Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  I nodded. “You think it was a friend of his, then?” I asked. “Or at least somebody he knew?”

  “I think so, but I don’t have any real idea because he clammed up, and I didn’t ask anything more. It was weird, anyway. We were still working on flirting, and talk Lite. You know we met at a big party, did your basic chitchat: How was England, what do you do, what’s your sign, how do you feel about feng shui—the usual fill-in-the-blanks—and then, we had dinner, and then lunch, way too soon for death-threat talk, so I got us back on track by invoking you guys, and then we talked about what kind of photos I take. I think that was the last mention of anything like that. Of course I feel bad about that now. Maybe he would have said more. Maybe none of this would have happened.”

  “You couldn’t have known, and it probably was irrelevant, anyway. He fell down a flight of stairs. Nothing could have prevented that.” I refused to think about the cheekbone. “When was that lunch?”

  “Today,” she said, as if I should have known that.

  “Today? When?”

  She looked worried about me, wrinkling her forehead and moving closer. “Lunch was . . . at lunchtime, why?”

  “Because . . . was he injured in any way?”

  She squinted. “His feelings, you mean?”

  “No, I mean his face. Was he . . .” I was being ridiculous. Nobody had lunch with a new woman while his cheek looked raw and demolished the way Tom Severin’s had.

  “He was fine. And you—are you okay?”

  “One thing,” Mackenzie said. “You didn’t mention anything more about us? About the PI offices, or anything?”

  Sasha shook her head slowly, her forehead creased. “No,” she finally said. “Like I said, Lite.”

  “He took our office number?” Mackenzie asked.

  Recognition dawned in her eyes. “No,” she said. “No!” And then she grinned. “That’s why he came to the school! I never said where your office was, but he knew you taught there—I said so. When I told him you were an English teacher by day and sleuthette by night he asked me where you taught, and when I said Philly Prep, he raised his eyebrows. He looked impressed.”

  “More likely horrified, or incredulous.” Our school’s reputation ranged from mediocre to laughable.

  “But you never mentioned Ozzie Bright,” Mackenzie said.

  “Correct. I couldn’t remember his name. So that mystery’s solved,” Sasha said, and as soon as she had, she looked at her full plate with actual interest, although by now it was cold. Her emotional recovery speed remained amazing.

  Now the note made sense. He was probably coming to ask me how to get in touch with Mackenzie. I felt as if some great psychic obligation had been removed. Now it was our turn to talk about her English adventures. She’d been back only a few weeks, and though we’d spent time together, it hadn’t been enough. Sasha’s life had always seemed a series of exciting but unrelated short stories. Having spent over a year in London and environs, and not being a particularly happy letter or even e-mail writer, Sasha was brimful of sagas needing new ears.

  “You know,” Mackenzie said when he’d finished his coffee, “those phone calls might well have been a prank, or from an angry employee who works things out that stupid way. People trip and fall all the time, and when a two-story marble staircase is involved in the misstep—people die. There wasn’t anything you could have done differently, so don’t go feeling guilty or as if you’re somehow responsible.” He kissed her on the forehead and excused himself to continue studying.

  Sasha nodded. “I hope that’s true. I hope it was all a terrible coincidence. Even that way, it’s hideous news.” She sighed, and finished her coffee, and we left it like that and did the dishes together.

  You’d think after his gracious words to her she’d stop looking for his fatal flaws, especially given that she had almost no standards for the men in her life, but as soon as she was no longer thinking about Tom Severin, Sasha questioned my Mr. Right’s absence from washing-up detail. I explained our every-other-night kitchen arrangement and defended him as a fair partner, and then, having done with death and love, I felt the inevitable next topic approach.

  “About the color scheme,” Sasha said, retrieving her ribbon bouquet.

