Impulse (13 page)
Felix Darnell and Brad Stark met Frank outside the building that housed the school’s archives. Since he hadn’t told anyone except Elizabeth Roulx he intended to do some research, he guessed she must have given them a heads-up. Darnell wore a smile that could have deep-fried a bushel of potatoes. Stark, on the other hand, showed no expression at all. His eyes were on Darnell, not Frank.
A pair of sharks, Frank thought, circling an old white whale. Moby Dick, that’s me, Ahab’s nemesis—or maybe Ledezma’s—or maybe I have it backward. Does Ledezma have the harpoon or do I? Hard to say who’s pursuing whom. We are two fencers, thrusting and parrying, each after the same thing but unwilling to help the other get it. Capone and Ness…stop! That’s way too many metaphors for one paragraph. A writer’s curse, he thought. He smiled at his hosts and shook their hands.
“Dr. Darnell, nice of you to come. Not necessary, of course. I only want to sit for a few hours and read through some of your news clippings, yearbooks, that sort of thing.”
Darnell maintained his smile, but his words came out cool, sober. “I hope,” he said, “that you understand the seriousness of this project. Scott is known for its academic excellence and the care we provide our students. I would hate to think of what might happen to the school and to the families involved if this were all to be dragged out into the open again.” He reconfigured his face to an appropriate seriousness.
“The gist of what you are not quite saying is—you don’t want me to write a book about whatever I find, is that right?”
“Well, of course, the decision to do something like that is entirely yours, and I would not want to give the appearance of influencing it, but—”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll change the name of the school.”
“Well….” Darnell looked doubtful. Evidently his attorney told him any attempt to stop a book or sue subsequently for damages to the school’s reputation would be a stretch. He should try persuasion instead. “Could you put us, that is, this fictional school, in another state?”
“I could do that. On the other hand, it might work better if readers were left to guess.” No sense letting the guy off the hook too easily.
“If you don’t figure this out,” Stark cut in, “what then? I mean, a lot of people have come through here trying to untangle this mystery and none have ever succeeded. These were professional people, real detectives, not….But it doesn’t stop people from trying. We’ve even been on television—unsolved mysteries, cold case files, that sort of thing. So what are your chances?”
“Listen, would it matter so much if I didn’t? I write fiction. The mystery of the missing boys is a great plot device whether I figure this one out or not. I don’t have to solve it to write about it, and the truth of the matter? I am not very sanguine about sorting this one out, frankly. It’s been twenty-five years and, as you say, better minds than mine have tried and failed. But I am intrigued by its possibilities, and as a mystery junkie, I think, however remotely, it’s possible. So there we are.”
Darnell’s face collapsed into worry. Stark, on the other hand, looked relieved. Relieved about what, Frank wondered. That the book might not be written after all? Not likely. That the mystery wouldn’t be solved? Why would that be good news to him? He’s their fund raiser and public relations flack, of course. Frank realized he would need to come back to Brad Stark and his peculiar take on solving the mystery—a challenge he had been party to in the first place.
“How about this: if I write the book and name Scott, I’ll assign fifty percent of the royalties to the school.” Now he had them. Like the Godfather, he’d made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. If they had any ethical sense, they could. But he guessed they had none. He’d put the bloody horse’s head in their bed.
Darnell cleared his throat. He’d developed a tic in his right eye. “Well, in that case….” His voice trailed off. Stark paled. Frank turned and descended the steps into the basement.
The Scott Academy archives were located in the lower level of the Upper School girl’s dormitory. Elizabeth Roulx met him in the small space that served as a work area. Darnell excused himself, claiming the press of business. He left Stark to oversee Frank’s studies. The room, or more properly, the basement, smelled of damp and old paper. A small gray steel desk, the sort you see in government offices, sat in one corner. Frank pulled up a chair and arranged his legal pad with handful of pencils neatly in its center. Stark settled in a chair across the desk from Frank. Elizabeth Roulx took Frank’s itemized list from him and went to search for the items he’d requested. Stark spent the next hour interrupting all Frank’s efforts to read. Finally, in exasperation, Frank asked him to leave. Stark looked genuinely startled and started to protest. Elizabeth Roulx, who witnessed it all, assured him she’d be happy to stay with Frank. Stark’s face reddened with embarrassment or anger, Frank couldn’t be sure which, and he huffed out.
