Sebastian Stuart - The Mentor

“I hope the trip is a success.”

Anne throws her arms around his neck and kisses him, long and hard, not wanting to let go.

“I’ll call you tonight,” Charles says.

“I love you.”

Anne picks up her bag and walks to the terminal doors. She turns and smiles at Charles. He smiles back and waves. She walks into the terminal and then turns for one last look. The car is gone…

As Charles pulls away from the terminal he reaches for his car phone and punches in Emma’s number.

“Hello?”

“Listen, Emma, I’ve got some appointments today, let’s take the day off. Don’t bother coming in.”

“But what will I do with myself?”

“I hope you’ll write.” Charles smiles-she’s at a loss without him.

“Of course.”

“I’ll call you tonight. I’ll try to make it down there so we can get a little work done.”

Charles listens to Miles Davis as he drives across Pennsylvania, propelled by his need to understand Emma, to discover what it is in her past that she guards so warily. He looked up Munsonville in his atlas and there it sat, surrounded by other small towns, black dots connected by red lines on a green background. It was there, in that western Pennsylvania town, that her life-and their book-began, and he needs to see it in three dimensions, to smell it, hear it, feel it, to find Emma’s place in it.

It’s afternoon when he exits the turnpike. The countryside is bleak-low hills littered with mobile homes and sagging barns. As he approaches Munsonville, the scene grows bleaker still, the small houses close together, aluminum-sided, painted dreary shades of light green or dark brown; the children playing in the ratty front yards look ill-kept and furtive, suspicious of life already. In the center of town, the houses give way to nineteenth-century brick buildings. The only businesses that seem able to survive on the beat, forsaken streets are bars and pizza parlors. Some of the empty storefronts have droopy For Rent signs taped to their windows; others just sit there, hollow and abandoned. A very pregnant girl wearing a dirty Palm Springs sweatshirt slowly pushes a young boy in a stroller.

Charles finds the palpable air of decay evocative, almost romantic. He thinks of Emma walking these streets, wonders which house she grew up in, wonders where her mother lives. Emma said she’d remarried. What’s the stepfather like?

Munsonville High is set on a rise just outside of town, an imposing American Gothic edifice built in a more optimistic time. The hallways have that deserted, slightly eerie after-school feeling. Charles walks past posters warning of HIV transmission and the dangers of cigarettes, past a cabinet filled with dusty trophies, until he comes to a frosted-glass door that reads: Guidance Office. He knocks.

“Come in.”

The front room is empty, but a woman is sitting at a desk in one of the four small offices that open off it. She’s reading something in a folder. A sign on her desk identifies her as Claire Eldredge.

“Ms. Eldredge?”

“Yes.”

Charles guesses she’s in her late fifties, large, one of those round-faced women who has probably looked the same since her mid-twenties. She wears her glasses on a chain, a loose gray dress, no makeup. Claire Eldredge’s one vanity appears to be her hair, which is an unnatural brown, styled in a helmet of tight curls.

“I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“I rarely leave before six. This job just keeps getting harder.” She looks at Charles expectantly.

“My name is Charles Davis.”

“The writer.”

“Yes.”

If Claire Eldredge is impressed, she does a good job of disguising it.

“Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

“One of your former students works for me. I’ve become a little concerned about her.”

“What’s the student’s name?”

“Emma Bowles.”

Claire Eldredge’s face grows grave. She leans forward on her elbows.

“I believe she graduated five or six years ago,” Charles says.

“Emma never graduated.”

“She didn’t?”

Claire Eldredge closes the folder on her desk and puts it aside. She takes a pencil out of a cup and turns it between her fingers.

“Emma was gifted, but I could never reach her. She was very much a loner.”

“Can you tell me anything about her family?”

“The father ran off when Emma was very young. Helen Bowles wasn’t the most stable person to begin with.”

“Her mother?”

“Yes. She painted. Or did at one time. Went to art school in Chicago. Fancied herself a bohemian. Dressed outlandishly. Hated Munsonville and wasn’t shy about letting people know it. They lived above the hardware store downtown. She drank. Pills, too. The household was chaotic. Emma did all the shopping, cooking. Not that there was much of either. Helen wouldn’t let Emma have a life of her own. Personally, I think she hated her daughter for being bright and talented.”

“She certainly is talented.”

“More than once she came to school with bruises. She’d often start to cry for no reason. We did a couple of home visits, but Emma always defended her mother. Afterward everyone said they saw it coming.”

“Saw what coming, Ms. Eldredge?” Charles asks too quickly.

Claire Eldredge looks him in the eye. “What exactly are your concerns, Mr. Davis?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure. She seems so unhappy, so unstable. I want to know why.”

“There’s bound to be instability with a history like hers. I’m glad she’s working for you. Give her my best.”

“Ms. Eldredge?”

“I’ve said too much already. It’s all in the past. Everyone deserves a second chance.”

Munsonville’s boxy one-story library is drafty and ill lit, smells of floor wax, and has a meager array of current titles displayed on a folding table. It’s staffed by one distracted middle-aged male librarian. Charles sits in a far corner staring at the screen of a microfilm viewer, scrolling through front pages of the Munsonville Daily Press. Hyperalert, focused like radar, he scans past stories of storms and car crashes-and then he stops:

MUNSONVILLE WOMAN BLUDGEONED TO DEATH DAUGHTER CONFESSES TO CRIME

Helen Bowles, 36, of 12 West Bridge Street, was murdered early Tuesday morning, according to Sergeant Rupert Markum of the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. At 3:14 A.M., a 911 operator received a call from the victim’s daughter, Emma Bowles, who stated, “I hurt my mother.” Officers Ellen Grady and Karl Werner responded to the call, and when they arrived at the scene they discovered Mrs. Bowles’s body lying on the floor of her daughter’s bedroom. The victim had received multiple blows to the skull from a blunt instrument. A small metal lamp found beside the body was covered with blood. According to Officer Grady, Emma Bowles was sitting on the floor near her mother’s body and said, “I did it.” Officer Grady described Miss Bowles, 15, as “weirdly calm.” She was taken to Juvenile Hall at the Washington County Jail, where she is being held on $100,000 bail.

Accompanying the story is a photograph of Emma’s bedroom. Helen Bowles’s body is covered with a blood-soaked sheet. There’s an old iron bed, a cardboard dresser with a goldfish bowl on top, unruly piles of books everywhere, and a poster of Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom on the wall. The walls are splattered with blood, sperm-shaped streaks, as if someone holding a sopping paintbrush had whirled around and around in the middle of the room.

Charles feels a sense of disbelief, as if the story and picture aren’t real, exist only on the screen. He sits stock-still, suspended, his breathing shallow, the library silent. Finally he resumes scrolling.