by Kate Flora
The trouble was, I was running solely on assumptions here. I hadn’t spoken to Heidi or her friends. I didn’t know that there wasn’t a secret boyfriend. But if her denial was genuine, as Dr. Purcell felt it was, then this was not a love child.
He went on studying his shoes.
“You mentioned Heidi’s guitar teacher?”
“Will,” he said. “William McKenzie. But he’s almost my age.”
I put Basham’s age at about fifty. “Tell me about him.”
“But…” He began gearing up for another argument about how it didn’t matter and I wasn’t the police. I read minds, and I could see it coming.
Sometimes it helped to ask questions to get the conversation rolling. “How long did she take lessons from him?”
“Two years.”
“Did she like him?”
“She loved him. He was talented and funny and he made her feel creative. Sometimes I’d walk by when he was teaching and they’d be jamming together and laughing.”
He stopped. “You know. That was about the only time I ever heard her laugh. I don’t expect Lorena and I were any picnic to live with, even before General Asshole entered the picture. Lorena was so jealous when I showed Heidi any attention that I guess, to avoid conflict—”
He buried his head in his hands, twisting it sideways like he was trying to get the top off a jar. “I stopped giving her attention. It’s ironic, really, Ms. Kozak, that I’ve spoken with Heidi more in the months she’s been here than in the couple years before that.”
He raised his head and gave me a boyish smile. The kind of “aw, shucks” smile that had probably been getting his failures excused all his life. He and his ex, in their own ways, both believed charm and looks excused bad behavior. “But you wanted to know about Will.”
I nodded. “Where did her lessons take place? Was it always at your house? Former house?”
“It was, but—”
Another pause. I guessed he was one of those people who didn’t think things through, but rather discovered his own thoughts and feelings from what he found himself saying. “After Norris was in the picture, he found the sessions irritating and Heidi started going to Will’s place. So I guess…” He looked surprised. ”…a year and a half now, she’s been going to his place.”
“So Will had access, and a lot of time alone with your daughter?”
“But he’s my age. And he cares about Heidi. I was jealous of that. Their closeness. She would confide in him instead of me.”
And we all knew how easily that could spill over into inappropriate behavior. But was it the kind of relationship that could result in trauma and denial? Was he the type of man who might use drugs instead of seduction? Or was the relationship such that Heidi might lie to protect him?
“She never acted secretive about him, about Will? Or, conversely, like she might have a crush on him?”
“Not that I ever saw. You should ask Lorena.”
Right. I should ask Lorena, the woman he’d said was indifferent to their daughter and didn’t give a damn about her. A truly great suggestion. Of course, I would ask Lorena. I just didn’t have high hopes. And why did I get the sense that he was holding something back? Something about Will.
“Lorena’s cousin?”
“Dennis,” he said, pouncing on the name. “Now there’s a better suspect! He’s a male Lorena. Interested in nothing and no one other than himself and what pleases him.”
“Do you have any reason to think that seducing Heidi would have pleased him?”
He shrugged, unwilling to consider my question, then gave me a “Do we really have to do this?” smile.
I continued, not charmed. “Would he have had opportunities to be alone with Heidi?”
He went through the head holding ritual again, like squeezing and shaking might bring up useful answers. This conversation was making me sick. Either the conversation or the smell of bacon and sausage that was creeping into the room. That must be the breakfast that had been sent over. I love breakfast, but right now, I was so overtired even the smell of food made me sick. Basham was also making me sick. I wanted to see protectiveness. Outrage. A father ready to kill whoever had done this to his daughter. Instead, I was seeing curious surprise at his own reactions, like a kid discovering something colorful at the bottom of a tide pool or studying a zit in the mirror.
A stronger wave of sausage came at me and my stomach flipped.
“Excuse me,” I said, and went to find a bathroom.
Thirteen
I hovered in the powder room, feeling miserable, wondering whether I just didn’t know enough about Heidi to be sure of what I was seeing. What if she wasn’t the shy innocent who had been described to me, but instead a great actress and manipulator? What if her denial wasn’t the result of trauma or some terrifying event or an assault she was unaware of but simply that she’d had an affair with her music teacher and now was faking amnesia or repression to cover her actions? Could she have fooled someone as experienced as Dr. Purcell?
Even if it were true, we’d still want to protect her. She was very young and young teens made mistakes and did stupid things all the time. The responsibility still rested with the adult. But her choices made a difference. Not to any lawyer brought in to protect her interests, but to the Simmons community and to how we made our decisions.
Should I have talked with her friends before making any judgments or trying to interview her parents? It was pretty early in the day to haul her friends over here and start asking them questions. When I was done with the familial see no evil and hear no evil—Basham and his ex were clearly willing to speak all kinds of evil—I’d get Gareth to arrange for me to meet with those who were closest to Heidi. Meanwhile, I’d started down this road. I might as well finish with Ted Basham before Mrs. Norris arrived. It looked like an unpleasant day all around, but no one ever promised me a rose garden. The occasional bloom would be nice, though.
