A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  “Your friend Nita—”

  “Not my friend anymore. I hate people who don’t finish what they start. You can’t count on her. She thought it was a good idea and then—did she tell you? Is that how come you’re here? Those stupid poems? Her stupid hints?”

  I didn’t blame Nita for being afraid of Allie. Allie scared me, too.

  “Nobody was supposed to—nobody ever meant—”

  I didn’t bother to look over and see which boy had spoken.

  “We aren’t like you think,” another boy said softly.

  “But you were—” I had to take deep breaths before I could finish. “You were forcing your friend, your teammate off the roof, goading him to suicide—do you realize you nearly murdered him?” More deep breaths.

  One of the robed figures ran toward the edge of the roof and doubled over, sick.

  “What—what happens now?” Allie wailed. “What happens to us now?”

  I didn’t have an answer. What I hoped happened was that they began to grow up, but along with that, I thought the worst had already happened. They were all casualties now. Seth would face the least official punishment, but of them all, he was perhaps the most wounded. It is anything but easy to recover from betrayal by those you thought your friends. I suspect it takes close to a lifetime.

  The bass below at the party throbbed into the night like a subterranean heartbeat.

  “Think about what nearly happened, about what you nearly did, and what you nearly became,” I said, though it hurt to speak. “Think about what you already have done to others and to yourselves while you walk downstairs in an orderly fashion. Do you hear that music? Good, because what happens now is: You’re going to face it.”

  “What happens” covers a whole lot of time. Forever, perhaps. Where do cause and effect end? A butterfly changes course in Guatemala and there’s a tsunami in Asia.

  A group of arrogant teens decide to force a teacher to quit because he’s grading them too harshly and then, because he’s crossed an imaginary line they set, because he’s bringing the date of his choice to a party, they decide to frame a friend for their pranks. Two birds with one stone, as Allie said.

  And the waves that bird or stone set off continue to stir the air and a prank backfires horribly, maiming and nearly killing a teacher.

  And the scapegoat catches on and is horrified and furious and lets them know he’s going to report the fact that the chemistry lab explosion was not an accident. Unintended, but the conditions for it had been set up deliberately.

  And mass hysteria, the madness of crowds—something—propels them onto the roof to persuade him to remain silent. Or to jump.

  So what happened next was beyond my ability to know. What happened immediately was that all six of them admitted planning to set the sodium in the lab. Wilson ran it in, but he was no more than their courier.

  They only wanted to further infuriate Juan Reyes and never thought he’d turn water onto the sodium block. They should have included Seth in their plans. He was a good student. He might have thought ahead, considered the possibilities.

  They did not.

  As for me, I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll erase that scene on the roof and what it meant. I look back now on my anxiety and worries about the seniors this week and my imagination seems so limited and innocent. I’d raced there fearing a scene of humiliation for Seth or, at worst, another fistfight.

  It sounds so Leave It to Beaver now to me, but I wish I could rewind back to that point, those ideas.

  The current and future medical bills and lost income Juan Reyes suffered—because he was now on the road to a difficult but real recovery—became the responsibility of the students involved in the series of pranks including the sodium planting, and of their parents.

  And somewhere in the bedlam, I had a chance to ask, “Why me? Why the stolen exam?”

  “It wasn’t stolen,” Allie said sullenly. “Never was.”

  “But why me? Did you want me to quit, too?”

  She shook her head. “We wanted somebody to pay attention and at least get Seth in trouble and Mr. Reyes wouldn’t. We knew you would and maybe then he would.” Her voice lowered to the mumble again. “It made sense back then.”

  Back then, four days ago, when we were all so much younger.

  She looked directly at me. “And in a way, it worked. You paid attention.”

  Seth told me two things late in the evening, after all the parents who could be summoned had gathered and questions of guilt and innocence had been answered as best as they could be. The first was that he did not want to press charges. “I don’t know what they’d be,” he said. “And I don’t want anything from them anymore. All I want is to finish this year and get on with my life.”

  And later, outside on the sidewalk, when Mackenzie had come along with the entire cast of the dinner party to retrieve me—we were all, plus Pip, going to an all-night diner to find food for me—Seth pulled away from his parents and said, “Excuse me. There’s something I want to say.” He looked around, and I was afraid whatever he had in mind would be censored or silenced by the presence of strangers, or perhaps simply by the sight of Sasha, still nothing short of incredible in her orange get-up and a black fur stole.

  But I should have realized Seth was not that easily daunted. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say it, and now it seems crazy, but right then, I felt as if—I felt so—They’d been my friends, my best friends, and then, for a minute, it seemed easier to just let go—of them, of everything.” He cleared his throat and nodded. “I think you saved my life,” he added softly.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I understand, but you saved yourself, and I’m beyond glad that you didn’t give in to that feeling, that moment. You’ll find better friends. True friends.”

