The Job of the Wasp Read online

  “Someone put her here,” he said, “so that no one would find her. We’ve found her. I don’t want to find out what happens next.”

  “You think she was murdered?” I said.

  “Look at her face,” he said.

  There were no wounds on the body that I could see, but it was true her expression was one of abject horror. The lower jaw seemed unhinged. Her fingers were spread open and curled back, as if she would be forever defending herself against her attacker.

  The other boy was right to observe that someone must have put her here, but it was a suspiciously unsuitable place for a corpse anyone truly wanted to store beyond the possibility of casual discovery. It occurred to me then that this might have been the very reason we had been rewarded with garden duty so early in the season. The goal hadn’t been to keep someone from finding the corpse, but to bury it so that it might be discovered without any trouble at all.

  The Headmaster’s note—If there’s something you’d like to confess, any time is a good time to do so—took on a potential meaning I had not yet considered. I had assumed his thinking was guided by at least an undercurrent of sympathetic rationality, meaning the note was a kind gesture made in the spirit of trust and reconciliation. I see you have something to say, and I want you to know it’s okay to say it. But if the Headmaster was in fact mad, by which I mean if his thinking was governed by a violently subjective irrationality, then it stood to reason that, in our second meeting—which had possibly gone well, in spite of how I’d felt toward the end—he might have grown suspicious, or even become convinced, that the teacher had lied to him about what transpired between me and Fry. I’d insisted on one thing, she on another, and if the Headmaster had believed me—a new boy in a bad situation—over a woman he’d once trusted enough to appoint as an extension of the facility’s authority, of his own authority, it was undoubtedly because she had been caught lying before. While it was hard to believe that a single lie could have resulted in her murder, it was not so hard to imagine that a series of lies on her part could have added to a pressure already existent within him, against which he’d battled all his life, making this final lie, however minor, enough to push a long-struggling man over the edge. What was all that folding, if not something to keep his otherwise potentially murderous hands occupied? The note, I now understood, could have come from a part of him that sensed he was on the brink of something grave and irreversible, meaning it had been nothing short of a desperate plea for me to save this woman’s life. If I had revealed myself to him in that moment as the source of our discrepancy, I could have been punished more reasonably, as I was a first-time offender and hadn’t yet established a habit of lying. I was new to the facility and maybe a little afraid. A first lie, a single lie, only meant I hadn’t yet realized I was safe and that he could be trusted. But a pattern of lies, a history of lies, compulsive dishonesty, undermined the structural integrity of any relationship—professional, personal, or otherwise. And perhaps, in the case of the teacher, the Headmaster was finished with being undone.

  Her nudity suggested it was a crime of passion. Something personal had been shared between her and her murderer, moments before the final act. Perhaps her lies had wounded him so deeply precisely because their relationship exceeded its professional capacity. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the Headmaster bent backward over the teacher’s desk. A mud-covered breast in each hand. Her gnarled fingers guided through his silver hair.

  “It’s horrific,” said the other boy. “Cover it up.”

  “I don’t think this is something we can easily or successfully keep a secret,” I said.

  “I say we fill in the dirt and finish our work,” he said, “and never talk about this again.”

  Above us, clouds were gathering. The blackbird was gone. The body had no smell. I imagined for a moment that it was still alive. That she would sit up, maybe ashamed or maybe proud, and cover herself with one of the larger leaves from the pumpkin’s vine.

  “We’ll play knuckles to decide how we handle it,” I said. “If I win, we’ll alert the authorities immediately, come what may. If you win, we’ll cover her up and take the secret to our grave.”

  I stared at him.

  “You already lost once,” he said.

  “That was different,” I said. “This is for this.”

  “You’ll go first then,” he said, “because loser goes first.”

  I nodded. He curled his fingers and made two fists. He held out his arms. I made two little fists as well and brought one squarely to his jaw.

  I hadn’t meant to hurt him all that badly, only to take control of the situation. But the ground was soft and it was easy to lose your balance, as I’ve said. He was sent back and over by the punch, almost like the long board of a seesaw. And suddenly he was in the dirt.

  They were like two vegetables in a row, the corpses, and it was starting to rain. The boy’s left leg was twitching, but it was clear he was done for. The twitch was only nerves. I’d heard we do that. It’s one way in which we’re like insects,

  I’d been told.

  The staff of the garden hoe extended from behind the boy’s head like a diagram. His skull must have been made of paper, the poor thing.

  I didn’t wait for any more rain to fall and offered his body no comforts or condolences. Instead, I ran in the direction of the facility’s main building, where the Headmaster was surely still in his office and a phone could be used to call the paramedics, the morticians, the landscapers, whoever helped in situations like these. Whoever could clear and clean all of this up. I was upset, but with my distress came a level of relative clarity. The work ahead of me was known, and the steps to begin it were well within my reach.

  It was a tragedy, no doubt, what had been done to the teacher and what had happened to the boy, but there were upsides to that tragedy, which I could see even while in the midst of it. There were long-term, as well as immediate, benefits to be gained. If the Headmaster had in fact murdered the teacher and buried her in the garden, all the better that I was now a murderer as well. I wasn’t proud of the accident, but I knew it granted me exclusive grounds on which to approach the Headmaster in a more direct and intimate way. I could be trusted. I wasn’t one to judge.

