The Twisted Thread (15 page)

“As I said, Miss Maillot,” Matt said, “we have a favor to ask you.” He showed her the notebook, turned carefully to the pages with which he wanted help. But she leafed through it from the beginning, finding, as Matt had hoped she would not, Claire's rude drawing. To his surprise, she took a deep draw on her cigarette and laughed, exhaling smoke in a raucous, twisting cloud. “Claire,” she said. “I taught her for three years. She was a little
méchante,
that one.” She looked up at them. “A little mean. But she spoke the most beautiful French. She spoke like a native.” Matt understood for a moment how Marie-France had survived here for so long. She just didn't take any of it particularly seriously, except for her own subject.

“You were Spanish,” she said to Matt, still remembering—and disapproving—after all these years, as if the pursuit of any tongue but her own was an affront, an indication of reduced intellect. Matt could imagine how she'd taken the introduction of Mandarin to the curriculum.

He said yes. Her reputation had been too formidable for someone like him, and again she laughed and it was like listening to a dragon. “She wouldn't pursue the independent study,” Marie-France said. “I know why now. Stupid girl.” Blunt words tinged with tense regret. She continued turning the pages. “I would have helped her. It has happened before.” She turned another page and said, “What no one understood about this girl is that she was angry. She had every advantage in life, but no one took her seriously. I tried, but she had given up on adults. This is what you want, no?” she said and showed them the dated passages. Matt said yes and watched the woman read. She ground out her cigarette and did not immediately light another one, a rarity, he guessed.

“It's a journal, or part of one,” Marie-France said, still looking at the pages. “Notes she wrote. I will translate them for you. There are only three or four pages and then she stopped.” She glanced up and said, “It will take a bit of time. I will send them on e-mail. Can you give me your address?”

Matt nearly said, “You have e-mail?” thinking that someone who still hoped French would return as the lingua franca would have shunned such an innovation. But he jotted his address on a card and passed it over to her. “Is there anything you can tell us now?”

For this, Marie-France did stop and light a cigarette, and when she had it tucked into her fingers, she said, “She doesn't say who the father is. That's what you're looking for, of course. It's about this girl who was helping her. Rosalie Quiñones. A new girl here this year. She didn't last.” At this, Marie-France blew out a perfect cone of smoke and looked at her flourishing beds of herbs.

“What happened to her, Miss Maillot?” Vernon asked, and for the first time, Marie-France looked directly at him.

“I am not sure. But if Claire was telling the truth, it had to do with those ridiculous girls and their group. Robespierre,” she spat. “An abomination. Grace will know.” She tapped ash into a clamshell. “No, don't bother talking to Grace,” she said, rising. “She will tell you nothing. Talk to Sarah. She will be honest. And I will get the notes to you within an hour. You can download them on your phone, no?” she asked, and her smile was tilted. What was interesting was how delightful it was to hear her say
download
in that undiluted accent and how effortless it was for her to flirt well into her sixth decade.

“Jesus,” said Vernon as they walked down the stairs. “She could teach a class on how to stay true to your native culture in the midst of infidels. Now I never have to go to Paris.”

CHAPTER 13

M
adeline made it to class about thirty seconds before her
students arrived, relieved as she left her apartment to find no more emblems of the Reign of Terror on her doorstep. She was off to teach the sophomores, her favorite kids, who for some reason had thrown themselves into American poetry with a fervor most teenagers reserved for online chatting and Cheetos. Porter's instincts had been right; it was better to start up the routine again. He had ridden through a wave of protest from parents and faculty, arguing for the cancellation of the remainder of the school year. He'd stated that sending students off without giving them even a short time to come to terms with their shock and grief would backfire. The emotional consequences were too extreme, he said, not to mention the financial ones. Those, he was quick to point out, would not redound to the school; the time to return deposits was long past. Despite the hit to their wallets, quite a few parents were withdrawing their children for the end of the year and the next. Even by last night, the campus had indeed seemed emptier—the lines in the dining hall were thinner, and there were leftover strawberries for once. The kids who had stayed had a grim set to their faces, evidence of a kind of courage of which Madeline wouldn't have thought them capable. They were going to tough out a difficult situation. She'd thought such cosseted children uniformly allergic to that degree of discomfort.

