Child's Play

by Jones, Merry;

  CHILD’S PLAY

  Also by Merry Jones

  THE ELLE HARRISON NOVELS

  The Trouble with Charlie

  Elective Procedures

  THE HARPER JENNINGS THRILLERS

  Summer Session

  Behind The Walls

  Winter Break

  Outside Eden

  In The Woods

  THE ZOE HAYES MYSTERIES

  The Nanny Murders

  The River Killings

  The Deadly Neighbors

  The Borrowed and Blue Murders

  HUMOR

  I Love Him, But …

  I Love Her, But …

  Please Don’t Kiss Me at the Bus Stop

  If She Weren’t My Best Friend, I’d Kill Her

  America’s Dumbest Dates

  NONFICTION

  Birthmothers: Women Who Relinquished Babies for Adoption

  Tell Their Stories

  Stepmothers: Keeping It Together With Your Husband and His Kids

  CHILD’S PLAY

  AN ELLE HARRISON NOVEL

  MERRY JONES

  Copyright © 2017 Merry Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-191-1

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  To Robin, Baille, and Neely

  Acknowledgments

  Deep appreciation to: agent Rebecca Strauss; editors Pat Gussin and Emily Baar; the entire Oceanview team, headed by Bob and Pat Gussin; trapeze queen Maureen Krajewski; Philadelphia Police Department homicide detective Chuck Boyle (Ret.); the entire Philadelphia Liars Club; dog-and-beer buddies Kelly Simmons and Gregory Frost; venting recipients Janet Martin, Nancy Delman, and Lanie Zera; both Nicks, valiant first reader, Robin, and Baille and Neely, who make me so proud.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was the first one there.

  The parking lot was empty, except for Stan’s pickup truck. Stan was the custodian, tall, hair thinning, face pockmarked from long-ago acne. He moved silently, popped out of closets and appeared in corners, prowled the halls armed with a mop or a broom. In fourteen years, I couldn’t remember a single time when he’d looked me in the eye.

  Wait—fourteen years? I’d been there that long? Faces of kids I’d taught swirled through my head. The oldest of them would now be, what? Twenty-one? Oh man. Soon I’d be one of those old schoolmarms teaching the kids of my former students, a permanent fixture of the school like the faded picture of George Washington mounted outside the principal’s office. Hell, in a few months, I’d be forty. A middle-aged childless widow who taught second grade over and over again, year after year, repeating the cycle like a hamster on its wheel.

  Which reminded me: I had to pick up new hamsters. Tragically, last year’s hadn’t made it through the summer.

  I told myself to stop dawdling. I had a classroom to organize, cubbies to decorate. On Monday, just three days from now, twenty-three glowing faces would show up for the first day of school, and I had to be ready. I climbed out of the car, pulled a box of supplies from the trunk, started for the building. And stopped.

  My heart did triple time, as if responding to danger. But there was no danger. What alarmed me, what sent my heart racing was the school itself. But why? Did it look different? Had the windows been replaced, or the doors? Nothing looked new, but something seemed altered. Off balance. The place didn’t look like an elementary school. It looked like a giant factory. A prison.

  God, no. It didn’t look like any of those things. The school was the same as it had always been, just a big brick building. It seemed cold and stark simply because it was unadorned by throngs of children. Except for Wi-Fi, Logan Elementary hadn’t changed in fifty years, unless you counted several new layers of soot on the bricks.

  I stood in the parking lot, observing the school, seeing it fresh. I’d never paid much attention to it before. When it was filled with students, the building itself became all but invisible, just a structure, a backdrop. But now, empty, it was unable to hide behind the children, the smells of sunshine and peanut butter sandwiches, the sounds of chatter and small shoes pounding Stanley’s waxed tiles. The building stood exposed. I watched it, felt it watching me back.

  Threatening.

  Seriously, what was wrong with me? The school was neither watching nor threatening me. It was a benign pile of bricks and steel. I was wasting time, needed to go in and get to work.

  But I didn’t take a single step.

  Go on, I told myself. What was I afraid of? Empty halls, vacant rooms? Blank walls?

  For a long moment, I stood motionless, eyes fixed on the façade. The carved letters: Logan School. The heavy double doors. The dark windows. Maybe I’d wait a while before going inside. Becky would arrive soon, after she picked up her classroom aquarium. Other teachers would show up, too. I could go in with them, blend safely into their commotion. I hefted the box, turned back to the car.

  But no, what was I doing? I didn’t want to wait. I’d come early so I could get work done without interruption or distraction before the others arrived. The school wasn’t daring me, nor was I sensing some impending tragedy. I was just jittery about starting a new year.

  I turned around again, faced its faded brown bricks. I steeled my shoulders, took a breath, and started across the parking lot. With a reverberating metallic clank, the main doors flew open. Reflexively, I stepped back, half expecting a burst of flames or gunfire. Instead, Stan emerged. For the first time in fourteen years, I was glad to see him. Stan surveyed the parking lot, hitched up his pants. Looked in my direction. He didn’t wave or nod a greeting, didn’t follow social conventions. Even so, his presence grounded me, felt familiar. I took a breath, reminded myself that the school was just a school. That I was prone to mental wandering and embellishing. And that children would stream into my classroom in just three days, whether I was ready or not.

