The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  “I’m still the one who chose Mooney,” he said.

  “But you’re not the one who mixed it into his cup of punch,” I said. “Or Fay’s.”

  “I might as well have.”

  “Pete, you’re forgetting that somebody put it into mine. And I sure as shit wasn’t planning to kill myself last night.”

  “You’re right,” he said, lifting his foot off the brake pedal. “You’ve got me convinced. I think this was murder.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Two things,” he said. “First, if you had the same flu that’s going around New Boys, you’d still be feverish and throwing up. You’re not.”

  “Second?”

  “I can believe Fay and Mooney might commit suicide, but there’s no way they wanted to take you with them.”

  “And if I got dosed at the party, they couldn’t have,” I said. “The poison was still locked up, right?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “And we only put out six a night. They got counted in the morning, so Mooney couldn’t have kept one back for himself. Even if they killed themselves, it wasn’t until after you left the building last night that he had access to any poison.”

  We’d reached the dining hall. Pete pulled up in front and turned off the ignition.

  “When we go inside,” I said, “you should explain all of that to the cops. I’ll tell them what happened to me.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said.

  But we didn’t get out of the car. We just sat there staring at the building in silence for a minute.

  “Can we find out who was wearing the key to that cabinet last night?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There are spares to everything down at David’s house—dorm keys, fire alarms, meds cabinets . . .”

  “Who has access to those?”

  Just David?

  “Too many people to narrow it down,” he said. “Everybody on staff, pretty much. I had to borrow a spare master for New Boys one afternoon last week, after I locked mine in the car. Not to mention there’s probably more than one set of copies on campus: maintenance, Dhumavati, security . . . David wouldn’t want to be woken up every time somebody got locked out in the middle of the night.”

  “Great,” I said.

  And then we just sat there staring at the dining hall some more.

  Pete pulled his keys out of the ignition and held them up. There had to be more than a dozen of them hanging off the carabiner he used for a chain.

  “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but I wish this were ‘just’ suicide. Hard to say whether it’s worse thinking any one of us could have killed two kids, or finding out which one.”

  “Going in there is gonna suck, isn’t it?” I said. “Even more than everything already does.”

  “Big-time.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

  Dhumavati walked over to us the minute we got inside the building.

  “Madeline,” she said, “I just can’t . . .” Then she broke down and wept.

  “I know,” I said.

  She stepped forward and went slack against me. She didn’t even have the strength to raise her arms to my waist—her hands just fell limp against my hips.

  I snaked an arm tight around her upper back, worried she’d slide to the ground if I let her go, then reached up to cradle her head on my shoulder. We stayed like that for a long time.

  “Have you talked to the police yet?” I asked her.

  She pulled back. “I just finished.”

  “Then go home,” I said. “You need sleep.”

  “Madeline’s right,” said Pete.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. “There’s too much to do.”

  “Then at least take fifteen minutes,” I said. “Let Lulu make you some tea.”

  She agreed to that, and Pete and I stepped through the inner doors into the dining hall.

  The first thing the cops did was separate us. They’d spread out at various points around the room, taking preliminary statements from everyone who’d been at the Farm the night before. There was a young woman in uniform standing in the foyer, sorting everyone out. She’d already dispatched Gerald, Tim, and the kids who’d been on the Farm to separate tables. Pete and I were promptly assigned to distant chairs.

  I waited for a couple of minutes but then got nervous about how much area they were protecting around the ostensible suicide scene down at the Farm. I got up from my solo table and walked back across the room toward the clipboard woman.

  She glanced at me but was busy speaking into a handheld radio. I didn’t want to interrupt her but finally worked up the nerve to say, “Hi?”

  “Ma’am,” she said, “please remain at your table. We’ll take your initial information as soon as we can, okay?”

  “I don’t know if you’re the right person to ask this, Officer”—I looked at her name tag—“Officer Baker, but I have a question about how much of the area you’ve cordoned off down at the scene.”

  “Ma’am, if you could just—”

  “I know this sounds kind of out there, but I think you guys may be looking at a homicide here, and I was hoping to, um, run something by whoever is in charge of evidence collection?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I was at the birthday party last night, and I think something was slipped into my punch. I was . . . I threw up outside the dorm and was really disoriented for a number of hours afterward, and . . .” I was sounding like a complete lunatic, even to myself. I half expected her to send me back to my quarantine table, but she held up a “don’t move” index finger instead, while bringing the radio back up to her mouth. After a burst of static, she told the guy on the other end to find Cartwright, ASAP. I thanked her, and she motioned to another uniformed guy across the hallway.

  He grinned at her as he walked over. “Whatcha need, Kas?”

  Baker ignored him. “This is Officer Hoyt,” she said to me. “He’s going to take your information.”

  Hoyt walked me back into the dining hall. We sat down at a corner table, and he got set with a clipboard and pen. He was maybe a few years older than me. Wiry guy. Pleasant and polite.

  All his questions were general, open-ended. He started out with the basics: my name, my address, how long I’d worked at Santangelo.