  My turn to sigh, too loudly. She looked hurt. I held up one hand to stop whatever she was going to say. “I know you all mean well, but I’m having a devil of a time with my mother’s color scheme dilemmas, and my mother-in-law isn’t helping given that she’s wearing a lovely number she made herself. It’s fuchsia and lime and guess how Mom feels about working that into the attendants’ outfits and the tablecloths and flowers? And when I tell them—everyone—to wear whatever they like, that’s not acceptable, either. So forgive me. My color-choosing nerves are frayed.”

  I poured us both wine, and sat back down at the kitchen table, under the best light, to choose a ribbon.

  “Not that I’m making suggestions,” Sasha said, “because I want this to be what you want—you and nobody else.”

  That, by the way, is how everyone prefaces heavy-handed “suggestions.” Sasha included.

  “However,” she continued, “if you like this one”—she pulled out a mossy green that would not have been my first or second choice— “I have a coffee service from England that would go perfectly and I think it would look pretty as part of the picture frame . . .”

  The telephone rang, saving me from noting that she’d become precisely like my mother and sister. My choice—as long as it was her choice.

  A pleasant male voice asked for Mackenzie. “He’s asked to not be disturbed,” I said. “Could I take a message?”

  There was a moment’s silence, as the man on the other end of the phone seemed to decide whether he should trust me.

  “This is his fiancée,” I said, and then, hearing myself, I had to control a fit of the giggles. Fiancée! I will never get used to that silly-sounding word, but it seemed to give me cred as a potential taker-of-messages.

  “Oh, sure. Right. Amanda Pepper. We talked.”

  Now I recognized the voice. “Correct, Detective Edwards.”

  “You’re the one brought it in.”

  He was brimful of information I already had. This must be a social call. Getting back in touch with Mackenzie. But “You’re the one brought it in” meant he had the cup of tea on his mind.

  So perhaps not quite so purely social. Edwards was once again hesitating. I envisioned him staring at the receiver with that intense expression, then looking off to the side, deciding whether to tell me anything.

  I hazarded a hunch. “Is this in response to Mackenzie’s phone call to you?”

  He grunted agreement. My surmise had been correct. My fiancé had been doing end-runs, helping me behind my back. I couldn’t decide if I should be annoyed by this or not.

  I opted for not. We were, after all, partners, in the kitchen and in crime detection. Now if he could also convince Edwards that I had not pushed Severin down the stairs . . .

  Edwards obviously decided that no harm would be done if he trusted the messenger girl to transmit his words to the great sleuth himself. “Tell him he was right,” he said. “There’s a benzodiazepine in it.”

  I had no idea what a benzodiazepine was. I needed a definition, but didn’t want to ask for one and allow Edwards to be still more patronizing. “Sorry to be dense,” I said, “but how do you spell benzo—”

  “Easier to just write one of its street names. Roofies,” he said.

  “Got it.”

  He either didn’t hear me, or didn’t believe me, or didn’t care, so he continued on. “Mackenzie will know. People call it a date-rape drug. Somebody takes it in a drink—can’t taste it, can’t see it in his tea, and he gets a kind of amnesia for whatever happens while he’s sedated. Gets bleary, a little out of it and if he takes enough, he can pass out completely.”

  I truly had known all that, I just hadn’t been sure of the scientific name. I’m the advisor to the school paper, t
he Inkwire, and we’d started this academic year with a bang—the first issue had a serious piece on drugs and their availability, a student-researched article that was exceptionally good because it was peer-to-peer straight talk. I was so proud of that article; I intended to enter it in a journalism contest.

  “Not normally lethal, not that it was here, either,” Edwards continued. “But if he had alcohol, say at lunch, and the autopsy’s looking like he did, it’d make it much worse.”

  “I thought the tea might be significant,” I said, blatantly offering my back for patting.

  “Sure was, and since traces of it disappear quickly, thank him for the heads-up.”

  I resigned myself to the idea that this was a guy thing, and life was too short to start working on this problem at the moment.

  “They’re checking Severin for it now, and they wouldn’t have otherwise. Or if they did tomorrow or the next day, it’d be too late. It becomes undetectable.”

