The Bluest Blood (19 page)

“They said I needed a responsible adult. Nothing else.”

“I never heard of that before. You’re amazingly calm, you realize that? Good for you, I’m impressed.” I was babbling noise, in lieu of real ideas, but I couldn’t slow myself down. “Okay, the police have you and will release you if—but should I be the one? What about—”

“I can’t ask my mother. I mean literally. I tried. Twice. She’s not answering the phone, and she turned off the machine, so they didn’t count that as a call and I got to phone you. Shouldn’t I have?”

“Oh, no, sure, no problem.” An optimistic alien presence was speaking through my mouth, because I had more sense than to reassure a student that he could call me at four A.M. from jail. “Sure,” the alien said again. “It’s okay. Just tell me once again—you’re where?”

“In
jail.
Gee, I’m sorry—were you sleeping?”

Duh. “
What
jail?”

“Radnor.”

Spiers had been murdered in Radnor. You probably had to be locked up where the crime happened, so the police had dragged Jake out there.

Then why had he needed to call his mother? Why hadn’t she gone with him to the station?

“That’s where the party was,” Jake said.

“Excuse me?” What were we talking about?

“Griffin’s party. We thought you knew, heard us at school Thursday. I was trying to stop him, thought he was in enough trouble already. He should have listened.”

“I’m sorry, I must have missed…what does a party have to do with jail?”

“The police arrested everybody. Like three hundred kids. But Griffin and me, we weren’t even there.”

“Of course not. I’m surprised anyone would think you’d leave your mother to go to a party so soon after your—her husband was—”

“But I did, kind of. Not for the party, for the leaving.”

“You went to a party so you could leave it?”

“Leave everything. Griffin and me.”

A suicide pact? My breath caught—until I realized it didn’t fit what had come before, so I moved from fear back to confusion. There was no comfort in the transition. “Jake, you should have called me. There’s no reason to think of such a drastic—”

“Well, we didn’t, but that was the plan,” Jake said. “Leave in the dead of night. Nobody was supposed to see us or know for a long while, and by then, we’d be long gone and far away.”

Running away. I exhaled.

“It was pitch dark, no moon,” Jake said. “We took back roads and didn’t even turn on the headlights. The car was black, too, like we could just disappear into the night. It should have worked, but it didn’t. Not exactly.”

Shaking my head wasn’t clearing it of confusion, just giving me whiplash, so I stopped.

“We didn’t think it through. Plus, the Roederers came home last night instead of today, and when they saw all the cars, they called the police.”

I will sort this out, I told myself. Calmly. In order. Point one: Jake’s in jail. Point two: this doesn’t have to do with Harvey Spiers’ murder. Point three: Griffin gave a big party. Point four: Griffin and Jake were not at the party. Point five: the Roederers surprised the party-in-progress. Point six: the police arrested all the partygoers, of which Jake was not one. Point seven: Jake’s in jail.

Maybe if I tried it again?

Go to jail, go directly to jail. A roundelay that wound up behind bars no matter where we began singing it. And since we were back to the start, anyway, how about my initial question. Why me?

I had to
claim
him, he’d said. Like a coat I’d checked. Or was it more like staking a claim—to Jake? Would that imply future responsibility for him? I’d told him he could count on me. I had fantasized being the semi-mythical teacher of Hollywood fame, the one who’d make All The Difference. I hadn’t meant it to involve the wee hours or long drives into suburbia. I wanted to be a sage advisor full of pithy observations about life—not Jimmy Cagney’s mother coming to bail the gangster out.

“Miss Pepper? They say I can’t tie up the phone anymore.”

I stood up, carrying the receiver as I tried to one-handedly pull on jeans and a sweatshirt. Whether or not I understood what had gone on, time was wasting and Radnor Township was not nearby.

And the longer Jake stayed there, the higher the risk that some Radnor policeperson would correlate him with a Latin teacher’s incriminating phone call.

