In the Dead of Summer (21 page)

“I’m not running anywhere,” I told Flora, “even if,” my voice nearly broke with joy, “even if, as it appears, I wouldn’t be running blind.”

“THIS EXPEDITION IS STUPID,” MACKENZIE SAID. WE
parked his car in my spot in the alley behind the school. The Mustang, not sufficiently damaged to be covered by my insurance, had been towed to a semi-schlocky body shop that promised overnight magic, and Mackenzie didn’t think graffiti would strike twice in the same parking spot. “I’m only going along because I don’t think you should be going anywhere at all tonight. And surely not alone.”

“I’m fine,” I muttered.

“Yeah, right. You still have a patch of bright red in your hair, as if your scalp were bleeding. And red dots around your eyes.”

“They said they’d wear off.”

“An’ you don’t have much in the way of eyelashes.”

“That’s not a real handicap, is it? Besides, the sunglasses help.” I looked like a termite, but I was trying to be gallant about it. My eyes were working—working well enough to make out a fine spray of pinky-red paint on the ground near where I’d stood this afternoon.

“The point is—somebody’s after you,” Mackenzie said in a low and lethal voice. “You’re a target. You could at least lay low.”

“Back down, be intimidated? Play by their rules? I can’t. It would make the future much scarier than anything happening now.”

Five was picking us up around front. I would have gladly chauffeured, but Mackenzie’s VW does not seat a trio gracefully, particularly when one of the group has a log leg. “What is my cover story for going there? Who am I supposed to be?” he asked petulantly. This was accompanied by grimaces and grunts as he insisted on extricating himself from the car without assistance.

“Look, C.K., I’m glad to have you along, but it was your idea, remember? You’re going as my friend, if you go—but you don’t have to. I asked to borrow your car, if you recall. And even with that, Five could have picked me up. This isn’t going to take long. I want to see what I can find out, and nothing would be made better if I sat in my home instead of the Truongs’. And Five’s along. I can manage.”

“Five,” he muttered. “What kind of name is Five?”

I glanced at him. Some macho competition was in progress even before the players met. “A man without a name is not in a position to challenge somebody else’s nickname.” I wondered how I’d manage the introductions. “C, this is Five” sounded like inept spy-talk. I nonetheless explained the
Bartholomew Dennison business. “Maybe you’d like to decipher your lack of a name while we’re at it?”

“I don’t like the sound of this guy. Too hail fellow well met.” Mackenzie was finally out of the car. “Oh, forgot to give you this in the confusion,” he said. “I got what you wanted, the contents of April’s book bag.”

The slip of paper he passed me listed, in his handwriting, a cerise canvas wallet with two dollars and thirty-seven cents and ID, a dark pink lipstick, a student assignment calendar, a paperback dictionary, a rolled up rain hat, a three-subject notebook, house keys, seven student discount bus tickets, an apple, a copy of
People
magazine, a flyer advertising a series of Taiwanese films to be shown on Penn’s campus, an environmentally correct spray bottle of something called Hair Scruncher, and
Huckleberry Finn
,
property of the Philly Prep library, not due for another week.

“Where’s her work?” I asked. “
Romeo and Juliet
and something about immigration—the paper she was writing? See? The newspaper said her backpack had schoolbooks in it, but
her
books aren’t actually here. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Uh-huh,” Mackenzie said with little interest. He was looking behind me. “You know her?” he asked.

I did, to my regret. I watched her squatty figure determinedly bear down on us. “Evening!” Aldis Fellows said.

I made introductions, and took a step away, toward the front of the building where Five would be waiting.

“Would you look at that!” Aldis gestured at the unimpressive back of the school. “That’s what eats the budget and doesn’t let us have books or films we need. A disgrace!”

“You mean the paint spray?” I asked.

“The what? I mean those lights!”

Three barely visible bulbs illuminated the recessed back door.

“This citadel of learning does not seem to know that the days are longer in summertime. The sun has not yet set, and yet lights blaze away, burning energy and limited funds. No one has the intellect to reset the timer! It’s all wasted resources around here—false alarms ringing midday, lights on before dark—”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. The woman had the ability to make me feel responsible for the decline of Western civilization, as demonstrated in the three wrongly burning lights. I was relieved she didn’t seem to know who’d set off the afternoon’s false alarm.

“Excuse us, ma’am,” Mackenzie said softly but firmly.

Aldis nodded, and we made our limpy, slow way around to the front of the building. “She may be the single angriest woman I’ve ever met,” I said.

Five’s dark green sedan waited at the curb. “A narc car,” Mackenzie said. “What’s the guy afraid of?”

Two teachers on a mission to console parents, and Mackenzie behaving as if Five and I were having a tryst. “It’s hard to buy a Maserati on a teacher’s salary,” I said. “He has an ordinary car, what’s it to you?

“Five, this is my friend, Mackenzie,” I said as I tried to hold the backseat door open for the invalid. However, he looked affronted, his manhood questioned, so I left him on his own.

“Mackenzie?” Five asked. “Sorry, I didn’t catch the first—”

I climbed in the front. “Crispin,” I said. “It means curly-haired, and isn’t that appropriate? Did you have lots of hair when you were born, Crispin?”

The detective arranged his right leg in a diagonal across the back of the car. “Hitting
What to Name Your Baby
again?” he murmured.

I had, indeed. At least the C’s. “St. Crispin was the patron saint of shoemakers.”

“Then are you a cobbler?” Five asked. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Scion of a shoemaking dynasty, perhaps?”

“No,” Mackenzie said.

Rude, rude, which prompted a need on my part to make social noises. “Or like Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the American Revolution. That’d be a name you’d know, Five, wouldn’t you? Five teaches American history,” I babbled. “Knows all kinds of things about Philadelphia, too, even a poem about Peppers!”

