by Joan Hess
I was hopping up and down, trying to see over a sea of plumed hats and tuba bells, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It started with a P and stood for Peter, as in Rosen.
“Are you looking for a potty?” he asked politely. “There’s one in the drugstore behind us, and I think it’s free. If not, I’ll be glad to loan you a dime.”
“That’s not funny.”
“But you are, with this imitation of a human pogo stick.” He gave me a look that forebode all sorts of problems. “What’s going on, Claire? You’re not the sort to be possessed by demons, nor are you one to make a spectacle of yourself-without cause. You’re behaving manically, and you must have a reason.”
I will admit that I should have told him about the pink fuzzies. I was the one who had concluded that confession was good for the soul, if not the ego, and that I would jeopardize the relationship if I continued to hide things from him. But I wanted to talk to Miss Parchester, and I wanted to do it alone. Okay, I wanted to do it first. She would be thoroughly spooked by a cop. I needed to calm her down, reassure her that the judge’s reputation was as safe as her own, and convince her she could come back to school-in time to chaperone the dance.
It would mean a great deal to her, this opportunity to show the students that she was, as always, above reproach. Having justified myself to myself, I gave Peter what I hoped was an enigmatic smile.
“I thought I saw an old classmate across the street, but the band cut me off at the pass. It’s not important; I’ll probably run into her some other time. Why don’t you come sit with Caron, Inez, and me?”
The flower box proved adequate for four bottoms. The band finally passed on, in the literal sense, and was replaced by the senior float, “Bye-bye, Bantams.” The girls looked rather nervous, sensing competition from the upper classmen, but they managed a few catty comments about the unevenness of the lettering on the banner.
Peter gave me a wry smile and put his hand over mine, just as if I weren’t a treacherous, conniving, faithless quisling. He looked startled at my sigh, but I could only shake my head and look away as I tried to convince myself, as Caron would say, to Do The Right Thing.
As the moral dilemma raged, Jorgeson came over. “We lost her, Lieutenant. We spotted her in that jam of people across the street, and tried to sort of surround her without her noticing, but it didn’t work so well. That dame can scamper like a frightened puppy, and the uniformed officer couldn’t bring himself to tackle someone who resembles his grandmother. Said it was too cruel.”
Peter glanced at me, then stood up and pulled Jorgeson a few steps away. ‘Does the uniformed officer with the unsullied conscience realize this woman is wanted in a murder investigation, that she may well have poisoned two people in the last eight days?” he said loudly enough to be heard over “Flaunt Thy Feathers, Falcons” or whatever. “Tell him to report to me in one hour. Now, alert all the patrol cars to watch for her on the sidewalk in at least a six-block radius.”
Jorgeson saluted with one finger and hurried away to do as ordered, the back of his neck noticeably red against his navy jacket. Peter sat down next to me, harrumphed under his breath like an asthmatic whale, and stared fiercely at the rows of boy scouts straggling in front of us.
“Will you still take me dancing?” I asked.
A series of harrumphs ensued, punctuated with sighs and dark looks from under a lowered brow. “I have to coordinate a dragnet all over the damn town tonight. Beat the bushes. Search dumpsters. Find a suspect who has once again eluded us, although it seems she might have been apprehended had we been given a discreet tip.”
“The dance doesn’t start until ten-thirty.”
“Perhaps you can persuade your old classmate to go with you.”
“The sight of policemen was likely to frighten her, and she needed to be approached by a friendly, familiar face. I was going to convince her to turn herself in at the station.”
“Class of what?”
“Nineteen aught three. We rode dinosaurs to school, wrote in cuneiform, and eagerly awaited the invention of the jitterbug.”
“Well, tonight you’ll have a wonderful chance to jitterbug till dawn. I will be occupied at headquarters those same hours, bawling out the uniformed officer and eagerly awaiting the apprehension of Miss Emily Parchester.”
The conversation was clearly going nowhere, and I was clearly going to chaperone the Homecoming dance alone. I was saved from further remarks by the appearance of “Broast the Bantams,” accompanied by hordes of goose-stepping freshmen yelling unintelligible things about the future of the freshmen, class of ‘90. They seemed to be predicting they would do “mighty finey.”
