by Kate Flora
“Where did you come here from?” I asked.
“New York.”
“Do you live in New York?”
He nodded. “Sorta.”
“And did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
“Why does that matter?”
He sounded like his ex-wife. Why, why, why. It was like dealing with children. “Because if Heidi didn’t leave on her own, or with the help of her friends, or with her mother, we’ll have to widen the circle. A circle that might include whoever is responsible for Heidi’s pregnancy. Someone who, quite possibly, didn’t know the trouble he was in until yesterday.”
Basham’s face wore lines of chronic tension, like he was used to expecting, and getting, troubling news that had to be dealt with. Now those lines got deeper and he was looking around like he was searching for an avenue of escape. But what he said was, “I’m sure that she’s okay.” Which made no sense at all under these circumstances, unless he knew something about Heidi’s disappearance.
I should have kept my mouth shut until we knew more. The most likely scenario was that we’d find Heidi back in her dorm room, or with one of her friends.
Gareth was already heading upstairs with Helen Brooks, the anxiety on his face a mirror of that on Basham’s. While the two of us waited downstairs, I figured I’d use the time.
As I led Basham into a small sitting room, I had to fight a powerful desire to tell Gareth I quit, then go back to The Caleb Strong Inn and climb into my comfy bed. I’d pull the ruffled chintz extravaganza that served as a bedspread over my head, whimper like an abandoned puppy, sleep a few hours, and enjoy those pancakes.
What ever made me think I liked my job?
Twelve
My instinct last night in Gareth’s office—that if we didn’t get information from Basham right then we might never get it—had been right on the money. This morning, and to give him the benefit of the doubt, it was pretty darned early for anyone to be functioning, he seemed to have forgotten about the four people he’d mentioned last night who might have had access to Heidi.
Access to Heidi. It was such an ugly phrase. When people ask what I do and I tell them I’m a consultant, their eyes glaze over. They don’t imagine students lured out onto frozen ponds, or a cult of male students preying on naïve freshmen. They don’t think of massive egos and the corrupting power of money, the terror of stalking, or the drama of students involved with faculty members. They picture Abercrombie and J. Crew. Bean boots and Uggs and plaid pajama pants, bikes and scooters and ultimate Frisbee, not the fierce anger of a 6’ tall black female basketball player or a penny-pinching school in New York City where the headmistress’s mission is to save young African American girls.
After his third head shake and reflexive “I can’t remember,” I asked if he’d like coffee and went to the kitchen to make some. The coffee didn’t help. I was contemplating torture as a reasonable form of information gathering—I was a civilian contractor, after all, and not the government—when Gareth reappeared and said we were moving back to his office.
Back in his office, securely behind the authority of his impressive desk, Gareth told Ted Basham about the Norrises.
Basham took the news of General and Mrs. Norris’s suspicious—and precipitous—departure with admirable calm, as though it was no more than he’d expected. “She’s never been the hang around and wring her hands type, and Norris doesn’t care a fig for Heidi. But it’s highly unlikely that she took Heidi with her. Too big a cramp in her style. They were both delighted when Heidi wanted to come here. Aside from the money, of course.”
He shook his head. “You’d better call her, though. Update her about Heidi’s disappearance and see if you can get her back here. It’s unlikely to change her mind, but you never know when something’s going to prick that bitch’s conscience.” He shrugged, like it wasn’t his problem, and added, “Someone has to make some decisions about Heidi and that baby’s future. She’s the custodial parent. It’s her job.”
He was displaying the same disdainful and cynical attitude toward his ex that we’d seen yesterday, but today it felt like his heart wasn’t in it. Yesterday’s caring dad who spoke to his daughter often on the phone was missing. He didn’t seem overly concerned about Heidi’s situation. He fidgeted like someone eager to dump any responsibility for this mess and be gone, and looked like someone who hadn’t gotten any sleep.
“Is there someplace I can get breakfast?” Basham asked.
