A Hard Day’s Fright (10 page)

And I had better things to do than sit there and watch her pout.

I threw my hands in the air, and then, because it attracted the attention of that transit cop who was suddenly keeping a very close eye on the woman sitting by herself and talking up a storm, I grabbed my cell and pretended to be dialing, then talking.

“You and Ella are both dopes,” I said into the phone.

Lucy’s bottom lip protruded a little farther.

“You’re keeping secrets that are, like, decades old. Both of you.”

“So Little One didn’t tell you?”

“She told me that you told her that you wouldn’t tell except to tell…” Even I couldn’t follow what I was saying. I grumbled at my phone. At least it didn’t make me look as crazy as muttering in the direction of the empty seat next to me. “You told Ella that you had a secret boyfriend. And a broken heart.”

“Which may or may not have been true.” Lucy sat up straight and pulled back her shoulders. It was the lamest display of nonchalance that I’d seen since the time I tried the same thing in the mirror, just to practice how to look if I ever crossed paths with Quinn again.

“Who was he?”

Lucy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “It doesn’t have anything to do with my murder.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know, that’s all. He wouldn’t have been my boyfriend in the first place if I thought he was a murderer.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say.” My editorial opinion delivered, I stared at her.

Lucy mumbled a reply.

“What was that?”

“Darren,” she said.

“Darren Andrews?” This was big news, and hearing it, I was certain Ella wasn’t holding out on me. She was so impressed by Darren and his big house and his bigger money, she never would have kept her mouth shut if she knew Lucy and Darren had been a couple. “And this is some big secret, why?”

“Because nobody knew about it. Isn’t that what makes a secret a secret? Darren and I, we were keeping it all very hush-hush. You know, like the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine.”

I wasn’t sure when we started talking about whoever it was we were suddenly talking about. I didn’t care. Heathcliff and Catherine weren’t my problem. “Who broke it off?” I asked her.

With one finger, Lucy traced an invisible pattern over her knee. “Me. Mostly.”

“Then if you broke up with Darren, he might have—”

“No!” The air around Lucy sparked. Just like her eyes. “Darren wouldn’t have hurt me. He wasn’t like that. Darren loved me.”

“Then why did you break up with him?”

The sparks sizzled like a current of electricity. They were so bright, I had to turn my face away.

“He made some mistakes,” Lucy said. “That doesn’t mean—”

“You mean another girl.” I chanced another look at her, squinting against the neon blue and icy white flickers that circled Lucy’s head. It was worth it when I saw her flinch and knew I was right. “So that was what he was trying to talk to you about at the Beatles concert. Ella said he looked like he was trying to convince you of something. And then…” The truth dawned, and I grinned, not at Lucy’s misfortune, but at my own brilliance. “And then Ella saw Darren and Janice and they were fighting. You were what they were fighting about.”

Lucy crossed her arms over her chest. “He didn’t love her.”

“You’re sure?”

“He didn’t.” She slapped her knee with one hand. “He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t.”

The sparks sizzled and flew. One of them landed on my leg and a puff of smoke poofed around me. I hurried to pat the spot before that transit cop could catch a whiff of smoldering raincoat, and while I was at it, I cursed my luck. So far, the only thing this investigation was any good for was destroying my spring wardrobe.

When the fire was out, I looked over at the seat beside me. It was empty.

And I was left with even more questions than I’d started with.

What was the deal with Darren Andrews? And Janice Sherwin, was she jealous of Lucy? Jealous enough to kill her?

And then, of course, there was still the big question mark that was Patrick Monroe. Like it or not, there was only one way to handle that.

It looked like I was going to a poetry reading.

A
riel and Gonzalo were still on the outs, and her mother had made it clear that if she couldn’t find an adult to accompany her, Ariel was out of luck as far as Patrick Monroe’s poetry reading was concerned. When I told her I’d go with her, the kid was so darned excited, it was clear—to me at least—that she needed a social life that included more than heart-wrenching poetry and boys with bad haircuts.

The heart-wrenching poetry I couldn’t help. After all, that’s exactly what we were headed to hear.

But I swore I’d do my best that evening to convince Ariel that she was better off without Gonzalo.

Since Ariel’s love of bad poetry meshed just fine with my need to investigate, I made all the arrangements. She had to come to Garden View after school, anyway, so I told her it would be no big deal for the two of us just to go from there down to Case Western Reserve University together.

Of course, when I think things are going to be easy, that’s when I should know they’re not going to work out.

Ariel claimed there was no way she could be ready for something as wonderful as a reading by her favorite poet without a stop at home first. Rachel volunteered to drive her down to the university, and swore she wouldn’t drop her off anywhere except right in front of the auditorium where the reading was being held and not leave her in the company of anyone except me.