Madeline looked at the kids flopping into place around the oval table. They seemed relieved to have something to do other than mope about the dorm. Emily, Carter, Max. Stuart, Eddie, Cordelia. From all around the country, all around the world. In this high-ceilinged room ringed with wispy spider plants and curling posters from Stratford-upon-Avon—as the intern, Madeline didn't merit her own classroom and she shared her digs with Forrest, the English chair—she had coaxed them into reading a wide variety of work and writing experimental sonnets. But today, she realized with rising panic, she had almost nothing prepared for them. Merely getting here had taken all her effort. “Why are we talking about poetry when this tragic thing has happened?” she asked them. Better to admit to the horror than to hide it, she'd assumed. But they looked at her, blank and more than a bit confused. And then she launched into the ways that poetry could teach you to structure thought and language and expounded on its ability to provide succinct, precise ways to capture feelings. Her hand motions were getting bigger and bigger, which was always a bad sign; it was not an effective teaching tool to imitate someone waving semaphores from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Then she found herself pressed up against the whiteboard, a marker clutched in her fist, and absolutely nothing to write there, so she rubbed her nose and said, with open desperation, “Well, that's what I was thinking about. How about you?” And Emily, a delicate redhead, raised her hand and offered tentatively, “Poetry is beautiful. And focusing on something beautiful when you're really sad or upset puts the hard thing into perspective.” So they spent the rest of the period reading and discussing the poems they loved most in their Norton anthology. “That was nice, Miss Christopher,” Emily said on her way out, as if Madeline and not she had been responsible for salvaging the class.

During her next class, Madeline let the juniors write in their journals for twenty minutes and then discussed a handout on a final, short analytical paper on dramatic structures. They looked gray but grateful for the full complement of work she'd dumped on them. At least they had something to complain about collectively.

At lunch, she avoided the stares of Lee and Olu, and noticed that they sat with a few other imposing girls at a table near the front of the room. They must be what's left of the Reign, Madeline thought, and though she was grateful that Portia and Suzy had decided to depart early, there were still enough of them remaining to cause more than a little trepidation. She was very happy that Sarah Talmadge sat down next to her.

The assistant head was compact and dark-haired, with an alert, sensitive face. Porter had hired her three years ago, and she, like her boss, was someone faculty and parents liked and respected. She worked hard, made difficult decisions fairly, and was utterly unpretentious. She had spent years at Armitage as a math teacher, gone to another school for almost a decade as a dean, then let Porter lure her back. What Madeline most admired in her, however, was that she managed to take her work seriously without losing a lightness of touch, a sense of humor that made her enjoyable to know. The best kind of grown-up, Fred said, and Madeline agreed. “I won't pretend this is a social call,” she said now. She was drained, Madeline saw, and the skin on her face looked fragile. “I've got a couple of things to ask. First, can you set up an appointment to see me early next week? I want to talk to you more concretely about next year. I know it seems jarring, but we've got to keep focused on what's ahead, too. And I have a big favor to ask.” She hadn't touched a single one of the carrots on her plate, and Madeline doubted she would. The fish she had served herself was congealing in sauce. But Sarah pressed on. Claire's parents were badgering the school for a chance to look at her room. Someone from the dorm needed to be there, just at the beginning. Would she mind?

Madeline gulped and said, “Really? Why me?” Sarah looked at her and said, “Grace is entirely preoccupied with the police right now. As for Harvey and Marie-France, well, they might not offer the most reassuring presence.” She explained she would also come by, as soon as her 3:30 meeting was done. The parents wanted to be there at 4:00. “Okay,” said Madeline, wishing that Sarah looked a little less tired; she badly wanted to talk about this Robespierre business with her. Sarah's thanks were genuine, and she lifted her tray and hurried off to her next task.

Madeline got up to take her own tray off to the conveyor belt and knew that Lee and Olu were watching her. They were certainly not through with her yet, but what precisely they had planned and why they were bothering was unclear. In spite of her desire to appear nonchalant, to actually saunter, Madeline scurried past them.

She limped her way through track practice and found herself back at the dorm, hot and smelly, with only five minutes before Claire's parents were supposed to arrive. She didn't want to greet them with wet hair or miss them altogether and chose instead to daub herself with a soapy washcloth. She dragged a comb through her hair and made sure there weren't visible spots on her skirt. She plunked herself down on Kate's old futon and waited, thinking that was the word she associated most with her parents. Waiting for her mother to pick her up from school. Waiting for her father to come by on one of his infrequent custody visits. Waiting for someone to call and tell her which parent she was going to spend Christmas with.

At least, Madeline thought as she chewed her nails, they didn't pretend that they'd done the most stellar of jobs in raising their children. “Darling, people just had babies back then. There wasn't all this
choice
the way there is now,” Isabelle had said. As if nothing she had done had led to being pregnant the two times it had taken to produce Kate and Madeline. As if she'd woken one morning to find herself large-bellied and about, as she often put it, to “descend into motherhood,” as if parenting were no more than a dank basement in which she had to fold endless loads of laundry. Madeline's father hadn't exactly embraced his familial duties, either. Despite a solid career as a trusts and estates attorney, he had recently blown his fourth marriage, as heartbroken and reckless as Britney every time it didn't work. Fortunately for him, the lawyerly side had kicked in early enough in these relationships that he'd managed to protect his assets before getting scalped by Deborah, Helene, or Jemima. The Hurricanes, Madeline and Kate called them, for the emotional if not financial wreckage that they caused. Unlike Madeline's mother, her father seemed to know how babies were made and had resolutely avoided having any more since his girls had been born. The Fool for Love, Kate and Madeline called him, often shortened merely to Fool, though most people called him David. Still rakishly handsome, he was nursing the end of his latest union in Aruba. Isabelle was apparently happily settled with her third husband, a bland, rich man named Harry who carved decoys as an avocation. They lived on the coast of Massachusetts and cooked ornate meals to impress others with their kitchen equipment. Their stove was so powerful Madeline had singed her eyelashes the last time she'd tried to use it. Madeline sighed. What was there to prevent her from making exactly the same mistakes? What if marital haplessness was in her genes? How much choice was involved anyway? Owen was indeed breaking up via text, the end of a relationship captured in digital attrition, and she couldn't even keep her eyelashes on.