“Listen, Jake. In case…if the police ask you about anything besides the party, whatever you do, don’t say anything. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

In this black-and-white movie, I’d been cast not as a war-torn lover at a train station, but as one of those poor but saintly mothers whose only fashion accessory was an apron. Middle of the night, I was going to see my boy in the slammer, brave smile hiding my broken heart.

Top of the world, Ma.

Thirteen

All the way to Radnor I argued with myself. I shouldn’t be going. It wasn’t my role. I was his teacher, not his keeper. And what was I supposed to do at a police station? I was out of my league, and so nervous and irritable, I felt like an ad for analgesics. The
before
part, and nobody held out a remedy.

My mood wasn’t helped by a low fog, a miasma rising from the vestigial snow and still frozen earth. Cold steam like the breath of the underworld obscured vision and made the drive look like a hokey, low-budget horror movie.

And why not? Life of late had gone peculiar—histrionic and overdone. Bad actors, overblown rhetoric, changes and turnarounds, paranoid fears, betrayals, shocking surprises, and ultimately, death.

Curtain.

Where did this call of Jake’s fit in? Was it the start of a new act? The finale? And was this a tragedy or a comedy?

The instant I entered the police station, I felt cowed. I had crossed the bridge from good citizenship to the netherworld of baddies. I wasn’t alone, though. Scores of parental faces reflected my own shame. The difference was, I told myself, their discomfort was deserved. Their spawn had gone wrong. I, on the other hand, was picking up an unrelated rental. I fought the desire to announce this significant difference to three testy patrolmen attempting to control the clearing-out process.

“Excuse me,” I said, squeezing through a sea of tightly screwed faces. “I need to talk to somebody.”

“Who doesn’t?” a man wearing a parka over pajamas asked wearily. “Broke my neck getting out of the house, then it’s wait, wait, and more wait.”

“…juveniles,” a sergeant was telling us, “…records sealed and if they don’t get in any further trouble, this will…”

“Excuse me.” I addressed a woman I recognized as the mother of a Philly Prep junior. “Have you already done whatever it is to get your child out?” She stared at me blankly, her eyes blind with that where-did-I-go-wrong mix of shame and fury.

“Is this a line?” I asked someone else. “Am I in line?” The parka man shook his head; the woman next to him barked, “Yes”; and a third parent shrugged.

So I pushed on, unsure whether I was being rude or pragmatic.

“…not pressing charges at this time, pending a complete household inventory of the damage and theft. They retain the rights to…”

In the bedlam of parents, each trying to manage the trick of being simultaneously aggressive, submissive, polite, quick, and subtle, it took forever to be heard, and then to deal with the paperwork and official chastisement that would release Jake from the clutches of the constables.

“Your son—” the cop began.

“I’m his English teacher, not his parent.”

He didn’t care. These wealthy suburbs suffered, someone clever said, from
affluenza,
and the cops had seen enough smashed and shattered families with kids catching hold of whatever adult steadied them for however long. They didn’t understand why I wasted breath establishing nongenetic ties.

The more I thought about it, the less I did, too.

*

Jake slumped low on the seat and deeply into his parka, imitating a six-foot turtle holding a backpack.

“Where was Griffin?” I asked, as we drove back through surreal ground fog.

“Like I said, we weren’t at the party long. Then we were on our way. He stayed on his way.”

“And you?”

Jake looked away from me. “I hadn’t thought things through enough. I got…nervous. I asked him to drop me at the police station. I figured I wasn’t in trouble and I could get a ride from somebody. After all, I wasn’t at the party when the police came. I didn’t do anything wrong. But Mrs. R.—she was there looking for Griffin—she didn’t believe me.” With that, he sank even lower on the seat. He was in danger of strangling on the shoulder harness. “She knows me,” he said. “Why did she think I’d lie? She was really pissed. She got me in trouble like the rest of the kids.”

“Let me get this straight—you went to the police station solo.”

He nodded. “I realized I needed a passport or papers or something to get over the border.”

“You were headed for Canada?”

He shrugged, as if that went without saying. “They could have just made everybody go home. Had everybody call a designated driver. That’s what other people do.”

