I wonder what she would think if she knew I was the one who facilitated her finding those panties.
As Ms. Crenshaw decides that she and I need toast as well, I sit forward. Or try to. The doughy cushion I’m on has a death grip on my lower body. I glance around, looking for a rope to pull myself out—
I stop. I frown.
I become transfixed by the lowest shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
Shoving both my palms into the couch’s arm, I surgically remove myself from the sofa and double-check that Ms. Crenshaw is still working on the pomegranate juice that I lied about being allergic to, the orange I don’t want, the toast I don’t need. She is leaning over the toaster, as if rays from her eyes, rather than coils heated by electricity, will be what browns the no-doubt whole-wheat-whatever she put in there. And she is talking, talking, talking, her words like lemmings leaping out of her mouth.
I have to step around a magazine holder with issues of Mother Jones in its slats or else I will trip, fall, and end up fending her off to avoid being given CPR.
Over at the shelves, I crouch down and focus on the splash of color that caught my eye. It’s a keen turquoise, an outlier in this apartment full of so many shades of browns, tans, and golds.
It looks like Nick Hollis’s sweatshirt. The turquoise one with the map of Nantucket on it that he wore on Mountain Day. The one that he later complained to me was lost, back when he and I were talking about his books, and I was spinning romantic fantasies about him, and Greta was still alive.
I have to be sure.
I glance over my shoulder to the kitchen. “I’m really hungry,” I say. “May I have two pieces of toast?”
“Oh, yes! You know, I made this bread myself. It’s got four different kinds of hand-ground grains in it!”
Without warning, she leans around the partition.
I shove my boot out and make a show of doing up laces that were already done up. “I was just looking at your collection of magazines. And books.”
She smiles and points across with the tip of a serrated knife, one that seems really big and really long for the job of slicing homemade bread.
“Did you see all my Dickens? I love Dickens.”
“I was looking at them, yes.” I straighten and reach for something. Anything. “But what I’m really interested in is… Shakespeare.”
“You like the old classics.”
“I do.” I put the book to my heart. “They’re my passion.”
“Mine, too!”
She goes back to what she was doing, and I hear a sawing that suggests either she’s trying to slice off a piece of the counter or that bread of hers is solid as a rock.
“You know, we should start a book club!” she says.
I wait to see if she needs more eye contact. When she just keeps talking about literature I have no interest in, I duck back down to the shelves.
There’s a key by the sweatshirt. A napkin and spoon that seem like they’re from the cafeteria. A glass that is empty—and given its murky contours, used yet uncleaned. A stick about six inches long. And a newspaper clipping.
With Nick Hollis’s grainy picture on it.
“What are you doing?”
Ms. Crenshaw’s voice is right next to me and I straighten quickly. She is standing behind me, and she has the knife in her hand. I look to the apartment’s door. She’s closed it.
“I was just wondering if you had any Jane Austen,” I say.
I meet her dead in the eye. As if I am not lying. As if I’m not suddenly worried about making it out of here alive.
There’s a pause.
“They’re over on that side,” she says tightly, pointing with the serrated knife.
“Thanks,” I croak.
chapter THIRTY-ONE
It’s the following day and classes are canceled. As it turned out, Ms. Crenshaw did let me go from her apartment, but I no longer feel safe in my dorm, and I can’t decide whether that is paranoia or self-preservation. I am also aware of a simmering anxiety that seems to be expressing itself in a tic involving my left eyebrow. The thing has been going into fits all morning, like the spout cap on a boiling teakettle.
Currently, I am walking into town at a fast pace, and as I pass by the CVS, my stride gets even quicker. I don’t want to go in there ever again, and my mind teases me with an unlikely scenario that its glass doors are actually a suction flow that will pull me in and never release me. All of this ugliness and deadly disruption kind of started after my first trip inside, and as much as I hated Greta, I wish none of this had ever happened to any of the parties involved.
As my brain connects dots I regret, I feel as though my role in this terrible drama is as the binder. I am the link between so many disparate people and events, and though I did not stab Greta Stanhope on the rocks down at the river, I cannot escape the sense that I am the bridge that let her killer cross onto her private island.
Feeling pursued, even though I am the one who is doing my own stalking, I cut down a shallow alley beside the pharmacy. It is clean as a city park, and I presently emerge behind the lineup of stores. The library is off to the right, forming the farthest boundary of the parking lot, and as I note its tight proximity to the police station, an irrational fear grips me. I see cuffs slapped on my scarred wrists. I see me dragged inside and put immediately into an electric chair. I picture the old-fashioned metal cap on my head, and feel the surge of volts go through me. I smell burnt hair and flesh as my fingers stick straight out of my straining hands, like spikes—
To escape my spinning mind, I’d walk even faster, but then I would be jogging. And besides, what is that saying? Everywhere I go, there I am.
I’m breathing heavily as I enter the Mercer Memorial Library’s glass doors, and I pull them closed behind me, like they’re a cloak of invisibility that will shield me from prosecution.
In spite of the fact that I am guilty of nothing. And Detective Bruno was the first to know this.
I need a moment before I can recalibrate and absorb my environment. When I am able to form an opinion about where I am, my first impression is that the library is over-warm, like an elementary school room where the teacher is worried her charges will come down with spontaneous pneumonia if the temperature goes below sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The carpet underfoot is a speckled brown that coordinates with the seventies-era harvest gold and avocado green décor, and on this main floor, there are big windows all around, letting in gray light. The aroma is pure book, something on the nose spectrum between oatmeal and fresh paint.
The front desk is unmanned—or unwomanned, more likely—and I am glad, even though it means I’m going to have to hunt and peck for what I’m in search of. Beyond the gatekeeper station, the children’s section is right up front, along with popular fiction. There’s also a newspaper station, the hanging rods slung with various pulpy editions like wash that is drying in a yard. These dailies are close to what I’m looking for, but they’re too recent.
After all, I already know what the current articles are saying about Greta. And yes, the murder did hit the national news. There’s nothing about Nick Hollis in any of the reports yet, and I wonder how long that will last. The media are being very persistent. There are a dozen TV newscasters and reporters at the gates of Ambrose, and I don’t think the school is going to be able to keep a lid on something so germane to the murder as what that man did with the student who was killed.