  I told him what I’d told Baker, but he didn’t bring the conversation back around to any of that at first. Didn’t interrupt me at all—just let me talk until I was emptied of words, after a question—giving space and time for each of my answers to play itself out.

  I told him where I thought I’d gotten sick, near the fence of the Farm’s garden, and told him why I thought it might be important.

  “Do you want me to show someone where, exactly?” I asked.

  “I’ll let them know. We want to keep people out of the scene as much as possible, ma’am.”

  “The guy I came in here with,” I said, “Pete?”

  I looked for him across the room. “Blond hair. Wearing a blue sweater, over there by the salad bar.”

  “Yes, ma’am, with Officer Stinson.” He looked down at his clipboard to jot another note.

  “Pete and another teacher—Lulu Costigan—found me down there in the snow last night, unconscious. I know where I started to throw up, but it sounds like I crawled farther afterward, and I don’t know where to, exactly. You might want to ask Pete.”

  “I’ll double-check, make sure we get that information.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m not sure it matters, but just in case.”

  “Better too much information than too little, ma’am,” he said.

  I nodded.

  Hoyt looked up at me, pen at rest again. “So you think there was opportunity to slip something into your drink?”

  “I kept losing track of my cup,” I said. “I went back for a new one twice. It was hot, with the woodstove going. I was really thirsty. Gerald didn’t mind.”

  “Gerald?”


  “Another teacher,” I said. “The guy who found Fay and Mooney this morning. He was serving the punch, but it could have been anyone.”

  “We’d like you to go down to the station, Ms. Dare—do some follow-up on your preliminary statement. I’m sure Detective Cartwright will want to ask you some further questions once he reads my notes. He might like to get your fingerprints as well, see if we can match them with the cups you drank out of.”

  “Certainly,” I said, trying not to look unsettled by that idea.

  “Our crime lab’s in Sudbury. They can analyze the punch, let us know if there’s anything of concern.”

  “My husband’s on his way down from Pittsfield,” I said. “Lulu told him I’d be waiting at Dhumavati’s apartment, across campus. In fact, he may be here already. Could I let him know before I leave?”

  “We’ll make sure he’s brought up to speed,” said Hoyt. “Would you like him to meet you at the station?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “And thank you for taking my concerns seriously. I may be absolutely wrong. I don’t want to think anyone here could have done something like this, but if it wasn’t suicide . . . I just wanted you to know there might be another way of looking at what happened last night.”

  “Suspicious deaths are investigated as homicides at the outset,” he said. “We don’t make any presumptions. No way to have a handle on what’s important until we’ve had a chance to reflect on everything.”

  A dark panel van drove slowly past the front windows of the dining hall. There was an official-looking seal painted on its door.

  Maybe the coroner’s. Maybe Fay and Mooney were inside.

  It was snowing again. Bleak and gray.

  “Officer Hoyt?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I know this place must have a strange reputation. I mean, it’s not the first time the police have had occasion to come up here.”

  His expression didn’t betray any opinion on that.

  “It’s just . . .” My throat got all tight, and I could feel tears coming up at the corners of my eyes. An ache, a soreness.

  I stopped for a minute, wanting to get the words out right without breaking down.

  “Sir?” I said finally. “They were good kids, Fay and Mooney. I want you guys to know that.”

  Then I lost it. I coughed up sobs and covered my face with my hands and felt the loss of them cut through me, hard and sad and awful.

  I lowered my hands, wanting to tell him more, thinking, Fuck it if my face is covered with snot. I held my breath for a minute, trying to make my chest stop shuddering.

  Hoyt touched my shoulder.

  “Please,” I said. “Whatever happened last night, Fay and Mooney deserved better. They mattered.”

  “I know they did, Ms. Dare. And please let us know if there’s anything you need down at the station.”

  I hunched down in the patrol car’s backseat as it pulled out of the gates, headed for Stockbridge. My hands were cold, and I shoved them deep in my jacket pockets. I touched the half-empty box of birthday candles, surprised when something sharp poked into my fingertip. I scooped my hand under the contents of my pocket and pulled everything out slowly.

  Four objects rested at the center of my palm: the candles, my lighter and cigarettes, and the silver crescent moon of Fay’s necklace.

  Its clasp was fastened tight, but the chain was busted—tiny links twisted open at the break as though it had been snatched off her neck in a hurry.

  18

  We didn’t stop in Stockbridge, just kept on driving.

  “Be going to the state police barracks in Lee, ma’am,” the guy at the wheel explained. “Something like this, Stockbridge calls us in. Our branch of Troop B patrols sixteen towns locally. Five hundred fifty square miles.”

  I thought of Arlo Guthrie singing about how Stockbridge had “three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car.”

  Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?

  Cartwright was sure to appreciate me singing half a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant” once they had me sitting on the Group W bench there.

  Especially after they ran my fingerprints.

  Especially once I told them I had Fay’s necklace in my pocket.

