Perhaps I would still achieve that comfort level with Thad. Perhaps it didn’t matter if I was his father or guardian or uncle or foster parent. The names didn’t seem to perplex Thad; he simply called me Mark. And Neil never cared whether I was his lover or roommate or husband or friend; he simply called me Mark.
Lighten up, Mark, I told myself as I reached the edge of the park.
Go home. Start supper.
Friday, September 22
GLEE SAVAGE HAD PHONED Miriam Westerman to pitch our idea for a photo feature on her New Age school, and predictably, Westerman snapped at the bait, inviting Glee to visit the new facility on Friday, shortly after the opening of school.
Wanting to see Westerman in action with my own eyes, I offered to pick up Glee at her apartment before work that morning and drive her to the school; she readily accepted, happy to have me along. What I didn’t understand when making this offer, though, was that Westerman’s school operated on two calendars—a lunar calendar to determine which weeks classes were held, and a solar calendar to govern the school day. “What the hell does that mean?” I asked Glee.
“It means that the schedule shifts every day to get the kids in sync with their planet. Classes start at sunrise.”
“Christ. These days, that’s about…when, six-thirty?”
“About.” She grinned. “Miriam insisted I arrive well before seven—in order to fully appreciate the day’s birth energy.”
So Friday morning, at the crack of dawn, I drove from the house on Prairie Street toward Glee’s downtown apartment building. My dashboard thermometer said the outdoor temperature was forty-two, forcing me to wonder why I’d been foolhardy enough to leave the house without a topcoat. The windshield defroster switched on automatically, and the rush of dry, heated air against my face served as a reminder that summer was truly gone.
Glee’s building lay ahead, on the corner of Third Avenue and Park. Lights burned yellow in many of its windows as residents arose to prepare for the day. Under the portico, between a pair of ornate lanterns that had been left on all night, stood the Register’s veteran features editor, ready to roll.
Dressed for fall in a deep-hued wool skirt and jacket, Glee also sported a tidy waist-length cape, its collar trimmed with dark fur—that touch of mink. She always wore a hat—today’s brown velvet pillbox was spiffed with an enameled pin representing a cluster of leaves in bright autumn colors. And she always carried a purse—today’s portfolio-size carpetbag was pumpkin orange, overlaid with a darker pattern of fallen leaves.
Strutting toward my car as I circled into the driveway, she grabbed the door handle, swung it open, and hopped in. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the sunrise,” she told me dryly. Brightly, she added, “Morning, boss.”
“Good morning, Glee. Ready to take on Dragon Woman?”
“Bring ’er on,” she said boldly, peeping inside her purse to check for her notebook. Satisfied, she snapped the bag shut.
Pulling out of the driveway, I asked, “Where is this place—what’s it called?”
“A Child’s Garden,” she reminded me.
I snorted. “Pretty sappy.”
“It’s on some converted farm outside of town.”
Glancing at her with raised brows, I asked, “Not out there by the porn shops?”
“No!” She laughed. “Other side of town. Scoot out on First Avenue.”
And we did. Breezing through downtown (there was no traffic yet), I recapped, “Now the plan is, I’ll stay in the background. The interview is all yours. Miriam won’t like the fact that I’m there at all, so you do the schmoozing.”
“Right. She’ll be expecting a photographer, though. What’ll I tell her?”
I thought for a moment. “Say that we’ll be sending one to follow up later.”
“Maybe we should send one. This joint sounds weird. It might be worth a feature—though I doubt if Miriam would appreciate the tack we’d take.”
I grinned. “I do like the way you think. Have you prepared enough ‘intelligent’ questions to flesh out a real story?”
“Of course,” she mocked offense that I would ask. “Miriam won’t have a clue that our true purpose this morning is to ferret out any connection she might have to the Cantrell case.”
“We assume that she had ample reason to hate Cantrell. So remember, we need answers to two questions: First, how could she possibly have been clued to the fact that Cantrell was here to testify for the porn industry? And second, was it Miriam who made that cake?”
Glee nodded patiently—she was fully aware of the plan.
