A Hard Day's Fright Page 9

  Ah, the plot thickened!

  “What’s a woman supposed to do, Pepper?” Ariel asked, and it took me a moment to realize the woman she was talking about was her. “What do you do when a guy turns on you like that? When he breaks your heart into a million little pieces and betrays your very soul?”

  I wasn’t sure if this was some sort of rhetorical cosmic question, or if her you meant me personally. If it didn’t, I would be better off just letting the whole subject slide. So would my ego. If it did…yeah, I’d have to swallow my pride, but it would give me a chance to impart a little hard-won wisdom. With the mood Ariel was in, she just might listen.

  To up the odds, I leaned forward and pinned her with a look. “You know those million little pieces? That heart belongs to you and not to anyone else. So you pick up every one of those pieces and you move on.”

  She gulped. “I’m not sure I can.”

  “Then the only other thing you can do is stay in the same miserable place you are now.”

  Good advice. Now I just needed to remember it.

  Before I could get into some uncomfortable soul-searching, I realized I’d made a mistake. Miserable wasn’t going to scare Ariel away. Miserable and Ariel were best friends.

  Big surprise, she actually nodded, swiped her nose, and smiled. “I needed that,” she said. “A figurative slap in the face to remind me of the perfidy of the opposite sex. I must steel my heart.” She slapped one hand over it. “I must keep my mind busy and occupied. That’s why you do what you do, isn’t it, Pepper? That’s why you’re always investigating. Somewhere back before you were so old, I’ll bet your heart got broken and now you have to keep your brain from thinking about it too much.”

  Now that she mentioned it…

  This was a little too much sharing, and rather than get caught in that trap, I U-turned. “You know,” I said, “if you’re looking for something that will take your mind off Gonzalo…”

  Ariel’s dark eyes sparked with what was nearly enthusiasm.

  “There’s this Patrick Monroe character, and he’s supposed to be some kind of—”

  “Some kind of god of poetry!” Ariel swooned and fell back into my chair. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Patrick Monroe. He used to teach at my school, but that’s not why we study him in English. He’s famous. He’s more than famous. He writes the most fabulous, evocative, angst-ridden poetry. I mean, not all his stuff, of course. Some of it is just what Gonzalo thinks—” She caught herself and cleared her throat. “Some of it is what I think is just hackneyed drivel. But there’s this one poem of his, ‘Girl at Dawn’…that poem is perfection. Come on, Pepper, you must have read it. I mean, they must have taught it in English class, even back in the old days when you were in school.”

  It was the old days that stung. I rose above the insult and got down to some serious thinking. Now that she mentioned it, the title of the poem did sound familiar.

  While I was thinking, Ariel began reciting:

  Girl,

  Crimson and golden.

  Nymph

  Chick

  Babe.

  Awake to the dawn,

  Crimson and golden.

  Alive to the pulse

  The vibration

  The beat.

  She sighed softly. “It goes on from there, every line more brilliant than the last. Every emotion…” Another sigh, just for emphasis. “Every emotion is right out there for anybody reading the poem to feel and suffer. You don’t need some English teacher to explain, not a word of it. That’s how you know if a poem is good. You don’t need some PhD or Cliffs-Notes to tell you what it’s about. You can feel every single word down in your bones. That’s where I feel ‘Girl at Dawn.’ I feel the ache of her adolescence, her yearning, her desire to fly free.” She threw her arms out. “You must know the rest of the poem, Pepper. You must know how awesome it is. Everybody who’s ever been in freshman English does.”

  Maybe everybody who’d ever paid attention in freshman English.

  Since we were bonding, I figured this was not a good moment to point this out. Instead, I got back to the topic that had sidetracked us in the first place. “I could use some help,” I told Ariel, “finding stuff out about Patrick Monroe.”

  “He’s coming to town, you know.”

  This was news to me. I perked up.

  Ariel nodded. “He’s doing a poetry reading at Case Western Reserve. I have tickets. Two.”

  “Because you’re taking Gonzalo.”

