What Has Become of You (21 page)

Vera shook her head, the sort of head shake tourists give when asked for directions in a language they don’t understand.

Ferreira took the folder from Vera and turned to a page that was flagged with a Post-it note. “You say in your written comment, ‘You make some statements that might alarm some readers. I want you to know that I don’t disregard these comments, but I am not easily shocked by them, either.’ You don’t think it’s shocking, a kid writing something like that? You don’t think you maybe should have reported this to someone in the school?”

She found her voice. “As I say later on in that written comment, I was aware that Jensen had had some therapy in the past and apparently had been referred by the dean. I felt she was covered and cared for.”

“You also say, ‘I am someone you can always come to with such thoughts and issues, and if coming to me with them helps, then so much the better.’ Did she come to you with any issues outside of what she wrote here, Miss Lundy?”

“Nothing beyond what she wrote here.”

“You seem a little nervous.”

“I
am
nervous. This is extremely upsetting. Jensen Willard is a good student. A very bright young woman.” Vera was finding it hard to keep up with both the detectives’ unrelenting eye contact. “I’m sorry about the nerves. I don’t know why I’m like this.”

“With all that you’ve experienced lately, I think you’ve got a pretty good excuse.”

“You aren’t suggesting anything, are you, Detective? You’re not suggesting . . .”

“Look, ma’am . . .” (Vera closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, annoyed that Ferreira had called her that). “We aren’t
suggesting
anything. Nine times out of ten, these missing teenagers turn out to be runaways, and there’s plenty reason to believe that the Willard kid falls in the same category. But with some of the things this kid has written, we’ve got to look into this seriously. Not to mention the recent death of one of her classmates—of which you are fully aware.” He got up without ceremony from the chair, not bothering to put it back where he’d dragged it from.

“We good here, Hel?” he asked his partner.

“We’re good,” she said.

Ferreira gathered up his clipboard and folders. “Some advice for you,” he said, looking down at Vera, who was still seated. “Trying to be the ‘cool teacher’ really does your students a disservice. Don’t be surprised if I come back to speak to you again. Here’s my card if you think of anything you want to add in the meantime.” And with that he was done with her, but on the two detectives’ way out the door, Cutler gave Vera a parting look that she could not interpret—was it pitying? Contemptuous?

Vera studied the card with the detective’s name on it. She felt as though she’d been taken to task; worse than that, she felt hurt.
Nine times out of ten, these missing teenagers turn out to be runaways,
Ferreira had said. On the surface it seemed more believable than any other explanation Vera could think of—but the more she thought about it, the less it made sense. Where would the girl have run to in the middle of the night? What else could have kept her from making it six houses down to her own front door, then, if not for running away?
Don’t be surprised if I come back to speak to you again,
the detective had said, and as Vera tapped the detective’s business card against the palm of her opposite hand, she heard his voice in her head, thick with insinuation.

She wondered if she would have been better off owning up to seeing Jensen on Friday night—better off admitting she’d met her in a hotel and walked her home afterward. It seemed as if she was in enough trouble just for not having reported the journals to a higher authority in the school.
If he read the journals,
Vera thought,
he already at least knows about the hotel.
Then she remembered that the last two pages Jensen had submitted were handwritten—the pages stating her intentions for that Friday night. The version the officer had in his possession was likely incomplete, stopping where the typescript ended. She looked at the card in her hand again. She should call him, she thought—for this was something he probably needed to know. The suicide threat—all of it.

She was so numb that she felt nothing at all when Sue MacMasters came into her classroom just minutes later. Sue had the same incredulous look she’d had when speaking to Vera about students with emotional difficulties who took medication.

“Oh, Vera, what a mess,” she said, and for a second Vera thought she was referring to her role in it specifically—the mess
she
had made. “What an awful time for a student to go missing, right after we’ve lost Sufia. I’m sure this girl is a runaway, but what are the students going to think? I’d like to have Jensen Willard’s teachers meet with me in my office today at lunch. We need to discuss this problem amongst ourselves, I think. I’ll send out for sandwiches and things so that no one has to go hungry.”

