Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  “You seem quite . . . I mean given that your engagement—”

  She looked sulky, but only for a moment, and then she seemed to clear the darkness off her face and she hugged the little dog and lapsed into baby-talk again. I tried not to hear it, but “poor uggums whose mama . . .” snuck through my yuck barrier.

  “Just to make sure I have it right—is it correct that the two of you ended the engagement recently?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “A speed bump. A lover’s disagreement, not even a quarrel. We’d have worked things out.” She looked at me defiantly. The little dog yapped, as if agreeing. “If you are suggesting for one minute that I am somehow responsible for Tom’s death—”

  “Not at all. Just trying to keep everything straight.”

  “We would have gotten past this. Every couple has differences, every relationship its ups and downs. I heard about the supposedly ‘new’ girl. Penelope made it a point to tell me. But I know Tomas. He’s Ingrid’s son that way and how could he be otherwise? He comes from people who don’t have the same moral code as the rest of us. But she was nothing to him. He’d have been back.” She opted to sniffle again. The little dog stood on his hind legs and licked her face.

  Poor, poor Sasha. Or maybe lucky Sasha, to have not had the chance to become over-involved with this man and family. “Ms. Koepple suggested—”

  “Don’t talk to me about her. She’s a vulture, picking at Ingrid’s remains before the woman’s gone. Those airs! So Merchant-Ivory—based on what? And the fake humanitarianism makes me sick. It’s all about her, don’t you see? She talks about how Cornelius is robbing Tomas’s children of their birthright, as if she gives a damn. She hates them—and frankly, I’m with her on that. The twins are the whiniest, most spoiled . . . but then, if you look at their mother, you know how they got that way.”

  “Their mother is the current . . . ?”

  “Nina, yes.” Georgeanne nodded. “Penelope all but faints every time they come to visit their grandmother. She always finds things to do that take her away from home, and she was delighted to hear that Tomas was leaving Nina. Trust me, Penelope isn’t worried about anybody’s future except her own. She’s picked on Cornelius and tried to poison Ingrid’s mind about him every step of the way. Obviously, Ingrid bought none of it, and got angry with her. Penelope’s rightfully afraid that she’s pissed off Ingrid to the point where whatever was promised her is no longer in the will. I’d been led to believe Ingrid was leaving her enough of a bequest that Penelope never had to work again.

  “That’s why she wants Cornelius out of the picture. If nothing gets changed, and Ingrid keeps failing, Penelope’s set for life. If they start mucking with Ingrid’s will, who knows what happens to Penelope’s bequest?”

  I thought of the afternoon’s contretemps. Was that why Penelope wanted me there? To upset and disorient Ingrid so that no new will could cut the secretary out? “You’ve gotten to know the family quite well,” I said quietly.

  She raised her eyebrows. “I knew Tomas quite well. These things worried him. You’re thinking it’s odd that I met his mother and his children, because Tomas is—was—still married, technically speaking, but it’s an odd family. A sort of medieval fiefdom with dukes and empresses and intrigue and plots one against the other. Nina, his—the wife he was divorcing—she was history in that household. They don’t have problems getting over people.” She shook her head as if bemused. “Ingrid’s the Czarina, all right, but all the Mrs. Severins, maybe except the first wife, are Grand Duchesses, or whatever high and mighty term exists. I get the feeling the first one was a youthful mistake, that’s all. Quickly over and forgotten. But the other two, what a pair of harpies! I would not be surprised if one of them poisoned him with whatever that was. Whatever else you might think about me, I would have been his best-natured wife.” She looked sniffly again.

  She wasn’t having an allergy attack. Her tears were, indeed, those of mourning, though I couldn’t yet tell if they were about Tomas or his billions. She seemed so brittle and hard, she would have fit right into that family. No wonder she was upset.

  “Had Tomas and Cornelius worked out their differences?”

