“I’m sorry,” Danny repented, though taking more opportunities to feel the boy up as he helped him back into his shirt and doublet.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Jeremy said after examining the cut fabric again, noticing how clean the incision was, no loose threads or tearing… it was as if it had been sliced with a razor.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” Danny said, going back to his locker and getting his cellphone out, “But I think someone tried to kill you by tampering with my rapier. I’m calling Officer Kelly, we need to have the police in on this immediately.
“Tried to kill… me?!” Jeremy gaped in disbelief, “Why?”
“I don’t know, my love,” Danny knelt in front of Jeremy and took both his hands, “But I swear to God, nobody will hurt you as long as I’m alive to prevent it.”
“Me!” Jeremy said again, not listening, just reeling with the understanding that he’d come dangerously close to death.
“Please don’t freak out, sweetheart,” Danny wrapped his arms around the shaking boy.
“I’m not freaking out,” he shouted, “I’m pissed off! How dare someone try to kill me?!”
Freaked out or angry, Jeremy burst into tears, and Danny was delayed in contacting the police until he could get the boy calmed down; and once that was done, he had barely enough time to call Officer Kelly, explain the situation, and get back on stage for the tomb scene, where he had to lie perfectly still under a chiffon shroud while Jack and Felicia did a very creditable job of Act V, Scene III, leaving not one dry eye in the house.
And Jeremy wasn’t so undone that he couldn’t take his bows and a curtain call, which got a partial standing ovation and a presentation of flowers.
17
“This is very serious, Danny,” Officer Kelly examined the sword under strong light with heavy gloves on his hands; it had already been dusted for fingerprints, but none were found, except for Danny’s on the hilt, “This sword would have killed the boy. He’s damned lucky you scratched him and noticed it before you drove it in under his ribs.”
“This is too close, Officer Kelly,” Danny’s voice quivered with outrage and fear, “I love Jeremy, I can’t have him hurt. You have to find out who’s doing this and stop him.”
“Or her,” Officer Kelly corrected automatically, his mind turning over the various avenues of investigation that the sword opened up.
“I don’t think it’s a her,” Danny said after thinking it over for a moment, “A female wouldn’t have been able to get at Mr. Janacek in the cruising park, for one thing.”
“Why not? It’s pretty dark up there.”
“Have it your own way,” Danny shrugged impatiently, “It’s not really to the point, anyway. What can I do to protect the people I love from whoever is doing this?”
“Not much,” Officer Kelly looked at him with concern, “I know this is hard for you, Danny, but we’re doing all we can. This killer is extremely clever and very circumspect.
“Do you think it’s safe to go ahead with the next two performances?” Danny wondered, sensible of how much it would hurt everyone in the play to have to cancel it after working so hard.
“Yes, actually, I do,” the officer, put the sword inside a plastic bag, and then into a paper evidence bag, rolling it closed and taping it, “So far this killer has used very different methods with each murder; I don’t think he or she will try the same thing again.”
“Which makes it impossible to predict what will happen next, impossible to guard against it.”
“Yes, there is that. But I think Jeremy’s safe for the time being. But not for long. This time it’s someone you are known to love… before it was someone who was your enemy, and before that someone who, though you liked him, might have been viewed as having taken advantage of you — if this person knew of your relationship with your teacher but not that you instigated it. But with Jeremy, this is someone who may be viewed as standing between you and the killer, somebody who needs to be got out of the way so as to leave open access to you.”
“That’s horrible,” Danny’s eyes filled up as he contemplated the danger Jeremy was in.
“Maybe you should distance yourself from Jeremy,” Officer Kelly suggested.
“You think I should break up with him to keep him safe?” Danny was aghast.
“It might be best. In the meantime, I’ll see if our forensics people can find anything useful on this sword. You never know, sometimes people will leave distinguishing marks in unexpected places, fingerprints, DNA, special tools. We might turn something up.”
“I hope so,” Danny looked at the bag and shivered again, thinking what could have happened.
