Nora
Nora didn’t make it home for lunch with her father. The sheriff questioned them in the staff room right through recess. Other than the make of Adam’s car and the address Bettina pulled up on her computer, nobody had anything helpful to say, but that didn’t stop Bill Watterly from asking how long they’d known Adam and whether they’d seen any strangers lurking around the school while Nora watched the clock, thought about her father drinking in the camper, and seethed with frustration.
After the sheriff left the day trudged by. Nora’s afternoon classes didn’t know what had happened—Bill had asked them not to tell the students yet—but they knew it was something big, and their excitement made them antsy. Nora clung to her patience with difficulty. Her mother had taught language arts here for fifteen years, and she’d been beloved by students and teachers alike. When Nora told Bettina she was getting her teaching certificate, the principal had embraced her. “We’d be honored to have your mother’s daughter teaching here,” she said, but in this, as in many things, Nora knew she wasn’t her mother’s daughter.
But by the time the last bell rang, the anxiety of lunchtime had given way to a familiar resentment, and Nora no longer wanted to rush home to the camper. It would just be the same mess it always was, and by now there’d be nothing to do but clean it up. After her classroom emptied she sat at her desk and rubbed her eyes, feeling the scratch of sand under the lids. Sand was everywhere, always—in her pores, her hair, even in the grinding space where her molars met. She was sure that when her flesh rotted away there would be a pile of sand in her coffin, inside the cage of her bones.
A quick knock made her look up to see Mary Barnes in the doorway. Mary’s perfume, flowery and cloying, flooded the room.
“Can you believe it? That poor man.” Her eyes were wide with ghoulish excitement.
“It’s terrible,” Nora said, neutrally.
“It’s shocking! A murder, right here in Lovelock!” Mary smacked her bright red lips. “Why would anyone kill Adam, of all people? He was—well, you knew him. He didn’t seem worth the trouble.”
Nora kept her temper with an effort. “The sheriff asked us not to talk about it.”
“How can we not? He was our colleague.” Mary pressed her hand to her breast, as she had in the staff room. “Our friend.” Her blouse was open one button too far, showing the wrinkled skin of her cleavage. Her hair was dyed blond and teased into curls that fell past her shoulders, just as they doubtless had in her 1988 Homecoming Queen portrait. Nora, who’d been one of the two most popular girls in her own class, prided herself on little these days, but she would never be like Mary Barnes, clinging desperately to bygone glory. That was something, at least.
“I’m sorry, Mary. But I’m not going to talk about it,” she said, and Mary’s mouth shut with a snap.
Once Mary was gone Nora leaned back in her chair. She still couldn’t bring herself to leave, so she watched students board the Marzen bus outside her window. There were eight middle schoolers from Marzen this year, which was more or less how many there were every year. They looked like all the other kids, with their basketball shorts and pink leggings and secondhand Old Navy tee shirts, but Nora knew they were a clan apart. It couldn’t be easy trying to fit in with the Lovelock kids, who’d known one another since kindergarten, but there was also something insular and wary about Marzen itself, crouching in its little valley in the hills. In high school Nora had ridden that bus many times with a Marzen girl. Lily DeSanto, with her fragile face and thin blond hair, wasn’t in the popular crowd Nora ran with by then, but Nora liked the delicate horses Lily drew in her notebooks during class. She liked Lily’s mother’s tapioca pudding, too, and the spongy mattress of Lily’s twin bed, where they slept head to toe. But no matter how often Nora rode that bus to Lily’s house she’d remained as much an outsider as the first time. That’s how Marzen was.
Sheriff Watterly had asked the staff why Adam might have gone there. Nobody had any idea, including Nora, but now she remembered the Marzen boy in the sixth grade, a small, quiet boy who sat in the back of her classroom with the misfits. An outsider even among outsiders, this boy—Sal Prentiss was his name—had eaten lunch with Adam almost every day. Nora had seen them on Thursdays after school, too, the only members of Adam’s chess club. If she worked late enough on Thursdays she’d see them getting into Adam’s car afterwards, and she’d thought it was nice of Adam to give the boy a ride home. So that explained how Adam knew where Marzen was. But yesterday was Wednesday, so it didn’t explain why he’d gone there the day he was killed.
Nora tilted her head back and stared at the asbestos ceiling tiles. All year she’d wondered why Adam had come to Lovelock. He’d been running from something, that much she knew. Everyone who moved to Lovelock was running from something, even the supervisors sent by the mining company, whether they knew it or not. But what could it have been? Nora was good at getting people to talk when she put her mind to it, so she’d assumed she could get Adam to tell her why he’d left a university professorship to teach middle school in a small desert town, but he’d gently deflected all her questions and politely ducked out of conversations the moment they turned personal.
“Why Lovelock?” she’d asked him once, trying the direct approach.
“Suffice it to say,” he’d said, in that stilted way of his, “that I am where I need to be.”
Eventually she’d stopped probing and relaxed into what became a warm, though not close, friendship. She had liked him. He was awkward, but he had that sadness about him, and an unaffected kindness that was refreshing. When her brief marriage to Mason ended, ten years ago, Nora had dropped all of her old high school crowd except Britta. That made Adam her only other friend, even though she’d never seen him outside of school and they’d never talked about anything that mattered.
Ironically, Nora thought she’d come closest to making an honest connection with him just this past Monday. She’d stopped by in the morning to say hello, and his appearance had startled her. His skin was the color of paper, his hair was uncombed, and his dress shirt, normally as starched as a shirt in a 1950s magazine ad, was wrinkled.
“Are you okay?” she’d asked.
He’d stared at her with wide eyes, and she thought this was it: he was finally going to say something real. Then he looked away. “Just a bit under the weather,” he said, and she let it go.
Now guilt rose about her like water, familiar and cold. She should have pressed him. What if whatever was bothering him on Monday had something to do with his murder two days later? Had he seen it coming? Did it have something to do with the past he’d never talked about? Nora couldn’t imagine Adam having a secret so dark it had gotten him killed, but if his murderer hadn’t been someone from his past, then it was someone from here, and who in this dry, lifeless town had it in them to set a man they barely knew on fire? She couldn’t imagine that, either.
She shook her head, feeling her ponytail brush her shoulders. Her father was waiting, and she wasn’t going to figure out who killed Adam. That was Bill Watterly’s job. And Mason’s.