A Butterfly in Flame (5 page)

Chapter Nine

Assume the absence of suspicion.

“That’s why,” Fred said. “Just curious.”

The pair gathered its forces to move on.

“Don’t know the town,” Fred told them, approaching. He never bothered with a hat, and rain was coursing down through the stubble of hair he kept short, and down his face and neck. “I’d heard of Stillton Academy, took the turn, and here I am on a bad evening. Where should I go for a meal?”

“There’s two places, you want to sit down,” the female said. She wore what might be her big brother’s black raincoat, if her big brother happened to be a police officer, and a blue hat that went with someone else’s big brother’s outfit.

“But one of them’s closed,” the male added. “Closes at eight. Bee’s Beehive. What’s open is the Stillton Café.” He pointed down Main Street, away from the sea, the lighthouse, and all the rest of the view. His outer garb was the transparent plastic raincoat the drug store sells you in emergencies—ripped and splattered with paint. He was tall, lean, and dark-haired, and as recently as yesterday had been clean-shaven.

Fred told them, “Thanks,” and followed the direction they suggested. When he turned to look back at where he had left them, they were turning the corner of Stillton Hall as if to go behind it. “Not much privacy in Stillton, Massachusetts,” Fred observed, “Maybe there’s shelter back there? A shed? A summer house or bandstand?”

Main Street offered, absolutely and absurdly,
nothing
for tourists. Again, the easiest explanation seemed to be a pervasive influence of the Taliban and the Stillton Historical Commission. No antique or thrift shop. No real estate office. No gift boutique or shop specializing in cheese and wines from far away. There was a bait-and-tackle shop near the docks, but Main Street was without its upscale equivalent, Le Chandlerie, where you could meet your scrimshaw needs.

Maggie’s Provisions was closed, but through the generous front windows Fred could see that it was a place to buy an honest pickle, toilet paper, the
Boston Globe
or
Herald,
a lettuce or green pepper, frozen food, a ready-made baloney sandwich, beer or wine that didn’t claim to come from anywhere. Etc. Art supplies? Where did those come from. Books? There wasn’t even a used book store to aid in the recirculation of vacation reading.

The Stillton Café stood out by being open, under most of a blinking neon sign in blue and orange. It was across Main Street from Bee’s Beehive, which was closed. The café was a single large storefront room with a counter along the back separating the tables from the small, very visible kitchen. There might be a dozen people in evidence, between clients, the man cooking, and waiters. No one was older than the mid-twenties. Fred took an empty table from which he could see the room, hung his wet jacket over a chair back, and used a couple of paper napkins to swab his head, face and neck.

“Use my towel,” a young woman suggested, taking the white cloth from the sash of her apron. The label on her left breast said
Marci.
Fred used the towel, which left behind it on his skin a redolence of the concentrated essences of hamburgers and fries.

“Thanks, Marci.” He handed back the towel, which was folded again and replaced at the ready, over the sash of the apron emblazoned with the motto
Stillton Café.
That was company issue, but the waitress hadn’t been forced to wear a uniform. Fred demanded cheeseburgers and fries, with water from the tap and “coleslaw, if you have it.”

“Of course,” Marci assured him. “We don’t make it, but we have it. He gets it in big tubs. No problem.” She yelled past the counter in back, “Two Stilltons with cheddar.” On her way to the counter to deal with the issues of Fred’s water and off-the-rack coleslaw, she stopped to talk with two male students who were drinking beer intently while disregarding the silent basketball game on the TV above the counter.

The conversation was too discreet to be overheard, other than the name, repeated several times, “Hag Harrison.” Everyone in the café, like everyone else Fred had seen on the peninsula, was one of the variant mongrel mixtures Americans call “white.” It was disconcerting, this close to the city of Boston, to seem to have arrived so very far away.

Marci came back to his table with the water and a shallow dish of coleslaw, along with a plate with two slices of one-size-fits-all white bread and a suspiciously yellow pat of something greasy. “You don’t want a beer?” Marci asked.

“Student at the Academy,” Fred said.

“You are?” Marci asked. “Oh. You mean, am I? Sure. My first year.”

“But you’re not from here,” Fred said.

She shook her head and laughed. “Colebrook, New Hampshire,” she said. “About as far north as you can go before you fall off.”

“Into Canada,” Fred finished. “No beer, thanks.”

Marci shrugged and wandered back toward the counter, pausing to tell the couple of students drinking beer, over her shoulder, “What I did, I’m holding a broom.”

