What Has Become of You (31 page)

 • • • 

When Vera arrived at the apartment, Elliott was there pacing in the living room. “That didn’t take long. What did you do,
fly
?” he asked, pressing the keys in her hand.

“I ran part of the way. Are you leaving already?”

“My friend Juliet wants to eat at this little Vietnamese place downtown before we go to the movies. Three train transfers to get there.”

“Aw,” Vera said. “A movie date, with popcorn and holding hands? That’s adorable.”

“Juliet is an out-and-proud lesbian, thank you very much. Speaking of adorable, don’t forget to look at the latest news back in your hometown. It’s about your young swain, Ritchie Ouelette—he of the soul patch, the two teeth, and the ‘Born to Lose’
tattoo.”

“He doesn’t have a—” Vera began, and then stopped, seeing that Elliott was teasing her. “I’ll be sure to check it out,” she said. “Enjoy your night on the town.”

When Elliott was gone, Vera made sure to watch him from the apartment window until he had disappeared down the street; if he came back having forgotten something, she did not want him to find her at his computer, overeager to see whatever news report it was that he’d alluded to.

As the day’s edition of the
Dorset Journal
loaded on the screen, Vera scooted the wheeled desk chair closer to the monitor, her features bunched together in concentration as she began to read. The story was no joke, she quickly saw—no joke at all.

New Suspect in Galvez Killing

Bombshell evidence recently presented in the Angela Galvez murder has exonerated current suspect Ritchie Ouelette and implicated another party. This surprise discovery turns the investigation upside down. “Because the new suspect is a minor, we are not revealing any names at this time,” Officer Gerard Babineau told the
Journal
. When asked if this recent development will lead police to refocus their investigation of the death of Sufia Ahmed, Babineau said that the Dorset Police Department cannot comment.

Vera kept reading, her eyes darting between the text and the accompanying photograph of Ritchie Ouelette being escorted down the steps outside the county jail, looking as unsteady and bewildered as though he’d just been hatched to the outside world.

New information provided by Ritchie Ouelette, who has been in police custody for more than five months, plus the cooperation of a second party, has led to a second confession in the case. “We have every reason to believe this new confession is credible, and that it cancels out the first one,” Babineau said.

The suspect is a minor,
Vera thought. Was the suspect also the second party, the bringer of the credible new confession?

The suspect is a minor. Bret Folger is a minor.
Jensen
is a minor,
Vera thought. Her palms were clammy with excitement, but she knew there was no point getting ahead of herself. Much as she wanted to hop a bus back to Maine straight away, much as she wished she could call Paul or Amy Nimitz at the center to find out more about what was going on, she was persona non grata
in Dorset now, and her work in New York, despite what she had told Elliott earlier, was far from finished.

If the suspect was Bret himself, then he was no longer in New York City. She could no longer waste any time waiting to ascertain his exact whereabouts. These whereabouts needed to be determined, and fast. Taking a deep breath, she found the number for Dr. Louis Rose that she had saved in her phone’s address book.

As she was preparing to punch in Dr. Rose’s phone number, Vera sat on the edge of the lumpy sofa bed and rehearsed what she might say into the Spenserian scholar’s answering machine—something about needing urgently to reach his pupil Bret Folger—and was thrown for a loop when an actual human voice answered the phone, a voice that sounded vaguely English and vaguely perturbed.

“Dr. Rose? I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Vera Lundy. I’m Jensen Willard’s teacher—Jensen is your student Bret Folger’s girlfriend, and I believe you may have met her once. I need to get in touch with Bret about something concerning her.”

“Bret Folger’s girlfriend?” The old professor sounded more puzzled now than annoyed. “I don’t remember a girlfriend.”

“She came to your apartment, and you took a photograph? Sometime this past fall, I think?”

“Oh, Jen-
seen
. You mean Grendel.”

“
Grendel
?”

“That’s the name I gave her when I met her,” he said—loftily but not unkindly. “‘An unhappy being who has long lived in the land of monsters.’ Is she all right?”

“I don’t know,” Vera said. She hadn’t expected the professor to speak to her this way, to say these kinds of things.

“Does this have something to do with Bret not being in my last two class meetings, I wonder? It’s unlike him to miss a class. It never occurred to me that it might be girl trouble. While it would be unorthodox for me to give you Bret’s number, I do have it. I suppose if you really think it’s urgent . . .”

Vera got the number and repeated it inwardly to herself after she’d hung up the phone; when she was sure she had it committed to memory, she dialed it and was directed, this time, straight to voicemail via an automated message. After the beep, she struggled to raise her voice over the sound of the train coming over the 125th Street platform outside. “Is this Bret? This is Vera Lundy, Jensen’s English teacher. I’m in New York City now, not far from you, and I would really like to speak to you right away, if that’s possible. Meet me on the stone bench right outside Jay at six o’clock. If you have a class or a prior commitment, please cancel it, because I’ll be waiting.”

