by Kylie Logan
“I’m not giving out grades,” Eileen assured her. “I’m just asking you to think. What do you suppose happened?”
Jazz had to admit she wasn’t sure. Just like she promised Eileen she was going to find out.
In keeping with her promise, the next morning, brighter and way earlier than usual, she was out in the garden shed. The cat was the same cat—the female—that had been there the day before. She was a frisky little thing, and though Jazz was much more a dog person than a cat lady, she enjoyed a few minutes of whisking a string back and forth along the floor and watching the cat make a grab for it.
Until she heard a noise outside the shed.
One finger to her lips—maybe she was a cat lady after all, because she actually expected the cat to know what she wanted her to do—Jazz moved into the shadows beside an old wooden workbench and waited.
“It’s not locked,” she heard a whisper outside the door, a girl’s voice.
“Perfect,” another girl answered.
“Can we just get this over with!” A third voice, tight and panicked, wavered on the edge of tears. “I can’t hold this thing much longer.”
The door swung open and Jazz stood still and waited until all three girls stepped into the shed. She recognized them instantly.
Eighth graders.
Cammi Markham.
Juliette Briggs.
Taryn Campbell.
Taryn was the owner of the quivering voice. There were tears on the girl’s cheeks and there was something wrapped in a towel in her outstretched hands.
Like a gift.
Or a sacrifice.
Cammi made a move to scoop up the cat, but it clearly had no intention of being caught and darted behind the open door. “Don’t let it get away,” Cammi hissed to Juliette. “Grab the stupid thing.”
“I’m not getting scratched,” Juliette shot back. “Taryn, you—”
“And what am I supposed to do with this thing?” Taryn was a redhead with pale skin, and in the dim light her eyes were big and dark and round. “I can’t catch the cat.”
“The real question is why you want to catch the cat.”
When Jazz stepped out of the shadows, the three girls froze.
“Ladies.” Jazz nodded a greeting. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Ms. Ramsey … we’re just…” Cammi swallowed hard. “We’re just checking on Titus,” she said, forcing a laugh. “We’ve been praying for him, you know, and we were worried about him. We brought him some treats.”
“Treats are a great idea. Go ahead.” Jazz waved toward the cat, who at the sound of her voice had come out from behind the door and jumped on top of the workbench. “Get the treats out. I bet she’ll come to you once you do.”
Cammi looked at Juliette. Juliette looked at Taryn. Taryn burst into tears.
Jazz crossed her arms over her chest. “Who wants to explain?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Taryn blurted out at the same time Cammi warned, “Shut up!”
Jazz wasn’t one for threats, but she hated being treated like a fool. “We can do it here or we can do it in Sister Eileen’s office,” she told the girls.
Juliette started crying, too.
Cammi clicked her tongue.
Taryn, her nose wrinkled and her hands still out like she wanted to keep as far as possible from whatever was wrapped in that towel, seemed like the most likely choice to cave, so Jazz turned to her. “You want to unwrap what’s in that towel?”
Taryn shook her head.
“Then you want to tell me what it is?”
“We were j-j-just trying to be nice,” Juliette stammered. “You know, to make Ms. Quinn think her prayers were really working. We were being kind. At least that’s what we thought. But then…” Her gaze flickered to the towel. “Then Cammi said—”
“It was just sort of a game.” Now that she’d had time to collect herself, Cammi sounded more like the girl Jazz had heard in the cafeteria, ordering her friends around, telling them where to sit and who not to talk to. “It’s not like we hurt him or anything.”
In that moment, Jazz knew exactly what was in the towel.
“Over there.” She ordered Taryn to set the towel on the workbench and the girl did and stepped back, putting as much distance between herself and the bundle as she could.
Jazz flipped back the towel. Just as she expected, Titus—the real Titus—was inside it. Dead.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, wishing him peace, before she turned to the girls, her fists on her hips. “You better not have had anything to do with that.”
“We didn’t, Ms. Ramsey, I swear!” Taryn hiccupped around her tears. “He died all on his own, right after we—”
“Shut up, Taryn,” Cammi warned her, but she really didn’t have to.
