Bloodline (16 page)

I hadn't gotten into that with Roxanne, but I figured I would wait until the right moment. A candlelight dinner. A bottle of Moët & Chandon. Soft music. Roxanne would leave the room to slip into something more comfortable and when she came back and settled into my arms, I'd whisper into her lovely ear: “Do you know that window behind your head was shot out by a shotgun just two days ago?”

“Please,” she would say. “Can't it wait until tomorrow?”

Yes, this was going to be difficult to explain, and my fear was it would put us right back where we'd been when Roxanne last left. Things had spun out of control in my life and Roxanne had been swept into the whirlpool of threats and violence. Her reaction then had been to leave. I wondered if she'd want to get out of Prosperity, too.

Of course, the situation here was still manageable. Kenny, if it was Kenny, was a loose cannon, so to speak, but maybe Poole would do something about that. And the story was moving in all directions, but at least it was moving. Things were okay. Just a couple of rough edges, that's all. Roxanne and I would have some time to sort things out. To see if we could start out, not where we left off, but where we were before that. Close, and on the verge of getting closer. Of course, if we did, I wouldn't be getting much work done.

Speaking of which, it was time for me to earn my daily beer.

I puttered around the house for a while longer. Stared at my notes. Missy Hewett and Tracy Crown. I thought about the kid, Jimmy Cowett, the father of Crown's baby who didn't want to give the baby up. Did he sign the paternity forms? Was paternity established? Where was he now, and how could I find him? And what about Kenny and his brothers in the can? Maybe I should just find Kenny and talk it out.

But I couldn't do any of that milling around the house.

I made lunch: tuna salad on whole wheat with olives, celery, lettuce and tomato from the Varneys', and English hot mustard. I stuck the sandwich in a bag with a banana and, feeling like a kid again, went out the door.

To school.

It was still overcast and gray and a gentle rain had started to fall. There was something tranquil about rain in autumn, and I drove slowly
up the road. One of the college girls was getting out of her car and she waved and smiled and I waved back. She looked happy and healthy and without a care. She was Missy Hewett's age, and she was everything Missy Hewett was not.

It struck me that to be terribly unhappy at eighteen was unnatural and unfortunate, a real tragedy. There was more than enough time for that later.

The truck lurched down the rutted road and I turned on the windshield wipers. They smeared the raindrops across the windshield and turned everything into an Impressionist blur.
La Rue de Dump
, by Claude Monet. I lurched to where the pavement began, but still I didn't speed up. I was thinking, and the faster one drove, the less clearly one thought. It was one of the things that was wrong with our society. Smoother roads, faster cars, dumber people.

I was thinking about Missy Hewett and her change of heart. Where were the counselors and shrinks that Roxanne had talked about? Had she refused their help? Had it been offered? And what kind of adoption agency did she go through? Was it through the hospital? Who was the “they” she spoke of? Why did she seem so alone?

Something about the situation didn't seem right. Missy seemed so much on her own, this hardened little girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Or at least, the weight of a baby girl. I wondered if she thought of that at all, that piece of information about a baby to which people seemed to attach so much significance. “She was born at 8:33 a.m. Seven pounds, six ounces.” It was pronounced as if it were a mark of character, a clue to the child's future. In Missy Hewett's case, that future had been placed in someone else's hands.

It was a noble thing to do, a tremendous sacrifice, but I wondered if it wasn't so unselfish as to be unnatural. It would take a very strong
person to give a baby up and then just go on. Either very strong or very cold, and I didn't get the impression that Missy Hewett, underneath her emotionless exterior, was either.

Before we met up again, I wanted to get a better feel for her—to know more about the circumstances that had led her to college and Portland. She had enough drive to push herself that far. Where did it come from? Family? School? If it were friends, where were they now that she needed them? Why would she call me?

