The Affliction

  “OCD,” said Maggie

  “Yeah, OCD. He’s different, but he’s harmless.”

  * * *

  It was just three-thirty when Maggie started back to the school. She had a lot to think about. First on the agenda was to spend some time in the faculty lounge when the girls were at sports or study hall and the teachers were off duty. She needed to know who Florence’s friends were, and now for different reasons she wanted to know more about Marcia Goldsmith and her family. She remembered Marcia’s tears the previous morning. It was good that Hope would be here soon. Hope would help Maggie think her way through the underbrush just by listening, but she also had an uncanny way of reading people. Plus she was fun to be around, and Maggie felt she could use a serious dose of that right about now.

  She was walking briskly back toward the school on the side of the road, not yet knowing the footpaths around the village, the shortcuts the locals knew. Rounding a bend, she saw emerging from the woods a slightly dumpy young person in jeans and a baseball cap. In a flash of cold alarm, she feared it might be young Mr. Goldsmith but quickly realized it was a girl, and one she knew. She quickened her pace and caught up with her.

  “Alison?”

  The girl, huffing along, looked up and said warily, “Yeah?”

  “I’m Mrs. Detweiler. We saw each other at the yarn shop earlier. Do you mind if I walk with you?”

  “Wait, were you in our class the other morning?” With the words wafted a strong scent of cigarettes and mouthwash.

  “I was, yes. With Mrs. Goldsmith. Are you due somewhere?” The girl was setting quite a rapid pace, designed, Maggie suspected, to wear her out.

  Alison checked the time on her phone and said, “Yeah. I have riding at four and I have to like get my boots and stuff.”

  “That’s your athletics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you one of the dressage riders?”

  “No. Just, you know. Walk, trot, and canter. I think we’re going on a trail ride this afternoon though.”

  “That sounds like heaven.”

  Alison looked as if she thought Maggie were out of her mind.

  “Tell me about Miss Marcus.” Maggie knew she was perilously close to the kind of conversation kids hate, with the aunt who tells you how much you’ve grown and wants to know what your favorite subject is.

  Alison shrugged. “She’s an easy grader.”

  “Riding goes on your transcript?”

  Alison shrugged again. “I guess.”

  “How about Mrs. Goldsmith?”

  Alison looked up at Maggie as if she didn’t understand the question, and Maggie didn’t know exactly how to phrase it without leading the witness.

  “Do you have classes with her?”

  “Oh. No. I take Spanish.”

  “I just met Mrs. Goldsmith but I liked her. Do you know her son?”

  Alison perked up unexpectedly. “Not well, but . . . you know.”

  “I don’t know, actually.”

  “He thinks he’s the shit, because he can sing and everything. He was nice to me, though, so I like him.”

  “Nice to you how?”

  “I messed up my lines all the time and he always knew them, he’d feed me my cues. He knew all our lines.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

  “When we do plays, we have to have boys from outside. Obviously. He’s hot, and he doesn’t have much choice, since Mrs. Goldsmith makes him, so he was Birdie last year in the musical. My roommate was, like, so into him.”

  Maggie was astonished. “Jesse Goldsmith?”

  Alison surprised in turn. “Eric Goldsmith. Mrs. Goldsmith’s son.”

  “Does Eric have a brother?”

  “Uh—don’t know. Maybe. This is my dorm.”

  “Run, then.”

  Alison was already jogging away, no doubt wondering what tedious thing that was about.

  The faculty lounge was below grade, downstairs from the entrance, in the main building of the school. Windows high in the wall mixed lemony afternoon sunlight with the rather synthetic aura from the fluorescent bulbs that hummed from the ceiling. From inside, through the windows, you could see feet and ankles pacing by on the walkway to the quad. Running shoes. Sandals. UGG boots, though it was warm. A pair of bedroom slippers, all framed in the window, like an avant-garde film that told its story exclusively through footwear.

