedding, and towels. Period. We didn’t even have a phone in our room. We’d had to use the one in the hall. Things were sure different now. This room had more stuff in it than a closeout sale at Macy’s.

  Aside from the phone and the refrigerator, Holland’s room contained a microwave, a TV, a VCR, a stereo, and a computer, not to mention color-coordinated bedspreads, drapes, rugs, posters, and tons of stuffed animals. The only thing I could see missing were the books, but then, college had never been about studying anyway.

  “So,” Holland said, waving her left hand in the air to help the polish dry after the girl left, “what do you want to ask?”

  I explained.

  “Duh. Of course she was there.” Her tone indicated what she thought of my question. She waved her hand around again. “So was Beth. Everyone knows that.”

  “Including the police?”

  Holland shrugged. “I assume they know. It wasn’t
like it was any secret. It was a big party. Lots and lots of kids were there.”

  “Are you sure about Melissa?”

  Holland blew on her nails. “Of course I’m sure. She came to my room about four o’clock in the morning wanting to borrow some Advil. She said she had a really bad headache. She said she’d been at the party and had too much to drink.”

  “How do you know it was the party Jill Evans died at? Did she say it was?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I assumed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was the one everyone was going to,” Holland said impatiently. “I already told you that.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “Yeah. She was weirding out.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Holland indicated her night table with a nod of her head. “Open the drawer. I would, but my nails are still wet.”

  I did what I was told.

  “Good. Now, all the way on the bottom you’ll find a kind of bracelet made of brown cloth.”

  I began looking. “I don’t see it,” I told her as I pawed through a multitude of lipsticks, bottles of nail polish, emery boards, cotton puffs, jewelry, packets of tissues, and bags of hard candy.

  “It’s there,” Holland insisted. “I kept it because I felt funny about throwing it out.”

  When I finally found it, I could see why she’d said that.

  “She said I should take it,” Holland told me. “She said she didn’t believe anymore, that maybe it would protect me. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t believe in all that religious crap. But I didn’t want to upset her any more. She looked upset enough as it was. And anyway, I’d never wear anything like that. Would you? Look at the color.”

  Mrs. Hayes took the scapular in her hand and looked at it sadly. I hadn’t known what it was called until I’d showed the brown cloth bracelet to Tim.

  “Melissa gave this away?”

  I nodded. “To her suitemate.”

  “She told me the clasp broke and she lost it.”