In the Dead of Summer (26 page)

And that was it, except for another paper folded in thirds. I swallowed hard. It wasn’t yellow or stapled, but it still produced an extra pulse beat or two. I forced myself to open it.

It was laughably unthreatening. A quote from Shakespeare, printed in Gothic letters. Somebody had a splendid graphics program.

“O Woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!

Most lamentable day! most woeful day,

That ever, ever, I did yet behold!

O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!

Never was seen so black a day as this:

O woeful day, O woeful day!”

I passed this page, too, to Mackenzie.

“This about what happened to Woody?” he asked.

“What else could it be?”

“Should be ‘O woeful evening.’ Or woeful night.”

“Guess Will Shakespeare didn’t plan ahead for all possible woe schedulings.” I shook my head and got my brains closer in place. “But it was in my cubby this morning.”

“How come you didn’t mention it?”

“I didn’t read it till now.” I felt chilled. “Oh, God, was this a warning of what was going to happen?” A competent teacher—an Aldis sort of woman—would have read all her notices immediately, no matter what threat was tossed in with them.

Mackenzie shrugged. “If it was meant as a warning, then it was a singularly stupid one, like somebody wagging a finger and saying ‘something bad’ll happen at some point.’ Like the daily horoscope. ‘Don’ do anything stupid today.’ Big deal. It’s too vague to mean anythin’.”

I excused myself for a quick run up to the third floor, site of my home office, attic storage, guest room, and library. All of which were contained in one small sloped-ceilinged room. The air conditioner wasn’t on up here, and the cubicle throbbed with heat. I grabbed the paperback edition of
Romeo and Juliet
from the corner of my desk and descended to the living room’s relative comfort.

“Are there opposing groups at your school? Members of rival gangs?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve noticed that the black and white kids don’t hang out together this summer, but that doesn’t mean all that much.” Maybe they just plain didn’t like each other.

“How about Woody?” Mackenzie asked. “Does he have black friends?”

I shrugged. “I never saw him with X or Lawrence or Warwick, all of whom are in his class. But I never noticed any particular tension between them, either. And all of that means less than nothing. There are obviously lots of things I never saw or suspected.”

“I can’t figure who would have done that to the kid. In the school, too, like a taunt, but for what purpose?” Mackenzie said.

I thumbed through the play looking for the event that had triggered those “woe is me’s.” A tragedy, it was chockablock full of woe producers. Mercutio’s death? Tybalt’s death? Romeo’s banishment? Ah… Juliet’s supposed death.

The cat, having eaten excessively, now resolutely ignored me and switched to his cop-groupie self, sidling up to and draping himself over Mackenzie’s neck like a feline boa. I am not such a petty soul that I could be jealous of where a cat placed his no-good wandering sluttish affections, even though
I
am the one who feeds him and performs his unaesthetic custodial services. The only thing I can figure is that the Macavitys and the Mackenzies go way back, maybe even share a tartan in the Old Country.

Besides, I had found the quote. “The nurse,” I said. “She’s the one with all the woes are me.”

“So what? What’s it mean? That we should wring our hands and gnash our teeth?”

“The nurse is carrying on because she found Juliet dead.”

Mackenzie raised a single eyebrow. “That’s less than astoundin’. Most folk would express similar sentiments when findin’ a dead girl, particly one in her charge.”

“That word is supposed to have five syllables. There’s no such word as
partic-ly
.”

“All the same, what is
particularly
remarkable about that quote?”

“I don’t know. I’m not the one who printed this out. Only there’s all this lamentation—and Juliet isn’t really dead at this point.” The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that had to be the message. “Juliet isn’t dead. The young girl isn’t dead. The charge isn’t dead, she just seems that way.” I stood up and paced my small first floor, sure with each step that a solid idea was only one more step away, which meant I circled my downstairs a dozen times before I said, “It’s about April.”

“It’s about Juliet. How are you making the leap?”