The message finished, she checked the time. It was five o’clock. She had no way of knowing if Bret would receive the message before six, but she could be patient if she needed to; if she needed to call again, she would call again. She would wait outside Jay all night if she had to. She felt motivated, fueled from within, as she went to the sink in Elliott’s bathroom and splashed water on her face. Gently patting her skin dry with a towel, she told herself that there was nothing foolish at all about applying fresh makeup and fixing her hair for her confrontation with a sixteen-year-old boy who may or may not come to meet her.

 • • • 

Vera sat on the bench outside Jay Hall at the appointed time, still as a statue. She did not move or flinch when her phone vibrated, recording another message from her mother and a text message from Elliott, which included a photo of a plate of food and the following message: “Conversation’s lousy, but the banh mi is damned good.
How’s old Ritchie Ouelette treating you?”
She felt people moving and parting around her without actually seeing her. For once this phantomlike invisibility made her feel that she had an advantage:
I may be cleverer than all of you,
she thought.
I may be on the verge of knowing far more than I knew before.

Then she saw Bret coming. As she had envisioned, he was hard to miss and could be mistaken for no one else. He was weedy and pale, with bangs cut straight across his forehead, framing a pair of worried-looking eyes. The worry had not been a part of Vera’s mental schema. She did not know what to make of his concern. Upon spotting Vera, he stopped in front of her bench and said, “Are you the teacher?”

His voice, a slightly hoarse tenor that suggested shyness, was lovely.

“I am,” she said. “And you must be Bret. Won’t you sit down?”

He did not sit at the farther end of the bench, leaving a gap as most strangers would, but sat right in the area she’d patted beside her. She could feel warmth coming from him, the hazy, humid warmth of a young boy. She willed herself not to inch away, to assert more space for herself.

“This must be about Jensen,” he said.

“It is.” Vera resisted the urge to break eye contact with him. His gaze was so direct, and so infused with genuine solicitude, that Vera felt he could see clear through her, the way some children see clear through the facades of adults. She wasn’t sure that she liked this feeling. There was no time for discomfort, however. “Bret,” she said, his name sounding harsher than she meant it to as it came out of her mouth, “I have a question for you—one that I’m sure you’ve already been asked by police. Have you heard anything from Jensen at
all
since March thirtieth?”

Vera, expecting a ready
no
, nearly fell off her bench when Bret said, “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so? You either know or you don’t.”

“Well, I got a postcard. It wasn’t signed.” The creeping flush that Jensen had written about was starting to appear on Bret’s face, bright finger marks on each cheek that made him look as though he’d been slapped.

“Tell me more about this postcard.”

“The front of it was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe. That famous portrait where his face looks kind of lopsided? The back of it was blank. I mean, there was nothing written on it but my address, and there was a Maine postmark. I thought maybe it was from Jensen because we talked about Poe the first time she ever came to my house.”

“She told you that Poe was a little overrated, but he had his place,” Vera remembered.

“How do you know that?”

“Not so important how I know. Did you tell the police about this postcard?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was afraid.”

“I understand, I think,” Vera said. “I understand that fear. I know a lot about Jensen, but I don’t know everything, Bret. I need you to
tell
me everything—everything you know about her. Okay, maybe not
everything
, but anything you can think of that might be worth knowing about. But before you do that, I want you to take a look at this. Does this look like Jensen’s handwriting to you?”

Bret, looking a little frightened of Vera’s intensity, peered at the Salinger postcard that Vera held out. “It looks like it, but she likes to change it sometimes. Are you working with the police?”

“Not exactly,” Vera said. “It’s more like a parallel investigation. Same destination, different tracks. This isn’t the first message I’ve received from Jensen, you see.” She told him about her time volunteering at the BRING JENSEN HOME headquarters and the unsigned greeting card with its promise that Bret Folger knew more than he was saying.

“I don’t know why she’d write that,” he said. “I don’t know any more than anybody else does. And aside from the postcard, I haven’t had any contact with her since we broke up.”

“What precipitated the breakup?”

“Huh?”

“Did your breakup have anything to do with your romantic interest in your classmate Tova, or your intimate involvement with your roommate, Max? Sorry if these questions are a little personal.”

“What?” Bret’s eyes widened, his blush now verging on purple. “My
mother’s
name is Tova, but that’s the only Tova I know. And Max . . . Max is my little brother. My roommate’s name is Sudip. He’s from Bangladesh.”

“And you haven’t had any such involvement with
him
, presumably.”

“No. Oh, no, I’m not like that. Jensen is the first and only person I’ve ever even kissed. Did she tell you something different? She must have.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I said I didn’t think we should see each other anymore because I was getting weirded out by her contradictions and lies.”

“I think I’m sort of getting the picture here. Can you elaborate a little more on some of these . . . contradictions?”

