The Main Line Is Murder

by Donna Huston Murray

  Kevin shook his head out of a trance. "No," he said sadly. "Wharton was a callous bastard, but he didn't cause Dad's problems."

  The unspoken "just hurried them along," hung in the air between us.

  "So this afternoon. Where were you when it happened?" I gestured toward the school.

  Kevin gaped at me. "I don't know."

  "In your office?"

  "Probably."

  "Hear anything?"

  He stared at my elbow. "No."

  I widened my eyes and tilted my head. "Too bad.”

  Then I nodded toward the perking coffeepot. "Pour that when it's ready, will you?"

  "Sure," Kevin agreed, his head hung low.

  I gathered the two dozen muffins onto two cookie sheets, grabbed three forks, and left Kevin to collect himself in private. While Garry, Chelsea, and I separated muffin halves in preparation for assembling a bunch of impromptu pizzas, I remembered the offhand comment that had brought Kevin to Bryn Derwyn and exposed him to this nerve-wracking situation.

  As Rip had become immersed in the financial mires of Bryn Derwyn Academy, he came to believe that a business manager would pay for him- or herself and also relieve the headmaster of several messy chores. By August he had begun to shake the grapevine for a candidate.

  "I wonder if the school could afford Kevin Seitz," I remarked to Rip one evening.

  As it turned out, the school could indeed afford Kevin. After his father’s suicide, the up-and-coming business whiz needed an upbeat enterprise to restore his ambition. Interviewing cooks, managing a health insurance plan, streamlining the payroll, shopping for everything from paper clips to a better mortgage—in short, making sure Bryn Derwyn met its financial obligations in every way—suited the young man's needs. Kids would benefit from it all, either directly or indirectly, and Kevin liked the way that felt. He allowed the job to consume him. Recently, I'd begun to think he needed a woman in his life, and I had introduced him to a couple of prospects without much luck.

  "Kevin Seitz!" Lt. Newkirk called from the top of the steps as Rip trotted down from the second half of his interview. "Could I see you, please?"

  On his way by, Kevin glanced into the dining room where I was sitting with the kids. I felt a chill of apprehension when our eyes met.

  Surely, the family who was delinquent with their child’s tuition had departed as soon as possible, leaving Kevin and Richard Wharton alone in the Community Room minutes before Richard's death. One word from Kevin about his father's bankruptcy, one snide retort from the arrogant attorney—who wouldn't want to reach for a shovel?

  Chapter 8

  IN THE MIDST of the people waiting in our living room, Rip donned his plaid wool jacket and pulled on some gloves. We met at the kitchen doorway.

  "Jacob went home," he explained, "so I have to lock up the school after the specialists finish with the crime scene." He kissed my bangs, squeezed my shoulders and left, shutting the front door tight behind him. The house felt quite a bit lonelier.

  From her chair by the TV, Joanne, the consummate caffeine addict, smelled the coffee and eased into the kitchen.

  "You're not fooling me," I said in an attempt at normal banter.

  She shrugged. "Where are the cups?"

  My hands were sticky with the spaghetti sauce I was spooning onto the muffins, so I indicated a cabinet door with my elbow;

  "You okay?" I asked.

  "No. Are you?"

  "Not really."

  "Don't talk to reporters," she said, as if it was foremost on her mind.

  I glanced at the phone I'd shut into a drawer and thought of the scathing remarks I'd been preparing in my head. "Why?" I asked.

  "It's a PR thing. Let Rip do it." Joanne emphasized her words with a somber look in the eye, then poured coffee and turned tail on me.

  Open-mouthed, I stared after her, clutching the countertop to steady myself. I’d been hoping for company in the kitchen, somebody to calm me with chitchat. Instead I’d been warned about messing with the delicate reputation of the school.

  And the worst thing about it: Joanne was right. Word of mouth generated by Rip’s summer networking lunches had netted Bryn Derwyn thirty students by September. Education was the school’s ultimate product, but goodwill was the currency that paid the bills. If the press chose to sensationalize Richard's murder, it wasn’t inconceivable that the fledgling institution could go out of business.