I drove through the village, mulling it all over. There were a couple of cars and a truck parked in front of the post office. An old man who looked familiar was standing by the door of the truck. When I drove by, he waved, a reflex action that probably dated back decades, to the days when to live in this town was to be a part of a fraternity of farmers and woodsmen. If they wanted to invite me, I'd be glad to join.

From there, I drove out of town to the east. The roads were empty and black and glistened in the rain. I drove out to the big brick school and pulled in the drive. The rain had picked up and the parking lot was deserted. With Kenny and friends in the back of my mind, I parked the truck close to the building and walked down the wide sidewalk to a side entrance. There was someone standing just outside the brown metal doors, hunched in the rain, hurrying through a cigarette. At first I thought it was a student, but when I got closer I saw that it was a woman, maybe a teacher. When I got within thirty feet or so, she dropped the cigarette and hurried inside.

She didn't hold the door for me.

I followed the woman inside. Like the roads, the corridor was empty, too. I walked along, glancing through the classroom doors that passed like frames on film. A teacher, a man in bow tie and suspenders, speaking French loudly and slowly. “Je m'appelle Monsieur
Elliott. Et vous?” An unseen woman calling out sharply: “Mr. Smith. Do you mind?” A big, sloppy boy in gigantic sneakers writing something on a blackboard: “Plato. The cave. Reality.”

That corridor ended and I turned a corner and came into the atrium near the office and the main entrance. There were three or four kids huddled forlornly near the front doors, like homeless people in an office-building lobby. They stared out at the rain as I hurried by the office, not wanting to risk another encounter with the principal's phalanx of secretarial security police. They were busy, probably interrogating some unfortunate student about a suspect sick note. I couldn't hear the screams, but I suspected they were using the soundproof room.

Down the hall and around the corner to the right was the guidance office. I went in and stopped in front of the secretary's desk. Her red glasses were placed on a folder and there was a new poster on the wall:
HAPPINESS IS A HABIT
.
PRACTICE HAPPY ATTITUDES
,
BECOME A HAPPY PERSON
. This credo was accompanied by a photograph of a kitten.

Funny. I'd never thought of cats as happy.

I waited five seconds and then went to Janice Genest's office door and looked in. She wasn't there. I stood for a moment. They were lucky I was an honest person. I could have pilfered the place of paper clips. Instead, I stood a little longer, then went into Genest's office and sat down in a chair. There was a brochure on the corner of her desk and I picked it up. It was about the dangers of deliberately inhaling fumes from aerosol cans. No kidding. Did these kids need to be told not to walk blindfolded on I-95 at night, too?

A buzzer sounded in the corridor and the express-train roar started to build in the distance. Doors opened and slammed shut like it was a school possessed. The secretary came in and just as quickly
left. There were footsteps and then Genest came in, saw me, and pulled up short.

“The door was open,” I said. “I was just reading about why I shouldn't spray air freshener into my mouth.”

“Causes brain damage,” she said, walking around the desk and standing by her chair. “I've got three guys right now who used the stuff. While it's scrambling your brains, it causes hallucinations and some sort of euphoria. For that, they've significantly reduced their chances of being Rhodes Scholars.”

“Which weren't great to begin with?”

“It wasn't a sure thing, if that's what you mean.”

“What ever happened to beer?” I said.

“Shows up on your urine test when you're on probation. There's no test for air freshener.”

“Who would have thought there'd have to be?”

Genest shrugged.

“You'd be amazed,” she said. “Kids have an endless capacity for self-destruction.”

“They come by it honestly.”

Genest looked up and sniffed.

“True,” she said.

She was opening what appeared to be her mail. I watched her for a moment and decided she was more attractive than I remembered, with that thick hair and high cheekbones, and maybe not as prickly. Maybe she was warming up to me.

“So how's your story coming?” she said. “Saved the world yet?”

“It's coming. And no, I guess I haven't. How 'bout you?”

“Nope. But some days we can take it off life support.”

“About all you can ask, right?”

“I guess.”