On her saggy sofa, checking her watch—Claire's family was now fifteen minutes late—Madeline was also observing the arrival of a deep funk that always came when thinking about her parents. To distract herself, she thought instead about Matt. When she had told Grace about her conversation with him at Ali's and mentioned how nice he'd been, Grace had sniffed, “Well, it's true he graduated from Armitage. But in slightly dubious circumstances. It's a wonder he came back here at all. I'm surprised they've let him be involved in this situation,” but said nothing further. Madeline had been startled by the idea of dubious circumstances surrounding Matt, though she remembered with some shame her surprise at finding out he'd been part of this place. Peering through the blinds, she guessed that the detective's uneasy relationship with Armitage couldn't stem from something as bald as academic incompetence. He appeared smart enough to have done well here; he looked like a good athlete, too, and he was handsome, not the way all those blond, patrician boys were, but Mediterraneanly. Dark, with brown eyes.

She checked her watch again. Despite their insistence on needing to see Claire's room, the parents were now almost half an hour late and Madeline had gnawed her nails down to bloody cuticles. She had class prep to attend to and needed to organize her thoughts about what she hoped to accomplish during the last few days of school. It was becoming increasingly apparent to her that her groovy education had fostered in her a reactionary desire to give a lot of tests and grade numerically.

Finally, she saw a Mercedes pull up in front of the dorm. Her father could have recited the make and model, but all Madeline knew was that the car barely made a sound and moved almost as lithely as an animal. Claire's mother, Mrs. Duval, got out and tugged her pashmina shawl around her shoulders. It was real pashmina, most definitely unrelated to the one Madeline had bought for five dollars from a nice Nigerian man on Newbury Street one weekend. Even from a distance, Madeline could tell Mrs. Duval's would never pill. The father shut the door on the driver's side and stood by his former wife for a moment. Madeline caught her breath. They still made a gorgeous pair. The only people Madeline had ever seen to whom the adjective
well heeled
could be applied with total aptness. There was no way to know from this distance what their expressions were; they both wore sunglasses that wrapped around their faces. They weren't here to do any actual packing, either. Some assistant would be allotted that particular task. They were here only to witness where their daughter had died.

Madeline hadn't realized until that moment precisely how frightened she was of dealing with these people. But she was discovering an unexpected ability to live alongside unpleasant emotions and to continue to do what was expected of her. Having been gravely disappointed along the way by people and institutions, she had developed rather strict personal standards about comportment under pressure. Still, she couldn't help but imagine Claire's mother rolling her perfect black stockings up her perfect lean shins. How could she have bothered?

“Mrs. Duval?” Madeline said as she walked out to meet Claire's mother, her hand extended like a little banner. “My name is Madeline Christopher. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”

Claire's mother said, “Thank you.” She looked at her former husband, who was staring fixedly at an oak tree.

“Flora,” he said in a tone that Madeline recognized. A touch weary, a touch exasperated, yet lined with some small confidence in its ability to exert moral suasion. A note that contained the tiny dose of proprietariness that might be tolerated in an ex-husband. The note that David had used with Isabelle on the rare occasions when he and his former wife needed to provide what he called, with an astounding lack of irony, a “united front” for the children.

Flora Duval, it was abundantly clear to Madeline, was long past being able to stand even the slightest hint at old allegiances. What she needed was a clear destination and an immediate task, and although Madeline was only twenty-five, she was the only one there to provide that. She put her hand on the older woman's and was surprised at the strength of Mrs. Duval's returned grip. “Are you ready to go to Claire's room?” she asked, and Mrs. Duval nodded.

The dorm was empty now, except for faculty. Madeline had been surprised at how she had relied on the girls to provide her with a sense of safety, a padding of voices and bodies that she missed only once they were gone.

The mother's heels and the father's wingtips jarred noisily on steel risers. They climbed in silence, and then, when they reached the entrance to Claire's room, the mother stood stock-still. She tore open the crime scene tape, took off her glasses, and walked slowly through the room, her fingers trailing the surfaces of the desk and bedside table. Traces of the powder the police had used to dust for fingerprints had left grayish smudges on the windowsills, Madeline noticed. She had thought that it was stuff that existed only on television shows or in mystery novels, but apparently not. The furniture had been rearranged: the bed pulled from the wall, the armchair positioned at a new angle to the window. Matt Corelli had apparently confiscated the contents of the desk and the crowded bulletin board, with Claire's Yale letter and its photos and Post-its.