The Affliction Read online

  “You don’t have to say anything,” said Phillips, “but I’m curious that you happened to be carrying.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Hope. “My son Buster thought I should be armed.”

  “He’s the deputy sheriff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “He likes guns,” said Hope.

  Phillips nodded. “He made you take the training?”

  “Yes, I did very well. Then he took me gun shopping. We hadn’t been shopping together since I bought him his last school blazer in sixth grade.”

  “In Maine, you bought the gun?”

  “Yes, they have a wonderful store near him, where you can also buy groceries or rent a wedding dress. Did you know guns come in colors? There was a very pretty purple one, but I chose gray because I didn’t think purple would go with everything.” Surveying the room, she added, “I don’t know how your case is going, but if Ray’s life depended on the court of public opinion it wouldn’t look good.”

  “No,” Evelyne Phillips agreed.

  “Am I allowed to ask, how is your case going?”

  “You can ask,” said Phillips.

  After a pause, Hope offered, “I know that his alibi fell through. Ray’s.”

  Phillips looked startled. “You do?”

  “Yes.” She explained about her lunch with Margot McCartney. “I assume you’ve checked the cameras in the casino that night.”

  “We have,” said Phillips. “They have pretty good coverage in the game room, but it isn’t perfect. A couple of cameras were off-line, a couple badly aimed.”

  “Did you find Ray?”

  “We did not. Not in the elevator going to his room either. But it’s hardly proof you can take to court.”

  “You’d think they’d be security conscious, with all those people wandering around with chips and cash.”

  “I guess margins are tight in the casino business.”

  “How about his room key? Do they know who uses them when?”

  “The record shows that the key issued to Ray opened his door at two-forty-four Friday morning.”

  Hope was thoughtful.

  “Of course, that only proves his key was used, not that he was the one who used it.”

  “Right.”

  “Witnesses in the game rooms remember him?”

  “The craps dealer does, but he can’t swear to times. Who is that talking to Ray now?”

  Hope turned. “That’s Hugo Hollister. He’s a trustee at the school. His daughter is the student who found Florence’s body.”

  Phillips watched the pair. Hugo seemed to be reassuring Ray. At one point, he gave his arm a squeeze and seemed to be giving him a string of advice. Ray was paying close attention, and both women saw that Ray was mollified at receiving the kindness of this world beater in his flawless linen suit, with the silk pocket square that matched his tie.

  Hugo gave Ray a pat on the back and left him.

  “Are they friends?” Phillips asked.

  “News to me, if true. I’ll ask Hugo’s wife.”

  “You know his wife?”

  “Yes, historically.”

  “Is she here?”

  Hope pointed out Caroline.

  “Let me know what you find out, will you?”

  “Will do.”

  “By the way, could you tell who Jesse was aiming at? Was it you or Mrs. Detweiler?”

  “No, it was Ellie Curtin. The girl sitting right behind us.”

  “That’s Ellie Curtin?” The detective sounded alarmed.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Detective Phillips decided she shouldn’t be talking about this with a civilian, but her mind went back to the day she had gone to interview Jesse. He had made a disturbing impression on her, his demeanor unpleasant, refusing to meet her eyes, answering in monosyllables with an air of contempt when he answered at all. Except when he suddenly asked her, “Who told you to come here? It was Ellie Curtin, wasn’t it? I knew she’d blame me.”

  When Phillips had replied that she didn’t know who Ellie Curtin was, the boy had finally looked at her, his small eyes blazing. “That jealous slut. She was always hanging around us. She knew how much Florence liked me.”

  The associate sent by Hope’s lawyer arrived, a slender young woman in a pinstripe suit with a pencil skirt and platform pumps that could break your ankle if you fell off them. Hope went off with her to her date with destiny in White Plains, and Phillips went to find a place where she had cell phone service to call the hospital and see if the shooter could yet be interviewed.

  When the final stragglers were saying good-byes, and at last Suzanne Cuneo was gathering her family to start the journey back to Virginia, she found Maggie to say, “I brought you the manuscript you were asking about.”

  Maggie was briefly baffled.

  “Florey’s novel. It wasn’t finished, you know, but I thought you might like to see it.”

  “Of course,” said Maggie.

  “It would be so wonderful for Florey, if you thought that a publisher might . . . well, you live in New York. Maybe you’ll know someone who could take a look at it.”

  “Of course,” said Maggie again. Suzanne fished a thumb drive out of her purse and handed it over. “Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? So much time and work stored on a thing the size of a piece of gum.” Her husband was beside her, holding Florence’s mortal remains, while the niece carried the framed photograph to return to the mantelpiece in Virginia. Across the room, Maggie noticed Ray staring at the urn Matt Cuneo had taken, but he didn’t move. Suzanne looked at Maggie for a second more, as if trying to ask her something, extract a promise. But in the end she was too undone to translate it into words, and the family started for their car.

