A Hard Day’s Fright (7 page)

Ella laughed. “It was the sixties. And Mr. Monroe…” She shook her head. “By the time he came back to Shaker for that assembly when I was a senior, Mr. Monroe was a world-famous poet. Come on, Pepper…” She poked me in the ribs. “You know how it is. There isn’t a woman alive who can resist a poet.”

I was pretty sure this woman could.

Rather than dwell on it, I glommed on to something else Ella said. “You said, when he came back to Shaker. Does that mean this Patrick Monroe guy—”

“He was a teacher at the school. Of course, you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t run across his picture in one of the older yearbooks! Mr. Monroe was in the English department. He quit teaching when that poem of his was published. Oh, you must know it.” Thinking, she snapped her fingers together, and when she finally gave up, she shook her head in disgust. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. I’ll think of it. I’ll bet it’s a poem you studied when you were in high school. That’s how famous it is.”

She made her mistake there.
Studied
and
high school
in the same sentence.

“Anyway…” Ella stabbed up some more debris and put it in my bag. “Everybody else was taken in by him, but me…I always wondered if Mr. Monroe had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance. Shaker wasn’t his first teaching job, you know. The rumor going around school…” As if it hadn’t happened forty-five years before, Ella leaned closer, sharing the confidence. “Rumor had it that he’d been asked to leave his first teaching job somewhere in New York. Because of…you know…an inappropriate relationship with one of the girl students.”

Finally, something interesting connected with my case. Gross, but interesting. As for whether it had anything to do with Lucy, there was only one way to find out.

“Did Lucy ever say anything about Mr. Monroe coming on to her?”

“Oh, really, Pepper!” Ella fanned her face with one hand. “We weren’t quite as blatant about discussing things like that back then as you young people are now. But no, there’s no way.” There was a fast-food burger wrapper across the road and Ella headed that way. She stabbed it and said, “If Mr. Monroe was doing something inappropriate, Lucy would have told me. And she would have reported him. She was that kind of girl. I told you, she didn’t put up with any sort of unfairness and she didn’t keep quiet in the face of what was wrong. She didn’t—”

Ella’s cheeks turned suddenly ashen. Her mouth fell open.

I put a hand on her arm.

“I just remembered,” she said on the end of a breath. “That night of the concert, when we were on the rapid…I remember there was some talk about Lucy having an appointment with the principal. I can’t remember…I don’t know who mentioned it or if Lucy said it was true or not, but if it was…”

Interesting and more interesting!

“Did she say what she was going to see the principal about?”

Thinking hard, Ella squeezed her eyes shut. “She didn’t. I’m sure of it. But I remember everyone seemed surprised.”

“So she didn’t confide in anyone?”

“Well, she certainly didn’t tell me about the appointment. If there was really an appointment. In fact…” She thought some more. “Everyone was surprised to hear about it except Will. Apparently, Lucy mentioned it to him. But then, that wasn’t anything new. Will was one of those guys the other kids confided in, a natural-born psychologist. From what I’d heard, any student brave enough to to see our principal needed some sort of therapy! Mr. Wannamaker didn’t believe in being friends with his students. He was tough and he was strict. Not the sort of person you’d just stop in on to chat. If she really did make that appointment  .  .  .” Ella sighed. “Lucy must have had a very good reason to want to talk to him.”

“And do you think it might have had something to do with this Monroe character?”

She shook her head and my hopes plummeted. “Even if it did, the police investigated Mr. Monroe thoroughly after Lucy disappeared. I mean, everyone was talking about how he’d been let go from his last job. That was no secret. The police heard the stories, and of course, they checked out Mr. Monroe. Even after school started that fall, I remember seeing cops in the hall, and once, I saw them talking to Mr. Monroe. They apparently never really thought it was him, though. Or they never found a way to connect him to Lucy. Otherwise, I don’t think they would have dropped it. Especially since Lucy took that summer school poetry class with Mr. Monroe.”

This, too, was news, and I perked up, but apparently Ella didn’t notice since she was busy poking and stabbing. I urged her on with a hopeful, “And…”

“Oh, the summer school class?” Like it was no big deal (and for all I knew, it wasn’t), Ella shrugged. “That’s the class Lucy got an F in and we thought she wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Beatles concert, but her parents let her go, anyway.” Her smile was bittersweet. “Fate is a funny thing, isn’t it? Lucy almost didn’t get to go to the concert. But she did go. And she had such a wonderful time! She even kissed Paul McCartney. And if she did die…I mean, I’m saying this theoretically, not because I believe it or anything…but if she did die that night, then the concert was her last happy memory.” She sighed and got back to work.

