Summer People Read Free Page B

would have to live with it. It wouldn’t be worse than the other stuff Marcus was living with.
    Suddenly Winnie appeared, tugging on Marcus’s arm in an eager, excited way, like a little kid. All three of them were seventeen, but Winnie seemed younger. Maybe because she was a girl. Or because she was so skinny. She had no body to speak of, certainly not the way some of the girls at Cardozo had bodies—with huge tits like balloons under their sweaters and curvy asses. Winnie was a stick person—right now she was wearing jean shorts that showed two Popsicle-stick legs, and her torso was swimming in her sweatshirt. She had blond hair like her mother and she was cute in a way that elves are cute. But not womanly. Even Marcus’s twelve-year-old sister LaTisha had more action going on than Winnie.
    “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you your bedroom.”
    “In a minute,” Marcus said. He wanted to finish with Garrett, although he could see that the moment had passed. Garrett walked by them with his load of luggage and Marcus slung his bag over his shoulder and reached for another box. He needed to catch up.
    “Come on,” Winnie said. “Please?”
    Marcus managed to stave her off until he and Garrett had unloaded most of the car. In silence, except for the squeaky complaints of Marcus’s shoes.
    “Come on, Marcus,” Winnie said.
    Marcus picked up his leather duffel, which looked nothing but ugly compared to the Newtons’ luggage, and followed Winnie up the stairs.

    “This is your room,” Winnie announced. She could feel herself gushing but she didn’t know how to stop. Ever since Marcus appeared at their apartment at, like, five that morning, it was as if Winnie were wearing some kind of electric bracelet that sent shocks up her arm to her heart. She’d had a crush on him since the minute she knew of his existence. More than six months ago now, since the morning that Arch took her to EJ’s Luncheonette to have breakfast (she and her father both loved the red flannel hash). They were supposed to be talking about grades, school, her prospects for college (he wanted her to apply to Princeton; she wanted to stay in the city—NYU, Barnard), but instead they got on the topic of Constance Tyler’s case and once Arch was on that topic, he couldn’t stop.
    He’d read about the murders in the
New York Times
the day after they were committed. That was a second morning emblazoned in Winnie’s memory. Her father so engrossed in the frontpage story and the photograph of the dead girl wearing black party shoes, that he held his hand up for quiet when Beth asked him what his schedule looked like that day. He drank the story in, and then hurried with the newspaper into the living room where he plucked his Princeton face book off the shelf and rifled through it, holding up the paper for comparison—because next to the picture of the dead girl in the Mary Janes was a picture of the suspected murderer, Constance Bennett Tyler, a public school teacher.
    “Bingo!” Arch shouted. “Constance Bennett, Queens, New York. I went to school with this woman.” He held the face book up. “Nineteen-seventy-five freshman class, Princeton University.” Then his expression crumbled. “Well, she killed someone.”
    “That’s Dad for you,” Garrett said. “He loves all things Princeton. Even the murderers.”
    “Did you know her, Dad?” Winnie asked.
    “Never seen her before in my life,” Arch said. He tucked the paper into his briefcase and Winnie forgot all about it.
    But not Arch. Although he didn’t generally handle criminal cases, he made a few phone calls that day, and discovered that the woman’s case had been taken by a P.D.—no real surprise— and the D.A.’s office had already announced it was seeking the death penalty. They wanted Constance Bennett Tyler to be the first woman to die of lethal injection in the state of New York. Arch decided to go to Rikers where Connie was being held and talk to her. She had