“You don’t know what—”
“Fact two: We met online and you found someone who shares your interests, who excites you and makes you think and laugh. And now that you know who I am you’re scared, because I could make you lose everything.”
She stared with an intensity that bore right through me and her voice fell to little more than a whisper. “But I would never do that, Peter. Because I’m the right woman.”
She was so close. I could reach out and touch her again, but this time to pull her in and kiss her. I could tip her head to the side and run my mouth down her neck, taking bites out of her, tasting the skin that smelled so fresh and sweet against the rotting wood of the barn. She would let me. She would let me do more.
I backed up two quick steps until my heels hit the door, opened it, and walked outside, breathing deep. The wind had picked up, and the swift muddy scent of the fields and lake cleared my head. Hattie walked out and stood next to me, facing the same horizon.
“I could transfer out of your class, if that’s the problem. You wouldn’t be my teacher.”
“I teach basic English for seniors, too. You’d still be my student, just surrounded by idiots.”
She laughed. “No, thank you.”
“How can I make you understand?”
She waited, and I sensed a satisfied silence, as though she’d rather stand next to me arguing than be anywhere else.
“You’re too young. You’re too innocent.”
She laughed again, but it was a different laugh, edgier. “I’m not a virgin.”
“That’s not what I meant.” It was what I meant, but I couldn’t concede any ground. My resolve weakened the longer we stood here, where even the shadow of the oak seemed complicit. I silently counted all the reasons I couldn’t kiss her, shouldn’t even think about kissing her.
“I’m good at being what people want me to be. Watch me, Peter. You’ll see. I’ll become the last girl in the world who would be having an affair with her English teacher.”
I swallowed and when I finally spoke, my voice was hoarse. “That’s because you’re not having an affair with your English teacher.”
She walked out of the shadows into the moonlight at the edge of the clearing, her slim hips jutting from side to side, and paused at the walking path that led around the lake. It was the same spot where the boys broke out of rank for their mad dash to the front, where their order and steady pace turned into the chaos of shifting and merging bodies. She glanced back at me, her eyes shining with blatant confidence.
“Fact three, Peter: I’ll be eighteen on January fourth. See you then.”
And she disappeared into the night. I stood there for what felt like an hour, knowing I’d lost a key battle. I’d sprinted for the lead with no strategy and stumbled, giving up any chance of victory. My gut churned with dread and disgust at myself. This had to stop. If I had any decency at all, this affair had to be over.
From this point on, as far as I was concerned, Hattie Hoffman was as good as dead. She had to be.
DEL / Tuesday, April 15, 2008
TEENAGER STABBED IN PINE VALLEY. FRIENDS BELIEVE CURSE RESPONSIBLE
Just weeks before her high school graduation, an eighteen-year-old girl was murdered outside Pine Valley. The Wabash County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the identity of the victim as Henrietta Sue Hoffman, known as Hattie to her friends and family. The body suffered multiple stab wounds and was discovered in an unused barn near Lake Crosby on Saturday night. The Sheriff’s Department has no suspects in custody at this time, but confirmed they are following “all possible leads.” One such lead may be from an unusual source: a four-hundred-year-old curse. According to Portia Nguyen, a close friend of the victim . . .
“Hell.”
I threw the paper back on the table without glancing at the rest of the story. It was front-page news in the Minneapolis newspaper, and the County Gazette had run Hattie’s senior picture under the headline along with a two-page spread of other pictures from her high school yearbooks. Hattie’s murder was already big stuff in the local news—everyone demanded details when a young, pretty girl got killed—but now that this Macbeth nonsense had hit the wire, every nutcase and reporter in the state would be all over us. Pressure like that might make the killer nervous, and who knew what a jumpy murderer would do next.
It was 5:30 a.m., too early to go downstairs and pound on the Nguyens’ door, so I went over my suspect and evidence lists, ate my oranges, and tried to forget about the media.
The oranges were a birthday gift from my sister in Florida. She sent a huge crate every year and spoiled me for those pale, watery ones at the grocery store. I ate one from the crate every morning, peeling it right over the garbage, and watched the droplets spray with each rip of skin. The scent of it got on my hands and lingered all day, no matter how many times I washed. It was a good scent, bright and tangy, and I needed that this week. The further I dug into Hattie’s life, with the picture of her bloody, bloated-legged corpse waiting each time I closed my eyes, every bite of orange tasted sweeter, sharper.
I ate and read over my lists. We had two possible suspects now: Tommy and the person who’d signed that letter L.G., so Jake was working on ID’ing him through Hattie’s internet records. The guy was connected to her by two things, we figured from the messages Hattie saved. They both liked art—acting and reading and stuff—and neither of them cared for country life. They never mentioned names, their own or anybody else’s, or any places or events, so it was hard to pin him down. Boy was educated. Liked throwing the five-dollar words around and sounded pretentious as hell most of the time, but Hattie seemed to take to it. Girl like her probably would have. Probably thought he was refined. We knew they traded messages for about a month—talking books and then talking dirty—until they figured out who the other person was, somehow through Jane Eyre. That’s when he seemed to end it. In any case, that’s when Hattie stopped saving the messages. I couldn’t prove a relationship beyond October of last year, but the whole thing smelled wrong. So far he was the only person who’d clearly wanted Hattie to disappear, and that was enough to land him on the suspect list.