“Look,” he said.
Mira did.
There was nothing there.
She moved her eyes slowly from the newspaper back to Perry Edwards’s face, and shook her head.
“There’s a girl there,” he said.
Mira looked again, more closely—although by now she suspected where this was going, and that her hunch about mental illness had been right. She searched the grainy distance until, finally, just over the boy’s clean fingernail, she did see what looked like a gray figure of a girl moving out of the photograph.
She looked back at Perry, and shrugged. She said, “Okay. Maybe. Yes?”
Perry let the newspaper drop onto his lap, and then leaned over his backpack again and took a manila envelope out of it.
“I scanned the photo,” he said. “And then I enlarged it.” He reached into the envelope, took it out—glossy, gray, eight by twelve—and handed the photo to Mira. Now only the right-hand corner of the whole image remained—a few petals on a bough at the bottom, like a cloudy carpet, and, in the left-hand corner, the shining bumper of someone’s car parked in the sorority driveway—and, in the center of it all, the blurred girl.
She was wearing something filmy, either a mid-thigh-length dress or a shift over a miniskirt or shorts. Her arms were bare, and she was obviously in a hurry to get somewhere—one leg was bent behind her, like she was running. Her arms were swinging widely at her sides, or pumping. There was a flash of silver or gold around her wrist—a bracelet—and the side of her face had caught the sunlight, and the light obscured her features. Her blond hair was flowing behind her from her shoulders, lifted by a breeze or by her own momentum.
Certainly, from this distance, the girl looked like Nicole Werner, but so did half the other girls standing in the first photograph, in their black dresses, with their straight hair, holding one another’s hands.
So did half the girls on this campus, especially the sorority girls.
“Yes,” Mira said again, nodding, and handed it back to him.
She continued to nod as she tried to think carefully about what to say next. She’d made mistakes with students in the past, given them too much encouragement. She swallowed, and inhaled, and then said, “You’ve been through a terrible trauma. I understand that. I think, for that reason, this is not a class you should be taking right now. The material is too relevant, perhaps, at the moment, and it might be”—she used her hands to try to soften the word before it came out of her mouth, opening the hands on her lap—“suggesting things to you.”
Perry Edwards nodded, but he didn’t look away. He seemed to have expected her to say this, and was neither disappointed nor insulted.
He inhaled, bit his lower lip for a second, and then he said, “I understand what you’re saying. But I’ve had this photograph since May. And there are other things.” He looked up to the ceiling, as if searching for the words, and then back at Mira. “Professor Polson, Nicole’s here. She’s still on this campus. I was here all summer. I’ve seen her.”
Mira sat back in her chair, a kind of recoiling she immediately regretted. The tone of his voice. It was so certain.
Perry Edwards reached into his backpack again, took out another envelope, and out of it, a second photograph—this one of a slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair emerging from one of the sorority houses on the Row. She was glaring at the camera. She looked ready to sneer an obscenity at the photographer, or raise her middle finger. He held the newspaper—the senior portrait of the blond Nicole Werner—up next to the photograph.
Mira looked from one to the other, and said, “I do see the resemblance, Perry, but, surely, you—”
“I know,” he said. “I know these girls all look alike to people who don’t know them. But, Professor Polson, I went all through school with Nicole Werner. We grew up in the same town. We went to Sunday school together. We were confirmed at the same church. I know what she looks like. I see her. She’s here. She’s dyed her hair, but it’s her. I don’t know how. And I didn’t expect anyone to tell me anything except that I’m crazy if I told them, so I haven’t told anyone. But, I thought—well, I read your book, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins.” He pronounced the words carefully, as if Mira might not recognize the title of her own book. “And,” he said, “I thought maybe, if you’re working on a new book, a book like it, what could be better than if you had a campus equivalent of this?” he held up Melvin’s book again, open to the photograph of Etta. “I mean, even if you just think we’re crazy—”
“We?” Mira asked.
“That’s the thing,” Perry said. “There are two other guys who’ve seen her. Lucas Schiff. He’s a fifth-year senior. He was our resident advisor last year—”
“I know Lucas,” Mira said. Lucas Schiff. He’d been in her first-year seminar her first year on campus. He’d been busted for possession of a controlled substance then, but had gotten off on some technicality. He was one of those politically active kids who used their political activism as an excuse not to bathe, and to smoke a lot of dope.
“And also Patrick Wright.”
“I know Patrick, too,” Mira said. Patrick was clean-cut, from a small town in the northern part of the state. Nothing like Lucas Schiff. “He’s a junior?”
“Yeah,” Perry said. “He and Lucas—they’ve both been with her since she died.”
“Excuse me?” Mira asked.
“They’ve had sex with her.”
Mira put her hand over her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. Perry seemed not to notice the gesture. He went on.
“What my point is, Professor Polson. I mean, couldn’t you, maybe, write, say, something comparing Etta to—”
“Nicole Werner?”
“Yeah. I mean, if you’re working on another book. You wouldn’t have to believe us. Melvin doesn’t believe what the villagers are saying about Etta. He just listens. He analyzes.”
Mira looked at Perry Edwards carefully. For a crazy second she wondered if he’d spoken to the dean of the Honors College about her, if he somehow knew she hadn’t even begun the book she was going to have to have published in the next eighteen months. That she hadn’t even come up with a solid idea for the book.
No, of course not. He was just a bright, passionate, or maybe crazy kid. She inhaled. She said, “Why, Perry? Why do you want me to do that? What’s the point?”
“I need your help. There’s something here. I need”—something seemed to catch in his throat, and he swallowed—“a grown-up.”
“Perry,” Mira said, and then stopped, literally biting her tongue.
Although, later, she would try to tell herself that it was this last appeal to her as a “grown-up” that had brought the two of them together in their search for Nicole, Mira could already see, in her office that September afternoon, the book, published by a major university press, in her hands, the bright, smiling senior portrait of Nicole Werner on the cover, her own name underneath that photo, and the letter to the dean from the department chair, and the recommendation it expressed for her tenure.
What, at this point, did she have to lose? Did she have any better ideas?
“Professor Polson?” Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.
She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, “Okay.”