“The Roederers? But the police said there was damage.”

Jake slid still farther down the seat. Soon his long bones would fold one atop the other and he’d collapse under the glove compartment.

“Was there?” I asked. “Damage?”

Jake sighed. “So the police could have taken everybody’s address, like they did, anyway. They didn’t have to do that stuff with holding cells.”

“How did three hundred kids come to that house? Griffin seems a loner.”

“He hired an organizer, a pro. This kid gets the kegs, spreads the word, you know.”

I’d thought the swollen, destructive parties that erupted whenever parents were out of town were at least spontaneous. I considered this profession of guerrilla party-planner and wondered if he followed through all the way, let himself be rounded up with the guests.

Jake wore gloves with the fingers cut off; he tapped his knees and seemed deep in thought. “It wasn’t Philly Prep kids who did the real damage,” he said. “It was the other ones. Like they were angry, right from the start. Before we left, we tried to get them out of there. They were already messing up, putting cigarettes out on rugs and floors.”

I winced. I know it’s only stuff, but it’s gorgeous stuff.

“The chandelier was the worst.”

“The one in the hallway? That enormous crystal—not that one!”

“One of those idiots tried a Schwarzenegger kind of stunt. The chandelier came right out of the ceiling and smashed. All over.”

I could almost hear crystals shattering on the marble floor, a million prismatic shards blanked out. Murdered.

“It’s not Griffin’s fault,” Jake said. “He didn’t ask to live with fancy stuff you have to tiptoe around, and he didn’t break anything.”

“I’m going to assume you’re too tired to think clearly. Whether or not Griffin favors antiques is nowhere near the point. That doesn’t answer the issue of what three hundred teenagers can do to a house. Maybe Griffin didn’t break a thing, but he made sure somebody would. And you colluded.” The cold rage behind their actions frightened me.

Jake didn’t try to refute me. “He was really upset. Boarding school’s like prison. We sat up half the night last night—no, wait, two nights ago, then night before last, talking about it. He hated the idea, and they knew he did, too, so why do it? Because of what my—what Harvey was doing? What sense did that make? That’s why he decided to do that party and leave.”

“They probably went to boarding school themselves, so it seems natural.”

Jake shook his head. “They don’t want him anymore. He was something they borrowed. Now they’re returning him. Like he’s broken or they don’t need him anymore. It’s so harsh.”

“I’m sure the Roederers mean well.” I heard how inane the words sounded the second they were out of my mouth. Childless, I nonetheless sounded like a mother on automatic pilot.

He shook his head again. “They’re stubborn, is what it is. Griffin says that when they make their minds up, that’s
it.
Whatever they say becomes the Eleventh Commandment. They got really pissed once when he asked them if they thought that maybe God had a Roederer complex.”

Something Jake had mentioned had snagged in passing on a corner of my mind, and I needed to backtrack, to find and consider it. What was it? The purchased child? The boarding school? The chandelier?

“Like they bought him to make them look like a family. But a family doesn’t send off—”

Two nights ago and the night before last. That’s what he’d said. Including the night Harvey Spiers was murdered. And Jake was not at home, as I’d assumed, miles away, but there, pretty much at the scene of the crime. “Jake,” I interrupted, “did you say you were at Griffin’s Wednesday night?”

“Why?”

How to say this without creating more grief for him? “I wondered if…well, since that was the night your—the night of the murder across the road, I wondered if you saw or heard anything.”

And also, by the way, did you—or maybe you and Griffin—kill anybody whose actions were, perhaps, destroying a lot of people?

He squinted, as if trying to magnify and read me. “The house is back from the road,” he said. “You never hear much in there.”

“Did you sleep over? Were you still there when it happened?”

“I don’t have a car.”

“That’s no answer.”

He studied his hands, the brown, raveling gloves that covered only his palms. I hoped he’d speak soon for many reasons, one of which was that I needed constant stimulation in order to stay awake. I’d have preferred caffeine, but emotional agitation would do, and Jake seemed able to provide a lot.