“I can call the dining hall and have some food sent over,” Gareth said.
“That would be great,” Basham said. “And please, can you excuse me for a little while. I have to make some calls. People are expecting me in New York today.”
Gareth directed him to the room I’d used with the Norrises yesterday.
“Did you call the Mrs. Norris?” I asked, when he was gone.
“You said they left.”
“I said the owner of the inn told me they were heading for the airport. They don’t know I saw them leave, and you have no reason to think they’ve left. You should call them. Right now. Tell them Heidi is missing and you need them in your office as soon as possible, and see how they react.”
“If they’re not already on a plane.”
“They’ve been gone not much more than an hour, hour and a half, so that’s unlikely. But if they don’t answer, leave them a voicemail. It’s due diligence.”
He looked at me blankly, so I explained. “This isn’t just about Heidi, though she’s our immediate concern. It’s about the school. How you handle emergencies. How you communicate and how that’s consistent with the place you want this to be. If the Norrises want to blow off her kid, that’s their bad act. You still need to be making a record of being responsible and responsive. You want to have acted properly, not from who they are but from who you are. From what the Simmons School is. To be a positive example for your other parents of how Simmons cares for its students.”
He stared at me like he didn’t understand what I was saying, and I realized that he didn’t. He was about the day-to-day running of the school and about a creating and sustaining a community with a particular set of values, while I was about damage control and making a record of responsible caretaking. He was about living it, and I was about proving to the world that he’d done a good job. He didn’t see the value in calling the Norrises, if they had indeed decamped, because of what it said about their commitment to Heidi. I needed to make sure that down the road he could show that he’d done everything possible for his troubled student, including being responsible with respect to her parents. Keeping them informed. Trying to involve them. After that the choice was up to them. Experience has shown me that parents were likely to be outraged at any sign of inattention or carelessness on a school’s part, even if they were indifferent to their own responsibilities.
I could explain in detail later. Right now, we wanted to be sure they’d been called before they got on a plane. “Make the call,” I said. “Now.”
Wearily, he picked up his phone. He needed to pace himself or today would be a complete disaster, and I kept making his to-do list longer. Okay. Truth. If we didn’t find Heidi, today was already going to be a disaster. But he could roll with it better if he wasn’t exhausted. If both of us had the energy to deal with what lay ahead. And disaster was supposed to be my specialty.
I watched him dial the number, and then he said, “Mrs. Norris, Dr. Wilson here. I’m afraid there’s been a new development.”
He listened, then said, “Heidi has left the infirmary without telling anyone. I’m calling to see if she is with you.”
I could hear her squawk of indignation from across the room.
He said, “No. Of course we’re searching the campus. We’re doing that now. But in the event that we don’t find her—” he said.
Another squawk and a flurry of words that I couldn’t make out.
Gareth stayed admirably calm. “No,” he said, “we just discovered this ourselves
within the past hour. What this means is that we have to explore every possible avenue. Identify who she might have left with. People she knows from back home as well as ones she knows here. You are the one who knows her best, so we certainly will need your help with that. Right away. This morning. I’m sorry to wake you so early, but I need you here in my office as soon as possible.”
He listened again, and said, “You’re what? You’re at the airport? With your daughter in the midst of a crisis? When nothing has been decided about her future or your granddaughter’s future?”
He was playing it well, dropping onto his sofa as he settled in for an argument. “No, Mrs. Norris, impossible. No phone chat could possibly be adequate. Nor you being out of touch for the six hours or more it will take to fly to California. I cannot emphasize too strongly how critical this situation is. Your daughter is missing. Vanished in the night. At this point, we have no idea whether she left of her own volition or whether someone else was involved.”
