Impulse (16 page)
Three things happened in the morning, and one of them would change Frank’s life forever. Dexter Light mailed off his documentation and power of attorney to Harlan Mosley—next day express. Rosemary Mitchell slipped her engagement ring and wedding band from her hand and put them away in her jewelry box, and Fletcher Brent, a fourteen-year-old eighth grade student at John F. Kennedy Middle School, threw a three-pound rock onto I-95. He watched in fascinated horror as the stone arced into the middle lane and shattered the windshield of a late model Volvo. The driver, momentarily stunned by rock and glass imploding in his face, swerved into a bridge abutment and hit it head-on at sixty-five miles an hour. All of the occupants of the car, which included the driver’s wife and his two young children, were killed instantly. Fletcher ran all the way home. He would never tell anyone what he’d done.
Frank only knew about Fletcher’s madness when he heard the story on the morning news. He made a point of not commenting on the missing rings, and would have no idea of what Light had done for at least another twenty-four hours, if ever.
Rosemary handed him a fresh cup of coffee and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. They’d eaten a quick breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and gone to the hotel room to make their calls.
“That’s awful,” she said as the newscaster reported the accident. “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“Impulse,” he said. “People do things like that without contemplating the consequences. Then, they either own up or, more often than not, run. If there are no witnesses, whoever tossed the rock will never be found unless or until his conscience moves him.”
“Not a her?”
“No, probably not.” He patted her hand. Not a her. Girls, women, act impulsively, but usually in different ways. A boy would toss a rock onto a busy highway; a girl would make up some awful gossip. Either could be lethal.
He shut off the TV and laid index cards out on the desk. Each had a name and a telephone number. He opened his cell phone and punched in the first number.
“Who’re you calling?”
Frank held up his hand. She shook her head and looked at the cards remaining on the desk.
“Mr. Parker? Frank Smith, one of the alumni in for the weekend. I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but I wonder if you would have time to meet with me for an hour or so this morning. What? Yes, you’re right, most of us have left, but Dr. Darnell asked me to talk to the few faculty members left on the staff who were here twenty-five years ago when—”
He listened for a moment. Rosemary lifted her eyebrows into parentheses.
“Yes, I know, but if you wouldn’t mind doing it one more time….Yes, I do write books and yes, it is possible I might write one about this mystery, but I assure you if I do, names, dates, and so on will be fictionalized….I see, you don’t care. You want your ex-wife to be exposed and would I do that? I, ah, well, I’m not sure how that fits into the story but, I suppose I could….Is there some reason I….Certainly, you’ll tell me at ten this morning. Thank you, yes, goodbye.”
“What was that all about?”
“Hell hath no fury like a schoolteacher scorned? I don’t know. Apparently he’s still angry about a wife who walked out on him twenty-five years ago. The chance to see her excoriated in a book, even if fictionalized, is just too good an opportunity to be missed. He said he could tell me things no one ever heard before.”
She printed
MARVIN PARKER, TEN A.M.
on the schedule sheet. He picked up another card. For the next twenty minutes he made calls. They filled the sheet for the morning. They kept an hour clear at noon, even though some of the appointments would have been easier to make had it been on the lunch hour. But, since they’d be operating separately, they would need time to compare stories.
“No luck with Dexter Light?”
“No. He works, I don’t know where, and I suppose he’s gone there for the day. We’ll try again in the evening.”
***
Harlan Mosley considered himself an ethical man. He served two terms as President of the County Bar Association. His practice, while not large by some standards, earned him a comfortable living. Trent Farragut provided a substantial portion of his legal work. Farragut lived ten miles outside Spartanburg on a restored antebellum plantation. He owned seventeen automobile dealerships in four states and was arguably the richest man in the state, undoubtedly in the county. Harlan owed him, as they say. The question he wrestled with this morning had to do with the contents of Dexter Light’s envelope. He had not been entirely forthcoming with Light. He knew exactly what the contents of the envelope were. He’d put them in it himself when Luella Mae Parker approached him years before.