  After Maggie helped the minister reboot his Wi-Fi router, she walked down to the head’s house to wait with Nimbus for Christina to get back from the hospital. She’d have liked to have gone herself, but the point was to take support and comfort to Marcia Goldsmith, now in grievously deep emotional water, and it was clear to her from that moment in the church that her presence would not bring ease to that particular sufferer.

  Maggie had a kettle for tea ready when Christina finally came in, dropped into a chair, and pried her shoes off.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked the younger woman.

  “I can’t remember,” said Christina, gratefully accepting a mug. “Wait, yes. I had some peanut butter crackers from a machine.”

  “Would you eat a scrambled egg, if I made it for you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Maggie didn’t press. If Christina didn’t know how to maintain her own machinery by now, feeding her an egg wasn’t going to help. “How is the boy?”

  “He’ll be fine. It’s a deep flesh wound.”

  “And Marcia?”

  “Terrible. It was her raincoat he was wearing. She doesn’t know where he got the shotgun. Her husband came to the hospital but she wouldn’t speak to him, she’s fending off everybody.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” said Christina.

  They sat in silence until Maggie said, “On the other hand—did you really remember where Alison’s cell phone is?”

  Christina nodded, swallowing a hot gulp. “I’m afraid to look, in case I’m wrong, but when everyone started screaming I had a memory of coming into this room and getting down my sewing basket. A sense memory of feeling a button in my pocket. I’d pulled it off my jacket at some point during that day and I wanted to deal with it before I lost it.”

  When you’re surrounded with things gone wrong that you can’t fix, it’s calming to fix something you can. Like a button.

  “Where is the basket?”

  Christina pointed to a shelf over Maggie’s head. Among the books and ring binders there was a round container about the size of a cookie tin woven long ago from sweetgrass. Maggie stood to lift it down. The lid had a pattern of concentric green and tan rings woven in.

&nb
sp; “My grandmother’s,” said Christina as Maggie handed it to her and sat down again. “Mom doesn’t sew.”

  She took the lid off the basket, and there, among measuring tapes and needle papers, pin cushions and dressmaker’s chalks, lay a scratched and grimy black smart phone. Maggie gave a small whoop of relief.

  “I knew it had to be somewhere,” Christina said. She laid the phone on the table between them. “Now what?”

  Maggie pushed down the locking button on the top corner that would have brought it to life if it had any juice. Nothing. She peered at the slot where the charger would connect and said, “I assume you have a drawer for mystery cords?”

  Christina did, since all such things on campus had to be disposed of in an environment-neutral way, and a campuswide green waste drive was the duty of the ecology club, which had gone moribund when its faculty advisor left to have a baby. She returned from the drawer with a snarl of charger cords, earbuds, ancient stupid phones, and two pagers. Maggie soon found a charger that would fit and plugged Alison’s phone into the wall socket. It began to flicker and chirp, awakening from coma.

  “Won’t it be locked?” Christina asked.

  “With old ones, sometimes they don’t bother.” But Alison had; up came a keypad.

  “So we’re cooked.”

  “Not if she’s lazy about passwords. Most kids are.”

  TRIX took care of it. They had a screen of icons. Maggie swiped through, to see what was there. Facebook, Twitter, Vine, TickTalk, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube. The phone’s Message app.

  Christina didn’t look happy.

  “Should you be doing this? I don’t want you to . . .”

  “I’ll risk it. I don’t seriously think they’d bring a case against me, and I don’t have a career at stake if they do.”

  “Picture roll—no thank you. E-mail—later for that. Texts—wow. It looks as if she never erased a thing. The most recent ones are back and forth with Ellie Curtin. . . . Okay, TickTalk. Here we go.”

  The app was set to log in automatically. It gave her a sunny home screen, with a couple of cartoon clocks talking to each other. She scrolled backward to see what had been posted from this account. Christina watched her.

  “‘Does your roommate have mange? Mine does,’” read Maggie.

  Christina put her hand over her mouth. Eventually, Maggie handed the phone back to Christina, who read what she had found.

  After a few minutes, she looked up at Maggie and said, “Oh my god.”

  “Yes.”

  “We admitted Pinky right before the school year started and Alison was the only one in the class with an open bed in her room. I thought—well, I guess I thought since Alison was being shunned that it might help her to shepherd someone else new and alone.”

  “Might have worked.”

  “But it didn’t.” She gestured toward the phone as if it had started seeping noxious goo. Maggie took it back.

  “She’s pretty horrible to someone called Earlobe Girl too,” she said, back on the TickTalk screen.

  Christina sighed. “Gussie Spoonmaker. A day girl. She’s one of my projects. Can Alison really have hoped these girls would drink bleach? Or jump in front of a train?”

  “Who knows?”

  They sat in silence for a bit.

  “So the pattern here,” Maggie said, “is that she targets whoever is vulnerable?”

  “Apparently.”

  “She doesn’t have any special animus against Lily?”

  “No idea. She’s isolated and angry, so she stirs the pot. Now, how am I going to protect Pinky?”

  Maggie said, “Why don’t you invite her to live here? While she ‘convalesces’?” Maggie made air quotes.