  I knew that, too.

  “What was that all about?” Sasha asked as soon as I’d put the receiver back on its cradle.

  “Tomas Severin. Did you have wine with lunch?”

  “I had a glass. Tom did, too. And a vodka martini beforehand. He’d had some kind of disturbing hour before lunch. Separate from the phone calls.”

  “Did you by any chance get tea-to-go when you left the place? Or did he?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t that kind of place. Really—just a tiny bistro. No take-out.”

  “When did your lunch end?”

  “An exact time? Amanda, I didn’t check my watch, but it wasn’t long. An hour, I’d say. We went our separate ways at one. He had another appointment. Very busy guy for somebody who basically didn’t even work. Why?”

  “It appears that somebody drugged him by dropping a date-rape drug in herbal tea he had in a Styrofoam cup.” And if it wasn’t at the café with Sasha, then where was it?

  “Too weird,” she said. “Why drug him? But why especially with that?”

  “Beats me. It would make him dopey, slow to react. Rape was surely not the goal in this case, but you could do whatever else you had in mind more easily, I guess.”

  “What? What could anybody have wanted to do to him at your school?”

  “In my classroom,” I added.

  “Tomas Severin, you don’t deserve to live,” Sasha said abruptly, startling me. “That was what the third phone call said.” She paused, then nodded, and when she spoke again, it was so softly I could barely hear her. “Somebody meant it,” she said. “Somebody meant it enough to kill him.”

  * * *

  Five

  * * *

  * * *

  PERHAPS the events at Philly Prep would have been newsworthy no matter who had died. After all, it’s shocking—though sadly less so all the time—when violent death hits a school. But it’s definitely worth a mouthful of sound bites when the victim’s the scion of a local dynasty, and it becomes lead-story time when the wealthy and prominent middle-aged dead man has an infamous date-rape drug in his system. Each time the media enjoyed another wallow in the story, they mentioned the “plucky”—absolutely not a word I’d want applied to me, ever—teacher who’d spotted the cup in her classroom.

  I was given credit for my housekeeping—for finding the thing, but not for brains. The stories made it sound as if I’d simply noticed trash and mentioned it to the crime-fighters.

  Needless to say, the excited newscasts and headlines did not make for a smooth workday. Now the students knew I’d discovered the body and the drugged cup—the latter in their very classroom, which became, therefore, a crime scene, and made them part of an investigative team. Each class in turn scanned for additional clues and evidence in corners and under desks. I could almost hear their excited thoughts: This time, they’d be the—plucky—ones to spot something and make the eleven o’clock news.

  This is the result of too many reality shows. Or too much reality.

  I felt as if I were hauling the curriculum behind me on a rope, trying to tug it into a room already overstuffed with yesterday’s news. I didn’t want to talk about the things the students chose as topics: how it felt to find a dying man; what the police asked me; whether I’d have to testify when they found out who had drugged Severin and probably killed him.

  Now and then I tossed a little of the lesson plan into the C.S.I. talk and the day progressed. By the time my seniors entered the room, most of the crime-talk was over. Unfortunately, so was the day.

  Even there, one adamant youngster came up with a new question. Faye Horrell, who was too cute and smart to be as afraid of speaking her mind as she appeared to be, protected herself by avoiding all direct statements. Every sentence out of her mouth was in the form of a question, even when she was suggesting that her teacher might be a criminal. Especially when she was suggesting that I might be in trouble with the law.

  In her own interrogatory way, Faye delighted in all things deadly. I stood at the side of the room, where I could see the books stacked on her desk and, with her permission, I lifted the stack and looked at the titles. One was Stiff, by Mary Roach, one was Corpse, by Jessica Sachs, and one was Declared Dead, by Suzanne Proulx.

  “For research?” she said. I didn’t ask of what kind.

  “So . . . have they said anything about your being under suspicion?” she asked in her tiny voice.