Harlan grew up with Luella Mae. They both came from what used to be considered the wrong side of town. Both of them had boot-strapped their way out, managed a college education, and moved on with their lives, never looking back, never returning to the old neighborhood. She’d married a man from Maryland, but that hadn’t worked out. She returned Spartanburg, pregnant and broke. She had not lost any of her beauty, and three months after the birth of her son, she snagged Trent Farragut. They were married; he adopted the boy, and she dropped Luella from her name. Mae Farragut.
That spring she’d brought him the documents and made her will. Just in case, she’d said. For old time’s sake, and by way of payment for his legal services, she introduced him to her husband and persuaded the latter to engage Harlan as his attorney. He owed her, too, big time.
Trent Farragut had called and wanted to know if there was anything in Mae’s will that he should know about. Harlan struggled with that all morning. He picked up the phone and called Farragut. He had just left for Atlanta, his secretary said, and asked if it was important.
“No, nothing that can’t wait until next week,” he said and relaxed. Light would probably call before Farragut got back, and then it wouldn’t make any difference if he disclosed the contents or not. He removed the documents one by one. A birth certificate for Dexter Light Parker, four bearer bonds which at the time she bought them were worth twenty-five hundred dollars but were now worth nearly fifty thousand, and photographs—scenes of Luella Mae and a young boy. He fingered the bearer bonds and contemplated his ethical dilemma.
***
“My wife may have lied in her statement to the police,” Parker said. “She had a reason for not being in those woods before two o’clock.”
Frank made a note on the pad in his lap. He didn’t know where this line would take him, but he decided he’d let the little schoolteacher talk, tell his story. Then he would ask questions.
“See, she had this problem. She couldn’t seem to get enough, ah…in the physical relations area.”
“She was over-sexed?”
“Yes, that’s one way to put it. Anyway, I finally had to say to her, enough. You know…every day and night…well, it interfered with my studies. I was enrolled in the Master’s Degree in Teaching program at the Hopkins and I needed time to prepare for my classes, not just the graduate work, but the classes I taught here at Scott. Well, you can see how that must have been.”
Parker sat in an Eames chair, his legs crossed, knee over knee, and fingered his paisley bowtie. He wore a brown shirt, blue slacks, and black loafers with short, gold-colored socks. Frank did not consider himself a style maven, but he knew Marvin Parker could be a candidate in anyone’s contest for worst dressed, either that or he was colorblind. Parker loaded an onyx cigarette holder with a filter tip and lit it, exhaling a plume of smoke at the ceiling.
“The thing is I believe…no, I know…she was having an affair. The sex thing, you see. And I think she met someone that afternoon when the boys disappeared.”
“Why would she lie about the time?”
“Well, if the person she met needed to be protected or something, she could do that by changing the time, you see.”
“But you don’t know if she did, in fact, meet someone.”
“No, not for a certainty, but—”
“But what?” Frank wondered if he hadn’t just wasted an hour of his time.
Parker brushed cigarette ash from the front of his slacks. He jerked his head up and leaned forward, thrusting his face toward Frank. His relative calm replaced with an expression of fury.
“The little slut,” he spat. “She seduced students. She didn’t think I knew, but I did. Everybody knew. How do you think that made me feel? Every upper school boy knew about it. I could hear them sniggering behind my back. For all I knew, any one of them or the entire graduating class might have been in bed with her.”
Frank said nothing. He had met women like this man’s ex-wife. Not many but a few, most of them in Hollywood when he went to watch the filming of his TV series. Either their husbands wallowed in their infidelities, divorced them, or killed them, often enough, the last.
“Well, you may wonder how I know all this. I’m not paranoid, you know. Mrs. Gardiner told me a little. She said I was better off. She was the head librarian, Luella Mae’s boss at the time. Then there was the doctor’s report she tried to hide from me. But I found it.”
Frank waited while Parker stubbed out his cigarette and patted his lips with a handkerchief.
“We weren’t planning on children, you see. Not until I finished my doctorate. We agreed on that. But I think she decided to go ahead anyway. She would throw her pills away, one at a time. She didn’t think I’d notice. But I knew, so I took care of the prevention business myself. But with the activity she engaged in, it was just a matter of time.”
