by Leigh Perry
“I said I’m not interested in working for your crummy business. I am interested in what happened to Patty Craft.”
I’d gone so far off script that he actually had to start making up new lines for himself. “I thought Patty killed herself.”
“Is that what you thought? I’ve got reason to suspect otherwise.” Coccyx, now I was starting to sound like a TV villain. “She was murdered.”
“You’re serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“And you think I had something to do with it? Hey, I liked Patty. Even after she went through chemo and couldn’t fool anybody into thinking she was a high school student, I used her for other work until last year, when she got too sick to do even that.”
“She must have needed money pretty badly after that. Did she maybe call and threaten to go to the police if you didn’t pay her?”
“You mean like blackmail?” he said.
“That’s what blackmail is.”
“That’s crazy. How could she turn me in without getting herself in trouble?”
“People get immunity for testifying against others.”
“Sure, but it would have ruined her career, right? What school would have hired her once word went out about her being involved?”
That hadn’t occurred to me, but I didn’t want to admit it to him. “What about Robert Irwin?”
“What about him? I haven’t used him since he started losing his hair and showing his age. He couldn’t even fake being a college student for the LSAT anymore.”
“He’s missing, probably dead.”
He blinked. “For real? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“So Irwin wasn’t blackmailing you, either?”
“Same answer. He couldn’t have said anything without losing his job. To tell you the truth, both Patty and Bert had as much to lose as I did.”
“Then were you blackmailing them?”
“Of course not! Patty Craft had cancer—what kind of an a-hole do you think I am?”
Maybe I was nuts, but his mingled shock and offense sounded utterly sincere.
He pulled himself together and assumed his oily, urbane tones again. “I assure you, Dr. Thackery, I am simply a businessman providing a valuable service. I treat my contractors with utmost respect.”
I believed him. Not about the simple businessman, valuable service, or utmost respect parts, but that he didn’t know what had happened to Patty Craft or Robert Irwin. Given the amount of trouble he’d gone to in order to confront me, I figured I could at least let him finish the scene closer to his original vision. So I said, “Very well then. I have no further interest in your activities, though I suggest that in the future you utilize universities other than McQuaid for your recruiting efforts.”
He nodded regally and stood. “I think I can guarantee that. I’m gratified that we were able to resolve this without any unpleasantness.” Then he moved away smoothly.
I waited until he was gone before I started laughing. He’d gone off with a napkin stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
37
After the hilarity wore off, I realized that it was really no laughing matter. Okay, the napkin on the shoe had been guffaw-worthy, but now I was even more at sea than I’d been before. Instead of the shadowy crime kingpin I’d been expecting, I’d encountered a Netflix addict. Frisenda was a crook, but he wasn’t a killer.
So where did I go next?
I took a deep breath, tossed out my trash, and headed for my mother’s office. I still had a job to do. Two, in fact. As soon as I’d finished up with office hours at McQuaid, I had to run home, make sure Madison had something for dinner, and zip back to PHS for parent-teacher conferences.
I really wasn’t expecting many parents to care enough about a part-time SAT prep teacher when I hadn’t had their children as students for long and wouldn’t keep them for much longer, but there was a line of a half dozen parents waiting when I opened my classroom door at five o’clock to get things started.
Ms. Rad had told me that there were no set appointments for the parents—it was first come, first served. The evening would end at seven thirty, though it was considered polite to continue meeting with parents if they’d joined the line before then.
First up was a father.
“Hello, I’m Jarod Kingston. My son is Frank.”
“Of course. I’m Dr. Thackery.” I shook his hand, waved him to a desk, took my own chair, and pulled out my laptop with the class records. I didn’t see much resemblance between the lanky red-headed boy in my class and this man, balding and dressed in regulation Brooks Brothers from head to toe, but maybe Frank took after his mother.
Kingston said, “You know, Mr. Chedworth is great, but I’m really excited to have the opportunity to talk to somebody who teaches at the college level. I was wondering if you’d gotten a good picture of Frank yet.”
I wasn’t sure what he was asking for, so I went into the spiel Mr. Chedworth had coached me on. “He’s a great kid, always cheerful and on time, and he seems to have an excellent grasp of the material. We’ve only had the one practice quiz so far, but he did very well on that, and Mr. Chedworth’s records show that he’s made straight As all quarter.”
“Good, good. Do you have any suggestions for positioning Frank?”
“Positioning him?”
“For his college applications.” I must have continued to look blank because he added, “His college admissions hook. His grades are solid, and as you know, he tests well, but we’re still struggling to find his ‘wow factor.’”
“Wow,” I said weakly.
“I did have one thought. Frank is an excellent magician, particularly with card tricks, and I thought we could do something with that, have him perform at a children’s ward in the hospital or maybe at a senior citizens’ home. I’m just not sure which would be better.”
