Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  “—that you were writing an article, but why’d you keep sayin’ that, given that no matter how you’re urged, you never do it?”

  He was undergoing a chemical change, his cuteness factor ebbing, obnoxiousness on the rise. This was how endings began.

  “The misunderstanding is partly my fault,” I admitted.

  Instead of wondering what I meant, he nodded instant and hearty agreement, which made me want to throw my mushrooms at him, but it’s a pity to waste portobellos. “I thought I could use him to publicize the lawsuit, make the Fields so ashamed of themselves they’d go away. So much for my ability to manipulate the media.”

  I needed to talk about the suit, about Havermeyer’s probable response, about the possible loss of my job, about what I should do. “Why don’t we forget about that hack’s fantasy? I’m concerned about tomorrow. Havermeyer wants to see me, and I’m afraid—”

  Maybe it was the acoustics, but apparently, Mackenzie didn’t hear. “I’m afraid for you,” he said. “Real worried. The hack made you sound like you know too much. Once and for all, tell me true—do you know who killed Jimmy Pat?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. Honestly. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Not a good expression, given the situation.”

  “No idea. Honestly.”

  “Not even a theory? An overheard whispered rumor?”

  “Not even that.”

  He leaned back. “I wish this article made it clear that you don’t know squat. It’s obvious Henneman wasn’t crazy about you. What’d you do to annoy him so much?”

  “I didn’t tell him why I was at the station. I didn’t give him my, ah, article. Then he left a message at school, so there’s probably something else I didn’t do, but this time it was unintentional.”

  “What did he want?”

  I shrugged. “For me to call him at my earliest convenience. Helga didn’t give me the message till three hours later. He’d already have been past his deadline. Maybe if I’d returned his call he wouldn’t have been so creative with the facts.”

  Mackenzie’s turn to shrug with cynical disbelief. “If he was going to do a hatchet job, I wish he made you sound like an idiot instead of Amanda Pepper, Ace Detective. This way, whoever killed Jimmy Pat is likely to misconstrue. Believe this. You emerge soundin’ like you hold the keys to this thing. I was convinced after I read it, which is why I was so annoyed with the games I thought you were playin’.”

  It was a relief to belatedly understand his early testiness.

  “But I’m not anybody for you to worry about,” he went on. “On the other hand, somebody out there does not want those keys he thinks you hold to unlock anythin’. I don’ want you to have anything to do with that somebody. Understand why I’m worried?”

  I understood. He was on my side. Sometimes I forget to trust that. Force of habit.

  “Care about you, tha’s all.” It took even me awhile to decipher those words which slipped by in a single soft syllable. He cared. Really cared.

  The charge in the air dissipated, the miracle of ancient chemistry cleared his features, and the attract-repel factors returned to their original tilt in his favor.

  *

  Friday arrived ahead of time. We’d stayed up late trying to pull apart the confusing web of facts and suspicions about the two murders. Pretty much the only result of the effort was excessive fatigue the next morning.

  My classic Mustang was not, for all its charm, the most perfect vehicle for a frigid January morn, and my heater never felt that my commute time was worth the effort and energy to rev up and make a difference. With all the whistling air leaks, I might as well have driven the kind of mustang that had a mane and a whinny.

  I pulled into my parking spot and sat for a moment, temporarily—I hoped—overwhelmed by the challenges of the day ahead. Looming above all was, of course, the lawsuit. I was about to walk a job-related tightrope, and I wished I had more confidence in my balance and ability to make it to the other side. I wished, in fact, that I knew which other side I wanted to be on.

  And of course, there would be the Henneman article repercussions. Last night, there’d been a blather of reactions on the answering machine. My friend Sasha wanted to know why I hadn’t asked her to take photographs so the article could be a joint venture. Emily left a cryptic, worried message—I recognized her voice, because she didn’t leave her name as she questioned what precisely was in that article. Vincent Devaney left an inarticulate, half-completed message ending in “never mind.” The only thing clear was his anxiety about the contents of the mythical article. Billy Obenhauser was much clearer, if not on what I might know, then definitely on my obligation not to withhold whatever it was unless, of course, it might incriminate me.

  And that wasn’t even the lot of them. Luckily, my mother’s subscription copy of the paper hadn’t reached her yet, so I was spared that call. But a concerned aunt filled in for her. Shrink Quentin offered reduced-fee post-trauma therapy—free if I’d go on-air with her and discuss it. One former colleague wanted to know if I was leaving teaching because of this new career and if so, was my position open, and an actor I’d dated in college wanted first dibs on the movie version of my story.

  People say newspaper readership is down. I say nonsense.