  Christina brightened. “Brilliant. I’m chockablock with spare bedrooms. Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “If she isn’t allergic to cats. You said the text messages go way back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Back before Alison came to us?”

  “Let’s see. She came here when?”

  “Beginning of last school year.”

  Maggie was scrolling backward. She came to something that stopped her. She studied it. She rapidly scrolled further back, then slowly and carefully read through post after post.

  Christina said nervously, “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “She shouldn’t have broken the rules. When she chose to, she must have known there could be consequences.”

  “So far, I can’t see that she’s ever suffered much of a consequence for anything,” said Christina.

  After a beat, in which she finished what she was reading, Maggie said, “You’d be wrong about that.” She scrolled back to the top of the thread she’d been following and handed the phone to Christina.

  Christina read in silence. Scrolling slowly. Once in a while looking up at Maggie. Finally she turned the phone off and put it on the table between them.

  “Oh, god,” she said.

  Maggie nodded. “Do you think her parents had any idea?”

  Christina thought about it. “More tea?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Christina refilled the kettle. At last she said, “I can’t imagine they did. If they’d told me—I would have . . .”

  There was silence until the kettle whistled and they both had fresh mugs steaming in front of them.

  “What am I going to do?” Christina asked. “How could young people—children—say such things to someone they know, someone they see every day?”

  “This is something your generation is going to have to solve. She said, with a carefree laugh.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Christina said. Then added, “Poor little thing. I mean, it seems crazy to feel sorry for her, but she is a child.”

  “Yes. As for what you’re going to do, it’s too late to talk with Alison directly. You might have been able to help her when she first came to you, if you’d known, but it’s gone too far for that; these are criminal matters.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “I think you should take this phone to your lawyer. Have him set up a meeting with Alison’s parents. Both of them.”

  “And me?”

  “No. You’ve seen the phone and you don’t want them off on a sidetrack about whether you had a right to look at it. Have him tell them where to start and have them read the whole history there in his office, from the boy’s posts and the shaming at her last school down to the things she posted about her victims.”

  “What if they won’t read it?”

  “They will. No parent can resist knowing their children’s secret lives.”

  “And then?”

  “Then your lawyer will tell them that they are going to withdraw their lawsuit. Otherwise you’ll go to trial and this will all wind up in the press. He can recommend they withdraw Alison from the school; that’s up to you. If she stayed you might be able to help her, but I doubt she will. I’ll send you some names of people who can advise them what to do next if they take her out.”

  Christina looked glum. “When are you going?”

  “This evening. I’m sorry, I wish we’d had more time.”

  Christina nodded. She had five weeks to go until commencement, four of them in May, the month where everything that hasn’t yet gone wrong during the school year blows up at once. She couldn’t imagine what that would be, given what they’d just been through, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “Christina, look at me.”

  The younger woman did so.

  “You are going to be fine. The school will get through this, and so will you. You are stronger than you think, and wiser than you think. You did a wonderful job today and it’s going to play very well in this community.”

  The phone rang. Christina punched a button on the landline unit on the table that turned on the speaker, and said, “Yes, Sharon?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Sharon’s etiolated voice, “but your mother’s on the line and she
says it’s an emergency.

  * * *

  “Tell me the truth—why did you bring the gun to the funeral?” Maggie asked. They were in Hope’s car, headed for the city. Hope’s driving was usually a source of low-grade terror for Maggie, but they had so much to catch each other up on, she had decided to risk it rather than take the train.

  “That sounds like the beginning of a moron joke.”

  “Whose horoscope did you cast? Mine?”

  “I just had a feeling.”

  “Pants on fire.”

  “Oh, all right. Yours. And wasn’t I right?”

  “You know, I’m beginning to be sort of impressed.”

  “As well you should be.”

  “How long have you had it? The gun?”

  “It was Buster and Brianna’s Christmas present to me.”

  “That was a pretty good shot you got off.”

  “I found a terribly nice shooting range, where the police go. I practice every week. I have my own ear protectors.”

  “Do they have any idea what to make of you at the Chilton Club?”

  “Not really. Tell me about the cell phone.”

  Maggie hesitated. “I don’t want to shock you.”

  “Go ahead. I was young once.”

  “Not like this you weren’t.”

  They rolled south through the gloaming of a spring evening. Lights glinted on the river, and there was pinkish-orange light in the western sky.

  Maggie said, “Alison is a year too young for her class, plus she’d been at junior boarding school since she was eleven.”

  “Why?”

  “Good question. The father is British. It may have seemed normal to him. Or maybe there was trouble at home, marital split or something. Christina says they are together now, the parents, so we don’t know. What it looks like, from what’s on the phone, is a boy asked her for a nude picture. She saved the texts, the way you saved notes from a boy you had a crush on at that age.”

  “Fourteen?”

  “She should have been fourteen, but she was younger. The notes from him are sweet. He says she’s the prettiest. He says he loves her eyes, and her flirty answers are so full of hope. She sent him a picture.”