I was waiting there the next evening, watching the time tick away on my cell phone and thinking that the girls had played both me and Ella for chumps. How Ariel had talked Rachel into something fishy, I didn’t know, since Rachel was usually the sensible one, but the reading was about to start, and Ella was going to hang, draw, and quarter me when I had to call her and tell her there was no sign anywhere of Ariel.

“Hey, Pepper!”

I was looking right at the tiny redhead coming up the walk toward the building and I still didn’t realize she was talking to me. In fact, it wasn’t until she was three feet away that the voice and the face registered.

I bent for a closer look. “Ariel?”

She grinned and skimmed a hand over her hair. “I did it right before I left the house and I wasn’t sure how it was going to look. What do you think?”

Since her hair was exactly the same shade of red as mine, it was impossible not to say it looked terrific.

“And the jeans?” She turned all around so I could see that her grungy black jeans were gone. They, too, were replaced with a pair that was sleek, stylish—and exactly like the ones I was wearing. Ariel was wearing sandals, too, and her toe-nails were painted a boisterous pink.

This was either the ultimate compliment or really disturbing, and I needed some time to sort it out.

Good thing I’d have a lot of time to think. Thinking was better than listening to poetry. “Come on,” I told Ariel, “we need to get inside or we’ll miss the start of the show.”

Her laugh was light and airy. “It’s not a show,” she said, tossing her red locks in a manner that was, until that moment, all mine. “It’s a reading. A poetry reading.” She slipped an arm through mine. “And we, girlfriend, are going to have a crazy wonderful time.”

I
only nodded off twice.

This, I think, says something about my remarkable stamina in the face of the adversity that is an egomaniac poet (come on, Patrick Monroe was wearing a T-shirt with his own picture on it!) with a monotone voice reading a whole slew of unrhymed gobbledygook that ranged from the incomprehensible to the just plain weird.

I was about to slip into la-la land one more time when Ariel pounded on my thigh with her fist. I snapped to and saw that she was out of her chair, bouncing from foot to foot.

“Is it over? Already?” My head was a little fuzzy, but even that wasn’t enough to keep me from pouncing on the opportunity to escape the blah-blah and get down to investigating. I grabbed my purse and the leather portfolio I’d brought along and whispered a silent prayer of thanks-giving that the torture was over. Poetry can kill you if you’re not careful. “Boy, that sure went fast.”

“It’s not over yet, silly.” Ariel grabbed my arm and did her skinny-little-girl best to drag me to my feet. “It can’t be over. Not until he recites ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

“Didn’t he do that one already?”

The head toss she gave me told me she’d been practicing. It was that perfect.

Because I wasn’t sure what the point was, I still wasn’t standing, and Ariel gave me another tug. “He always reads it last,” she said. “It’s his encore. And when he does, everybody stands. You know, to honor him. Come on.” She was more urgent than ever, and this time, it was give in or have my arm yanked off.

I gave in, and saw that all around us, the college students, academic types, and aging hippies who packed the reading were stomping their feet and clapping. Monroe had already exited the stage—I wasn’t sure when that had happened since I wasn’t paying attention—and when he walked back on, the roar was deafening.

He was my height maybe, a scraggly guy in jeans, wearing a sport coat that hung off his shoulders and looked as if it had been borrowed in honor of the occasion. It also looked as if it had been slept in. His hair was salt-and-pepper, thinning at the top, and long at the back and sides in a way that shouted
artiste
! He had a gold stud in his right earlobe, and wallowing in the applause, he never cracked a smile. But then, maybe poets never do. He bowed and pointed to his own face looking out from that T-shirt of his, all moody and glowering.

Ariel elbowed me. “You’ve got to clap,” she mewled. “If everybody’s not clapping, his artistic sensibilities get offended, and then he won’t recite ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

I clapped with as much enthusiasm as it was possible for me to muster. Apparently, Monroe had superhuman vision and spotted the last holdout finally cooperating there in the fifteenth row. He stepped up to the microphone.

“‘Girl at Dawn,’” he moaned.

And the place went zooey.

Except for me. But then, I was busy sizing up the guy who just might be the guy I was looking for.

My powers were far from superhuman, but my imagination was pretty good. I did my best to visualize what Monroe might have looked like forty-five years earlier.

Just as scrawny, I was sure.

Just as self-centered.

I knew from seeing his picture in Ella’s yearbook that his hair was even longer and scragglier back in his hippie days, and he’d had a beard, too, but I suspected that when he was teaching, he was all about clean-cut. Sans beard, his weak, pointy chin was evident. His eyes were little blue marbles. When he wrapped them around the microphone, I saw that his hands were small for a man and his fingers were long and thin.