“Hey, keep your chin up,” Officer Kelly reached over and tousled Danny’s hair, “It’s going to be OK.”
“I hope so,” Danny said again, thinking about what he could say to Jeremy, how he was going to make it look like they were breaking up, publicly enough that the killer would buy it, without actually giving the boy up. It was a puzzle that was going to take every ounce of ingenuity he could scrape up.
*****
Jeremy preempted Danny, however, by breaking up with him… not quite publicly, but fairly dramatically and in front of enough people that word would get around.
“Danny, I care about you,” Jeremy said in his closing argument, “But I’m not going to risk my life for you. I’m sorry, but we’re through. Please don’t call me, OK?”
The blow of Jeremy dumping him took all possible pleasure out of the accolades he was receiving for his performance in what had turned out to be a very good production of Romeo and Juliet. And though he didn’t exactly cry himself to sleep every night, he was noticeably mopey.
Jeremy also made a show of telling everyone of his plans for Winter Break, which were to spend the entire three weeks with his grandmother in Vermont, gassing on to anyone who would listen about skiing, ice-skating, and all the wintry joys of Christmas on the East Coast (it hadn’t even rained in Vandervere yet, and snow was not expected even in the highest points of the county).
The truth that Danny could see in his eyes was that he was terrified; he was going to do anything and everything he could think of to distance himself from Danny and the danger that followed him. And he wasn’t, as far as Danny could tell, play-acting: this was nothing like the pretend breakup that Danny was planning, this was for real. Jeremy was cutting him off and turning away from him in earnest.
18
Having decided that the most appropriate response to Jeremy dumping him was to end his self-imposed celibacy, Danny’s usual Saturday ride took him to the hotel across the lake, where he was determined to have sex with as many men as possible before returning home.
There weren’t a lot of men there, as Lake Augusta is more of a summer concern: it seldom snowed in Vandervere and the lake never froze, the weather was usually dreary, wet and cold in winter; the cabins and most of the resort’s amenities were closed for the off-season, and the hotel had shut off all but one wing; however, the stables were still fully staffed, since horses don’t hibernate, the restaurant continued to run, drawing custom from the town, and the hotel’s skeleton crew was, due to some rather inappropriate hiring practices, one hundred percent homophile.
Four hours later, Danny headed back to the stable, sore, sated, and happy, resolved to never go so long without sex again. He greeted David, the groom, with a brief hug and a peck on the cheek; he knew David had a serious crush on him, and had always been mystified that the young man didn’t want to have sex with him. But he was beginning to understand about bodies and emotions, and how sometimes they had to be separated to keep one from getting hurt.
“Who in the world has Ashtaroth out in this weather?” Danny asked when he noticed the big black horse was not in his usual stall; horses were usually difficult to handle during rainy weather, and livery horses moreso than others.
“He died a couple of months ago,” David told him, helping saddle Tenorino.
&n
bsp; “Oh, that’s too bad,” Danny busied himself with buckles and straps, “But he was pretty old, wasn’t he?”
“Sixteen, I think,” David said, which wasn’t all that old for a horse, “He didn’t die of old age. Somehow he got out of the stable one night and ate most of an oleander bush, I still can’t figure out why. Had a heart attack out in the woods and died before we could track him down.”
“That’s awful!” Danny was horrified.
“I know. I didn’t even know there were oleanders in these woods. Or that a horse would be stupid enough to eat them. I mean, Ashtaroth wasn’t very clever, he was so pliable he’d eat just about anything anyone put in his mouth. But to go out on his own and eat a shrub to the stems, that probably doesn’t even taste good to horses, seems weird.”
“I’ll talk to some people I know at Animal Control and the Forestry Service about getting the oleanders out of the woods. We have to keep those and foxgloves and rhododendrons away from the horse trails,” Danny frowned in concentration, as he usually did when making a complex mental note.
“That’s the thing, he wasn’t anywhere near the horse trails, he’d wandered all the way up to the hiking trail.”
