The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

  Victoria seemed to be packaging up her life, moving, leaving. I knew catching someone in transition was often the best time to interview them, to get a fresh insight.

  Reports of the disappearance at the time said they had been very close to each other, Victoria and Louisa. Lavelle must have been on the outside of their circle, even though they admired him. Had he tried to break them apart in some way, had he wanted one and not the other? Had that led him to steal away with Louisa in the night? Convince her she was in love, seduce her with his tales of art and travel?

  I hadn’t got any direct sense of Victoria’s views of Lavelle. Her description of him as a hollow man was interesting. His elusiveness, the attempt to catch him that she referenced. These were phrases that suggested him not so much as a predator, but rather as the prey hunted by them. I had felt in both Helen’s and Victoria’s descriptions that there had been no sense of fear of him. I wondered, for a very brief moment, if everything we had assumed about the disappearance was wrong.

  Early the next morning a brown parcel arrived by courier. It was tied with string, like something an ageing aunt would send you for your birthday. I made tea and sat down to open it.

  On top was a note from Victoria, handwritten in black ink on heavy card that had her address embossed on it. She thanked me for our meeting and said she was looking forward to seeing me again next week.

  Below that, there were three folders. The first contained photos, a mix of Polaroid pictures and some printed on glossy paper from a time when people stood in darkrooms working with chemicals.

  There was Lavelle leaning against a car; the date written on the back was December 1990, along with ‘Vintage Car Show, Temple House’. I had not seen this image of him before and decided to send it to the editor to run with the piece on him. Other images were of the school grounds, hockey matches and school concerts, photos filled with people I did not recognize. There was only one of Louisa. She was lying on the grass, a sweater rolled up like a pillow and her head turned to the side so you could only see one eye. Her dark stare was intense and unfriendly. The sun was shining, there was a flare-like light above her, possibly a fault in the printing, and I could see the blue sea off in the distance. The last picture was of an unusual glass cabinet, antique-looking, filled with items I could not quite make out. There was a small key in the cabinet door.

  It was an odd assortment of random images, and apart from the new photos of Lavelle and Louisa, they were not much use.

  The next folder was of Louisa’s writing. There were two essays. The first was myth-like, describing two lovers who had been turned to stone statues. They stood in shadow under the tall trees and watched the world with sad eyes, never able to look directly at each other. Condemned to stand just off centre, only the vague sense of the other out of the corner of their stone eyes. It was a strange and eerie story. She wrote well, her voice strong and clear, with descriptions that, if not elaborate, were affecting. Her handwriting was squarish and certain, with no frills or embellishments.

  The second essay was shorter, more like a speech that had been written quickly. It was titled ‘Art Class – Cabinet of Curiosities Assignment, September 1990’.

  I have chosen the skull as my symbol for this year in art class. I will outline my reasons for doing so below.

  Skulls remind us we are weak. They show us the vanity of our thinking, in imagining we are different, unique. We fill our lives with trinkets, thoughts, lovers, art to distract us from the reality that lies underneath. The end that waits for us all. The skull is the manifestation not just of death, but the illusions we create around it. Our lives.

  Often placed in still-life settings with rotting fruit and wilting flowers, the skull is a physical demonstration that nothing lasts. Our thoughts, wishes, hopes, intellect, they are temporary and finite. . . It is vanity to think otherwise. Artists have used the skull as a reminder to explore the bigger questions of life and not to be tempted to think that love will save you.

  It sounded angry; the words had been coughed up on to the page.

  The last part of the last sentence read: The skull is the opposite of the heart.

  Apart from the essays, there was another page of quotes, ripped from a notebook. Phrases that must have meant something to her, copied from other books. I recognized some of them, including James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and J.D. Salinger, the usual suspects, and then one from Virginia Woolf: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

  I stopped at this. The morbidity of being sixteen.

  There was a tiny scrawl in her writing at the bottom of one page – the fates can choose to come to the rescue of the hero. Lavelle’s name was beside it.

  There was a copybook, yellowing slightly, with doodles and drawings that looked like they had been done at the back of the class. It included mock reviews of various albums and books. It certainly gave me a sense of Louisa, her humour and love of irony, but again not much else. It was going to be helpful to have some of her original writing and it did make her seem more alive and three-dimensional.

  The final folder was black and thinner than the others. I removed the elastic band around it. There was a charcoal drawing of a young woman with long hair, lying naked on a couch. There was no background to indicate where it had been drawn or when. She was not identifiable really; all you could see was her youth and beauty. It did not seem overly sexual, a sensitive rendering of the naked body. It was dated May 1990. Were there life-drawing classes in the school, held by Lavelle? The school, however, did not seem to have been a place where this kind of thing would have been allowed. Maybe he ran clandestine lifedrawing classes after hours. I stared at the woman but nothing about her seemed familiar. She was anonymous.