And I got what looked an awful lot like an insight into why Lucy was stuck on that rapid. Her last happy memory, of course. Better she should be stuck there than in the horror of what happened after she got off the train.

I actually might have gotten all melancholy if Ella hadn’t started talking again. “Then,” she said, “when Lucy and I were on the train and she said that thing about how she had a secret boyfriend and a broken heart—”

“Whoa!” I put a hand on her arm to stop her. “You never told me that Lucy said anything about a secret boyfriend.”

“Didn’t I?” Ella is a lousy liar. When she tried to play it cool, I called her on it with a no-nonsense look. She was probably a lousy poker player, too, because she caved in an instant. “She told me in confidence. And I did tell the police about it when they questioned me. I mean, I didn’t think the confidence extended that far. They obviously never thought anything of it.”

“And you don’t think it had anything to do with her disappearance?”

“It couldn’t have.” Ella was sure of herself. “Lucy told me they’d already broken up, so if it was over between them—”

“Then her boyfriend might have been plenty pissed.”

“No, no.” She dismissed the idea with a shake of her head. “Lucy was the one with the broken heart. That means he must have broke up with her.”

“And she never said who it was?”

There was a paper lying on the ground and Ella stabbed and lifted it. “Not a word,” she said.

“And do you think she might have been talking about Patrick Monroe?”

Ella was about to make another stab, and she stopped mid-stride. “I never thought of that.”

“And when he came back to Shaker to talk to your senior class?”

She shrugged. “I never said a word to him. I mean, I wouldn’t have dared. By then, Patrick Monroe was as famous as Dylan.”

My blank look said it all.

“Bob Dylan,” Ella said. “Patrick Monroe was living in Greenwich Village and writing these incredible, soulful poems about love and loss and longing.”

“Longing for high school girls, you think?”

She twitched her shoulders. “Like I said, I always wondered if he had anything to do with Lucy’s disappearance. Especially since I saw him talking to Lucy at the Beatles concert.”

OK, that did it! I flung my trash bag on the ground and faced Ella down, my hands on my hips. I would have been more imposing in my suede pumps, but the green boots would have to do. “A little something else you might have mentioned?”

She wasn’t as cowed as I expected. In fact, even in the face of my righteous indignation—and it was plenty righteous—Ella had the nerve to smile.

“Pepper!” She wagged a finger in my direction. “You’re not just looking into Lucy’s disappearance to help me out with Ariel. Now that you know Lucy’s story, you’re hooked. You’re going to use your talent for figuring out mysteries and you’re going to find out what really happened to her.”

There was no use denying it. Especially since I wanted to hear about the concert. Right after I admitted my interest in Lucy had taken a very detective-like turn, I asked, “Monroe was there?”

“Oh, well, so were thousands of other people.”

“But you saw him talking to Lucy?”

Ella nodded. “We went up to the ladies’ room during intermission and I thought I got done first so I stepped into the hallway to wait for Lucy. Then I realized she was already out of the restroom. She was standing over near a refreshment stand, talking to Mr. Monroe.”

“About her appointment with the principal?”

Ella shrugged.

“About that F in her poetry class?”

“I really can’t say.”

“Did they look really friendly?”

“I told the police all this,” Ella said. “If they thought there was something between them—”

“So they did look friendly?”

“He had his hand on her arm.”

“And she?”

There was nothing like loyalty that stood the test of time. Ella glanced away. “She didn’t look like she wasn’t enjoying it,” she mumbled. “But really, Pepper, if something was going on between Lucy and Mr. Monroe, she would have told me. We were best friends. We were sisters. I thought he might have had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance, that she might have run away with him or something. But that was just me being young and stupidly romantic. By the time Mr. Monroe came back for that assembly my senior year, I figured he couldn’t have been involved. For one thing, Lucy wasn’t cruel, she wouldn’t have let her parents suffer that long if she could have told them she was OK. For another, if Mr. Monroe had anything to do with it, the cops would have found something out by then. And Mr. Monroe wouldn’t have had the nerve to come back to Shaker. Not if he was responsible for Lucy…you know…going away.”