  She narrowed her eyes, as if to better see where I was headed. “Now how would I know that, unless I was in close contact with Cornelius?” Her voice had lost any trace of warmth. “You’ve let the Dragon poison your mind about me.”

  She put the tissue to her dry eyes again. I took that as my cue to leave. I couldn’t understand the script she was following, but her act was wearying.

  * * *

  Ten

  * * *

  * * *

  MACKENZIE countered logically when I said I wanted to stop working with the wretched family. He agreed, but suggested that first we complete our report on Cornelius. That made sense, so even though I wasn’t in the mood for making sense, I agreed to complete the project. We needed the money and the work was next to nothing. Therefore, that evening the two of us returned to the land of Ozzie, and overjoyed his pizza boy by doubling the usual order, and while we munched pepperoni and mozzarella, we combed databases looking for Ingrid’s fiancé and discovered that Cornelius Westerly appeared to be precisely who he said he was. He’d never been married, never been in prison. The only thing you could hold against him was a lackluster school record and a series of go-nowhere jobs, except for the most recent one as a paid “host” on cruise ships. That one had led directly to the Severin mansion.

  His duties had been to escort single women on shore excursions, to be charming with them at all times, and to dance with them when the music played.

  “How come I never heard about that job?” Mackenzie said. “What a life I could have had!”

  “It must be tiring, like a boring party where your smile muscles ache, but one that lasts months.”

  Ingrid had apparently been wowed by her dance partner on a Caribbean cruise, and thus had begun their great romance.

  Nothing criminal about that. Nothing criminal anywhere. Not that I believed Cornelius was profoundly in love with a barely-held-together woman pushing eighty, but strange are the ways of the heart and in any case, his actions were legal.

  There were one or two more places to check, but Mackenzie was taking care of that, and we had no reason to expect any different results there.

  Penelope was going to be disappointed, but I for one didn’t care. We’d done what she asked, and our report would officially end our relationship.

  I felt good knowing that as I entered school the next morning. It felt like starting over, ending the ugly chapter that had begun with my discovery of Tomas Severin Monday afternoon.

  I had the sense that even the students had gotten sufficient distance on those events, and we were refreshed and reenergized. My first-period class actually had fun learning how to write a friendly letter. “Even if you break my heart and use e-mail all the time,” I said, “make your goal being able to express emotion without spelling out things like grin. If you’re being funny—be funny. No ‘in my humble opinion,’ no rolling on the floor laughing, and none of those little happy, sad, or whatever else faces. Use the language. That’s what it’s there for.”

  They humored me. It was an auspicious beginning to the day.

  It was also an anomaly, a false indicator, and it was downhill from then on. The next class balked at taking a quiz, insisting I’d never assigned the section at hand, and what was frightening was that I wasn’t sure they were wrong. We had a surprise fire-drill in the middle of a class that was going well, and that was it for that period. My tenth grade writing unit seemed to have detoured into incomprehensibility hell, and I could see no evidence that anyone had learned anything from the last exercise, and finally, in the afternoon, while the seniors were in the middle of an SAT-prep quiz, there was a knock on my door, and Mrs. Wiggins stood there, her arms bent up, palms facing me and fingers curled. Like a squirrel, only not as cute. I walked to the doorway.

  “I wouldn�
�t bother you,” she whispered in her rabbit-speak voice.

  “It’s all right, but why not send up a messenger if—”

  “Except that it’s the police, you see.”

  I didn’t see. I could only see this plump, gray woman who looked as if she were begging for nuts before winter arrived. “What do they want with me?”

  “Nothing. Oh, no. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

  “Why are you here, Mrs. Wiggins?” I asked in the softest voice I could manage.

  “Oh. Yes, of course. Well, dear, I’m here because they told me to come here.”

  “Because?”

  “They’re here for one of yours. If I read the schedule correctly, that is.” Now she folded her hands over her chest, in a vaguely self-protective motion.

  “The police want one of the students in this room.”

  She nodded.

