Chapter Four
Weeks passed. The fear and speculation surrounding Mrs. Douglas' murder faded with the arrest of the drifter, Jedidiah. His trial was to be held in the city in a few months time. The police had arrested him because he'd been seen in the vicinity of the murder earlier that day, asking the neighbors if they had any odd jobs he could do. He'd also had a bottle of Mrs. Douglas's strawberry wine when the police came to question him. Evidently she was famous for the beverage and won prizes at the county fair every year for it.
Jedidiah's story was that he'd gone to her door to late that afternoon to ask about a job. She'd given him the wine as a gift and sent him away without hiring him. No one believed that she'd part with a bottle of her precious wine. I didn't believe it either. Jedidiah quite likely stole it from the storm cellar. It was just his bad luck that the broken lock on the storm cellar door was found near Mrs. Douglas' body in the side yard of her home. With the lack of any other suspects, the police focused on Jedidiah as the culprit.
Or so Peter's uncle, Officer Fletcher, opined. Peter spilled the details of the investigation to his friends who spread them around the school. Since the wheels of justice ground slowly in the city, the humans became complacent once again.
That suited me just fine. The last thing I needed was for everyone, adults and students included, regarding each other with suspicion. Carlisle assured me that I looked like a normal seventeen year old. I didn't feel "normal". If they only knew how easily I could kill them, the fragile creatures surrounding me would recoil in shock.
'Monsieur Sieyes is nothing compared to Edward. How could I have ever liked him?' Clara wondered as she delivered a note from the office to the unfortunate French teacher.
The teacher, oblivious to her poor opinion, thanked her with a "Merci, Mademoiselle," and set the note down on his desk, then went back to conjugating verbs on the chalkboard.
Clara stared at me as she left, knocking her shoulder into the doorjamb because she wasn't paying attention.
'Ow, that hurt!' she thought while she giggled self-deprecatingly. She stepped back and made it through the doorway safely on her second try.
Yvonne smiled in sympathy, thinking that she would've probably done the very same thing, and snuck a glance my way. I pretended not to see it.
Monsieur Sieyes heard Clara's giggle and shot a severe look at the back of her retreating head. He thought she might be laughing at what he was writing on the board. Checking his work, he couldn't find anything amusing about the verb forms in English or in French so he shrugged it off and continued to write.
His mind began to wander to his wife. She was pregnant and the pregnancy was doing interesting things to her figure. I shuddered and focused my attention on the thoughts of the new boy in the class. I'd already mastered the verbs written on the board, I just needed to hear them in order to get the pronunciation down.
Hartley Saunders joined Saint Anselm's Academy a few days after the murder. He was a competent student, quiet, mysterious to the other students, and very good at sports. Ned Shelton immediately considered him a rival. Several girls professed themselves in love with him.
He, on the other hand, was too wrapped up in depression to notice them. He hated it at Saint Anselm's, and only attended the school because his father decided to move the family after his mother committed suicide.
Hartley was the one who'd found her, hanging from a rafter in the kitchen. He thought of it often. Thankfully his mother chose hanging rather than slicing open a vein or shooting herself. I don't think I could've taken another bout of bloody imagination such as the ones I'd been subjected to after the postmistress's murder. Even so, the regularity of the image in his mind was disturbing. His mother's death, rather than the postmistress's death, was what consumed him. He'd been in town during the murder, but his father hadn't let him come to school until the presumed murderer was caught.
At lunch Ned held court from his usual spot in the patio.
"Did you see that?"
Ned held up two hands, with a fly smashed between the palms.
"I got it."
Harriet rolled her eyes and took a bite out of her apple while Clara, Dorothy, Steven, and Gordon exclaimed dutifully.
"Bet Hartley Saunders can't do that," he muttered, wiping the fly carcass into the grass.
Ned was jealous of Saunders. Ever since he'd discovered that the boy was just as good at baseball as he was, he was determined to best him.
It was petty and ridiculous, especially since Hartley didn't realize there was a competition going on between them.
I leaned back against my favorite tree and let the conversation swirl around me. Lunch ended. During English class it began to rain.
Miss Lucey was thrilled.
'What perfect weather for discussing the sewer scene,' she thought as she read out loud the part where Valjean carries Marius through the sewers of Paris and confronts Javert.
