Wabanaki Blues (26 page)

Twenty-two

The Janitor's Closet

I toss on Shankdaddy's zombie-woman jacket and hop in my truck. I think of how awesome it would have been to wear this on our defunct Haunted Bonepile concert tour. But the dead had other plans for me. Mia pushed me to spend time with Beetle and Del so I could solve her murder.

The corpse-gray Connecticut River lined with sepia leaves leads me to my apartment. I yell for Mom. She's supposed to be back from sunny Jamaica, but I hear no reply. No matter. Even when she's here, she's not fully present. Dad's autumn tweed professor blazers, plaid scarves, and nubby fall sweaters lay colorfully scattered across the living room—an homage to the missing autumn leaves. Mom must be preparing to send his stuff to Russia. The mess in here reminds me of the way Grumps' cabin in Indian Stream looked when I first arrived. I slump, remembering that Grumps is gone.

The fridge contains a half-empty box of chardonnay, a head of browning iceberg lettuce, and a frozen Tupperware container full of orange Jamaican beef patties. I open it and their sharp turmeric smell makes my stomach growl, even though I know that actually eating meat would make me wretch. I break open a couple but discover no vegetarian ones. I rummage though the cupboards and find no bananas, honey, peanut butter, or even bread.

My stomach growls as I carry Rosalita on the short walk to my high school. I hope to grill Millicent Dibble about why she changed her attitude toward Cricket. The feel of my guitar bouncing against my back on this familiar street is comforting. A high chain-link fence wraps around the school. The sign on it says “Scheduled for Demolition 10/31.” That's Halloween, less than four weeks away. It's also the anniversary of the day that I considered jumping off City Place. I can't believe Cricket Dill considered the same stunt because of Mia's taunts.

I snort at the classic green Coupe de Ville sedan parked near the school with the familiar license plate, MILLY. Stepping through the unlocked gate, recollections of high school flood in. I picture the first time I saw Beetle walk up these crumbling front steps two at a time, his butterscotch bangs blowing in the wind, his sparkling licorice eyes checking out every girl but me. That was Freshman year, when Lizzy and I began our obsessive habit of texting Beatles lyrics in order to secretly gossip about him. It was entertaining until junior year when she abandoned me and moved to Toronto, right after the City Place incident. I miss her. Maybe I can get a gig in Toronto and we can hang out together. I loved her most recent text, when her new stepdad took the family to Europe. It said, “Standing in the dock at Southampton, Trying to get to Holland or France.” That was one of her better ones; our texts grew up with us. My very first text about Beetle said, “I wanna hold your hand.” How childish is that? How ironic? The first time I held what I thought was Beetle's hand, it was actually the hand of Del's mom.

My relationship with Beetle was forgettable until my very last day of high school when my cupcake-pink Dead Kittens tee shirt caught his eye. I feel warm inside at the thought of how great we both looked at the Farewell Dance. I shake away that smug thought, remembering how mean I was to Beetle that night and how jealous I was of whatever happened between him and Rasima. Jealousy is lethal. It pushed Cricket Dill to lock Mia Delaney in a basement closet, which in turn ruined the lives of Will and Del, not to mention how it had traumatized Millicent Dibble. That's why I don't understand her push for leniency toward Cricket. She found a dead student in her school basement. I would think she'd hate Cricket for creating that nightmare. Then again, there's her compulsive need to champion the innocent, like B.B., and perhaps to some warped extent, Cricket.

All the desks, chairs, and tables in the building are gone. The bare walls are rife with shadows. I imagine seeing a girl with curly dark hair but know she's imaginary because Mia's spirit is contentedly laid to rest, now that her killer has been found.

I assume Millicent Dibble is here to gather the last of her things before the demolition. I step onto the tumbledown chessboard of the main hallway and shout her name. It echoes in the empty halls, like a group of long lost students is calling for her. I head down to her basement office, past a blueprint taped to the stairwell that says “Demolition Plan.” Red and green X's made from strips of electrical tape cover sections of the walls, marking the locations for the explosives. Thank God Rosalita is with me. I pass the music room and instinctively pull her around and finger the first notes to “You are My Lightning.” I can't resurrect the warm feelings this room used to generate. It's not the same without all the sheet music stands, clarinets, guitars, keyboards, drums, and music geeks.