“Interesting,” Mackenzie said. “Well, I’m not of the Attucks branch. Not the scion of a slave dynasty, either, far as I know.”

Five’s laugh was forced.

“Mackenzie’s been reading a lot of history this summer, while he recuperates.” I sounded like a nervous hostess at the start of a bad cocktail party. Come on, somebody, pair up and mingle!

“I noticed. Ski accident or what?” Five asked with minimal interest. It doesn’t take a whole lot for men to feel slighted, and somehow, both men already did.

“Or what,” Mackenzie said. “Bullet misplacement. Into my leg. I’m the scion of a bullet-ridden branch of the service.”

“Sorry,” Five said, “I’m not following.”

“Special division of the Philadelphia Police. C.O.C.—Cops on Crutches,” Mackenzie said. “You know these new laws—can’t discriminate against us crips. Our motto is: We’re hobbled but hot.”

We were silent most of the rest of the ride into the Southwest section of the city. Five gallantly, I thought, did not comment on my splotched skin, mottled hair, or missing eyelashes. Nor did he comment on the outside scenery, which was no more aesthetic than my recently painted face was.

We drove up Woodland Avenue, past boarded and steel-sheathed stores. Past paving dense with broken glass and wire-fenced playgrounds that looked like Bosnia on a bad day. No one needed statistics to know this was one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in the city. And no one needed to point out that this was not the Southwest with which decorators had fallen in love.

There was a pervasive grayness despite the orange sunset sky, the leafy attempts of curbside trees, and the occasional hydrangea on a tiny front lawn or pot of petunias hanging from a porch support. And the tension was almost palpable. We were a nondescript car with three riders, but a great deal of curbside energy went into checking us out as we passed.

“A lot of ethnic strife around here in the past,” Mackenzie said.

I remembered ten years ago, when I was in college, a black family had bought a house on an all-white block around here and they were burned out. Thugs set the house on fire. After we’d thought the Civil Rights Movement had to do with the South.

“Right,” Five said. “Ever since the influx of Asians and blacks. Used to be Irish, Italians, Russians, Germans,
and Brits, then, mid-century—”

“I meant in the
past
.”

I felt yellow fever approaching again.

“Swedes took it from the Lenni Lenapes, then the Dutch threw the Swedes out, then the Brits threw the Dutch out.”

“When?” Five asked.

“Sixteen hundreds.” My history’s older than your history, so there. That ended that conversational tack, and all was silent until we reached the Truong home.

April’s parents were small people who looked as if they’d been sandpapered close to the bone by time and circumstance. They lived in a narrow brick row house that had seen better days inside and out, and they sat close together, hands clasped, on a love seat that had probably been nondescript when it was in its prime.

We were seated across from them, on unmatched straight-back chairs. Cups of tea and a plate of delicate cookies were on the table in front of us. A photograph of April in a bouffant white dress—first communion, perhaps?—was on top of the TV.

I apologized for my dark glasses and said I had an eye problem. They looked confused. I moved on and said how fond I was of their daughter, and how I wanted to do anything I could to help her family and the search for her. I said what a bright student she was, how much I expected a good future for her, how impressed I’d been by her work and her attitude.

Her parents smiled weakly and nodded. Now and then her mother wiped at her eyes and swallowed hard.

April’s brother Thomas, pencil-thin, wore a T-shirt that had a painted tombstone with VO
VAN TRAN
written on it. Custom-made mourning shirts were a local growth industry. Thomas sat on the worn arm of an overstuffed chair and helped his parents with their conversational English. I had the distinct impression that he’d been coerced into being part of the gathering, but I had the equally distinct impression that Thomas Truong wouldn’t be an easy person to coerce.

April’s parents spoke in a mix of English and what I assumed was Vietnamese.

“My parents explained that the police have not been back,” Thomas said when they were finished. “Not since that first time.”

“Did they question other people who knew—know—April?” I asked. “For example, the boy who was killed outside the school—the one on your shirt—Vo Van—could there be any connection between that terrible event and April’s disappearance?”

The older Truongs inhaled in unison at the mention of Vo Van, and watched their son nervously.

Thomas’s posture became defiantly rigid, his chin tilted upward. “My sister’s disappearance is not the fault of a Vietnamese, of our neighbors,” he said. “There is an unfairness toward us, toward my people. The truth is that while my sister has very little sense about the people she favors, Vo Van was not one of the people she favored. There can be no connection.”

“Of course, we know April only through school,” Five said quickly. “And only for a few weeks. She was—is—a promising student, but I—we naturally feel deep concern about her disappearance, and wondered if perhaps there was anything she had said—about school—that might help the police find her.”

Thomas sat up even straighter and spoke. “I do not understand.”

“Do you feel the police were thorough enough about April’s life outside your home?”

Thomas translated for his parents, who looked at each other, then shook their heads. How would they know if the police had failed to ask something significant about a portion of April’s life they didn’t share?

“Perhaps something about school,” Five said. “Did she mention anything that worried her?”

“Many things worry all of us, including April. But my parents are tired when they come home,” Thomas said. “And then there are the little children. April did not return from her work until nearly midnight, when they would be asleep. I do not think there were many long conversations about school.”

“Then with you? You picked her up from work.”

“Many times,” he said. “Not always. We did not talk a great deal.”

“Why did you pick her up?” I asked.

“My sister had no car. It is a dangerous city. She might have made an unwise choice of transportation otherwise. She did not always have sense about the people she favored. She needed to be protected. From herself.”

From Woody. Thomas had thought he was making sure they didn’t see one another.

“Do you think she might have meant to go away?” Five asked his question slowly, with deliberation and consideration of each word, and he watched intently as the Truongs responded.