  The rest of the boys were still working at their chores. Some were on the dish line. I could see others through the building’s large windows, picking at the trellises of its façade. I slowed to walk calmly past them all. It was really too late to rush, and there was no reason to cause the innocent undue distress.

  The Headmaster was in his office, examining a sheet of paper. He must have had a near-endless supply in his lower desk drawers. I was sure he refreshed them on a schedule, every week or even every morning, with obsessive regularity. How fragile his grip on the world must be, I decided, and how severe the consequences for those who interrupted his compulsions.

  “That was fast,” he said, setting down the page.

  “There is a situation,” I said.

  “I’m aware,” he said, “which is why I sent Hannan to fetch you.”

  “Hannan?” I said.

  “Yes, Hannan,” he said. “You can be sure Greta would be deeply disturbed if she were to find out.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Ms. Klein,” he said.

  That was her name. Ms. Klein. I could hear the other boys chanting it now. Great Greta Klein. Great Greta Klein. What will it take for me to make her mine?

  “To where did you send Hannan?” I said.

  “To the garden,” he said, “to fetch the boy responsible for this.”

  The Headmaster lifted the sheet he’d been examining. It was a drawing of a naked woman, finely shaded. She was leaned against the white of the page in a vulgar position.

  “Just now?” I said.

  “What are we going to do about this?” he said.

  Beneath his concerne
d expression, I could detect the faintest bit of levity. A grin that had not quite made it to his mouth. I’d been wrong about the Headmaster, I realized, almost entirely.

  This drawing, and his self-satisfaction at the timing of its presentation, was evidence enough that he’d never been on my side, never been seeking to curb his impulses, but had instead delighted in staging an elaborate framing of his newest student. This drawing, which he obviously hoped to pin on me, was clearly of his own creation. He’d murdered Ms. Klein, stripped her of her clothes, buried her where I would be forced to discover her, and was now planting evidence of an illicit relationship, real or imagined, obsessive either way, that I might have been carrying on with her. Hannan, if he’d even ever sent Hannan down, had likely seen me push the other boy and then sit with the two corpses for some time, drawing up my plan of action while coping with the shock of it all. From a distance, that shock might have appeared menacing, even celebratory. I can’t be asked to know how someone might misread a desperate scene like that. And now the Headmaster was hiding Hannan somewhere, surely under the auspices of protecting him from the facility’s murderous new arrival.

  My supposed guardian sat before me, a man in no rush. I could feel in the patience he exhibited while I sorted this all out that I was on the right track. Though his plan had not yet revealed itself to me in full, I could see its outline, feel its shape, and I needed only to fill in the details. Why couldn’t he have disposed of the body in the lake? Or ground it up and fed it to the pigs I’d been hearing so much about? Why plant it right under our noses then send us off to sniff around? Why bother framing anyone at all?

  He set the drawing face-down on the desk.

  “If you’re going to claim you didn’t do it,” he said, “then I would ask you how it wound up in your room.”

  “Someone planted it,” I said, hoping that by hinting at my understanding of what he was up to so far, I might provoke him to slip in some way and definitively confirm my suspicions.

  He reached behind him to a low shelf and produced a pile of pages. I could see the geometries of a naked body through the back of each page as he thumbed slowly through them.

  “There are sketches here,” he said. “Bits and . . . pieces. Add to them the finished work found under your mattress. A substantial time investment, and a fairly elaborate staging, if indeed that is what you are proposing. More likely, these are the products of a young pervert who’s been working away at his unsavory project for a while now.”

  I couldn’t describe what I felt then as a release, but a great deal of tension did vanish from my body. The sheer excess of drawings was key to understanding why this all did not begin and end with the disposal of a single body. Yes, the Headmaster was the creator of these drawings, and their existence firmly established the inappropriate relationship I’d originally only supposed. Here was proof of the intimate time the Headmaster had spent with our teacher. The study he’d made of her. There were likely troves of evidence to this illicit relationship, scraps scattered around the facility, which these two had carelessly allowed to accumulate during their oblivious carnival of passion. More than to just get rid of the body, the Headmaster needed a story that would explain or discredit any evidence that might turn up, not only of her murder but of his perverse idolization of her and their subsequent tawdry trysts.

  He slapped the pile of pages to his desk, sighing theatrically, so prepared was he to put his plan into action and reinforce the roles he’d written for us. I could see there was no longer any upside to a direct approach, and that I would be forced to wage war on a field of his design.

  “I ask again,” he said. “What are we going to do about this?”

  “I have to accept full responsibility,” I said.

  “That’s a start,” he said.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” I said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Great Greta Klein since I arrived.”

  He grimaced.

  “I haven’t been able to take control of my hand,” I said. “When I’m alone in my room, it’s all I think about. There is something wrong with me.”

