Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa - Jersey Girl 01 - New Math Is Murder

by Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa

  “Will it be in every paper?”

  “Probably just the Tranquil Harbor edition,” I told him.

  Da Silva looked disappointed. “I guess that’s better than nothing.”

  “It’s a local interest story,” I explained.

  Da Silva nodded.

  “I heard you were nominated for the Teacher of the Year award.” I said.

  “Yes, I was.” He brightened up.

  “Congratulations,” I said, and pulled out my pad and wrote it down to remind myself to include it in the article. “Wasn’t Jason Whitley also nominated?”

  “Yes,” he responded again with a nod.

  “I wonder if that might have had something to do with his murder?” I looked directly at Da Silva.

  Da Silva looked away for a moment, then back at me. He seemed anxious, maybe even scared. “You don’t think someone is killing off the nominees, do you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Suppose someone wants all the nominees dead so they can be Teacher of the Year?”

  “Not to downplay the honor, but it’s not exactly the Nobel Peace Prize,” I told him. “I don’t think any of the other nominees feel threatened. I’m sure the police are looking into the possibility, though.”

  “It’s scary. The Harbor isn’t as safe as it used to be,” Da Silva said.

  I shoved my notebook back in my bag. “Really, Mr. Da Silva, I don’t think you have to worry about a crazed lunatic killing off the nominees. Maybe you’re reading too many mysteries.”

  “I don’t read ’em,” Da Silva told me. “But why else would someone kill Jason Whitley?” he paused. “What’s your theory?”

  “I have many theories, but I doubt any of them would hold water.”

  “Hold water!” Da Silva said. “That’s pretty funny coming from you.”

  I wondered if every aspect of my life would be fair game for the entire town. “Who told you about my little swim in the bay?”

  “Ron Haver mentioned it when he dropped by yesterday to question the faculty,” he said.

  I ended the interview and met Kate in the hallway for the second half of our excursion. We retraced our route back to the small corridor and the main office.

  There was no sign of Kevin Sheffield in the hall. Betty Vernon stepped out of the guidance office, finished for the day. She was dressed in an outrageous neon pink suit. The skirt came to mid-thigh and the jacket, though not exceptionally tight, was shocking in that she wore no blouse or chemise beneath it.

  “Mrs. Caruso!” she said, delighted, as though she hadn’t seen me in months.

  “Hi, Miss Vernon. I’m glad I ran into you. I wanted to thank you for meeting with Sara. Your chat has her thinking about her grades instead of making excuses for them.”

  Betty Vernon walked toward us. “Sara’s a bright girl. I hope she’s not the reason you’re up at the high school so late.”

  “Nothing to do with Sara, thank God. How about you? What has you still here?” I asked. “We saw your little argument with Mr. Sheffield. I was wondering if something serious is going on.”

  “Nothing too serious,” she said. “The seniors are having trouble raising funds for their class trip, and a few of us stayed to offer suggestions. We tried. They’re just not thrilled with holding car washes—unless the girls can wear bikinis! That idiot Sheffield sided with them.”

  I laughed. “I’m here because I had to interview Stanley Da Silva for a story.”

  “Would that be for the Teacher of the Year award nomination or the stupid basketball clinic?” she asked.

  Kate chuckled, and I introduced her to the guidance counselor. Betty Vernon used the cinderblock wall for support and demurely crossed her ankles as she checked out my sister’s outfit, probably comparing it to the Pepto-Bismol garb she wore. I couldn’t recall ever seeing shocking pink spike heels on anyone but the Barbie doll I had when I was eight years old.

  “I came about the basketball clinic,” I told her.

  “I thought you might be looking for Jason Whitley leads,” she said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  Miss Vernon pursed her pink lips. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess because your best friend is now considered the prime suspect.”

  How could this creature possibly know that Bevin was under suspicion? I knew Haver wouldn’t have told her, and Ken Rhodes didn’t even know Betty Vernon.

