by Joan Boswell
Melanie’s face and parka were peppered with red dots. Her own face and hands were wet from a soft scarlet rain. She turned to look behind them.
“What’s happened?” Melanie choked out.
Ora stifled a ridiculous warning not to look. “Hold onto Basil,” she said.
She staggered up, stumbling down off the boards onto the grass to kneel next to the crimson nightmare behind their bench. His notebook had fallen open, its stained pages rustling in the wind.
She couldn’t help herself. Her fingers reached for the brass chain and pulled the book over. Heart pounding, she took the edge of the last page. Made out the words “dog” and “soul”. Underneath he’d scrawled, “Dog needs blind lady. Only way.”
She bent her head and cried.
Madeleine Harris-Callway is a longstanding member of Crime Writers of Canada and Sisters in Crime. She has published mystery short stories in both print and electronic media. In 2004, she won the Crime Writers of Canada Golden Horseshoe Award for her story, “Kill the Boss”, and in 2005, her entry, “The Land of Sun and Fun”, was long-listed for the Debut Dagger Award. She and her husband share their Victorian home with two spoiled cats.
Mad Scientist
Linda Hall
I’ve suspected for some time that I should go to the authorities about Lewis. Why haven’t I? Fear, I suppose. Even anonymous calls aren’t anonymous. Both my landline and my cell phone could easily be traced to me. Even a payphone is out of the question. For example, if I used a payphone, the call would be tracked back to that particular phone. And witnesses would come forward, witnesses who could identify me making a call at the phone booth at that time. These people have their ways.
Plus, I have the idea that he suspects I know something. So, that’s why I need to be circumspect in my dealings with him, and hope (and pray) for a window of opportunity.
Lewis, you see, is a terrorist. Lewis is the worst kind of terrorist, because Lewis is leading a classroom of high school aged children down the Taliban path. That’s the sad part, the part that makes me know I’m shirking my responsibility by not going to the RCMP immediately with the information I have gathered about Lewis and the goings on in his classroom.
Lewis is a chemistry teacher in the same fairly renowned private school where I am employed as a mathematics professor, and my classroom is located directly across the hall from his. So, you see, this gives me an opportunity to note everything that goes on in there.
I have studied these things on the Web. I know the chemicals one must have on hand to build a bomb, and in what proportions. I know the paraphernalia required, the supplies needed. Lewis has all of these in abundance, in locked cabinets in his classroom.
You may wonder at my interest. My wife of only three years was killed in 9/11, and if this has sharpened my senses to terrorist activities, then so be it.
Lewis knows my history I note the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m unaware he’s there. I see the way he regards me across the hall with that pouty mouth of his, one eyebrow raised, hand on one hip. The way he stares at me in the staff room and addresses me with, “So, Maurice, you’re young. When are you going to think about getting married again?”
That he would bring up the subject infuriates me!
I’ve chosen not to remarry. Terrorists like him would like me to. They would like me to get on with my life, but I won’t give him or the terrorists the satisfaction. When I told him that, when I told him I hated all people, everywhere, of Arab descent, he seemed taken aback.
“I’m shocked,” he said, eyes wide. “Many of them are good people. How can you say that?”
How can I say that? After what happened to my wife, how can he even wonder? It was then that I began to observe him. I live my life carefully looking for that window. But while I wait, I am forced to endure the smells from his room, the inane chatter, the music that he insists on playing. There are times I can almost taste the various reeks of the bomb-making chemicals in there. More than once I have gone home sick to my stomach at the stench of it all. Plus, my dreams are filled with his high-pitched voice calling to his students, “Measure carefully, kids, or you’ll blow us all to kingdom come. Heh, heh.” That chuckle and those words should tell you everything.
In my dreams I watch him sashay between his classroom tables on tiptoes, as if in dancing slippers, his grey-streaked pony tail whipping from side to side. In one recurring dream, he leans over and smirks at me, his lab coat falling forward to reveal a chest full of bombs.
Dreams or no dreams, I tell you, sometimes I am downright terrified of the man. I truly am. If you could see the gleam in his eye, I know you would agree with me. Plus, I have done a little digging. I have learned a fact about Lewis that few people know. One evening after everyone had gone home, I was able to get into the school’s confidential files.
I discovered something profoundly unsettling. Early on in his career, two students suffered minor injuries when a chemistry experiment in his lab went horribly wrong. According to the report, it was not Lewis’s fault. Two years later, the same thing happened. Again, he was deemed not culpable. Students had stayed after school, unsupervised while they worked on a science fair project. At the end of it all, he felt responsible (as well he should), took a year’s leave of absence and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Psychiatric hospital, my foot. I know how these terrorist cells work. I know what he was really doing during that time.
Since I discovered Lewis’s past history, something strange has happened. Somehow he has figured out what I know, and his rampages have become increasingly personal, directed at me.
