The Year of the Gadfly (37 page)

 

At school that week, Lily avoided Justin and spent lunch in the spacious handicapped stall on the third floor where she didn't think anyone would look for her. She sat on the ledge over the radiator and stared out over the fields or straight down at the familiar courtyard where a single duckling sometimes poked at stale bread.

In the quiet, Lily dreamed about escape. She imagined walking through days of sunlight, her arms stretched wide beneath the open sky. In this fantasy there was no one to send her inside, but it didn't matter, because she never burned.

Midweek, someone walked into the bathroom. “Hello?” It was a male voice. Justin. Lily held her breath. “Lily?” She heard the first two stall doors creak. Then his face appeared beneath the door of the handicapped stall. “You're hiding from me?” When she didn't move from the window ledge, he slithered under the door. She turned her head to the window.

“If you just tell me what's wrong, I know we can fix it.”

Lily pressed her body against the window. She couldn't make herself small enough.

“I brought you something.” Justin pulled a brown box from his backpack and handed it to her. She opened it and peeled back the tissue paper. Inside a picture frame, pinned to a white backing, was the dragonfly he'd found under the picnic table.

“You can't make me better.” Her eyes were full of tears.

“I can try.”

“Your tournament's coming up.” She ran her finger absently around the frame. “Don't you have useless information to cram?”

“It's not useless.”

Why the hell wouldn't he get mad? She'd insulted him. He was supposed to lash out! Lily looked out the window, her eyes drifting over the woods and hills to where the mountains bled into the horizon. She thought of Justin filling his brain with libraries of facts. The information was endless. He'd never learn it all.

“Don't you ever get frustrated? Don't you ever just want to stop trying? Doesn't that sound like a relief?”

Justin's blue eyes opened into wide circles, as though this question had never occurred to him before. “No,” he said, blinking. “It doesn't.”

MURROW WASN'T HAPPY
with me. I was continuing to investigate on behalf of Prisom's Party, he argued, because I was angry with Mr. Kaplan for canoodling with Hazel behind my back. He said there was no way that anybody with half a conscience would continue spying for that organization after I'd discovered their lies about Edmond Dantes and Thelonius Rex.

But I didn't care. In the forty-eight hours since I'd discovered Hazel and Mr. Kaplan kissing outside the Historical Society, I'd decided to finally nab his car keys. “If I'm going to solve the mystery,” I said to Murrow as I made my way toward the science department, “I'm going in whole hog.”

“So now you're using clichés?” he asked. “Iris, I'm surprised.”

“I'm not using the phrase as a cliché,” I snapped. “‘Whole hog' is a literary allusion to
Huckleberry Finn.
”

“Somebody ate a bowl of Pretentious-O's this morning,” Murrow murmured. I ignored him and directed my attention to the current task. The science department was usually empty at this hour, it being just long enough after school that the student-teacher meetings were over. Mr. Kaplan, meanwhile, was coaching an Academic League scrimmage in the theater. I knew where he kept his keys, because I'd seen him pull them from his jacket pocket on multiple occasions. I stood before the parka now, reached my hand in, and, sure enough, felt the rough serrations of metal.

“You'd think he'd be more careful,” I said. “I mean, just leaving his keys lying around like this? It's idiotic.”

“A certain level of passion, even indignation, is useful, Iris. But you're on the warpath.” I turned to see Murrow, sitting in Mr. Kaplan's desk chair, watching me.

“Go away! I don't want you here. And ‘warpath' is a cliché!” I headed for the door and marched into the hallway. Murrow followed, skulking just behind me.

“Your mother is right about the whole cliché-czar attitude. You shouldn't fault people for every verbal imperfection.”

“If I'm not going to be vigilant, then who will?” I stopped and turned to face him. “I mean, if you give an inch, they'll take a— Shit!”

“You expect too much of yourself, Iris.”