“You took Titus and replaced him with a cat that looked enough like him that you knew it would fool Ms. Quinn.” When nobody objected, Jazz knew she was on the right track. “You hung on to Titus over the weekend and he died.”
“In my garage.” To try to get rid of the memory, Taryn shook her shoulders.
“And then you brought the dead cat back here because—” The logic of the thing eluded Jazz.
“Because Mrs. Popovich is coming home today,” Juliette explained, even though it wasn’t much of an explanation. She added, “And we figured it would teach Ms. Quinn another lesson, you know? Like if prayers can work, well, then sometimes they don’t work, too.”
“Cammi thought it was funny,” Taryn said.
Cammi rolled her eyes. “Ms. Quinn, you know how much she likes to use games and puzzles in class. Well, we were just following her example, giving her a puzzle to follow. We were going to show her—”
“A dead cat?” Jazz flipped the towel, covering Titus’s body. “And what were you going to do with the live one?” she wondered.
“We w-w-weren’t going to hurt her,” Juliette stammered. “She belongs to the lady next door and my family is watching her ’cause Mrs. Popovich, the lady next door, on account of how she was on vacation. And Cammi and Juliette were over this weekend and they saw the cat and they said how much she looked like Titus and…” Taryn’s shoulder’s drooped. “Cammi said it would be funny.”
“You all thought it was funny, too,” Cammi shot back. “Ms. Quinn, she would have come out here to check on the bouncy little cat she found yesterday and—”
“And her heart would have been broken.” Jazz pinned the girl with a look. “Really, Cammi, you think there’s something clever or funny about that?”
“I…” Cammi shrugged. “Okay, maybe not. But Ms. Ramsey, you don’t know what she’s like! Ms. Quinn is always talking about God this and God that.”
“She is a religion teacher,” Jazz reminded them. “And this is a Catholic school.”
“Okay, sure. But it’s like she’s from another planet. Can you blame us for—”
“Making fun of Ms. Quinn?” Jazz shot a look from one girl to the next. “I hope you’re learning to be better people than that here at St. Catherine’s.”
“So what…” Juliette was so afraid of the answer, she could barely get out the words of her question. “What are you going to do?”
“Me?” Jazz left Titus right where he was and picked up the other cat. “I’m going to take this cat back to Juliette’s where she belongs. Then I’m going to come back here to school, and when I get here I better find the three of you talking to Sister Eileen and Ms. Quinn, explaining what you did and why you did it.”
“But—”
Jazz cut off Cammi with a glare. “And you know what else you’re going to do? After the last bell rings today, you three are going to meet me right here. I’ll have Frank get some gloves and some shovels. You three are going to bury Titus.”
CHAPTER 6
The day Gus and Jazz found Bernadette’s body, the girls who had rides or permission from their parents were dismissed early. The rest of them stayed in the gym where Eileen had delive
red the news of Bernadette’s death and led the girls in prayer. While Eileen went back to her office and gave a flawless statement to the media, Tracy Durn, the phys ed teacher, organized a volleyball game for the girls who felt like playing. Carly Tanner, the school librarian, gathered up any of the girls who preferred peace and quiet and spirited them to the library. Jazz’s friend Sarah Carrington took charge of the rest of them and gave them free rein in the art room. By the time the school day officially ended and everyone was gone and Eileen was in her office behind closed doors with St. Catherine’s board members, Jazz felt stretched tight, antsy, exhausted.
Eager for a distraction, she went out into the first-floor hallway. The school was deathly quiet, as if the building itself was holding its breath, waiting to see what shock waves would result from the day’s horrible discovery. And yet …
Jazz glanced down the hallway and couldn’t help but smile. Leave it to Sarah—bubbly, artistic Sarah—to know exactly what the girls needed to see when they came back to school on Monday. Before she left for the day, she hung the pictures the girls had painted in the hours after they learned of Bernadette’s death. The hallway outside Jazz’s office was a rainbow of paintings.