This morning I came to school to find my entire desk in disarray. I always keep finely sharpened pencils in the rectangular compartment in the middle drawer of my desk. These are laid side by side next to the mechanical pencils and the ball point pens, all with their sharpened ends toward the left. I have arranged them thusly, so when I pick them up with my right hand, they are ready for immediate use. Next to them are my mathematical instruments, the compass, the protractors and other accoutrements of my profession. Beyond them, in the larger compartment, I keep boxes of staples, notepads, sheets of graph paper and an assortment of rulers, including a slide rule and a number of scientific calculators. To find the pens in disarray, to find them interspersed amongst each other, to find three of the number two lead pencils blunted, I was, frankly, horrified. The effect was one of violation, not unlike, I imagined, that of being raped. I immediately went to the headmaster, who asked me if anything had been taken.
Taken! No, nothing was taken. Nothing except my security, my safety. My sanctuary. When I suggested that it might be Lewis, he said, “Why would Lewis do that?”
“Because he’s a...” I almost blurted out the word, terrorist! But I held my tongue.
I made my way back to my classroom, and there was that scoundrel standing in the hallway arranging student science fair displays. This is supposed to be a high school, yet these displays look as if done up by pre-schoolers. This is science? This is what parents pay for? I remind myself that this isn’t where he shines; his expertise lies in bomb making, and what a perfect cover, a chemistry teacher.
“Morning, Maurice,” he called to me. He was up on tip toes, taping a picture to the high wall. I merely nodded. He will ruin the walls with that tape of his, I was thinking. I was going to make a comment, there and then, but thought better of it. Time enough to bring it up at the staff meeting.
He came down to flat feet. “Just thought I’d brighten up the old halls of learning.”
I turned away from him.
Plus, his classroom! I need to describe that room. Through his door—which he insists on keeping open at all times—I note the disorganization; students walking willy nilly, jars perched precariously on mucky tables. How can anyone live like this? No wonder two students almost died. My own classroom, by contrast, is orderly, and my students know exactly what is expected of them. I glanced at the locked metal door to the
bomb cupboard.
A week later, another incident: I had returned from my usual quiet lunch in the corner of the staff room to find that my class instructions, which I had meticulously written on a corner of the blackboard—Homework, Chapter 18, Sections One and Two, Including the Bonus Questions—had been completely obliterated from the board. Lewis had done this to warn me. What he was saying was back off, keep what you know to yourself.
But I shall not! I shall not! I will wait for the window.
And this time I had proof. Moments before, I had seen Lewis emerging from my classroom. I walked over to his room, forced myself to enter that den of disorder and said, “Lewis. A word.”
He strode toward me, all concern. “Yes, Maurice?
“You were in my classroom, I believe.”
“Yes, I guess I was.” He was rubbing his hands together. Well, of course he would, to get rid of the chalk dust!
“May I ask what you were doing in there?”
He raised his eyebrows. I stood waiting. He laughed. I hate that laugh of his, nervous and high-pitched, like a whinnying horse. Then he flipped his pony tail behind him and put his hands into his pockets under his dirty lab coat. I started. For a moment, I expected him to pull out a gun or reveal a chest strapped with dynamite.
But he pulled out his hands, scratched his nose and kept looking at me expectantly, like a child.
“You’re serious,” he said.
“Yes. I am. Most definitely.” I stood my ground. It’s important to stand one’s ground when dealing with people like Lewis.
“I was talking to Anna Greene. She’s your student, she also happens to be mine. We were discussing the set for the play.”
I turned on my heels and walked out. The set for the play! And if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale. Back in my classroom, it took me several minutes of rearranging my things before I could calm myself enough to begin the mathematics lecture.
Lewis’s torments increased after that. I began seeing him everywhere, hovering near my classroom, following me into the staff room. Once I even spied him bending over my car in the staff parking lot. I accosted him about that one, and here’s what he said, “Your Austin. A beautiful car, Maurice. You’ve kept it in nice shape.”
“Yes,” I said, unlocking the driver side door and climbing in.
At home, I discovered that Lewis had even been there. He had actually come right to the front door of my home. There was a small pile of dog manure on my porch. Who but Lewis and his sick mind would have put it there?
“Is this what they teach you in Taliban school?” I yelled to the heavens. But I could not be sure this was just manure, so I donned a double layer of rubber gloves to check through it. It would be just like the terrorists to hide in the muck, a bit of plastic explosive. It seemed harmless, but what it gave me was a new revelation. Lewis expected me to think there was something in this and make me paw through it. He was probably at home right now, laughing at the whole ordeal.
Lewis, the ultimate actor, feigned complete innocence when I approached him the following morning. Chemistry? He should be teaching drama!
“Do you like shit?” I asked him quietly in the staff room.
“Do I like shit?” He turned slowly to face me and said the whole thing again, elongating the last two words, saying it loud enough for everyone to hear. “Do I like shit?”
“Yes. Do you think it’s funny to put things in it, or not put things in it?” I kept my voice down while I stirred a sugar lump into my coffee. I watched his reaction carefully.
Lewis shook his head at me, sighed and walked away. But I could see it! I could! A tiny tic of nervousness, an anxious squinting at the corner of one eye. I’m on to him!
The last straw, the final straw occurred a week later, when I left the house one morning to find that one of the tires on my Austin was flat.
“Lewis, you have gone too far this time!”