  He smiled, nodded, stood up straight, and walked off with his parents.

  “Kew-ell,” Pip said later at the diner. “It’s just like you said—anybody could kill if they thought it would save their lives.”

  “Didn’t think Amanda would provide a laboratory demo for the theory, though, did you?” Mackenzie said.

  “I knew being a detective was more exciting than you pretended it was,” Pip said.

  “Maybe being a teacher is more exciting than you think.”

  Pip was too polite to say what he thought of that idea.

  “All right, then,” Sasha said, “if you saved a life, I will forgive you for missing dinner.”

  “Pip,” I said, “you’re going to make a great detective someday yourself. You called this one. When I described all those confusing things going on, you were the one who realized they might not have anything to do with the real problem, which, you said, could be a feud. And you were close to the mark.”

  He grinned. “As soon as I get my diploma.”

  Mackenzie whispered, “Cheryl told him she wouldn’t date a dropout. He says he’s coming back next summer to woo her more, but meanwhile, he’s goin’ home Sunday.”

  Which is to say that somethings do work out on their own—even when the participants are teenagers. My view of adolescents was balanced and brightened. My view of the future also looked a bit less congested and complicated. I hadn’t been fired, and I hadn’t compromised myself, either. I was going to hang on doing just that as long as I could.

  I plowed through the diner’s gargantuan servings of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and ice cream. I enjoyed the conversation that whirled around me, but I barely participated, happy with my soft, amenable foods. Soon I’d be as comfortable as an oversized sofa and about the same width.

  “Tell me,” Mackenzie said when I’d finished. “How did you know what was goin’ on up on that roof? All week you showed me things that meant nothin’. Not a piece of those bad poems and meaningless scraps would hold up in court, so what was it really about?”

  How to answer? Three drunken lugs grabbing me and my accidentally looking up?

  Or realizing the poems were trash, but not meaningless tr
ash.

  Or knowing that Nita and Allie should not have been at each other all week long.

  Or that Seth was not himself.

  Or listening to fragments—that some people weren’t welcome at the party, or filling in the blanks on the note that told somebody to not panic.

  Or using pure and simple common sense.

  Or . . .

  Mackenzie looked grim. “So Freud—who has been discredited, you know—had this theory that men marry their mothers.”

  “Oedipus did.”

  “We’re talkin’ here in metaphors. Psychologically. So did I?”

  “I dress much more conservatively than your mother. And I don’t intend to have eight children. And you need not blind yourself.”

  He nodded. “But how did you know to rush out of Sasha’s—she told me—to get to those kids up on the roof? Only thing I can figure is you’re one, too. Are you?”

  “What?”

  He raised one eyebrow and looked at me.

  “A witch?”

  “What else?”

  I considered the idea. It had worked like a charm for Gabby Mackenzie and it saved lots of explaining about the three lugs and the rest. About anything you didn’t feel like explaining, in fact. “You think her wedding gift to me was sharing her secrets?”

  “Was it?”

  I smiled. “Do you think I’d witch and tell?” I tapped my watch. “It’s after midnight. Happy Halloween, the new major holiday. And this year, we’ve got a lot to celebrate.”

  “Yeah,” Pip said. “You broke the Case of the Fake Disability, and saved a kid’s life.”

  The group of us clicked our glasses of soda, iced tea, and beer respectively and toasted Halloween and sleuthing.

  It felt almost like Nick and Nora’s life, if they’d found themselves in a diner eating meat loaf on Halloween.

  It felt close enough.

  About the Author

  GILLIAN ROBERTS won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery for Caught Dead in Philadelphia. She is also the author of Philly Stakes, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia, With Friends Like These . . . , How I Spent My Summer Vacation, In the Dead of Summer, The Mummers’ Curse, The Bluest Blood, Adam and Evil, Helen Hath No Fury, Claire and Present Danger, and Till the End of Tom. Formerly an English teacher in Philadelphia, Gillian Roberts now lives in California. Her website address is www.GillianRoberts.com—and she enjoys receiving fan e-mail at Judygilly@aol.com.

  BY GILLIAN ROBERTS

  Caught Dead in Philadelphia

  Philly Stakes

  I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

  With Friends Like These . . .

  How I Spent My Summer Vacation

  In the Dead of Summer

  The Mummers’ Curse

  The Bluest Blood

  Adam and Evil

  Helen Hath No Fury

  Claire and Present Danger

  Till the End of Tom

  A Hole in Juan

  A HOLE IN JUAN is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Judith Greber

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roberts, Gillian.

  A hole in Juan : an Amanda Pepper mystery / Gillian Roberts.

  p. cm.

  1. Pepper, Amanda (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Preparatory school teachers—Fiction. 3. Women teachers—Fiction. 4. Halloween—Fiction.

  5. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R356H65 2006

  813′.54—dc22 2005053175

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-49087-2

  v3.0