  My neck went rigid. Quite suddenly I realized I didn't want to leave this place.

  True, we'd only been here half a year—six exhausting months—but those months had committed Rip to the school, and to my surprise—me, too. Bryn Derwyn had become the Barnes' family business. Every evening when Rip related the details of his day, I took every word to heart. This was personal. We lived here. Even this leaky, drafty, cramped, unreliable house suddenly seemed worth fighting for.

  Until Joanne's remark I saw Richard as the only victim, felt compassion and anger and fear only as they related to him. Now I feared for anybody who depended on Bryn Derwyn Academy.

  And nobody, I realized, depended on it more than Rip, me, and our children.

  If Bryn Derwyn closed, the current students would be absorbed by other schools. The alumni might or might not notice that their mailings stopped, and the Board members would probably cross a time-consuming chore off their lists with much relief and very little regret.

  Yes, the teachers would need to find other jobs, as would Rip and maybe even me. But as soon as the bank caught on that the school's mortgage was no longer being paid, we Barneses would also be out on the street.

  Even worse, beyond all reasoning, Rip would consider the school's failure to be his fault. Every part of me yearned to prevent any of those possibilities from happening.

  Burdened with frustrated resolve, I shouted, "Coffee's ready." Then I got the pizza rounds ready to serve. My attitude was grim, militant and contagious. I could feel it in my muscles and see it reflected on the faces of my reluctant guests.

  Joanne refilled her mug and waved the food away. She forced a breath into her lungs and wiped a tear from her cheek.

  "I won't say anything," I promised. She had been right to warn me; I was much too forthcoming with information, much too honest and blunt. I would sink Rip's ship with my first sentence.

  "Probably doesn't matter," she said.

  "Oh, Joanne," I moaned. "Is it really that bad?" She knew everything about everybody. She had been Bill Bodourian's assistant for years.

  "Joanne Henry," Lt. Newkirk called.

  I poured a mug of coffee for her to carry up to Newkirk. If he didn't drink it black—tough.

  The school's pivotal employee wiped both eyes with her cuff and finally responded to my question. "Maybe not. We'll see."

  That's when it occurred to me to wonder exactly what Joanne would be telling the police.

  Kevin Seitz danced down the stairs from his session with Newkirk like an athlete thrilled by an open field. His face was flushed. He could scarcely refrain from grinning. He had been up there a mere five or six minutes.

  When he retrieved his coat from the pile on a dining room chair, Newkirk bent down from his position on the stairs and saw him. "Not just yet, if you don't mind, Mr. Seitz. I may have a few more questions later."

  Kevin simply deflated. If a dining room chair hadn't been two feet from his rear, he'd have slumped to the floor.

  I put some food in front of his face. "Eat this," I ordered. "Then I have something for you to do."

  Kevin looked through me as if he wondered where my voice had come from, then he looked at the pizzas as if they were yak dung. I hooked his arm and said, "C’mere. Our Christmas tree lights need untangling. I promised the kids we'd do it tonight."

  He glanced around for somebody to delegate the chore to but found no one even slightly interested. "You're the man," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "There they are." Garry had deposited the boxes of lights and ornaments under the tree.

  When
the kids saw Kevin open the box and peek inside, they were beside him in a flash, grabbing handfuls of green wire strung with tiny clear bulbs. Some of the bulbs would be burned out, so none of them would light. I'd given Kevin an annoying time-consuming job just determining how to begin. Exactly the distraction he needed.

  Someone had shut the TV off, and an uncomfortable silence permeated the room. Music? We usually played our ancient Christmas albums while we decorated, the only time I could stand listening to them. Soon the radio and mall public address systems would sicken me with the repetition. Yet hearing the carols for the first time after a long hiatus always cheered me with the promise of the season. Soon enough we would all become cynical, resentful, irritable, and tired.

  Chelsea ended my internal debate by switching on the radio—to her station. Bump bumpy bump, la la la. I could never quite get behind the new music, couldn't quite imagine Chelsea becoming nostalgic over any of it thirty years from now, turning up a favorite, singing along. But who'd have guessed that "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah," would linger. Chelsea strung wire through her fingers looking for burned out bulbs, bouncing and swaying and whispering song lyrics as she worked, tactfully though, just being herself. I wanted to cry. It was perfect, precisely what everybody needed.

