The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  “The little shit.”

  Lulu picked up, muttering a groggy “Hello?”

  “Check it out,” said my husband. “Bunny’s blushing.”

  “What the hell was Wiesner doing in Pittsfield?” croaked Lulu after I’d related the most recent developments.

  “He wanted me to know some shit about Gerald. Stuff that happened last year.”

  I could hear running water and clinking on her end of the line. “What’re you, washing dishes?”

  “Making coffee,” she said. “It’s after midnight and looking like I’m gonna be up awhile.”

  “Could you let Dhumavati know? Wiesner took off about ten minutes ago.”

  “I take it you’d like me to avoid mentioning this to Gerald?”

  “Just call me back.”

  “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” she said.

  I recradled the receiver.

  “You’ve gotta get some sleep, Bunny,” said Dean.

  “Go on ahead. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  He yawned. “And I’ve got some prime swampland in Florida.”

  “I’ll be quick as I can, okay?”

  He started staggering bedward, mumbling, “Brooklyn Bridge” back over his shoulder at me.

  I snapped up the phone on the first ring, pulling the cord taut to make it reach the sofa. “So?”

  “Madeline?”

  It wasn’t Lulu. It was Dhumavati.

  21

  I know you must be exhausted after today,” said Dhumavati, “but I wish you’d kept Wiesner at your apartment until we could’ve sent someone to pick him up.”

  The phone line crackled a little. She didn’t sound angry, just tired and concerned.

  “My husband was going to drive him down to you,” I said. “I’m so sorry. We never expected him to bolt from the parking lot like that.”

  “Wiesner’s always been a bolter, but that’s not your fault, Madeline. We’ve sent a couple of teachers up to look for him, and the police.”

  “You sound so tired,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Horrible,” she said. “Devastated. When I called Fay’s and Mooney’s parents to tell them, I just—”

  There was a catch in her voice.

  “My heart goes out to them,” I said. “I’d’ve thought that breaking the news would fall to David?”

  “You know how I cherished Fay,” she said. “Mooney as well, but there was just something about that girl—”

  Dhumavati started weeping, the inhalations between her sobs so jagged and heartrending that she got me crying again, right along with her.

  “I should’ve done more, Madeline,” she said at last. “I should have seen this coming.”

  I was on the verge of telling her that she couldn’t have done anything to stop what had happened, if what I suspected proved to be the truth, but it seemed like too much to throw at her when she was already so shattered.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” I said. “Let’s just get to the end of this excruciating day, okay?”

  “I’ve got to stay awake,” she said, “in case there’s any news about Wiesner.”

  “Let someone else wait up. Let David. It’s so late, and you’ve been through far too much already.”

  She wasn’t hard to convince, once she’d extracted a promise that I’d immediately go to bed myself.

  I fully intended to call Lulu back but was out cold on the sofa before I’d managed to dial.

  Eight hours later, it was becoming increasingly evident that if I’d escaped the flu Tuesday night, I was now getting my ass kicked double for payback.

  I lay on the bathroom floor, curved all fetal around the flared base of the toilet, wrapped in a blanket.

  Dean plied me with ginger ale, since I’d already puked up the rest of the apple juice.

  “Please don’t make me drink any more,” I said. “If I throw up anything else, my uvula’s going to snap off and fall into this damn bowl.”

  “You didn’t eat yesterday,” he said. “You’ve got a fever of a hundred and three, and if you get any more dehydrated, I’m driving you down to the emergency room so they can put you on an IV.”

  My teeth started chattering. “Any way you could talk them into a little morphine? Maybe an electric blanket?”

  “Just drink it,” he said, waving the glass of bubbling beige at me.

  “You talked to Lulu?”

  “Yes, they know you’re not coming in today.”

  “I have to call the detective. Cartwright.”

  “Ginger ale first,” he said.

  “If I drink that, I’m just gonna barf for another twenty minutes.”