I trudged back inside through the gathering storm and called a cab. I should have known when I saw Lewis admiring my car. I should have known he was planning something like this.
When the cab arrived, driven by a scruffy little man who smelled bad, I seethed all the way into town. It’s a good fifteen-minute drive at the best of times, and the cabby seemed in no particular hurry, despite my protests that I’d better things to do than to sit in the back seat of his foul smelling vehicle.
By the time I arrived, school had already begun. It was raining heavily. “Lewis, you will pay for this!” I muttered as I slopped through puddles, cursing myself for forgetting my rubbers. I hurried down the hall, my shoes squawking with the wet. Outside of my still locked mathematics door, my students were lounging against the walls. Some of them were snickering.
“Mr. Schector, don’t you know it’s bad luck to have an open umbrella in a building,” one of the girl students said.
“Thank you,” I said, “for those words of consummate wisdom.”
One of the tall girls tittered. I stared hard at her and unlocked the door. I was in no mood. Across the hall Lewis stood in his doorway and called cheerily, “Morning, Maury.”
Maury? He was calling me Maury now?
A month after the car incident, fate handed me that window.
The two of us were at school late in the evening, when Lewis came into my classroom and right up to my desk. He was all smiles when he said, “I see the two of us are burning the midnight oil. How ‘bout when we finish here, we go out and grab a beer?”
Grab a beer, indeed! I barely looked up when he said this but continued grading my papers. He was halfway out the door when I remembered the pipe and Bic lighter I always keep at the ready in my breast pocket and yelled, “Wait!”
He turned, clearly startled at my outburst.
“How about on the roof?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“How about we go up on the roof. I was actually going to head up there in a bit to have a smoke.” I patted my pipe and smiled. I actually smiled at him. “I’ll make a pot of tea in the staff room and take it up to the roof and meet you there,” I said.
“Well. Sure,” he said stroking his ponytail. How I hate that man for what he did to my Mary.
There is a deck of sorts on the roof of this old school. It’s strictly off limits to students, but staff use it, and there are several chairs and a picnic table up there.
I made a pot of tea, carried it up the steps to the roof and sat in the cool breeze on the top of the building waiting for him. I put the pipe in the middle of the table.
Then finally he was there, scraping his chair back and sitting down, flipping his pony tail behind him and chatting about how nice this was, just the two of us. And how he’d been looking forward to talking to me and he’d been wanting for a long time to clear up whatever it was between the two of us.
“Stop,” I put up my hand. I could stand no more of this. “Stop right now.”
He blinked at me and promptly closed his mouth. The pipe lay there between us. “Smoke it,” I told him.
“What?” he looked at me aghast.
“I said smoke it.”
“I don’t smoke.”
I leaned toward him and pointed to the pipe. “Pick it up. Smoke it.”
His scrawny Adam’s apple bobbled up and down as he swallowed rapidly. “What’s going on, Maury? What’s this about?” A tiny tongue of spittle snaked down his chin. The wind lifted his ponytail. I could tell he was nervous. Good.
“You know exactly what this is about,” I said. “Consider this revenge. For the death of my Mary.”
“Mary? Your wife, Mary? What do I have to do with Mary?”
“Take the pipe.”
“No, thank you. I don’t know what this is about, but no thank you.” He got up, and I grabbed the pipe and my lighter and went to the railing, where he was leaning against it, looking out over the city. It was on to plan B, but that was okay.
“I don’t understand it,” he said turning to face me. “Why you seem to
hate me. I’ve tried to be nice to you, I’ve gone out of my way...”
“Why do I hate you? Now there’s a question.” I leaned far over the railing. Up the road, a garbage truck was rumbling its way down toward us. I smiled. Fate was indeed on my side tonight. I leaned over farther, tried to calculate when the truck would thunder past to mask the sound...
“Maury, I wouldn’t exactly trust that railing.” Lewis was quite close to me now and was touching my jacket. To pull me to safety? With one quick motion, I pulled the pipe from my pocket, lit it, and shoved it deep within his shirt pocket, so quickly, so suddenly that he didn’t have time to react. In one motion, I heaved him over the railing. He screamed, looking back at me in shock as he fell.
“Fly! Fly!” I called after him. As the truck roared past, covering the sound, the pipe bomb exploded. He had blown into a million pieces before he hit the ground. I watched the truck. It didn’t stop. They hadn’t seen anything, or if they had, they would merely have thought it was a light flickering in a window...
I was back home in my own house, drinking tea before anyone realized he was gone.
The following morning, when I entered the staff room for my morning coffee, a group of sombre faces looked up at me from around the table. The fresh out of college girls’ gym teacher was there and her head was down, her shoulders heaving.
“What’s the matter?” I asked cheerfully. “Somebody die?” My voice was jocular, full of gaiety.
She looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Haven’t you heard? Lewis is dead.”
I raised my eyebrows, attempting to look concerned.
The biology teacher said, “As near as anyone can tell, it was suicide. His body was found this morning beside the school. He made a homemade bomb with chemicals from his lab then jumped off the building last night. Who would have ever thought he would do that?”