  I put the drawing carefully back in the folder and picked up the next small scrap of paper in the bottom of the file. It was a poem, not a particularly well-written one, but certainly intense in its feeling:

  You touch and I fade

  You breathe and I dissolve

  You speak and I am deaf

  You leave and I fall

  I typed the words into Google to see if they came up as lyrics or some unknown poem but there were no matches. It must have been an original work, written more than twenty years ago to someone who was an object of fascination.

  I rang my editor.

  ‘I met Victoria, she sent me some things. I am not sure yet if they are relevant, but I just wanted to let you know,’ I said.

  ‘What did she send you?’ he said.

  ‘Photos, some essays of Louisa’s, that kind of thing.’

  A fly that had been trapped in the room was bashing itself against the window. I watched it as he spoke to me.

  ‘What was she like?’ he replied.

  ‘She was odd, eccentric. Damaged maybe. I felt like she wanted to talk but just couldn’t quite get there.’

  ‘Does she think Louisa ran away with him?’

  ‘She wouldn’t get into their relationship and kind of fudged her responses on the subject when I asked,’ I said. ‘This visit was about building trust,’ I added quickly. ‘I didn’t get everything I needed from her, but we are talking again.’

  ‘Whatever works,’ he said.

  The image of Victoria as the deer in the woods came into my head once more. I thought about telling him we had planned to travel together to the school, but decided not to mention that yet. He might send a photographer with us and ruin any chance of her opening up.

  ‘It’s odd. Victoria kind of comes alive when Lavelle is mentioned, but when I talked about Louisa she seems, not afraid, but kind of unnerved,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe they weren’t as close as everyone said they were,’ he answered.

  ‘No, there was something between them, I’m sure of that,’ I said.

  Picking over lives. Stringing incidences together and making meaning.

  Finding a lesson in it all.

  I put the phone down and went to the window, opening it gently
. The fly flew out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I finished the draft of my article on Edward Lavelle and gave it to the intern to read before I sent it to my editor. She was taking ages over it, kept putting it down to look out the window and occasionally writing notes on the pages. I went to get a glass of water. A colleague was shredding some papers. I knew before he spoke he would say ‘shredding the evidence’. Which he did. He didn’t ask me about the Louisa story. I knew this meant I was doing well and everyone else knew it too.

  The intern was finished when I got back to my desk.

  ‘This is good,’ she said.

  I thanked her and took the pages.

  ‘I mean, his friend Xavier, there’d be a book in him alone,’ she said.

  I laughed.

  ‘Does he actually live in a castle?’ she asked.

  ‘No, more of a tower – not that I got to see it. I called him,’ I answered.

  ‘Still impressive, though,’ she said. ‘They seem like they are from a different world.’

  I looked up at her; she had a tendency to sit on the edge of my desk. It was irritating.

  ‘Faux bohemians are the words you are looking for, and entitled,’ I said, starting to read through her scribbled notes.

  ‘The teacher sounds like he was harmless,’ she said, looking at her nails now.

  They were always painted different colours, or had stickers on them.

  ‘Not from what the detective said to me, and anyway Xavier was a friend, he might not have known what he got up to. He just heard Lavelle’s version of events in the school. He probably wanted to appear like his life was a big success,’ I said.

  ‘We had a religion teacher like him,’ she said, ‘sort of wanted to hang with the kids type thing. We found it embarrassing, but then, he wasn’t very good-looking.’

  ‘I think Lavelle had charm, charisma, and that can make all the difference,’ I said, sitting back in the chair. Made him dangerous, I thought.

  ‘They were vulnerable in the school; there wasn’t the language really to say no to someone like him back then,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  I vaguely wanted her to leave now. She never picked up the signs. I wondered if she was suited to reporting. She heard her own voice above all others.

  I thought about Victoria’s view of Mr Lavelle. She had seemed wistful about him, the man who was there but also wasn’t. He must have been compelling in some way, despite what Helen had said. I looked at the picture of him leaning against the car.

  ‘Like a cult leader maybe, like Jim Jones or the Waco guy,’ she said, still sitting on my desk.

  ‘Yeah, exactly,’ I replied, gazing at the picture. Power, influence, beauty.

  My editor walked over. I told him I was proofing the piece and would have it to him that evening.

  ‘We got a call from a researcher on a radio show, the one where people ring in and complain,’ he said.

  ‘A caller claims to have been abused in the school, by one of the teachers,’ he said. ‘Only had the courage to come out now, you know the story.’

  The intern raised her eyebrows and started checking her phone.

  I sat up.

  ‘I’ll ring the show, see if we can get their details,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring the police too. The detective gave me a number for someone who might be helpful.’

  ‘When are you making the trip to the school?’ he said.

  ‘Next week. I’ll take photos when I’m there,’ I said.

  Don’t send anyone with me.

  He began to walk away.

  ‘It was something to get to see Victoria. Well done,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll write it up over the weekend,’ I replied.

  I went back to reading the notes the intern had made.

  Are you sure the fact that he had grand ideas and was a bit precious about art means he was making stuff up and liked fantasizing. . .? You need to be careful, bit biased.