At the end of the hall, I smell cigarette smoke. “Hello!”

“Hello, yourself,” rasps a familiar voice. “I'm down here. Is that you, Mona LaPierre?”

“Yes, Principal Dibble.” I'm shocked at how childish my voice sounds.

“Come on down!”

I consider what I'll say to her carefully because I owe Millicent Dibble a good deal. Her cat helped launch my band's success. I also sympathize with her loss of her music career to rheumatism. My own fingers drift onto Rosalita's strings. I pick a few notes, just to be sure they still work.

I follow the scent of smoke. The once-flickering fluorescent lights are completely out. I have to feel my way down, pressing my palms into the cold, lumpy cinderblock wall. Something squeaks near my foot and I swear I'll die if I've stepped on a mouse. At the bottom, the door to her old basement office is cracked open, and a beam of light shoots out. Millicent Dibble is hunched over her infamous card table desk with a flashlight sitting on top that illuminates a wild river of yellowed locks, flowing over a pile of paperwork.

“Mona!” She sets her glowing cigarette on the edge of the card table desk and thrusts out a gnarled, rheumatoid hand for me to shake. “I haven't had the chance to properly thank you for solving Mia Delaney's murder. It is so fitting that the resolution of her case coincides with the closing of our school. Your investigative work has completed the circle, as you Native Americans say.”

I let that comment slide. She shoves the last of her things into a cardboard box—the framed picture of her with her hot man, her monogrammed pad of paper that says, “M.A.D” (I still wonder what that middle initial stands for), and a brass plaque with the Confucian quote: “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.” Grotesque as it seems, I suppose working in this janitor's closet is one way for Dibble to keep the past alive.

Millicent Dibble stares at the boxed remains of her career. “I can't believe this is the last of my things.” She shakes her head, disbelieving. “I've finally retired.”

“Congratulations.” I say, trying to sound upbeat.

The flashlight beam on her desk highlights the deep pencil lines on her face, lines that write the history of the last two decades of Colt High, including the tale of Mia Delaney's disappearance, murder, and the decades-long investigation into her death.

“Principal Dibble, why did you tell the police you would speak on behalf of Cricket Dill?”

A feline gleam fills her usually lightless eyes. “I couldn't let her serve a sentence she didn't deserve. Little Cricket locked up a fellow student to keep her away from a boy she liked, not to commit homicide. She was a troubled, innocent girl. She thought it would buy her a bit of time to win a boy's heart, not end a girl's life.” She grunts with loathing, “Besides, you didn't know Mia Delaney. She probably locked Cricket up a dozen times. Everything was a game to her. She toyed with people. Mia was cruel. She came from a terrible family.

Her flashlight goes out. The only light comes from the sizzling ash of her cigarette, hanging off the end of the card table desk. Millicent Dibble whacks her flashlight and the beam returns, falling on the photo in her box of belongings. I recognize the man with her now. It's Shankdaddy! My mind races. Celine said he was a notorious ladies' man. Irving Stone said Dibble once played guitar. Maybe, they were in a band together. Maybe Dibble lost her innocence to him. Maybe he jilted her, like Celine's mom. I remember Shankdaddy telling me how people who kill for love turn into ugly fiery angels.

Millicent Dibble notices me scrutinizing the picture and takes a drag of her cigarette. I stare into it, watching it burn. She waves her flashlight at the corner of the room, “I suppose you're looking for your band mascot, Mr. B.B. King.”

Truthfully, I hadn't thought of her cat. But I'm not about to admit that. “Absolutely,” I say, bending down, pretending to try and locate B.B. The flashlight blacks out again. I think nothing of it, until the door slams behind me. I hear the sound of a metal lock, rattling to a close. If this is Millicent Dibble's idea of a joke, it's not funny. She is elderly. She may be suffering from dementia and not realize what she's doing. I vigorously push away that thought.

She coughs and rasps through the door. “Poor B.B. passed away last month. Not that you would care.” She snivels.