He thanked her and she winked. “They want something from you, you know.”
“Well, I did make them an offer, but if its real money they’re after, they may have to wait.”
He turned his attention to a small stack of clippings. They were the same stories Rosemary had pulled from the Internet, except for the pictures. He studied the grainy likenesses, four boys, three age twelve, one age eleven. He wondered about their parents, how they must have felt in that awful moment when the realization their sons were gone for good finally hit them. How they must have felt then, and perhaps even now, knowing there would be no body, no closure—ever. He knew something about that. Without a body, you just never know. Somewhere, some mother or father may still be harboring hopes that…what were their names?…That Teddy or Ned or Tom or Bobby would come walking through the door—knowing it wouldn’t happen but hoping anyway. He pushed away a vision of Sandy Smith. She wouldn’t be coming through his door either.
“Are the parents of any of these boys still around?”
“The father of one is. Aaron Sands teaches music in the middle school.”
“Mrs. Sands?”
“She couldn’t take it, apparently. She left him. I think she lives in Towson. I don’t think she remarried and so she should be easy to find. I will tell you now, Aaron will not discuss this—period.”
“Anyone else on the faculty then still here?”
“Marvin Parker. His wife left him that year. Nobody knows why. I don’t think there is any connection, but you never know. There were rumors about an affair, but no facts. And to answer your question, no, we don’t have her address. He might know where his wife went, though, if you need to speak to her.”
“I doubt it. I’d like to talk to him and to Sands, though. Can that be arranged?”
She said she’d try, and Frank returned to his clippings. He found nothing new or interesting in them and turned to the yearbook. Scott produced an impressive annual, paid for in large part by businesses owned by the students’ parents. He leafed through its pages. Each class had a group picture. Young men—boys in blue-gray woolen dress uniforms and those awful choker collars he remembered—picture day. They were seated or standing in neat rows on bleachers set up for the occasion. He read the names of the sixth grade students, Robert Sands, Thomas Richardson, and Edward Sparks. The fourth boy he found on the previous page with the fifth graders, Theodore Krantz—Bobby, Tommy, Ned, and Ted. He picked up the next year’s book. Same pictures, same bleachers, same smiles. But new boys with different names had taken their places.
Frank thought about his brother. How the yearbook put together the year after he died must have looked—short one smiling face. No mention of his death. No indication he’d ever existed. He resisted the temptation to find his yearbook and look for Jack. Enough was enough. He opened the first book again and studied the fifth and sixth grades, flipping the pages back and forth, reading names, studying faces. It took him three tries with the sixth grade picture before he found it. Bradford Stark with a brooding, familiar face stood at one end of the third tier.
“Stark never told me he knew these boys.”
Elizabeth looked up from her papers. “Stark? Yes, I guess he must have. I never really thought about it, but yes, his father taught here for a while and he would have known the boys. I gather there was a pack of them—all campus kids. You should talk to Stark.”
A pack of them
. Frank had run in a pack when he was their age. George and Kim and Mike were his pack. And Jack.
“Yes, I will. I wonder what else he would rather I didn’t know.” Frank leafed through the remainder of the book. He set it aside and then pulled it back. Another picture had caught his eye as the book fell shut. Senior pictures. Dexter Light.
“My, my, now there’s an irony.”
“How’s that?”
“This boy, Dexter Light, BMOC as we used to say. Corps Commander, president of his class, bound for the Naval Academy, captain of…good Lord, was there anything he wasn’t the captain of? Isn’t he the rather dissolute forty-something who brought this whole thing up? What happened between then and now, I wonder?”
“Nobody knows. He’s an embarrassment to the school. They, that is, Darnell and the poobahs in the Admin offices, wish he’d just go away, but he pops up every year at the reunion to demonstrate that you can be a Scott graduate and a failure.”
Frank put all the material aside and thanked her. She said the addresses of anyone he might want to contact would be in the alumni office or with Stark, if they were anywhere. He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. He’d call Rosemary and set up lunch.
“You wouldn’t know how to access newspapers archives, would you? I tried the paper’s web sites but couldn’t find the door in.”