  When Xavier said that Mr L thought everyone could be an artist, does that not seem kind of good, like a very New Age form of teaching but in a good way?

  You seem to really like Louisa, is this just because she lived on your road? Maybe she was kind of arrogant and was trying to get his attention all the time, wanted to be special. She might have wanted him (though he should have said no).

  Xavier says that Mr L loved teaching in the school, never gave any hint he was planning to leave. Interesting, non?

  Her notes were actually helpful. She was possibly better than I gave her credit for.

  I shouted, ‘Thanks for these,’ as she walked past later on. She looked surprised.

  I opened the folder and looked at Louisa’s essay on the skull.

  Who was she, really?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was raining as we drove along the coast road out to the school. Victoria sat silently for most of the journey, sharing a few pleasantries and nothing more. As we left the city behind and the road opened before us, I put the radio on in an attempt to keep things reasonably normal and sane. It was the phone-in show I had been in touch with; today callers were complaining about a local hospital. It was reassuring. We could have been any normal friends, sitting in the car, on our way for a day at the coast. Except it was March and the rain was falling heavily outside, with the windscreen wipers keeping a rhythmic and oddly melodic beat in time with the rain. And we weren’t friends.

  Victoria appeared not to be listening to the chatter but rather seemed to be looking at the countryside as we drove. I imagined it was a familiar journey, filled with memories. It was only as we slowed the car to turn off the motorway that she spoke, commenting on my choice of radio station, declaring, state-ofthe-nation style, that it seemed as if people feel ‘nothing works any more’. She sighed, then turned off the radio.

  I thought about mentioning the caller last week who had rung in about abuse in the school. But I didn’t. I hadn’t been able to contact the person anyway.

  We stopped for a coffee and to get petrol. Victoria sat on a stool that looked over the forecourt while I queued. She seemed out of place among the travelling salesmen and families on trips to visit relatives. I sensed that this was a kind of average life she did not engage with. A world where you stopped to shop and queue and eat greasy convenience food. She possibly wasn’t as different from Helen as I might have thought. I placed the cups on the bench in front of us, she thanked me and remarked that all these motorway stops were new. Even the road itself had been re-made, widened and curved away from the sea and was not familiar to her. I asked her how long it had been since she visited the school, expecting she had gone back at some point, for some reason.

  ‘Not since the day after Louisa disappeared,’ she said, ‘so twenty-five years ago this December.’

  She ran her fingers over the lid of her takeaway cup as she spoke. I didn’t know whether to believe her.

  ‘How soon did it close after they went missing?’ I asked.

  ‘The following summer,’ she said. ‘After the investigation and all the headlines, enrolments dropped to nothing.’

  ‘But you left earlier than that?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I left that Friday night, just before Christmas, and never went back.’

  I told her I would be talking to Louisa’s mum in the coming days. She nodded but did not respond. It would be in the next article, the one that would run after the piece on Lavelle. I explained it had been hard to get her to talk. Victoria remained silent. The rain had eased as we walked back to the car. As we got in she said that Louisa had been embarrassed by her parents, and had never really spoken about them.

  As we strapped on our seatbelts she said, ‘I think she wanted to get away from them, her parents. They seemed to mean very little to her.’

  She then switched on the radio, turning it to a station that played classical music, and went back to staring out the window.

  The topic of Louisa’s parents was off limits f
or now and I silently agreed to obey her wishes.

  The gates to the school were locked. I got out to see if they had just been shut rather than bolted but they didn’t budge. They were wrought iron and rusting badly. I rubbed my hands on my jeans after touching them, leaving orange stains. Victoria got out from the car and said we could walk.

  She led the way through the long grass, along a high stone wall that ran around the edge of the estate. It wasn’t raining but the air was damp and misty and the grass was sopping against our legs. There was a vague smell of salt and seaweed in the air, though the sea was not yet in view. After a short time the wall became lower, with a small, broken wooden stile cut into it that we climbed over.

  Victoria jumped from the wall ahead me and, after landing, stood still. I could not see her face, but felt again that heaviness in the air between us as she stood there looking up the narrow, tree-lined gravel driveway, the house not yet visible. We walked on in silence, only the crunch of the weed-filled gravel under our shoes. The drive was edged by thick overgrown grass; in some places there were clumps of daffodils peeping through. It was strangely beautiful. The drive veered off towards the coast, but Victoria shook her head and gestured for me to follow her. We walked through long grass, a shortcut that linked back to the drive. Tall yew trees stood each side of us. They reached over our heads, almost forming an arch, and the trunks were wide and looked like they had split in half, with a hollowness at their centre. Victoria stopped to look up.

  ‘They have grown,’ she said. ‘They never used to meet in the middle. We were never allowed past the trees; they formed a sort of unspoken boundary, from all the mad, naked men that were hiding here.’

  I laughed, then felt bad for doing so. She looked at me as we walked.