The idea of going hungry was the last thing on Vera’s mind. “I’ll be there,” she said.

“I must say I’ve never had a conversation with the girl personally. But when that detective showed me her picture, I did recognize her. Small, mousy girl. Always wearing dark-colored clothing. Easy not to notice in the halls. Now, of course, I wish I’d paid more attention.”

Vera hadn’t been in Sue’s office since her final interview before being hired. Today, at the lunch hour, her boss’s rather nondescript space—Georgia O’Keeffe print on the wall, tear-off calendar propped on the desk next to pictures of her grown children—had been converted into what looked like the most joyless party imaginable, with a tray of cut-up submarine sandwiches on the center of Sue’s cleared-off desk alongside bottled water and lemonade and a plate of cookies. There were four other teachers in the room when Vera got there, all buzzing around the food and loading up paper plates before squeezing into their chairs; she had seen them around, seen them eyeing her archly whenever she hogged the photocopier, though the blond and bearded teacher—Tim Zabriskie, one of the few men who taught at Wallace—was the only one she could name.

“Thank you all so much for coming in here on short notice,” Sue MacMasters said. “I know we don’t have a lot of time, but since you all share Jensen Willard as a student, I thought perhaps we could benefit from talking about what’s happened.”

You all share Jensen Willard as a student
struck Vera as a funny way to put it. She looked around at the other teachers—Tim Zabriskie, and then the weary-looking woman with the frizzy salt-and-pepper hair and the tapestry skirt, and two younger teachers with immaculately pressed clothing and what looked like expensive shoes. “Before we get started, I should quickly introduce Vera Lundy, who, as I’m sure you all know by now, is our long-term sub for Melanie,” she said. Vera gave a stiff, robotic nod. “Do any of you have any questions about what went on this morning? And since you all know Jensen Willard better than I do, is there anything in her behavior or class conduct or anything else that might suggest why the girl is missing?”

None of the other faculty seemed to want to take Sue’s questions head-on. They had other things they wanted to address first. The woman in the tapestry skirt, who turned out to be Jensen’s social studies teacher, complained that she felt her civil rights and morale were compromised by having a member of the police force invade the “safe haven” of Wallace. Jensen’s math teacher—Tim Zabriskie—said, “When I taught in public school in Lewiston, I had this happen once, where two students went missing. Turns out they went off to see a concert. That’s usually the way it goes with these kids.” The two younger teachers, who seemed to be friends, practically spoke in unison. One said that she had been trying to get Jensen to participate more in class by teaming her up with partners or small groups, but that the girl insisted on working alone and defying the structure of the group activities. The other said that Jensen had scored poorly on a recent French quiz, filling in the blanks with “nonsense words” instead of straightforward answers about shopping along the Champs-Élysées.

“She’s not a math person, I can tell you that much,” Tim Zabriskie said. “I’ve made her come in for extra help after school, and it’s clear she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. She’s one of those ones who you really can’t
teach
if it’s something she doesn’t already know. How did she end up on scholarship again?”

“She won a national essay award during her freshman year in public school,” Sue MacMasters said. “Vera, even though you’ve only just joined us, I’m assuming you’ve had an opportunity to see some of her writing for yourself?”

The detectives hadn’t said anything to Sue about Jensen’s journals, then. Why would they not have mentioned it? Vera stammered that yes, she had read the girl’s writing, and added that she thought she wrote well. The insipid, inadequate words filled her with self-loathing as soon as they came out.

The experience of hearing other teachers talk about Jensen Willard left her feeling more displaced than ever. There were times when Vera had considered the possibility—knowing, of course, that it couldn’t be true—that she had conjured the girl into being. At times the girl had almost seemed like a backward projection of her younger self—especially in those first two weeks of teaching, when she had been smitten with the girl’s writing ability and sardonic wit. Now, at last, was proof that she existed outside of Vera’s mind—that others had seen her. They had not
really
seen her, but they had seen her in the limited way that most people actually see one another.

