Thin Air

Chapter 8

Merrimack State was a small cluster of mismatched buildings on the west fringe of Proctor, where the crime rate wasn't keeping up. It looked more like an elementary school with some outbuildings than a college. The administration building appeared once to have been a two-family house. The building had been painted white, but not recently, and the parking area out front was dirt covered. I parked in a spot marked Visitors and went in. I asked at the counter in the Registrar's Office, and got shunted around for maybe half an hour until I ended up talking to the Dean of Students.

"I know this is trying, Mister Spenser, but obviously the right to privacy is something we must respect in regard to our students."

"How about the right to get found, if they're lost?" I said.

The dean smiled politely.

"May I see your credentials, please."

I thought about showing him my gun, rejected the idea, and let him see my license.

"And you're employed by Ms. St. Claire's husband?"

"Yes."

"I'm afraid I'll need his authorization."

"Of course you do. After all, I'm asking if she's enrolled here, and if so what courses she's taking. Hot stuff like that has got to be handled discreetly."

"You may be as scornful as you wish, Mister Spenser, but it's not a question of what you're asking. There's a larger issue here."

"I think it's called self-importance."

"I beg your pardon?"

The dean's name was Fogarty. He was a small man with a trimmed beard and receding hair. He wore a business suit. He'd probably started life as a high school principal somewhere and moved up, or down, depending on your perspective. The state college system was not a hotbed of erudition.

"There is no issue here. I'm not asking you to reveal anything which is in any way of a private nature. You just like to think that whatever goes on here is weighty with high seriousness."

"Are you afraid to have me call Ms. St. Claire's husband?"

"Ms. St. Claire's husband is suffering from gunshot wounds. It will not help him to talk with a pompous asshole."

"I'm sorry. But there's no need to be offensive."

"You think I'm offensive? I'll give you offensive. Ms. Lisa St. Claire's husband is a cop. Cops look out for each other. I can, if I have to, have some really short-tempered guys from the Essex County DA's office come in here and ask you what I'm asking you. I could probably even get them to come in here in force with the sirens singing and the blue lights flashing, and haul your ass down to Salem and ask you these same questions in a holding cell."

Guys like Fogarty have power over a bunch of kids and it gets them thinking it's real, which makes them think that they're tough. It took Fogarty a minute to adjust to the fact that he was misguided in these perceptions. He stared at me with his mouth partly open, and nothing coming out.

Finally he said, "Well!"

"Well," I said.

"I don't wish to be unreasonable."

"Good."

We sat and looked at each other. Neither of us anything.

"Well," he said again.

I looked at my watch. Fogarty picked up his phone. "Clara, could you see if we have a student named Lisa St. Claire, please. Probably continuing education. Yes. If we do, may I have her folder? Thank you."

He hung up and looked at me and looked away.

"I guess it's why I'm an educator, Mister Spenser. I'm invested in students. Sometimes, maybe, too invested."

"Sure," I said. "That's probably it."

He was pleased that I agreed with him. He leaned back in his chair and patted his fingertips together.

"Young lives," he said. "Young lives."

A very small woman who might have been 125 shuffled in with a folder in her hand. She shuffled across the room, put the folder on Fogarty's desk, and shuffled backwards out of the room. She did not speak. She did not kiss the hem of his garment.

Fogarty picked up the folder and opened it and looked at it for a moment as if he were studying the Book of Kells. Then he raised his eyes from it and looked at me.

"Yes. Ms. St. Claire is enrolled in our continuing education program."

"What I would have called night school in my innocence," I said.

Fogarty smiled politely.

"Well, it's not really night school. Classes are held in the late afternoon and in the evening."

"What course is she taking?"

"HD31-6," he said. "Self Actualization: An Analytic Feminist Perspective."

"Yikes," I said. "What's HD stand for?"

"Human development."

"When's it meet?"

I was asking him to violate the code of Omerta again. He looked uncomfortable, but he rallied. "Tuesday and Thursday; eight to nine forty-five p.m. In the Bradford Building."

"Who teaches it?"

"Professor Leighton."

"And where do I find him?"

Fogarty hesitated again.

"Pretend I'm a student, and I want to take his class. Do I stand outside and yell, `Hey, Leighton?"'

"Her office is in Bradford, second floor."

"Thank you very much," I said. "Is there anything in Ms. St. Claire's folder that would shed light on where she went?"

Fogarty didn't hesitate a moment.

"Absolutely not," he said.

He'd have probably said that if there were a ransom note in there.

"And you have no thoughts on the matter?"

He shrugged in a worldly way.

"Marriages sometimes flounder," he said.

I nodded thoughtfully.

She lay on the bed in the darkness and thought about her situation. Despite the eroding intensity of her fear, she was still all right. He had not touched her. And except for tying her up when he took her, he hadn't harmed her. She wasn't home. The ordinary life rhythms she had, perhaps for the first time in her life, established, were cacophonously disrupted, but she was still whole. She was still Lisa St. Claire. She thought of her husband. She knew he would find her. Sooner or later, no matter what, Frank would come. She missed him. She wanted more than she had ever wanted anything to see him. To see the door to this black room open and to see Frank walk through it. She had never been altogether sure she loved him. She liked sex with him. But she liked sex. If she were to be totally objective, she would probably say it wasn't better with Frank than others. With Luis, before, in fact, the wildness of it, the adventure of it, might have made sex with Luis a little better than sex with anyone. Frank had been the one she fled to after she fled Luis. And more than Luis, when she fled all that she had been. Frank had been calmness and stability and probably above all else safety. A tough cop. He would keep her secure. He would keep her whole. He would protect her from what she had been and from what she always feared she might be again. In his calmness and his clarity and his strength he was a stay against disintegration. It was ironic really, if she could detach herself, that the kidnapping had dispelled the last of the romantic vapors that had clung retrospectively to Luis. Now and then at breakfast in their upscale kitchen, quietly, ready to go to work, she would remember Luis and wonder if there might be something there that she shouldn't have abandoned-infinite possibility, maybe, music from beyond a distant hill, something like that. There had been an I-don't-give-a-damn excitement about Luis that Lisa occasionally remembered with nostalgia as she watched her husband eat the same breakfast he always ate. She liked him. He was good for her. But she had sometimes wondered, as her mind rolled over her life before him, if she had made a mistake. She knew she hadn't. She knew what Luis was, and even more, she knew what Luis represented for her. But often, in a sort of visceral way, she wondered about Luis. Now I do not, she thought. Now more than anything I have ever wanted, I want him to find me, and take me home. It was more than the corrosive fear that made her long for her husband. It was what he, was and what he represented-a life to be, lived, a connection to be nurtured, a full chance to be Lisa St. Claire. He'll come, she thought. He'll find me. And alone in the dark lying on the alien bed she cried for the first time since Luis took her.