  “Don’t look so shocked, ladies. It stands to reason Bevin Thompson would be the prime suspect. Jason told me way back in January he was seeing a very hot redhead. He was bragging, of course. Rubbing my nose in it, so to speak.”

  Kate grimaced at the remark. A disgusting image popped into my head that I blocked out immediately.

  “Wouldn’t that put you at the top of list, Miss Vernon?” Kate asked. “Jealousy is a powerful motive.”

  Betty Vernon shook her head. “I’m not a jealous woman. And it just so happens I dumped Jason Whitley. He didn’t dump me.” She turned on her pink heel and stormed off.

  Kate smiled, pleased with herself for goading the woman. I grabbed her arm and we continued down the hall, pausing briefly at the door to the main office. Kevin Sheffield was busy behind the attendance desk, stuffing envelopes in the teachers’ mail slots. I didn’t imagine the deep flush in Sheffield’s cheeks when he saw me. Was it guilt or embarrassment at being caught fighting with Betty?

  “Let’s keep moving,” Kate whispered. She gave me a healthy push for emphasis.

  The large corridor that led to both the auditorium and the front entrance gave direct access to the school library. A skinny young janitor lethargically pushed a wet mop back and forth outside the auditorium’s center doors. Two other custodians sat on a bench and sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups. The men barely glanced in our direction. We reached the library unchallenged and found our luck had held out. The doors were propped wide open.

  “No lights,” Kate said.

  “We can’t switch them on or the cleaning crew might get curious.”

  Kate dug inside her cute little designer purse and pulled out a finger-sized flashlight. “At least I come prepared.”

  “You couldn’t bring a bigger flashlight?” I asked. “How are we supposed to find one book out of thousands with that little thing? And you absolutely had to wear those sandals? Did you figure we’d go dancing after we swiped the yearbook?”

  Kate turned on me. “If you’re so smart, why didn’t you bring a flashlight?”

  She had me there. The thought had never entered my mind.

  Just beyond the library doors, I spotted the tall, plastic antitheft devices.

  “Are those detector things turned off?” I asked my sister.

  She shrugged. “If the doors are propped open, I guess they shut the security system down to clean in there. There’s only one way to find out.”

  We went through the open doors and crept past the security device. Kate snapped her penlight on and pointed it toward the bookcases beyond the checkout desk. “Just remember, going in isn’t the problem,” she reminded me. “It’s sneaking a book past it when we come out that will set it off—if it’s still on.”

  “Okay, genius, where do they keep the yearbooks?” I asked.

  The reference section was in the rear of the library, about fifteen bookcase rows back from the front desk. Kate kept the thin beam pointed at the floor to light our way. It offered only murky illumination.

  “Just follow me,” she said.

  “But I can’t see anything. We’ll never find the yearbook in all this dark.”

  Kate got halfway down the aisle and dropped to the floor to crawl on her hands and knees. “Sure we will.”

  “Are you nuts? This isn’t guerrilla warfare. We’re looking for a book, not snipers,” I told her.

  Kate ignored me and kept going. I found myself alone near the checkout desk. I got halfway down the aisle and jammed my big toe against a solid bookcase. My sister had the right idea. I got on my hands and knees and grovel
ed toward the reference section.

  “Hey! Get over here!” Kate croaked in a hushed, Fleming-Irish whisper. “I think I found the yearbooks!”

  I felt my way down the aisle and turned left at the end of the row. Ahead, I could just about make out my kid sister. She was flat on her stomach, pulling yearbook after yearbook off the bottom-row shelves.

  For a few seconds, Tranquil Harbor Regional High School was silent. There were no sounds coming from the other side of the open library doors and no footsteps overhead on the second floor. Even my breath seemed nonexistent. Then a page rustled softly as Kate turned it, a muffled laugh echoed from the bench where the janitors gathered, and a dull thud came from somewhere behind us.

  I stopped and turned my head. I couldn’t see a thing down the dark aisle, but there shouldn’t have been anything to see. The janitors were all near the auditorium. Kate and I were alone in the library.

