Inside the building, Jennifer stayed at Miles’ side down halogen-lit halls, followed by whispers and stares, both of them used to being looked at: Miles because of what he’d done, Jennifer because she was so pretty. They’d each learned not to pay attention to gawkers, which might prove advantageous to the Kensington County police officer who—less than 24 hours ago—had been pulled off routine patrol and assigned undercover to the school as a teacher’s aide to watch Miles Peterson. Her name was Debra Vance.
2.
The first time Miles kissed Jennifer was Day 9—as Principal Davies referred to it—already the end of their second week of school (which, because of Labor Day, had only been four days long).
They were at a Starbucks in Georgetown for the second Friday in a row—maybe something that might turn into a ritual. But not a date. Sitting outside at a small table in warm sunshine, Jennifer drank coffee with soy milk and three sugars, holding the cup to her face with the plastic lid removed because she liked the feel and smell of the steam. Miles had a cup of something that looked like desert, topped with whipped cream, lines of caramel, and sprinkles of some type of confection. After a few sips through a straw, he gave it a look as if studying a dissected frog in anatomy.
Jennifer laughed. “Why’d you get it if you don’t like it?”
“I didn’t know if I’d like it or not. It sounded good.”
“Yea-uh…? It’s supposed to sound good. Like how all the new townhouses near school are luxury residences.”
Miles took another sip, then gave his head a quick shake as if reacting to the high sugar content. “Man that’s sweet.”
Jennifer laughed again.
He set down his drink and looked across the busy street, where the descending angle of early September sun was, day by day, making longer shadows of the old buildings.
As traffic backed up at the intersection, opportunistic pedestrians crowded across against the signal.
“I can’t get over how many people are here.” Miles seemed truly amazed, as if settings like this were only in TV shows and movies. Last week, he’d asked her if it was always this noisy.
Jennifer nudged his leg with the toe of her suede Wallabee mocs. “You are such a yokel.”
He didn’t mind when she teased him—even seemed to like it. But Jennifer had limited their conversations to safe topics so far. Her opinions of certain teachers and classes. Other students who were jerks and might cause Miles problems—like Rusty Bremmer, who she warned might get in Miles’ face for no particular reason other than to see if he could stir him up, test this boy from Florida who didn’t look like he’d ever been in a weight room. Since third grade, Bremmer had been the kind of kid who’d kick dirt at a growling dog through a chain fence.
“There’s a home game tomorrow,” Jennifer said. “Are you going?”
“I don’t think so.”
“When you say, ‘I don’t think so,’ that means, definitely no, right?”
Miles shrugged.
Jennifer had been trying to pick up his habits and mannerisms, curious to figure him out. At one time, she’d thought about studying psychology in college, then figured that might be a depressing and sad profession. Now, she was leaning toward something in the medical profession—not as a doctor, but perhaps a pharmaceutical or instruments sales rep. Although she was still interested in psychology.
Miles fascinated her, and not just because he’d killed a man two years ago—and it truly had been a man, not some other kid, according to newspaper articles she’d found online. Miles had killed a grown man in a fight, and with his hands—not a weapon—striking the man so hard in the throat it collapsed his windpipe. Jennifer still couldn’t picture it.
Miles seemed so incapable of such a thing, she was beginning to wonder if he’d actually done it—wondered if maybe the reason the case against him ended up being dropped was because the police figured out someone else killed that man and Miles was covering for them. Either that, or maybe Miles was now on some kind of meds that made him mellow—although Jennifer had snuck looks through his knapsack on three separate occasions and never found any prescription bottles.
“Well…if you’re not going,” Jennifer said of tomorrow’s football game, “I’m not going, either. Eff-it. But if you change your mind, I’ll go with you.”
Miles said, “I’m going to hang out with my dad this weekend. We’ve been talking about finding a place to rent a boat and do some fishing.”
“My dad fishes,” Jennifer said. Crossing her legs, the slit skirt of her Bohemian dress parted, revealing bare skin between lengths of tribal-motif fabric. “He and a couple friends have a boat they keep over in Edgewater—not far from Annapolis. If you want, I can ask him for you.”
“That’d be cool.” Miles nodded—that gentle bounce of his head with his lips pressed firmly together, the way he showed approval Jennifer had noticed before when studying his face.
Miles had such a beautiful face she imagined people would think he was prettier than she was.
“Did you fish back home?” she asked, careful with questions about his past—not wanting to expose her curiosity. Although she really wanted to know what it was like to have killed someone. Did he have nightmares about it? Forget all the crap about being arrested, being held in an adult jail for months, then the case being dropped—although that all must have been brutal—what was it like to know someone was dead because of what he’d done? Even if it was an accident. Or self-defense. Or what did the prosecutor in the newspaper article call it: reasonable force? Could reasonable force still kill someone?
Miles said, “I worked at a marina for a while and sometimes went out as a deck hand for one of the charter captains.”
Between sips of coffee, Jennifer said, “I’ve never been fishing. Crabbing—I did that a couple times as a little kid. But no fishing.”