  “Then he’ll have to wait another twenty minutes.”

  “Cruel man,” I said. “Why the hell did I marry you?”

  He held the glass to my mouth, and I took three small swallows, front teeth rattling against the rim.

  I started to salivate immediately, my stomach churning.

  “Right back atcha,” I said, leaning in to the bowl.

  Dean crouched behind me, holding my hair back.

  “Lulu said they haven’t found Wiesner.” His voice echoed off the porcelain. “Kid’s probably halfway to Canada.”

  When I finally stopped long enough to inhale, I looked up at Dean.

  “Call Cartwright. You’ve got to let him know what Wiesner told us about Gerald.”

  Then it all started up again.

  “Go,” I said, lifting my head during an all too brief intermission. “Call.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Please,” I said.

  He got to his feet, knees cracking. “You’re sure?”

  I flopped a weak hand at him, wanting privacy before I started to hurl again.

  “Close the door,” I said, so Cartwright wouldn’t hear me in the background.

  I heard the latch click shut.

  The chills had passed. Now I was broiling, slick with toxic sweat and desperately thirsty. I ducked out of the blanket and slumped back down against the cool rim of the toilet.

  I shut my eyes, but all I could see was the image of that coroner’s van driving past the dining hall, shifting to an imagined tableau of Fay and Mooney, pale and still in each other’s arms, drifts of foam spilling out of their mouths.

  I blinked those pictures away and reached for the ginger ale—thirsty all over again, the Sisyphus of barf.

  I spent the next couple of hours alternately sweating and shivering, drifting in and out of horrible sleep when I wasn’t retching into a stockpot by the side of the bed. I heard a loud knock on our front door, and Dean answering it.

  He came into the bedroom and touched my shoulder gently. “That Cartwright guy is here to see you,” he said.

  “See if he wants coffee, okay? Let me brush my teeth.”

  When I came out into the living room, I saw Cartwright was accompanied by the young female officer, Kas Baker.

  “We got results on those fingerprints back,” said Cartwright.

  Then he told Baker to cuff me and pulled out a Miranda card. “You have the right to remain silent—”

  “What the hell is this about?” asked Dean.

  Cartwright paused and looked up at him.

  “This is about whose prints were on the cups found with those two kids,” he said. “Theirs and your wife’s.”

  He dropped his eyes back to the card and continued reading me my rights.

  “Bunny,” said Dean, “I’m calling your godfather, Alan Flynn. Then I’m coming right down to the station.”

  “Uncle” Alan, the Manhattan real estate attorney who’d said to Dean at our engagement party, “You two ever need something legal, I’m your beagle.”

  I was pretty sure this wasn’t the kind of “something” he’d had in mind.

  “She’ll be in county lockup,” said Baker, all terse, and Cartwright nodded.

  On the bright side, I threw up all over the back of their squad car.

  Part IV

  S
omething did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a positive dread of everything unknown that might occur.

  —Joseph Heller

  Something Happened

  22

  There were exactly two good things about my being in jail with the flu.

  The first was that the upper bunk was empty. The second was I didn’t have to worry about raising the seat on the cell’s toilet when I had to puke, because the cell’s toilet didn’t have a seat.

  Thoughtful decor, considering. Not to mention time-savingly ergonomic.

  Otherwise, it sucked ass. No pillow, no sheet, no ginger ale—just a fire-resistant vinyl-covered mattress and one thin scratchy blanket and those cinder-block walls, ugly as my classroom at Santangelo.

  My retching finally tailed off into a mere grainy crush of exhaustion. I crawled into the bunk and wadded a lump of blanket beneath my head, ravenous for sleep.

  Not bloody likely.

  Whenever I shut my eyes, this sad, crazy fever-Bosch slide show started cranking fast through my head:

  Gerald grabbing some faceless kid’s dick . . .

  Wiesner bolting away from Dean for the dark streets of Pittsfield . . .