“That doesn’t rhyme,” I pointed out to Caron once she and Inez had ceased their shrieks.
“Nothing rhymes with ‘ninety,”’ she said. “We had to come up with something to yell at pep rallies and this sort of thing, but no one could produce a single acceptable rhyme.”
“I’ll have to agree with that. Who thought up ‘mighty finey’?”
“I did, Mother.”
Peter glowered from one side of me, Caron from the other. Miss Don was undoubtedly displeased with me, as was a nameless pregnant woman, the denizens of the lounge, a paranoiac Parchester, and the staff of Happy Meadows.
I told Caron and Inez to find a ride home, gave Peter a shrug, and exited to my bookstore, where there were no storms in the port. The jackhammer provide a pleasant drone that precluded thought. It was exactly what I needed.
ELEVEN
The Book Depot grew dim as the day latened, but I did not turn on a light in the front room. The street crew had departed in a roar of dozers and dump trucks, and the ensuing tranquility was too lovely to be disrupted. I waltzed about with a feather duster, savoring the solitude as I sneezed my way through a week’s accumulation of dust. The teachers’ lounge seemed very distant; naggish thoughts of the dance were firmly dismissed.
I was in my office at the back, nose-deep in a ledger that appeared to have been depleted by an embezzler, but in reality was depressingly seW-depleted, when I heard someone knock on the door. Despite the “closed” sign, customers did occasionally insist on admittance. One would think they could read.
It was Evelyn, her cheeks flushed from the chill in the air and her eyes bright from, I supposed, the excitement of the parade. I let her in and invited her to the office for coffee.
“No thanks,” she said, “we’re going to have to hurry if we’re going to be on time for the game. Because of the Homecoming activities, it begins half an hour earlier than usual, and the bleachers are apt to be packed.”
“Is this some kind of cruel joke?”
She shook her head. I protested steadily as I turned off the office light and locked the door. I continued to protest as I was driven to my apartment to fetch a scarf, hat, and gloves; and I did not falter as I ate a hamburger, drank several gallons of coffee as a preventive measure against the cold night air, and actually paid money to a gate attendant to be admitted to Falcon Stadium, Home of the Fighting Falcons, No Alcoholic Beverages Permitted. At that point, my protests became not only redundant, but also irrelevant.
We joined Sherwood on the fifty-yard line. A red-and-gold plaid blanket awaited us, along with a thermos of coffee and a discreet flask of brandy. I had not attended a football game since high school, having managed to avoid them throughout college as a matter of principle. Scrunched between Evelyn and Sherwood, my feet already numbing, my nose beginning to drip, surrounded on four sides by screaming fans, I remembered why.
“Why did you do this to me?” I asked Evelyn. “I was having a perfectly nice time at the Book Depot. I planned to go home, read the newspaper over a Lean Cuisine and a drink, and prepare myself for the dance. My plans did not include freezing in the bleachers, spilling coffee in my lap, or watching a group of faceless hulks batter each other to pulp over an ovoid plaything.”
Evelyn laughed. “But it’s Homecoming, Claire. We must applaud the ladies of th
e court and cheer on the Falcons to victory. Where’s your school spirit?”
“In my living room, curled on the couch.”
“Try this,” Sherwood murmured, handing me a liberally spiked cup of coffee. “It’s my contribution to spirit. Enough of this and you’ll be on your feet with the optimates screeching for a touchdown.”
“I thought this was forbidden,” I said. I sipped at it anyway; the worst they could do was haul me away to jail, which was probably a good deal warmer and quieter.
“De minimis non curat J~ the law does not concern itself with trifles, such as a dollop of brandy.” He prepared cups for Evelyn and himself. “I heard an interesting tidbit from my fifth period hoi polloi, by the way. It seems that Immerson was reinstated at the fateful moment, and the Falcons now have a chance to broast, barbecue, and bake the Bantams.”
“That’s odd,” Evelyn said. “He surely didn’t produce a grade above a D on a pop quiz or turn in an assignment in his own handwriting. Word of that would have spread across the school more quickly than a social disease. Did Miss Don actually relent and agree to let him play?”