Ella was probably right. I had no doubt the cops had done all they could to look into Lucy’s vanishing, just like I had no doubt that it would take a guy who was either really twisted or really dumb to show up as guest of honor at the school his victim attended.

But then, who ever said killers were smart?

I
n terms of my investigation, the logical thing to do was to talk to Lucy about Patrick Monroe and that appointment she had with the principal.

I would have done it, too, except that over the next few days, things got a little out of hand. For one thing, I was so whooped from dragging myself around the cemetery carrying that disgusting trash bag, I didn’t have the energy to get to the rapid, much less ride it. For another, when I finally regained my strength (thanks to a long bubble bath, a facial, and a well-deserved visit to Olga, a wizard with a file and a bottle of nail polish), and gave up my lunch hour on Friday in the name of my investigation, it was something of an effort in futility. I drove over to the rapid station and I was all set to hop on the train and question Lucy when I remembered the whole exact-change scenario, which, come to think of it, doesn’t make any sense at all and really is nothing but a big ol’ inconvenience.

Long story short, all I could do was stand there on the platform like some lost soul and watch the train whizz by. That, and wave to Lucy, who—speaking of lost souls—was sitting on the train with her nose pressed to the window, waving back.

And then there was the brawl, of course. The one in the biker bar.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After my wasted trip to the rapid station, I wasn’t in the best of moods when I got back to the office. Finding Ariel sitting behind my desk didn’t help.

“It’s too early for you to be out of school.” I dropped my Juicy Couture purse into my bottom desk drawer and stepped back, the better to allow her enough room to get her skinny little butt out of my chair.

“Early dismissal. Parent-teacher conferences.”

I pitied the child for thinking I was that naive. That was right about the same time I gave her a probing look. “On a Friday afternoon?”

Oh, she was good. She never batted an eyelash. And believe me, I would have seen it if she had. She wasn’t wearing her clunky dark glasses.

The silver stud was missing from her lip, too.

Surprised (not to mention grateful and not repulsed), I guess I must have smiled.

My mistake. She took it as a sign of weakness.

“You might not believe there are conferences this afternoon, but my mother does.”

“If your mother actually believed there were parent-teacher conferences today, she’d be first in line to sign up.”

Ariel grinned. “She went on Wednesday night. She thinks today’s conferences are for the stay-at-home mothers.”

Like this made sense, I nodded. But was I about to give up? Not a chance!

Since it didn’t look like Ariel was going to move, I strolled around to the front of my desk. “Wow,” I said, as casual as can be, “if I’d fooled my mom like that, I wouldn’t be here at boring Garden View. I would have used the extra time to hang with Gonzalo.”

“Gonzalo. Hmph!” Matchstick arms folded over flat chest, Ariel glared. The entire performance would have been more convincing if I hadn’t used the same sort of posturing myself a time or two when I was trying to prove how much I didn’t care about Quinn. Of course, Ariel’s quivering bottom lip was a giveaway, too.

I dropped into my guest chair. “Fight, huh?”

“He’s unreasonable.”

“All men are.”

“He’s self-centered.”

“Goes with the territory.”

“He writes these incredibly intense poems  .  .  .” She sighed in a very fifteen-year-old-girl way. “You know, poems full of pain and anguish, poems about this bleak, hopeless thing called life. And then…” She gritted her teeth. “And then I saw him over at Starbucks drinking a Caramel Frappuccino. How ordinary!”

I was about to point out that the boy’s taste in drinks probably didn’t really have any direct correlation to how miserable he found life, but Ariel didn’t give me the chance. Now that she’d opened up about Gonzalo’s middle-of-the-road tendencies, she was on a roll. She jumped out of the chair and threw her hands in the air. “With Tiffany Slater!”

Ah, the plot thickened!

“What’s a woman supposed to do, Pepper?” Ariel asked, and it took me a moment to realize the woman she was talking about was her. “What do you do when a guy turns on you like that? When he breaks your heart into a million little pieces and betrays your very soul?”

I wasn’t sure if this was some sort of rhetorical cosmic question, or if her
you
meant me personally. If it didn’t, I would be better off just letting the whole subject slide. So would my ego. If it did…yeah, I’d have to swallow my pride, but it would give me a chance to impart a little hard-won wisdom. With the mood Ariel was in, she just might listen.