As we zipped past the city line, the sun slid through a bank of clouds that clung to the horizon like distant gray mountains. The clear sky overhead instantly grew blue. Responding to something in the air, my car’s defroster shut off, and the cabin now seemed eerily quiet, as if awed by the solemn moment of daybreak.
“The school’s just ahead,” Glee told me, pointing, “on the far left.”
“That’s appropriate,” I muttered while slowing the car.
A rough-hewn sign at the edge of the road announced A CHILD’S GARDEN, its letters woven from tortured twigs. Beneath, a second sign, crudely painted on barn boards, explained, PRIVATE DAY SCHOOL, K-12, MIRIAM WESTERMAN, HEADMISTRESS. Amazed, I asked, “All twelve grades?”
“Plus kindergarten.”
Pulling into the crushed-limestone driveway, I saw that the grounds were clearly those of a farm. The house, barn, and its old outbuildings still dotted the property, as did several new buildings of spare, featureless design—all freshly painted a goofy shade of park-bench green, the color of the eco-movement. The driveway opened to an irregular-shaped gravel parking lot, where a dozen or so vehicles were scattered without order.
Near the door of the largest of the new buildings, a gold-trimmed Jeep idled, its muffler sputtering exhaust into the cold morning air. The woman behind the wheel wore a bathrobe, and her hair was a mess—she’d obviously overslept and had torn out of the house to get her kid to school. When the youngster leaped out and ran inside the building, the mom pulled away, meeting my car in a tight squeeze. I opened my window to apologize. She opened hers, telling me, “This shifting sunrise schedule—I don’t know.” Peeved, she blew a shock of hair from her face.
When our paths had cleared, I parked wherever space allowed, and both Glee and I got out of the car. All was quiet. Looking around, we weren’t sure where to go, so we moved toward the building that we’d seen the child enter. A sign at the door listed SCHOOL OFFICES, FSNACH OFFICE, CLASSROOMS. Glee and I exchanged a quizzical glance—this was apparently the school’s all-purpose building. Opening the door, we stepped into a hall.
“…and if you don’t agree, you can damn well get out!” screamed a shrewish voice, Miriam Westerman’s—I’d know it anywhere. She was ranting at someone inside an office, its open doorway just a few yards from where we stood.
Another woman’s voice, far quieter, near tears, responded, “But don’t you think you should at least take into account the views of some of your faculty?”
“Views?” asked Westerman, crowing sarcastically. “There are no ‘views’ that matter here other than those expressed in the founding principles of the Society.”
“But some of the boys in the school—”
Westerman cracked something on a desk or a table—it sounded like a bullwhip. When the other woman had stopped speaking and started crying, Westerman hissed, “I think I know what’s best for the chill-dren.” She pronounced the word with slow, exaggerated precision. “Now get back to your class—they’re late for leaf-gathering.”
The young teacher skittered from the office into the hall. Seeing us, she found her anguish compounded by embarrassment and buried her face in her hands, stumbling off in the opposite direction.
Jerking my head toward Westerman’s office, I told Glee under my breath, “I guess the headmistress is in.”
Behave yourself, she told me silently with a smirk. Then sh
e stepped to the open doorway, rapped on the jamb, and asked, “Miriam, is this a bad time?”
Westerman gasped. A chair scraped the floor as she stood. Her voice dripped sweetness as she said from within, “Why, Ms. Savage, I didn’t hear you arrive.”
Of course you didn’t, I wanted to say. You were practicing your banshee act.
“It’s Miss Savage,” Glee corrected her. “But do call me Glee.”
“Glee,” Westerman said the word with delight, as if hearing it newly coined. “Such a fine, spirited name, it sounds as if it sprang kicking from the womb of Mother Earth herself.” She tittered while clomping toward the door and into the hall, reaching to shake hands. “It’s indeed a pleasure, Glee, to welcome such an esteemed writer to A Child’s—” Westerman stopped short, features falling as she saw me. Brusquely, she asked, “What’s he doing here?”
“Mark’s just along for the ride,” Glee assured her blithely. “You know men—nosy but harmless.”
“Hello, Miriam,” I told her through an innocuous smile.
