What Has Become Of You Part 5

The teacher wrinkled her brow. "Willard? Oh, no, I don't remember Melanie mentioning her specifically. I believe she transferred to Wallace just this year. On scholarship."

The way the woman said on scholarship made Vera decide to push it no further. She kept quiet for the rest of the lunch period, keeping a faint, interested-looking smile on her lips and trying to follow what the other women said to one another. When the women gathered up their plates to return them to the cafeteria line, Sue MacMasters brushed past her, poked her in the arm, and said, "Look at that plate! No wonder she's so skinny!" in a voice loud enough for all the other teachers to hear.

Vera's studio apartment seemed quieter than usual that night. Taking out Jensen Willard's latest journal entry, she glanced at the t.i.tle-"You Don't Do One d.a.m.n Thing the Way You're Supposed To"-and at first thought it was meant as a direct hit, a pointed critique of her cla.s.sroom methods. Then she remembered that Holden Caulfield's roommate had said those exact words to him. Interesting t.i.tle choice, Vera thought, trying to suspend judgment until she had read more.

You Don't Do One d.a.m.n Thing the Way You're Supposed To: Journal Entry #3, by Jensen Willard h.e.l.lo again.

I know I said I'd make more of an effort to include literary a.n.a.lysis of The Catcher in the Rye in these journal entries, but I'm having a really hard time focusing on that. Truthfully, I'm still kind of obsessing over the last phone conversation I had with Bret-I've got to make sense of all that first and foremost. But please, if it gets to be too much, just let me know, and I'm sure I won't have a hard time coughing up something else to write about. I can write about anything once you get me started.

One other thing I've still been thinking a lot about lately is that girl who got murdered. Angela Galvez, the one they found in the Dumpster. She was strangled. Such an ugly word, strangled. It sounds almost exactly like what it is. Like onomatopoeia. I remember the first day of cla.s.s, someone brought up Angela, and you looked like someone p.o.o.ped in your shoe. I guess I can't blame you for not wanting to talk about it. But I hope you can't blame me for not being able to stop thinking about it-for not being able to stop wondering.

Specifically, I wonder what it's like to be eleven years old and to know someone is killing you. I wonder what an eleven-year-old's last thoughts are as she's dying.

I overheard Chelsea Cutler talking about something her aunt had told her-that Angela had claw marks on her neck, marks from her own nails where she had tried to remove Ritchie Ouelette's hands. And the nails were broken off. She tried to fight, but what chance did she have, being that small and young?

One of her purple shoelaces was missing when they found her. She'd had two laces, one on each shoe, when she left the house, her mother said. Purple laces, and the sneakers were silver. You have to wonder what happened to the other one or why anyone would think that was a good trophy to keep, out of all the trophies one could take.

Vera looked up from her reading. What was it about these lines that didn't sit well with her? It was the word trophies, she decided, looking at Jensen's last paragraph again. That was a police word-a word she didn't think Jensen would know to use in this context. Then again, how well did she really know Jensen? Just because I didn't peg her as someone who watches CSI or reads crime novels doesn't mean that such things aren't known to her, Vera told herself, and brought herself back to where she'd left off in the journal.

I knew Angela a little bit. That is, I babysat her and her little brother, Jared, once. Annabel used to do it on a regular basis, but one night she wanted to go to a roller-skating party and recommended me to the Galvezes instead. Big mistake. I'm an awful babysitter. It's not that I mean any harm, but I always end up being way too lenient because I figure, how is a few hours of leniency going to hurt anyone? And Angela was really too big for a babysitter anyway, but her parents were overprotective. Fat lot of good that overprotectiveness did for Angela in the end.

The Galvez kids were brats the day I sat with them. I know you're not supposed to say a dead little girl was a brat, but it's true, and that doesn't mean I'm not sorry about how she died. These kids wanted to play Truth or Dare out in the yard, and at one point Angela dared me to take off my bra and throw it up into the branches of this oak tree they have out back. So I did it. I didn't let them see my bare chest or anything-I turned around and maneuvered the bra out from under my shirt and pitched it in the air. You could tell they weren't expecting that I'd actually do it, which is why I did it. But then the bra was stuck hanging from a high tree branch, and the kids apparently told their parents about it later, because Mrs. Galvez called my mother that night and said, "Your daughter is the worst babysitter I've ever had, and I'm going to tell all my friends who have children." Which was kind of a relief, because I've never had a good babysitting experience yet.

