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Gabe

Before

The high school where Mia Dennett teaches is located on the northwest side of Chicago in an area known as North Center. It’s a relatively good neighborhood, close to her home, a mostly Caucasian population with an average monthly rent over a thousand dollars. This all bodes well for her. If she was working in Englewood I wouldn’t be so sure. The purpose of the school is to provide an education to high school dropouts. They offer vocational training, computer training, life skills, et cetera, in small settings. Enter Mia Dennett, the art teacher, whose purpose is to add the nontraditional flair that’s been taken out of traditional high schools, those needing more time for math and science and to bore the hell out of sixteen-year-old misfits who couldn’t give a damn.

Ayanna Jackson meets me in the office. I have to wait a good fifteen minutes for her because she’s in the middle of class, and so I squeeze my body onto one of those small emasculating plastic school chairs and wait. This is something that certainly does not come easy to me. I’m far from the six-pack of my former days, though I like to think I wear the extra weight well. The secretary keeps her eyes locked on me the entire time as if I’m a student sent down to have a chat with the principal. This is a scene with which I’m sadly accustomed, many of my high school days spent in this very predicament.

“You’re trying to find Mia,” she says as I introduce myself as Detective Gabe Hoffman. I tell her that I am. It’s been nearly four days since anyone has seen or spoken to the woman and so she’s been officially designated as missing, much to the judge’s chagrin. It’s been in the papers, on the news, and every morning when I roll out of bed I tell myself that today will be the day I find Mia Dennett and become a hero.

“When’s the last time you saw Mia?”

“Tuesday.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

We make our way into the classroom and Ayanna—she begs me not to call her Ms. Jackson—invites me to sit down on one of those plastic chairs attached to the broken, graffiti-covered desk.

“How long have you known Mia?”

She sits at her desk in a comfy leather chair and I feel like a kid, though in reality, I top her by a good foot. She crosses her long legs, the slit of a black skirt falling open and exposing flesh. “Three years. As long as Mia’s been teaching.”

“Does Mia get along with everyone? The students? Staff?”

She’s solemn. “There’s no one Mia doesn’t get along with.”

Ayanna goes on to tell me about Mia. About how, when she first arrived at the alternative school, there was a natural grace about her, about how she empathized with the students and behaved as if she, too, had grown up on the streets of Chicago. About how Mia organized fundraisers for the school to pay for needy students’ supplies. “You never would have known she was a Dennett.”

According to Ms. Jackson, most new teachers don’t last long in this type of educational setting. With the market the way it is these days, sometimes an alternative school is the only place hiring and so college grads accept the position until something else comes along. But not Mia. “This was where she wanted to be.

“Let me show you something,” she says and she pulls a stack of papers from a letter tray on her desk. She walks closer and sits down on one of the student desks beside me. She sets the mound of paper before me and what I see first is a scribble of bad penmanship, worse than my own. “This morning the students worked on their journal entries for the week,” she explains and as my eyes peruse the work, I see the name Ms. Dennett more times than I can count.

“We do journal entries each week. The assignment this week,” she explains, “was to tell me what they wanted to do with themselves after high school.” I mull this over for a minute, seeing the words Ms. Dennett splattered over almost every sheet of paper. “But ninety-nine percent of the students are thinking of nothing but Mia,” she concludes, and I can hear, by the dejection in her voice, that she, too, can think of little but Mia.

“Did Mia have trouble with any of the students?” I ask, just to be sure. But I know what her answer is going to be before she shakes her head.

“What about a boyfriend?” I ask.

“I guess,” she says, “if you could call him that. Jason something-or-other. I don’t know his last name. Nothing serious. They’ve only been dating a few weeks, maybe a month, but no more.” I jot this down. The Dennetts made no reference to a boyfriend. Is it possible they don’t know? Of course it’s possible. With the Dennett family, I’m beginning to learn, anything is possible.

“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

“He’s an architect,” she says. “Some firm off Wabash. She meets him there most Friday nights for happy hour. Wabash and...I don’t know, maybe Wacker? Somewhere along the river.” Sounds like a wild-goose chase to me, but I’m up for it. I make note of this information in my yellow pad.

The fact that Mia Dennett has an elusive boyfriend is great news for me. In cases like this, it’s always the boyfriend. Find Jason and I’m sure to find Mia as well, or what’s left of her. Considering she’s been gone for four days, I’m starting to think this story might have an unhappy ending. Jason works by the Chicago River: bad news. God knows how many bodies are pulled out of that river every year. He’s an architect, so he’s smart, good at solving problems, like how to discard a hundred-and-twenty-pound body without anyone noticing.

“If Mia and Jason were dating,” I ask, “is it odd that he isn’t trying to find her?”

“You think Jason might be involved?”

I shrug. “I know if I had a girlfriend and I hadn’t spoken to her in four days, I might be a little concerned.”

“I guess,” she agrees. She stands from the desk and begins to erase the chalkboard. It leaves tiny remnants of dust on her black skirt. “He didn’t call the Dennetts?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Dennett have no idea that there’s a boyfriend in the picture. As far as they’re concerned, Mia is single.”

“Mia and her parents aren’t close. They have certain...ideological differences.”

“I gather that.”

“I don’t think it’s the kind of thing she’d tell them.”

The topic is drifting, so I try to reel Ayanna back in. “You and Mia are close, though.” She says that they are. “Would you say that Mia tells you everything?”

“As far as I know.”

“What does she tell you about Jason?”

Ayanna sits back down, this time on the edge of her desk. She peers at a clock on the wall, dusts off her hands. She considers my question. “It wasn’t going to last,” she tells me, trying to find the right words to explain. “Mia doesn’t become involved too often, never anything serious. She doesn’t like to be tied down. Committed. She’s markedly independent, perhaps to a fault.”

“And Jason is...clingy? Needy?”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s not that, it’s just, he’s not the one. She didn’t glow when she spoke of him. She didn’t gossip like girls do when they’ve met the one. I always had to force her to tell me about him and then, it was like listening to a documentary: we went to dinner, we saw a movie.... And I know his hours were bad, which irritated Mia—he was always missing dates or showing up late. Mia hated to be tied down to his schedule. You have that many issues in the first month and it’s never going to last.”

“So it was possible Mia was planning to break up with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she wasn’t entirely happy.”

“I wouldn’t say Mia wasn’t happy,” Ayanna responds. “I just don’t think she cared one way or the other.”

“From what you know, did Jason feel the same?” She says that she doesn’t know. Mia was rather aloof when she spoke of Jason. The conversations were nondescript: a checklist of things they had done that day, details of the man’s statistics—height, weight, hair and eye color—though remarkably, no last name. But Mia never mentioned if they kissed and there was no reference to that tingly feeling in the pit of your stomach—Ayanna’s words, not mine—when you’ve met the man of your dreams. She seemed upset when Jason stood her up—which, by Ayanna’s account, happened often—and yet she didn’t seem particularly excited on the nights they planned a late-night rendezvous down by the Chicago River.

“And you’d characterize this as disinterest?” I ask. “In Jason? The relationship? The whole thing?”

“Mia was passing time until something better came along.”

“Did they fight?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But if there was a problem, Mia would have told you,” I suggest.

“I’d like to think she would have,” the woman responds, her dark eyes becoming sad.

A bell rings in the distance, followed by the clatter of footsteps in the hall. Ayanna Jackson rises to her feet, which I take as my cue. I say that I’ll be in touch and leave her with my card, asking that she call if anything comes to mind.