  “Who? Why?”

  “They didn’t say why to me, Miss Pepper,” she said in her subdued voice. “They just said they wanted to talk with Zachary Wallenberg. That’s all.”

  “They? How many?”

  “Him, actually. One.”

  Zachary. My pride and joy and personal success story. Three years ago, his distraught mother had thought of this school as a last try. Ever since her divorce, which meant for most of Zachary’s elementary and junior high years, her son had been what’s so euphemistically referred to as “acting out.” His grades were abysmal and he’d had petty encounters with the law.

  But he was one of the reasons that teaching sometimes seems one of life’s great gifts. The sullen tenth-grader slowly dissolved into a kid with a new vision of how he could live. He pulled out all the stops and determined to get into a top college. He wanted to study everything, and then to write about it. To travel the world and report back about it.

  And he would. I was sure his grades and sports were going to carry him to whatever school he desired. After that, who knew, but the breadth of his ambition warmed my heart.

  I couldn’t bear the idea of his screwing up now. I had a momentary panic about his being in trouble because of the drug article he’d written. But finding out about something isn’t a crime.

  Then I realized that if he’d done anything really serious, the cop would have come for him himself. This was probably about an idiotic adolescent thing that needed a talking-to, and little more. In fact, it probably wasn’t even about Zachary himself. He simply must know something about somebody who was in trouble. And so I convinced myself while the squirrel-woman waited.

  She pursed her lips. “He—the officer—told me to tell you his name. Very formal and polite of him, I thought! But . . . the thing is, I can’t quite remember it now. I should have written it down. I have trouble remembering. Old age, I suppose, creeping up on me.” The rust-colored patches I’d seen there before once again formed on her cheeks.

  She was too young for jokes about old age. She looked like someone in her forties who had, perhaps, lived a little too hard at some point. Maybe that accounted for the memory lapses. Or she’d never been overly powered in the first place.

  “An unusual name . . .” She continued musing to herself, making me think she might have a hearing problem as well. “If only I could . . .”

  I wondered why an officer would feel obliged to tell me his name, unless he was a friend of C.K.’s and simply wanted to say hello—but that seemed unprofessional, to say the least. Hi, I’m here to make an arrest and how’s it going? Then I knew who it had to be. “Was his name Owen, by any chance? Owen Edwards?”

  Her head bobbed assent before I finished the name. “Owen. Unusual. Not the Edwards part, of course. How did you know?”

  “I heard the name somewhere.” I didn’t want to remind her of Monday’s fracas, did not want her to associate Zachary with any of it, or to inadvertently or on purpose start rumors.

  But what was going on? What could Zach possibly have to do with the man’s fall down the stairs?

  “Zach will be down in ten minutes, when the period ends.”

  “The officer wanted to see him right away.”

  “I understand, but everybody’s time is of the essence, including mine. Including my students. Tell him the class is taking a timed test, and as soon as it’s over, Zach will be down. I’ll escort him myself.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Hasn’t this been a week, though,” she said. “Police and trouble and more police . . .” and she toddled off, holding very tight to the banister of the great and fatal staircase.

  It wasn’t a timed test, and it wasn’t important, but I couldn’t see the point of humiliating Zach by having him pulled out of class by the school secretary. He’d come too far from the days when that happened with regularity.

  The ten minutes rolled by fairly quickly for me, and, I hoped, for Officer Edwards downstairs.

  I stopped Zach as he was leaving. “I’m going to go with you now. There’s a police officer here who wants to talk with you.”

  He pulled back, as if my touch burned him. “Why?” he asked, but not with the level of incredulity and surprise I’d have liked.

  “I don’t know. I’m sure it’s nothing. How could it be something?”

  I wanted him to agree with me, to be indignant, or look really confused. Instead, he looked terrified. No other word for it.