“Of all the quotes in the play, it’s one of the least memorable, so why put it in my mailbox? It has to be a message, and in context, it must be saying that our girl isn’t in the trouble she appears to be.”

“Be careful.
It
says, ‘Oh, woe is me,’ and
you’re
sayin’ all the rest.”

“No, no, I’m sure. Somebody who’s afraid to speak up directly is trying to tell me something.”

“Woody?”

“I don’t think so. Not this message. He’s sure she’s dead and he’s somehow to blame for it.”

“Then what are you sayin’? That April’s alive and she nailed Woody up?”

I sat back down. The cat blinked at me warily from around Mackenzie’s neck. “April didn’t hurt Woody. Of course not. But she talked an awful lot about whether Juliet had done the right thing by deceiving her parents. She seemed intensely, personally, involved in Juliet’s story because it obviously paralleled her life. Woody told me his father would kill him for consorting with a Vietnamese, and that her parents—her brother, actually, and Vanny, like Tybalt in the play, her kin in this sense, were just as rabid about her being with a white boy. In the play, Tybalt is so enraged by Romeo’s being with Juliet that he fights with Romeo’s friend and kills him, and then Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, in return and sets off the whole chain of events.”

He put a hand up, like a traffic cop at an intersection. “Are you saying that Romeo Woody shot Tybalt Vanny? You’re gettin’ carried away with the analogy. Who are you in all this? The nurse?”

“I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation with each plot turn, but…” I was still working through the possible meaning of the note, but no matter how I twisted or detoured, I kept falling into potholes.

“But what?” Mackenzie finally said.

“What if April Truong wasn’t kidnapped, just the way Juliet wasn’t really poisoned? What if the bad thing that supposedly happened to her just plain didn’t? What if she planned it as a deliberate attempt to get herself away, and if she’s Juliet, then it had to do with Romeo—Woody—and saving the two of them.”

“Whoa! We’ve leaped from Shakespeare to Woody. Why ascribe so much to that quote? For that matter, why do people keep sendin’ you cryptic poems?”

“What do you mean?”

“That test? The thing with April’s name at the end?”

I stopped all pacing and stared. “You’re right. It
ended
with her name.”

“You’re maybe missin’ the point of what I’m sayin’.”

“He said to look at the part that wasn’t about April.” I excused myself again. Up to the desk where my copy of Miles’s paper still awaited a decision as to grade. I read it again, and realized I’d been right. Slow, but right. I ran downstairs and slapped it down in front of Mackenzie. The cat deigned to leave his love’s shoulder in order to sit on the poem, but we gentled him off.

“Okay,” Mackenzie said. “What?”

“Look at the initials at the beginning. All the initials.”

Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with

A group? An idea? A tradition? A

Person? Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang. They’re dead.

Assigning blame is useless, something he wouldn’t

dare.

Would he?

Ask him.

Perhaps he is

Afraid.

Probably is, because

Reality

Is too much like fiction and

Life sucks.

“See that?” I said.

“I see it.” W.A.P.A. Running down the side of the poem. Running, a second time, right into April. The same letters that had been carved in Woody’s side, sprayed elsewhere. “Things are connected,” I said in a low voice. “I was right.” That didn’t make me feel any better. I took a deep, deep breath.

Romeo and April Truong. All her questions about whether Juliet had done the wrong thing. I remembered asking her what other options she thought Juliet had. I’d wanted her to realize that acting without reflection—killing herself as Juliet had, as Romeo had, was juvenile. April’s response instead had been that Juliet could have left sooner.

But Juliet had never left at all. April did, and saw it as a parallel. “She left to save them, to save Woody.” My tongue felt thick, words hard to say.

“Then it sure was one sorry plan.” Mackenzie looked at me. I could tell we were both remembering that boy, hanging from the backboard, arms up, hands nailed in a parody of an all-too-familiar pose that usually was accompanied by the idea of salvation. “But maybe,” he said slowly, “the people who wanted to hurt that boy chose that particular method to make it clear that nobody was saved. Not at all.”

