The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Within an hour both boys were out the door. Schulz called and said he was going down to Lakewood again to work on the Kathy Andrews case. He asked how we were, and I said truthfully that I was exhausted.

  “I keep trying to figure out what’s going on. Since Miss Ferrell wanted to talk to me about Julian, I need to at least make an attempt to chat with the headmaster about him.”

  “Keep at it,” Schulz said. “You inspire great trust, Miss G.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He promised he would meet us at the Tattered Cover for the last college advisory affair this coming Friday night. Was it still going to happen, he wanted to know. I said I would call die school to find out if I was still the caterer of record.

  “Look at it this way,” Schulz soothed. “It’s your last one of these college advisory things.”

  Small comfort. But I smiled anyway. “Getting to see you will be the best part.”

  “Ooo, ooo, should have gotten this on tape. The woman likes me.”

  I savored his wicked chuckle for the rest of the day.

  The school secretary brusquely informed me that Headmaster Perkins was completely tied up with the police, parents, and teachers. He wouldn’t have a free moment to see me for days. Then she put me on hold. In that time I managed to put together a Roquefort ramekin for our vegetarian supper, so I guess I was on hold for a long time. She returned to tell me that yes, they were going ahead Friday night; I should just fix the same menu. And Headmaster Perkins and I could discuss Julian Teller Friday morning at nine if I wanted. If I thought with indignation.

  The week passed in a flurry of meetings with clients who were already planning Thanksgiving and Christmas parties. I called Marla every day, but that was my closest link to the grapevine around the adults connected with Elk Park Prep. Unable to attend her exercise class with a broken leg, Marla had precious little access to information herself, although she did tell me that she’d heard Egon Schlichtmaier was dating somebody else from the athletic club.

  “In addition to Suzanne Ferrell? Really?”

  “She swears his relationship with Ferrell was just platonic. This other woman is disgustingly thin,” Marla pronounced. “I just know she’s had liposuction.” She asked how Julian was doing, and I assured her he seemed fine. When I asked her why she cared about Julian, she said that she had a strong sympathy for vegetarians. News to me.

  On Thursday, both Julian and Arch attended the memorial service for Miss Ferrell at the Catholic church. I had an unbreakable appointment with a client who had booked me for Thanksgiving itself. This client wanted a goose dinner for twenty that I would have to balance with my other commitments. Generally, I limited myself to ten Thanksgiving dinners. I would do most of the cooking Tuesday and Wednesday, deliver fixings for nine of them early Thursday morning, then actually cater one. John Richard habitually took Arch skiing that weekend, and I earned enough during the four-day period to support Arch and me for any sparsely booked spring month. Not only that, but I had learned that clients with relatives visiting over that weekend didn’t want to see turkey Tetrazzini, turkey enchiladas, turkey rolls, or even poultry of any kind until the following week. So it was a great time to showcase any fish recipes I had been working on. Clients were famished for anything without gravy or cranberry jelly.

  The windstorm raged all week. Temperatures dropped daily, and a skin of ice formed over the dark depths of Aspen Meadow Lake. Friday morning, after I had finished my yoga, I set out at nine o’clock and wished for about six more layers than my turtleneck and faded down coat. The fierce cold and snow had even encouraged the Main Street merchants to bring out their Christmas decorations early. The digital readout on the Bank of Aspen Meadow sign provided the grim reminder that it was November in the mountains: eleven degrees. Uneven ice coated the roads, the result of snow being churned up by the plows and then frozen solid. I drove carefully up Highway 203 toward Elk Park Prep and wondered if you could make a decent living doing catering in Hawaii.

  The telltale side spotlights, huge mirrors, and low-to-the-ground chassis announced the fact that the only other vehicle in visitor parking at the school was an unmarked police car. More investigators for the Ferrell homicide? Catching up with me from the faculty parking lot, Egon Schlichtmaier, elegantly sartorial in a new fur-trimmed bomber jacket, held one of the massive doors to the school open wide and bowed low. Someone, I noticed, had finally removed the black crepe paper and Keith’s picture.