  The room held a couch and some armchairs, worktables, a copy machine, a microwave, coffeemaker, sink, and a small undercounter fridge. When Maggie came in, instead of the hive of school hubbub she had been hoping for, there was a sole woman unknown to her rather fussily washing coffee mugs and wiping spilled crumbs from the counter. Her hair was crimped into orange waves that had the burnt look of a home permanent, and she wore a wrap skirt and sneakers.

  “I don’t know who they think is going to clean this up, if they don’t clean up after themselves,” the woman said. “It’s not as if the ladies’ maids are going to do it. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Thanks, I’d love some.”

  The woman banged around in the cupboard, finding filter papers and whatever else she needed. “No matter when I come in to read the paper, it’s always a mess.”

  Maggie observed a used-looking newspaper on one of the chairs.

  “We used to get three papers and some magazines but we’re down to one copy of the Times now. Are you here for the science job?”

  “Me? No, I’m just doing a little consulting for the board. Maggie,” she added, offering a hand.

  “Pam,” said the other.

  “You teach?”

  “Yes, by negative example. I’m what we used to call a housemother. When I was in school, it was our joke, the worst thing that you could think of, to wind up back here as a housemother. Dorm parent, being the current locution. So here I am, and you know what? We were right. It’s pathetic. But . . . life doesn’t go the way you expect. Milk? Sugar?”

  Pam gave Maggie a mug with a picture of Snoopy on it, dumped three heaping spoons of sugar into her own cup, and sat down across from Maggie.

  “Well,” said Maggie, “start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

  “No. We’d be here until next week.”

  “Okay, we’ll start small. What can you tell me about Florence Meagher?”

  “That’s not starting small,” said Pam.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Florence and Ray used to live upstairs from me in Sloane House,” Pam said.

  “And?”

  “And,” said Pam. She let it hang, then added, as if it should go without saying, “you learn a lot.”

  “Like what?”

  Pam’s rather small hazel eyes, with colorless brows and lashes, narrowed as she considered her answer. Maggie was preparing an explanation of why she wanted to know, when Pam apparently decided that it wasn’t her job to shut the barn door after the horse was gone.

  “It’s a wooden floor, and they didn’t use rugs. You hear everything, shoes, click clack click clack. Things breaking. Voices.”

  “Raised voices?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “His? Hers? Both?”

  “Mostly his.”

  “And what was it about?”

  “Different things. One of the big ones was children. They don’t have their own. She wanted to, he didn’t or couldn’t. She got more and more into mothering the girls. She’d have big breakfasts for them on Sunday mornings. She has favorites. The runts, the ones from divorces, the ones who’d been raised by servants. Ray doesn’t like her having groupies. Or friends, really.”

  “Are you a friend of hers?”

  “Try to be. To tell you the truth I find the verbal diarrhea hard to take, but that’s just because I’m not a very nice person. Florence is. And she rattles on like that because she’s frightened. She didn’t used to.”

  “Frightened. Of Ray?”

  “I assume.”

  “And the girls were hearing a
ll this as well?”

  “They must have heard some. But our apartments are down at the end of the corridor and there’s a fire stair between us and the student rooms. Sound may not travel through the walls as much as through the floor. My girls never mention minding the music I play, and believe me they would, if they heard it.”

  Maggie at once wanted to know what kind of music Pam played but asked instead, “Is it just because of her student pets that Ray gets angry?”

  “Oh, he just uses that as an excuse to bully her. He’s one of those big babies. I can’t help it, whenever I see him I picture that great hairy body in diapers with his big forehead bulging out of a frilly little bonnet. Having a tantrum.”

  The door opened, and a man and a woman came in, both teachers Maggie had met the first night. Unhelpfully no longer labeled. The woman filled the electric kettle and plugged it in.

  “Anyone else want tea?”

  No one did. “But don’t use that mug, Mary Jean,” said Pam. “It’s cracked.”

  Mary Jean looked at it and back at Pam, as if to ask, if it’s cracked, why is it still in the cupboard, then dropped it into the wastebasket.

