As we pulled out of the parking lot, the reporters spotted me and suddenly cameras flashed and bodies swarmed closer to the car. I sat woodenly, indifferent to what any of this would mean for my life.
“Hmm, I guess the secret’s out. Smile pretty.” He eased out into the street.
“I didn’t kill Hattie.”
“Good one. Next you’re going to tell me you don’t fuck your underage students, either.”
She wasn’t underage—I bit back the impulse before I could say it. He laughed low and mean at my silence as we cruised the few blocks down Main Street.
“Not going to bother denying that one, are you? Now shut up and don’t give me any excuses.”
At the station he hauled me through fingerprinting and photos and shoved me in the first of three empty cells in the back room. Then everything was quiet.
There were actually bars on the cells. It seemed so clichéd. I paced and, without even trying, the list of names started forming—William Sydney Porter, Ken Kesey, Paul Verlaine, every Russian writer ever—and the discussion questions rose to frame them. How did time spent in prison inform their work? Compare and contrast the societal pressures against Oscar Wilde versus Solzhenitsyn. I could even see the handout I would type up and distribute to the students along the front row, igniting that flush of anticipation in Hattie’s complexion. She would read every excerpt by the next class and then she’d insist—
Hysterical laughter dropped me to the cot and turned into a half-bellow. I covered my face and strangled the sound so the deputy wouldn’t come back and threaten to beat the shit out of me for something I hadn’t done.
I did not kill Hattie Hoffman.
She had killed me, in so many ways, over months of guilt and obsession and need. She had taken everything I thought I was and destroyed it with a coy wink in the middle of a chaotic classroom. When I’d met Hattie in the barn on Friday night, I let her demolish me. I gave in to screaming temptation and lost myself in her, rejected every responsibility, corrupted every decency for the chance to fly away with her, to attach myself like a barnacle to her shooting star. I made love to her. I kissed her goodbye and went home. I did not kill her.
But who had?
For the last five days it had consumed me, imagining her ending, her brazen heart breaking open and spilling on to those coarse, cold planks. Tommy. Tommy, was all I could think. That hulking arm always wrapped over her shoulders like she was some prized football trophy. The baby fat that still clung to his giant frame, his sudden shouts in the lunchroom, the fanaticism on his face during pep rallies. I’d watched him closer than he could’ve ever imagined, the secret lover stalking the public one. She’d wanted to torment me with him, and God, she had. He must have followed her there. It had to be Tommy.
That’s why I kept going to school—to watch him, to see if his guilt would manifest in some physical way—but he hadn’t been in class all week and I hadn’t been able to confront him today in the overwhelming crowd. I needed to see his eyes when he looked at me. If he’d seen us together, if he’d killed her for it, I knew he couldn’t hide it from me in those big, dumb eyes.
I paced the cell, a ten-foot length that made my legs stiff with the need to stretch, to run, and waited for the sheriff to finish burying Hattie.
At least two hours passed before the deputy came back. He brought me to the same conference room from two days ago, although this time I noticed recording equipment had been brought in.
“I want my phone call.”
He ignored me, so I repeated myself.
“You’ll get it,” the sheriff answered as he strolled in. The suit from the funeral was gone, replaced by his uniform.
“Mary Beth already phoned here, if that’s who you were going to call. Everybody else on the planet is calling, too. Some of those news vans are sitting right out there.” He pointed at the door.
“I didn’t murder Hattie.”
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about.” He sat down across the table and fixed a piercing stare on me.
“Yes, okay, obviously I was having an affair with her. It was stupid and wrong. Believe me, I know how wrong it was, but I genuinely loved her. I could never have hurt her, much less stab her to death in cold blood.”
“We’ll get there, lover boy.” The sheriff leaned back and crossed his arms. “When did it start?”
I told him everything; how Hattie kept pursuing me after I’d found out who she was, how she started dating Tommy as a cover, the notes on her assignments, the trip to Minneapolis and every meeting after that. It was a relief to admit it, finally to be free of this secret that had hung over my life for the last half year. I told him how I found out Mary was pregnant from our only sex in months, how I’d ended the affair and withdrawn the last of my savings, hoping Hattie would use the money to go to New York.
“I wanted her to leave. I couldn’t bear seeing her and didn’t want her to have to see Mary pregnant.”
“Wouldn’t want her to talk to Mary, you mean.” He hadn’t said much throughout the entire story up to this point.
“No. I mean, yes, but I was thinking mostly of Hattie. I didn’t want to cause her more pain.” I dropped my head. “I took her innocence. I know I did. I thought the least I could do was help her realize her dream. I knew she’d find someone in New York who would make her happy and she’d forget about me.”
“That’s a nice little story you’ve got there. I’m sure your lawyer will love it.” He checked a piece of paper in one of his files. “Now, I’ve got one last pesky question for you. That envelope showed up on March twenty-first, three weeks before she died, when you wished her well and sent her on her way, so how is it that we’ve got your semen inside of her on the night of her death?”