The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  “Mindy going, too?”

  “Already down there,” she said. “Canopy bed and all.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s just gross.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  We sat there in silence, sharing a long moment of mutual disgust.

  “Do you want some coffee?” she asked when we couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Love it,” I said.

  She got up and bustled toward the kitchen, thank God, reaching for the can of Bustelo. A convert.

  “How’d it go this morning?” she called back over her shoulder as she filled the carafe under the kitchen faucet. “You feel okay about that new shrink?”

  I’d had my first appointment with a doctor in Williamstown that morning. Someone who’d never even heard of Santangelo.

  I still couldn’t believe I was ready to give therapy another shot, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  “He seems okay,” I said. “For a shrink.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “I didn’t say much at first. Just walked into his office and started crying.”

  “How’d he handle that?”

  I laughed, not in a particularly happy way. “He watched me for a while, and then, after about five minutes, he said, ‘Do you feel this way all the time?’”

  “I hope you told him yes,” she said.

  I stood up and walked over to the window, watched the cars duking it out in the North Street rotary four stories down.

  “I did,” I said. “’Fessed right up.”

  I turned back around, lounging against the wall with both elbows propped on the high sill.

  Lulu opened a cabinet, pulling two mugs off the second shelf. “Did he ask you why?”

  “You know, I figured once I admitted to him that I was pretty much constantly weeping, we’d get right back into the whole ‘and how does that make you feel,’ routine.”

  “Of course.” Lulu checked the progress of the brewing, then turned to lean on the pass-through, waiting for me to go on.

  “Thing is,” I said, “that’s not how it went at all.”

  I walked over to the table, grabbed my Camels. “Want one?”

  Lulu shook her head.

  “Kind of knocked me for a loop,” I said, shaking out a smoke from the near-empty pack, “his actual response.”

  I flicked the lighter, took a drag, exhaled. “Left field, et cetera.”

  She waited.

  “Well,” I said, “first he wanted to know how long I’d felt like this, so I said probably since I was nine years old, off and on.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “So then he said he figured I was clinically depressed.”

  I tapped my ash onto the plate I’d reserved for the purpose.

  “I said I’d tried therapy before,” I continued, “but that I’d never really felt like it made any difference.”

  The coffee was done.

  “Guy said he wasn’t a bit surprised,” I said, settling into the sofa, “since talk therapy doesn’t do crap for depression.”

  “No shit?” she said, shaking her head. “And after we went through all that damn Kleenex.”

  She filled our mugs and ferried them out to the living room.

  “He told me there’s this new drug,” I said. “Prozac.”

  Lulu nestled against the armrest at the other end of the sofa, bare feet toward me, mug propped on her knees.

  “Think you’ll give it a try?” she asked.

  I slid my mug onto the side table and arched my back so I could fish the brown plastic bottle out of my pocket.

  When I’d wrestled off the childproof cap, I shook two capsules out into my palm.

  Pretty little things, those pills—one end jade green, the other tinted somewhere between butter and old scrimshaw.

  “I’ll try anything once,” I said. “You?”

  “Much obliged,” she said.

  We plucked our respective doses from my palm, then washed them down with Bustelo.

  “Ah,” said Lulu, “I feel better already.”

  “Hard to feel worse.”

  She clinked my mug with hers. “Amen to that.”

  “You’re going to stay for Thanksgiving, right?”

  “I want to avoid the Jell-O salad and scrapple at home for as long as I can.”

  I was glad, since Markham said he’d come back out from Boston. I was hoping the two of them might hook up before she went back to work at the Econo Lodge.

  Dean was still working at GE, and they said he could count on it going through December. I had a job lined up after Christmas—teaching ESL at a boarding school in Williamstown. They’d never heard of Santangelo, either, and the kids I’d met there called me Ms. Dare.

  Part VII

  Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. . .

  John Gillespie McGee, Jr.

  “High Flight”

  41

  Sitzman and Wiesner sat on top of the ridge, high above campus.

