“None.”
“That would probably be the way he’d want to go. Claim that the girl was financially dependent, stress her runaway status, abandonment of the baby and its subsequent death. That’s all public record. The lawyers could lean hard on her overdose as a suicide attempt. After that, mostly it would depend on the judge. Down here, I could pretty much call it according to whose court it was set for. There, I just don’t know. But they’d probably get some kind of exclusionary ruling. Commitment to one of the diagnostic centers for observation, possibly, or mandatory court-monitored therapy.”
“Is there anything we could do to counter it?”
“This isn’t science we’re talking, Lew. Not even law, really-and law itself is unpredictable enough. More like magic where the correspondences are skewed and whatever rules there are, keep changing. Let me do some checking. I’ll get on the network and see what I can turn up. I have some contacts scattered around up there. I’ll get back to you. May be a while. The girl able to sit up straight and say what she wants?”
“Yes. Once she decides.”
“She look okay?”
“Yeah. A little shopworn.”
“Good. That counts for a lot. Okay, let me fire up the circuits and read some smoke. Where you gonna be?”
I gave him my phone number and said if I missed him, which was likely under the circumstances, I’d check back with him sometime tomorrow.
I hung up and sat remembering light gouging at my eyes.
Once years ago, surfacing briefly in a diner during a week-long drunk, I found Mephistopheles himself sitting across from me in the booth, pouring Tabasco sauce into his coffee. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We talked a while (I remember the waitress coming by to ask if I needed anything, and a couple of times to ask if I was all right, and some other people staring over at us), I declined his offers, and he left, telling me to keep up the good work.
Naturally, I later used the whole thing in a novel.
Tomorrow morning, too, I would call the university, try to mend that tattered sail as best I could, if it were mendable at all. Then Clare. Hoping for wind and calm seas.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I found her standing at the side of the two-lane highway near a gas-station-and-foodstore crossroad, wearing the cotton dress and navy pumps.
My phone had chirred that morning at eight. Crickets were devouring the Superdome, then there were incoming missiles. The door to my elevator wouldn’t close despite a formless something lurking out there in shadow. When my beeper went off, the thing tracking me turned its head suddenly, tipped by the sound-then the sound was only a phone.
Someone’s hand went out and got it.
“Mr. Griffin?”
I admitted it.
“Doris Brown, at the hospital. I’m one of the nurses on Three East. We were wondering if you’d seen Alouette.”
I came suddenly awake.
“Not since last night. I brought her back about nine-thirty.”
“The nurse on duty remembers her coming back, but somehow she never logged back in. And when Trudy made a bed check about two A.M., Alouette was gone.” She turned her head away, coughed. “I’m sorry we’ve been so long getting in touch with you, but we had trouble locating a number for you. You have no idea where Alouette is, then?”
“No.”
“Will she contact you, do you think? Or is there someone else she might get in touch with? Her hospitalization became voluntary upon release from the jail ward, of course, but we’re concerned.”
“I understand.”
“You’ll let us know if you hear from her?”
“I will.”
I hung up and stood in the shower a long time, turning the water ever hotter as I adjusted. I’d been awake much of last night, finally falling into agitated sleep just as dawn’s fingers tugged at the sill. A sleep in which restless dreams billowed soft and soundless as silk parachutes and dropped away.
I’d spent those hours preceding my shabby, ragged symphonie fantastique remembering an incident, itself almost dreamlike, from years ago.
Every teacher has stories of students who suddenly give way under pressure. They start coming in during office hours all the time for no discernible reason, they just one day vanish and are never seen again, they disrupt class with objections and urgent queries or sit in the back and never speak, the essays they turn in have little to do with the subject and everything to do with themselves.
Oddly enough, in all these on-again, off-again years, I’d really had only one instance.
The young man’s name was Robert. He dressed neatly, chinos and oxford cloth shirts mostly, and when he spoke, it was with a demure, softly southern accent; he had the deferential look of men raised by women. His French was extraordinarily good. He easily followed everything that was said, evidenced fine vocabulary and grammar on all written work, but had trouble whenever things shifted over to speech, as though words and phrases caught in his throat like some kind of phlegm and only with great effort could he expel them.
During conversation one afternoon-we were discussing Montaigne, as I recall-Robert passed twice, and when it came around to him again, simply sat there watching me blankly until I directed a question elsewhere. When I glanced back at him moments later, he leapt from his desk and stood in a crouch beside it.
“Ca va?” I asked him.
Whereupon he straightened, announcing in a loud voice, and in perfect French: “There is a conspiracy against me, Mr. Griffin. Surely you know that.”
“No, I wasn’t aware of that, Robert. But can you tell me just who is involved in this conspiracy?”
He looked around him wildly, but said no more. The room was absolutely quiet. No one moved.
I said: “I’d like for everyone who is not directly involved in this conspiracy to leave the room, please.”
The others quickly gathered their things and slipped from the room. I walked over to Robert, who remained standing stock still by the desk.
“So it’s down to just us now,” he said.
And looking into his eyes, I realized that he wasn’t talking to me. I don’t think he even knew I was there any longer.
Security came, and Robert let them lead him away without protest. A few weeks later, at a department meeting, Dean Vidale told us that Robert had got up one night at the state hospital, gone into the shower stall, and hung himself with a strip of ticking torn from his mattress.
I was thinking about it again that morning as I climbed back into the car with a huge cup of coffee and a bag of doughnuts and pulled out onto Highway 61. I’m not at all sure why this came to mind. I hadn’t thought about it in years. But now that I had, I couldn’t seem to shake it.
There was only one place for Alouette to go. And only two reasons for going there, the first of these, and far the least likely, her grandmother.
I’d driven less than an hour, coffee long gone, half a doughnut left in the bag, when, ahead, I saw a semi pull onto the opposite shoulder to let someone off, then pull back into traffic without looking, sending a panicked Camry into the oncoming lane. A panel truck in front of me hit its brakes and swerved onto the shoulder. It fishtailed and came to a stop nose-down in a shallow ditch at roadside, one wheel hanging free. I worked my own brakes, slowing by increments, and at the end of the curve, after the Camry had retaken its lane and shot by me, fell into an easy U.
I watched her face change as I approached and pulled off beside her.
“Thought you might need a ride.”
“Guess so. Last one’s price was one I didn’t want to pay. Man, you get straight and people start smelling bad, you know what I mean?”
She got in, crossing her legs beneath her on the car seat.