Glee continued, her tone girl-to-girl, “He signs my check, Miriam, so I thought I’d better let him come—but I made him promise to keep his mitts off my story.”
I smiled benignly.
“Well”—this was clearly against Westerman’s better judgment—“all right.” She swirled her head away from me, returning her attentions to Glee, as if I ceased to exist. What she failed to understand was that her insulting behavior suited me fine. As she stood there in the hall, engaging in sister chat with Glee, I had the opportunity to study the woman unnoticed, as a fly on the wall might.
She wore her usual formless gray cloak, which hung to the knees. A pair of snagged green tights slithered down to those lumpish, muddy clogs. In addition to the primitive necklace (the one that looked like painted bones and teeth) that always rattled against her chest, she’d strung a crude, childish chain of still damp leaves around her neck. Flecks of these leaves, bark, and other debris clung to her cloak like dirty scabs. Her lifeless hair was an oily tangle, knotted with a leather thong into a halfhearted ponytail—apparently her “office do.” I knew she was forty-five (the same as Doug Pierce and Harley Kaiser, who were all contemporaries), but she looked far older than Glee Savage, who was in her early fifties. In fact, compared to my stylish features editor, Westerman looked like an absolute hellhag—but then, my view was a tad tainted.
Glee had fished the notebook out of her bag and was asking, “And your enrollment is what, Miriam?”
“We opened two weeks ago with a charter enrollment of seventeen chill-dren.”
Glee noted the number. “That’s about…two students per class.”
“On average, yes. But the lower grades are the largest. In fact, we have only one student in ninth grade, and none above that—yet. The lower grades will ‘feed’ the upper school, of course, and we continue to recruit new enrollment from the ranks of our FSNACH membership.”
“With such small classes,” said Glee, “you must be able to lavish considerable attention on each student. I assume your curriculum is highly progressive—computers from day one?”
Westerman looked aghast, clapping a palm to her flat chest. “Heavens no, Glee. No electronics whatever. We rely solely on traditional methods and a natural geo-based curriculum.”
“Which would be…?” asked Glee, suppressing a laugh with a dainty cough.
“We instruct our chill-dren, from kindergarten on, to respect the generative force of Mother Earth and to absorb the celestial harmony that governs the life cycle of the seasons.” Westerman paused in thought, then summed up, “Basic holism.”
With perfect composure, Glee queried, “The school is of course accredited? And the teachers certified?”
Westerman tisked. “None of that is necessary, and in fact, such bureaucratic meddling only serves to frustrate the learning process. According to Wisconsin state law, we need only demonstrate that a sequential curriculum—”
Two shrill noises interrupted Westerman’s lecture, noises like the call of some huge predatory bird. Glee froze wide-eyed. I nearly wet my pants. With a wild expression, Westerman grabbed Glee by the shoulders and yanked her inside the office. I slipped in with them.
“What is it?” asked Glee, quavering.
In a matter-of-fact tone, Westerman explained, “Ms. Avery signals the change of class periods with birdcalls. We waste no opportunity to educate the chill-dren in nature’s own native vocabulary. There’s a quiz at the end of the day. If I’m not mistaken, that was the red-tailed hawk.” As she spoke, the hustle of little feet could be heard pattering through the hall.
“But why,” Glee sputtered, “did you pull me into the office?”
Westerman paused. “I must apologize, Glee. But I didn’t want the chill-dren to see you—not like that. They might be frightened by your pelt.” She wagged a naughty-naughty finger at Glee’s mink collar.
I bit my tongue. The woman was not only ludicrous, but hypocritical. I wanted to ask, How about that collection of bones and teeth hanging around your own neck, sister? That carnage is enough to frighten anyone.
Westerman delicately suggested, “Perhaps if we could just hang that up…?” And she beckoned to remove the pert little cape from Glee’s shoulders. Eyeing me askance for a moment, Glee obliged by doffing the garment and offering it to Westerman, who handled it gingerly, so as not to touch its fur trim. Draping it over the back of a chair, she said wistfully, “Man has inflicted such violence on the world, there’s no point in exposing chill-dren to the sadistic butchery of trappers.”
