Free Old School Bones by Randall Peffer Page A

last week? Maybe in your apartment?”
    She frowns. “These damn people. Nothing is private. I don’t know why I work in a place like this.”
    Tory and Gracie shuffle in their thick winter coats, hugging themselves. The school has dropped the heat in Hibernia House to about fifty degrees to conserve energy. Vapor puffs from the girls’ lungs, Awasha’s, his. They are all panting. A cloud rising toward the ceiling. Her private rooms overhead on the second floor.
    She had someone in her bed with her. She thinks I don’t know about her boyfriends … It’s like that book
Smart Women, Foolish Choices.
Sometimes I feel her hurt. Lonely lady.
    “You want to show me around?”
    “Can we do this fast, someone might.” Her voice sounds raw.
    He understands. This seems fruitless. But if there is one thing he learned from the Provincetown Follies case, it is that absolutely nothing tops a thorough re-creation of events leading up to a death when it comes to getting beyond speculation and misunderstanding.
    “What would Liberty have done when she came in here that night? Would she have stayed in this room?”
    “No. If Doc P is not in her office, we usually go into the living room and call for her.” Gracie gives a little shrug. “It’s a big house. She never hears us call if we stay in here.”
    Awasha sighs, leads the crew out of the study into an immense Victorian salon. High ceilings, huge marble fireplace. Antique furnishings, a grand piano in one corner.
    “The living room. I just don’t get what you expect—”
    “This place is pretty amazing.”
    “The furnishings belong to the school. An historic house, they expect me to entertain. So they decorate the public rooms on the first floor. Lot of old WASP stuff.”
    “You sound annoyed.”
    “I really don’t want to have to explain to someone why we’re in here. Why these girls are in here when they are supposed to be at the all-school assembly.”
    “But look at this place.”
    “Yeah.” She eyes oils of a half-dozen portraits of the American gentry, circa 1850. And one of Edgar Hibernia by the piano. “A memorial to a bunch of dead white guys.”
    Tory clears her throat. “It’s kind of spooky when you come in here late at night, the lights off. Like all those dudes on the wall watching you.”
    He looks around. Even on this bright morning the room reminds him of a funeral parlor. Purple, filtered light. He tries to picture Liberty in here sometime after midnight. A black girl in a room full of dead white men. Bruised by the words
wog gash,
craving a hug. But his mind blanks on an image, keeps picturing the scene he cannot talk about. Awasha with Tupac Shakur.
    The bed creaking. Moaning … Sappy whack music.
    He spots the stereo. An old-school component set-up tucked on a bookshelf beside the fireplace.
    “Can we go now, please? It’s just a matter of time before security or some maintenance worker shows up to check on the heat.”
    “You listen to a lot of music?”
    The girls roll their eyes.
    Maybe she blushes. Her skin just the tiniest bit redder across the bridge of the nose.
    Suddenly he has this urge to see her music. Maybe hear it. Just plain, dumb curiosity.
    He spots an album box, empty, in front of the tuner. Next to an open can of Red Bull. He picks up the box. Squints to read its contents. It’s a homemade mix of love songs. Luther Vandross. Al Green. Oleta Adams, “Get Here.” Mariah Carey, “Vision of Love.” Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time.” More. A duet, “Can’t We Try?”
    He cocks his head, squints at her. Gives her a silly smile.
    “You going to disrespect my taste in music? We didn’t come in here so that—”
    “Doc P, you have to admit—”
    “Hey, if I can’t control what’s on my walls, at least I can control what I listen to. How do you think it is down here when you girls are raging with Bow Wow, Puffy, Public Enemy and that crowd twenty-four seven. Sometimes hip hop can …”
    He says he likes this