The Crazy School (19 page)

I lowered my hands, wanting to tell him more, thinking,
Fuck it if my face is covered with snot
. I held my breath for a minute, trying to make my chest stop shuddering.

Hoyt touched my shoulder.

“Please,” I said. “Whatever happened last night, Fay and Mooney deserved better. They
mattered
.”

“I know they did, Ms. Dare. And please let us know if there’s anything you need down at the station.”

I hunched down in the patrol car’s backseat as it pulled out of the gates, headed for Stockbridge. My hands were cold, and I shoved them deep into my jacket pockets. I touched the half-empty box of birthday candles, surprised when something sharp poked into my fi ngertip. I scooped my hand under the contents of my pocket and pulled everything out slowly.

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Four objects rested at the center of my palm: the candles, my lighter and cigarettes, and the silver crescent moon of Fay’s necklace.

Its clasp was fastened tight, but the chain was busted—tiny links twisted open at the break as though it had been snatched off her neck in a hurry.

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26

We didn’t stop in Stockbridge, just kept on driving.

“Be going to the state police barracks in Lee, ma’am,” the guy at the wheel explained. “Something like this, Stockbridge calls us in. Our branch of Troop B patrols sixteen towns locally.

Five hundred fi fty square miles.”

I thought of Arlo Guthrie singing about how Stockbridge had “three stop signs, two police offi cers, and one police car.”

Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?

Cartwright was sure to appreciate me singing half a bar of

“Alice’s Restaurant” once they had me sitting on the Group W

bench there.

Especially after they ran my fi ngerprints.

Especially once I told them I had Fay’s necklace in my pocket.

I touched the point of that silver moon again, rocking it back and forth under the pad of my thumb while I wondered how the hell it had gotten there.

I remembered Lulu telling me not to go outside without 1 7 8

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my jacket on the night before, and I remembered ignoring her admonition.

For a second I wondered if Fay had tucked the necklace into my pocket herself, to say goodbye. Maybe she and Mooney really had committed suicide?

Except Fay would have unhooked the clasp, not broken the chain. Or
asked Mooney to unhook it for her.

Someone else took it off her neck. Not gently—the chain was slender but well made.

And now I’d touched the pendant, probably ruined any chance of fi nding out who that someone was.

I pulled my hand away, too late. Nothing on the surface of Fay’s moon now but my own fi ngerprints.

Prints that were on fi le at a police station in upstate New York—enshrined in
some little folder, a study in black-and-white—because I’d been the fi rst person to arrive at the scene of another murder the year before.

I shifted in my seat.

Looked at the back of the young cop’s close-cropped head.

Wondered whether I should show him the necklace right then and there.

He eased the car off Route 20 and onto Laurel Street. The state police barrack was a solid old brick building at the corner.

Tall narrow windows marked each of its two stories, with a dor-mered third row jutting out from the low-pitched white roof.

My driver walked me inside before handing me off. I fi lled a crimped-foil ashtray with the stubs of my remaining Camels, waiting for Cartwright in a small back room. It contained two metal chairs and a scarred table but had no windows—just an overhead fl uorescent panel, the kind I always blamed for the 1 7 9

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minor chord of despair in cut-rate department-store dressing rooms.

One of the fi xture’s tubes had developed an arrhythmic tic, its fl icker and buzz compounding my bridle of headache. After cursing the damn thing for twenty minutes, I considered climbing onto a chair to yank it out.

The young guy who’d driven me down stuck his head in the door just before I actually stood up to attempt it.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee?”

I begged him for aspirin, and he took off to fi nd some.

When he returned with a bottle of Bayer and a white cone of water from the offi ce cooler, I asked, “Is my husband here yet?

Tall blond guy?”

“He’s out front, ma’am. We’ve told him it might be a while.”

I could see a wall clock over the cop’s shoulder. I’d been here close to an hour. “Can I talk to him, tell him I’m okay?”

The guy hesitated; he obviously didn’t know what to say but wasn’t about to let Dean come back and hang out with me.

“If he’d like to go home,” I said, “please tell him I can call when we’re done with everything.”

He gave a clipped nod in answer to that, then left me alone again.

I pulled Fay’s necklace out of my pocket and placed it at the center of the table. I didn’t want to lose my nerve when it came to showing the thing to Cartwright, if he ever in fact arrived.

Not that I begrudged him the time, no matter how much I ached for sleep. The crime scene deserved his full attention, and cooling my heels at the station was the least I could do for Fay and Mooney.

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I sparked up another Camel and pondered the riddle of that necklace. Safe to presume Lulu had grabbed my jacket when she left the Farm. She was thoughtful that way.

But then how had the little moon landed in my pocket?

Wouldn’t Fay have noticed someone snatching it off her neck during the party? The idea of someone tiptoeing into Dhumavati’s guest room to plant it on me in the middle of the night was ludicrous.

Nothing made sense.

I stubbed out my smoke and started kneading the tight thin fl esh across my forehead, closing my eyes against the sickly fl icker of light and willing the aspirin to kick in. Finally, I got up and fl ipped the switch by the door, feeling the way back to my seat in the dark.

I crossed my arms on the table and laid my head down. All I could think of was Fay and Mooney lying side by side in the back of that cold van.

I wept myself to sleep, haunted by the image of their faces, veiled beneath black bags that had been zipped unequivocally closed.

I startled awake, squinting, when the lights snapped back on.

A bulky guy stood in the doorway, gray-haired and bull-necked, wearing a sport coat that was tight across his shoulders and a touch short at the wrists.

“Sorry to keep you waiting here so long, Ms. Dare,” he said.

“Not a problem, sir.”

He stepped over to the table and stuck out his hand. I looked him in the eye and shook it.