  Santangelo bashing Tim’s face against a blackboard over and over until his features gave way to a glistening mask of meat pulp and cartilage . . .

  Fay and Mooney . . .

  Fay and Mooney . . .

  Bad sucker-punch pictures—snap crackle double-march pop.

  My brain struggled to piece them all into a rickety construct of sense. All of it exhausting as trying to parse that old riddle about getting the goat and the wolf and the head of cabbage safely across some river in your too-small rowboat, only worse this time, because Kafka kept lighting the oars on fire and laughing his ass off.

  Pictures again.

  Click . . .

  Click . . .

  Fay and Mooney . . .

  Sleep.

  My attorney was one Markham D. Stuyvesant, according to his card.

  In his thirties, maybe. Longish hair. Good shoes. Suit courtesy of “the Brothers.” An air of the young Winston, had Churchill grown up around Houston.

  I liked him already. He’d told me to call him Markham, then had the guard give me a pack of cigarettes and a 7UP out of the soda machine.

  Markham sat across from me behind a thick glass partition, each of us holding an old-fashioned black phone handset, so as to converse through the divide.

  I took a sip of 7UP. “So how do you know Uncle Alan?”

  “One of our senior partners played squash with him at Yale, I believe,” he said.

  Not a huge guy, Markham, but he had a big voice. Deep yet soft, with a bit of a drawl. Soothing. Good for radio.

  “Small preppy world,” I said.

  He laughed at that, and I liked him even better.

  “So,” I said, “the squash partner sent you?”

  “I’m their criminal guy.”

  “Lucky thing, seeing as how I’m the criminal.”

  “God forbid,” he said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” I replied, “and yet here I am, sitting on the Group W bench.”

  Markham smiled. “Not for long.”

  “Define ‘long.’”

  “You haven’t been charged,” he said. “You and I are going to sit down with this Detective Cartwright and have a few words. Then you’re out of here, lickety-split.”

  “Is your office here in Pittsfield?”

  “Boston,” he said.

  It was still before noon. “How did you get out here so fast?”

  “Made good time on the Pike, I guess. I’ll be staying at the Red Lion. You can get ahold of me anytime, day or night.”

  A Boston lawyer with a fast car, working around the clock. Not cheap.

  “I, um . . .” I coughed. “We should discuss your fees. Or whatever.”

  “That’s all taken care of.”

  “Dude,” I said, “you are shitting me.”

  “Madeline, I never shit my clients,” he said right back, hand on heart before I’d even had the chance to blush at having said “shit” in front of some southern guy in a fancy suit whom I didn’t actually know—one who happened to be my criminal-defense attorney, besides.

  “Markham,” I said, “please pardon my language. I am genuinely stunned.”

  “Understandably,” he said, in that amiable drawl.

  “Could you please explain how this miracle came to pass during my hour of darkest need?”

  “Your godfather apparently feels,” he said, “that he’s been a tad remiss in the arena of celebratory checks on past occasions, including but not limited to birthdays and graduations.”

  I stared at him.

  “I have been instructed,” he continued, “to spare no expense when it comes to clearing up this little spot of misunderstanding.”

  “Uncle Alan?” I barely knew the man.

  “I believe his exact words were ‘That young lady’s as good as they come, this whole thing is obviously a complete crock, and I expect you to get out there and start kicking some serious ass on her behalf.’”

  I started to tear up, speechless.

  Markham touched his hand to the glass. “Madeline, that ‘small preppy world’ thing? There are times when it doesn’t suck. This would be one of them.”

  What with all the puking and fever and everything, it was only then that the enormity of my situation really really sank in.

  All I knew from Cartwright was that my fingerprints had been found on the outside of Fay’s and Mooney’s cups. Which had to mean I’d been right on the money about there being a quantifiably mongo parts-per-million ratio of nasty-ass-toxic-shit to sticky-punch dregs inside those cups.

