With Friends Like These... (22 page)

How foolish of Lyle Zacharias to have summoned his ghosts, all those waiting passions, injuries, and secrets.

That’s what comes of not reading and heeding the classics.

But I had, and even so, what was I to make of it?

“There is no evidence against me,” Dorian Gray, aka. Jack Clancy, said to himself after Lord Henry left. Jack favored hand flapping for dramatic emphasis. But the production wasn’t Broadway bound. It would have an extremely short run at a Philly Prep assembly, and Jack was having a wonderful time, so I let the student director handle the spastic motions and silently apologized to Oscar. He’d understand. He had a great sense of humor. Besides, he’d coped with much more serious issues in his time.

“Except for the picture,” Dorian continued with an extravagant wave of both hands. “The picture!—my conscience, my enemy. As I killed its painter, so will I kill
it
!—and then at last I will be at peace!”

He brandished an imaginary knife at an imaginary portrait and let out a bloodcurdling, agonized scream.

“Jack!” I shouted. “Hey! Keep it down. There’s a class in the next room!”

“Carried away. Sorry,” he said, then he dropped to the floor, sprawled on his belly, the better to put on his mask when the time came.

The door to our room whipped open. “Everybody okay?” Flora Jones called out. She was followed by a half dozen of her computer students. She gasped and put her hands to her heart as she saw Jack on the floor, then rushed over and dropped to her knees beside him, but by then I was up the aisle and vastly annoyed.

“Come on, get up! You’re scaring Miss Jones. Don’t worry,” I explained. “It’s only Dorian Gray, where he stabbed himself.”

Flora Jones was a formidable woman, a computer whiz, working part-time at our school while she completed her MBA at Wharton. She was also a marathoner and a former Miss Black Teenage Philadelphia. None of which necessarily made her familiar with Oscar Wilde’s work.

“Dorian needs an ambulance,” she snapped to one of her students. “Quickly. Do you know CPR?” she asked me.

“No!” I shouted to the retreating student. I prodded Jack with the tip of my shoe, controlling the urge to give him a swift kick. “Jack! Cut this out!”

“Jack?” Flora said.

“Up!” I shouted at the inert body while Flora watched with horror, then growing relief as Jack finally stood up.

“Gotcha, didn’t I?” He bowed to the class. “Talk about acting!” He strutted back to his seat.

“It’s a play they’re rehearsing.” I glared at Jack. “Talk about overacting. Forgive us.”

She exhaled with some deserved exasperation. “I thought something had happened to you,” she said.

“Why? Why me?” Asked too intently, my paranoia index setting new highs. What did she know?

“I don’t know. Guess you just hear about it so much… Plus,” she lowered her voice to avoid offending Jack, “the kid’s voice is still pretty high. I thought it was a woman’s. Yours.” Her own voice back to normal, she continued. “Anyway, the scream and the body must have rattled me, else I’m losing my mind. How could I forget Dorian Gray? The guy with the picture that got old instead of him. I’ve always wanted to find that artist and commission my own portrait. How could I have thought it was your student’s name?” Laughing at herself, she left the room.

I laughed, too. And tried to believe that it was Jack’s high-pitched voice that had made her think I was in danger, and not any special intuition of impending danger on her part—or intimate knowledge of the note I’d received.

* * *

Last year the highlight of the Junior Journalism Conference had been a strawberry-blond history teacher with dark eyes. Once he opened his mouth, it was obvious there was precious little behind the splendid facade, but he was so aesthetically pleasing, I’d hoped for a second viewing.

However, his school was now represented by a tidy woman in a dress-for-success suit. The businesslike power ensemble had a certain ridiculousness, given the realities of teaching, where success is largely intangible, and certainly nothing that good tailoring can assist. I murmured something about the missing strawberry-blond.

“You talking about Douglas?” She had a brassy voice that clashed with the suit. “He left teaching. Went to L.A. to act, can you believe?” She rolled up her eyes so that I’d get it that there was something fishy about his new profession.

I waited to find out what was on her agenda.

“From what I hear,” she continued, as I’d known she would, “he mostly acts sexy. Entertaining dirty old women. One of those male exotic dancers.” She pursed her mouth in distaste and waited for me to concur.