  “Me? Why on earth? Because I found him?” I sounded just like her. Maybe my level of panic equaled hers then, too, because I flushed with the fear that she somehow knew about Severin’s note, about Edwards’s suspicions that I was involved in Severin’s end.

  “Because . . . the article?” she piped. “In the Inkwire? Remember?”

  Of course I remembered it—with pride and pleasure in the students’ accomplishments. It was the article I planned to submit in the journalism competition.

  Faye wrinkled her forehead, looking pained and frightened. A “don’t hit me!” face was one of her most-used expressions. I had worried about that, about her interest in all things morbid, about possible abuse, but Rachel Leary, the counselor, had quelled my fears. “She’s pretty happy and normal. I had to ask her outright, and she basically told me that her cringing questioning style makes her distinctive. Kind of a trademark? As she would ask-say. She thinks it makes her cute.”

  Her writing was assertive and question-mark free. Someday I’d figure out a kind and polite way to let her know that the persona she’d adopted was annoying, not adorable.

  “Nobody mentioned anything about the school paper,” I said. “And even if they did, that doesn’t make me a criminal.”

  “But wouldn’t it have to be somebody who knew about the drug who did this? Somebody who knew where to buy it?” Faye’s face scrunched still more intensely. I wouldn’t have believed that such young skin could produce that many wrinkles. The child was going to need Botox shots before the semester was over. “You remember what Zach wrote?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Zachary Wallenberg, one of the outstanding seniors and one of our true success stories, had gone underground, with permission, and only to a preagreed-upon extent, and then had written an article that gave no specifics, but made it clear that close to a complete assortment of drugs—at least of the party and club variety—was available within five minutes’ walking distance of the school.

  “And wasn’t that drug found in the dead man mentioned in the article?”

  And yes it had been. I suppose Faye’s mental scenario was that the police would assume I had a fit of temporary insanity and asked a student where to make a buy before I doped up this Severin stranger. Little did she dream that they had a far more logical reason to think I was involved, one that did not require a question mark at the end of the supposition.

  “Thanks for your concern,” I told her, “but there’s no cause for it. Knowledge is power—not guilt. Only actions get people in trouble.”

  For the entire remainder of class, she’d look my way till
I felt her glance and met it, and then she’d do the forehead thing and I’d smile, understandingly, and disengage eye contact. By the end of the period, I was no longer sure I was completely innocent.

  As usual, before I left the building, I picked up the flyers, notices, ads, and general junk that mysteriously refills our mailboxes each day.

  “Find everything okay?” Mrs. Wiggins asked that every day. I wondered if she’d worked in a supermarket before coming here.

  “Just fine.” I said that every day, too.

  “And . . . about that . . . I saw on the news that—he was on drugs.”

  “Not exactly. The theory is that somebody put a drug into his tea and he didn’t know it. It’s tasteless and odorless.”

  She looked pale and overly anxious and she neared the office divider cautiously. “Do they know who?” she whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “Have any theory?”

  “Me? Or the police?”

  That choice stymied her, then finally she laughed, nervously, and said, “Either, I guess.”

  “I surely don’t, and as far as I know, neither do they, but then, they wouldn’t have any reason to tell me if they did. How about you?”

  “Me?” She stepped back from the divider, as if it had become electrified. “What do you . . . ?”

  I tilted my head toward Dr. Havermeyer’s closed office door. “About . . . not seeing Mr. Severin come into the school. You know. Is it okay?”

  She took three shuddery breaths, and nodded, then kept her gaze downward. “I think so. It was . . . embarrassing.”

  “You’re only human. Don’t worry.”

  She looked up at me and blinked. She was going to spend a long time analyzing what I meant, so I waved and walked outside, into the lobby—to the infamous bottom of the staircase, in fact. I thought about the remainder of the day, about putting in a few hours at Ozzie’s office. Moonlighting under October sunshine. The office would be a welcome change. My tasks there were so routine my mind could go on sleep mode while I entered numbers and mailed out bills.