  Okay, so I did cry. Just a little, and in the kitchen. Danny Vega, humming along, brought in debris from the impromptu meal. A stick of a guy with a beaky nose and sloped shoulders who always wore short-sleeved permanent press shirts he probably bought from a catalog, he ignored me, dumped the trash and left. Danny taught civics, and I knew of no connection between him and Richard Wharton except that he'd been in the building when Richard was killed. In Rip's office to be exact.

  He flipped the lid off the ornament box and began to examine a light blue, wooden airplane on a thin red string. He stuck it on the tree, extracted a Styrofoam snowman, peered at it quizzically. "My mother only did red balls and tinsel," he explained when he caught me watching. We shared a smile. What was it about celebrating holidays the same way year after year that comforted us and at the same time made our families feel unique?

  The hostess in me surveyed the room. The two cops still leaned against the walls apart from the others—professional, unapproachable, and alert. If I walked up to the nearest one and said, "How's the wife," he'd have gawked as if I had said something rude in Swedish.

  On the far end of the couch Pamela Washington and Sophia Mawby conversed softly under the music and tried not to glance at the cops. Both women had pressed their knees close together as if for warmth. Warmth?

  "Danny!" I called to the storky civics teacher. "How about lighting the fire? It's ready to go, just open the flue." I walked in and handed him some matches.

  Pamela was a compact African-American woman of about twenty-six with large, prominent bones covered with firm muscle. As an artist's creation her title would have been "The Elegance of Pride." She taught fifth grade, an especially good time to introduce that concept. She also managed to express herself with a minimum of effort. For example, right now she was conveying sorrow, discomfort, and impatience with a simple, graceful frown.

  Her companion was an amorphous white woman of fifty-five who taught middle school math. Her shoes were scuffed brown lace-ups, her stockings washed to a shade paler than her skin. She wore a softly pleated brown skirt, a brown belt, and a tan blouse with pearl buttons. Her hair was fine and as washed out as her stockings. Glasses dangled down her bodice on a thin silver chain, leaving naked dark eyes of a formidable clarity.

  Within Sophia Mawby's vision the world was strictly ordered, a paint-by-the-numbers formula that scorned deviation. She chaired the Social Concern Committee of which Pamela, Dan, and Rip were members. I later learned that at the time of Richard's death, Joanne had been in Rip's office getting instructions from them for a general mailing about an evening program on teenage promiscuity and AIDS.

  No doubt Lt. Newkirk had already determined the validity of their mutual alibi, but these people had also been closest to the main entrance of the school. They might have seen the murderer enter or leave, a possibility Newkirk was surely pursuing.

  However, I doubted that it was taking Joanne half an hour to describe what little she saw. My guess was that the lieutenant was pressing her for dirt—who hated Richard Wharton, to be exact.

  Which meant she was probably relating what she told me about Jeremy Philbin back in September, the night Bryn Derwyn's veteran algebra teacher ruined my inaugural faculty party all by himself.

  Philbin's story was a humbling one because although he could be a reactionary pain in the butt and was potentially alcoholic, he was also a rather ordinary guy, like all of us either living with his flaws or in spite of them.

  I settled into Joanne's former seat by the TV, sipped some bitter black coffee, and tuned into my own thoughts.

  If Jeremy Philbin killed Richard Wharton, I decided half the population of the world was probably in danger from the other half.

  Which, it chilled me to realize, has never been far from the truth.

  Chapter 9

  ONCE WHEN I was fairly young, my father, a sometimes musician, took me to watch an open rehearsal of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The tickets were a bonus for donating $100 or more, and someone who Dad knew had done that and passed the tickets on to him. For the second half we sat where we could watch all the players, but initially we chose the first row.

  The guest conductor was Russian, a thin, elegant man wearing a pale gray, three-piece suit of a fine, lightweight wool. His shirt was white, and I could see that the points of his collar were stiff with starch. His medium-brown hair puffed high with waves. His shoes were a plain shiny black, and I thought to myself as he stood in the wings, holding himself still, waiting: How is he going to do this? He doesn't speak English!