“Glory be,
un
dressed for success,” I murmured. Before we could debate the hunk’s career path, a student tapped my shoulder and whispered that she couldn’t find the page makeup room, which problem provided me with an acceptable excuse to move on.

I saw the student safely into a room of earnest seniors arranging and trimming columns, like paper-thin jigsaw puzzles that didn’t interlock, and then I stood by the door, deciding what to do. I scanned the workshop list: editorial writing, news coverage, copy editing, photography, sports writing, features, and columns, and then, finally, the faculty advisors’ workshop, scheduled for a half hour from now. I had time to search for coffee.

I spotted the machine, and the man currently using it, Terry Wiley. He was bent over, retrieving a cup of what looked to be cream mixed with a little coffee. “Oh!” he gasped upon seeing me. “It’s, ah, Pepper, right? Amanda. I had forgotten that you—but of course, you did say…well, in the confusion, who could remember anything?” He sounded as if the sight of me had literally taken his breath away. He pulled a stirrer out of a container on the counter and worked on the contents of his cup, treating the mixing of coffee, cream, and sugar as a major project. “Let’s see—Philly Prep, I think. What a surprise—a nice surprise to see you again. So soon.”

The oddest thing about him was not his spluttering but my absolute conviction that his befuddlement was an act, a lie, that he had known full well I’d be here and yet felt it necessary to deny it. I could not for the life of me figure out why.

“Well,” he said. “Well, well. You, ah, busy right now?”

I shook my head.

“Then would you,” he shrugged with one shoulder, “like to sit down or something? I mean after you get your coffee. I mean I’m assuming you want coffee or you wouldn’t be here.” He laughed nervously.

I couldn’t envision him part of that high school trio Lyle had described, but I knew it was possible. I see unlikely combos like that at school—kids who need sounding boards and audiences so much they confuse them with friendship.

I put change into the machine and received a cup of bitter black brew, and I sat down at a small cafeteria table across from Terry Wiley.

He ran his tongue nervously over his lips and looked around the room as if searching for a topic of conversation.

“It’s unusual for the science teacher to be the newspaper advisor,” I said, trying to fill the conversational abyss before the man had a heart attack. I felt tired already. I seemed to be on a roll—Inarticulate Men R Us. Quinn last night, Terry Wiley today. Mackenzie had his faults, but at least speech wasn’t a controlled substance with him. He talked funny, but he believed in words, thoughts, communication, and I gave him points for that.

“Unusual? Well…I guess. But, um…”

I peeked at my watch. Twenty-four more minutes of this torpid tête-à-tête. My heart plummeted.

“I was a writer once,” he said. “Reporter. Philadelphia Bulletin. Remember that? Afternoon paper. Gone now, of course.”

I wondered whether his news stories had also emerged in two- and three-word gulps, like stuttered telegrams. Even more than that, I wondered why I made him so nervous.

“Science stories. Health. Inventions. You know.” He gulped. “Paper folded. Didn’t want to move.” Major swallow of air. “Offered job teaching.” He looked abashed, then focused on his cream with coffee and drank from it.

“Lucky journalism students you have,” I said when it appeared that Wiley had drained his conversational reservoir. “To have an authentic pro as their advisor. The rest of us spout theory, but you know the real world of journalism.”

I should have said, “And did you like it, Wiley? Do you miss it? Did you think about your other writing—the one opening on Broadway and making somebody else famous? And did you fester about it after the lawsuit, before the party Sunday night? Would you please confess now and get my mother off the hook?” Instead, I drank more coffee.

“Journalism’s risky,” Wiley said. “That’s what I know. Bulletin went out of business. Now I’m a teacher. A lot safer.”

The sum total of his knowledge of two professions. How depressing, and not much to dig in the flat-surfaced landscape of his world.

How to leap the chasm from that to whatever murderous impulses lurked inside his twitchy exterior? I debated techniques for a moment, then decided to proceed the only way I could—straight on. “There was a teacher of yours at my table the other night,” I said. “Priscilla somebody. She said something about your having been a playwright.” I was proud of getting to the point via an almost truthful route.

“She said I was a playwright?”

I nodded. “She said you wrote something back in high school.”

“Lemoyes changed her mind? Now?”