  “Who?” Ariel jumped out of my chair. “You can come with me if you want. Monroe is bound to read ‘Girl at Dawn.’ He closes all his readings with it, and I hear the audience goes nuts. You know, screaming and crying and all like that. So what do you need to know about Patrick Monroe?”

  Ah, that was the question! “Everything, I guess,” I told her. “See, your mom’s friend, Lucy, took a summer school class with him.”

  “And got an F.” So much for thinking I’d actually gotten Ariel on the right track. At the mention of her mother, she was right back to sounding like the Ariel of old. Attitude and sass. Not bad attributes when they’re used judiciously (I should know). But not pretty in the hands of a teenaged girl. The upside? At least when she curled her lip, I didn’t have to watch that silver stud jump. “So what you’re not telling me is that this whole research thing, it was my mother’s idea?”

  I shook my head. “My idea. Because you’re good at it. And I need help.”

  Her shoulders shot back and she stood a little taller. “ Really? And it doesn’t have anything to do with teaching me a lesson about running away and how Lucy’s been missing like for a million years and nobody in the whole world still cares except my mother?”

  “Not going to deny it.” There didn’t seem much point. “But first of all, your mom didn’t know I was going to ask you to research Patrick Monroe for me. I didn’t, either, until right now. Secondly…well, the research part would really help me out.”

  Ariel’s eyes lit. “Because we’re going to try to find Lucy?”

  I was careful when choosing my words. I couldn’t afford to string along a second Silverman woman. “We’re going to try to find out what happened to her.”

  “So we’re detectives?”

  “Sort of.”

  She hustled to the door. “My mom’s in a meeting with Jim. I’ll go use her computer and see what I can dig up about Patrick Monroe and everyone else who worked at the school at the time. That’s what you’re thinking, right? That Monroe might know something. He is brilliant, after all. I’ll bet he saw plenty that the cops never noticed. You know, something that would point to the real perp.”

  Apparently in between being a runaway and a pain in the neck, Ariel watched TV. “We don’t know that. Not for sure.”

  “But we think it’s possible.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “So you’ll want information on any priors anybody might have. And Monroe’s opinion of each of them. I’ll bet there’s stuff in his collected journals. They’ve been published, you know. I’ve got them at home, I just never actually thought to look for anything about Lucy in them.” Her mouth dropped open. “You don’t think Monroe knows who really did it, do you? That all these years, he’s been protecting someone? Maybe someone he loves.” She clutched her hands to her heart. “Leave it to Patrick Monroe to live the tortured life of an artist with a terrible secret.”

  She was way off base, but I had to give the kid points for imagination. I was used to that other Silverman woman and pulling the wool over her eyes. It looked like things wouldn’t be so easy with her youngest daughter.

  “Like I said, we’re going to find out.” That was all the incentive Ariel needed. The last I saw of her, she was heading to her mother’s office, humming under her breath.

  Mostly, Friday afternoons at the cemetery are pretty quiet.

  This is good news because on Friday afternoons, I’m busy planning my weekend. That particular weekend, I was s
upposed to get together on Saturday night with some old friends: Absalom, Reggie, and Delmar, guys I’d worked with on a cemetery restoration project the summer before. Sure, they all had rap sheets. Not to mention trash-talking attitude galore.

  It didn’t mean we wouldn’t have had a good time. As long as nobody decided to do anything that would violate their probation.

  Unfortunately for me and my plans to spend a casual afternoon crafting an even more casual and nonfelonious weekend, cemetery work got in the way.

  Remember what I said about the days getting out of hand? Perfect example. That afternoon I decided that almost three forty-five was just about as good as five o’clock in my book and I already had my purse in my hand and my car keys out. If anybody asked on Monday where I’d been, and if that anybody happened to be Ella (who was the only anybody who would notice, anyway), I would say I was out among the headstones, walking through a new tour. Too bad I wasn’t quicker. Just as I was about to walk out of my office, Jennine, our receptionist, showed up to tell me Jim wanted to see the entire administration staff in the conference room.