  “It’s not an appropriate practice,” he said. “But it’s understandable. You are a young boy in a facility full of young boys. She is the only woman in your life. If it weren’t for my beautiful wife . . .” He stopped there. I might have heard a tremble in his voice.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for understanding. But we both know it was wrong of me. Imagine if our poor teacher had discovered these drawings? Imagine if I had kept on drawing them until the room overflowed with them and they spilled out into the hall, into the classroom, into the libraries of our great state?”

  He nodded.

  “So you’re going to stop?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. “Do you think I could bear to face this kind of humiliation more than once in my lifetime? I’m mortified by your discovery. I feel my darkest secret has been unearthed, exposed to the scrutiny of strangers and God himself.”

  I watched his face.

  “These days, ours is a secular facility,” he said.

  I wondered then how old the Headmaster was. It was impossible to tell from his face, where he seemed to carry more years than one life could account for. The only thing I knew for certain was that he’d passed beyond the stage of aging and was well into that of aged.

  “I accept full responsibility, and I ask that you commandeer all of my drawing materials until further notice,” I said. “Until this demon has been privately exorcised from my wrist. I beg you.”

  “Well, try to keep yourself calm,” he said. “I don’t mean to punish you for having impulses you don’t yet know what to do with. Out of respect for Ms. Klein and this facility, though, this practice has to stop. And I agree with you: I should collect your drawing materials and keep them until further notice.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “I’ll return to the garden, then, to complete my weeding, and will bring you the materials before dinner.”

  “It’s already getting late,” he said. “You can finish your work tomorrow.”

  “Sir,” I said. “This is something I must do. I need to feel the weight of my mistakes. I need to blister.”

  “First,” he said, settling into his chair, “you should be wearing gloves when you’re working out there. Second, the sun is going to set momentarily. And third, it’s raining. Your garden duty is over for the day.”

  It was true. The rain had not let up. It had only grown more severe.

  “I should at least go gather up the tools,” I said. “They’ll ruin.”

  He nodded, and I saw in that simple gesture all that he knew and did not know. If Hannan had already returned with his report, there was no way the Headmaster would have allowed me to return to the scene. That I’d already unearthed Ms. Klein, the fate of the boy in the garden—the Headmaster would never have let me out of his sight if he knew these things. In what he did not know, there was hope for me yet.

  “Gather up the tools,” he said, “alert your partner, and be done with it all. After that, you can clean up and go to your room. Gather any other pictures you might have squirreled away and bring them to me to be destroyed with the rest.”

  I ran back to the garden. There was no sign of Hannan along the way. The hill leading down to the garden was slick with rain, and as soon as the bodies came into view, I lost my footing, sliding forward on my rear for several feet before finally catching myself with both hands. I stood again and checked for wounds. I was covered in mud, but already the rain was washing it away.

  The water had worn down the edges of the hole that held Ms. Klein. It was collecting around her too, but she was not yet submerged. She seemed almost a part of the earth, like a stone relief, a naked body worn into obsidian. I could see the veins in her breasts like serpents under the surface of the ocean. I set my hands to her, and she was cold and rubbery. S
he was heavy, but I could move her. I lifted her, her top half and then the lower, into the wheelbarrow. It wanted to topple at first, but I dug its legs into the mud and somehow managed to keep it upright.

  Then there was the other boy, whose name I still did not know. There was a great deal of blood at the back of his head, and more when I removed the garden hoe. He was lighter than the teacher, but it was much more difficult to move him.

  Piled in the wheelbarrow together, I could inch them wherever I pleased, but I would not describe the overall task as easy. The blood on my hands and wrists ran the lengths of my arms, absorbing into the sleeves of my shirt. It was several hundred yards to the lake, and the mud made it slow work.

  I’d never visited our lake before and was surprised to find a small boathouse at its edge, infested with wasps, as all our buildings seemed to be. They were huddled in their nests when I arrived, ignoring me as I steered the wheelbarrow onto the dock’s wooden planks. The laden wheel clicked at the gaps between the boards until I was near the dock’s far edge, where a canoe had been tied to one of the posts. I untied the rope from the canoe, letting the narrow craft drift toward the middle of the lake, where it stalled, jerking and tipping in the rain.

  Getting the corpses out of the wheelbarrow was easier than getting them in. I tied one end of the rope around them, binding them together. I tied the other end to a rock I found at the edge of the boathouse, near a low, metal pipe that was sticking up out of the ground and filling with water. I left Ms. Klein and the boy where they were, then carried the rock to the water and dropped it in. The rope tugged the corpses an inch or so along the dock before the rock settled at the bottom of the lake. I crouched behind the bodies and pushed them over the edge.

  They hit the lake with a slap and bobbed in the water until the boy rose up like a pale buoy, holding Ms. Klein just under the surface. The rain rinsed his face, the wasps pulsed in their nests, and I climbed into the lake to finish it.

  Waist deep, I gripped the rope and tried to throw the rock into deeper water, but it sank the moment it left my hand, drawing the corpses down by an inch or so, before they reemerged in the same arrangement as before. I took the rope in hand, dragging the anchor until it was too deep for me to stand and I let the rock start pulling me down.