I’d spent a lot of that ride with my eyes closed, either in terror or in bliss, but, “Yes,” I said, “I probably can.”
“Then let’s go there. He wanted you to see it for some reason, maybe so you’d tell me about it, and then I’d go out there to investigate.”
“You’re not going in to work at all today?”
“I’m calling this work.”
“Geof, did you tell Sergeant Meredith or anybody else official about that confession tape of Clemmons?”
“God, I wish it’d rain again.” He took off his jacket and draped it over his left arm, undid his tie and put it in one of the pockets in the jacket, then undid the top button on his shirt. Finally, he answered me. “No, I didn’t, Jenny.”
“What about the fact that the Mayers built that ramp?”
“You’ve been with me, you know I haven’t had time to tell anybody.”
“You phoned into the station from Hardy’s office, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes …”
“But you just didn’t happen to mention any of this.”
“Well, no.”
I sighed. “Then maybe you’d better fill out a job application for my foundation. Keep this up, and you’re not going to be a cop very much longer, are you?”
“Ah, well,” he said in a cynically amused tone. “It’s always good to have employment options, isn’t it?”
I took hold of his arms and turned him around to face me and to confront the most important new fact we’d been avoiding.
“So. It’s a boy, hmm?”
His eyes focused on my forehead. “Looks that way. A hundred and sixty-eight pounds, sixty-three inches long.”
“Father doing well?” I asked him, trying for a light tone.
“Um.”
Which was more than could be said for either the mother or the “stepmother,” I thought but refrained from uttering. I did say, “How positive are they, Geof?”
“Ninety-nine percent positive, based on blood types and blood proteins.”
“I guess that’s pretty definite, all right.” He started to pull away from me, but I put my arms around him and wouldn’t release him. “Are you happy about this, Geoffrey?” His body felt restless in my hot, imprisoning embrace. He muttered over my head, “Happy doesn’t enter into it, Jenny.”
That’s what I was afraid of even if I didn’t believe for a second that he really felt that way. This was a man who had always wanted to be a father. And now he was.
“Congratulations anyway,” I said and kissed the point of his chin, before letting him go. This was not the moment to tell him the truth of what had been tearing me apart ever since David Mayer had walked into our lives: A week before, I had decided that with Geof turning forty, if we were ever going to get pregnant, we’d better do it now. I would tell him—happily, I hoped—that I wanted to stop using birth control so that, with luck, we’d have a child to love for his next birthday or at least one soon after that. Since I’d made that decision, I’d gotten increasingly excited about “giving him” what he seemed to want more than anything else in the world.
And now, out of the blue of an August day, he had a ready-made child—a distracting, troublesome son whose very real existence had almost instantly dissipated, possibly forever, any desire I ever had to bear children of my own. So much for my “gift,” which now seemed like a terrible idea, a mere sentimental notion born of love and idealism, all too easily thwarted by reality. How stupid! What had I thought I was going to do? Hand him an infant and say, “Here, darling, it’s all yours!”
I was filled with self-loathing for a moment, until from somewhere inside me came a more gentle voice, one that said, “Hey, it’s all right. The fact that you don’t want to have a baby doesn’t make you a bad person. You’ve got reasons, kiddo, including a history of mental illness in your family that you don’t want to pass on to an innocent child. It’s okay. You can’t help it. The world will keep revolving. Geof knew this was a possibility when he married you. You haven’t lied about anything, not about your real feelings. So don’t start now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured in reply to it.
But that moment of acceptance didn’t at all keep me from feeling in the very next moment completely sorry for myself and guilty toward Geof and furious at the boy who’d changed my mind.
“No,” the gentle voice in my soul quietly corrected me again. “The boy didn’t change anything about you; he is the one who has given you the gift—by forcing you finally to acknowledge this one very important part of who you really are.”
“What are you thinking?” Geof asked me back in the Jeep.
Oh, my intuitive love … he knew me!
“Of how to get to where we want to go,” I told him truthfully. “I guess we’d better stop by the school first.”
The car was already moving in that direction.
“That’s exactly where I’m headed,” he agreed.
I know, I thought with love. All of your roads lead to David. Maybe I could help him along his journey. Not a bad gift after all.
21
AS WE TROD THE HALLS OF OUR ALMA MATER, I said, “I love the feel and smell of schools, don’t you?”
“No, they make me feel claustrophobic.” Geof was looking from one side of the corridor to the other as if searching for a way out. “They make me feel like doing something rude in public. They make me feel like lighting a joint, even though I haven’t smoked anything in probably ten years. They make me feel like talking back to somebody, I want to let loose with a stream of profanity, I want to …”
“All right!” I laughed and grabbed his left elbow to hold.
He glanced down at me, looking surprised at the firmness of my grip.
“I don’t want you cutting school right now,” I warned him.
Students looked up at us curiously from inside their classrooms as we walked past. Teachers’ voices jarred the air, like different radio stations turned up too loud. Somewhere a couple of locker doors slammed shut, and everywhere there was that smell that only schools have and that echoey sound and that odd slanting light in the halls.
“Let’s get this over with quickly,” Geof growled.