  As for Owen Edwards, his expression was sad and he seemed reluctant to make the next move. He verified that Zachary Wallenberg was the young man standing in front of him, and then he suggested that Zach go into Dr. Havermeyer’s office. He made it clear that the headmaster was not in there, and they’d borrow the space for a minute or two. His voice was casual and light, making whatever business they had to transpire sound optional and nonthreatening.

  Zach walked into the office with the air of someone on death row.

  “I came down to vouch for this young man. He’s a good kid, a good student, and don’t let his long-ago reputation influence you otherwise. I’ve watched him shape up and forge ahead these past three years and—”

  “There’s no lynch mob in the principal’s office. I’m not even closing the door. I simply need to ask some questions.”

  “He’s obviously terrified by—”

  “Trust me to not be frivolous, or to jump to conclusions.”

  “Still, is this really necessary?”

  “A man’s dead.”

  “But what could Zachary have to do with—”

  I’d thought Edwards handsome, but now he was simply a collection of chilled and steely features.

  “Fine,” I said. “Sorry.” I waved farewell, and turned around, furious, but accepting the idea that I wasn’t doing Zach any good by interfering.

  Ben Summers was waving at me from the top of the stairs. When he caught my eye, he nodded and walked toward my classroom door, where he awaited me.

  He was a small, rumpled man who taught and adored science and had little time for those of us teaching what he’d called “frippery.” “Name a poem that invented computers or cured cancer,” he’d said during one particularly caustic meeting when the allocation of textbook funds was being battled out.

  I wasn’t sure if having him eager to talk to me was good or bad news.

  “The police are here,” he whispered without preamble. “They came to my room.”

  What was this, a general roundup? “Why?”

  “Wanted to know about Zachary Wallenberg.”

  Maybe I’d been wrong. Cops worked on more than one case. Maybe Zach had committed a scientific prank that backfired or stolen chemicals.

  Except that Owen Edwards was a homicide detective, not a prank investigator. “What about him?” I asked.

  “About assembly. Monday. You know, the day that man . . .” He shook his head. “Zach was in my group that period. We should have been doing something worthwhile in the lab, not wasting everybody’s time on that god-awful speech, and then maybe nothing bad would have happened.”

&n
bsp; “I’m not following.”

  “The cop asked me weird questions, like whether we take roll in assembly. Do you?”

  “A head count, and as long as everybody actually made it from the room to assembly, why bother?”

  “That’s what I said, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Then he asked me when assembly began—why me? When precisely my class had arrived and when they left—I mean it was the same for my class as anybody else’s. Did they ask you things like that?”

  I shook my head. I felt slightly unethical not telling him that Mrs. Wiggins had come on the police’s behalf, and for Zachary himself. Then I thought again of the textbook battles, and didn’t feel all that bad. “About Zach,” I reminded him. Ben was a methodical man who could take forever to get to the point of his story, the only part of it I cared about.

  “Then he asked whether anybody had been excused from the assembly. Of course nobody had, though I’m positive everybody wanted to be.”

  “What was he getting at, and what about Zach?”

  “Zach left assembly. The cop seemed to already know that. I mean he asked all those general questions, but he was just revving up to get to Zach. And I couldn’t remember for how long Zachary was gone. What do they want of us? It couldn’t have been that long, or I’d have noticed, but it takes awhile to get to the boys’ bathroom, and then come back, and if he dawdled and was reluctant to hurry, who the hell could blame him?”

  “Was—was he the only one?”

  “The only one I remember. I’d barely have remembered about Zach if Edwards hadn’t brought him up specifically. What do you think he wants? How could he think Zachary . . .”

  We shook our heads in mutual dismay and confusion and went to our rooms. I waited, and just as I was about to go back to the office to find out what was going on, the object of my concern appeared. He looked ashen. “Is it okay if I come in?” he asked.

  “Of course. Have a seat.”

  “I don’t want to keep you or anything.” He managed to slump even while he was getting into the chair. Having a broken arm didn’t make him look less pitiful, either.