  The hallways were still unlit. I hurried along the long, dark corridor, hearing only my breath and my own rapid steps until at last I came to room 2B. My room. Inside, I turned on the lights, closed the door, and worked nonstop all day, not joining colleagues for lunch, not taking breaks to chat. When Becky came by with Joyce, it was already after three.

  Becky, one of my best friends, was Logan School’s kindergarten teacher. Short, warm, honey-voiced, and bosomy, she was a walking, talking hug. Children and puppies were helplessly drawn to her. So were men.

  Joyce Huff, on the other hand, was my nemesis. She taught the other second-grade class. Except for one year when she’d filled in for a fifth-grade teacher on maternity leave, she’d been teaching second grade since the Mayflower landed, and she thoroughly disapproved of my teaching style. Her pale-tan hair was fastened in its customary old-fashioned beehive. Her smile, like her skin and posture, was tight. She stepped into my classroom, lost her smile, and raised a hand to her mouth, actually swooning.

  I followed her gaze to my “Wonder Work” bulletin board, twenty-three sections in varied neon colors, one for each student’s best assignments.

  “My God,” Joyce finally spoke. “Was there a Crayola
explosion in here?”

  I smiled. If Joyce didn’t like it, it must be good.

  “It’s very colorful.” Becky gawked.

  The room was vibrant, yes. Each zone—Art and Writing, Reading, Tech, and Science—was identified by a large bright overhead mobile. Each bulletin board display radiated a medley of tones. Shelves contained glowing colored baskets. And each desk was labeled with a student’s name in a rainbow of vinyl letters.

  Becky didn’t say anything, just looked around.

  Bright colors were stimulating. What was the problem?

  “Sweetie.” Joyce called other people “sweetie” and “darling,” as if she were a wise adult and we were all children. “I know you’re a free thinker and you intend well, but you’ve …” She paused to purse her lips. “Sometimes you’ve got to follow the rules.”

  Rules? “Sorry?”

  “We’re dealing with second graders, Elle, darling. At their age, children are sensitive, struggling to make sense of the larger world. They need their classroom to be an organized haven, a safe, soothing, structured place in which they can relax and learn.”

  I looked at Becky, but she backed off, sank into the chair at my desk. Not getting involved.

  No problem. I could deal with Joyce on my own. “My classroom is very well organized, thank you, Joyce. It’s also energetic and stimulating.” Joyce fancied herself the Martha Stewart of second-grade teachers. A self-proclaimed expert, the maven of oilcloth and doilies, her classroom featured monochrome pastel bulletin boards with matching fabric borders. Everything was consistent in size, color, and texture. Repetitive. Predictable. Mind numbingly boring.

  “I’m only thinking of your sweet little seven-year-olds,” she went on. “They need order and calm. The security of regular patterns. Look around. It’s helter-skelter in here.”

  I bit my lip so I wouldn’t lose my temper. “You and I have different styles, Joyce. So far, my students have done fine.”

  “But you have every color in creation, clashing and battling for attention. You have moving pieces. Incongruent shapes. There’s no thematic thread in your design, no comfort in your color scheme. In fact, dear, you have no color scheme. The room has no focal point—”

  “Elle?” Becky interrupted, lifted a printout off my desk. “You didn’t tell me Seth Evans is in your class.”

  Joyce and I turned to her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He completes the set.”

  “Who’s Seth Evans?” Joyce asked.

  “Ty Evans? Seth’s his baby brother,” Becky told her.

  Joyce’s eyes widened. “Oh my.”

  Like Becky, I’d taught Ty Evans and his younger sister, Katie. Now, I’d teach their little brother, too. I’d treat Seth the same as the other students. I picked up a marker, began tracing letters for a poster board. Eventually, it would be titled, “Mrs. Harrison’s Superstars,” decorated with the children’s glowing names glued onto colored stars.

  “He’s out,” Becky said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ty,” she answered.

  “Out?” Joyce grabbed the chain holding her reading glasses. “He is? So soon?”

  I kept tracing.

  “I saw it in the paper the other day. He turned twenty-one, so they sprung him.”

  They sprung him? I looked up and smiled at Becky, her attempt at talking gangsta.

  “So what did he serve, five or six years?” Joyce frowned. “They call that justice?”

  I pictured Ty, a skinny, scrappy second-grader, knees scuffed, hair unkempt. Acting tough, picking fights, taunting other kids, making them cry. How many times had I tried to meet with his parents? His father never showed. His mother, Rose, came reeking of eau de booze. I could still see her, a small, bone-thin woman with leathery skin and inch-long dark roots, crimson glue-on nails, a broken front tooth. She’d insisted that her son was a good boy, that the other kids must be singling him out, lying about him.

  I’d wondered about her tooth, how she’d broken it. And the thick makeup under her eye looked kind of green. Was it masking a bruise? I’d asked her if Ty had ever been exposed to violence, and she’d denied it so vehemently that I suspected his bullying behavior mimicked what went on at home. I’d recommended that Ty get counseling, brought Rose to talk to Mrs. Marshall, the principal. But without clear evidence that he was being abused, there wasn’t much we could do. Ty kept on bullying and getting suspended. Years later, when I heard he’d been arrested, I was sorry but not surprised.