WOODY WAS THE ONLY SUBJECT ON THE CURRICULUM
the next morning. It isn’t often—thank God—that students are found crucified in a school gym. The late news and the early morning news had headlined the story and repeated it every five minutes. All three networks had called my house last night, but I’d refused to comment, let alone be photographed. This morning, CNN had phoned. Mackenzie fielded the calls.

Even though I felt as if I’d emotionally and intellectually exhausted the topic, it was obvious that I couldn’t avoid it.

Five approached the school at the same time I did. I’d walked, because my car was still at the shop, the weather was fine, and I hoped exercise would keep me alert, maybe even reinvigorate me after a night of no real sleep.

I wasn’t invigorated, but Five looked even worse. Ashen. “Mandy!” he said. “My God! I watch the news while I shave, and when I heard—” He shook his head, speechless. “I nearly cut my throat!” He had a Band-Aid on his jawline, but I permitted the hyperbole. That was nearly his throat. “Speaking of cuts—what’s that on your face?”

“I’m auditioning for Bride of Frankenstein.” I could not bring myself to describe the spike in Woody’s hand cutting my cheek.

“They said you found him. Is that true?”

Why had they used my name on the air? Wouldn’t a generic “found by a member of the faculty” have sufficed?

“What—Why were you there? When I left you, I thought you and Crispin were going home. What made you go into the school? Go looking for Woody?”

My mental screen flashed Mackenzie’s grin, sexy Mrs. Taubman, and our plans for the evening, and I felt my neck, then my chin, then my entire face blush. “I was, I—I didn’t mean to—I wasn’t looking for—I—” I forced myself to shut up until I was breathing normally. “I’d forgotten something, and since I was there, I thought I’d get it from my room.”

“What?”

The police hadn’t ever inquired what I needed to retrieve, but Five was a fellow teacher, and less likely to be satisfied with vagueness, and much more aware of the normal parameters of teacherly devotion. What was worth going back to school for at night? “My roll book,” I said, “and I was in a real sweat—didn’t want a student to get ahold of it and change grades or anything.”

He nodded.

Stupid!
The police had to call Havermeyer to get Woody’s number—but if my roll book had really been in my classroom, I could have provided it. I need a lot more practice at lying.

But why would Five question how or where the police got their information? I relaxed. The trouble with lying is that you—I—become paranoid and excessively suspicious, jumpy, and worried about loopholes in my story. Five had asked a casual teacherly question. A make-conversation question.

“They said—the TV—that he’s going to live and probably will have full use of his hands,” Five said. “But they aren’t sure about damage to the shoulders and hips.” He shook his head again. “Did he say who did it? The news didn’t say a word about that, maybe for legal reasons.”

“He couldn’t speak. He was in shock.”

Five’s lips were clenched. There was lots to say—and no point saying it.

“They carved letters in his side,” I said. “They stand for some racist group. Did the news say that?”

He shook his head, his mouth slightly open. His silent shock reminded me of Woody’s last night. I thought about Mackenzie’s unfounded suspicions of him and wished he could see him now.

“Something rotten’s going on,” I said. “And I hate to say this, but I think it’s based here. In this school.”

“Why here? Just because that’s where Woody—”

“I personally think even April’s disappearance is connected.”

He looked at me with great concern, then shook his head. “Her parents didn’t seem to.”

I shrugged.

“I can only hope you’re wrong,” he said softly. He moved in the direction of the office, slowly, so I could accompany him. “You still didn’t say why you think this thing, whatever it is, is based here.”

“Have you gotten peculiar notes?’’ I asked “Poems? Threats? Things that feel in code?”

“No,” he said. “But obviously, you or somebody must have or you wouldn’t ask. What kind? What did they say?”

I shrugged. “Nothing specific. Vague threats. A quote from
Romeo and Juliet
.
The nurse saying ‘woe is me.’”