But me? I could have quietly taken a seat at a desk in one of the classrooms, preferably English Lit, and stayed all semester.
* * *
Geof did not explain to the principal, Dr. Nellie Fellows, his actual connection with David and the Mayer family. “We’re distantly related,” he said. And she didn’t press for more, as she appeared much more interested in Geof’s function as a cop than in any role he might have as a relative. I wondered later if he’d have been more forthcoming if she had been anything but the principal of a high school and therefore a member of a species of which he was by nature suspicious. “Why did you want to see me, Dr. Fellows? Are you having some problem with him?”
She was a woman in her early forties with very short blond hair and a rather delicately boned face and figure, which was well covered up with a calf-length full cotton skirt and a matching cotton knit sweater—a long-sleeved, thighlength turtleneck—all in a flattering rust color that brought out the high color in her complexion. Her office was air-conditioned, which accounted for all the clothes, but I wondered how she stood it when she walked outside in the rest of the school. An attractive woman, Dr. Fellows also had large blue eyes whose warmth of expression she controlled with an inner thermostat that appeared to be able to go from a heat wave to an ice age in an instant. At the moment, we were still in the temperate zone of her initial response to us.
“We’re having a problem about him,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Graffiti …”
Geof and I “looked at” one another without even turning our heads to do so.
“But before I explain that,” Dr. Fellows said, interrupting herself, “Fm afraid we have a more immediate … problem … and I’ve called down his teacher for last period to talk to us about it.”
It seemed th
at David had not turned up for his sixth-period class, although he’d been in all of his classes up until then.
“He just went to the bathroom,” his teacher exclaimed, looking bewildered when she arrived to explain the student’s sudden absence. “And he didn’t ever come back.”
The teacher’s name was Esther Gaines, she was tall and slim, a lively, attractive woman with dark hair and eyes and an intelligent, energetic air about her. Her subject was senior honors math, otherwise known as college calculus.
Both teacher and principal agreed this was not like David. He was a well-behaved kid, they agreed, a student who scored far above average on standardized tests—hence, the honors math—but who didn’t work up to his potential in class, a very quiet kid, definitely a loner with no friends they could identify, at least not since his parents’ deaths, but he was no problem to the school, never had been.
“Except that he doesn’t seem very interested,” his teacher said, looking a little embarrassed, a little discouraged. “Sometimes I think we only bore him.”
“He had friends before his parents died?” Geof asked.
“He seemed to, but now he’s always alone.”
Dr. Fellows also told us about the graffiti that had appeared that morning on the blackboards of all of the rooms where David had classes that day. The janitors had caught it early and shown it to the teachers—who called in the principal—before the students arrived.
“In the room in which he had Senior English, it was the title of a book by J. D. Salinger,” Dr. Fellows said, and then she named it: “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters. In calculus, it was …” Tactfully, she looked to Ms. Gaines to say it.
“Three minus two equals one.”
In Latin, it was Pater Familias, Mater Familias, which was X’d out.
More meanness, I thought, like the graffiti at his parents’ home.
“Did David see any of it?” Geof asked.
“No, but we haven’t told you all of it,” Dr. Fellows said. “All of those were terribly unkind, of course, but rather tame, I think, at least compared to the last one …”
The final piece of graffiti appeared in the room where David had art class: It was a pornographic sketch of the Virgin Mary, an elaborate drawing in several different shades of chalk that covered all three panels of the blackboard.
“Doing what?” Geof asked them.
“Doing it,” Dr. Fellows explained with a pedantic air.
“With anybody in particular?”
“With just about everybody,” the teacher offered, and behind the shock of propriety offended, I thought I saw a hint of amusement in her eyes. I had a feeling she’d be a good teacher, or maybe it’s just that I had a bias toward anybody with a sense of humor.
“With all the heavenly hosts, I’d say,” the principal affirmed, and then she must have detected a twinkle in her interrogator’s eyes, because she turned a quite serious face toward all three of us. “I know it sounds funny in a juvenile kind of way, but it wasn’t amusing to those of us who saw it. It wasn’t even exactly offensive in the conventional way. It was …” She looked over at the teacher, seeking help in expressing her meaning.
“Disturbing?” Ms. Gaines suggested.
“Yes,” the principal agreed. “It was very disturbing to see, and I think it can only have been produced from a very sick mind. If it was done by one of our students, we’d better find out who it was and get him or her some counseling at once. If it was somebody from the outside, I want that person caught and kept out of my school.” She eyed Geof sternly. “Do you just find this amusing, Lieutenant, or are you able to understand my concern?”
He was too experienced to get snagged by her anger, and so he simply replied in a mild and diplomatically apologetic tone, “I’d probably understand it better if you’d show me the drawing.”
“I can’t. We erased it.” Now it was her turn to sound apologetic. “I’m sorry, but we had to hold class there today, and I didn’t want any of the students to see it. And of course I didn’t want David to see it or even to hear about it It would have been terribly upsetting to him, I’m sure, as well as to some of our other students who come from Christian backgrounds. Their parents would certainly raise Holy Ned. Besides that, I hope I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that it was the stuff that nightmares are made of, and our boys and girls are not so sophisticated they can’t be scared by things that really are frightening.”
