“According to my boss, too.”
Helen scrutinized her. Her willingness to give out love could sometimes make Helen seem stupid, but she wasn’t. She’d always been good at reading people—that was true when Natasha was a student here, and it was true now. It was as though she was finding all your secrets and adding them up one by one.
“Helen,” Natasha said, “I’m not a cop; I have no authority with this and you don’t have to talk to me.” Helen watched her closely. “I’m here for personal reasons….” Natasha hesitated. “Between you and me, I think whatever happened to Lucero is connected to Ben.”
“You always had something for Ben, didn’t you?” Helen said. “Even way back then.”
Natasha could feel her face go hot.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Helen said, patting Natasha’s knee and flashing a conspiratorial smile. “You weren’t the only one. He was a gorgeous boy.”
Helen turned and reached toward a shelf of yearbooks. She grabbed one marked 1973 and opened it up to a page with a yellow Post-it.
“I’ve been here for twenty-seven years,” Helen said, nodding her head slowly. “Sometimes it seems like forever, but since I’ve been thinking about Lucero it feels very short—like no time at all, really.”
“Memory is a strange thing,” Natasha said. She’d been working as deputy medical examiner for six years now. Her first cadaver felt like a century ago, but his face was still with her, clear as his meltwater-blue eyes.
“You know, Lucero was one of Wakeland’s boys.”
Natasha nodded. “He was a swimmer.”
“It’s more than that,” Helen said. “Coach Wakeland’s always taking the swimming team out for pizza or having them over to his house for barbecues, that kind of thing, but Lucero was the boy he’d chosen to mentor. You’d sometimes see them driving around together in Wakeland’s Corvette.”
“Anyone question why a teacher was driving around with a student?”
“Well, it was so out in the open,” Helen said. “If there was something to hide, you’d think they’d hide it.”
“Did you question it?”
“I’m the attendance lady.”
“And he’s the big-time swim coach,” Natasha said.
“The city’s using the swimming program in its brochures to get families to move in.”
Natasha nodded.
“Most of the time everything feels disconnected,” Helen said, “especially over so many years, but then when you start thinking about it, really thinking about it, you can find threads of things, you know?”
“A pattern.”
“Kind of.” She turned the pages of the book and pointed to a boy, Ryan Bell. “He went to Stanford. If you remember, he was the butterfly leg of the Olympic relay team in ’76. His grades were terrible, missed a ton of classes, especially senior year. So how does he get into Stanford, full scholarship?”
“Wakeland’s got connections.”
“If you were on the swim team,” she said, “you wanted to be one of Wakeland’s boys. You got special privileges—excuses from classes, rides in fancy cars, scholarships to the best schools.”
She grabbed another yearbook from the shelf: 1979. She turned to a page marked by another Post-it.
“Tucker Preston,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, until Ben came in here the other day.” She rubbed her finger across the boy’s forehead. “He dropped out of school his junior year. After swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Parents sold their house and moved.”
“One of Wakeland’s?”
She nodded. “State record in the backstroke.”
“Any rumors?”
“There was a meeting with the superintendent. Lawyers were involved. Some kind of confidentiality agreement.”
“Hush money,” Natasha said. “Anyone say why?”
“Everyone had a reason,” Helen said, “but it depended on how you wanted to see things. Some people thought it couldn’t be such a big deal if the family was so willing to shut up about it. Others thought the opposite.”
“What about you?”
“I think anything that has to be shut up about is a bad thing,” she said. “But police, lawyers, the superintendent, made the decision they made. People tend to think that counts for something.”
“Maybe the people in charge don’t deserve to be in charge.”
“I might agree with that.”
Helen grabbed another yearbook, from 1970. Ben. There he was, his beautiful seventeen-year-old face creased with a guarded smile.
“The world is full of open secrets,” Helen said. “Kids like Lucero are being raised in cardboard boxes; the military tells children it’ll give them a future.”
She handed Natasha the yearbook, and she stared at Ben’s picture. He was beautiful then, but there was something in his eyes, something you could still see today if you looked at him closely: something lost about them. Natasha remembered him from high school—six foot two, his swimmer’s shoulders twice as wide as hers, his sinewy muscles that were literally carved by water. She’d see him around, sometimes with Wakeland—in the man’s Mustang multiple times, now that she thought about it. She was a child, a little girl, and Ben had looked like a man and she believed him to have a man’s authority in the world. More than a few times in high school she had fantasized about him using that authority on her.
“Why’d no one say anything?” Natasha asked.
“That’s what I’ve been wondering about,” Helen said. She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know exactly, but I guess I can only speak for myself.” She went quiet again, thinking. “Years ago, something like that was an embarrassing secret, something you didn’t want to look at, something you didn’t want to point out. It was so embarrassing you wanted to believe it wasn’t true.” The phone rang, but Helen let it go. “It’s like being fat,” she said when the ringing stopped. “Everyone can see it, but they don’t come up to you and point it out to you. They talk to your forehead instead of looking in your eyes, anything to avoid the embarrassing fact of your size.” She picked up a pencil and chewed on the eraser. “The boys didn’t complain, as far as I know—except for Tucker, maybe—and after a while Wakeland and a boy in his car was just another part of Santa Elena—like the illegals in the fields, the coyotes in the backyard, the bulldozers knocking down people’s homes to make new ones. Besides, it was hard to see how a boy like Ben—so big and strong—could be forced to do something like that if he didn’t want to.”
Natasha had to admit it was. If she’d been big enough, strong enough—if she had been six foot two, two hundred pounds, like Ben had been—she would have fought the boy off. She stared at Ben’s face and wondered who he really was. She went into the sciences to find clarity and had found the opposite. She’d begun to realize in the last few years that most things were difficult to understand—from love, to murder, to the very muscle and tissue that held the body together. We gave them names, but identification was simply the illusion of understanding.
“And then Wakeland got married,” Helen said, “and everyone sighed in relief.”