He gave that a moment to sink in, then continued. “I think you will want to be here. No. Let me be clear. Your presence isn’t optional. You need to be here, no matter what happens next. Here, not on another coast trying to handle this by phone. You are the custodial parent. Whether we find her or not, there is inevitably going to be police involvement. And the press. And when she’s located, Heidi will need your support—”
He waited through another interruption, a sardonic smile on his face, then said, “Whatever General Norris’s pressing business is, I’m sure he can handle it on his own. He’ll understand that you have your own pressing business here. Your responsibility is to be available to your daughter.”
He took a deep breath, and I watched him set his hook right into the center of her denial. “She will need you here, Mrs. Norris, on this coast and available, whether it’s in the event that her decision to flee triggers a police decision to arrest her, or if it turns out that she has been abducted. And of course, as things fall in, if it becomes necessary for the Simmons School to determine that she is no longer a good fit for our community, you will need to be here to take her back to California. I hope that that will not happen, but in the event, it is essential that you are available.”
The squawking got louder. I didn’t really need to hear her words. The tone was sufficient.
“And there is the matter of the child. The infant. Someone must assist Heidi in making decisions about her parental rights. And that someone is not the headmaster of her boarding school.”
This time they must have heard her squawk all over the airport.
He waited until the noise subsided, and said, “You’ve been here twelve hours, Mrs. Norris, during which time no decisions have been made regarding your daughter. I have to say I find your decision to leave so precipitously, and with so many matters unresolved, incomprehensible. I would remind you that it is you, and not Mr. Basham, who has signed the contract with this school, and who is financially responsible for Heidi, whatever that may entail over the next few days.”
When all else fails, use the contract, and the money.
Minutes ago, he’d seemed fuzzy and exhausted, now he was doing just fine. “I’m very pleased to hear that, Mrs. Norris. I look forward to seeing you in my office as soon as possible.”
He disconnected and said, “She’s coming back.”
A little after five in the morning. The day had barely begun. Gareth already looked exhausted and I felt like I’d been flattened by a steamroller.
“We’re going to have to tell the police about this,” Gareth said. “And once we do, any chance we have of protecting Heidi or our student body from questions and intrusion is gone. They’re not going to cut us any more slack.”
“You haven’t told them?” I said.
His shoulders lifted and fell. “I’m still hoping we’ll find her somewhere here on the campus and it won’t be necessary. I’ve had the house parents and dorm residents checking, and security is going through the other campus buildings. We’re not done looking, but so far, there’s no sign of her. One thing that really troubles me is that she doesn’t have a coat. She went from her dorm to the hospital in an ambulance, and then security picked her up and brought her back here to the infirmary. She didn’t take her coat with her. Helen Brooks thinks the friend who brought her clothes didn’t bring a coat. There isn’t one missing from the infirmary, as far as Helen can tell. So unless someone else visited her and brought her one, she’s out there in this rotten weather without one.”
Heidi lost to us without a coat. It was just a symbol, I knew, of a much bigger problem. The whole business was just such a disaster. For Heidi. For her classmates. For the school. My specialty was damage control and right now, I couldn’t begin to think of how to contain the damage. Heidi’s disappearance, along with the evidence of deliberation in her not taking her pill, made the situation so much worse. It’s harder to spin ‘abandoned the baby and then ran away herself’, whatever her mental state. Running always looks guilty.
Last night’s rain and sleet had abated, but the dawning light disclosed a foggy, misty gray world with soggy, dark ground and wet black tree trunks and mushy patches of snow, the remnants of last night’s late-season event. It looked like the landscape of a horror movie, not a pleasant school campus in spring.
My phone vibrated. Given my father’s situation, I wasn’t ignoring any calls. It was a number I didn’t recognize, so I ignored it. But staring at my phone triggered another thought. “Does Heidi have a cell phone with her?”
Gareth didn’t know.
“Call Helen over at the infirmary and ask whether, at any point, she saw Heidi using a phone. A cell or a landline. Have her ask the other patients, too.”