Flowers, sunshine, clear summer skies. If nothing else, the girls’ drawings proved the young were resilient.
Comforted by the thought, Jazz strolled down the first-floor hallway, examining picture after picture, feeling better at the sight of the bright colors and the sweet sentiments scrawled alongside the drawings.
Good-bye, Ms. Quinn.
God bless you.
Rest in Peace.
It was the drawing closest to the doorway of Bernadette’s former classroom that stopped Jazz cold.
This painting wasn’t hung with the rest of the pictures. It was taped below the neat row of drawings Sarah had hung at eye level.
An afterthought.
The sheet of drawing paper was a study in monochrome, black and gray. Except for the lower right corner—the spot where the other girls had signed their names—where there was one fat drop of red.
Jazz had no intention of insulting the artist, whoever she was. But she clearly remembered the looks on the faces of the girls as they’d filed out of school a few hours earlier. Dazed. Shocked. Afraid. Teetering between two worlds as the young always did, trying so hard to act like adults at the same time all they wanted to do was melt down in tears. There was no way Jazz was going to let them feel any worse. Carefully, she untaped the picture from the wall and took it into her office. She’d just tucked the grim painting into the top drawer of her desk when Marilyn Massey walked in.
Though Eileen wouldn’t in a million years use the word, Marilyn was what some of the staff called one of the principal’s projects. Eileen had met Marilyn—middle-aged, down on her luck, and a recovering addict—at a local food pantry and after talking to her for thirty minutes hired her on the spot to clean at St. Catherine’s. That was fifteen years earlier, just as the school was about to open, and Marilyn was the first to admit those thirty minutes changed her life. She’d been clean and sober since; she’d gotten her GED. Marilyn was meticulous and so hardworking a few of the teachers hired her to clean their homes on weekends.
She had a bucket in one hand, and in spite of the fact that it was empty, Marilyn’s shoulders were stooped as if she carried the weight of the world.
“Tough day.” It was an understatement, but Jazz didn’t know how else to ease into the conversation. “I thought Eileen told everyone on staff they could go home early if they wanted to.”
Marilyn’s shrug spoke volumes. “Going to be plenty to do next week. Figured I might as well get a jump on it,” she said. She set down the bucket and swiped one hand through her bleached shoulder-length hair. “Funeral is Tuesday. Up in the chapel. But I guess you know that.”
Jazz did and told her, “Bernadette’s parents are long dead, but the cops contacted one of her cousins and Eileen talked to him. He said that’s what Bernadette would have wanted, a funeral here. He said she always talked about how much she loved the chapel.” It brought up an interesting thought. “I didn’t realize Bernadette had any relatives; did you?”
Marilyn pulled a rag and a can of Pledge out of the wide pocket on the front of her apron. She excused herself around Jazz so she could clean Jazz’s chair and her desk. “I never talked to her much. She was…” Jazz didn’t want to put words in Marilyn’s mouth, so she kept quiet. “It wasn’t like she was unfriendly. That’s what I told that cop. Those cops who were here today, they talked to everyone, you know. And the one who talked to me, I told him it wasn’t like that Ms. Quinn was unfriendly. It was more like her head was always off somewhere…”—Marilyn made a waving motion with one hand and the rag in it—“and none of us was in the same place.”
“So she never mentioned a cousin?”
“Not to me.” Marilyn moved away from the desk and brought out a bottle of Windex and a paper towel to wipe down the leaded-glass doors on the bookcases on the other side of the room. “She tried to save me once, you know.”
“You mean like you stepped in front of a moving car and she jumped into the street and dragged you to safety? Or like she tried to save your soul?”
Marilyn made a face. “My soul, of course. That Ms. Quinn, that was all she cared about. Souls and salvation. I’m not saying that’s not important, but these girls, they’ll find out soon enough that real life is all about redemption and forgiveness. They’re still kids; they don’t need it pushed down their throats every day. I didn’t need it pushed down my throat.”
