Page 44 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“It’s like a thousand degrees out, and this is an ice-cream shop. You’re sure that’s all you want?” Mira asks, and her voice is unexpected. Very soft and shy—it does not match the sort of person confident enough to seduce a teacher and have an affair beyond her years.

“You’re Mira,” I say, and she stops cold, my cup of coffee in her hand, and her brows raised.

“I’m Anna. Henry’s wife. I think you were a student of his.”

She puts the coffee down and tells me it’s on the house. “I’m going on break,” she says, starting to shut the order window.

“Whoa, wait! I’m sure you heard what happened to him, and I just want to ask you a question.”

“Sorry,” she says.

“I have...” I quickly sift through my wallet, wishing I had thought of bribe money. “A hundred and nine bucks if you talk to me.”

But she closes the window and disappears into the back.

I don’t believe it. I came in thinking it was a box to check because, although I’ve been disturbed by the rumor, it was just a rumor. Cass’s statement made it seem like there was more to it, but maybe not without explanation. This behavior, though... This is all red flags.

I leave my coffee and go to my car, cussing under my breath, already exhausted at 10:42 a.m. and not planning on giving up. I can’t force her to speak, so, what? Bring the affair information to the cops and get them to question her, get closer to the truth that way?

I blast my AC and close my eyes for a few minutes, wishing I’d taken that coffee. What do I do now?

There’s a knuckle tap on my window that makes me leap and lose my breath for a moment. I roll down my window, and it’s the friend standing there.

“Yes?” I say, flustered.

“Uh... I could use a hundred and nine dollars. I don’t know what your questions are, but I’d talk to you.”

“Okay, yeah,” I say, a wave of relief washing over me—a feeling like I might finally have a way to chip away at the first layer of this thing. Maybe.

She goes to the passenger’s side and lets herself in, to my surprise. “I don’t want her to see me talking to you.”

“Okay, so why is she afraid to talk to me?”

“First, let’s get out of here, and I’ll need the money up front,” she says, like a girl who is accustomed to manipulating people to get her way.

“Sure,” I say. I drive a couple blocks to a park where the girl hops out and lights up a cigarette.

She’s a big girl with a tight bun on the top of her head, and I guess she’s wearing a shirt, although I’d call it a bra, with tight cutoff shorts. She has hoop earrings the size of hula hoops in each ear, and she sits on a nearby picnic table under a willow tree and smokes.

“Here.” I hand her the cash. “So same question. Obviously she has a reason to not wanna talk to me, and she knows who I am, so what’s going on? What’s that about?” I ask.

“Probably thought you were here to kick her ass. Love her, but the girl is a deep-fried mess. She was obsessed with Mr. Hartley. I told her he was like a hundred and eww, but she didn’t care. In pottery once, she kept asking for help, trying to recreate that scene from that movie Ghost—you know with the...”

“I know, yes,” I say, wanting her to stay on track.

“She showed me the scene a few times. I never saw the movie, but anyway. She had a teacher obsession, like hard-core. She touched him all the time, and he even wrote her up and gave her warnings, and she acted like that was him flirting back. She like, would not stop. At parties where there were real boys, she’d talk about Mr. Hartley, pull up photos of him she snapped when he wasn’t looking. Really nutty stuff. It was like she was legit in a relationship with him by herself,” she says, and I can’t believe Henry never told me any of this.

He was always trying to protect me from stress, from things I couldn’t control so as not to worry me about them, but what about him? He needed to talk about this. He needed to process and figure out a plan on how to handle it. Why didn’t he talk to me? Maybe there was someone else he was talking to instead.

“So there were rumors at school about an affair?” I ask.

“Well, I mean, yeah, but they died down. He filed a sexual harassment complaint to make sure it was on record, I guess, and she was suspended. Then her parents switched schools because they didn’t want the truth to come out. I only know ’cause I’m her best friend, but I’m not supposed to be telling anyone. Anyway, he made sure it wasn’t public and that she wasn’t humiliated, but thought it was best for her mental health or whatever to go somewhere else and get help.”

“So that was it?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” She flicks her cigarette into a nearby garbage bin and misses. “I mean, she started showing up at his apartment—it’s like this shitty hotel with long-term rentals—well, I guess you know. No idea how she gets this info except that she follows him. Her dad bought her an old Suburban, and that’s when she started tracking him. I went with her a couple times. We’d smoke pot in the front seat and just watch the place. It’s a real shitty place, damn.”

“You were at his apartment with her?”

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