  I touched the point of that silver moon again, rocking it back and forth under the pad of my thumb while I wondered how the hell it had gotten there in the first place.

  I remembered Lulu telling me not to go outside without my jacket on the night before, and I remembered ignoring her admonition.

  For a second I wondered if Fay had tucked the necklace into my pocket herself, to say goodbye. Maybe she and Mooney really had committed suicide?

  Except Fay would have unhooked the clasp, not broken the chain. Or asked Mooney to unhook it for her.

  Someone else took it off her neck. Not gently—the chain was slender but well made.

  And now I’d touched the pendant, probably ruined any chance of finding out who that someone was.

  I pulled my hand away, too late. Nothing on the surface of Fay’s moon now but my own fingerprints.

  Prints that were on file at a police station in upstate New York—enshrined in some little folder, a study in black-and-white—because I’d been the first person to arrive at the scene of another murder the year before.

  I shifted in my seat.

  Looked at the back of the young cop’s close-cropped head.

  Wondered whether I should show him the necklace right then and there.

  He eased the car off Route 20 and onto Laurel Street. The state police barrack was a solid old brick building at the corner. Tall narrow windows marked each of its two stories, with a dormered third row jutting out from the low-pitched white roof.

  My driver walked me inside before handing me off. I filled a crimped-foil ashtray with the stubs of my remaining Camels, waiting for Cartwright in a small back room. It contained two metal chairs and a scarred table but had no windows—just an overhead fluorescent panel, the kind I always blamed for the minor chord of despair in cut-rate department-store dressing rooms.

  One of the fixture’s tubes had developed an arrhythmic tic, its flicker and buzz compounding my bridle of headache. After cursing the damn thing for twenty minutes, I considered climbing onto a chair to yank it out.

  The young guy who’d driven me down stuck his head in the door just before I actually stood up to attempt it.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee?”

  I begged him for aspirin, and he took off to find some.

  When he returned with a bottle of Bayer and a white cone of water from the office cooler, I asked, “Is my husband here yet? Tall blond guy?”

  “He’s out front, ma’am. We’ve told him it might be a while.”

  I could see a wall clock over the cop’s shoulder. I’d been here close to an hour. “Can I talk to him, tell him I’m okay?”

  The guy hesitated; he obviously didn’t know what to say but wasn’t about to let Dean come back and hang out with me.

  “If he’d like to go home,” I said, “please tell him I can call when we’re done with everything.”

  He gave a clipped nod in answer to that, then left me alone again.

  I pulled Fay’s necklace out of my pocket and placed it at the center of the table. I didn’t want to lose my nerve when it came to showing the thing to Cartwright, if he ever in fact arrived.

  Not that I begrudged him the time, no matter how much I ached for sleep. The crime scene deserved his full attention, and cooling my heels at the station was the least I could do for Fay and Mooney.

  I sparked up another Camel and pondered the riddle of that necklace. Safe to presume Lulu had grabbed my jacket when she left the Farm. She was thoughtful that way.

  But then how had the little moon landed in my pocket? Wouldn’t Fay have noticed someone snatching it off her neck during the party? The idea of someone tiptoeing into Dhumavati’s guest room to plant it on me in the middle of the
night was ludicrous.

  Nothing made sense.

  I stubbed out my smoke and started kneading the tight thin flesh across my forehead, closing my eyes against the sickly flicker of light and willing the aspirin to kick in. Finally, I got up and flipped the switch by the door, feeling the way back to my seat in the dark.

  I crossed my arms on the table and laid my head down. All I could think of was Fay and Mooney lying side by side in the back of that cold van.

  I wept myself to sleep, haunted by the image of their faces, veiled beneath black bags that had been zipped unequivocally closed.

  I startled awake, squinting, when the lights snapped back on.

  A bulky guy stood in the doorway, gray-haired and bullnecked, wearing a sport coat that was tight across his shoulders and a touch short at the wrists.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting here so long, Ms. Dare,” he said.

  “Not a problem, sir.”

  He stepped over to the table and stuck out his hand. I looked him in the eye and shook it.

  “Detective Cartwright,” he said.

  “Please call me Madeline.”

  Cartwright pulled the second chair back from the table and lowered himself into it, thighs beefy enough that he sat with his legs angled a little apart. He wasn’t fat, just former-fullback thick.

  He butted a sheaf of papers and file folders against the table’s surface to square them, then laid them flat in a crisp pile.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got so far,” he said, opening the uppermost file to reveal Hoyt’s notes.

  He skimmed the first page while unbuttoning his jacket, then produced a ballpoint pen, clicked its top, and raised his eyes back to mine.

  I pressed my fingers down against the tips of the necklace’s broken chain and dragged it across the table to rest, centered, at the head of his paperwork.

  “I thought you should see this, sir,” I said. “It belonged to Fay.”

  “She gave it to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “How’d it come to be in your possession?” he asked.

  “I found it in my jacket pocket,” I said. “On the drive over here.”

  “And do you have any idea how it might have ended up there?”