  Unfortunately, it now struck me as pretty damn obvious that Cartwright had figured me for the one who’d put it there.

  My prints on the cups.

  My prints on Fay’s necklace.

  My prints on file in connection with those other murders back in Syracuse.

  I wanted to believe that my having been the one to step forward and tell Cartwright that these two kids’ deaths weren’t suicides might serve as a mark in my favor.

  Hard belief to maintain when you’ve just spent the last twenty-four hours puking your guts up in a six-by-ten cell, arrested on suspicion of having committed a double murder.

  But still, you’d have to be insane to actively dissuade the cops from closing out their investigation on a pair of murders you’d actually committed.

  Crazier still to make sure the police lab didn’t miss out on the poison or the broken necklace in your pocket that had belonged to one of the victims.

  I mean, who wouldn’t want to get away with crimes like that, have them successfully written off as “tragic teenage suicides,” case closed? Who wouldn’t have just said, “Suicides. Yup. Those kids had been on the verge of offing themselves since, like, forever. We all knew it.”

  Who wouldn’t have let sleeping dogs lie?

  Nobody, for God’s sake. You’d have to be certifiable.

  Only maybe in Cartwright’s mind, that’s what I was.

  I mean, he could perfectly well see me as a teacher from “that crazy school.” Another whack job frolicking on the peak of Wifflehead Mountain, when she wasn’t doing therapy up the 24/7 yin-yang.

  Not to mention the daughter of a guy who thought ninjas were after him, when he wasn’t worried about the goddamn KGB reading his goddamn mail.

  No wonder Cartwright’d had Baker cuff me.

  I was lucky they hadn’t taken me down with a nice fat Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom elephant dart of Thorazine in my own living room, just to be on the safe side.

  “Markham?” I said. “I gotta tell you, I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “This is a fine mess, but I don’t believe the two of us will have a lick of trouble getting you out of it.”

  He gave me a reassuringly Churchillian smile.r />
  “Next time you see your godfather, however,” he said, “you might want to kiss his ring.”

  23

  Markham drove me home to Pittsfield.

  “I didn’t want to worry you before we got you sprung from the joint,” he said once we’d climbed into his car, “but it seems you gave your husband the flu.”

  “A patient and long-suffering man, my husband.”

  “I’m sure he is, but I would all the same appreciate it if you tried not to breathe in my general direction, now that we are not separated by a wall of glass.”

  “I hope I’m not still contagious.”

  “It’s not so much that I am fastidious about germs,” he said, “but that I should perhaps have had the forethought to bring you a toothbrush.”

  I snapped a hand over my mouth. “Oh, crap, Markham,” I mumbled. “I beg your pardon.”

  “May I offer you some chewing gum? I believe I may have a few sticks of Doublemint, there in the glove box.”

  He drove fast and well. Fancy-ass car, too. Big Beamer. It was like traveling aboard a large gazelle, one with excellent suspension. Made the previous twenty-four hours seem exceedingly unreal.

  “Did all of that just actually happen?” I asked.

  “You being in jail? Sadly, I believe it did. Now we must attend to making sure you don’t ever have to return.”

  “I’d appreciate that a great deal,” I said.

  “Fine and dandy with me. It’s always a pleasure to have the same goal as my clients, tell you what.” He said that like “whut,” and I could hear the H loud and clear.

  “So what next?” I asked.

  “We should go over what you know so far, starting with how you ended up at such a questionable establishment in the first place.”

  “The jail?”

  “The school, honey lamb,” he said. “How did a young lady like you end up in such an appalling excuse for an educational institution, not to mention at the mercy of the horrifically vulgar ‘Dr.’ Santangelo? ‘Doctor’ being an honorific that man should be ashamed to employ.”

  “He’s not a doctor?”

  “I believe he took a degree in comparative astrology,” said Markham. “Since I doubt he was bright enough to tackle semiotics.”