No, Jazz was pretty sure she didn’t. She offered Marilyn a smile. “Your soul didn’t need saving.”
Marilyn grunted a laugh. “Didn’t think so. Still don’t. But that Ms. Quinn, she was plenty religious.” She shook her head as if even after all this time, it didn’t make much sense. Marilyn turned and propped one hand on her hip. “There were times I had to kick her out of the chapel. You know, when I was closing up the building for the night.”
Jazz didn’t know. “You should have said something,” she told Marilyn.
It was inconsequential, and Marilyn’s one-sided grimace told Jazz as much. “It’s not that she ever argued with me about it or anything. Or like she ever refused to leave. If she did, I would have told Eileen. Or you. You know, the big guns.”
Jazz laughed. She’d never considered herself a big gun.
Marilyn shook her head. “More evenings than not when I got up to the chapel to give it a quick once-over, that Ms. Quinn, she’d be up there on her knees, praying like there was no tomorrow, mumbling to herself. Or talking to God.”
Remembering what Eileen had said earlier—the truth but not the whole truth—Jazz weighed her words. “Bernadette obviously hung around after the rest of us left. I guess that was her quiet time.”
Marilyn nodded. “I always cleaned the chapel last so she knew she’d have it to herself until I got up there. How she could be up there all by herself…” She shivered.
“You don’t like the chapel?”
Maybe because she was embarrassed, or maybe because she needed to dispel the shudder that crawled along her shoulders, Marilyn got back to work. She crossed the room and cleaned up the table where the refreshments had been set up for their Assembly Day speakers, stacking plates and cups, gathering up the last of the napkins.
“It sure is pretty up there.” Marilyn brought the vases of flowers over to Jazz’s desk and set them down. “But the way the sound plays tricks on you…” She shook her slim shoulders.
“It’s just because of the whispering walls,” Jazz said, even though she was sure Marilyn knew the story. The curved walls of the chapel played tricks with sound, causing unsettling echoes and even enabling a whisper from one side of the chapel to be heard on the other. A cutting-edge sound system had pretty much taken care of the problem when the girls were in the chapel for Mass. But yeah, Jazz imagined that when the sound system was off, when the school was empty, when
Marilyn was up there alone and each of her footsteps was amplified and banged back at her, it could get unnerving. It was the main reason staff and teachers never talked about the acoustical acrobatics up in the chapel with students. Early on, Eileen had decided it would only cause problems if the girls thought of the chapel as a fun house attraction.
By way of telling Jazz she knew it and she knew it was silly to let it bother her, Marilyn lifted a shoulder. She finished with the coffee machine and Jazz asked, “What about the fourth floor?”
Marilyn froze. “They found her up there.”
“I found her up there,” Jazz said, though she was sure Marilyn had heard the story. St. Catherine’s was a small community and word traveled fast, especially when the word was all about a dead teacher and the handler and dog that had found her. “Have you ever been up on the fourth floor?” she asked Marilyn.
Her top lip curled. “Early on. Before the school ever opened. Me and Eileen was up there to see what needed to be done. I cleaned it. I cleaned it real good. But then Eileen and the board members, they decided it would cost too much to make the space usable. You know, on account of that narrow stairway and the fact that the heating and cooling ducts don’t run up there.”
“And you haven’t been up there since?”
Marilyn thought about it. “Once,” she said. “I don’t know, maybe two, three years ago. Diedre McColm, her classroom is right under that space and she said something about how there must have been a dead animal up there because…” Marilyn’s mouth fell open. “I sent Eddie up there and he found a dead squirrel and we figured that was that. And I sprayed some air freshener and we went back downstairs and we locked up and…” She gulped. “It was more than just a dead squirrel, wasn’t it?”
“Did you tell the cops?”
“Do you think it’s important?”
Jazz had to admit she didn’t know. “They need all the information they can get. I have no doubt Detective Lindsey will be back. I’ll mention it to him. He might want to talk to you again.”
This time when Marilyn shivered, it had nothing to do with the weird sound effects in the chapel. “I don’t like talking to cops.”