Even though I wasn't sorry to lose a prospective babysitting job, I was sorry to lose the money. And I don't need Mrs. Galvez running around talking about me to half the town. For a little while, I really hated that kid.

Still, I thought about sending the Galvezes a card when Angela died. Just because they don't like me doesn't mean I shouldn't let them know I was sorry for what had happened to their daughter, but when I looked at the sympathy cards in the supermarket, they all seemed wrong. All these pictures of birds flying in clouds with gilded letters spelling out inspirational quotes about dying and the afterlife. Angela's death didn't seem to fit a card like that. Even my mother said, "Oh, we should send a card," but I don't think she ever sent one. Maybe she had the same problem I did picking one out.

This is making me sad. Sadder. Maybe it's time for me to talk about Bret now. But first, a snack. I feel like peanut b.u.t.ter crackers. Don't go anywhere.

Back again.

Here's the thing: I don't really have an outlet for talking about Bret outside of this journal. Sometimes I wish I still had Annabel to confide in, because she's pretty experienced with boyfriends and would probably have an opinion about what's going on. I'd talk to my mother, but she's so protective of me that she'd just wind up getting angry at Bret even if he hadn't really done anything.

So, journal it is. Journal and, by extension, you. I bet you feel really privileged.

I have one more Bret story, and after that I promise I'll shut up. I'm curious to know what you'll think about this one because it's about a teacher, sort of, and since you're one, too, it's possible that you might have a particular read on this. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you're not even reading this. I can't say I'd blame you if you weren't. I'm pretty sure the last English teacher I had, Mrs. Belisle, never read a d.a.m.ned word I wrote. One time I turned in a writing a.s.signment that was nothing but word vomit and gibberish, and all she did was put one of her check marks on the top of it, like always.

I went to visit Bret at Columbia one time, this past October. I really liked it there. Here, I feel like people stare at me all the time. But there, on campus, no one would give me the time of day, and I kind of liked that anonymity.

It was a big deal to take a bus to New York all by myself, especially because I had to change buses in Boston-I'm surprised my parents even let me do it. I drank Bret's supply of vodka and orange juice and got violently ill the night I arrived, and all the girls in Jay Hall (that's his dorm) kept coming up and cooing about how cute it was that he had a girlfriend in high school. The next day, once I was sobered up, we went to go visit one of his professors at his apartment off campus, on Riverside Drive by the park. You might find it interesting to know-maybe you already do know-that J. D. Salinger's family lived on Riverside Drive, too, just two buildings from where the professor lives now. I made it a point to walk past it and take a good look, but to tell you the truth, it just looks like any other building. That's one of the strangest things about New York, in my opinion; nothing ever looks all that special or distinguished. Even the supposedly special things blend in with everything else.

This professor, whose name is Dr. Louis Rose, had taught a summer humanities program at Dartmouth two years before, the same one Bret had attended as part of a Gifted and Talented program; I guess Dr. Rose was part of the reason why Bret had wanted to go to Columbia. He'd kept in touch with him the whole time and wanted to follow him wherever he went. He's taken cla.s.ses with him two terms in a row now. Kind of a man-crush, if you ask me. I'm not exactly sure what Dr. Rose was getting out of it in return, other than adulation.

"He's completely brilliant," Bret was telling me as we crossed Broadway on our way to the professor's apartment. "He's written two books about Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene. He's a Spenserian scholar. It's pretty cool if you think about it."

"You didn't have to put it that way."

"What way?"

"'Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene.' I know what he wrote."

"Have you read it?"

"Parts of it," I said, which isn't technically untrue. I have this big poetry anthology that I got at a yard sale once, and I'm pretty sure that an excerpt from it is in there. While I can't say I've exactly read it, it's possible that my eye has fallen on a phrase or two as I've flipped around in the book looking for other things.

I knew I was supposed to feel flattered that Bret had deemed me worthy of meeting the famed Spenserian scholar Dr. Rose. And I was flattered, I have to admit; I felt as though Bret wanted to show me off, for once. Once we got to the apartment-which seemed pretty small to me, for a professor's apartment-Dr. Rose turned out to be this wizened old man who had little boils on the back of his head popping out between tufts of thinning white hair. He was wearing an untucked shirt and cotton pants and loafers with no socks, which didn't make him look very scholarly to me. But I still felt ill at ease, meeting him. Like some country-mouse kid who had turned up uninvited at the door. He looked me up and down and then back and forth and sideways, then looked away and started talking to Bret about books.