“Does she have a boyfriend? Maybe a girlfriend?” asked the social studies teacher. “She could have run off with someone. I assume the police will be looking into that.”

“I hope no one thinks it’s a
crime
,” one of the well-dressed teachers said. “Not
another
one. Though with all that’s happened here lately, I can see where someone might jump to that conclusion. With that poor little Galvez girl, and then the Somali girl.”

“Sufia,” Vera mumbled.

“Pardon? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, Vera,” Sue MacMasters said.

“I just said her name: Sufia. Sufia Ahmed.”

Some of the other teachers were talking over her—some with their mouths full. The second of the young teachers made a great production out of lifting her finger in the air, as though she wanted to have the floor, before chewing and swallowing her food. “Don’t you think we should have some kind of speech prepared for Jensen Willard’s classmates? It doesn’t seem right to have police coming in and out of the school and not have everyone clued in on what’s going on. I’m sure the rumor mill has already started. Especially if they start thinking this might have something to do with those other two murders.”

Sue MacMasters said that this was partly what she wanted to talk to them about. “The full story’s probably going to break in the
Journal
tomorrow. In view of that, I think an assembly tomorrow afternoon to address any concerns students might have wouldn’t be inappropriate. I would advise not saying anything to your students before that time. If somebody asks beforehand, best to say you have no information. We’ll let Dean Finister handle it.”

“Such a shame this kind of publicity is being attached to our school,” the teacher who had claimed the floor said.

“Regardless of recent events,” Sue said, “the school itself holds no responsibility. Of this we can be certain.”

 • • • 

Later that night, Vera walked all the way across town to the hotel where she’d met with Jensen on Friday. She went into the parking lot but didn’t go past the hotel doors; counting under her breath, her mouth moving as though feeling around for something, she turned around and slowly retraced her steps back to Pine Street, where Jensen lived. Not wanting to repeat her earlier mistake at the Ahmeds’ house by getting too close, she stood at the corner of Middle Street for a long time, staring down at the approximate spot where she’d last seen Jensen Willard; from there she could just make out the roof of the Cudahys’ house.

Feeling bolder, she crept six houses down the street, careful to situate herself behind a large pine tree across the street as she squinted at the Cudahys’ white Cape Cod with the blue Dodge parked in the driveway. She tried to think where a teenage girl might go if she were trying to disappear between this house and Middle Street. Perhaps she had cut through someone’s lawn as soon as she’d crossed the street and was out of Vera’s sight.

Or what about the bushes and hedges that flanked so many of the neighboring houses—were these places where an attacker might have hidden, waiting until just the right moment when he could grab Jensen unseen? Might he have hidden behind the exact tree Vera stood behind, across the street from the girl’s house, watching both females come closer in the dark? For all she knew, he had watched them for some time. Maybe he’d had it all planned out. That was what Ivan Schlosser had done with his three victims—watched them until he knew just the right time to pluck one off the street, another from her school yard, and the third from the house where she was babysitting an infant boy.

In the early days, before anyone knew what had happened to Schlosser’s victims, those who knew them remarked that it was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed them whole. In the weeks following Heidi Duplessis’s disappearance, Vera had often lain in her bed at night and imagined Heidi Duplessis being swallowed by a crack in the earth, sucked gently into its center until the earth closed over her again. It was more comforting to think of her this way, nestled in the center of the world and curled up in permanent sleep—though the reality of such disappearances, Vera had known even then, was never that gentle or peaceful.

Rilke’s sonnet, the one that had come to mind when she’d found Sufia’s body, returned to her again, as intimate as a hushed voice in the dark:

She made herself a bed in my ear

And slept in me.

Her sleep was everything . . .

Vera rested her forehead against the trunk of the tree. She felt dizzy. Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Detective Ferreira and apologize for not having told them everything sooner.