  “Tardy today?” I asked.

  “I do not have a class until ten o’clock,” he replied cheerfully. “I was working out, but did not see you.” I eyed him and said, “Nice jacket.” He swaggered off.

  The headmaster was deeply involved in a conference call, but could see me in a bit, the receptionist informed me. I went down the hall to check on Arch—undetected, this time. To my surprise, he was standing in front of his social studies class, giving a report. Before creeping off to find Julian, I scanned the facial expressions of Arch’s classmates. All listened attentively. Pride lit a small glow in my chest.

  A uniformed police officer stood guard outside one of the classrooms of the upper school area of the old hotel. I nodded to him and identified myself. He did not reply, but when I looked through the window into the classroom, he didn’t ask me for ID either. Egon Schlichtmaier’s American history class had just begun: Macguire Perkins was giving an oral report at the front of the room. On the board was written: THE MONROE DOCTRINE. Sad to say, Macguire and the justification for hemispheric intervention were not receiving as much attention as Arch. Greer Dawson was combing her hair; Heather Coopersmith was figuring on a calculator; Julian looked perilously close to slumber. For one brief moment my eyes locked with Macguire’s, and he signaled hello to me with one hand. I shrank back from the door. The last thing I needed was for Egon Schlichtmaier to claim I’d been bothering his class. I slunk back toward the headmaster’s office.

  “He’ll see you now,” chirped the secretary without looking up from her computer monitor. I marched into the office, wondering vaguely how she’d known it was me. Did I smell like a caterer?

  Headmaster Perkins was once again on the phone—although this must have been less important than the earlier conference call—as he covered the receiver with his hand and waved me over to a side table laden with a tray of baked goods and silver electrified urn.

  “Help yourself,” he said in a low voice, “I’ll be right off.”

  There must have been an early morning meeting of the board of trustees, I thought vaguely, for all the profiteroles, miniature cheesecakes, chocolate chip bars, and frosted cupcakes on the tray. I poured myself a cup of coffee but decided against the sweets. How come Perkins hadn’t called me to cater an early-morning meeting? Did he save me for the easy stuff like getting up at oh dark-thirty to make healthful munchies for hordes of seniors? Or was he afraid I might hear how he presented the murder of Suzanne Ferrell to the big contributors?

  “Yes,” he was saying now into the phone. “Yes, quite tragic, but we must go on. Still seven P.M. Yes, on stress reduction in test-taking. Ah, no. I will be taking over the college counseling myself.” He took a deep, resigned sniff. “Same caterer, indeed.” But before he could say “ta-ta” again, the person on the other end hung up.

  “Tattered Cover,” he explained to me with a shake of his Andy Warhol hair. He looked around his desk, which was cluttered with papers and an enormous basket of fresh flowers. Someone obviously thought he needed sympathy when it was one of his teachers who had been murdered. Gray pouches of wrinkled skin hung under his eyes. He wore a navy sport coat instead of his usual Brideshead Revisited tweeds, and it suddenly occurred to me he hadn’t used a single simile since I’d walked into the office.

  “Are you all right, Headmaster Perkins?”

  He looked straight at me with enormously sad eyes. “No, Ms. Bear, I am not all right.”

  He rolled his swivel chair around until he was looking at the painting of Big Ben.
“George Albert Turner,” he said thoughtfully. “Great-grandson of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Not exactly ‘Burning of the Houses of Parliament,’ though, is it?” Then he turned toward me again, and weak sunlight from outside illuminated the capillary veins scrawled across his face. His mournful voice intoned, “And so far am I also removed from the real thing.”

  “Ah, I’m not quite following you.”

  “Purity of pursuit, my God, Ms. Bear! Purity of artistry, purity of academic inquiry … all the same.” Perkins rubbed his forehead with both hands. “Unlike”—he gestured to indicate the elegant room—“unlike all this.”

  “Mr. Perkins, I know you’re upset. I can talk to you about Julian some other time. You’ve obviously had some meeting—”

  “Meeting? What meeting?” A harsh laugh escaped his throat. “The only people I meet with these days are police.”