He went to one of the shelves where his books were-his apartment had wall-to-wall shelves installed, which I admit made me jealous-and took down one book that looked even more ancient than the rest. "You would not believe what I paid for this," he said to Bret. "One of the oldest known copies left on earth, and now it's mine." He opened it lovingly, paused, and read aloud, 'Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild / So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.' That's from Amoretti, as I'm sure you know."

I was pretty sure Bret didn't know, but he nodded with such vigor that I thought his head might snap off the end of his neck.

Aside from books, Dr. Rose had a lot of plants in his apartment. I was sitting in a wooden rocking chair, sort of apart from Dr. Rose's armchair and Bret on the chair beside him, and all I could do was look at these plants. When people have too many plants in their home, it makes me think the plant owner's trying to hide something. I like the idea of camouflage, hidden things, mystery-even plain old distractions-but in this particular case I was waiting for a tiger or something to jump out from all that greenery.

"Bret, I still sometimes think about the students in the summer workshop we had together," Dr. Rose was saying. "Do you remember Charles, the boy with the long ponytail? The one who always wrote poems about hitchhiking? I wonder whatever became of him. His work always had such interesting recklessness."

I thought the phrase "whatever became of him" was odd. I doubted that this Charles guy was old enough to have become anything yet.

"I heard he got early acceptance at Wesleyan," Bret said. "I don't know if he ended up going there."

"I always worry about boys like Charles going by the wayside. They so often do, when they're so clever and so scattered. That kind is easily led astray if they don't find some structure in college." And I swear Dr. Rose looked at me then. Had he decided, just from a glance, that I was scattered? That I was easily led astray? Or was he warning me of something?

Then-horrors-the famed Dr. Rose turned to me. "Bret tells me you're something of a writer yourself."

I wasn't expecting that. I'm not a fidgety person by nature, but I found myself wanting to fidget in the worst way. "I wouldn't say that. I do like to write sometimes."

"Who are your influences?"

"Influences? Oh, I don't write very well," I said, evading the question. "I guess I'm influenced by . . . anything dark. I just write, that's all." My voice sounded dumb even to my own ears. Schoolgirlish.

"You just write," Dr. Rose marveled, as though I had said something in a foreign language. Why can't I ever express myself properly?

But lucky me-Dr. Rose let me off the hook and started directing all of his comments at Bret again. He was going on about some poetry text he's translating from the French, from some poet I've never heard of and whose name I can't recall now. He took out some papers and started reading one of the translated poems aloud; Dr. Rose has one of those very theatrical "I'm reading capital-P Poetry" voices, and I was so busy hearing his meaningful pauses that I didn't really catch what the poem was all about. Something about a man seeing a woman whom he used to sleep with in Paris, only it was years later and he didn't find her attractive anymore.

"It speaks to the nature of l.u.s.t and the waning of l.u.s.t that comes with age or with settling," Dr. Rose said after he was finished. "I wouldn't call it complacency, but I do see it as settling for a more traditional, grown-up path. You, Bret, are still in the age of l.u.s.t, are you not?"

Bret laughed. When he laughs, he always sounds as though he's dislodging something from his nose. "Believe me, if you aren't now," Dr. Rose went on, "just wait a little while. Someday you'll meet a real woman, and after that things will never be the same."

I felt as though I'd been slapped. As though I'd been written off as "not a real woman," just some dismissed kid, someone of no real gender and of no real consequence to anyone. After that comment of his, I didn't listen so much to what he was saying anymore. He said something about his photography hobby, and what he'd done with his garden the summer before, and how he was going to get his kitchen remodeled and take a trip to Reykjavik soon, and all I could think was, Who cares? Who cares about stuck-up people who have too much money to p.i.s.s away on trips and kitchens? When Bret and I were getting ready to leave, Dr. Rose surprised me by saying, "Jensen . . ." (He p.r.o.nounced it Jen-seen, for some reason). "Jensen. May I take your picture before you go?"