“She got pregnant?”
Parker looked away. Frank thought he saw a tear.
“I showed her the report. She cried and said the baby was mine, that nothing is one hundred percent sure, you know. We had a row. The next day she emptied our savings account and left. I don’t know where she went.”
“You never tried to locate her?”
“No.”
“She said the child was yours?”
“Yes, that’s what she said. I didn’t believe her.”
“Any idea who the father was if it wasn’t you?”
“No. I’ll never know. Sometimes I wonder if she told me the truth and by driving her away, I lost my child. I would like to have had a son.”
Rosemary sneaked a peek at her watch. Susan Banks rambled. It didn’t seem to matter what question Rosemary asked, she insisted on talking about her difficulties with a lazy husband and two insolent teenagers. Rosemary would ask about the missing boys and she would puff, “Boys. Let me tell you about boys…” and launch into a ten-minute detailed monologue about her sons, their shortcomings and most recent scrapes with the law. She did the same for every topic. She only once mentioned anything even remotely interesting; the belief her mother held that her assistant, Mrs. Parker, was in a scandalous relationship with a senior student whose name she could not recall.
“Now you know, we lived on the campus only that one year,” she said. “My mother disliked the regimen living here imposed on the family. But I knew those five boys very well. Potty mouthed nasty little things, they were.”
“Five? You said five but there were only four, Mrs. Banks.”
“Four, five, it didn’t matter, they were like peas in a pod. Could hardly tell them apart. Now you take that Bradford Stark. He turned out all right but the rest of them, well….”
“But the others are dead.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Why did you say five?”
“Well, Muffy and me…that’s Myrtle Daigle…she hated that name…she was the headmaster’s daughter and my best friend at the time. We drifted apart after we moved off campus…we used to go down the hill toward the woods to pick wild strawberries in May and we saw them go in. Five of them.”
“But there is no statement from you in the police records about that.”
“Of course not. They never asked me, and Mother said it probably wasn’t important.”
“Who was the fifth boy?”
“I already told you. You weren’t listening. That’s the trouble with society today. Nobody listens to a word you say.”
“I’m sorry. Who did you say the fifth boy was?”
“Bradford Stark. He works at the Academy now, doesn’t he?”
***
“Now you know it’s a funny thing about that. See, I been driving that there run for maybe seven years back then. Drive downtown took a hour. Load up the order and drive back. Seems like I always got to the front gate at one-thirty, one-forty at the latest. But they say, ‘No, you must have got it wrong, Sam, ’cause someone done fixed the time at two on the dot.’ Well I don’t argue, see. I didn’t have no watch on me that day so I say, ‘Okay, two it is.’”
Frank shook his head. Sam Littlefield sat hunched on a stool in the back room of the school’s garage. He seemed ageless. The sun struggled through a begrimed window high up on the wall and lighted his brown face and startlingly white teeth.
“I remember your daddy. Not you. You was gone time I come to work here, but your father, I knew.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. Fine man. Some folks said he was a little hard but he treated me good.”
Sam had been driving school buses and vans since he was eighteen and had refused retirement twice already. Not an educated man but an intelligent one, and certainly not one given to making mistakes. If he said one-thirty, that’s the time Frank would use. He guessed that since the two o’clock figure came from a faculty member, and a white one at that, the police had ignored Sam’s timing.
***
“My husband does not want to talk to anyone about it.” Mavis Sands looked tired and worn. Some people arrived at fifty trim and alert, like they just stepped off a luxury liner. Others, like Mrs. Sands, staggered in like they’d spent the entire voyage in steerage, dowdy, old, and bitter.
“I understand,” Rosemary said, hoping to soothe the feelings of a woman she feared could very easily dissolve into tears or erupt into anger at any moment. “It can’t be easy for you, even now.”
Mavis Sands’ lower lip began to quiver. “You people,” she whimpered, “come here dragging this all up. I just want an end to it. Can you make an end to it, or are you and that writer fellow just here to exploit us like all the others? It cost me my marriage.”