  “Katie, I think there’s someone else in here,” I said, crawling faster and dragging my Samsonite-luggage-size pocketbook with me.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered.

  I reached my sister and she took my bag, opened it, and slipped a tall, thick yearbook inside. She zipped the bag closed.

  I heard another thud, closer this time. Really close.

  “Did you hear that?” I hissed.

  Before she could answer, the bookcase lurched. With a groan, the huge unit tipped over, falling toward us. Books and magazines, freed from their shelves, rained down.

  A tremendous crash shook the room.

  Kate yelped, more out of surprise than pain. We were squashed against the floor, buried in yearbooks and periodicals. The back of my head ached, where a particularly heavy book had hit me.

  I poked my head out of the pile.

  A set of sturdy wooden carrels had stopped the falling bookcase, saving us from death by oak shelving.

  I heard someone run out of the library, and a small stampede of far-off thunder coming from the direction of the auditorium.

  “My hand!” I cried, struggling to free my hand from between a massive book and Kate’s sharp hip bone.

  “Get off of me!” Kate yelled.

  I shoved books aside with my free hand. “I’m stuck, you feeb!”

  The florescent lights sprang to life. “Jesus, Mary and Emma!” a potbellied janitor declared. “What’s going on here?”

  Kate and I stopped bickering and looked up. Three surprised, angry custodians stood over us. We had just created hours of work for them with all the books and periodicals spread across the floor. They wouldn’t have to face another ho-hum night with nothing more pressing to do than put fresh rolls of toilet paper on the spindles in the lavatories.

  “What are you two ladies doing here?” the potbellied man asked.

  My spur-of-the-moment explanations always sounded like lies, but Kate majored in tall tales.

  “I lost my ring!” she told him.

  “Here in the library? In the dark? This part of the building is closed at night. It’s off limits!”

  Kate shook her head. “We were coming from a meeting with Mr. Da Silva and got lost. My ring slipped off my finger and rolled through the open doors.”

  “All the way back here?” the man asked.

  “We didn’t see it up front, so we figured it just kept rolling.”

  “Why didn’t you just turn on the lights?” one of the younger janitors asked.

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Because we couldn’t find the light switch in the dark! I guess we bumped into the bookcase or something. I don’t understand how it could topple over on us like that.”

  The story sounded so improbable that it could have been true. Even I started to believe it.

  The younger men lifted the bookcase off us, and the potbellied custodian extended his hands to help us up off the floor.

  “You girls could have been killed for all your trouble. What kind of ring did you say you lost?”

  * * *

  We left the custodians in the library still looking for the ring and walked down the corridor toward the front of the building. Kate had a slight limp, but she still refused to remove her sandals.

  “I can walk just as fast in them,” she insisted.

  The hallway looked like such a long hike, and we were fighting off pain. There was a door on our right with an EXIT sign over it and I thought, what’s the harm? I turned the knob and we went inside.

  “What’s this?” Kate asked over my shoulder. “I don’t remember this.”

  I didn’t remember it either, but back when we attended classes at Harbor Regional, the purpose of the room wasn’t county mandated yet. Shoved along the walls were six huge containers filled to the brim with discarded papers.

  Along the far wall was another EXIT sign, and I knew the door beneath it would lead to the side of the building.

  “This isn’t a shortcut,” I told Kate. “If we open that door, alarms will go off all over the place. This must be some sort of holding area for recyclables.”

  I turned back to the main corridor to leave and found the potbellied janitor from our library fiasco with his hands on his hips, staring at us.

  “And just what was it you girls lost in here?” he asked.

  “Just our way,” I told him, this time truthfully. “I thought this was a shortcut to the side of the building. We’re sorry, Mr., um …”

  “Lynch. Johnny Lynch,” the custodian told us. “The shredder truck pulls up to that side door to get the papers.”

  “The shredder truck?” Kate and I both said.

