The St. Ambrose School for Girls(107)

I snag the soft folds. Reading quickly, I look for the name Nick Hollis and do not find it.

“Can I have that back.”

The girl who forgot her copy is standing over me, utterly indignant. Like there are only a certain number of reads before the ink is consumed by our retinas and the thing is rendered blank.

“Sorry.” I hand the paper back. “But you left it.”

She walks off. I don’t recognize her so she’s probably a Wycliffe upperclassman. They all look the same to me.

I glance across the crowded cafeteria. Strots isn’t around. She hasn’t been sitting with Keisha, obviously, but there’s a second field hockey table that has, predictably, welcomed her with open arms. She’s not there now, though, and I wonder if my roommate’s gone back down to the station, because she left our room early this morning without her books.

I go through the motions of my afternoon classes, distracted by the effort of trying to discipline myself against the suspect-based Wheel of Fortune game my brain is determined to play. According to my spinning thoughts, there are potential murderers everywhere. They are anybody who ever spoke with Greta. Took a class with her. Ate with her.

When I return to my dorm, there are police cars parked in front of Tellmer again, and I wonder who they’re taking away in handcuffs.

Pulling open the front door, I hear girls on the phone in the phone room, but it’s regular traffic and conversation, three of the receivers open, the girls talking about care packages and test grades with their parents. I remind myself I better call my mother back, just to reassure her I’m alive.

And then I’m at the base of the stairs.

I look down to Ms. Crenshaw’s closed door, and think about her shrine. Has she dismantled it yet? It’s hard to imagine those talismans mean the same thing to her now.

Hustling up the stairs, I arrive on the second floor in time to see the other plainclothes detective, the one who is not Bruno, leave Nick Hollis’s apartment. Through the closing door, I catch a glimpse of our residential advisor. He’s sitting on his sofa, his head in his hands. But hey, at least he’s not being arrested for murder.

The detective doesn’t even look at me as he brushes up against my book bag to get at the stairs. It’s clear his mind is elsewhere, his middle-aged features grim.

Heading for my room, I wonder what Nick Hollis’s father is saying about all this, especially given the newest, sad twist that’s come out. I decide that the lawyer who was hired to fight the firing must be a good one because Nick is still on campus. This cannot last, however. St. Ambrose will really have to remove him now, and going by his obvious devastation, I don’t think he’ll protest the pink slip anymore.

I think of the moment I saw our residential advisor on that very first day when he’d been talking to those plumbers. Then I remember him apologizing to me for getting my name wrong. And I recall the empathy in his face when he suggested that I shouldn’t feel bad for dropping the ball in the Mountain Day game.

I also think of the many times my eyes clung to him, approving of so much about how he looked and who I ascribed him to be.

It is nearly impossible to square up both his kindness and my fantasy with the situation he now finds himself in, disgraced, unemployed, and surely soon to be divorced. I think of a brand-new sedan easing off the lot at a car dealership, freshly bought and paid for, an owner’s joy. But then there is the accident that crumples the front and shears off the rear, everything trashed. It’s a good metaphor, although the consequences of Nick’s actions are the result of choices freely made. What happened between him and Greta was wrong—and now it has become deadly and very complicated.

I go down to Strots’s and my room, and am disappointed that she’s not there. Then I remember the time. She has practice. She won’t be back until just before dinner, and she’ll be starved so she might go eat first at Wycliffe before she returns.

Though I try to focus on my geometry homework, nothing much sticks. Today in class, Ms. Crenshaw was even more scattered and wired than usual, and I found myself unable to look her in the eye. The police are going to want to talk to her, if they haven’t already, and to this point, I rise out of my seat and lean over my open textbook. Peering down into the parking lot, I note that her car is gone, but the other two are there. Maybe she’s at the station being interviewed right at this moment. Maybe she’s relieved that she gets to talk and make sure her name is clear.

I have a sudden image of her burning that turquoise blue sweatshirt, as well as the other strange artifacts of a romance that never was. I guess there are two reasons to disappear the items, both the disillusionment and so she doesn’t seem like a suspect.

As I sit back down, I knock my notebook of lined paper off my desk with my sleeve. Cursing, I bend over—

And that’s when I see the dirt on the floor.

My desk and Strots’s are pushed tight together under the big window, and right in between the end of hers and the start of mine… there is a trail of dry brown dirt particles that disappears into the shadowy seam. There aren’t a lot of the specks, and they are exactly the color of the scuffed hardwood, so they’re hard to see.

I look over the surface of Strots’s desk. Then my own.

Nothing dirty on anything.

I look down again. In the back of my mind, I know where I’ve seen this type of sediment before. It’s from the riverbank. I’ve brought it back in the treads of my boots, from when I was eavesdropping on Greta and the Brunettes. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s all over the bottom of my closet.