“Could the art teacher tell us if it was David’s work?” I asked.
“What?” Dr. Fellows looked truly shocked. Her glance at me should have turned me into an ice sculpture right there in her air-conditioned office. “David’s?”
“It’s just one possibility,” Geof soothed her. “Could she—or he?”
“I suppose. Do you want to know … now?”
He did, and so she called her art teacher out of class to ask him if he thought he recognized the handiwork on his blackboard. He didn’t want to tell us. But finally, after much persuasion, he said, “David Mayer. But I can’t prove it, and we’ve destroyed them, so we’ll never be able to prove it, and I don’t believe he’d do that anyway. It’s just not like him, it’s not like anything David’s ever done for class before. I don’t want to believe it, and I’m not going to …”
We couldn’t get any further at the school, though we left on a wave of warm pleading from the principal. “Please, if you’re a relative of the boy, please try to help him. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. It’s up to the rest of us, as adults hi his community, to see him through this difficult time, we can’t just let him roam loose without any supervision …” She paused, taking us both into her serious gaze. “Or love.”
Outside the office, back in the long halls again, we mixed with the students who were jostling their way out of their last-period classes. “Bitch,” my husband muttered.
“Geof! She’s concerned! She’s trying to help!”
“She’s a self-righteous, lecturing little miss priss who couldn’t help a kid like David if he asked her to spell dog.”
I stared at him. “You really did hate school, didn’t you?”
“There’s the last bell. Let’s get the hell out.”
When we were in the parking lot again, I learned what had him really upset.
“We’re being led, Jenny.”
“That can’t be true, can it?”
“He’s still leading us.”
“Where?” I asked, feeling cold and bleak as we stood among the noise and bustle of normal young women and men. Did we get one of them as a potential stepchild? Oh,no … We got one who specialized in pornographic religious graffiti and confessional videos and, maybe, dead animals.
“All we can do at this point is follow his trail and hope we find out.” He must have perceived the upsetting effect he was having on me, because he suddenly laughed and blurted as if to distract me, “Have you ever wondered exactly who Ned was and just why he’s so holy?”
“Nancy Drew’s boyfriend, you mean? My friends think that’s you.”
He laughed again, but it was a loud and false sounding amusement “No, the other Ned, the one people ‘raise.’”
“Oh, you mean Holy Ned?” I played along halfheartedly, willing to be distracted. “I’m surprised you don’t know. He was, of course, a little known saint … Theodore the Forgiven, twelfth century A.D., northern Iberia, founded a monastic order originally called the Holy Brothers of Theodore, whose monks were so greatly loved by the populace that they became familiarly known as the Holy Neds. The order died out in the fourteenth century, though the name was revived in the early 1960s by a rock band in Ohio, later known as the Holy Toledos.”
Geof looked puzzled. “How do you know all that?”
I burst out laughing. “Geof, I was joking.”
He shook his head and grinned. “You are amazing. You actually had me going there for a second. Why do I give you these openings?” He kissed me before I got out of his car.
 
; Nothing about the rest of the day seemed real after that. We played detectives as if real lives weren’t at stake, we joked as if our lives (and our marriage) didn’t depend on it. Maybe the weather was partly at fault: The heat that shimmered above the asphalt on the highway and made us feel as if we were continually driving into mirages of shallow pools of silver water; the sun that poured onto us in the open car like hot syrup, sticking our skin to the seats, burning us if we touched metal, sapping our energy, paralyzing our will as if it were stuck in hardening amber. Maybe when nothing seems real, then everything’s funny.
So all we could do was laugh.
22
A RED AND WHITE FOR SALE SIGN HUNG ON the fence beside the front gate of the property that David had shown me. It said “40 acres” and listed a phone number that Geof recognized as belonging to the senior Mayers.
“I wouldn’t take that sign too seriously,” I advised.
“It’s too fucking hot to take anything seriously.”
We both knew from acquaintances in the building trades that if you were in the real estate or contracting business, everything you had was always “for sale” on the off chance that somebody might happen to drive by and make you an offer.
We couldn’t get past the padlocked gate to any of those forty acres, but through the barbed wire I pointed out to Geof the red barn, the one-story house, the outbuildings, which included a garage, a shed, and a metal half-barn stacked with hay. Two brown horses stared at us from over the fence and one cow lowed out of sight in some nearby pasture. It all appeared to be beautifully maintained, ready indeed for sale to some lucky buyers.
“Farmette,” I pronounced from where we stood on the wrong side of the fence, sweating under the afternoon broiler.
“What?” Geof batted a slow fly away from my face.
“Thank you. I said, it’s a farmette. Farms are what they have in the Midwest, wide open vistas of land. I was on a ranch in Kansas that was ten thousand acres, and I know of one in Texas that’s at least twice that big, maybe three or four times as large. Why, they would sneer at this in Iowa. They would consider it a backyard in Nebraska. It would be a median strip along a highway in Oklahoma. This here is a mere farmette.”