“All I heard was that our Mr. Immerman was in the office most of third period,” Sherwood said, “and Jerry was there during fourth period. His absence encouraged the drivers’ ed class to engage in a brief but successful game of strip poker in the backseat of the Buick; an anonymous young lady was rumored to have lost a capite ad calceni-from head to heel.” He waggled his eyebrows in a facetious leer, but I didn’t doubt the story for a second. “But there is our principal pro tempore a mere dozen rows away; you might ask her why she changed the policy. Personally, I would rather consult Medusa about the name of her hairdresser.”
I agreed with Sherwood, although I was curious. I finished my coffee and asked for directions to the concession stand. Once we had unwrapped the blanket, much as the Egyptians might have done to check on decomposition, I fought my way down the rows of metal benches and went to see if Jerry had confided the details to his beloved.
Paula Hart was in the back of the concrete shed, watching popcorn explode in a glass box. I inched my way through the crowd to a corner of the counter and beckoned to her. “I hear Immerman was reinstated,” I said.
She gave me a puzzled look. “Yes, I believe he was. Can I get you a box of popcorn or something to drink, Claire? We have a limited selection of candy bars, but they’re ancient and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone over eighteen.”
“Did he convince Miss Dort to rescind the order, or did Jerry have a word with her?”
A frown that hinted of irritation flashed across her face, but she quickly converted it to a smile. “I have no idea. it’s really too loud and crazy in here for conversation, and I do have to watch some of the less mathematically inclined when they make change. Perhaps you might ask Miss Dort.”
“I’d love a box of popcorn,” I said, determined not to be dismissed despite the jostling crowd and my disinclination to eat anything prepared by adolescents. When she returned, I began to dig through my purse. “Now that Miss Dort is acting principal, what do you think she’ll do about Jerry’s graduate-school transcript?”
Paula’s hand tightened around the box until I could almost hear the popcorn groan. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she managed to say, her lipstick beginning to crack.
“I’d ask him, but I suspect he’ll be occupied with this thing between the Falcons and the Bantams for the next two hours. Of course, it wasn’t clear what Mr. Weiss intended to do. He sounded grim at the last teachers’ meeting, however; you two must have been alarmed.” The last bit wasn’t exactly speculation. but it seemed tactful to pretend.
“The police haven’t mentioned the graduate-school transcripts. How did you find out about them?”
“The police have the same problem I had initially,” I said. “They saw them in the personnel file, but they didn’t assume there was anything significant about the coach being exceptionally well educated. One has to understand the workings of the education bureaucracy to see why all teachers shouldn’t be exceptionally well educated.”
Her Barbie doll face crumpled. Ignoring the startled looks from the students beside her, she snatched up a napkin and blotted her eyes. “It was awful, just awful. Weiss made it clear he could have Jerry fired at any time. He also stopped me in the corridor late one afternoon after a club meeting and suggested that he-he and I engage in-in-a-oh, it was dreadful!”
“Did you tell Jerry that Weiss wanted sexual favors in exchange for job security?” I continued, unmoved by her display.
“Jerry called me that evening, and I just broke down.” She sniffled bravely into the napkin. “He was furious, but I managed to calm him down and talk some sense into him. He wanted to go right over to Mr. Weiss’s house, pound on the door, and make a terrible scene. It would have cost him his job for sure. With that on his record, he wouldn’t have been able to coach anywhere.”
Or buy a cottage and reproduce, I amended to myself. I was about to ask more questions when the bleachers above us erupted in a roar. The band took up the strains of the Falcons’ fight song, competing with the opposing band’s blare. Paula gave me an apologetic look and scurried away to blink bravely, if somewhat damply, at the popcorn machine. I left the crushed box of cold popcorn on the counter, and went back to join Sherwood and Evelyn on the fifty-yard line.