“No,
you're
the one with the impossible expectations. I've read all the books about you, all the transcripts, seen all the video footage. I've spent hours, Ed—hours absorbing your life, trying so hard to be like you, to live up to your standards, to be the kind of person—the kind of reporter—you'd be proud of, but I can't do it. I can't live the way you lived and still function here. I'm just as dirty as everyone else. So just be happy, okay? Be happy that you're still the morality king, the perfect Edward R. Murrow.” I started walking again.

“I'm not real!”

“I get it. You're a figment of my imagination.”

“That's not what I'm talking about, Iris. There is no Edward R. Murrow. There's only the myth of him.”

I halted. I couldn't speak. And Murrow just stood there, in stark relief before a panel of lockers, observing me, like he was waiting for me to make a decision. I'd never really seen his face before this moment, never looked at it as a collection of individual features. But now I noticed the mole beneath his right nostril and the crow's-feet around his eyes, and his thick black eyebrows. His hair was parted on the far left and slicked back. I imagined touching it, and feeling the hardened gel flake beneath my fingers.

Who are you?
I thought.
Do I know you at all?

And as I wondered, Murrow began to waver darkly. And then, like a television on the fritz, he went blurry and snapped out.

I stared at the lockers. Just like me, Murrow was a liar. He'd falsified his CBS application, lied about his age and prior experience, even invented fake degrees. He'd carried on a long-term affair with Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law, leaving his wife alone for nights at a time, lying to her, behaving as if his celebrity status exempted him from his basic commitments and moral obligations. I knew all these things. I knew how easily people ignored facts when they needed a hero. I knew that I'd edited out the parts of Murrow I didn't want to see, simply redacted the hurtful information. I just didn't like thinking about it.

I heard laughter and saw a group of girls some feet away staring. “Whack job,” one of them snickered. “Was she really talking to herself?” another one said. “Somebody needs to have her committed.”

I turned and fled in the opposite direction. What was happening to me? That time at home, when my mother caught me talking to the wall, I'd known Murrow wasn't really there. I'd been imagining, pretending. And maybe I was too old for that, but at least I knew the difference between reality and fiction. And now? My world had become an imbroglio of moral quandaries and deceptions. Maybe I really was crazy. I should have known that Hazel, despite her talk, was no different from any other grownup. I should have expected her and Mr. Kaplan to retreat into their private adult world and leave me on the outside, alone. Good thing I didn't mind being left out. Aloneness is a skill—that's something people don't realize—and I was always terrific at rejecting rejection.

I pushed through the back doors and plunged into the cold afternoon. My eyes watered. I stuffed my hands into my jumper pockets—I hadn't bothered to grab my coat—and marched toward Mr. Kaplan's Subaru, fishing the keys from my pocket. Standing before the car, I hesitated. For a moment I wondered,
What if Ed Murrow could see me doing this?

But he couldn't see me. And even if he could, so what? He was just a human being like any other. Flawed, imperfect, mortal. I'd been so foolish, treating him like a god.

I unlocked the door, climbed into the back seat, and hunched down. The interior of Mr. Kaplan's Subaru was significantly cleaner than Hazel's Saab. (Talk about a compatibility mismatch. Their relationship was clearly doomed.) I searched the various pockets and compartments. Then, under the seat, I found a shoebox of papers. On top was a handwritten letter on Mariana Academy letterhead.

 

Dear Jeffrey,

I wanted to tell you again how distraught I am over the accident and how sorry I feel about your loss. I want to do whatever I can to make your lives easier during this incredibly difficult time. Regarding your concern about preserving the accident site for inspection, I have called my contacts at both newspapers and am assured that the details we agreed upon will not appear in print. I, too, would rather this information be suppressed in order to protect Lily's privacy. As for your other question, Lily refuses to say why Justin drove over that evening. I'm sure she knows, and I'm equally certain she'll come around.

My deepest condolences,
Elliott Morgan

 

So that was why the exact location and cause of death remained absent from the newspapers—Lily's father had made a phone call, and the editors had done his bidding. But why keep this information secret?