  Apparently he knew Friday afternoons were slow around there, too, because he took the opportunity to spend the next hour talking about watching our bottom line and then, believe it or not, he actually had us go through piles and piles of old memos and pull out staples so we could take the paper back to our offices and reuse in it our printers.

  Really, I’m not kidding.

  By the time it was over, my right hand ached, and my pristine manicure needed a touch-up. No wonder I was grumbling when I got back to my office.

  I grumbled even more when Ariel showed up just as the clock was finally about to hit five. I had my purse out (again) and dreams of a staple-free weekend swimming through my head.

  She, apparently, was thinking otherwise. She had a pile of papers in her arm. “Downloads from the computer,” she said, waving them at me. “Stuff about Patrick Monroe.”

  “I hope you reused old paper.”

  She hadn’t been in the meeting; she didn’t get it. “I’m going to spend the weekend reading through it all,” she said. “I’ve got highlighters at home. At the beginning of every school year, Mom always buys highlighters. She thinks they’re going to help our brains expand, or something. I’ll highlight all the interesting stuff I find. That way, you can review it easier on Monday. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can dig up, then I’m thinking I could do a spreadsheet…you know, dates and places and a listing of Patrick Monroe’s poems and what he wrote when. That way we can match it all up and see if he ever mentions Lucy. We can put it all together, too, and see what kind of pattern it forms. Like on the TV detective shows, you know?”

  I didn’t. Rather than point it out, I said, “I’m leaving. I’ll just go down the hall and say good night to your mother and—”

  “She’s not here. She left the instant that meeting of yours was over.”

  For the second time in a week, an un-Ella-like action from a woman who was usually all about predictability. The odds were like, what, a million to one? Which is why I figured the kid didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’ll bet she’s in with Jim,” I said.

  “No. She left.”

  “She never leaves this early, not even on Friday.”

  “She did today.”

  “But that’s not possible.”

  “Her purse is gone and her car is gone, and she’s gone, and she asked me to ask you to give me a ride home.”

  I was intrigued. Which says something about the pathetic-ness of my existence.

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did she say when she’d be back?”

  “Just that she’d see me later.”

  “Did you see which way she turned when she drove out of the cemetery? That might at least tell us the direction she was headed.”

  “Didn’t need to.” Ariel lifted her chin. “I know where she went.”

  “You said—”

  “I said she didn’t say where she was going. That doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

  “Then where—”

  Instead of telling me, Ariel grabbed on to my arm and dragged me down the hallway to her mother’s office. Once we were inside, she looked up and down the hallway to be sure we were alone, then shut the door.

  “I have a feeling she wouldn’t want Jim to know about this,” Ariel said, and she pointed to Ella’s desk.

  Now, here’s the thing about Ella’s desk: except for the girls’ latest school pictures, a flowery tea mug, and a blue and white china saucer where Ella sets her reading glasses when she’s not wearing them (and then can never find them), Ella’s desk is always clean. I don’t care how deep she is into a project, or what she’s working on or how many balls she’s juggling.

  Ella’s desk is speckless.

  Except that day.

  There were papers strewn all over the place, books open and left out, and the yellow pages perched precariously on top of it all.

  Like anybody could blame me for jumping to the obvious conclusion?

  “Did you do this?” I asked Ariel.

  “Not a chance. Mom would get majorly crazy if I did. It was like this when I walked in. I swear. I didn’t touch anything or move anything, I just sat in front of her computer and worked around the mess. I didn’t even pay attention to what all this crap was. At least until Mom hotfooted it out of here like her shoes were rocket-propelled. Then I started looking through it all.”

  I’d already beat her to that. Carefully, I unstacked the stuff on Ella’s desk, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery—literally and figuratively.