He didn't ask to take Bret's, or to take one of Bret and me together. This was just about the most catastrophic thing he could have asked of me. I don't even think I can begin to tell you how much I hate having my picture taken. The results are disastrous; I always end up looking like a squat little gnome with one wonky eye and a tense mouth. But I let him take my picture, because I felt like I'd screwed up enough already and wanted to be on good behavior in front of Bret. As he snapped the shutter, I could almost see myself through Dr. Rose's camera-a pasty, surly girl in oversized clothing and shoes that were falling apart. It was a really c.r.a.ppy thing to have to see.

As Bret and I started walking back to his dorm, pa.s.sing by a guy sprawled out on one the park benches who looked like he might have been dead, he asked me, "What did you think of Dr. Rose?"

"He was a little pretentious."

"You're judgmental."

"A person can make judgments without being judgmental, you know."

"Well, you didn't come off as all that impressive yourself," Bret said. "You didn't present yourself as well as I'd hoped." And I didn't say anything to him for a long time after that, because I hadn't realized it was a test, even though I had already known, on some level, that I had failed.

A couple of weeks later, when I was back here in Maine, Bret called to tell me Dr. Rose had developed the photo he'd taken and given it to him: "It's not the most flattering photo, but it does look like you. I'll send it along with my next letter."

So. That leads me to this thought. And a pathetic thought it is, too-a pathetic note to end this journal on.

I don't think Bret realizes how much I've come to depend on the occasional kind word from him. How much I depend on praise or a compliment or a phone call or a letter. Nor can he understand how much it hurts when I don't get these things. If he knew, would he act differently? Would he give me more or give me nothing at all? I know it must seem beyond stupid, me starting off thinking he was repulsive and now needing his acknowledgment all the time and feeling like I'll die if I don't get it. Sometimes I feel like I almost hate Bret, and other times I think I want to have about twenty of his children, even though I really would rather hurl myself off a bridge than get knocked up even once. I realize none of this makes the least bit of sense. Does it make any sense to you?

Vera finished reading Jensen's entry. By the time she had reached the end of it, lying there on her mattress, she felt mixed emotions. The first was a sense of disappointment, knowing that Jensen had this weakness in her-the weakness of needing to be liked and cared for. But it isn't fair to be disappointed, Vera reproached herself. It wasn't fair for her to expect more from Jensen, a fifteen-year-old, than she felt for herself.

The second emotion, empathy, came from the nurturing part of her, which wished to counsel the girl-to tell her that yes, her feelings did make sense. Vera had been warned, when going through the multiple-interview process for her position at Wallace, that it was important to not act as a therapist to the students. "Many of them are bright, and with intelligence comes emotional problems sometimes," Sue MacMasters had said, wiggling around in her seat to lean in closer to Vera. Almost conspiratorially, she'd added: "Some of them are on medication. If you see any of the red flags we talked about, you must refer the student to one of the guidance counselors. Don't attempt to take on these problems yourself." Vera had nodded, privately irked by the way Sue's eyes had widened when she had uttered the phrase on medication. It was clear that this was something far outside the head of the English department's personal experience. Bizarre, Vera thought, that some of the faculty seemed more sheltered than the students.

She stood up and stretched, as though to shrug off Jensen's journal entry and this admonition of Sue MacMasters's. It was getting dark, and outside her studio window she could hear people in conversation as they walked by-people dressed up to go out for a Friday night. She found herself wanting to go out, too. She called her old friend Caroline on the off chance that she might be able to slip away for the evening. But Caroline was always so busy; she had recently launched her own literary magazine with the a.s.sistance of some local poets, and she'd had her first baby five months before. Vera had not actually been able to get her out of the house since then, and while common sense told her that it was hard for a busy mother to find child care, she suspected, rather childishly, that Caroline was so in love with her infant daughter that there was no love left for Vera. She got Caroline's answering machine, left what she hoped was a upbeat-sounding message, and looked out the window some more. Another lost friend, she thought, appropriating the phrase from something she had seen in Jensen Willard's writing.

More couples pa.s.sed her window: young women in high heels that clattered precariously against Dorset's cobblestone streets and the s.h.a.ggy young men who hovered at their sides. She decided to go to Pearl's by herself, have a drink or two, and head straight home.