  The man, who had the Arts section of the paper open and had just sunk into an armchair, cried, “Oh bloody hell. That crafts closet dingbat filled in the puzzle again.”

  “You don’t know who did it, Andy,” Mary Jean said without turning around. Maggie recognized that this wasn’t the first time this scenario had been played in this room.

  “Yes, I do. She uses green ink,” said Andy with disgust.

  “And half the answers are wrong,” said Pam, who had gone to the cupboard above the microwave, and reached up to a high shelf. She produced a photocopy of the blank puzzle and passed it across to Andy.

  “For you, from the puzzle fairy.”

  Andy looked at her with surprise.

  Pam said, “I figured out if I get here before the morning milk break I can get to the puzzle before the dingbat does.”

  “A grateful nation thanks you,” said Andy, his mood much improved as he propped the photocopy against the folded newspaper and took out his pen.

  “Do you have another one?” Mary Jean asked as she sat down with her tea.

  Pam got her a puzzle.

  “Is it a hard one?”

  “Typical Thursday. The trick is in thirty-three across.”

  “Don’t tell me unless I beg.”

  “This is Maggie. I was just telling her about Florence and Ray,” said Pam.

  “Where is Florence, by the way?” Andy asked.

  “Gone to her sister’s. Somebody’s sick.”

  “Oh too bad. Something serious?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. What I was saying was, that Ray makes a huge rhubarb about how much time she spends with the girls, but I think it’s just something to complain about. To keep her in line.”

  “I heard that what really sets him off is Marcia Goldsmith’s kid,” Mary Jean said.

  “Eric?”

  “No, the younger one. She spends a lot of time with him. Tutoring, playing Scrabble, that kind of thing.”

  “Better her than me,” said Pam, making a face.

  “I know,” said Mary Jean. “They latched onto each other somehow, I think it was last year during the play. Jesse would come with Eric and spook around backstage and other places he wasn’t supposed to be and Florence lured him into her Havahart trap.”

  It took Maggie most of that evening to get Hope up to speed on what she knew so far. Since their successful work together on the death at the Oquossoc Mountain Inn, Hope had taught herself a form of shorthand, not Gregg or Pitman, and not all that fast, but she diligently transcribed what Maggie told her in a handsome notebook with a green leather cover. Hope was in favor of any endeavor that required the purchase of new equipment.

  “What are you doing?” Maggie asked, peering across the dining table at Hope’s squiggles.

  “I learned it from a book in the library. I wish I’d done this when I was in college, it’s changed my life.”

  “Is it hard to learn?” Maggie was one of those rare people who could take complete notes on the sentence she just heard while also fully understanding the sentence she was hearing, so she had not found the need of quicker notes.

  “Not at all,” said Hope. “I can write it like the wind.”

  “But can you read it?”

  “Oh no, but I remember things if I’ve once written them down.”

  They had decided to have dinner at the inn where they were staying, since it was nearly empty midweek, and they could talk without being overheard. Meals were served in a drafty room with many windows, all leaking night air. The one waitress on duty had to be summoned from the pantry whenever they needed her, as it was warm in there. They’d been given a little bell for the purpose.

  “We’d like to try a bottle of the pinot noir,” Hope said to the girl when she appeared. “We need to see if it has chocolate notes.”

  “Wait—it isn’t a dessert wine,” said the girl.

  “It’ll be fine,” said Maggie, and the waitress rushed off. “You frightened her,” she added to Hope.

  “I’ll make it up to her.”

  Maggie returned to telling Hope about Florence Meagher and the olives on her cereal.

  “You said she was in Rome doing research?”

  “Madrid.”

  “What kind of research?”

  Maggie stopped chewing and looked at her. “I don’t know. She blew right past me with the prunes and I didn’t ask the obvious question.”

  “Is she working on a thesis, maybe? Taking an advanced degree?”

  “We’ll talk to her friends. I’m sure they know all about it. The way she talks, they could hardly help but know. That will be our first order of business tomorrow.”

