The Hand on the Wall(23)

“Much is made of the green light at the end of the dock,” Dr. Jenny Quinn said. Dr. Quinn was the associate head of the school and a generally terrifying person. She strode around in front of the room. She was dressed in high, glossy pumps, a pencil skirt, and an oversized white blouse that was definitely fancy in a way Stevie could not classify. “Everyone talks about the green light at the end of the dock. But I want to focus on the circumstances around Gatsby’s death at the end. About his murder.”

Stevie looked up. The Great Gatsby was a murder mystery? Why had no one mentioned this before? She looked at her copy of the book in a feverish sweat.

“Stevie,” Dr. Quinn said.

Dr. Quinn could smell sweat and fear, probably from at least a mile away if the wind was right. She narrowed her focus to Stevie, who felt her spine shrink under the pressure. “You’re our resident detective. Did you feel that Gatsby’s death was expected? How do you feel it served the narrative?”

She had to say something, so she went with what she knew.

“Murders don’t normally happen at the end of a book,” she said.

“Perhaps not in murder mysteries,” Dr. Quinn said. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be much for the reader to do. How does the murder function in this story?”

“Can I say something?” Maris said, sticking up her hand.

Stevie felt a wave of gratitude spread over her and in the direction of Maris and her blue lips.

“It’s a discussion,” Dr. Quinn said noncommittally.

“I felt like his murder was a cop-out.”

“How so?”

“I think Gatsby should have had a chance to live through the outcomes,” she said. “I mean, Tom—he’s a racist and an abuser. He and Daisy, they get to live.”

“And Gatsby pays for their misdeeds,” Dr. Quinn said. “But what I’m asking is, when do you think Gatsby really died—when the bullet went in, or at some other point in the story?”

It was like all of this was designed to pick at Stevie’s brain. When did Hayes actually die? When he decided to follow the path to that room filled with gas? And what about the others? When Ellie first made her way into the tunnel? When Fenton looked at the cigarettes on the table? Everything had been lined up for them by some hand, disembodied as the eyes on the cover of this book . . .

“So what do you say, Stevie?” asked Dr. Quinn.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I don’t know how to tell where it all starts or stops. It’s like a loop.”

Her answer was sufficiently weird enough to make Dr. Quinn pause and consider her. At first the lingering look predestined a dressing down in front of all her classmates, one that would cause the varnish to drip away from the mahogany bookshelves from the pure shame and embarrassment of it all. But then something changed. Dr. Quinn shifted her weight to her other heel and drummed her manicured hand on the desk. Her examination of Stevie deepened. It felt like Dr. Quinn wanted to pick her apart and examine her clockwork.

“A loop,” Dr. Quinn repeated. “Something going around in circles. Something that moves back as it tries to move ahead. Something that returns to the past to find the future.”

“Exactly,” Stevie blurted out. “You have to make sense of the past to figure out the present, and the future.”

Stevie had no concept at all of what Dr. Quinn was saying, but sometimes, quite by accident, you find yourself vibrating on someone else’s frequency. You can follow the sense of the thing, if not the literal meaning. Sometimes, this is more important and more informative.

“But are the answers there?” Dr. Quinn said. “That’s certainly what Gatsby thought, and look how he ended up. Dead in his pool. Think about this passage, from right before the shot, as his killer approaches: ‘He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.’”

Even without context as to their meaning, the words hypnotized Stevie. Ghosts breathing dreams like air, a figure of ash moving forward with, if Stevie was following along, a gun. The person seeking meaning in the past ended up dead.

Stevie looked at her teacher, swathed in designer clothes and pedigree. She was a woman who knew a lot of important people, had been offered jobs in presidential administrations—and here she was, teaching The Great Gatsby on a mountain. Why turn those things down to teach, to work under Charles, a man she appeared to dislike?

Was Dr. Quinn warning her—sending her a message? Or was Stevie losing her marbles, one by one?

“Read the book next time,” Dr. Quinn said, “or you’ll be penalized.”

Stevie could almost feel the ashen figure at her back.





April 20, 1936


FLORA ROBINSON AND LEONARD HOLMES NAIR STOOD ON THE stone patio outside the ballroom and Albert’s office. It had been a week since the phone rang and the world shattered. Albert had spent most of the week in his office with Mackenzie, manning the phones, waiting for news. Nothing had come since the night when he lowered a bag of money off Rock Point, and each day’s silence was more ominous.