  “These bins are for confidential papers. Don’t you gals know nothing? They need to be shredded before they can be recycled. This room is supposed to be off-limits and everyone walks right in here like it’s Grand Central Station!”

  I checked the door. There wasn’t a NO ADMITTANCE or DO NOT ENTER sign, and nothing to indicate the room was off-limits to anyone.

  “Do the kids come in here to cut class?” Kate asked, probably remembering her old high school days.

  “The teachers come here! They breeze right in and dig through the bins for things they threw out by mistake. Why, I caught that Mr. Whitley in here leafing through those papers the very night before he died!” Mr. Lynch said.

  “Any idea what he was looking for?” I asked, wondering what confidential papers were so important that Whitley had to dig through the trash for them.

  Lynch thought it over. “I forget what you call them, but there were some kind of tests in his hand. He said he accidentally threw them away.”

  “Like photocopied test papers?” Kate wondered.

  The custodian shook his head. “Nothing like that. Regular tests don’t get recycled. He had a bunch of those booklet-things in his hand. You know the kind I mean? The ones where you fill in the ovals with No. 2 pencils.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I told the janitor, leaving the room. “Thanks anyway. If we go straight down this corridor, will we get to the parking lot sometime before Christmas?”

  “Yeah, straight down and bear left,” he said. “It’ll lead you right to the front doors.”

  * * *

  Outside the school, I patted my pocketbook and the yearbook within. My hand throbbed, and the top of my head hurt, likely from the book that bounced off of it when the shelves tipped over on us.

  Kate and I crossed the narrow road where the school buses dropped off the students. My sister’s cute little Nissan Z Roadster was parked in the last row of the lot reserved for teachers. As much as I missed having my own car, I sure didn’t mind cruising around town in my sister’s sports car.

  “Who do you think dumped that bookcase on us?” Kate asked me.

  “It wasn’t a janitor, that’s for sure. Maybe Da Silva or Kevin Sheffield. But someone waited and followed us.”

  Kate laughed. “You do have a way with people, Colleen.”

  “Oh, look who’s talking!”

  “Be nice, will you? Everything hurts,” she sai
d. “Thank God I didn’t break a heel. These shoes cost a small fortune! My flashlight’s a goner though. I don’t even remember where I got it. It’ll be hard to find another one that small.”

  After all we’d been through, my sister had the nerve to complain about her crummy flashlight.

  “Do me a favor, Kate. Just shut up.”

  “You shut up!”

  “Look, we’re not kids anymore,” I said. “Let’s not fight, okay? I just want to get out of here. Can you drive?”

  Kate massaged her tender hip and limped along on her pricey shoes. “Yeah, I can drive. I guess the smartest thing we can do tonight is head straight home and go to bed. I hate this parking lot at night. It’s so dark around here. All these trees and shrubs! It creeps me out.”

  The lot did look creepy at night—especially the wide, landscaped strip of land that served as a noise buffer between the parking lot and the soccer field. The holly, English boxwood, yews, and junipers all retained their leaves throughout the winter and had overgrown with the warm spring temperatures. They provided enough privacy to make the spot a mugger’s paradise.

  “Nice place for a murder,” Kate said.

  I climbed into the Roadster and Kate started the engine. When she switched on the headlights, I had a brainstorm.

  “Didn’t Ron Haver say Jason Whitley was dumped on my jogging path but was killed somewhere else?”

  “That’s the theory.”

  I turned in my seat to look back at the school. “I never realized this lot was so dark at night. The lights from the building don’t reach back to this row.”

  “Are you having a senior moment or something? I said the exact same thing not five minutes ago.”

  I let the comment slide. “Where exactly was Whitley’s car parked the night he went missing?”

  “Right here?” she asked.

  I slapped the dashboard with my sore hand. “It had to be here!”

  Kate frowned. “But the police found the car abandoned and perfectly clean. If he got himself killed here, wouldn’t there have been blood on the car? The guy had a gash in his forehead, Colleen.”

  “That’s my point!”