To up the odds, I leaned forward and pinned her with a look. “You know those million little pieces? That heart belongs to you and not to anyone else. So you pick up every one of those pieces and you move on.”

She gulped. “I’m not sure I can.”

“Then the only other thing you can do is stay in the same miserable place you are now.”

Good advice. Now I just needed to remember it.

Before I could get into some uncomfortable soul-searching, I realized I’d made a mistake.
Miserable
wasn’t going to scare Ariel away.
Miserable
and Ariel were best friends.

Big surprise, she actually nodded, swiped her nose, and smiled. “I needed that,” she said. “A figurative slap in the face to remind me of the perfidy of the opposite sex. I must steel my heart.” She slapped one hand over it. “I must keep my mind busy and occupied. That’s why you do what you do, isn’t it, Pepper? That’s why you’re always investigating. Somewhere back before you were so old, I’ll bet your heart got broken and now you have to keep your brain from thinking about it too much.”

Now that she mentioned it…

This was a little too much sharing, and rather than get caught in that trap, I U-turned. “You know,” I said, “if you’re looking for something that will take your mind off Gonzalo…”

Ariel’s dark eyes sparked with what was nearly enthusiasm.

“There’s this Patrick Monroe character, and he’s supposed to be some kind of—”

“Some kind of god of poetry!” Ariel swooned and fell back into my chair. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Patrick Monroe. He used to teach at my school, but that’s not why we study him in English. He’s famous. He’s more than famous. He writes the most fabulous, evocative, angst-ridden poetry. I mean, not all his stuff, of course. Some of it is just what Gonzalo thinks—” She caught herself and cleared her throat. “Some of it is what
I
think is just hackneyed drivel. But there’s this one poem of his, ‘Girl at Dawn’…that poem is perfection. Come on, Pepper, you must have read it. I mean, they must have taught it in English class, even back in the old days when you were in school.”

It was the
old days
that stung. I rose above the insult and got down to some serious thinking. Now that she mentioned it, the title of the poem did sound familiar.

While I was thinking, Ariel began reciting:

Girl,

Crimson and golden.

Nymph

Chick

Babe.

Awake to the dawn,

Crimson and golden.

Alive to the pulse

The vibration

The beat.

She sighed softly. “It goes on from there, every line more brilliant than the last. Every emotion…” Another sigh, just for emphasis. “Every emotion is right out there for anybody reading the poem to feel and suffer. You don’t need some English teacher to explain, not a word of it. That’s how you know if a poem is good. You don’t need some PhD or Cliffs-Notes to tell you what it’s about. You can feel every single word down in your bones. That’s where I feel ‘Girl at Dawn.’ I feel the ache of her adolescence, her yearning, her desire to fly free.” She threw her arms out. “You must know the rest of the poem, Pepper. You must know how awesome it is. Everybody who’s ever been in freshman English does.”

Maybe everybody who’d ever paid attention in freshman English.

Since we were bonding, I figured this was not a good moment to point this out. Instead, I got back to the topic that had sidetracked us in the first place. “I could use some help,” I told Ariel, “finding stuff out about Patrick Monroe.”

“He’s coming to town, you know.”

This was news to me. I perked up.

Ariel nodded. “He’s doing a poetry reading at Case Western Reserve. I have tickets. Two.”

“Because you’re taking Gonzalo.”

“Who?” Ariel jumped out of my chair. “You can come with me if you want. Monroe is bound to read ‘Girl at Dawn.’ He closes all his readings with it, and I hear the audience goes nuts. You know, screaming and crying and all like that. So what do you need to know about Patrick Monroe?”

Ah, that was the question! “Everything, I guess,” I told her. “See, your mom’s friend, Lucy, took a summer school class with him.”

“And got an F.” So much for thinking I’d actually gotten Ariel on the right track. At the mention of her mother, she was right back to sounding like the Ariel of old. Attitude and sass. Not bad attributes when they’re used judiciously (I should know). But not pretty in the hands of a teenaged girl. The upside? At least when she curled her lip, I didn’t have to watch that silver stud jump. “So what you’re not telling me is that this whole research thing, it was my mother’s idea?”

I shook my head. “My idea. Because you’re good at it. And I need help.”

Her shoulders shot back and she stood a little taller. “ Really? And it doesn’t have anything to do with teaching me a lesson about running away and how Lucy’s been missing like for a million years and nobody in the whole world still cares except my mother?”