The band marched onto the field and arranged itself in some mysterious way that must have had some significance to those higher in the tiers. The cheerleaders bounced about like irregular ping-pong balls, shaking their pompoms among other things and arousing the pep squad to frenzied squeals. The drill team formed two lines and shook their pompoms among other things. The scene reminded me of a primitive, sacrificial ceremony in which virgins would go to the grave intact. To the tune of “Fight Ye Falcons,” no less. The crowd loved it.
The Homecoming court convertibles appeared on the track that encircled the football field. The girls perched on the backseats, their white, clenched fingers digging into the upholstery as they smiled at the crowd. They were escorted from their thrones by as-yet-unsullied football players to be presented to the crowd and to accept bouquets and admiration. Followed by the kindergarten attendants, Cheryl Anne clutched the arm of her darling Thud, who clumsily put a plastic tiara on her head and handed her a bouquet of roses. It brought back memories, distant and blessedly mellowed with time, of faces arranged in the yearbook, all grim and determined to succeed. I looked particularly stem under a bouffant hairstyle that always left Caron and Inez weak from sustained laughter.
The presentation of the court, sniveling babes and all, was touching. The next two-and-a-half hours of bodies flinging themselves against each other were not, except in the obvious sense. Grunts and thumps, the sound of helmet against helmet, the incessant screams of the pep squad, the boisterous verbosity of the fans-it verged on something worse than Dante had ever envisioned for the lowest circles of the Inferno.
The thermos ran dry. The flask went the same way. My feet forsook me and my hands turned blue. My nose ran a marathon. I was kicked from behind and elbowed from both sides. A coke dribbled down my neck during a particularly exciting play.
The majority of the plays were incomprehensible, although I did my best to follow both the ball and the seesaw score. The home team took the lead, then lost it via a fumble. Thud snatched the ball from a Bantam and scampered all the way to the goal line, sending the cheerleaders into paroxysms of glee. The Bantams doggedly scored once again. Everyone in the bleachers, with one exception, rose and fell with pistonish precision.
The final quarter arrived, along with a couple of Falcon fumbles and Bantam triumphs, causing the scoreboard to tilt dangerously to the enemy side. Just as I neared a frostbite-induced coma, the referees called it a night. The cheerleaders burst into tears on each other’s shoulders, while the band played a version of the fight song that seemed more of a dirge. Cheryl Anne stalked down from the bleachers, paused t
o hiss at the forlorn Falcons, then led her cortege into the metaphorical sunset. Thud threw his helmet on the ground, having displayed enough foresight to remove his head from it first. The coaches shook hands and trudged across the field, their troops in straggly formation behind them.
“Shall we go?” I said, trying not to sound too heartened by the thought of a car heater and even a gymnasium.
Evelyn sighed. “It’s such a shame to lose the Homecoming game. The kids really care about this sort of thing.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Shall I carry the blanket? Where’s the nearest exit?”
Sherwood glanced at me, but offered no editorial. We followed the stream out of the stadium. The students punched each other on the shoulder and verbally rehashed the final plays of the game; their liberal use of profanity was more than mildly disturbing to someone who would be obliged to restrain them in the immediate future:
I tugged at Evelyn’s arm. “What precisely is my assignment at the dance?”
“You have floor duty. Emily always volunteered for it, swearing she enjoyed it, and no one ever argued with her for the privilege.” Her voice dropped until it was almost inaudible. “You’ll survive, probably.”
“Floor duty?” I said.
Sherwood patted me on the shoulder. “You are the ultimate in loco parentis, dear sleuth. All you must do is keep the rabble from dancing too closely together-school policy is three inches and not a whit closer-and the ones sitting down to keep their paws off each other.”
“And the band from singing obscenities,” Evelyn added. “The lyrics can get pretty raunchy if you don’t keep an eye on them.”
“Don’t let anyone drink anything that comes from a back pocket,” said Sherwood. “No smoking, snuff, or chewing tobacco. No vodka in the punchbowl. No fistfights. Don’t let the girls roll up their skirts or the boys unzip their jeans.”
“That’s all?” I laughed gaily. “And I’m going to do this all by myself, right? I won’t have a squadron of marines to help me out, or even an automatic weapon. I’ll just shake my finger at perpetrators, and they’ll back off from whatever felonious activity they’ve chosen.”