“That’s odd,” Danny agreed, but then saw the time and realized he was going to be late for tea at the Aunt Ems’ if he didn’t get a move on, “Have a Merry Christmas, David, if I don’t see you again before then.”
Heading home at a brisk canter and leaving Kevin to curry Tenorino, Danny dashed into the house for a shower and change, then drove to the Aunt Ems’ as fast as his Explorer would carry him. He was late for tea, and got a gentle scolding from his great-aunts; he had to tell them about Jeremy breaking up with him, and though they were very fond of the boy they decided to vilify him for Danny’s sake, pointing out all of his shortcomings (most of which they had to invent, as Jeremy didn’t really have any shortcomings other than those common to seventeen-year-old boys).
The Pine Street mansion was already lavishly decorated for Christmas, with three huge trees in different parts of the house (a spectacular twenty-footer in the bend of the stairs in the central hall, and twin twelve-footers in the bay window of the Gold Drawing Room at the front of the house and the round turret off the upstairs sitting-room), garlands on all the railings and wreaths on all the doors, and hundreds of seasonal figurines and ornaments scattered across every available surface. Most of this had been done by florists and decorators, as it would be too much for the octogenarian ladies of the house; but there was a smaller eight-foot sugar pine in the corner of the Red Drawing Room at the back of the house that was the sole province of the Aunt Ems themselves.
Afternoon tea had been moved to this drawing room so the Aunts could work slowly at their special tree, which had real wax candles and an eighteenth-century German carved wood angel at the top, popcorn-and-cranberry garlands, and dozens of fragile antique blown-glass and silver ornaments, each one with a story of its own. Danny helped by placing handmade red and white peppermint candy-canes on the branches, stepping back frequently to make sure they were evenly spaced.
On Sunday he returned to the hotel for a late morning’s debauchery, then out to The Aspens for the weekly family dinner. The principal Vandervere mansion is a 1920s version of a southern plantation, a long buff brick neo-Colonial house with two-story fluted white Corinthian columns marching across the front and back, and outbuildings attached to the main house by curving colonnades.
It is the largest and most modern of all the Vandervere homes, and is actually the house in which the Aunt Ems grew up — though they seemed so much more in place at the Pine Street house that everyone thought they’d always lived there. It stood in the center of a huge meadow that had once been filled with a forest of aspens but was now mostly leveled and planted with rolling lawns, ruthlessly manicured rose gardens, and a spreading six-hole golf course.
Sunday dinner at The Aspens was a weekly tradition that Danny dreaded more than evening meals with his parents, as there were anywhere from eight to twelve people either criticizing him or ignoring him instead of just two. He always parked himself among the Aunt Ems for protection, but since the rest of the family also criticized or ignored those august old ladies (though they had to be more creative about it, since Aunt Mathilda was terrifying when roused), it wasn’t much help.
Monday morning found him at the Grand Hotel on Vandervere Town Square, where he spent a strenuous three hours with two very nice middle-aged gentlemen, a long-devoted couple who were staying there over the holidays; he’d met them at the buffet breakfast in the big plush dining room, where he’d gone expressly in hopes of meeting someone with whom to spend the morning. Afterward he did a little Christmas shopping, then drove over to Ash’s house to begin work on the portrait.
Ash had cleaned and rearranged his bedroom so that there was a bare area in which Danny could pose while Ash worked at his easel in the corner by the closet. They spent some time trying out different poses, Ash working with his digital camera and laptop to help them decide on a pose that was both artistically interesting and comfortable enough to hold for hours at a time.
By the end of the afternoon, when Danny had to return home for dinner, they’d settled on a dignified, almost monumental standing pose, his feet well apart and his torso at three-quarter profile facing left, with his right hand resting on the back of a chair and his left hand hanging loose at his side, his face turned to the right as if about to glance over his shoulder, his eyes turned back to the viewer with a light smile playing across his lips.