Unbelievable. Dibble has locked me in here because she's grieving over her dead cat, and she wants to take it out on me. I wish I'd never worn that Dead Kittens tee shirt to school. Then she would have never labeled me a cat-hater and locked me in this closet on the last day of my senior year. Then Mom wouldn't have sent me to Indian Stream for the summer. Then I wouldn't have met Del, and I wouldn't have linked Cricket to Mia's death. Then Cricket would not have been jailed, and now up for early release. Then I wouldn't be here. Millicent Dibble is right: things have come full circle. She has locked me inside the janitor's closet, again.

I try the door, to see if the lock is damaged like everything else at Colt High. No such luck. My mind floods with images of Will's locked doors, covered with swirling painted vortexes. I wish one of his vortexes would appear for me on this door.

I attempt to speak endearingly. “Please unlock the door.”

Her voice shifts down an octave. “I saw you eyeing that picture of me with that wicked, wicked man. He took everything from me, even my music. My fingers failed to play guitar when he left me.”

“Do you mean Shankdaddy?”

She groans, as if in pain, upon hearing his name. I recall the lure of his smoky gray eyes, his face and body made of carved granite, his big mocking white teeth. Like so many heavenly bodies, Shankdaddy had a dark side. But I'm also aware of his other side, the side that stuffed gift certificates for video games into kids' athletic socks, and I've witnessed the way he made unearthly blues that scraped the bottom of your soul. He lived life by his own rules. But perhaps he should have been a tad more careful of the people he crushed like bugs along the way, people like Celine's mom and Millicent Dibble. Now look what he's left behind—an ugly fiery angel.

I hug my guitar tight, sympathizing. “I'm truly sorry about your hands. I can't imagine life without Rosalita.” My eyes water, my feet and palms moisten. I know how the steers in my slaughterhouse apartment felt when they were corralled before killing.

“Nice try, Mona. But you're no innocent. You're a careless musician like Shankdaddy, and you're mean like Mia. I know what you did to Rasima's foot on the last day of school. I heard how you cheated on poor Beetle at the Farewell Dance. I've seen the foul band tee shirts you wear. Cricket would never wear anything like that. She's sweet. Mia ridiculed her for being skinny and plain. Poor Cricket only wanted to contain that wild girl, ever so briefly. That rotten groupie didn't deserve any happiness and neither did her pedophile musician-biker boyfriend. They both preyed on innocents.

I can hear Shankdaddy telling me how ugly fiery angels burn everything in their path, especially those who make beautiful music.

“Little Carrie Arquette wouldn't hurt anyone, intentionally,” she went on.

Carrie Arquette—Cricket. Her nickname is ridiculous, and she's certainly not innocent, no matter what Millicent Dibble says. I think back on Dibble's words the first time she locked me in here.
People who hurt innocents are criminals.
What a hypocrite. She eats meat. Of course, even I eat plants and fish, and they're living beings, too. Everyone hurts someone or something in order to survive. By Dibble's estimation, everyone would be a criminal.

Millicent Dibble inhales words with her cigarette. “When I came to work the week after Mia went missing, I heard a noise in the school basement. It sounded like a caged bear, snarling, growling, simply vile. I thought perhaps it might be Mia. But, as it happened, I couldn't find my keys that day. So there was no way to check. Someone had pinched them, and I guessed who that might be. Coincidentally, our janitor lost his keys. I figured I'd wait till he found his keys before calling a locksmith. I hoped this delay might give Shankdaddy time to show up in search of his daughter.

“It's only right you should want closure and felt the need to speak to the man. He owed you at least that much. But I sense something went wrong.”

I hear a foot grind a cigarette butt into the floor and a lighter flick. Millicent Dibble sighs. “Yes, something went wrong all right. That Sunday, the newspaper featured an article about the Hoodoo Chickens' Mexican tour. It turned out Shankdaddy had already left the country for the summer. He wasn't coming to look for his daughter. I went home and downed a few bourbons to console myself. When I returned to my office, I no longer heard any noise in the basement, so I wrote that earlier noise off to my imagination. I needed a vacation and took off for Lake Winnipesaukee for the rest of the summer.

She coughs through her words. “You see, Mona Lisa, what happened to Mia was an accident. It was simply the universe's way of wiping away the wicked.”

“I agree,” I lie, desperately. “Please let me go.”