“You have to go directly to the papers, most of the time,” she said. “There’s too much material for them to post. Your best bet is either a local library, or a general search. You’d be surprised what obsesses people and they dump on the Internet.”
“Library, of course. Thanks.”
He stopped at the alumni office and jotted down several addresses. The human resources office gave him three more and the names of the few people still on the staff in some capacity, who had also been employed twenty-five years before. He did not visit Stark’s office. He wanted to save him for later.
Rosemary followed the hostess to a booth. The restaurant had the requisite number of artifacts and signs suspended from the ceiling and attached to the walls. This outlet, because it stood on what used to be a working farm twenty or thirty years before, had been decorated with implements, tractor parts, and feed advertisements. She surveyed the lot of them, testing herself to see if she could identify any. Rosemary knew a bit about farm life. Scott once boasted a working farm, but it had never really interested her. She thought of herself as a city girl. She recognized a scythe but only because it figured in images of death, The Grim Reaper. She also recognized a rake but did not give herself credit for that. Rakes were everywhere. She wondered what ever happened to restaurants that were just that, a place to eat, whose owners did not feel the need to evoke some geographical area, some sociological theme or historic era. If she wanted to eat in a New Orleans restaurant, she’d fly to Louisiana.
Grumpy, grumpy. What’s got into you this afternoon?
“Be still. I don’t need you now.”
“Pardon me?” Her waiter hovered over her, a confused look on his face. She hadn’t noticed his arrival. He couldn’t be more than sixteen.
Eighteen. You have to be at least eighteen to wait tables in a restaurant that serves spirits. Or is it twenty-one?
“I’m sorry, I was daydreaming,” she said and smiled at the boy/man. “I’ll have an iced tea. I am waiting for someone to join me. We’ll order when he comes.”
“Certainly. Will that be sweetened or unsweetened?”
“Oh, ah…sweetened, I guess.”
“Raspberry, mango, or strawberry?”
“What? Just plain, please.”
“We don’t have sweetened plain iced tea.”
“Then bring me unsweetened iced tea, and something to sweeten it with.”
“Sweeteners, sugar, and sugar substitutes are on the table,” he announced and swept away to attend to his other customers.
She glanced at her watch. She’d arrived early. She rooted through her purse for a mirror, positioned it a foot or so from her face and inspected her makeup. She did not wear much—enough to cover Frank’s remembered freckles, a little blush, some eyeliner and lipstick. She sighed at the lines around her eyes. Crow’s feet. They looked more like turkey’s feet, maybe Big Bird’s feet.
We’re not buying into the “you’re not old’’ business, are we?
“Why do you always have to yank the fun out of everything?
Somebody has to keep you from making a fool of yourself.
“No, that’s wrong. You are the manifestation of my loneliness, that’s all. And that could end soon.”
He could be a murderer.
“I don’t care.”
Her tea arrived. The server gave her an odd look and hustled away.
Frank appeared in the entryway. She waved to him. He waved back, said something to the hostess, and made his way to the booth. He slid in beside her and before she could react, kissed her on the cheek.
“I hope PDAs don’t embarrass you,” he said and smiled.
“Sorry? PD whats?”
“Isn’t that what they were called in your school? They were in mine—Public Displays of Affection, PDAs.”
“Oh, those. I’d forgotten. Oh my, yes. Big trouble from headmistresses and chaperones for that. My goodness, how quaint we must seem to younger people now. My son is already worried about my granddaughter. He wants her on some contraceptive regimen. She’s only twelve, for goodness’ sake, but he tells me the whole group of them are sexually active and he can’t think how else to protect her.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told him to teach his children to respect themselves and their families, to say no, and to wait until the experience held some meaning. He just rolled his eyes and said, ‘That’s easy for you to say, Mom,’ and changed the subject.”
“My daughter told me one of her neighbor’s teenage girls was bugging her for breast implants. She said all the other girls were getting them for graduation presents.”
“No. What did the mother say?”
“She said, and I am here quoting my daughter, but I cannot reproduce the tone of her voice, she said, ‘Only if you get a B+ average.’”
