The St. Ambrose School for Girls(103)

Without warning or preamble, I disassociate and float away from my own body—and in a rush of fear, I become convinced that this library trip is all an illusion in my mind. The real-reality is me back in my dorm room, sitting on my bed, my disease having created a new and different black hole for me to fall into, not a galaxy this time, but the local athenaeum.

Yes, this is all a hallucination. Mr. Pasture was right. None of this is real. Not the panties. Not the death. Not the police or Nick Hollis… or the two women I think I’m seeing now. After all, I am not actually in the Mercer Memorial Library, and I am not—

I snap back into focus and reach out to touch the microfiche machine. When my trembling fingers inform me that, yes, there is a three-dimensional, measurable mass in front of me, I take a deep breath and try to sort out my confusion about where I am.

In desperation, I start to move the image on the screen, and try to connect with—

And there it is. An article about a Yale University teaching assistant becoming embroiled in accusations of sexual impropriety. It’s blinded of Nick’s name, but I know it’s him. The date is right, it notes that he’s married and a master’s candidate in English, and it says he comes from a prominent family. Granted, there are probably a lot of people who fit that description at the school, but there’s a tell that strikes me to the core.

The girl’s name isn’t mentioned.

Because she’s fifteen, according to the article.

Mollyjansen was fifteen. According to Sandra Hollis.

I sit back in the seat and stare at the glowing print. I wonder how their paths crossed. Was she the daughter of a professor or an administrator? No, I decide that she was a townie, someone who didn’t matter, so it was easier to gloss over the whole problem, bury it in spite of this piece of nonreporting because the school worked with Nick Hollis’s dad and closed the case. Was the girl’s family paid off? There’s no mention of charges being filed, so I’m thinking they were.

I’ve read enough of my mother’s People magazine articles to know how rich people deal with things that take the shine off their reputations.

And for sure something happened with the girl. I heard an ugly truth in Sandra Hollis’s voice when she brought up the whole situation in the parking area, right before she took off with her Civic and her suitcase.

But the real news flash isn’t about Mollyjansen. Greta was pregnant? That certainly raises the stakes, especially as I consider payoffs to minors. Greta and the Stanhopes went bankrupt. So what if she got herself pregnant and tried to blackmail Nick Hollis? After his father had to buy silence from another girl the year before?

That might just get a guy who loves American Psycho to take a page out of Bret Easton Ellis’s book.

“May I help you?”

I brace myself before I look up—because I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to see. The article has kind of put me back on the planet, but who the hell knows what’s real.

I turn my head toward the disapproving female voice. It’s not the staffer who needs to go to the hairdresser for her roots.

“I’m almost done,” I say, assuming either one of us is actually here.

“Please do not try and reshelve the film,” she tells me. As if she’s a brain surgeon taking a scalpel out of the hands of a landscaper. “It goes in that basket.”

She points to a red plastic container that belongs at a burger joint full of fries fresh from the oil vats. Sure enough, there is a wrinkled, handmade sign taped to the front of its flimsy slats: Please Put Film Here.

Well. What do you know. This is exactly the kind of stupid minutia the real world drowns in. Maybe this is happening.

“Thank you,” I say. “I won’t reshelve.”

She nods, like we’ve formed a blood pact and if I violate the agreement, I’m subject to a lifetime library ban. Taking strength from the banality of our exchange, I put my head down.

And it’s “do not try to reshelve the film,” I think to myself when I’m finally left alone. And the reels are in a drawer, not on a shelf.

After I make sure I’ve followed the rules more correctly than her grammar does, I go back up to the first floor via the stairs. The lady with the roots showing is at the front desk, but she is on the phone, taking notes on whatever conversation is occurring. I don’t know where her “try and” colleague is.

I almost walk by the newspaper display, but I stop.

The local paper is the fourth in the lineup, going from left to right, behind the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. As I lift the rod it’s bifurcated on, I wonder if I’ll be allowed to “reshelve” it when I’m finished.

There’s a big table with six chairs around it right next to me, clearly provided so that people can do what I do as I lay out the folio on its dowel. The front page is filled with the known details of the murder thus far, and there are plenty of photographs. The first is a shot of the river behind Tellmer, but it’s a stock photo, from the Ambrose admissions pamphlet. Another image, of the school gates with all the reporters and news trucks, is a fresh one, however, and so is that of the police chief at a microphone, addressing the press at the station house next door. The last is a picture of Mr. Stanhope looking more enraged than full of grief as he walks out of the headmaster’s house. This one was clearly taken with a serious telephoto lens from the iron fence, as the press is not allowed on the school’s private property.