An exotic-looking woman walked by on the sidewalk—Polynesian? Jennifer wondered. The woman had thick black hair pulled back in a braid and wore a strapless dress in a wild tropical print that draped to her ankles like a caftan and flowed when she walked. Jennifer wanted that dress.
The woman caught Miles’ eye, but didn’t hold it, and Jennifer almost asked him if that was because he preferred blonds. Instead, she said, “Is fishing something you and your dad do a lot?”
“When my grandfather was alive. He lived in Fort Myers.”
At first Jennifer thought he was talking about Fort Myer, the army post in Arlington, then realized he meant somewhere in Florida.
Miles said, “My granddad had a Boston whaler we took out drum fishing. But he died when I was twelve and my uncle ended up with the boat and took it up to Topsail—North Carolina,” he added.
Jennifer couldn’t picture Miles’ slender fingers baiting a hook, or getting a drum fish—whatever that was—off a line. “Sounds like you and your dad are pretty close.” In the few hours she’d spent with him so far, he’d talked fondly about his father—not as much about his mother.
“He’s a good guy,” Miles said warmly.
Jennifer had never heard any of her friends refer to their fathers as good guys—never thought of her own father that way, even though he was. “So what’s he do? What’s his job?”
“He’s a claims adjuster for an insurance company.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“If a building gets damaged in a storm or fire, he figures out if the loss is insured and how much it’s going to cost to fix it.”
“Does he like it?”
“I guess. Although he was a supervisor back home. Here, he’s back out in the field.” Miles stretched his long legs alongside where hers remained crossed. He had on another pair of jeans—all he’d worn so far were jeans—but Jennifer hadn’t seen this pair before: stonewashed 501’s with thread-bare thighs, frayed hems, and reddish-brown stains on both hips that looked as if worked into the denim from Miles wiping his hands, maybe getting off fish guts.
All of Miles’ clothes looke
d like he could go fishing in them. He didn’t wear anything trendy or expensive—nothing like what Jennifer and her friends got in Alda Baptiste’s, that new place in Dupont Circle with racks of stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else.
“What about your mom?” Jennifer hoped this was the right time to talk more about Miles’ parents. She was curious about them, too. What was it like to know their son had killed someone? Jennifer imagined her own parents—especially her mother—would come completely unhinged if Tyler killed someone. Then again, her little brother—their baby, their “surprise”—was only ten. But Jennifer had seen him drop a brick on a mouse by their back patio door without giving it much thought…so who knew.
Miles said, “My mom’s a teacher.”
“Where’s she teach?”
The corner of Miles’ left eye pinched slightly, an almost imperceptible wince Jennifer had also seen before and believed was a tell of hesitancy. Holding her drink close to her face, the steam no longer as hot and aromatic, she waited for Miles’ response.
He said, “She’s not at a school now. She’s not certified here yet. So, she, um, put her name in to do some substituting…” He started to say something else, but stopped.
“Substitute teaching…” Jennifer raised her eyebrows. “…that’s got to suck.” She looked across the street as if her attention was wandering, even though when she was with Miles she found it difficult to concentrate on anything other than Miles. “You want to walk around a little?” Standing, she ran her hand through her hair, gathering it back so it fell between her shoulders.
Miles remained seated, looking at her with an easy smile.
“Or not…” Jennifer laughed awkwardly, thinking he had no intention of getting up, and started to sit back down when Miles pulled in his legs and got to his feet. Because he could tease her, too.
As they started down the street, he put his arm around her waist, very casually, very confidently, very smoothly—his hand coming to rest with his thumb at her hipbone and his fingers along the curve of her thigh. And Jennifer thought, Oh, okay, because even guys she’d dated hadn’t done that. Hardly anybody walked arm-in-arm.
So she put her arm around him, her hand at the waist of his jeans where they hung low on his narrow hips.
Whenever Jennifer stopped to look in a shop window, Miles stood alongside her and commented about what she pointed to. If she wanted to go inside, he held the door for her. When they passed a street musician playing a passable violin, Miles gave the guy a dollar.
On a side street, when Jennifer peered down a narrow cobblestone alley and said she’d always wondered what was there, Miles said, “Let’s find out.”
No sooner were they away from where most anyone could see them than Jennifer put her back against the warm brick wall and drew Miles against her. And Miles, with his hands at the curve of her hips, very sweetly, very passionately kissed her like she’d never been kissed before—never imagined being kissed before, which filled her with a warm rush and had her thinking Miles suddenly seemed much more than just a year older than she was.
3.
Officer Debra Vance did not like the county lawyer who represented the school board. She thought Arnold Baylor’s attempts at self-deprecation and humility were poor masks of his arrogance, and that if he was offered a chance to cheat on his wife that carried little risk of getting caught, Arnold would jump on it with the unrestrained glee of a toddler on a trampoline. Not to mention, Arnold Baylor was short, and Debra Vance did not trust short men—an ironic prejudice considering her own very small size, although she didn’t see it that way any more than actuaries would be thought bigoted for predicting smokers to have reduced life expectancies.