  “But”—I gestured to the urn and trays of baked goods—“I thought—”

  Again the sad, ironic look, the voice of distress. “Midterm grades, Ms. Bear! The flowers are a gift! The owners of the flower shop want their son to go to Brown after he graduates next year. They want me to write the recommendation after I change the boy’s French three grade from a C to an A. Miss Ferrell wouldn’t do it, you see.” I stared at the headmaster, incredulous. Was he losing it? He prattled on. “The baked goods are also a gift. One of my teachers has a new fur coat. He asked if it was all right for him to keep it, since it cost more than his entire wardrobe. He swears the donors haven’t asked him to change a grade. I told him, ‘Not yet, they haven’t.’”

  “But these people who wanted Miss Ferrell to … do this for them, could they …”

  He shook his head. “They’re in Martinique. With their son. You see, they go every year at the end of October, and the boy gets rather behind in his work.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “They want me to give him credit for going to Martinique! They say he speaks some French there, so why not?”

  “Purity of pursuit,” I said softly. “Did you change the grade?”

  He stiffened. “That’s not the kind of question I answer. You wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m under.”

  “I would believe it,” I said truthfully. “Just look at what’s happened around here the past two weeks. Speaking of gifts, could you tell me any more about this scholarship Julian received? I’m afraid there may be strings attached. Maybe not at this very moment, but as you yourself would say, not yet. Like your teacher with the coat. Maybe next week, or next month, Julian could get some anonymous message saying if he wants to keep his scholarship, he has to flunk a test, not apply to a certain school, something like that.”

  Perkins shrugged and looked back at the neo-Turner. “I know as much as you do, Ms. Bear. We received a call from the bank, period. To the best of my knowledge, nobody at this school knows the donor. Or knew,” he said, to my unanswered question about Miss Ferrell.

  “Why do you think someone killed her?”

  “We all have a constituency, Ms. Bear. You do, I do, Miss Ferrell did.” He held up his hands in his mannered gesture of helplessness. His voice rose. “As a caterer, you must do what you know is bad for your constituency, because it is what they want. If the obese want fudge rather than oat bran, well, why not? When it comes back to haunt them, you’ll be long gone. Displeased parents make my life a misery with phone calls and letters and all kinds of threats.”

  “Yes, but are you saying Miss Ferrell wouldn’t play along? Sort of like Miss Samuelson?”

  Anger blazed in his eyes. I felt myself recoil at the unexpected intensity of his obvious distress, his loathing at my bringing up this topic Perkins had tried to disguise his dislike for me by trying for sympathy in—unprofessionally, I thought—sharing details of his emotional load. But it hadn’t worked. Now he pressed his lips together and did not respond.

  I said, “Did you tell the police that Miss Ferrell wouldn’t play along, perhaps?”

  His haggard face turned scarlet. “Of course I did,” he snarled. “But they think somebody might have been searching her room that morning. They can’t find her grade book; they don’t know what was going on or who might have been having problems. And I doubt that any parent or student would dare put the pressure on me now.” He leered. “But perhaps I don’t know all she did.”

  “What about Egon Schlichtmaier? Have you talked to the police about him?”

  He ran his hands impatiently over the cottony mass of hair. “Why are you so interested? Why not just leave it to the authorities?”

  “Look, the only person I’m worried about is Julian. I want to know who would give him this scholarship and why.”

  He tugged the lapels of his sport coat. “Julian Teller is a fine student.” His lips closed firmly.

  I mumbled something noncommittal, and Perkins said he’d see me that night for the last of the college meetings. The bell signaling class change rang, and I made noises about it being time for me to leave. But instead of the usual metaphorical sendoff, Headmaster Perkins merely swiveled back to the painting by Turner’s great-grandson. As I left his office, my mind groped wildly.

  Someone searching her room … they can’t find her grade book …

  In the hallway I saw several seniors I recognized. All avoided me by looking away or starting to talk animatedly to the person nearest to them. Discovering two dead bodies can get you ostracized, I guessed. Except by Macguire Perkins, who came lumbering down the hall and nodded when I said hello. I pulled his sleeve.