A jazz ensemble played at the bar that night. The band was competent, if not exactly good, and Vera found herself singing a little to herself as she sat on her stool, humming and purring into her gin and tonic and then, changing it up, into her whiskey and c.o.ke. When she had been a little girl, her father had liked listening to jazz and big band cla.s.sics on one of the AM radio stations; whenever he drove her somewhere, this music played in the car, and though Vera went through a stage where she pretended she thought it was corny-some of the crooning harmonies, she'd said, sounded like people mooing-she loved those songs and had liked sharing them with her father.

"Singing and smiling," a voice next to her said. "Somebody's happy. Or is it the whiskey?"

Vera looked over to her left guardedly. A man had taken the bar stool beside hers. He seemed tall, judging by the way he hunched his shoulders and upper torso over the bar, and he had a long, not-unhandsome face. He reminded her of someone, but she could not think of whom. "You look like someone," she informed him, and when she put two and two together, she sucked in her breath a little. Ritchie Ouelette.

"I look like someone? Who might that be?"

"Jimmy Stewart," she said, recovering quickly.

"Jimmy Stewart, eh? That's a new one." The long-faced man stared at her openly for a while as she stirred the straw in the last of her drink. "You're very beautiful," he said. She ordered another drink.

She guessed the man to not be scandalously younger than she was-perhaps in his early thirties, which was not outside of the realm of decency. The man said he was up from Louisiana for the weekend, visiting a friend. They exchanged some banter above the sounds of the band and began to look at each other in a speculative way. They wove in and out of the bar to take cigarette breaks outside, though Vera had quit smoking a few years before; she borrowed his cigarettes and his matches. Wasn't there something in The Catcher in the Rye about Holden Caulfield lighting matches-some beautiful line? She couldn't remember. She leaned against the brick facade of the bar and closed her eyes as she drew the smoke into her lungs.

"You okay?" the bouncer doing door duty asked at one point.

"Yes," Vera said. She wasn't exactly sure if Jimmy Stewart was standing next to her anymore. She was aware only of cool air on her face and a humming in her ears from the music on the other side of the door.

What happened during the rest of the evening was something she had to piece together the next day. There had been more drinks, of course, and Vera had the faintest memory of being away from the bar, in a car heading to 7-Eleven for beer; she remembered the man who looked like Jimmy Stewart keeping his hand on her leg as he drove. She noticed a ring on his hand, and she heard the man's voice saying, "My wife and I have an understanding." She remembered, next, lying on a beach-whose idea had it been to go to a beach at the beginning of March?-and she could see the man putting his pants on, his mouth twisted up as though he wanted to laugh. "I'm cold," Vera remembered saying, sitting up in the sand with her arms wrapped around her legs-and then, when he didn't get the hint, she had whined, "Come hold me. I'm cold." Reluctantly, the man came and hunkered down next to her in the sand. He held her as if it were a duty, the way a young bachelor who doesn't want children might react when urged to hold a friend's infant. She was wearing her dress, but her tights were clutched in a ball in her hand. That was the last mental picture she had. The rest went blank, up to a point.

The next thing she remembered, she was walking home in the direction of her apartment. How she had ended up on foot was a puzzle; the beach was a twenty-minute drive from her place, so it was possible that Jimmy Stewart had either ditched her or, more likely, dropped her off somewhere at her behest. She always enjoyed a walk when she'd reached that level of intoxication. The wind on her flushed cheeks always felt good, and in such instances she liked to imagine her legs chugging along like forceful little pistons: left-right-left.

She remembered walking through Dorset Park, a shortcut. This was atypical and, she imagined, indicative of exactly how drunk she was; normally she avoided the park at night, preferring the safety of the well-lit sidewalk, but the drinks she'd consumed must have given her some bravura. Part of the reason why the park was to be avoided, she thought, was because she could sometimes hear a man in there, whistling from the deepest recesses of the trees-a whistle that was sometimes fluent and complex and sometimes staccato and repet.i.tive. She took this to be a code-a drug deal in progress, maybe, or a male prost.i.tute soliciting clients. Things to avoid, at any rate.

She did not remember hearing the whistler during this particular walk home in the dark. When asked about it later, she could recall seeing or hearing no one. No one, that is, until she came upon the figure under the tree.