“Detective Cartwright,” he said.

“Please call me Madeline.”

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Cartwright pulled the second chair back from the table and lowered himself into it, thighs beefy enough that he sat with his legs angled a little apart. He wasn’t fat, just former-fullback thick.

He butted a sheaf of papers and fi le folders against the table’s surface to square them, then laid them fl at in a crisp pile.

“Let’s see what we’ve got so far,” he said, opening the upper-most fi le to reveal Hoyt’s notes.

He skimmed the fi rst page while unbuttoning his jacket, then produced a ballpoint pen, clicked its top, and raised his eyes back to mine.

I pressed my fi ngers down against the tips of the necklace’s broken chain and dragged it across the table to rest, centered, at the head of his paperwork.

“I thought you should see this, sir,” I said. “It belonged to Fay.”

“She gave it to you?”

I shook my head.

“How’d it come to be in your possession?” he asked.

“I found it in my jacket pocket,” I said. “On the drive over here.”

“And do you have any idea how it might have ended up there?”

“Not a one.”

Cartwright exhaled through his nose, teasing the broken chain straight with the tip of his pen, then fl ipping over the little moon. There was engraving on the back.

“I touched it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Didn’t know what it was before I took it out of my pocket—just something sharp when I put my hand in there.”

“You had that jacket with you last night?”

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“I left it at the party. Felt so awful all of a sudden. I just wanted to get outside for some air, then I passed out.”

I explained about Lulu and Pete taking me up to Dhumavati’s apartment, and Lulu washing my clothes after they’d put me to bed.

“You probably know all that from Offi cer Hoyt’s notes,” I said, “but when he took my statement, I didn’t know yet about the necklace.”

“MDL,” he said. “Are those the boy’s initials?”

“Mooney LeChance. I don’t know his middle name.”

“He gave her the necklace?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fay told me she hadn’t taken it off since.”

I watched him move the ballpoint’s tip away from the broken links of chain, tapping it thoughtfully against the table’s edge.

“Doesn’t seem as though she’s the one who took it off this time,” he said.

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

Cartwright looked up at me again. “When I spoke with Dr.

Santangelo this morning, he expressed his profound remorse and grief that two students had chosen to end their lives while in his care.”

I crossed my arms.

“He then added,” Cartwright continued, “that while, of course, he and the entire staff of the Santangelo Academy were deeply saddened by this tragic outcome, he could not truthfully maintain that these two young people having committed suicide came as a complete surprise. Either to himself or to their respective therapists.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I gather, Ms. Dare, that Dr. Santangelo’s last point is not one you agree with.”

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“You gather correctly, Detective Cartwright.”

He smiled at that for a fraction of a second, though I bet he would’ve denied the hell out of having done so.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’d like you to tell me why.”

So I did.

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27

They got me fi ngerprinted at the end of it all, and when I was dispatched from the back rooms of the building, I found Dean still waiting for me, not in the best of moods, his neck all cordy.

He responded to worry by becoming angry.

When Dean is truly pissed off, his eyelids seem to open a little wider than normal, as though there’s a buildup of something hot back there in his skull that wants to get out. A sharp hiss of steam, or sulphur, or maybe tear gas.

Dean looked not at me but up at the old black-rimmed clock on the station wall, its yellowed face over a foot wide.

“Three hours and forty-seven minutes,” he said staring at the clock.

“No shit,” I said. “Could we please go home now?”

He didn’t move, so I started walking toward the front door.

When I was almost there, I heard him stand up to follow me, the soles of his high-tops squeaking on the polished fl oor.

It was cold outside, and my jacket felt thin. The air rasped metallic on the intake, and the afternoon sky was low and 1 8 5

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dark—like some giant hand had clapped a stainless-steel bowl upside down over the surrounding hills.

Dean drew alongside me at the bottom of the concrete stairs.

I couldn’t see where he’d parked, so I slowed to follow his lead, uphill or down, just before the sidewalk bisected our path.

He cut across me to the right. I turned in his wake, jogging to catch up and then stutter-stepping to match his strides down the block. He threw off such a force fi eld of bristle that the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for both of us.

I hustled beside him, off the concrete and along the front edge of a half dozen lawns. My boots punched through a thin crust of ice with each step, making the frosted spindles of grass beneath crackle and pop as I mashed them fl at. Dean’s rusted Mercedes sedan was another block down the street.

I wanted to ask him why he was being such a dick, but the cold sawed at my ravaged throat and I was getting dizzy.

I slowed down until I fell behind him, then stopped to rest against an old station wagon parked at the curb, hands cupped around my mouth to capture the warmth of my breath.

Dean turned around, walking backward. “Bunny, are you all right?”

I shook my head, turned to brace myself against the car, then puked in the gutter, water and bile raining down on the exhaust-blackened chunks of snow at my feet.

I heard Dean pounding back toward me, felt him lift my hair gently to get it out of the way. His other hand rested on my shoulder as I convulsed with dry heaves. He wrapped me in his coat when I’d fi nished.

“So tired,” I said.

He put an arm around my waist to steady me down to the 1 8 6

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curb. “I’m going to get the car. Will you be okay here for a minute?”

“Mmm.”

He pelted away up the street, and I wrapped my arms around my knees, shivering.

I woke up in the dark again but knew right away that I was home this time from the sound of cars hissing through slush in the rotary four stories below.

Shifting onto my side, I saw Dean sitting cross-legged on top of the covers next to me, outlined against our bedroom windows by the soft glow of Pittsfi eld.

“Hey,” I said, my voice ragged.

“How are you doing?”

“Shitty.”

Talking made me cough, the effort hurting my belly and throat.