“Frank Smith is a good and decent man,” she said and realized the moment she said it, she believed it. She smiled at the revelation. The smile seemed to reassure Mrs. Sands and she relaxed, her lip steadied, and she sat back in her overstuffed chair.
“We never got to an end, you know. It’s like all those men who are missing in action back there in the jungle. Where are they? My cousin from Des Moines, he would be much older than me, went missing in Vietnam. They think he was sent to China and then, who knows. My aunt died never knowing. They never buried him. And then, our Bobby…there’s never an end to it.”
Rosemary handed her a tissue and waited while she blew her nose and collected herself.
“If you and Mr. Smith could just do that,” she said.
“If it can be done, we will do it.”
“They went out to play, the way they always did on a Saturday, Bobby and Edward, Teddy, Thomas, and Bradford, the Starks’ boy. The wonderful thing about living on the campus then was they had nearly nine hundred acres of woods and fields to play in. We never worried about them. Every Saturday, Bobby would do his chores. He took the trash out, cleaned up his room, you know how boys are, and off they’d go.”
“You said five boys.”
“Well four or five, maybe six. It depended on who could get away. I never noticed that day. I wish I had. I don’t know why, but as I thought on it over the years, it seems to me that it might be important to know.”
“Bradford Stark is working at the school now. Have you ever asked him?”
“Well, I’ve thought about it but, you know, he couldn’t have been with them that day because of the DISH.”
“Excuse me, the what?”
“DISH. That’s what they called Detention Study Hall. Boys who received delinquency reports were required to report to the study hall on Saturday afternoon. Bradford spent more than a few Saturdays in that place, I can tell you.”
“So he wasn’t with Bobby that day?”
“No, he couldn’t have been. That’s why it must have been four. Jack Blazek was part of that gang, he might have been with them, too, but his mother said he went to the doctor’s office that day. I don’t know if she told the truth. I never trusted that woman. She could be covering up for him. If he knows anything….”
Rosemary wrote
Jack Blazek?
in her notebook.
“Did your son ever say anything about what they did in the woods?”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Sands’ expression quickly turned stormy. Rosemary backed away.
“Oh, nothing really. I just wondered if it were possible they might have told everyone they were in the woods but they could have exited out on the backside and met someone or gone some place they didn’t want you to know about. You know how boys are.” She sounded like Susan Banks.
Mavis Sands’ brows knit together. “You know, I never thought of that. Boys do things like that, don’t they? And they’d never tell us because if they did, they’d be in trouble. Boys are so secretive sometimes.”
“Girls can be, too,”
They exchanged smiles. Oh yes, girls, too.
***
Frank’s cell phone began to break up in the middle of the interview. Jack Blazek lived in Chicago and worked at the Merchandise Mart making a risky living dealing in corn futures. It took them nearly five minutes to establish who Frank was and why he had called. Once done, Blazek continually broke off the conversation to answer another phone or shout to someone nearby.
“Sorry, you were saying?”
“I wanted to know what you can remember about the day your friends disappeared into Old Oak Woods.”
“You a policeman or something? I already went through this with them, and with one of the networks, and some retired cop from the county a dozen times.”
“No, I am not a cop. The headmaster asked me to look into the mystery, I guess, one last time. Put it to bed, so to speak.”
“Well, I’m not the guy you want to talk to. I had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. Really frosted me at the time. We had plans to do some exploring; that’s what we called it, crashing through the woods like jungle hunters. Ned Sparks told me he found something he wanted to show us, something important.”
“What was that?”
“He didn’t say, just looked mysterious and said, ‘Like, wait and see.’ I said, ‘Come on Ned, you can tell me.’ But he wouldn’t. Then they all disappeared and I never did find out.”
“Any guesses?”
“With Ned it could have been anything, anything from a fox’s den to a dead horse. Actually, we did find a dead horse one time. Big day for us.”
Frank heard the static on the phone begin to stretch into longer intervals and knew he would lose Blazek any moment. He thanked him and hung up. He looked at his watch. He had ten minutes to meet Rosemary for lunch.