She tossed a stack of envelopes and papers into the trash.

I was pleased to see we used the same filing system.

“I wanted to ask you about a student. An ex-student, actually. Missy Hewett.”

Genest looked at me.

“I know Missy,” she said.

“She had a baby,” I said.

Genest looked up.

“I know that, too,” she said.

“And she gave it up for adoption.”

Genest didn't respond.

“You don't have to worry about confidentiality or anything,” I said. “This is off the record. Background. Because I already talked to her and she told me about most of it. The baby. The adoption. The missing daddy.”

“He did her a favor.”

“Sounds like it. But she seems like such a levelheaded kid. Nice kid. How do they end up with these guys who turn out to be so worthless?”

“They're seventeen,” Genest said. “Everything's young in them but their hormones.”

“But she doesn't seem young.”

Genest came around the desk and walked over and shut the door. I waited for her to come back and sit down. Instead she came over and faced me.

“Missy Hewett is one of the strongest kids I've known,” she said vehemently. “She has this inner strength. She's had to have it, the way she's grown up.”

“How has she grown up?”

“With everything going against her. She's—and this is off the record, right?”

I nodded.

“She's the youngest. Has two older sisters. Both of them got pregnant and dropped out of high school. Pammy, I think that's the oldest one, I don't think she finished ninth grade. They had their babies, got their state checks, and that's been their life ever since.”

“What about her parents?”

“Lived with her mother. Father, I think she told me he left them when she was seven or eight. He drove a truck and ran off with some woman from Connecticut. A waitress or something. He moved down there and left Missy's mom with the three girls. The mother did the logical thing, which was to start drinking, go on the State, and take her unhappiness out on her kids. Missy did not have a happy childhood.”

I remembered her—how she said the father of her child was a chromosome or something like that.

“I got that impression,” I said. “She has this hard shell. I don't know. This grimness to her.”

“What do you expect, Mr. McMorrow? I don't think there was much to laugh about in her life.”

“Was she like that here?”

“Pretty much. Kind of quiet. Didn't act silly like the rest of the kids. It was like the silly had been beaten out of her somehow.”

“Literally?”

“I don't know. If not literally, then figuratively. You don't have to hit a kid to wound him.”

“Or her.”

“Or her,” Genest said.

“But Missy Hewett came through it somehow. How'd she end up in college? I mean, it doesn't seem like that would have been—”

“A likely destination? No, I guess not.”

“But you got her there?”

Genest paused for a moment. Looked away. When she looked back, her eyes were brighter, almost glowing.

“We got her there,” she said, that same resolve creeping back into her voice. “Well, she got herself there, really. I just gave her a push here, a pull there. When she needed it. It wasn't all that much. She's a very tough kid. Very determined.”

“Where does that determination come from, do you think? She wasn't getting it at home, was she?”

Genest snorted.

“Are you kidding? All she had at home was her mother, who was drunk most of the time, and the succession of drunks her mother brought home. I guess the mom was kind of a barfly. Made the bottle club circuit. Kind of sad, really. From what Missy said, she didn't stop trying to find somebody. Of course, the guys she ended up with were the worst thing for her.”

“So what about Missy?”

Genest got up from her chair. If she'd smoked, she would have lit a cigarette.

“Missy is one of those kids that make me think who we are is something genetic. Or just something you're born with. Something that comes out of nowhere.”

“The piano prodigy with the tone-deaf parents?”

“Who hate music,” she said. “Some kids are just born different from their families. Some, not all, of those kids manage to pull it off. Missy is one of them.”

“Is she smart?”

“Fairly. No genius. But she has this determination. A lot of guts. She got A's because she had decided she was going to get A's. I remember she started to have some trouble in math and I got her some tutoring here at school. She asked me for it. Most kids, it's the parents who want the tutoring. You know, so they don't flunk and get kicked off the basketball team. Missy asked for the tutoring because she was afraid she was going to get a B.”