I had the horrible realization that Priscilla Lemoyes must have testified on behalf of Lyle. I would have given anything to unsay my words.

“Wrote the senior show in high school,” Wiley said. His speech had become less nervous, so much so that it was without affect. It sounded as if he were reciting memorized lines. “Tried to, that is. They only used one skit.” He looked bemused. “Can’t believe Lemoyes changed her mind, after all. A little late for me, but all the same…” He didn’t seem angry because of my lie. In fact, he looked relieved. Exonerated, perhaps?

Now that he was relaxed, what could I do but push at him a little more? “Never tempted to go back and tinker?” I asked. “Write another play or fix that one up?”

He shook his head.

I had pushed us back into silence. Terry’s eyes repeatedly darted toward the door, as if awaiting the posse who would rescue us. Since we were both headed to the same advisors’ meeting, and since I obviously had no other commitments, I didn’t know how to gracefully excuse myself. I silently counted off the seconds.

But then, miracle of miracles, just as I reached fifty-nine-one-thousand, Terry spoke spontaneously. “Well!” He sounded breathless again, but pleased at having discovered a new conversational lode. “Awful, wasn’t it? Lyle, of course.”

“Awful.” And did you do it? Why couldn’t I think of a single other thing to say about the death of Lyle Zacharias?

We stared at each other. “Awful,” I said again.

“Scary,” he added.

More silence. “Guess we didn’t have to go to the hospitals, after all.” My voice emerged with an unfamiliar, high-pitched perkiness. “The police are pretty sure it wasn’t the food that was poisoned.” And then I clamped shut my mouth—a few sentences too late. I couldn’t believe I’d blurted out privileged information.

I once dated a headhunter, an executive recruiter who, over dinner, explained his method of getting people to divulge things the law didn’t allow him to ask, but that he nonetheless wanted to know. “If you keep quiet,” he told me, “there is an almost irresistible impulse to fill the silence, keep the conversation going. People get uneasy and blurt out incredible things, often not in their own best interests.”

He then proceeded to use the technique on me, and even forewarned, I became one of his suckers, babbling nonstop while the recruiter grew pensive, or took forever to light and tamp his pipe. By the end of the evening, he knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him, except that I didn’t want to see him again. Another Dater’s Digest’s Condensed Relationship: a first-date/last-date all-in-one sandwich.

And now I’d done it again, repeating what Mackenzie had told me in confidence, what had definitely not been meant as an all-points bulletin. The only atonement I could think of was to practice the same technique on Terry Wiley and see what I could learn. Unless, of course, his tongue-tied habits were so ingrained that he could sit in silence without any discomfort. I smiled, lifted my eyebrows slightly, and kept my lips sealed.

“Who on earth could have done it?” Terry finally said, wrinkling his brow in a great show of sorrow and confusion.

I shook my head. And waited some more.

“Of course, I don’t know much about Lyle’s…” He left the idea dangling, shook his head, ending the unarticulated idea. I waited some more. “We’ve been out of touch a long time.”

I nodded and widened my expectant smile.

“Since,” he added as the silence persisted, “since Lyle’s first wife—Cindy—died. Terrible thing happened to her.”

The timing of his split with Lyle surprised me, or at least the way he’d marked it historically. If Cindy had been the old high school friend, the emotional link, I could understand it, but that wasn’t the case.

I’d had it with silent passivity. “You were good friends with Cindy, then?”

He nodded.

“What was she like?” It was an honest question. Through some alchemy, this woman whose existence I hadn’t suspected two days earlier now felt like someone I’d lost and needed to reclaim.

Terry looked thoughtful. “Wonderful,” he finally said. “Kind. Beautiful. Cared about people. About what was right.” It is odd to see a blush on the cheeks of a man with a graying mustache. Particularly if the blush is provoked by mention of someone dead for many years. Someone wonderful.

He’d been in love with her. With his buddy’s wife.

He cleared his throat and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “She was a good friend,” he said. “To both of us.” Janine. Of course. He’d been married since high school. “Cute baby, too. Janine pretended…” His glance flicked to the doorway again, then around the room, anywhere but near mine. “We, um…don’t have children. When Janine saw that red-haired baby, she wanted…even looked a little like her.”