“I’m sure people would enjoy either.”
“But which would look better on the application? Sick kids or old people?”
I belatedly realized what I was dealing with. I’d heard rumors in the academic community about how parents hired consultants to help their kids get into college, but I’d thought it was something confined to people who had more money than they knew what to do with. Though I doubted Kingston had that much money—his suit was Brooks Brothers, not Armani—I could tell he’d either spoken to somebody or absorbed a boatload of articles about student positioning.
“Which group of people does he prefer being around?” I asked.
“Does that matter?”
“Absolutely. If he’s not really dedicated to magic or performing for one group or the other, admissions people are going to know he’s just being ‘packaged.’”
“But I thought—”
“I know, you thought that positioning wasn’t the same as packaging, and there’s something in that, but you still can’t fake it.”
“Oh,” he said. “What about music? Like playing the xylophone? That’s unusual, right?”
“Does Frank play the xylophone?”
“I could get him lessons over the summer. Hey, then he could combine magic and music. Like playing a song, then making the xylophone disappear!”
What I really wanted was to make Kingston disappear, but I hated the idea of the guy forcing his kid to spend all summer learning an instrument when it wouldn’t do him any good.
“My best advice is for you to figure out what Frank already enjoys. That’s all the positioning he needs.”
“I see,” he said, nodding. “Thank you for your insight.”
I could just tell that he was going to start disregarding my advice before he got to his car.
About half of the rest of the parents were a variation on that same theme. No matter what I said, they were sure there was a trick to getting their kids accepted at a good college, something beyond goo
d grades, high test scores, and a well-written personal essay. Some of the exceptions wanted to tell me how stupid they thought the SAT was, which I agreed with, and a few actually wanted to know how they could help their kids do better on the test. I wished I could have talked to them all night.
Two parents were waiting when the announcement came that the evening’s conferences were over, so I took the first and told the second to warn off anybody else who tried to get in line. So naturally, when I opened the door again, I found that two more parents had shown up and were waiting with an air of determination. So I bit the bullet and spoke to each of them, though admittedly I was talking as fast as I could.
As I was ushering the last one out, I saw a woman walking quickly in my direction, so I firmly closed the door and locked it. Ms. Rad had warned me that there might be latecomers, and my best bet was to wait in the classroom until they were gone. So I took my time gathering my things, straightening the room, and making sure all the cabinets were locked before I peered out through the door’s inset window into the corridor.
The woman was standing right outside.
I texted Madison that I was stuck at school for a little while longer, checked e-mail on my phone, and peeked again.
She was still standing by the door.
Okay, if I let her in, it would take five minutes to get my stuff back out so I could access her child’s records and probably fifteen minutes of conference. So it was a choice of twenty minutes of work or an undermined amount of time waiting her out. Plus, if I did talk to her, it would encourage her to come late next time—maybe it wouldn’t affect me, but it would be a pain for other teachers. So I waited.
At nineteen minutes, I was about ready to throw in the towel. But then I heard the welcome sounds of her stomping down the hall toward the stairwell. Victory was mine!
Just in case she was lying in wait downstairs, I waited another five minutes before turning out the lights and locking up. By that time, it was nearly eight thirty, and apparently all the other teachers had managed to avoid being ambushed. I didn’t see another soul as I went toward the exit.
As I walked, I texted Madison again, to let her know I was really on the way this time, and got a message back:
Don’t forget Sid!
“Coccyx,” I said loudly, immediately regretting it because of the way it echoed through the empty building.
It had been Sid’s idea to stay at school during the meetings, hoping he’d hear a familiar voice or something juicy as parents wandered to and fro. Of course, what he’d really wanted was a chance to make up for his misstep in setting up the supposedly untraceable e-mail address that Frisenda had used to find me.
Now I had to go get him out of Madison’s locker, which meant backtracking down a corridor that seemed longer than usual.
I know it’s nuts for somebody who’s spent most of her life in the halls of academe, but I still get creeped out when those halls are empty. A school without students or teachers is just unnatural, and since PHS teachers were regularly reminded to turn out their classroom lights when they left, to save power, every doorway was ominously dark. Though I was annoyed I’d have to get Sid, I was just glad I was going to have him for company on the drive home. What could be more cheering than a talking skull?
Just as I turned the corner of the hall where Madison had her locker, the lights went out. “Coccyx,” I said again.
I felt along the wall at the corner where I was fairly sure I’d seen light switches, but my triumph at finding them was quashed when I flipped all the switches and nothing happened. I had no idea if it was a busted fuse or a security timer, but either way, I was stuck in the dark.
I reached into my purse for my phone and managed to find the flashlight app. Having only a streak of illumination was almost worse than being in darkness, but not quite, so I used it to make my way to the right locker.
“Sid? You okay in there?” I whispered. There was no reason to whisper, of course, but I didn’t want more echoes.