When I got back to the little lounge, Basham wasn’t there. Before I jumped to the conclusion that he’d scarpered like his ex, I stuck my head in Gareth’s open door. He and Basham were bent over a tray laden with a breakfast feast. Bacon, scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, muffins, croissants, and good strong coffee. I wanted those pancakes back at the inn, but would settle for eggs, croissants, and coffee. Maybe a muffin, despite my middle of the night snack. Today my wonky morning stomach said skip bacon and sausage.
“Join us, Thea,” Gareth said. When I hesitated, he looked at me like I’d gone slightly loony. He knew I liked to eat. I decided my stomach had settled down, and joined them.
Basham ate like a man in a hurry, which was how I usually ate as well. I’ve heard it’s not good for our digestion. I hadn’t even gotten food when he set down his empty plate and stood. “Where’s the loo?” he asked.
Gareth, grinning, gave him directions and Basham hurried away.
When he was gone, I said to Gareth, “When I’m finished with Mr. Basham, I’d like to talk with her dorm mother and some of Heidi’s friends.”
He nodded.
“Gareth?”
He turned toward me, his expression quizzical. I guess my tone was laden with portent. In matters like this, I sometimes feel like the queen of doom and gloom, unless it’s like someone’s nagging mother.
“Did you call the police? Have you told them Heidi is missing?”
He didn’t reply.
“Would you normally call the police if you had a missing student?”
His sheepish nod was answer enough. “But what do I say?”
“You ask for their help. You do exactly what you’d do with another student. You describe the situation—her delicate condition and troubled state of mind, the fact that the doctor has prescribed sedatives, your uncertainty that she’s capable of making sensible decisions right now. The mystery of the open door and the alarm that didn’t go off, which suggests someone else was involved. You say that last night’s weather was dreadful, and you’re concerned about her we
lfare.”
I let him process for a minute, then said, “You can’t let this slide. Especially if you want good on-going relations with them. Which you do. Not just in this situation but in the future. You don’t want to damage your credibility.”
He knew all this. He’d just let this crisis push him into tunnel vision. That’s why I was here.
“But Heidi?” he said.
“If she’s out there hiding somewhere, or if someone has aided her escape, or, worst case, someone has taken her, how do you help her by not trying to have her found?”
I gave it a beat. “And how does inaction reflect on the school? Simmons isn’t about hiding things or keeping secrets. It’s about open and honest communication. Open with your students. Open with their parents. Open with the police. If you believe Heidi is telling the truth—her truth—you’ve got nothing to hide, right?”
“But you’re already talking about shaping the story,” he countered.
“And isn’t ‘we believe her’ part of the shaping that story? Isn’t looking after a vulnerable child part of the story? Isn’t the fact that these are children, still in the process of becoming adults, still vulnerable to adult manipulation, part of the story? What about innocent until proven guilty? You want to concede the field before we’ve even started?”
It struck me then that I was tired of helping people tell the story. Weary of trying to get even well-intentioned people to listen and take my advice. Tired of crises and bad events and death and danger and people who didn’t think it mattered. I wanted to leave poor baffled, temporarily indecisive Gareth standing there and go call my husband and ask him how he did it, day in, day out, year after year, without growing cynical and sour. I felt like I was curdling. My resilience was ebbing. I was getting too old to run on little food and less sleep and a steady diet of personal and professional crisis. By the time MOC arrived, I would be what the medical profession called an “elderly primigravida.” It sounded like a dinosaur.
This was not about me, I reminded myself sternly. I was here to do a job, not to indulge in a bout of poor me. “Eggs and toast,” I said, reaching for a delicious-looking blueberry muffin the size of Rhode Island. “Then I’ll finish with Basham and we’ll talk about our strategy for the day.”
Gareth patted my shoulder. “This isn’t easy,” he said.
I filled a plate and went back to the little lounge, and a moment later, though I was expecting Basham, Gareth appeared. “Is it always like this?” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like impossible to get a handle on people?”
“You’re good with people, Gareth,” I reminded him. “But this is worst case scenario. Crisis does not bring out the best in many people. Their impulses to lie and defend themselves at the expense of those around them click in. Plus, in our world, there are so many families who’ve sent their children to boarding school not for the student’s benefit, but to get rid of them. They’ve sent their kids away because they don’t want to deal, or don’t know how to deal, and now they’re being forced to deal. They don’t want to face their own failures. They want to keep handing their problems back to you. And sometimes, they’ve been complicit in creating the problem, and they don’t want to accept that responsibility, either.”
“I can see that with the Norrises. But yesterday, Ted was so attentive.”
“That was yesterday. Yesterday he was thinking of Heidi. He was also trying to show us, and his ex, that he was the better parent. Excuse my language, but that was part of their ongoing pissing contest. Today, he’s back to thinking about himself. What he might need to protect and how he’s going to go about that. About responsibility. About the awful possibility that he might have to find a way to be a full-time dad and not just a loveable telephone dad.”
“Ugly,” he said. “Disappointing.”