Next I dug up Justin's death certificate. It resembled the personal-info section of an application: Name, DOB, Permanent Residence. I imagined what would have happened if this death certificate had accidentally ended up with a bunch of admissions officers.
Well, he went to a good high school, but I'm not sure his death is Harvard material.
I grimaced and kept reading.

Severe fracture to the head,
the certificate said.
Victim died on impact.

But impact with what? The car didn't crash into a pocket of air.

I flipped through more documents, and there it was: the police report. My blood pounded in my ears. The statement described Justin Kaplan driving a 1989 Peugeot down Church Street at approximately 4 a.m. when his car slipped on black ice, spun out of control on the severe slope of the street, and crashed into a large oak tree outside 95 Church.

Ninety-five Church was Lily Morgan's address—my address. Justin had died outside my bedroom window.

I remembered seeing the tree when my mother and I first arrived at the Morgans'. I remembered its imposing size, its lofty, gnarled branches. In my mind's eye I saw these branches waving erratically, as though dancing to a strange and sinister tune. A boy had died beneath them, only feet from where I'd been living.

With trembling fingers I pulled the next pages from the box. It was getting dark outside, and I held the papers up to the window to catch the last light. Now I was looking at a series of numbered sheets. Mathematical equations sprawled across the first few, but as I flipped through the packet, I began to see images too: quick sketches of a car on a hill; markers representing the hill's slope; the hood's angle against a tree; and the location of the black ice. I turned to the last page to find the complete image of the accident site: car, ice, tree—and, drawn in the middle of the page—the four-eyed demon of Prisom's Party.

My brain felt like a hard drive at capacity. But the answer was there, in a few short words scribbled below.
Face spooks J, car swerves, hits ice, loses control, impact.

Impact.

No wonder the four-eyed monster on the bathroom mirror had spooked Mr. Kaplan. No wonder he'd hurled his bag at the demon's face on the Trench wall. Mr. Kaplan wasn't afraid of Prisom's Party at all; he was furious because their symbol had killed his twin.

I thought about all the things that linked Prisom's Party across the generations. Their members were artists—painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and above all storytellers. The yarns they spun were like spider silk, sticky and ensnaring. Justin Kaplan had unwittingly wandered into their web.

I sat back and shut my eyes, watching a picture swirl up out of the dark and come into bright, digital focus. I saw Justin Kaplan speeding toward Lily's house in the dark, the demon seeming to leap out of the road. I imagined his heart bursting with fright as his hands lost control of the wheel, as his tires hit ice and the tree rushed forward as though to greet him. Justin's death itself had been a kind of performance piece, the climax of a nefarious drama. Was there a video of this too, I wondered, playing in some gallery in New York City or Berlin to audiences who didn't realize they were watching something real?

Was Lily responsible for this? She'd refused to explain why Justin came to her house in the middle of the night. She'd disappeared after the accident. And then, there was
Sacrificial Lamb:
hard evidence of her betrayal. She could easily have drawn the demon on the street outside her home and lured Justin over, knowing the monster would be there to send him on a treacherous collision course. And maybe she had a motive, but maybe she just liked being part of a project, playing the role of creator.

The day I first arrived in Nye had seemed inconsequential, when in fact I'd fallen deeply into Lily's world. It frightened me to look back at my former self and see all the awful ways in which I'd wised up. I didn't want to be like Lily, a pawn of the Party. I was through with them.

But my investigation wasn't over. My journalism was supposed to change people's lives. A naïve goal, maybe, but Murrow had done it. Lieutenant Milo Radulovich was discharged from the Air Force because his sister read Serbian—i.e., “communist”—newspapers. Murrow's first broadcast against McCarthy took up Radulovich's case and led to the lieutenant's reinstatement. Like Murrow, I would be an advocate. Mr. Kaplan and I harbored the same dark shadows, and I understood his grief. So I would uncover what really happened to Justin—accident, suicide, or devious plot—and in so doing, restore Mr. Kaplan to his pre-grief state. I would help him heal.