“What’s going on out there?” he said. “What happened to the lights?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. I just want to get out of here.” Then, of course, I had to find the text Madison had sent me with the combination, and that took what seemed like two or three hours of fumbling around. Once I had it, I had to hold the phone in one hand while twisting the ossifying knob on the ossifying lock with the other. Meanwhile Sid was humming the theme to Jeopardy!
When the lock’s shackle finally let go, I swung the locker door open and snarled at Sid.
He was grinning at first, but then his eyes got impossibly wide. “Georgia, behind you!”
Without thinking, I threw myself to the side and onto the floor and heard the swish of something going over my head and the earsplitting crash of something slamming against the row of lockers.
38
I’d dropped my phone as I hit the floor, and the light showed only a pair of sneakered feet standing behind where I’d been a second before.
“Help! Police! Help! Fire! Help! Police! Help! Fire!” Sid yelled.
The person in sneakers hesitated, probably trying to figure out who was making all the noise. Then he—or she—turned to go. I stuck my foot out, hoping to trip him, but he dodged it easily and ran down the hall.
“Help! Police! Help! Fire! Help! Police! Help! Fire!”
“Sid! Sid, he’s gone.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I took a moment to make sure I was telling the truth, but while I might find a bruise later, nothing seemed to be broken or bleeding. “I’m fine,” I said again and got up from the floor.
“Call 9-1-1!”
“Already on it.”
An hour and a half later, I almost wished I hadn’t bothered. First off, the woman answering the phone sounded all too familiar—I was pretty sure she’d been the one who answered the phone when I’d called in my anonymous tip, and I was afraid she recognized my voice, too.
To add to my paranoia, Deborah’s friend Louis Raymond was one of the responding officers, but if he was suspicious about my being attacked after having been involved in a bizarre murder case a few months before, he kept it to himself.
Principal Dahlgren, on the other hand, couldn’t quite hide his feelings. While he said all the right things, I couldn’t help but pick up the impression that he thought the incident was most peculiar. He kept asking why I’d stayed at school so late, even after I explained that I was dodging a tardy but overly persistent parent. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was stealing school supplies or if I’d been doing something illegal and/or immoral on school property.
He insisted that they’d never had violence at the school before, and when Officer Raymond reminded him of Irwin going missing after his interview there, he came just short of snapping when he insisted that Irwin’s disappearance had nothing to do with PHS. What he really wanted was for the police to confirm that I’d been attacked by a random stranger coming into the school.
The police weren’t buying it. For one, my attacker had known how to temporarily disable the hall lights. It turned out that it hadn’t been a fuse—it was something much simpler. There were switches on both ends of the long hall, and the lights had been turned off using the panel farthest from me. Plus the switches had been left halfway between on and off, so they couldn’t be turned back on from the end I was on. It was an old trick, but it showed that my attacker was familiar enough with the building to know where the light switches were and how to rig them. Moreover, the police found that he’d left behind the weapon that had hit the locker instead of my head. It was a baseball bat clearly marked as PHS property. Dahlgren had no rebuttal for that.
The police started out by focusing on any kids I might have flunked out of my class, or possibly arguments with their parents during the night’s meetings, but I kept telling them that it was a pass-fail course and n
obody was failing. Then they asked about my personal life, and I had nothing to tell them about that, either.
Eventually they concluded that they couldn’t conclude much of anything. It could have been random or it could have been personal, but they were having a hard time reconciling either scenario with somebody finding out that I’d be at school late and alone, knowing how to deal with the lights, and being able to locate the baseball bat.
Of course, I couldn’t explain why I thought I’d been targeted, and I certainly couldn’t tell the real story of how he’d been scared off. I’d had Sid back in his bag before the police and Dahlgren arrived, and if anybody wondered why I was carrying a bowling bag, they didn’t mention it.
Finally everybody agreed that there was nothing else that could be done. The police took the bat with them to check for fingerprints and escorted me to my car to make sure I got there safely.
Sid managed to contain himself until we were out of the school parking lot, but then he started thumping on the inside of the bag and kept at it until I was stopped by a red light long enough to unzip the bag.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked immediately.
“Yes, Sid, I’m okay. Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me? If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t be involved in this crazy mess!”
“Stop that!”
“You know it’s true.”
“And you wouldn’t have gotten us involved if Madison hadn’t forgotten you at school, and Madison wouldn’t have had you at school if I hadn’t let her take you. So that makes it my fault.”
“That is the worst logic trail I have ever heard.”
“Okay, then blame Deborah. That’s always fun.”
“Seriously—”
“Seriously, Sid, you had my back. As always. And literally this time.”
“But—”
“But me no buts until you grow one of your own.”
“Hey! I have a very shapely tailbone.”
“If the shape to which you refer is a point, then sure you do.”