Heartsick

CHAPTER 42

Anne sat on the carpet in Dan McCallum’s dark little living room, surrounded by Cleveland High School yearbooks. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But Archie suspected Reston and she was going to find him something to move on. The books had been arranged chronologically and Anne had started with the most recent volume, flipping through the pages, hoping for something to catch her eye. Page after page of goofy club photographs, sporting events, school plays, class photos, teachers, and plaintive senior messages, and then, halfway through the 1994 yearbook, she found exactly what she was looking for. She pulled the 1995 yearbook off the shelf and searched frantically through it until she found the next picture she needed to confirm what she was thinking. It did.

She scrambled up off the floor, holding both the books cradled to her chest, and fled through the house to find Archie.

He was in the kitchen, watching as they zipped McCallum’s corpse into a black body bag and prepared to wheel him out of the house. Anne pulled him to the back stoop and thrust the first yearbook into his hands, open to the photograph of the Cleveland High School drama club. There at its center was Susan Ward, and next to her Paul Reston. Susan, fourteen years old, before the pink hair. She had not yet come into the beauty that was waiting for her. She was still an awkward-looking, thin, brown-haired girl.

“Jesus Christ,” said Archie, his color draining. “She looks like all the others.”

“Why did you suspect Reston?” Anne asked.

She could see Archie hesitate for a moment. He touched the photograph of the young Susan, as if his fingertips could somehow protect her retroactively. “Susan told me yesterday that she had a sexual relationship with him when he was her teacher. Today, she denied it.”

Anne harbored no doubt that Susan had slept with Reston when she was a teenager. “It’s him,” she said simply.

“He’s got an alibi,” Archie said, leaning against the back of the house. “We can’t pick him up based on an old photograph and a crime with a long-passed statute of limitations.”

Anne laid the next yearbook over the one he held and opened it to Susan’s sophomore-year photograph. She was a different kid from the one in the first picture. She wore a black T-shirt and black lipstick. Her eyes looked helpless and sad and hard all at the same time. And she had bleached her hair. But she hadn’t used Clairol. She hadn’t gone to a salon. She’d used what she could find under the sink. She’d used Clorox.

“It’s all about her,” Anne said. She cataloged the morgue photos in her mind, the girls’ marbled faces, their hemorrhaged corneas, the cruel yellow-orange of their once-brown hair. “He bleaches them because it completes the transformation.”

Archie’s eyes didn’t lift from the page. She could see him processing all of it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said almost to himself. Then he looked up at Anne, his face flushed with urgency. “Where are Claire and Henry?”

“I’m here,” Claire said, coming up the back steps, cell phone still in her hand. “Jeff just called,” she said, face tense. “ Reston isn’t at home. He left school at the usual time, but hasn’t come home yet. They don’t have any way to find him until he shows up. Should I have them wait?”

The back door burst open and Anne saw the back of a jacket that read MEDICAL TRANSPORTATION SERVICES, and then a college-age man backed out, pulling the metal gurney that carried McCallum’s bagged body. Anne held the screen door open for him as he and another man moved the body out onto the stoop.

“Find him,” Archie said to Claire, handing the yearbooks back to Anne so that he could get to his cell phone. “Arrest him. He’s our guy. Get a warrant to search his house. And get some uniforms over to Susan Ward’s apartment. Now.”

The transport team cleared the stairs and began wheeling the body down the slim cement path that led to the driveway. The wheels made a cruel grating sound on the concrete.

Anne glanced down at the top yearbook. In the margin next to a photograph of a young man was a scrawled message from one of McCallum’s students: “Hey, Mr. M. I’m outta here. Have a great life.”