I spent two days at Frannie's writing and talking to people who had been around at the time of the murder. Pauline's father was dead, but her mother and sister still lived in town. I decided not to talk with them for a while because I wanted an overview of things before going to the heart of their matter.
Frannie had kept a good file of the records of both the murder investigation and the subsequent trial of Edward Durant, but I held off reading those too. I pictured my investigation as a kind of circular labyrinth. Entering somewhere on the outer edge, I would inevitably make many wrong turns but hopefully close in on the center eventually.
That meant first finding out who were the peripheral people in her life and seeing them. A couple of teachers were still at the school who had taught her. Two old lizards who had long overstayed their welcome in academia. Wizened and cranky, they were not the most reliable sources in the world. Yet because they spend so much time with kids for a specific, concentrated block of their young lives, teachers experience them in a singular way no others do.
Her French teacher remembered her because good as she was at the mechanics of the language, Pauline could never say the words so they sounded anything like French. "Bonjour" became "Bone Jew" on her tongue, and hard as she tried, it always stayed right there. He remembered her ramrod posture and how she loved the poetry of Jacques Prevert. What I got from him was a picture of every teacher's favorite student – eager, inquisitive, occasionally remarkable.
The same wasn't true with her English teacher, Mr. Tresvant. I'd had him too when I was in school. He was one of those sanctimonious sour balls who made us read dinosaurs like Hope Muntz's The Golden Warrior, and then had the audacity to call them literature. He appeared to be wearing the same brown tie and dead corduroy suit he had three decades before. What was weird and perversely wonderful was that on entering his room again after all those years, I felt my asshole tighten with the same fear I had felt back when his grades meant life or death.
The first thing he said to me was, "So, Bayer, you're a bestseller now, eh?"
I wanted to say, "That's right, you old stump. No thanks to you and Hope Muntz!" But I gave an "aw shucks" shrug instead and tried to look modest.
I asked if he remembered Pauline Ostrova. To my surprise, he silently pointed to a picture on the wall. I continued looking at him, waiting to hear if he was going to say anything about it. When he didn't – Tresvant was famous for his menacing, pregnant pauses – I got up and went over. It was a fine drawing of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Whoever had done it had spent a long time because every possible detail was there.
"Did Pauline draw this?"
"No, of course not. That was, that is, the English award, Mr. Bayer. Obviously you've forgotten the goings-on here. Every year I give away a copy of that drawing to the best English student in my classes. Pauline Ostrova should have won it because more often than not, she was an excellent student. But you know something? She turned out to be too excellent for her own good. She was a cheat."
I reacted as if he had said something obscene about one of my best friends, which was ridiculous because she was dead almost thirty years and I really hadn't known her. Finally I managed to weakly repeat, "She was a cheat?"
"A very adept one. And not always. She read everything. Wayne Booth, Norman O. Brown, Leavis . . . Send her to the library and she took everything she could lay her hands on. But once too often what she read appeared in what she wrote, whole cloth, and she was dangerously stingy about giving credit where it was due."
"That's hard to believe!"
He smiled but it was an ugly thing, glowing with scorn and superiority. "Did you love her too, Bayer? Much more than the cheating, that was her sin. She made it easy to love her, but she never loved back."
"Did you love her, Mr. Tresvant?"
"The only thing that went through my mind when I heard she was dead was a mild 'Oh.' So I would guess not. Anyway, the less old men remember about love, the better."
Skin cuts the easiest. Even the thinnest paper resists – a moment's no before the knife slices through its surface. But a knife into skin is like a finger into water. I was cutting open a package of legal pads when the knife slipped and slid through the top of my thumb. Blood shot out and splattered across the yellow paper.
It was ten at night. Frannie was downstairs eating Mongolian barbecue takeout and watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme video he had rented earlier. I wrapped my thumb in toilet paper and called down, asking if he had medicine and bandages. When I explained what had happened, he raced up the stairs with a gigantic orange first-aid kit. He looked at my finger and wrapped it up like a pro. When I asked where he'd learned to do that, he said he had been a medic in Vietnam. Surprised he had spent his time as a soldier doing that and not flame-throwing people, I accused him of not telling me much about himself. He laughed and said I should ask any questions I wanted.
"How come you keep calling David Cadmus?"
"Because the fucker's father killed Pauline Ostrova."
"The fucker's father is dead, Frannie."
"But the crime isn't. Turn your hand over so I can get the other side."
"I don't understand what that means."
"It means I want someone besides Durant to admit killing Pauline."
"Why? Why's it so important?"
He held my bandaged hand in both of his while he spoke. I tried to pull it away after what he said next, but he wouldn't let go.
"What do you believe in, Sam?"
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly that. What in your life do you believe in? Where do you worship? Who would you give a kidney to? What would you go to the wall for?"
"A lot of things. Should I list them?" My voice went way up on the last word.
"Yes! Tell me five things you believe in. And no bullshit. Don't be cute, don't be clever. Say five things right out of your heart, and don't think about it."
Offended, I tried to pull away. He held tight, which made me even more uneasy. "All right. I believe in my daughter. I believe in my work, when it's going well. I believe in . . . I don't know, Frannie, I'd have to think about it some more."
"Wouldn't do any good. Listening to you talk, all that cynicism leads you to one big fucking wall of nothing. You know the saying, 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'? The difference between you and me is I have at least one big thing that matters and gives me direction. I'm sure Edward Durant didn't kill Pauline. One day I'm going to prove who did.
"Even with all your success, you've got a fox's eyes, Sam – nervous and edgy, they don't stay on any one thing too long.
"I think you're back here because you're trying to get away from your life. Trying to return to some old part that's dead and safe. But maybe there'll be something in it to save you. That's really what attracts you, because where you are now is some Sunday in the middle of your life and the rest of your week looks pretty grim."
He let go of my hand and left the room. I heard him go down the stairs and then the sound of the television again. What was most interesting was the calmness of my heart. Normally bells and whistles would have been going off in there. I have a quick temper and an even quicker emergency defense system that throws up the walls in my soul whenever it is attacked. This time, however, my insides were as calm as the truth because that's exactly what he had spoken and I knew it.