  “Macguire,” I said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Oh well, okay.” He led me out the school’s front door.

  I looked up. For that was where he was, this lanky, painfully acne-faced basketball star—way up. A blue plaid lumberjack shirt hung out over jeans that ended in weathered hiking boots. No preppie outfit for the headmaster’s son.

  “I want to talk to you about Miss Ferrell.”

  “I, uh, I’m real sorry about Miss Ferrell.”

  “So am I.”

  “You know, I know she was mad about my college visit, and … other stuff, but I think she liked me.”

  “What other stuff?”

  “Just,” he said, “stuff.”

  “Like having your driver’s license suspended for drinking and driving? Or stuff like your use of steroids to muscle yourself up?”

  His scarred face turned acutely red. “Yeah. Anyway, I stopped the steroids. Last week, I swear. Ferrell was talking to me about it, said I could be strong without them, like that.”

  “She was right.” I hesitated. “There’s something I need, Macguire. Something she might have feared would get stolen.”

  “What?”

  “Miss Ferrell’s classroom might have been searched last Saturday. It was a mess when the police got to it. I’ve just had a talk with your father and it made me think…. Listen, I need her grade book. You of all people know your way around this school. Is there any chance she could have hidden it somewhere?”

  Macguire looked around the snowy parking lot before replying. Was paranoia a side effect of his brand of drug abuse?

  “As a matter of fact,” he said reluctantly, “I may know where it is. You know, being tall, I see things other folks don’t see.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Remember when I read my essay about I.U. at the front of the class?” I nodded. “She has those big posters up there by the blackboard. Behind that framed one of that arch in Paris, I saw something. Like a brown notebook. I could go look …”

  “Please do.”

  He trundled off, and within two minutes he was back, grinning triumphantly. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and unzipped it. Another quick visual scan of the parking lot. “Luck,” he said simply. He pulled out a brown fake-leather spiral grade book and handed it to me. I hadn’t brought a purse, so I just held on to it.

  “Give that to the cops,” he said. “Maybe it’ll tell them something.”

  My heart ached for this sa
d, loose-limbed boy. “Thank you, Macguire. I was so worried about you Saturday morning. You seemed so nervous about the test.”

  “What, me?” He backed away and held up his hands in protest. “Your cookies were great. I thought later, why should I have been so worried about the SATs? I’m not going to be somebody by going to Harvard. What the hell, I’m never going to be anybody.”

  20

  I phoned Tom Schulz when I got home in the hope that he might have returned from Lakewood. No luck. I told his machine I had Suzanne Ferrell’s roll book with the class grades, and where was he? The evening’s event loomed and I knew I had food to prepare. Still, I was getting close to the answers to a lot of questions; I could feel it. Cooking could wait. I sat down at my kitchen table and opened Suzanne Ferrell’s grade book.

  It was larger than most grade books I had seen, about eight by eleven instead of four by six, and with many more pages. The notebook was divided into three parts: French HI, French IV, and CC. When I flipped to it, CC proved to be college counseling. There I saw an inked list of the top-ranked seniors: 1, Keith Andrews, 2. Julian Teller, 3. Heather Coopersmith, 4. Greer Dawson, 5. Brad Marensky…. A quick check showed that Brad Marensky and Greer Dawson were in French III; Julian and Heather Coopersmith were in French IV. Keith Andrews had also been in French IV. They were all, including Macguire Perkins, in college counseling.

  In French III, Brad Marensky had a solid stream of C’s and B’s; his midterm grade was due to be a B minus. Greer Dawson’s showed wide swings: two F’s early on, the rest B’s. Her grade: C. Julian had made A’s at the beginning of the quarter, then a B and an F on a quiz last week. He had also received a B minus for the midterm. Heather Coopersmith had B’s punctuated by two A’s, and was due to receive a B plus. Keith Andrews had received all A’s and one B. There was a line through his name.