Debra Vance’s opinion of men of Napoleonic proportion was the result of a string of negative first-hand experiences, starting when she was 16 and worked part-time in a convenience store where a runt who owned a very successful construction company came into the store every Friday for dozens of bags of ice and refused to wait in line to pay. Instead, he had his workers carry out as much ice as he wanted while he threw cash onto the counter (which often landed on the floor) and barked that she could ring it up when she had time. When she learned the runt’s name was Burt, she began thinking of him as “Baby Burt,” and from that time on had assigned juvenile monikers to short men she didn’t like, such as Itsy-bitsy Earl, Teeny Ted, or—a personal favorite—Diminutive Dick.
Vance was yet to pick out a synonym for small that began with A, but seated in Arnold Baylor’s office late Friday afternoon, she considered the options.
“So what do we have on Mr. Miles Peterson?” Arnold asked her, a question he could have easily texted or emailed, but Arnold had that power fetish Vance believed genetically imprinted alongside the male short gene, which became especially dominant in a bureaucratic environment. Arnold enjoyed having the power to summons her to his office. He liked to sit in his faux leather chair with the padded arms, the seat adjusted so the tops of his thighs brushed the bottom of his center desk drawer and put him a couple inches higher than whoever was seated across from him.
“He goes to class,” Vance reported efficiently from notes made at the end of every school day. “He participates. He seems fairly bright, especially in physiology.” The complete class name was Physiology and Anatomy, but Vance was not going to give Arnold the satisfaction of whatever prurient thoughts—God forbid comments—she might inspire in him by saying, anatomy. “He gets some comments in the hall—less now than last week—which he ignores. And it looks like he might be making a couple friends. He’d been eating lunch by himself outside on the bleachers at the football field, but a couple days this week he sat in the cafeteria with what looks like the brainy, artsy fringe of the cool crowd. Basically, he’s like most any kid trying to adjust to a new school.”
“But he’s not any kid, is he?”
“He acts like it,” Vance replied. “Although probably less so than a lot of adults.” Her indirect swipe at the short lawyer was in retaliation for catching his eyes dart up from her breasts—even though she was wearing the same sort of unflattering loose blouse and bust-flattening bra she’d worn to each of her nine days so far as a teacher’s aide at Kensington High. She remembered all too well the paw prints left by horny classmates during her own middle and high school years—a time not yet long enough ago to become the sort of ancient history her mother had often promised it would become.
As if deep in thought, Arnold slowly swiveled his chair toward his office’s twin windows—narrow slats in the wall that reminded Vance of the turret openings of the tanks her father once commanded in Vietnam: the Patton M48A3 he’d been photographed in at An Loc in 1972 as a 23-year-old.
Vance’s father had been a brave young man who’d come home damaged and feeling despised by the country that sent him to war. He married late and finally had a family, but suffered stress disorders that ended his marriage to Debra’s mother, who then married a man not half as strong as her father but who slept through the night without screaming and could keep a job because he didn’t lose his temper at work. Debra’s step-father was a good, but spineless provider who she used to resent her mother for marrying.
She resented Arnold Baylor in a different way—how he sat in his office and directed secretaries and paralegals, all of whom were female, employing their assistance in creating verbose memorandums full of words that required a dictionary when a simpler word would have made the same point—using plethora instead of a lot.
Arnold was the kind who was all smiles and chipper personality until he didn’t get his way, then he turned angry and snide and threatening.
“Something’s strange about what happened in Florida,” Arnold opined, elbows on his chair arms, fingertips touched together in a teepee above his round waist. “Then again, what isn’t strange in Florida?” His chuckle was a cue for Vance to find his comment humorous, only she didn’t have it in her.
She believed her present assignment was a waste of time, as was b
eing in Arnold’s office. But she didn’t say so, not to Arnold, or to her lieutenant who’d assigned her to this case based in part on her stellar record, but primarily because she was female, small, white, and, presumably, would fit in better—less suspiciously—at a suburban public high school where, on any given day, half the cars in the student parking lot had a higher blue book value than most every car in the teachers’ lot.
“You reviewed the file,” Arnold assumed, meaning the pages he’d compiled about Miles Peterson that were supposed to have enlightened her: two-year-old newspaper articles; police reports and court documents that had been faxed from Florida; and transcribed notes from his phone conversations.
“Yes.”
“Someone’s lying, don’t you think.”
No, Vance did not think that. There wasn’t enough evidence. But that wasn’t going to stop this elfin power-hungry bureaucrat, without a shred of law enforcement or military training, from being convinced his hunches were facts. And, yes, he was elfin. Elfin Arnold.
“A witness,” he said, “claimed the man Peterson killed was already unconscious from what she described to police as…” He read from his file. “...and I quote: ‘a kick to the head like one of those MMA fighters.’ When Peterson then—another quote—‘karate-chopped him in the throat and dragged him behind a dumpster.’” Elfin Arnold—as Vance would think of him now—tapped the opened file on his desk. “That’s not reasonable force,” he determined. “That’s murder. Not to mention this witness—poof—disappeared after the grand jury hearing.”
When Arnold paused, Vance knew it was for dramatic effect, not an invitation for her to comment.
“I want you to find this witness,” he instructed. “Contact the place she worked. Reporters and cops involved in this case. Run her through the system. I want to talk to her.”
The Pretty Woman Who Lived Next Door Page 2