At first she hadn't known it was a figure, hadn't seen it as such. It was fabric that she noticed first-fabric of skirts so voluminous that she thought she was seeing someone's tarp, bunched and abandoned on the ground. Then she realized she was seeing the traditional dress worn by Somali refugees. It was not unheard of to find a Somali sleeping on a park bench or even in the gra.s.s, though Vera could not ever recall seeing a woman in that condition; it was the men who pa.s.sed out there, the wiry young men who'd had too much to drink.

She was inclined to hurry on past, not wanting to meddle and not wanting to be hounded for spare change if the woman under the tree happened to notice her pa.s.s by. Yet something about the way the woman was sitting made Vera take a second look.

Closer now, Vera could see that the woman was not sitting under the tree, as she had first thought. She was in a crouching position, with her back against the tree trunk; her skirts were hiked up to midthigh, creating the bulky silhouette of cloth Vera had seen from afar. The woman's knees were slightly parted, almost splayed, in the posture of childbirth; she thought about a student she'd had once, a boy from the Sudan, whose name, Tharjiath, spoke to a literal truth, translating roughly to "he who was born under a tree." And that was exactly how he had been born, as his mother stopped working in the fields long enough to push him out into the world-a story so cheerfully recounted in one of Tharjiath's compositions that Vera had never forgotten it.

But this woman, the woman in the crouching position, was not giving birth. Vera knew it even before she saw that the woman's head covering had been half pulled off and twisted around her neck and before she saw the improbable angle at which her neck lolled. The woman was not giving birth.

Nor was she even a woman. She was a girl. A girl Vera knew.

A pa.s.sage from the Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus came to her: sonnet no. 2, which she had memorized and written an entire a.n.a.lysis of at Princeton: She was almost a girl and forth she leaped From this harmonious joy of song and lyre, Shining through her springtime veils and clear, She made herself a bed in my ear And slept in me.

The girl, this almost-girl, was not asleep. This Vera knew. She had seen dead people only in photos before-her family believed in brisk, efficient cremations, no open caskets for any of them-but there was no mistaking death when she saw it in person.

Fully aware of her surroundings all at once, Vera reached into her purse for her cell phone and called 911.

Later, she would wonder why her self-preservation and survivor instincts hadn't kicked in. Surely it had crossed her mind that whoever had strangled her student Sufia Ahmed could be lurking somewhere nearby and that she herself might be in harm's way. Most women in her position, she supposed, would have run like h.e.l.l and called for help once a.s.sured of her own safety; still, she didn't like to think she had been heroic for not running. Heroics had nothing to do with it. When the 911 dispatcher had asked her, "Is she breathing? Can you tell?" Vera had remembered saying, with a pleading note in her voice, "I don't think so. I don't want to get any closer to her. Is that okay?" A heroic person would never respond like that.

She would not get closer, but she would not leave her, either. She stayed with her because Sufia was her responsibility now, more so than ever, at least until the authorities took over. When she saw the flashing lights of cop cars entering the park and heard the ambulance not far behind them, she waved them down, herding them in like a traffic conductor.

"Hurry," she heard herself say, her own throat sounding constricted. "Hurry, hurry."

She stood off to the side only when the cops bent over the body and checked it, uselessly, for a pulse.

Vera stayed with Sufia even after the police cars and the EMTs had arrived. Sufia's eyes, no longer soft and liquid, seemed to bulge in Vera's direction, following her wherever she went, as though it were Vera alone, and not these men and women who knelt beside her with cameras and evidence bags, who could make a difference. The officers pulled Vera off to the side, creating a wall with their bodies, trying to stand a little taller so that she could not see Sufia over their shoulders, but she still could feel the girl's eyes as she began to answer questions as best as she could. And the statement she kept coming back to-over and over and over-was not an answer, but a lamentation: She's one of mine. She's one of mine. You have to do something; she's one of mine.

Chapter Five.

Vera woke up in her own bed at about ten o'clock in the morning, desperately having to use the bathroom, and the soreness she felt brought some of the previous evening back to her. Intense self-loathing roiled in her stomach, followed closely by a need to vomit. She leaned over the toilet bowl and attempted to heave, and when that didn't work, she stuck her fingers down her throat until some of the leftover alcohol evacuated her stomach, watery and tart. Still wearing the clothes she had worn out to the bar, she now saw that her dress was inside out, and the bra she'd worn under it was missing. Her favorite bra. What an impression I must have made on the cops, Vera thought, and then, on the heels of that: What a stupid thing to think.

