God Save the Child

She laughed again and sat up.

I said, “How about dinner together next week? That way you won’t feel quite so hustled, maybe?”

She sat and looked down at me for some time. Her black hair falling forward around her face. Her lipstick smeared around her mouth. “You’re quite nice, Spenser.” She put her hand against my cheek for a moment. “Will you come and have dinner with me at my home next Tuesday evening at eight?”

“I will be very pleased to,” I said.

We stood up. She put her hand out. I shook it. I walked to the door with her She said, “Good night, Spenser.”

I said, “Good night, Susan.”

I opened the door for her, and she went out. I closed it. I breathed as much air as I could get into my lungs and let it out very slowly. Next time, I thought. Tuesday night. Dinner at her house. Hot dog.

10

Susan Silverman called me at my office at 9:30 the next morning.

“I’ve found out about that commune,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It’s an old house in the woods back from Lowell Street near the Smithfield-Reading line.”

“Can you tell me how to get there?”

“I’ll take you.”

“I was hoping you would. I’ll be out in an hour.”

“Come to my office,” she said.

“At the school?” I said.

“Yes, what’s wrong?”

“Mr. Moriarty might assault me with a ruler. I don’t want to start up with no assistant principal.”

“He probably won’t recognize you without your white raincoat,” she said. “The sun’s out.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll run the risk.”

It was sunny, and the first hint of a New England fall murmured behind the sunshine. Warm enough for the top down on my convertible. Cold enough for a pale denim jacket. I drank a large paper cup of black coffee on the way and finished it just before I got to the Smithfield cutoff.

I found a space in the high school parking lot and went in.

The receptionist in the guidance office was in brown knit today and displaying a lot of cleavage. I admired it. She wasn’t Susan Silverman, but she wasn’t Lassie either, and there was little to be gained in elitist thinking.

Susan Silverman came out of her office with a red, blue, and green striped blazer on.

“I’ll be back in about half an hour, Carla,” she said to the redhead and to me. “Why don’t we take my car? It’ll be easier than giving you directions.”

I said, “Okay,” and we went out of the office and down a school corridor I hadn’t walked before. But it was a school corridor. The smell of it and the long rows of lockers and the tone of repressed energy were like they always were. The guidance setup was different, though. Guidance counseling in my school meant the football coach banged your head against a locker and told you to shape up.

Susan Silverman said, “Were you looking down the front of my secretary’s dress when I came out?”

“I was looking for clues,” I said. “I’m a professional investigator.”

She said, “Mmmm.”

We went out a side door to the parking lot. Behind it the lawn stretched green to a football field ringed with new-looking bleachers and past that a line of trees. There was a group of girls in blue gym shorts and gold T-shirts playing field hockey under the eye of a lean tan woman in blue warm-up pants and a white polo shirt with a whistle in her mouth.

“Gym class?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Susan’s car was a two-year-old Nova. I opened the door for her, and she slipped into the seat, tucking her blue skirt under her.

We drove out of the parking lot, turned left toward the center of town, and then right on Main Street and headed north.

“How’d you locate this place so quickly?”

“I collected a favor,” she said, “from a girl in school.”

We turned left off Main Street and headed east. The road was narrow, and the houses became sparser. Most of the road was through woods, and it seemed incredible that we were but fifteen miles from Boston and in the northern reaches of a megalopolis that stretched south through Richmond, Virginia. On my right was a pasture with black and white Ayrshire cows grazing behind a stone wall piled without benefit of mortar. Then more woods, mostly elm trees with birch trees gleaming through occasionally and a smattering of white pine.

“It’s along here somewhere,” she said.

“What are we looking for?”

“A dirt road on the left about a half mile past the cow pasture.”

“There,” I said, “just before the red maple.”

She nodded and turned in. It was a narrow road, rocky and humpbacked beneath the wheel ruts. Tree branches scraped the sides and roof of the car as we drove. Dogberry bushes clustered along the edge of the path. A lot of rust-colored rock outcroppings showed among the greenery, and waxy-looking green vines grew among them in the shade, putting forth tiny blue flowers. All that waxy green effort for that reticent little flower.