I tried to picture those hands holding a blanket over Lucy’s face. Pressing. Smothering.

I was so lost in thought, I nearly jumped out of my skin when Monroe cleared his throat. Looked like I was the only one in the audience who dared to move. As if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room, the crowd held its collective breath.

“Girl. Crimson and golden. Nymph. Chick. Babe.”

He wiggled his silvery eyebrows. Ariel and all the rest of the Monroe-o-philes just about fainted on the spot.

“Awake to the dawn,” he boomed. “Crimson and golden. A-l-ive…”

Who knew two syllables could get dragged out like that?

“…to the pulse, the vibration, the beat.”

From there, it went on and on. And on. And although I heard the senior citizen hippie on my right purring the words along with him and Ariel’s tiny gulps of excitement, I didn’t listen. I was too busy trying to decide if a guy that geeky could tie up a woman, kill her, and dump her body somewhere where nobody would trip over it for nearly fifty years.

Either I was having a horrible case of déjà vu, or the poem ended the same way it began. Monroe, his hands poked into the pockets of his jeans and his chin high, finished with a flourish.

“Alive to the pulse.” He strutted nearer the microphone and lowered his voice to a growl. “The vibration.” It wasn’t my imagination because, believe me, my imagination does not go in such directions; when he said this, he actually cocked his hips. “The beat.”

I don’t think a
t
on the end of a word has ever been drawn out longer. The tiny ping of it hung in the air. One second. Two. Three.

And then the crowd erupted.

“Come on.” Ariel was out into the aisle before I had a chance to shake away the weirdness. She had her hand boa-constrictored around my arm again. “We’ve got to be first in line for the meet and greet,” she said. She was clutching a copy of
The Collected Works of an American Master: Patrick Monroe
to her flat chest, and it was such a truly pathetic picture, I couldn’t refuse.

But I had my own plans for the meet and greet, ones that did not include being first in line.

I dawdled, shuffling my way along the back of the crowd that surged toward a table where student volunteers were selling Monroe’s books as well as CDs of him reciting his poetry, those T-shirts with his picture on them, and an assortment of tote bags, bookmarks, and DVD recordings of readings like this. Ariel was impatient, but I was firm. With people pressing us to move forward, Monroe wouldn’t have time to talk. But if we were last in line…

“This is going to take friggin’ forever!” We’d already been in line for half an hour, and poetry lover or not, Ariel was a typical attention-deficient teenager. She groaned, bending at the waist to see down the line of people that still snaked ahead of us and toward the stage. “I told you we had to hurry if we were going to be first.”

“You’re young and impatient.”

“I’m in love!” She clutched her book and crooned. “Even Gonzalo doesn’t write poetry like that. Nobody in the whole history of the world has ever written anything as wonderful and as moving as ‘Girl at Dawn.’”

I made a face.

“What?” Ariel could do offended like no one else. “You think just because I’m a kid—”

“I think you should pay more attention to what’s going on around you.”

She considered this, and yes, it took her a while, but maybe there was more going on behind that teenaged exterior of hers than I gave her credit for. After a couple minutes, her jaw went slack. “You’ve been asking about Mom’s friend, Lucy, and you’ve been asking about Patrick Monroe. And Patrick Monroe was a teacher at Mom’s school when Lucy went missing, and”—her eyes were suddenly as big as saucers—“you don’t think that Patrick Monroe had anything to do with—”

I shushed her before she could say anything that would attract the attention of the people in front of us.

Lucky for me, besides having good taste in hair color, Ariel is a good sport. She swallowed whatever it was she might have said and her eyes sparkled. “We’re investigating,” she whispered.

“And we’re going to be very subtle about it,” I reminded her.

“But does that mean…?” She sneered at the
Collected Works
. Right before her lower lip trembled. “I can’t love his poetry. Not if he’s a…you know…” She glanced all around to make sure no one was listening and mouthed the word
murderer
.

My instant and total dislike of Patrick Monroe aside, I tried to remain my usual objective self. “The jury’s still out on that,” I told Ariel. “But that’s what we’re here to find out.”

By the time we got to the front of the line, Ariel looked more curious than starstruck. She slid her book in front of Patrick Monroe, stammered out that it was to be signed to her, and blushed sixteen shades of red when he squeezed her hand and offered what I think was supposed to be a sexy smile. I ignored my heebie-jeebies and made a mental note: he still liked ’em young.

With a little waving motion that urged me to take her place, Ariel stepped aside. I pulled back my shoulders and flipped open my portfolio. Then I stuck out my hand.

“Pepper Martin,” I said by way of introduction. “Graduate student.”