They dithered somewhat as to whether or not Danny should pose nude: though Danny was perfectly happy to expose himself to Ash and the rest of the world, he wondered if the painting wouldn’t be censored by the Art Show committee, which would doubtless contain his prudish Aunt Claudia; Ash couldn’t decide what else Danny should wear, since he didn’t want the picture to be a mere modern portrait.
When Danny came the next day, he brought several different things to wear, including his Tybalt costume, his riding clothes, and his best dress suit. But after spending several hours sketching and photographing him in different combinations of costume, Ash decided that Danny would pose nude, and he’d simply paint in a figleaf or some gravity-defying drapery to keep the picture Rated PG.
Unfortunately, what neither of them had considered was the difference, for Danny, between being naked in a locker-room or shower and being naked in front of a single person who was staring at him intently. It turned him on, being looked at so steadily, and he wasn’t able to control his body’s response; for the first two hours he posed, he had an erection, and his was not the kind of erection one can overlook. Though Ash didn’t say anything about it, it got to be very uncomfortable, getting hornier and hornier without any prospect of release.
When they stopped for a break, Danny dashed into the bathroom to jack off, but his cock did not go down afterward. He he splashed it with cold water, filled his mind with unpleasant images, and and then tried masturbating again.
Returning to Ash’s room, he looked like he’d just run a marathon, his cheeks rosy and his skin glimmering with sweat; Ash exclaimed that was exactly the look he wanted to capture in the painting. So Danny figured he’d just jack off in between posing sessions, and that would be that.
But that’s not how it turned out: after the third day, when Ash completed the rough sketches and had started laying out the outlines of the painting on the primed canvas, his own resolve to ignore Danny’s massive hard-on started to crumble. He’d been turned on by Danny’s nudity all along, but intended to channel the sexual longing he felt into the painting to make it more arresting; yet by the third day, he was so horny that he couldn’t concentrate on his work properly.
Throwing his brushes down in exasperation, he stalked over to Danny, pushed him onto the bed, and went down on him like a starving man falling on a smorgasbord. And Danny, not wanting to be left out, pulled Ash’s body around so he could open the boy’s pants and return the favor.
But even after they both came, it wasn’t enough; they spent an hour or more crawling all over each other, exploring with hands and mouths and cocks, rubbing against each-other until they both came twice more; they finally lay exhausted, loosely entwined and trying to catch their breath.
“Wow,” Danny finally said when he could breathe normally again.
“Yeah,” Ash agreed.
“Are you OK?” Danny wanted to know, turning his head so he could see Ash’s face.
“Fine,” the boy said simply, “Why?”
“I don’t want to spoil our friendship,” Danny explained what was worrying him.
“You won’t,” Ash turned his own head and met Danny’s eye.
With that assurance, they went back to their original positions, though Ash didn’t get completely dressed, only slipping on a pair of sweatpants, not as comfortable with nudity as Danny and also needing something near his hips to wipe his hands on.
Danny got as much joy out of looking at Ash working in the loose drawstring pants as Ash got out of looking at him nude; the boy had a beautifully proportioned body, small and wiry but elegantly balanced and tautly muscular, dusted with downy dark brown hair on his chest and belly and forearms. His cock was a lot bigger than Danny had expected on someone so small, though nowhere near as big as Danny’s, and it thrust out against the sweatpants and shifted enticingly while he worked.
For the following three weeks, the two boys followed that pattern: Danny would pose for a couple of hours, they’d fall on each other at the first break and spend the next couple of hours in bed, and then another two or three hours of posing; pretty much all the time he would have spent at school was spent with Ash during the Winter Break.
Ash didn’t allow Danny to see the painting in progress, always working in the corner so the canvas couldn’t be seen from any other part of the room; he did let Danny have one of the preliminary sketches, though, which was without additional draperies, anatomically exact and rather flattering. He couldn’t hang it in his room, where anyone else could see him in all his priapic grandeur, so he had it matted in a leather folder so he could look at it in private.
The Math Teacher Is Dead Page 14