“Just like Daygah would have done,” the rosier and plumper of the two men said. He and his companion laughed in the patronizing way that demonstrates the tenuous self-confidence that comes from barely superior age. “We all get over it eventually,” he added.

“Not Lambert. He should have used the Meeker Method.” The chuckles continued into conversation.

At another table it was two young women in consultation over a basket of fries into which each dipped now and then, in order to select a strand of potato to swirl in a puddle of ketchup and eat with deliberation, after using it to make a point in the air. Fred raised his glass to them, having caught their eyes, and was rebuffed. Both women wore jeans that had seen hard times, and shapeless sweaters. One had an orange kerchief over red hair. The other—her name might be Anna if he’d heard correctly—had black hair in a thick braid down her back.

Marci returned with a large plate fragrant with cheeseburgers and piled fries. “Not to hurry you, but if you’ll be wanting dessert, can you tell me? We start cleaning the kitchen in ten minutes. There’s chocolate cake and two slices of apple pie left that isn’t bad.”

Picking up the first of the pair of burgers, Fred shook his head and remarked, “I was half expecting to run into Morgan Flower.”

The room grew still and paid attention.

“The weed?” Marci said, and bit her lip. “No disrespect,” she added hastily.

“English One. And the rest of it,” Fred said. “Emily Dickinson.
Moby Dick.
”

“Moby Dick?” The question came from one of the two women who were entertaining fries.

There was a clattering in the kitchen and the man who had been cooking, swishing his stained yellow apron as if herding chickens, came to the counter to call out, “Kitchen’s closed.”

Chapter Ten

“Relax,” Marci called. “Eat, take your time.” But the room had changed as if Fred’s identity had suddenly been exposed as a poisonous fog.

“I’m in his class,” Marci said. “We all are. One class or another. Except for part-timers. They make you.”

“He wasn’t here earlier?” Fred asked.

One of the beer-drinking men took a final pull and put his glass down with a sharp clack. “He eats sometimes,” he said.

“Not tonight,” one of the pair of young women with French fries said, punctuating her observation by inserting a red-tipped fry into her mouth.

Her partner added, “He missed that thing on Saturday he calls a seminar. I had to get up for it and he didn’t show.” She shrugged. “I went back to bed.”

“After twenty minutes,” Marci explained, “they can’t mark you absent if they’re the one late.”

“Speaking of late, I guess it’s too late for that pie,” Fred said.

“Steve’s got the mop out,” Marci said.

The student diners were gathering themselves and their belongings, and putting on whatever rain gear they intended to interpose between themselves and the weather. “Since I’m kind of his guest speaker tomorrow,” Fred said, picking up the last of his fries. He let it hang.

People were leaving the café in a more or less general way. Marci took a slip of paper from her pocket and put it beside Fred’s plate, frankly face up. “Since I guess you can’t want anything else,” she said.

Fred started counting money from a damp wallet. “You’re first year, so you’re
Intro to Lit,
” Fred said, adding an ostentatious five dollar bill to the cost of the meal. “So I’ll see you in class. I’ll catch him in the morning before class, but that doesn’t give me much lead time. If Morgan Flower was here to clue me in, what would he tell me to do or say? What’s missing so far?”

Marci twisted his money with the bill, shoved it into an apron pocket, and said, “We figured he might not show. You want change?”

Fred shook his head. “Thanks for the use of the towel.”

“You’re going to get wet again,” Marci told him, gesturing toward the street.

“It was good to be dry while I ate,” Fred said. “See you tomorrow.”

Marci’s repeated shrug defied interpretation.

The rain hadn’t let up, but it had taken on a different slant. Or was it that Fred was now walking in a different direction? In ten wet minutes he had reached the cottage occupied by Meg Harrison and by now, for all anyone knew, by Morgan Flower himself, back from an unexpected trip to China, and even now turning out the contents of Fred’s bag, speculating about the identity of the absent intruder. Nothing had looked permanent about the instructor’s absence.

“I might have telephoned Molly,” Fred mused. “And I would now if Flower had a land line. It’ll wait till tomorrow.”

The apartment was still as vacant as it had been, with no further sign of its indignant tenant. Fred was so wet that he stripped, wrung his clothes out over the kitchen sink and hung them over the pipe from which the shower curtain was suspended. No source of clean towels being apparent, he made do with Morgan Flower’s slightly rancid towel, taking it from its hook behind the bathroom door. When it had done its job, he spread it to dry over one of the chairs at the dining table. It would have a better chance there. The apartment’s air was chilly. He pulled dry clothes from the overnight bag and put them on.