“We’ve both seen it before, Gareth. We have to keep our focus on what’s best for the school. And on Heidi. Sometimes in loco parentis really means moving beyond the loco parents and trying to do it better.”
Gareth’s grin came and went. “What does he need to protect, anyway? If he’s telling the truth, this didn’t happen on his watch.”
“Big if. Besides, people lie for a lot of reasons.”
“And I thought I was cynical.”
“I prefer to think of myself as a realist.”
I looked down at my rapidly cooling plate. “I’m going to eat now, Gareth. Then we can talk.”
“Right,” he said. “Forgetting my manners.”
“We’ll get through this.”
“I know.”
He backed away, like someone leaving the presence of the Queen, and moments later, Ted Basham arrived.
Breakfast had not put Basham in a more cooperative frame of mind. He plunked himself back down on the couch and folded his arms like a defiant kid. He and Lorena must have been quite the pair when they were together. It was not attractive behavior and brought out the side of me that wanted to whack him upside the head. I squashed the impulse and pulled out an encouraging smile.
“Lorena’s cousin Dennis,” I prompted.
He shrugged.
I looked around. Was there a weapon that might nudge him into cooperation without doing serious harm? The umbrella stand offered a few possibilities, both sturdy umbrellas and a thick walking stick. “He came immediately to mind when I asked you who might have had access to Heidi. Why was that?”
“Because Dennis lives to nail anything female that he can. Because he has an ugly, vulgar mouth and it’s always running on about this hot chick or that one and how cleverly he seduced them.”
“He’s known Heidi all her life.”
A shrug. “Yeah. But I don’t think that would matter.”
“How does Heidi feel about him?”
“She thinks he’s funny. He used to bring her little presents. Do magic tricks for her.”
“Sounds like he is fond of her. But you still think—”
“He was fond of money,” Basham interrupted, “and he thought that being nice to Heidi would make Lorena more amenable when he wanted to borrow some.”
“Did it?”
Another shrug. “He’s had some generous helpings of my money over the years.”
“He pay it back?”
Basham gave me a look.
“What about General Norris’s money?”
“Far as I know, Bradley Norris doesn’t have a lot of money.”
“I guess you don’t like Cousin Dennis much. Any particular reason to think he might have seduced your daughter? Have you observed unusual behaviors? Things Heidi might have said? Things Lorena might have said?”
“I try not to talk to Lorena.”
I waited.
“Other than just who he is? Not really. But he was around. And he tried to hit me up for money a while back. After Lorena and I were divorced. I turned him down flat, and Ms. Kozak, he’s just the type to take a sick kind of revenge like that. He would think it was amusing. You should ask Lorena. She’s always been protective of her cousin, but faced with something like this, you might be able to move her off the mark.”
I kept Cousin Dennis in the active suspects column, got some basic locating information, and moved along. “The two younger officers who were frequently in the house. Tell me about them.”
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum?” he said. “Lt. Alexander Crosby, thus Sandy or Dee, and Lt. Aaron Ramirez, who despite being a lieutenant is genuinely dumb. Crosby is a big guy, bristle-cut, shifty and sharp-faced. Despite the glasses, he looks like he’s always ready to pick a fight and would just as soon stab you in the back. Ramirez is smaller, dark, with a too-ready smile, a real Latin lothario. They look as different as night and day but they act like salt and pepper shakers. Always together. Always scrambling to please. Norris likes having sycophantic young men around him. Maybe that’s what generals do. I’m afraid that’s not the world I travel in.”
I wondered, if he’d been absent for some time, how
he knew so much about the comings and goings at his ex-wife’s house and decided not to ask. I also wondered why I got the feeling he was impatient to be done with this and gone. Was he planning to bail, like his ex-wife? Take off as soon as I let him off the hot seat?
“Why did they come to mind, Mr. Basham?”
“Ted,” he said. “Please.”
“Ted.”
“You asked who was in and out frequently. Who might have had access.”
“Tell me more about them.”
“I don’t know more about them. Because I didn’t have access. I’m just going on what Heidi said. That they were always around. That when The General and my ex weren’t sitting around drinking and laughing it up, he always had people in and out of the house like it was his office. And the two people Heidi mentioned most often were Dee and Dum.”
“Did she dislike them?”
“I don’t know. I think she just wanted…” He considered. “Some peace and quiet. Some semblance of family. Family dinner. Family breakfast. Some time with her mother when it wasn’t a three-ring circus. Of course, Lorena likes a circus, especially if it revolves around her. Attentive young men to refresh her drink, compliment her cooking, her looks, pull out her chair. Never mind that it meant she had even less time for Heidi. If her daughter wasn’t going to be the cute little girl, a useful accessory to the beautiful mom, she had no time for Heidi. That didn’t stop Heidi from wanting her mother to care. I think her decision to come to Simmons was a sign she was finally giving up.”
Lorena ought to meet my mother. They could have a field day talking about their difficult daughters. And boy could I relate to the challenge of pleasing an unpleasable mother. But I could ponder on that another day. I wanted to be done with Basham as much as he wanted to be done with me. I needed to call the hospital and check on my dad.