Monroe liked what he saw. But then, I was wearing a snug white T-shirt with my jeans, along with the cutest little sunset-colored shrug. Who says redheads can’t get away with shades of pink? From the look in Monroe’s eyes, I knew that as far as he was concerned, I could get away with anything.

I intended to try.

“I’m writing my thesis.” Oh yes, I batted my eyelashes. “About you.”

I wasn’t sure which he liked better, the batted eyelashes or the academic adoration. Still holding on to my hand, Monroe stood. I was right; we were just about the same height. This close, I saw that his face looked as lived-in as his sport coat.

“I have a large body of work.” His smile made it clear he wouldn’t let go of my hand without a little encouragement, so I slipped it out of his grasp and got out a pen. I didn’t have to pretend I was taking notes, because I wanted to remember everything he said. “What are you focusing on? My early poems? My eighties glam/punk stage? My newest works? Surely, you must have an opinion on ‘Rock and a Hard Place,’ the piece I premiered tonight? I think it’s one of my best, but then, we’ll have to wait and see what the critics say about that.” He laughed, but call me a cynic, I could sense the desperation behind his nonchalance.

See, I knew from the research notes Ariel had provided for me that, these days, the critics were less than kind to the wonderboy of the sixties. There was talk about Monroe being washed-up, and more than a few of the essays Ariel had downloaded (believe me when I say I was grateful I didn’t have to do it!) mentioned that he was no more than a one-hit wonder. After “Girl at Dawn”…well, a whole bunch of literary types claimed that it was all downhill from there.

Leave it to a poet to know how to talk a good game. As if his blatant self-promotion would actually convince me—and as if what I thought might actually matter—he whizzed right on.

“You’re a graduate student. That means you must be a smart woman. No doubt you noticed the atypical meter in ‘Rock,’ the unusual rhyme scheme and the measured tempo…ah!” He tipped back his head, savoring the thought, so I guess all that atypical stuff was good. “This poem is going to turn heads,” he said, and eyed me carefully. “But perhaps…” He wagged a finger in my direction. “Perhaps you’re not as concerned about my new work as you are about something else?” He tried wiggling his eyebrows at me, and when I didn’t melt like much of the audience had when he pulled that stunt during his reading, he turned down the volume on his attempts at sexy seduction. He did not, however, turn it off. A smile crinkled the corners of his mouth.

“I think,” he said, “that perhaps you are one of those marvelous young women who cut her hormonal teeth on ‘Girl at Dawn,’ and you’re going to concentrate on that poem exclusively in your thesis. Let me give you some friendly advice.” He stepped closer, and I was glad there was a folding table between us. Lust gives off a pheromone all its own; advice wasn’t the only thing Patrick Monroe wanted to give me.

I slid a look toward Ariel.

Even she wasn’t fooled. She opened her mouth and pretended to poke a finger down her throat.

“Others have tried to concentrate exclusively on ‘Girl,’” Monroe told me, and had I really cared, I might have appreciated his academic wisdom. “But remember, the piece cannot stand on its own. No poem can. Nothing is written in a vacuum. Surely you’ve discovered that for yourself in your studies.”

“I surely have.” My smile was sleek. “That’s why I’m going to eschew the easy route.” Yeah, yeah…I know…
eschew
is one lame word, and not one I normally toss around in everyday conversation. But I’d done my homework in preparation for meeting Monroe. I figured poets were all about words like
eschew
. I think it has something to do with the meter. Or maybe they like to use strange words to make their readers feel all woolly-headed. Four years of high school English and too many college lit courses, and I’m pretty sure that’s what poetry is all about in the first place.

“Actually, I was going to concentrate on your early career,” I told him. “Not your career as a poet. Your years as a teacher.”

His face registered surprise, but I didn’t give him time to think this over. I went right on. “I think I’m in an especially advantageous position,” I said, pulling out all the stops and the last big word I knew. “I live in Shaker, and that’s where you taught. It’s like a sign from heaven. I’m destined to write about the time you spent here.”

“Poets are big believers in destiny. After all, if it wasn’t for destiny, I might be writing advertising jingles instead of speaking at prestigious universities to beautiful women like you.” His smile never wavered, but I saw the way he looked past me, and the relief that swept over his face when he realized I was last in line. I was playing hard to get, and he wasn’t used to having to trawl for women. I had to move quickly, or I was going to lose him to the groupies who were already collecting in tight knots near the front of the stage. No doubt, Monroe would soon be on the receiving end of who-knew-how-many dinner invitations.

“So much of the research I need is right here, all around me,” I said, ignoring the
beautiful
comment as if I was modest, not grossed out. “I can talk to people at Shaker Heights High, and I imagine a lot of your students are still living here in the community. I’m so anxious to hear what they have to say about your brilliant classroom techniques. Especially the girls you taught.”