She felt ill, hungover, demoralized, and frightened-but her predominant feeling was one of numbness. The encounter with the man at the bar-the one who'd reminded her, at first, of Ritchie Ouelette-had been the cause of all the problems, she decided. Her irresponsible behavior, intended as no more than a sloughing off, a celebration of having survived a full workweek, had instead become a humiliating personal failure and a tragedy for another young woman's family. She saw the night's beginning and its ending as connected, a causal chain in which she was glaringly at fault.

She wondered if the story had hit the news yet. Vera felt that she needed to see it spelled out in order to believe it. Reading a news bulletin about Sufia might make things easier for her, might help her to remember her as a person, as her own quiet, responsible student and not just a dead body in the park. She wanted to see a photo of her-a photo of her from before, to cancel out the other image she had. Typing in search term after search term into her online browser window-Sufia Ahmed, Maine homicide, Dorset Park body-she found that there was no coverage about the dead girl. Was it too soon, or was the local media planning to sweep the story under the rug? If it had been a pretty local white girl or well-connected kid like Angela Galvez, Vera wondered, would the story be all over the place by now?

With her laptop still fired up, Vera ran a bath and settled into it to scour the beach sand out of her hair and eyes; she had a feeling she would be picking sand off herself and from the corners of her studio for a while. Even a change of her grit-covered sheets and a thorough sweep of her floor could not rid her of the last of it. This seemed nothing more than an added injury, a secondary source of despair. She lay back in the bath and remembered-quite out of nowhere-an earlier time that hadn't felt so long ago: a time when her life's ambition had been nothing more than to live with her parents through their dotage, haunting their upstairs rooms and acting as a hand servant to the end of their days, or to the end of hers if that came first. It had seemed such a quiet, focused, simple way to live. A better way, come to think of it.

Out of the tub and dressed in clean clothes, her hair still sopping down her back, Vera refreshed her Internet search-still nothing in the news. She logged out and, after some thought, went into her doc.u.ments and pulled up the file called Ma.n.u.script.

I ought to ret.i.tle that, she thought, so as not to confuse it with any future work-but then, thinking some more, she realized that this thought was too optimistic, too suggestive of prolificacy. The Ivan Schlosser ma.n.u.script was the only ma.n.u.script she had even thought about since finishing graduate school. She had been stuck on it the way an old record needle sticks to a warp in a groove.

In her dark and self-punishing frame of mind, she thought last night's gruesome discovery might enable her to work on her book about Ivan Schlosser. A gift in disguise? No, Sufia's death wasn't a gift-her student's slack, dead face imprinted in her memory was anything but a gift-but at least she wrote better, she thought, from such dark places.

For Vera, the appeal of the Schlosser case was personal. Not only had Schlosser been a local legend for a time, but also his confession had diffused her connection to Heidi Duplessis. Following his confession, her fellow cla.s.smates forgot that they'd ever had Vera on their radar. But Vera didn't forget. In a strange way, she thought of Schlosser as her rescuer, as someone who had swooped in and saved her from further harm. If not for Schlosser, she might still be haunted by Heidi of the white teeth and tanned face, popular, easygoing Heidi.

Vera was sure Heidi had never known who she was, though they had gone to the same school. Heidi had been oblivious to the mousy freshman who'd positioned herself behind a speaker at a school dance, glowering at her as she danced with Peter Mercier. She'd had no idea how high Vera's hatred had risen as she watched her press closer to Peter; as they shuffled around the dance floor in that awkward, swaying slow dance, she could not fathom the depths with which Vera hated every inch of her, cataloging her hatred of the girl from head to toe, from the tips of Heidi's lightly teased bangs to the soles of her pink Reebok sneakers. She hated her even more as she watched Peter's hand rest on the small of her back and hover just above the curve of her behind. No, Heidi had had no idea that Vera Lundy, freshman, had summoned as much venom and ill will as she could and had even wished her dead. Wished her gone. She couldn't have guessed that Vera had written as much, in the notebook she carried around all through high school: "If I could find a way to get rid of Heidi Duplessis, I would. I think first I'd duct-tape her to her car, and then I'd shave off her hair with a pair of clippers. If I could kill her and get away with it, I don't think I'd hesitate."