  “It’s an old Shaker yearbook,” I said, lifting the book that had been the bedrock of the pile. “It’s from 1967, the year Lucy would have graduated.” The book was open to a two-page spread that featured senior boys, and automatically I looked for names I recognized. “No Darren Andrews,” I said, and I didn’t bother to explain. Since Ariel knew the Lucy story inside and out, something told me she knew exactly who was with her mom and Lucy the night of the concert. “No Will Margolis or Bobby Gideon, either. In fact…” Since I’m so much taller than her, I had to tip the book so Ariel could see it. “It’s one of the last pages of seniors, and look, this guy’s picture is circled.”

  The photo was of a kid named Chuck Zuggart. Last in the class, and something told me that wasn’t just because of his name.

  Chuck had a flat, broad face and a neck as wide as football field. No big surprise there since the paragraph about him below his picture said he played tackle on the varsity team. Chuck had beady eyes, a shaved head, and a scar that cut his left eyebrow exactly in half.

  Of course, why Ella had bothered to ring his photo with red ink was still a mystery.

  I set the yearbook aside and dug through the rest of the debris, hoping it would provide an answer. There were a couple of MapQuest printouts of towns in some mostly rural county to our west and a page from some website called hogfriendly.com. Then there was the phonebook. It was open to a section titled “Bars and Restaurants,” and I looked it over and pointed.

  “Here. She’s circled something again.”

  Ariel had to stand on her tiptoes to see what I was talking about. She leaned in close and squinted. Maybe those clunky black glasses she used to wear were for more than just show.

  “‘Hog Wild,’” she read from the circled ad. “‘Biker boys and their biker toys.’ Yeah.” She glanced up at me. “That’s what I saw.”

  A funny, rat-a-tat rhythm started up in my chest, and when I set down the phonebook, my hands were shaking a little. “But that’s just crazy. You don’t think your mother actually went—”

  “Kind of what I thought. Except it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Unless Mom’s got a dark side!” Ariel said this like it might actually be a good thing.

  I was thinking not so much.

  But there wasn’t time to waste on thinking.

  I gr
abbed Ariel and, keeping my promise to Ella, drove her home and made sure Rachel and Sarah were there to keep an eye on her. Then the moment I was back in the car, I gave Reggie a call. Yeah, it was a day too early for our planned night out, but if there was one thing I’d learned in my years of being a detective to the dead, it was this: when it comes to places with names like Hog Wild, it never hurts to take along reinforcements.

  7

  Talk about a mismatched pair! Reggie Brinks is a hulking thirtysomething bald guy with a rock-’em-sock-’em personality that matched both the pit bull tattooed smack in the middle of his forehead and a police record as long as my arm. Delmar Lui, on the other hand, is a slim Asian kid with spiky black hair. He was a first-year student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, a sensitive kid with a good eye and, back in the day, a tendency to express his creative side on the walls of buildings with a can of spray paint.

  When they’d first met during my cemetery restoration project, they were both working off community service hours, and they couldn’t stand each other. But hey, maybe it’s the whole teamwork thing that worked its magic. Or maybe it’s just that my team and I, we went through a lot together that summer, including becoming flash-in-the-pan reality TV stars and solving a murder. Whatever the reason, Reggie and Delmar were now fast friends, and by the time I got to Reggie’s downtown apartment building, they were both waiting outside for me.

  I explained what was going on as best I could, but let’s face it, in my world, even explanations come with a catch. For one, I couldn’t tell them I’d gotten embroiled in trying to find the body of a woman who’d died forty-five years earlier. For another…well, the only thing I knew for sure was that I had a really bad feeling that Ella had headed off on her own to do something stupid.

  That was good enough for Reggie and Delmar.

  I was grateful. For their understanding and for the backup.

  It didn’t hurt that both the guys remembered Ella from the summer before. Reggie, especially. After all, she’d been the high bidder on him at a bachelor auction we’d sponsored to raise money for the renovation. Tough guy that he is, even Reggie admitted that Ella is funny and sweet. She’s about twenty years older than him, and he said (I hope Ella never finds out; she has the secret hots for Reggie and she’d be devastated!) that the thought of an “elderly” lady like her doing something she shouldn’t be doing and the people she shouldn’t be doing it with taking advantage of her, or worse, putting her in danger…well, that just pissed him off. Big-time.