Rosemary felt herself blushing as he spoke. She never did get used to talking about sex. Not because she had a problem with it. Three months into her marriage she discovered the exhilaration, the sheer exuberance of it. That was not something either her mother or her “health classes” had prepared her for. However much her friends may have thought of her as prim or prudish, she and George knew how to give and receive pleasure. But talking about it still challenged her.
“You’re blushing,” he said.
“Too much sun yesterday. What did you learn at the school?” She needed to change the subject fast or she might start thinking about him in other ways.
Carnal thoughts?
“Ah, quite a lot, actually. For example, the Director of Development, Stark—you remember the shortish man with the tallish wife?”
“Everybody knows Stark,” she said. “Remember, I saved you from him at the dinner?”
“Right, I forgot. I assumed everyone is as dense about who’s who as I am. I forget you have been in the flow for years and I have not. Anyway, he lived on the campus and played with those boys, in the same class with three of them. In different circumstances, he might have disappeared, too. Funny thing though, he never mentioned it. Then, the father of one of the missing boys is still on the faculty. His wife lives in Towson. Elizabeth Roulx says the father won’t talk, but the mother might. We can check her out tomorrow. There are some other people who were there at the time who we can talk to as well. Let’s see, including a bus driver, the daughter of the then head librarian, and another English teacher. What did you get from your contacts at the police?”
“From them, nothing. Even my friend the judge couldn’t spring the reports. But, the retired cop came through for us. He had his own copies. He told me he never liked the way the investigation went and he’s been digging through the case on and off ever since.”
“He’s working it as a cold case, I guess. Does he have a theory?”
“No, that’s the problem. He said he looked into every conceivable angle—pedophiles, drug dealers, serial killers, you name it. He’s scoured the Internet, contacted other jurisdictions—his word. I guess he meant other police departments and—nothing. When I talked to him all he could do is shake his head. He made me copies of everything he had. We can read through them this afternoon. He said if we came up with something, to call him. He’s lived this mystery for a quarter of a century and wants an answer as badly as the parents, I think.”
They ordered. While they waited, Frank shuffled through the stack of papers she handed him. He held his reading glasses up to the light, squinted at them, then polished them with his necktie. Men, she thought, never seem to have the equipment they need with them in spite of all their pockets. Women were severely limited when it came to pockets—at least women of her generation were. She remembered seeing a young girl at the mall wearing cargo shorts and envied her. The problem with men seemed to be they couldn’t remember to shift the contents of their pockets from one jacket to another. They ought to give up their macho ways and start carrying purses. The only man she’d ever met who seemed adequately supplied with whatever he needed was an artist she dated briefly right out of college who wore the same jacket every day. It smelled of turpentine and linseed oil. She couldn’t remember him in any other. He daubed Impressionist-like landscapes but didn’t sell much, and she lost touch with him when she met George Mitchell.
She nibbled at her sandwich and sipped iced tea. Frank put down the papers and attacked his lunch. They ate in silence. On two occasions, she looked up and caught him staring at her. On the third, she put her glass down and stared back.
“What?” he said.
“You were studying me, I think.”
“No, I—”
“You were. You were sizing me up like a stamp collector trying to decide whether to invest a huge sum on a particular bit of used postage. Or would it be experienced postage?”
“For stamps, used would be correct, and I wasn’t.”
“Then what were you doing? I saw you, Frank. Not an ogle, not a glance either. You were giving me the once over.”
“Okay, if you must know, I was trying to remember what you looked like when we were kids. I could have done that a few days ago. I hadn’t seen you for years and so my memories were locked in time. But now that I’ve had the pleasure of your company for a few days, the new data, so to speak, has displaced the old. So I’m studying this face so I won’t forget it later.”
“That’s a very pretty speech and I don’t believe a word of it. I’m a stamp and you are a philatelist, admit it.”
“What do you call someone who collects butterflies? I’m one of those if I must be anything. You are much too beautiful to be a stamp.”
“A lepto…something…lepidopterist?”
“The very word.”
She examined his face in turn. Nothing butterfly-like about him. He looked weathered and—and what? Experienced. It fit him. And behind the eyes, buried deep down in there somewhere, she saw pain.
“Are you collecting?” she asked.
He sat back and laughed. “Well, maybe I am, at that.”
You’re falling for this guy. Doesn’t the missing wife worry you?
“You know what? I’m okay with that.”