I noticed that she tended to read the parts she liked best herself, rather than allowing the students to read those bits. Not that I minded. Miss Lucey infused her words with a dramatic inflection that none of my fellow students were interested enough to emulate. I'd finished reading the book already.
'Bet it stunk to high heaven in that sewer,' Ned was thinking. 'Bet there was all sorts of poop floating in that water too.'
'I wonder if the sewers are a metaphor for hell?' wondered Sean as he began to read ahead. 'Javert sure is devilish.'
'That's a lot of rain. Thank goodness Mary and I won't have to walk home in it. It's nice living at the school. Poor Edward. He's going to get soaked when he leaves to go home.'
Sara glanced over at me and sighed quietly.
'He's so handsome. I wonder if he even knows I'm alive?'
I licked my lips and concentrated on the words printed in my book. Did I know she was alive? I was uncomfortably aware of every living human being in my immediate proximity. Sara's blood thrummed through her veins, enticing, tempting, calling out to me.
'Valjean is so heroic to carry Marius. I really like him. How can Javert be so mean?' wondered Mary. 'I wish he'd been shot at the barricade instead of Eponine.'
Hiding a smile, I allowed Mary's thoughts of vengeance against Javert distract me.
Hartley was in the library when I arrived for my independent study period. I didn't have a physical education class, and Hartley took private fencing lessons with Mr. Chin instead of regular phys. ed. so we both had a study period while the rest of the third years were engaged in sports. With the rain thudding against the windows, I figured they were indoors in the gymnasium today.
Hartley nodded at me when I sat down at the far end of the table where he'd spread out his books. He was about my height, with light brown hair and hazel eyes.
'He's so pale,' he thought. 'Has he been ill?'
I cleared my throat to reinforce Hartley's guess, and opened my French book. He only pictured his mother's body twice that period. That was down from the six times he'd thought about it the day before. As study periods went, it was a good one.
After my piano class with Miss Wentworth, I was done for the day. I told her that I practiced every day at home, yet she was still amazed at my ability to memorize the pieces of music she chose for me. I'd have to make some more errors to seem more human. I cringed at the thought of mangling Chopin.
Sara was right. I was drenched by the time I reached the train station. The overhang did little to protect the platform from the driving rain, so I wandered inside where the scent of wet wool and muddy boots predominated. Men and women sat miserably on the seats provided while the stationmaster muttered to himself as he hung the telephone's earpiece back on its cradle.
"I'm sorry folks," he said, coming out from behind the ticket counter. "There's been a mudslide across the tracks. They're cleaning it now but it'll be a two hour delay at least. You're all welcome to settle here to wait."
Groans and muffled curses met his announcement. I saw in his thoughts that it would probably be a three hour delay and resigned myself to wait it out at the station.
"Monsieur Cullen, is it?"
The cultured tone of my French teacher reached me as I turned in pretend surprise. I'd heard his thoughts before he caught sight of me. Not many people in the environs of Saint Anselm's Academy thought in French.
"Yes, sir."
"You are soaked to the skin," he noted disapprovingly.
"I'll be fine. It's just a little rain."
The last thing I needed was a teacher fussing over me.
"Mais non! You will catch cold. You haven't even a hat. Come, share my umbrella. I am going back to the school to wait. You can't stay here. You'll become ill."
Everyone else in the station was bundled up. The light overcoat I'd thrown on over my school uniform seemed flimsy in comparison. I could stay in the drafty room pretending to shiver or go with Monsieur Sieyes. The other option of abandoning the station to run home wasn't viable. The stationmaster could hear our conversation, and he'd expect me back to board the train once the line opened up again.
"Yes, Monsieur," I said meekly and ducked under the umbrella as he opened it.
Shoving my hands in my pockets, I trudged beside him on the wood planked walkway. We passed the post office in silence. The light was on inside and Mr. Withers, the replacement for Mrs. Douglas, peered out at us. Mr. Douglas hadn't worked out as a postal employee. He and his daughter moved to Boston where he had family. Hopefully they'd care for the little girl better than he could.
The silence was becoming awkward for Sieyes. He was one of those teachers who was most comfortable in front of a class, but at a loss when it came to one on one conversation outside of the classroom.
Taking pity on him, I spoke.