“Not going to deny it.” There didn’t seem much point. “But first of all, your mom didn’t know I was going to ask you to research Patrick Monroe for me. I didn’t, either, until right now. Secondly…well, the research part would really help me out.”

Ariel’s eyes lit. “Because we’re going to try to find Lucy?”

I was careful when choosing my words. I couldn’t afford to string along a second Silverman woman. “We’re going to try to find out what happened to her.”

“So we’re detectives?”

“Sort of.”

She hustled to the door. “My mom’s in a meeting with Jim. I’ll go use her computer and see what I can dig up about Patrick Monroe and everyone else who worked at the school at the time. That’s what you’re thinking, right? That Monroe might know something. He is brilliant, after all. I’ll bet he saw plenty that the cops never noticed. You know, something that would point to the real perp.”

Apparently in between being a runaway and a pain in the neck, Ariel watched TV. “We don’t know that. Not for sure.”

“But we think it’s possible.”

“Anything’s possible.”

“So you’ll want information on any priors anybody might have. And Monroe’s opinion of each of them. I’ll bet there’s stuff in his collected journals. They’ve been published, you know. I’ve got them at home, I just never actually thought to look for anything about Lucy in them.” Her mouth dropped open. “You don’t think Monroe knows who really did it, do you? That all these years, he’s been protecting someone? Maybe someone he loves.” She clutched her hands to her heart. “Leave it to Patrick Monroe to live the tortured life of an artist with a terrible secret.”

She was way off base, but I had to give the kid points for imagination. I was used to that other Silverman woman and pulling the wool over her eyes. It looked like things wouldn’t be so easy with her youngest daughter.

“Like I said, we’re going to find out.” That was all the incentive Ariel needed. The last I saw of her, she was heading to her mother’s office, humming under her breath.

M
ostly, Friday afternoons at the cemetery are pretty quiet.

This is good news because on Friday afternoons, I’m busy planning my weekend. That particular weekend, I was supposed to get together on Saturday night with some old friends: Absalom, Reggie, and Delmar, guys I’d worked with on a cemetery restoration project the summer before. Sure, they all had rap sheets. Not to mention trash-talking attitude galore.

It didn’t mean we wouldn’t have had a good time. As long as nobody decided to do anything that would violate their probation.

Unfortunately for me and my plans to spend a casual afternoon crafting an even more casual and nonfelonious weekend, cemetery work got in the way.

Remember what I said about the days getting out of hand? Perfect example. That afternoon I decided that almost three forty-five was just about as good as five o’clock in my book and I already had my purse in my hand and my car keys out. If anybody asked on Monday where I’d been, and if that anybody happened to be Ella (who was the only anybody who would notice, anyway), I would say I was out among the headstones, walking through a new tour. Too bad I wasn’t quicker. Just as I was about to walk out of my office, Jennine, our receptionist, showed up to tell me Jim wanted to see the entire administration staff in the conference room.

Apparently he knew Friday afternoons were slow around there, too, because he took the opportunity to spend the next hour talking about watching our bottom line and then, believe it or not, he actually had us go through piles and piles of old memos and pull out staples so we could take the paper back to our offices and reuse in it our printers.

Really, I’m not kidding.

By the time it was over, my right hand ached, and my pristine manicure needed a touch-up. No wonder I was grumbling when I got back to my office.

I grumbled even more when Ariel showed up just as the clock was finally about to hit five. I had my purse out (again) and dreams of a staple-free weekend swimming through my head.

She, apparently, was thinking otherwise. She had a pile of papers in her arm. “Downloads from the computer,” she said, waving them at me. “Stuff about Patrick Monroe.”

“I hope you reused old paper.”

She hadn’t been in the meeting; she didn’t get it. “I’m going to spend the weekend reading through it all,” she said. “I’ve got highlighters at home. At the beginning of every school year, Mom always buys highlighters. She thinks they’re going to help our brains expand, or something. I’ll highlight all the interesting stuff I find. That way, you can review it easier on Monday. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can dig up, then I’m thinking I could do a spreadsheet…you know, dates and places and a listing of Patrick Monroe’s poems and what he wrote when. That way we can match it all up and see if he ever mentions Lucy. We can put it all together, too, and see what kind of pattern it forms. Like on the TV detective shows, you know?”