I wasn’t sure why it mattered, or how much. Only that it might help us to know if Heidi had called someone. Normally, I was good in situations like this, thinking of possibilities and getting ready to handle the trouble that came. Today my brain was sleepy and slow. That didn’t stop me from being bossy. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, directive. This morning I was all about being directive.
With Mrs. Norris back under control, it was time for me and Gareth to get back to other pressing matters. He to get on the phone to security and his staff and get updates on the search for Heidi. Me to focus on Heidi’s father and what he might know that would help us help her. Things he really wasn’t likely to have forgotten in just a few hours. I mentally rolled up my sleeves and headed into the small lounge I’d used with his ex-wife last night. He was pacing and gesturing as he spoke into his phone. I smiled, waiting while he finished a call and put his phone in his pocket. Then I gestured toward a chair and waded in.
“Those four men you mentioned last night,” I began, the instant his butt touched the chair cushion.
“I really don’t remember—”
Don’t be combative or confrontational, I reminded myself. Channel Suzanne.
“Of course you do. It’s just been a hard night. Let me refresh…” I made a show of flipping through my notes. “Let’s see. Yesterday, when I asked about people…about men, of course, who were in and out of the house and could have had access to Heidi, you said there were four.”
I hated using the phrase “access to Heidi” but that was the reality.
I checked my notes again as he wiggled on his chair, restless as a toddler, even looking toward the door as though wondering if he could escape. “You said there were two younger officers who worked for General Norris who were in and out of the house regularly. Let’s start with their names.”
“You’re not a cop,” he said, in exactly the same tone my little sister Carrie used to say, “you’re not the boss of me.”
And last night, I’d thought I liked him. If I had a child and she’d just delivered an unexpected baby and then disappeared, I would be in a terrible state. I would be moving heaven and earth to find her and understand what had happened. I’d be calling the police and the headmaster and everyone else I could think of, trying to
locate her and know if she was safe. I’d be insisting that whoever had sex with my daughter and fathered that child be both locked up and castrated. I wasn’t seeing any of that here.
Well sorry, but I wasn’t having this. I might not be the boss of him, but somebody had to look after Heidi’s interests, and there weren’t a lot of candidates lining up for the job. “No. I’m not a cop.” I manufactured a wry smile. “And for that, you should be grateful. Last night you were very eager to discuss these men, Mr. Basham. We’re all trying to help Heidi here, so tell me, has something happened in the intervening hours? Has someone gotten to you? Have you been persuaded by someone that it is not in Heidi’s interest to try and identify the man who fathered her child?”
He studied his shoes like there would be an exam later. Wet, muddy shoes, which seemed odd since he’d only come from Gareth’s house and the infirmary. But it was raining out, and he moved slowly. He was so deliberately avoiding my gaze that I wondered if I’d hit on something. Something was making him reluctant to cooperate. I searched for a way to move him.
“Mr. Basham, do you love your daughter?”
“What? Yes. Yes, of course I love my daughter. What kind of a question is that?”
“A pointed one,” I said. “Someone had sex with your daughter when she was only fifteen and got her pregnant. From what both you and your ex-wife have said, it doesn’t sound like this was a couple of kids experimenting or a pair of too-young lovers who lost their self-control. It sounds like exploitation. The critical question is: who was in a position to do that?”
I could imagine Suzanne conducting this in a totally different way. All blonde sweetness and smiles and patting his hand in sympathy as she nudged him to do the right thing. Maybe she would have had better luck. Maybe I was better against brutal thugs and armed militia members and not recalcitrant parents. But Suzanne had been too busy to come, so like it, lump it, the Simmons School, and Ted Basham, got me.
I tried to summon some sweetness. “I know this is a hard business to get your head around. She’s your child and you feel protective. You want to protect her privacy. But in this situation, trying to protect her by being silent about the potential fathers of her child—and of your granddaughter—doesn’t protect her. It protects them. It allows their exploitation of her to go unpunished. I can’t imagine that’s what you want.”