The students in the café had been talking about someone they called “Hag Harrison.” That was presumably his downstairs neighbor. Morgan Flower was, not very inventively, “weed.” Should he give the impending requirements of pretending to be a teacher any thought? Anyone could do English Lit he’d been assured. As far as that went, to start with, he might have to throw himself upon the mercy, if any, of his students. The course called
Writing About Your Problems
couldn’t be prepared for. Should he take the five minutes it deserved to inform his students that to him the subject seemed lazy, cynical, and cavalier? A gut course from the instructor’s point of view.

That left
Lives and Loves of the Artists.
So-called. There’d been a folder in the top drawer of the file cabinet that looked helpful, labeled “Course Syllabi.” That hadn’t been what Fred was looking for on his first examination. When he went back and pulled it out he found the Manila folder woefully thin. Nevertheless, he sat in the armchair of his choice before opening the folder to study.

It gave him all of a single yellow sheet, folded, on which were notes in Flower’s now familiar hand:
Lives and Loves of the Artists.
Term One. 1. Da Vinci, 2. Michelangelo, 3. Titian, 4. Holbein, 5. Rubens, 6. Rembrandt, 7. Velasquez, 8. Goya, 9. Hogarth, 10. Blake, 11. Turner, 12. Audubon, 13. Daumier, 14. Review and final. Term two. 1. Manet, 2. Lautrec, 3. Van Gogh, 4. Cézanne, 5. Bellows, 6. Burchfield & Benton, 7. Wood & Curry, 8. Marsh & Gauguin, 9.—13. The Nude, 14. Review & final.

“A strange parade,” Fred said, running his eye over it. “Can this joker really be giving equal weight to Rembrandt and John Steuart Curry? Gauguin and Reginald Marsh in the same week? Where’s Balthus? Where’s Matisse? Tintoretto?
Lives and Loves of the Artists?
What’s Audubon doing in the lineup anyway, unless there’s something I don’t want to know about between him and some hen turkey?”

Judging from the evidence at hand, a term must be fourteen weeks. Figure they might be about seven weeks more or less into this second term, the grand disjointed progression might have reached Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield. If Fred had ever had a friendly word to say for either of these unnecessarily muscular and twisted American painters, he couldn’t remember what it was. “In which case, maybe my job, as a ship passing in the night, is to unload scorn,” he concluded.

The Timex said 9:45. He was fed, rain-washed and dry, not to mention clothed. He dithered a minute before he decided, put his wet shoes on again and went downstairs to tap at Meg Harrison’s door, once he had assured himself that the sounds of her TV gave him a right to conclude she was awake.

She called out, “Who is it?”

“Fred. From upstairs.”

“Give me a minute.”

Fred gave her five.

She opened the door wearing a large loose blue garment somewhere between a smock and a caftan.

“Not borrowing sugar,” Fred said. “Looking for guidance, really, if you have a minute. And, do you mind? Since I see you have a phone. Land line. May I use it? Collect, obviously. Molly’s in Florida.”

Meg nodded him in.

Chapter Eleven

The room he entered—through an untidy version of a kitchen like his own—was sparse, even barren. Other than the red telephone he had spotted from the doorway, there was nothing on the walls. You might guess that a nun lived here except, where was the crucifix? Wouldn’t there be a calendar with pictures of Saint Theresa and the perennially blessed Mother Seton? And what did a nun want with the full-length mirror propped against what should be a closet door?

“Whatever you want, as long as I’m in bed by ten-thirty,” Meg said. “Early day tomorrow.” She had no sofa but three yard-sale armchairs. She sat in one of them and gestured toward the phone—a portable. Her layout was the same as Fred’s. The doors to her bedroom and closets were closed and without ornament. The TV sounds, continuing, came from the bedroom.

“This happened so fast,” Fred explained. “Molly won’t have a clue how to find me.”

Molly was brisk once Fred had gotten past her eager daughter Terry, who wished to describe each one of the shells she had found. Fred had dropped the code word “perfect”—a word not otherwise called for in his daily parlance—which Molly recognized as the signal that this particular phone call couldn’t do much more than to assure her that Fred was alive and well. More information would follow when it could do so in a less public way.

