Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“I never thought you felt any other way, Mary.”

Mary looked at her watch. “Got to make dinner for Deano. Ask me if he hates being called Deano. Plucked it from an inspired moment.”

“Wish I’d been there.”

“Right,” said Mary Pick. “You’re never there. No one’s ever there when I’m inspired.”

Jo walked to the door and they looked through the glass at the rain. Mary borrowed an umbrella from Jo’s enormous stash of forgotten ones.

“Not to worry, Josephine,” Mary Pick said, her hand on the knob. “We’ll get things put right for Maud’s father. The church… thing.”

“Hey, Mary? Did you think Maud’s piece was good? Religion aside, sort of?”

“Religion aside? A writer lost to us there. I’m going to pray for her. I like to pray that all will be well in spite of things. You know, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ In spite of it all. You should try it, really. Why not?”

“I’ll leave it to you. I’m glad you liked her piece.”

“I didn’t say I liked it.”

“But you thought it was good.”

“Oh, yes! Time loves language, you know. Forgives the writer, the poet says. And here we are.” She gestured in the direction of the college’s well-known library. “Books everywhere. We do too.”

ACCORDING TO THE afternoon timetable, Stack had to change trains at what had been a derelict station in Connecticut he had not seen in a few years. His last time through it had been a crack scene, a rat-haunted vault of pissy shadows. It had been improved somewhat since the downtown bombings. Maybe, he thought, one thing had to do with the other. Graffiti had been painted over. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were as yet unvandalized, but the ticket counter was closed and the only person in the station with him was a suspiciously sleepy teenager in a hoodie. Stack went over and looked at him — a police impulse. The boy’s eyes were half closed. The kid never reacted, and it was as though he were trying to hide in plain sight.

Stack, in his best wool pants and rather shabby sport jacket, walked tilted against the weight of the semi-automatic pistol he had taken to carrying. New York cops had been issued Glocks while Stack was in the job. Glocks, which replaced the old revolvers, were fearsome, fateful pieces, and they could set a running man into an airborne spin. It was a weapon to display on a twenty-first-century coat of arms, Stack thought. If there was a piece of weaponry used to claim the streets, it would be the Glock, exploding into random fusillades. A carelessly drawn breath might set it blazing. A gun with a mind of its own, in the world that had come to be after 9/11—heavy, hard to use, ready to take out half the room in seconds. They had become popular. Prestigious weapons, they tempted bozos toward casual display.

The Glock had led to a pandemic of bizarre shootings. Things happened inexplicably, the gun creating absurd occurrences on the streets. He had not packed it since leaving the job, and it felt strange.

On the next train to the college Stack had his choice of seats. At New Haven he rose to change again and walked across the refurbished station’s interior. By Maud’s time they had cleaned it up, as befitted the classy young passengers who used it. Of whom Maud had been one. From New Haven a slow local train tunneled through the hills and up the river to Amesbury.

JO WAS IN THE OFFICE, closing it down for the holiday break. Amid the spreading tremors of accusation and fear that attended Maud’s death, she’d been giving the semblance of advice to students preparing to return transformed to their families. The home folks would be welcoming conditions as various as bird flu, drug addiction, kundalini yoga, and Salafism, and offering returnees a few unexpected variations on the lives they’d left behind. In short, it was a tough time anyway, compounding the elements of Christmas, the kids’ ages and so on. Mercifully for the college, the repercussions, for the most part, didn’t have to be acted out on college property.

Jo was almost finished with the mailings when an old man came through the street door upstairs and descended to her office.

“Miss Carr?” the old man asked. Jo smiled. “I’m Eddie Stack. I used to be Maud’s father.”

His way of putting it cut off her polite greeting.

“You’ll always be her father, Mr. Stack. Through eternity.”

“We talked on the phone,” Stack said. “You and me. The night before she died.”

She told him to sit down and took a place opposite him.

“I took her to the hospital that night because she was so upset. But she got away from me. You mustn’t say you used to be her father, Mr. Stack.”

She rose and shook his hand across the desk.

“Whatever you say,” he told her.

“I’ve told you how desolate we’ve been here. It makes such an awful Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Stack said. “It’s too bad. I see they got the streets in town decorated. I came up from Long Island.”

“We miss her so much,” Jo said. Stack was trembling a little. She wondered whether he had been drinking, and for how long.

“I know they liked her here. I heard.”

She could only take it for bitterness, and what could she say? That Maud was admired and loved here in ways with which she could not cope, before her time. That Maud herself had loved it here, that it was the fullness of life to her. That it almost certainly would have been fine in the end with a little luck and a little less of God’s appalling mercy.

“But you got her now, right?” Stack said. “You got her from me.”

She looked into the man’s ruined, unforgiving face. We lost you your pretty one. Forgive us!

“Mr. Stack,” she said. “I was going to call you today. You spoke about putting Maud with her mother? I understand that the church is making… difficulties?”

Stack writhed in his chair, and the scornful smile he gave her made her cringe as if she herself were the Church and the college and the self-indulgent faculty, all proclaiming their false love, their greed, their treachery.

“Well, look, Mr. Stack. One of our folks here is very active in the Church. And she’s arranged an interment for Maud with her mother at the earliest convenient time. And there’ll be a priest. A ceremony, if you require.”

“So you people,” Stack said, “you people up here, you can do anything, right?”

“No, sir,” Jo said. “We can’t. But we are people who care. Many of us.”

Stack sat silently for a moment, not looking at Jo. Then he stood up, walked to the window and watched the people above him in the street. A few students remained around the campus, selling their textbooks at the only independent store left in town, buying souvenirs for their friends and family.

“I don’t want a religious ceremony,” Stack said. “The priests can shove it. I want to put the kid with her mother.”

“We’ll do it, Mr. Stack. This week. In Advent.”

“I heard about this youth down south said he killed Maud,” Stack said.

“That was a false confession. A nutcase.”

“Yeah, I know. What about this Brookman? Some people say he pushed her in front of the car. The professor who seduced her. The ex-con.”

“No, sir. Can I call you Ed? It was another crazy rumor. The witnesses, almost all the witnesses, say he was trying to save her.”

“He was never arrested. Never charged. Is that because he works here?”

“There was nothing to charge him with, Ed.”

“That right?”

“I’m sure he didn’t hurt her. She was his beautiful prize student.”