  Chapter 4

  Friday, April 24

  But it wasn’t. Maggie was downstairs for breakfast at seven-fifteen, where the same waitress was presiding over the untouched breakfast buffet. Maggie was wondering whether the girl slept here, chained to a leg of the sideboard, when her mobile began to buzz and vibrate. It was a text from Christina Liggett.

  Cd u come asap?

  She answered Yes. All ok?

  The answer: no.

  Maggie drove so Hope could put on her makeup in the car, and they reached Christina’s office in eight minutes. Christina was waiting at her door, which she shut behind them once she’d herded them inside. Maggie introduced Hope, but Christina hardly seemed to hear. She went to stand at the window, which looked down the slope to the playing fields and the New Gym. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, her skin the shade of putty.

  She said, “They’ve found Florence Meagher.”

  “At her sister’s?”

  “No. In the swimming pool. The coach works with a couple of our girls in the morning before classes. This is Lily Hollister.” For the first time they noticed a small figure in sweat clothes, pale as a newt, sitting huddled in upon herself in the farthest corner of the room, half hidden behind a large globe in a mahogany stand.

  “She found the body,” said Christina, still looking out at the glowing spring morning to the cloud of pear tree blossoms that had just come out that week.

  She turned to Maggie and said, her voice a throttled whisper, “I don’t know what to do.”

  Hope went at once to the administration office down the hall and returned with a mug of strong tea for Christina and a coffee for herself. “I’ve told them to route all callers to me,” she said, holding up her cell phone. “I am now your press officer.”

  Christina looked at her as if her processing unit had just rattled a cascade of unrelated facts into a semblance of meaning. She said, “This is the end.”

  “No, it’s the beginning,” said Hope.

  “I mean, it’s over. All we tried to do.”

  “I knew what you meant. It’s the end for Florence Meagher, but not for anything else. At least not yet. Drink your tea.”
r />   Christina sipped, then looked at the mug. “I don’t take sugar.” Hope saw a fragile child, who could function heroically up to a certain level of stress and chaos, and beyond that, stopped dead.

  “Today you do. You’re going to need the energy.” Her cell phone rang. Hope answered, “Rye Manor School, Ms. Liggett’s office.” She listened briefly, then said, “I’m sorry, she’s not available. She’ll have a statement for you later in the morning. You’re welcome,” and hung up.

  Christina looked amazed, as if to say You could do that? Just refuse to talk? She’d been trying so hard to answer to everybody, at all hours of the night and day, for so long, that she’d forgotten she had any right to act rather than react.

  While Hope debriefed Christina, Maggie settled onto the sofa beside the huddled girl, Lily Hollister. “Tell me,” she said.

  Lily’s long, thin, rather elegant feet were in flip-flops. She must have rolled out of bed and into her swimsuit and sweats. Maggie saw that she had to swallow several times before she tried to speak; she was salivating as one does when battling nausea. She was a pretty thing, with full lips and very large blue eyes.

  “Coach meets us at the pool, Tuesday and Friday mornings. Me and Steph. We’re training for Junior Nationals. Steph’s suit was at the pool, in her locker, but I had taken mine home to wash out the chlorine, so I dressed in my room.”

  “Are you and Steph in the same dorm?”

  “Yes. No. She’s in Sloane One, I’m in Sloane Two.”

  “So you went down together?”

  “No. We always meet at the pool. It’s just easier.”

  Maggie noticed the earbuds hanging out of the pocket of Lily’s sweatpants and understood. One or both of them preferred music to talking in the early morning. She would herself.

  “Tell me exactly what you did this morning. You met in the locker room?”

  Lily shook her head. “I went in the front door, straight through to the pool, because it’s warmest there.”

  Maggie could picture her hurrying through the chilly early morning, into the lobby of the new building lined with as yet mostly empty trophy cases, and pushing open the heavy door into the high-ceilinged echoey humidity of the pool room.