  It had snowed again. The air was crisp and dry, sharp in their throats. Cold as you’d expect on Thanksgiving.

  “What if he’s not coming out?” asked Sitzman.

  “He’s coming out,” said Wiesner. “You heard what Forchetti said.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind,” said Sitzman. “I would. It’s goddamn cold.”

  “Don’t start going all pussy on me.”

  Sitzman shrugged. “I’m not. No guarantees about Santangelo.”

  “He’s not going to change his mind,” said Wiesner.

  “Listen,” said Sitzman, “if he doesn’t come out in the next half hour—”

  “There he is. I told you.”

  Sitzman squinted. “Where?”

  “Dining hall.” Wiesner pointed.

  “I don’t see him.”

  “He just went behind that hedge.”

  Below them, the fuchsia blob of Santangelo emerged from cover.

  He crossed the newly plowed driveway, making for the twenty-foot square of helipad, just right of center on the snow-covered grass.

  Sitzman shivered, thoughtful. “He’s not going up with that instructor today, right?”

  “Forchetti overheard them saying he was all set to go solo. His first time.”

  Santangelo paused at the lip of the concrete to admire his fancy toy, the Bell 206B-3 JetRanger III. Little snub-nosed budgie-looking thing, white with two-tone-blue stripe swooshing along its undercarriage and up to the tail boom.

  The man in pink waddled around to the pilot’s door and flung it wide, struggling for a second to hoist himself up into the cockpit.

  “Couple more doughnuts and he’d need a forklift,” said Wiesner.

  The door hung open. Maybe Santangelo was taking a minute to pant a little after such exertion.

  The guys on the ridge couldn’t see inside to tell. They watched a pink-clad arm reach out for the door handle finally, pulling it to.

  They heard a distant whine as the pilot’s left hand twisted his collective’s throttle grip.

  No instructor, no guidance. First time.

  The rotors started moving slowly, looking slightly soft until their increasing rpm’s lifted them stiff, then made them blur—the pitch of the engine’s shrill voice rising, as did the slender blades themselves.

  The pilot raised the collective to pick up the bird, rotor disk coning, downwash blowing snow outward to denude grass, crisp and brown, across a widening circle.

  The left skid was last off the ground, hanging low as tail rotor pushed craft toward the right. The fledgling pilot overcompensated with his left pedal, making the Bell’s nose jerk to port.

  The boys watched him wallow in the air—drifting and bouncing like a tired yo-yo—until he got the craft in trim.

  With the cyclic now pushed forward, the bird nosed over to pick up airspeed, slipping the surly bonds of earth as its pilot pulled up on the collective. />
  “Not yet,” said Sitzman.

  “Not by a long shot. We want him up there.”

  Fifteen feet. Twenty.

  The two-man audience didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

  The chopper came level with the flat roof of the dining hall at last, then the more graceful chimneys of the Mansion.

  Sixty feet and rising.

  It lifted above the farthest, tallest trees in the surrounding woods.

  Up, straight up.

  As it drew close to the boys’ eye level, the pad of Wiesner’s thumb moved slowly across a button at the center of a lopsided remote he’d cobbled together out of wire and tape and solder and plastic, with batteries sticking out its side.

  He touched it again, that button. A caress.

  “Lifts,” he said, pressing the half-inch disk of plastic downward.

  At the juncture of tail boom and fuel tank, a blasting cap detonated General Electric’s missing wad of C-4 explosive.

  “And separates,” said Wiesner as eighty gallons of aviation kerosene blossomed orange with a deep, resonant whomp.

  The shock wave rocked the two boys, flattening their hair back and away from their faces. Making them scrunch their eyes shut.

  When they looked again, there was little left of David Santangelo’s Bell 206B-3 JetRanger III, or of David Santangelo himself.

  There was only the hunk of turbine housing plummeting back into those surly bonds, surrounded by a slow rain of flaming bits—none bigger than a fist—dropping and arcing and sometimes even corkscrewing down onto the glittering white expanse of campus.

  Little circles of snow melted away around each on contact.