"Why were you at the train station, Monsieur Sieyes? Were you going somewhere?"
An image of his wife, thankfully clothed this time around, popped into his mind.
"I was meeting Madame Sieyes. Her train was due twenty minutes ago. It must be delayed from the mud. She was visiting her sister in Knoxville."
He missed her. He knew that she had to visit before her pregnancy made travel impossible. He also knew that the sister didn't like or approve of him, and he was anxious about his wife's state of mind.
"Knoxville? So Madame Sieyes isn't French?"
"Ah, no."
He wrenched his thoughts away from his sister in law's interfering ways.
"I met my wife here, in America."
I saw another image of his wife. In this one she was wearing a white shirtwaist with a long narrow blue skirt, the type women were still wearing at the end of the war. She carried a lace parasol and clutched it with lace glove covered hands. She was smiling gently.
He'd loved her from the moment he saw her. Prim, proper, fastidious Monsieur Sieyes had seen her as an angel of sanity in a world torn apart by war. The fact that she was a good deal younger than him meant nothing. He'd pursued her with a romantic fervor that none of his students, save me, would ever have guessed him capable.
I couldn't see her thoughts of course, and I didn't know if his feelings were requited, but I hoped they were.
The man walking next to me wasn't as handsome as Carlisle. His hair was already showing signs of grey at the temples, and he was on the slight side. There was, however, something about his thoughts towards his wife that were very similar to Carlisle's thoughts about Esme.
As we spoke about Knoxville, I pondered the similarities. Both Carlisle and Monsieur Sieyes were killers. Sieyes had killed men during the war, while Carlisle restricted his killing to animals. Both were distressed, disgusted even, at the need to kill, yet both had overcome the horror of what they'd become to find happiness.
I doubted I ever would. I lacked Carlisle's limitless compassion. He truly cared for the humans he treated. I still saw them as temptations that I needed to overcome. I could appreciate Monsieur Sieyes' love for his wife, just as I appreciated Jean Valjean's plight in Les Miserables, but it had nothing to do with me or my constant struggle. I was a phony, a sham. I could pretend to be human, but I wasn't really one of them.
"Eh Voila," said Monsieur Sieyes. "Here we are."
We stood at the steps of the main school building.
"Would you like to wait here or at my cottage?"
He was hoping desperately that I'd choose the school. He'd put flowers in a vase for his wife to see when she returned home to the staff cottage they'd been assigned when he was hired on at Saint Anselm's. He didn't want me to see them, or the love note he'd left for her with a heart drawn on it.
"Here, I think. I'll see if I can borrow an umbrella when I check back at the station. Thank you, Monsieur Sieyes."
I ducked out from under the umbrella and hurried, human speed, up the stone steps.
"It was nothing. Au revoir," he called out and began marching down the path leading to the staff housing area.
There was a sound that didn't belong outside in the rain. I heard the crack of a bat coming from behind the main building. Curious, I waited until Monsieur Sieyes' umbrella disappeared then made my way in the opposite direction down the gravel path that led across the front of the main school building and between the boy's dorm, which formed one arm of the 'U' shaped configuration of the school and the library.
The crack came again.
Walking faster now, I passed the library and rounded the tennis courts. There before me lay the athletic field.
Their thoughts alerted me to their identities before their sight or scents could. It was Ned Shelton and Steven Dereuter.
'Got to get better. Got to beat that Saunders kid,' was the litany going through Ned's mind.
He was standing across from Steven, holding a bat, careless of the rain which had soaked his uniform.
'I can't believe I let Ned talk me into this…again,' thought Steven. He was sitting on a stool at the pitcher's mound, wearing a yellow rain slicker and hat and scowling as he wound up for another pitch.
There was a half empty bucket of balls at his feet. Despite the awkward position atop the stool, his aim was true. The ball shot right over the plate and into Ned's swing.
Another 'crack' rent the air and the ball went high over Steven's head.
"I got it!" yelled Ned.
"Yep," affirmed Steven.
"Let's go again."
Steven reached for another ball, and I turned to go.
Ned might be simple-minded, but he had a goal. He was happy when attempting to achieve it. What goal did I have apart from not slaughtering my schoolmates?
Feeling an emptiness that had nothing to do with hunger, I turned and left them to their practice.