  Truth was, I’d let him down. So had his mother, his other teachers, Mrs. Marshall—every adult in his life. We’d let him slide, passing him and his troubles along year after year, until finally, at the age of fourteen, Ty had grabbed a knife.

  I pictured his father’s blood pooling on a linoleum floor. Ty, standing beside him, watching it spread. Had he been relieved? Shocked? Sorry? Scared?

  “Elle?” Becky nudged my arm.

  Oh dear. I’d lost track of the conversation.

  “You just pulled an Elle,” she whispered.

  Damn. “Pulling an Elle” was the cutesy term my friends had for my mental wanderings. Actually, those wanderings were anything but cute. They were a symptom of what a shrink diagnosed as a dissociative disorder usually brought on by stress or intense emotion. In other words, when there was trouble, I escaped by slipping off into the safety of my mind. But until that day, I’d never “pulled an Elle” at school. So I was worried. Was my condition getting worse? Would I drift during class, abandoning the children? Would I have to quit teaching?

  Joyce was still talking. “—but I had his sister, Katie, in class—that year I filled in for Jill Kaminsky and taught fifth. And that girl was an angel. Prettiest little thing.”

  “Elle and I taught her, too.”

  “So you know what I mean. She’s a darling, yet her brother’s a cold-blooded killer. Same family, opposite natures. Shows you that some children are just bad seed. Something rotten in their genes. Remember that boy in Myra Ellis’ class? The one with the gerbils?”

  “That was before our time,” Becky breathed.

  “But you heard how he was burning them with matches and cutting their bellies open. Imagine. In fourth grade. His parents—well. On the surface, they were lovely people. They sent him to a psychiatrist, but you can bet that, wherever he is today, he’s still just as bad inside. You can’t change a person’s nature. I bet this Ty’s just the same as that boy.”

  I blinked at her. To my knowledge, Ty had never tortured gerbils.

  “I don’t know,” Becky said. “People can change.”

  Joyce tsked. “You can’t change heredity, and mark my words, there’s a hereditary factor involved. I bet it’s sex-linked—you know, affecting only the Y chromosome. That would explain why Katie’s sweet as pie, not a bit like Ty. Either way, Elle, you better watch out for their brother. What’s his name again? Gabriel?”

  Gabriel? Where had she gotten that?

  “Seth,” Becky answered.

  “I’m serious, sweetie. You have hamsters in here, don’t you? Keep an eye on that boy.”

  “I’m not going to hold Seth responsible for someone else’s actions. Even his brother’s.”

  “I agree,” Becky said. “I don’t think Elle should have preconceived notions about Seth.”

  I resumed tracing an “S.”

  “I didn’t say she should,” Joyce bristled. “But she’d be crazy not to watch him. After all, where’s his big brother, Ty, now? Living at home with the family? So the younger boy has a killer in his house? As his male role model? How is that even allowed?” Joyce shook her head, wrung her freckled hands. Held onto her reading glasses as she looked around the room. “And seriously, Elle, given that boy’s likely predispositions, you really should tone this room down. You don’t want to overstimulate him—”

  “Joyce, stop. Elle will handle it.” Becky’s hands were on her hips. “You don’t even know Seth or Ty.”

  “No, but afte
r teaching for almost thirty years, I know their like. Once in a while, maybe every six or seven years, you run into a child who’s different.”

  “Every child is different,” Becky countered.

  “Not just different. Plain down-to-the-core bad. Soulless. Devoid of conscience. Capable of who knows what. And genetics has got to be part of it.”

  I shook my head. Refused to engage. Started a “U.”

  Becky rolled her eyes.

  Joyce crossed her arms, raised her voice. “I’m right and you both know it. Take your boy Ty. The court said he was too young to be tried as an adult. But he wasn’t too young to eviscerate his father. Where does that kind of brutality come from in someone so young? It’s got to be inbred. In his genes.”

  Becky met my eyes, shook her head. “So, Elle. What about them Phillies?”

  “You’re changing the subject because you know I’m right.”

  Becky smiled at her. “I’d say it’s time to call it a day. You heading out, Elle?”

  She was giving me a chance to escape. But before I could respond, Joyce gave a harrumph and waved her pointer finger at us. “Okay, as usual, you two are trying to ignore me. But if you’re smart, you’ll think about what I’ve said. Trust me. Some people are bad from birth. Pretend otherwise at your own peril.” With that, she stormed out of the room.

  Becky stared after her. “You’ve been warned, Elle. You might have a second-grade psychopath.”

  “And you might have a kindergarten killer.”

  I expected her to continue, come back with something like seven-year-old strangler, so I was trying to think of a retort, something better than kindergarten criminal. But Becky didn’t continue. She frowned.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re frowning about nothing?”

  “No.”

  I waited for her to continue, finished tracing an “R.”

  “Just … What if Joyce’s right? What if bad behavior is genetic?”