“But here’s what I still don’t get,” I said. “Her shift runs noon to eight. I looked at my watch. “It’s now after ten. So what happened when the new employee showed up at eight and didn’t see Marie? And what about her grandmother? Wouldn’t she be worried by now?”
“Two hours late coming home?” Jeffrey said. “That isn’t so long. Think about when you were a teenager and—”
“Stop.” Nolan was staring at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
His gaze stayed on me. “How do you know when her shift started?”
“Because she told me,” I said, feeling a little proud that I was the one she’d confided in. “She was scheduled from noon to eight, and at eight she was supposed to punch out and go home to her grandmother.”
Nolan was shaking his head. “No, something’s not right. We need to have a chat with Little Red Riding Hood. Right now.”
I glanced in her direction. Like me, she’d been devouring one cigarette after another. “Am I missing something?” I asked.
“Yeah, Will, you are. She’s been bullshitting us.”
14
I cracked open the door to Room A, leaned my head in, and told Marie that we’d like to talk with her. “There’s more room out here,” I said. “Can we trust you not to make a break for it?”
Trust and precaution, however, need not be mutually exclusive. We had already moved some equipment—a couple of amplifiers, that big canvas bag of drum gear—in front of the exit leading to the hallway. It would be impossible for her to make a fast escape even if she wanted to.
Marie nodded. I opened the door farther and stood aside as she slowly got up, stretched, ran a hand through her hair, and then emerged. The moment she left Room A she glanced over to the blocked doorway. Then her gaze moved to Jeffrey and Nolan, who were seated on folding chairs. I took a seat behind the drums and noticed that The Fixtures had stuck one of their bumper stickers onto the snare drumhead. I began to work the sticker off with my thumbnail. I was always peeling bands’ bumper stickers off things.
“Please,” Nolan said, pointing to the empty chair beside him. Marie took a seat. “Look, we’ll get right to the point. There’s something we don’t understand, and we’d like to hear what you have to say about it.” Her eyes widened a little. She waited for him to continue. “Will, why don’t you explain it.”
Marie looked like a model student—hands folded in her lap, head lowered in deference, or perhaps in an imitation of deference. “You told me earlier,” I said, “that you were working the noon-to-eight shift.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“Okay, that’s what confuses us.”
I didn’t enjoy having this conversation. It felt as if we were antagonizing somebody we had no right to antagonize. For this reason, I suppose, I’d sat at the drums. This was where I felt most comfortable, partially obscured behind cymbals and tom-toms. “You told me you’re a junior in high school.”
“A junior,” she said. “That’s right.”
“But today’s Friday.” I shrugged. “So we were wondering how it is that you could be working the afternoon shift.”
She looked up at the ceiling. If we’d been in a house, we would’ve heard the ticking of a wall clock. A refrigerator might have clicked on. Instead, we heard only our own breathing.
“We didn’t have school today.” Her foot began to tap on the wooden floor. “It got canceled.”
I glanced at the other guys, then back at her. “Can you tell us why?”
This was a job for a lawyer, or for someone like Nolan who enjoyed trapping people with his words.
“It was a teacher convention,” she said. “In Atlantic City. They have those conventions all the time.”
They don’t have them all the time. They have them once a year, and in the fall. Years of public school education had permanently etched in my brain this two-day vacation, occurring each year just before the weather turned too cold for outdoor play. I couldn’t recall, now, whether the convention was in September or October, but it wasn’t in April. I remembered always being surprised that we would be granted a reprieve from classes so close to the beginning of the school year.
“I’m sorry, Marie,” I said, “but that doesn’t sound right.”
“There’s no need to lie to us,” Nolan added. “We’re on your side here.”
“But I’m not lying.” More foot tapping. “I mean … maybe it wasn’t the convention. Okay, I might have that wrong. The thing is, I had to take the day off from school anyway, because the store needed someone to cover. Okay? That’s the whole story.”
Nolan’s response was instantaneous: “That may be the story, but we’d prefer the truth.”
“What?” She glared at him but then looked away. Her voice raised in pitch, and her breathing quickened. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Jeffrey, who’d been listening quietly until now, put up a hand, silencing her. “You aren’t in school anymore, are you?”
“What?” she repeated, and I was reminded of myself as a teenager, choosing deafness rather than defiance as a means of dodging the probing questions of a teacher or parent.