  “Will you look at that,” said grinning Wiesner, who, it must be remembered, really, really liked to blow shit up. “In excelsis David.”

  Sitzman shook his shaggy Saint Bernard head slowly, back and forth.

  Finally, he was moved to say a single word—one syllable, so drawn out by the shock and reverence and horror with which its speaker brimmed that the sound of it seemed to linger and shimmer on the very air, until the utterance dissipated like the steamy, curling puff of breath expelled along with it.

  The word was “Fuck.”

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to:

  Charles King and Lee Child, most of all.

  Mandy! For the helicopter!!!! May you top the windswept heights with easy grace. (If Dwight’s amenable to that kind of thing, in the Cantina.)

  My family, especially my daughters Grace and Lila, my sister Freya, my aunt Julie and uncle Bill Hoyt, and my splendid mom, Deborah.

  The wonderful people at Grand Central Publishing, who have been such a pleasure to work with: Susan Richman, Celia Johnson, Les Pockell, Jamie Raab, and Tareth Mitch. And of course the erstwhile Kristen Weber.

  The excellent duo of Michelle and Catherine Lapautre.

  Members of the wondrous Mysterious Writ, my writing group: Charles King, Karen Murphy, Sharon Johnson, Marilyn MacGregor, and Daisy Johnson. Without whom I would never have started the first book, or finished the second.

  And of the group that will SOMEDAY meet again: Bob Young and Gaylene Givens, Dave Damianakes, Heidi Kriz.

  The independent bookstores which have been so kind and supportive about my first book, and whom I hope will like my second: Mark “Bitsy Ramone” Farley (aka Bookseller to the Stars), London; Elaine and Bill Petrocelli of Book Passage, Corte Madera, California (and Karen and Hannah and Reese and all y’all cool people); Ed Kaufman and gang of M is for Mystery in San Mateo, California; Bobby and Linda at The Mystery Bookstore, Los Angeles, California; EVERYONE at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego and at Mysteries to Die For, Thousand Oaks, California; Bill and Lynne Reed of Misty Valley Books, Chester, Vermont; Barbara Peters and the most excellent people of Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona; and the tremendously kind staff of Houston’s Murder By the Book, who very nicely did not mention having overheard me throw up a few minutes before the signing. And, last but assuredly not least, Janine and Fran and Tammy at Seattle Mystery Books—especially Janine for greeting me at Sea-Tac with my very own green plastic beach bucket, having heard about the whole throwing-up-from-nerves-right-before-the-signing-in-Houston thing. And thank you to Cody’s in Berkeley, most especially the inimitable Tova Zeff.

  Hillary Huber, the goddess of all things relating to voice talent, telegrams, Pucci sandals, and daughters of renegade dads. Pat Fraley for the spookily perfect music on the audio version and the wonderful stories over sushi.

  Alice Hoffman my favorite newfound cousin, MBH—Mags, dude! Someday we have to figure out how we’re related, and that goes for Auntie NZ, too . . .

  My blogmates at nakedauthors.com: Patty Smiley, Paul Levine, James Grippando (at large), Jim Born, and Our J, Jacqueline Winspear.

  Rae and Maggie and Deanie and Heidi and Dot and Stuart and Sneaky Thief and Janine (again) and all the cool Reacher Creatures.

  My band, the Sad Anoraks: Andi Shechter (and Stu) and Shaz Wheeler and Louise Ure.

  Writer peeps who have been there when most needed: Sandra Ruttan, Ken Bruen, Martha O’Connor, Joshilyn Jackson (We’ll always have Paris. And Nicole.), Laura Lippman, and Cara Black.

  Sarah Weinman, Jon and Ruth Jordan, David Thayer, Lesa Holstine, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Michael Leone.

  Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, sister friend.

  Luan Keller, who survived it with me and is an endlessly fine friend and boon companion.

  Candace Andrews, friend without equal (in a good way). And of course if you hadn’t worked there first, I wouldn’t have a book.

  And finally, Rolph Blythe. I hope it goes well for you at Gray Wolf.