“Well,” Bret said, chewing his lip, “I can give you some examples, I guess. She was always talking about killing herself. That’s something I had a really hard time with, but I knew she’d never actually go through with it. I think she thinks too highly of herself to do a thing like that, even though she likes people to think she has low self-esteem. Is that bad of me to say? I’m not trying to make it sound like I
wanted
her to kill herself, because of course I would never want that.” Bret was staring straight ahead now, his hands folded on his lap, his brow furrowed in thought. Vera found herself feeling pity and warmth toward him; he was, after all, just a boy—a befuddled sixteen-year-old boy—and more than the shallow, pretentious person that Jensen’s journals had prepared her for. He was, on the contrary, someone she herself might have liked, if she’d been closer to Jensen’s age. And he was blameless—that much was clear. More blameless than she was.

“She’s clever and naive at the same time,” Bret went on. “She thinks she can get away with anything, and half the time she does. She’s honest, and she’s not honest at all. She’s passive, but she likes to manipulate.”

“Any examples of this?”

“Of the manipulation? Sure. She was trying to do to me what she did to Scotty.”

Vera sat up alertly. “I thought there
was
no Scotty.”

“What do you mean?”

“Considering she mentioned a false Tova and a false Max in one of her school journal entries, wouldn’t it make sense to assume that Scotty isn’t real, either? The Dorset police said most of the friends in Jensen’s journal are fictitious.”

“Well, Scotty wasn’t. I saw him once in Portland when we were walking along Monument Square. Jensen and I had stopped at the square to watch some street performers doing a show . . . they were spinning fire and stuff like that. This kid Scotty was standing off to the side near us, and Jensen pointed him out to me. He saw us, but he didn’t come over to talk. I got the feeling it might have been because I was there. I’m not really sure.”

“Do you know Scotty’s last name, or if he’s from Dorset?”

“I hardly know anything about him. But I think he and Jensen might have had something going on. She hinted it. I didn’t want to believe it was true. I’d heard her talk about him plenty—her bragging about how he’d been this cheerful kid whom she’d converted. That was her word,
converted
. She bragged about how she changed him from a normal kid to someone who had these homicidal and suicidal thoughts. She liked thinking she had that power over people, to change their whole outlook on things.”

The boy turned to Vera then, holding her gaze once more, his eyes large and imploring. “I know it sounds weird that I could ever have feelings for someone like her.”

“It’s not that weird to me, Bret.”

“She’s so dark. I liked that, at first, but she’s darker than she lets on. Now I wonder if I ever really loved her or if I just thought I did. How do you
know
when you really love someone? I’ve never been able to figure that one out.”

“I guess that’s a good question,” Vera said. “I guess that’s as good a question as any. I wish I had an answer for you.”

Vera was not sure how long the two of them sat next to each other in silence, thinking their separate, brooding thoughts. At last she said, “I suppose the police already asked you if you had any ideas about where Jensen might have gone.”

“I didn’t tell them about Aunt Miriam’s house.”

“Sorry?”

“My aunt Miriam has this cottage she doesn’t use much. She lives in Boston, but sometimes she’s in Dorset on weekends. She has a cat that she brings back and forth, and sometimes I cat-sit, so I have a key to the place. I took Jensen there a couple of times because she’s not allowed to come over to my house anymore—my parents don’t like her.” His eyes flickered toward Vera as though this last disclosure embarrassed him. “Anyway, the key disappeared. I always kind of figured Jensen stole it, but I didn’t want to rat on her, so I just told Aunt Miriam I lost it. She never bothered to change the locks.”

“So you think Jensen could be in this cottage, am I understanding that correctly? But you didn’t tell the police this theory at all?”

“No. If I told them, she’d know I was the one who said something. And I wouldn’t want that. I don’t even like to think about how she’d react. Like I said, she scares me.” Again, that flickering, discomposed look.

“You can tell
me
, though, can’t you? Tell me where this cottage is. Your aunt’s place.”

“It’s the last house at the end of Bleachery Road. The blue one on the hill.”

“Would you go there with me? If I found a way to buy you a bus ticket back to Maine?”

“Me? I can’t,” Bret said. Something changed in his face. “I have exams. I don’t think my professors would let me make them up. But if you’re planning to go yourself . . .”

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I guess nothing. I was going to say
be careful
, but I guess that would be stupid to say. You’re a grown-up, right? I really have to go now. I’m supposed to be tutoring someone . . . I’m already a little late, to tell you the truth. Are you going to be here long? In the city, I mean?”

Vera shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Have I told you enough, then?”

“You’ve given me something to work with. I thank you for that, Bret. Really I do.”

“Good luck with your investigation,” he said. “I’ll be glad when you guys find her.”

“Me, too,” Vera said. She tried to smile at the boy in parting, but she had a feeling her smile was a sad one.

She continued to sit there after Bret Folger got up and left, and even after it had begun to grow dark and the lights of Butler Library came on, illuminating its facade from between its Italianate pillars, she did not relinquish her spot.
How could I have forgotten how beautiful the library looks at night?
she wondered. She felt tears stinging her eyes and was not sure why they were choosing to come just then. She knew only that she wouldn’t mind sitting on this stone bench for the rest of her life, perpetually warmed by the steady glow of these lights.
What a shame it is sometimes,
she thought,
to have to be a grown-up, and to have to try to understand why anyone ever does anything.