  Suddenly he burst onto the stage, and with long strides across the floor quickly arrived front and center. He ripped his arms free of his suit coat and threw it onto an empty chair. He tore loose the knot of his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and stood, hands on hips, while he made eye contact with every orchestra member seated before him, every last one of them sitting at attention. I was ten years old with no musical training whatsoever, but I sat on the edge of my seat ready to get to work.

  Our first summer at Bryn Derwyn I was so new, so full of optimism and pride, that I believed Rip's and my first faculty party could do for Bryn Derwyn what that conductor had done with the orchestra: set the tone for their entire performance together. What an idiot I was.

  All summer long Rip had preached his family atmosphere theme to anyone who would sit still and listen. Less pressure with more personal attention. Extracurriculars for balance. His spiel enumerated the educational techniques the teachers would use to accomplish these ideals.

  The party would embody the same theme. I would serve make-them-yourself hoagies and put up the badminton net. There would be mint for the iced tea, twists of lemon, wedges of lime, and summer games to entice new friendships. A gold-plated idiot.

  That was obvious the minute three teachers broke free of their all-day meeting and wandered across the front of the school toward our new beer cooler under the tree.

  For my outfit I had shopped five stores, finally choosing a short, tailored golf-style outfit in grassy green to contrast with my tan. My white canvas slip-ons were pristine, rescued countless times throughout the summer from muddy paws, filthy car carpets, and ketchup.

  The teachers who straggled over from the school wore assorted flip-flops, cut-off jeans, a T-shirt advertising fitness equipment in one case, and in another a striped shirt that resembled some of Rip's pajamas. The two young men and one woman walked like marathoners the morning after. They were sweaty and inclined to rub their eyes. They looked like they might stay awake just long enough for a quick beer and a sandwich, if the sandwich didn't take too long.

  "Hi. I'm Gin Barnes," I said, sticking out my hand when they wandered within range.

  "'Lo," s
aid the first male. He mumbled a name I didn't catch.

  "Hi," and "Hi," said the other two. They sipped beer from the cans and looked at each other for a clue what to say.

  "How'd the meeting go?" I asked.

  "Fine, fine."

  "Well, we've got horseshoes, badminton, darts," I said. "If the mood strikes you."

  "Maybe later," said the woman sympathetically. Her eyes scouted around for seating. The school's single picnic table waited under a second tree, and she went over and sat on the bench facing the yard.

  "You catch the Phillies last night?" said one male to another, permission for me to leave if ever I heard it.

  Rip then arrived with a larger batch of people and others close behind. He introduced me around, but I must have been nervous because the names refused to stick. Then Rip directed everyone to the bar and the cooler. Clumps of three and four fell into conversations. Everybody had drinks. More people came. And that was it, thirty-five weary guests. I brought out the pretzels.

  Joanne Henry stood alone near a card table I had centered on the grass in front of the house, away from the bar to allow for traffic flow. After I deposited cheese and crackers and leaned against the table, she said, "Too bad your kids aren't here."

  "Why?" I asked with alarm. I had gone out of my way to give them movie money and deposit them at the nearest mall.

  "Somebody to start those games," Joanne elaborated. She bit a cracker without blinking. The stare came off a bit frigid for the circumstances, reminding me of an overzealous border guard. Since my husband worked inside her territory eleven hours a day, I decided I'd better befriend the gatekeeper.

  "Care for some wine?" I asked my nemesis with the fine, beige hair.

  "Chardonnay?" she inquired with an accompanying raised eyebrow.

  "I believe that can be arranged."

  I lifted the large green bottle from the ice cooler and filled two seven-ounce cups just short of the brim. Then I crooked a finger to indicate the two sunbathing lounge chairs in front of the bushes beneath the living room window. Joanne followed, easing herself onto the yellow-and-white striped one and leaving the orange-and-white one for me. She crossed her legs, which were clad in a navy blue cotton print, and rested her heels on the chair's extension. The tumbler of white wine was received with a solemn nod. After a long dip into it, she leaned back and sighed.