Fred replaced the phone and said, “I have to say, Meg, I’m going to be flying blind tomorrow and that’s about the total of what I know. Beyond the names of the classes and the names of the students in them, I am in the dark.” While he spoke Meg was gesturing him toward another, and the worst, of the three armchairs. Her feet, still bare—her legs being crossed—exhibited a tension well suppressed in the rest of her demeanor.

Meg started slowly, “I can’t say I pay attention to what he’s doing, and the kids—the students—don’t talk about Flower’s classes. If they have to write something they grumble. Beyond that, I don’t hear.”

“This lineup of artists he assigns in, what is it, a second-year course?
Lives and Loves of the Artists.
Does the rest of the faculty have anything to say about who he puts in front of his students? I mean, Burchfield? When you can have Matisse? Or, I don’t know, Copley?”

Meg looked at her watch. “People are going to ask, so I might as well. You said that you came as a favor for a friend of a friend of a friend. Never mind they’re acting pretty fast for a guy who’s been missing such a short time, unless they know something. Never mind. What I want to know is, who is this friend of a friend of a friend? Who is the friend of a friend? Who is the friend? And how come, if you have Morgan Flower’s keys from Elizabeth Harmony, you had to look her name up on a piece of paper?”

She crossed her legs the other way and her knobbed feet twisted.

Fred said, “For example, if I found I was going to do the job for real, and I was designing a course about painters, I’d ask you and the other members of the faculty which painters you want your students looking at. Who do you care about? Burchfield? Who’s going to learn anything useful from Burchfield?”

“Another time,” Meg said. “You want to play employment interview? Theoretical? It’s my turf. I start with the question—say I come in late, I never bothered reading your résumé or application letter, all that—I’m an artist anyway so I don’t read—I ask, ‘So, Fred, where have you been teaching until now? What courses? While we’re at it, what’s your last name?”

“Fair question. Taylor,” Fred said, and let his mouth close in a deliberate way.

“The other questions?”

Fred rested mute. Meg twitched, and scratched the side of her face, and studied him. “If I get my friend to Google ‘Fred Taylor,’ there’ll be eighteen or nineteen million possible matches,” she said.

“Thought I might see some examples of your work,” Fred remarked. “Since you live here.”

“I don’t shit in the nest,” she said. “Or to say it cleaner, I don’t bring work home. At home, if I want to think, I want to think about something else.”

“Does Stillton Academy have a catalogue I could look at, get my bearings a little bit?”

Meg stood. “We’re done. I don’t bring my work home. Period. Looks like that includes you. It’s been real.”

“I guess I’ll see the rest of the faculty here and there,” Fred said.

“Faculty meeting tomorrow. Four-thirty,” Meg said. “If it’s true you’re here for a week, I’d skip it. If it’s true.”

“Meaning that in your experience sometimes a temporary gesture slides imperceptibly into an unintended permanence?” Fred said.

“Meaning if I see you at that faculty meeting, I’ll have a good idea how temporary you are.” She paused, deliberating the next gambit. “If those are Morgan’s keys you got in with, if he sent you as his ringer, how come his car’s still on the street?”

Fred spread his arms in the universal gesture that means whatever that universal gesture hopes to mean at the time.

After she had closed him out, Fred heard, from the other side of the door, Meg’s raised voice, “They’re all such liars!”

“Time we considered sleeping arrangements,” Fred decided, once back in Morgan Flower’s apartment. He’d replayed the inconclusive conference with Meg Harrison while climbing the stairs, and registered the fact that what he knew best, now, was that she bristled with a suspicion that amounted almost to paranoia. If she decided that Fred was acting
for
Morgan Flower, or in collusion with him, Meg Harrison wanted no part of him. Since Fred was an unknown quantity to her, that seemed a vehement response on first acquaintance.

“These academics,” Fred said.

The few grains tossed into the coop make trouble among the chickens.

No lamp next to the bed. Did Morgan Flower not read before he slept? No. There was no bedside table with a dog-eared book. No radio. He didn’t read, he didn’t smoke. What did the man do, just lie down and turn off?

Do we give the man a shock, letting him stagger in late and find himself at the climactic scene in
Goldilocks
—there’s
Intro to Lit
for you—with Fred in the role of the heroine? Fred turned down the blue chenille coverlet—checking for sperm?—to reveal the splotched pillow and then, progressively, but gingerly, the continuation of the interior of a bed whose owner’s mother would have recoiled in dismay.

Not that he hadn’t slept in worse. Still, Fred pulled the coverlet up again as it had been, and smoothed it gently into place. Not for the first time in his life, he stretched out on an inadequate couch and considered the vagaries of sleep.