I hoped Glee would lay into the harpy, but she remained focused on her mission. Glossing over the implied insult, she commiserated, “And to think that such wanton violence has now visited our own community…”
Westerman didn’t follow. “Trappers?”
“No,” Glee explained patiently, “murder. Carrol Cantrell was victimized within our town’s very borders. And to think that I’d actually interviewed the man before he was strangled. I’ve never met anyone who later died so horribly.”
“I met him too, but I can’t say he left a very favorable impression.”
Glee and I both waited, hoping Westerman would expound on this, but she wasn’t going to make our job that easy.
“Now then,” she said, her manner again cloyingly sweet, “would you like to see the compound?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Glee reminded her.
“This way then,” Westerman singsonged, whisking past me to lead Glee toward the door. I turned, pausing long enough to take a good look at the office. I was still wondering what had been the source of that slapping noise we’d heard earlier while Westerman was berating the tearful teacher. It took me only a moment to spot it amidst the mess on her desk—not a bullwhip, but an old-fashioned hickory pointer, the type used by schoolmarms to whack errant pupils.
Also on the desk was a computer, up and running, with a Web site displayed on its monitor. Colorful graphics jerked and flashed, coarsely animated. Unable to discern the nature of the site that Westerman had been visiting, I cleared my throat, catching Glee’s eye, directing it toward the screen.
“Oh,” she said, “just a moment, Miriam.”
Westerman turned from the hallway, looking back into the room. “Yes?”
Glancing up from her notepad, Glee asked with a confused laugh, “Didn’t you say there were no computers in the school?” She gestured toward the desk.
Echoing Glee’s laugh, the headmistress explained, “Electronics play no role in educating the chill-dren, but I myself have found the computer to be highly useful as a communications tool. Our worldwide sisterhood is wired!” she assured us. “We know how to network.” And she whisked us out of the room.
So then—Earth Woman had gone techie. Suddenly, there was a plausible explanation as to how she might have learned Cantrell’s true purpose in Dumont. Linked by the Internet to a network of antiporn crusaders, she could have picked up a leaked list of d
efense witnesses from just about anywhere. Further, I now knew that she had the wits to plant a file in Cantrell’s laptop and rig its clock. Still, the hanging question remained: Did she make that cake?
Out in the hall, Westerman was explaining, “Our curriculum is ideally suited to the open-classroom approach, and I like to think of A Child’s Garden as an entire school without walls.” She yammered on while leading us through the building, which did indeed have walls—lots of them. Some of the “classrooms” were little more than closets, where two or three kids would labor at a card table on projects ranging from mud pies to macramé. In spite of Westerman’s professed allegiance to traditional teaching methods, I saw no activity that could be described as even remotely academic. Indeed, the whole setup struck me as something of a nursery school for kids of all ages—even the older ones engaged in nothing more mental than the chanting of wicca lore.
Leaving the main building, we followed Westerman through the compound, listening to her prattle about earthbound religions, the Great Goddess, and holistic feminism, confirming my assumption that the true purpose of her school was not education, but indoctrination. We toured the barn (where a child was instructed in the finer points of milking a cow), an activities building (where another student attempted to contort herself into the lotus position), and finally the dining hall (where a woeful child labored at husking corn, dutifully laying out the silk to dry for some unknown purpose). Encountering each of her students, the headmistress would warble, “Brightest blessings, child!” To which each would respond dully, mechanically, “Brightest blessings, Ms. Westerman.”
Standing there in the lunchroom, listening to her lecture Glee on the importance of strict adherence to the principles of organic nutrition (everything was natural, herbal, and of course vegetarian), I was concluding that our mission had failed. Though I was more convinced than ever that Westerman’s drug-addled hippie days had left her brain permanently impaired, and while Glee had accumulated more than sufficient material for a jaw-dropper of a story, we had not managed to glean from this wacky character any evidence of involvement in Carrol Cantrell’s murder. The mere presence of a computer on her desk was not sufficient to implicate her—we needed to know if she had baked that suspicious cake. Then I realized that we stood not ten feet from the dining hall’s kitchen, its swinging door propped open. Catching Glee’s attention, I discreetly led her glance to the door. With equal discretion, she nodded that she understood.
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