  The only heartening message was from my sister. After expressing obligatory horror, outrage, concern about my growing notoriety, and admonitions to leave the city immediately, abandoning my possessions if necessary, her voice softened. “By the way,” she said. “I, ah… Dr. Reed, On the Air? Quentin? Well, she’s no longer…well, we won’t be seeing her anymore. I was angry about how she used you as a ‘true story,’ and I could see how she twisted things. And to be honest, Karen said she was annoying her. So, I, ah…told her. And when she put up this big fight, saying Karen was seriously damaged, I threatened to tell people she was really a foot doctor.”

  I laughed out loud hearing that. “Your sister’s all right,” Mackenzie said. “A little stiff, but all right in the clinch.”

  I could hear Beth take a deep breath before continuing. “She used me as her true story last night. Called me ‘Louisa May’—you like that?—an abusive mother who wants to appear to help her child, but who really subverts…oh, you know.” And then she giggled. “What a creep!”

  And Bea’s daughters would be friends still longer. And Karen would be safe from On the Air’s meddling. All was semi-well.

  Remembering that, I screwed up my courage and willed myself out of the car and into the school. Once upon a time, the only thing I faced, feared, and anticipated at the start of a teaching day was teaching itself, which seemed quite enough, thank you.

  I opened the car door, then bent toward the passenger seat to retrieve my pocketbook from the floor where I leave it to make it harder on stoplight muggers. When I straightened up I yelped. The door was still open, but my exit was blocked and I faced a pair of slacks, a winter coat, a man inside them. He had his arms out, up on the convertible top, to block any possible egress.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “What’s this? Who’re—” I was getting tired of the shouting business. Besides, it didn’t seem to work.

  I craned and looked up at his face. Mostly, I saw flaring nostrils and a chin that needed shaving. “Let me out right now!” I snapped in my most authoritarian voice.

  It is an archetypal voice, generally reducing grown men to weepy memories of being tiny and helpless, of having Mommy give them over to a stern teacher replacement.

  This time it had no effect. This guy had definitely gotten over the kindergarten blues. “Listen,” he said, “whatever you found out—”

  I didn’t have to ask what he meant. “I didn’t! That article—”

  “You’ll destroy me. What I did was wrong, but a mistake, I swear, a big one, and I’ll make it good. You think you know things, you have your high and mighty code of behavior, but you don’t, you don’t know.”

  It seemed too late to ask who he was when
we were already deep into heated disagreement. Besides, he was impossible to interrupt, although I tried so often that my but—buts sounded like an outboard motor.

  “You—you live in this comfortable, steady world. A teacher kind of world, but other people—”

  I slowly edged my feet more securely in the open door, estimating my skill and limberness, his position, and the odds of success. “Get away from me,” I said. “You’re making me late.”

  “You could ruin me, understand? You could destroy me, and for what? Vincent’s so scared he got me into—”

  Vincent. The connection. The schoolroom fight, the missing funds, the question of whether or not he’d taken them. I had only heard him shouting last time, hadn’t recognized the speaking voice or the nostrils.

  “Fabian.” I tried the remembered name on for size.

  “I told him it wasn’t like it looked. I wouldn’t kill—”

  That’s who it was and I didn’t like him, never had. That first night, over coffee, all I had felt was anger corning off him, anger and dislike of me. “What do you want with me?” My feet were on the door opening. I could have used an old-fashioned running board, but I slowly edged my rear around until I was pretty much facing him.

  “Don’t act stupid! You know what I want—the article before anybody sees it, before you push me into doing something I don’t want to do. I’m at the end of my—”

  “No.” I was fighting over an article that did not exist. Freedom of the hypothetical press. And the man frightened me. There was something steely and cold at his center. “Don’t worry about it. There isn’t any—”

  “Hand it over or I’ll—”

  That was it, then. “Don’t threaten me—now—last chance, get out of my way!” I looped my bag over my shoulder.

  “I swear I’ll—”

  “I said don’t threaten me!” I screamed it, I’d been trained to—but you know, men have a lot of trouble around the issue of listening to women. Including him. So while he sputtered about what he might do to me, I gave up on verbal communication. Instead, I visualized myself as an Olympic gymnast, small, strong, and compact. I pulled my knees toward my chest, then as fast and hard as I could, I swung my feet up and out. Aimed for his manhood, as they say.

  And thus did I render my first lesson of the day.

  “Oof!” He doubled over. “Jeez, you—why’d you—didn’t have to—what is wrong with you?” Then he merely groaned.

  He was the one with time to contemplate answers. I was late for work and in enough trouble. As he staggered, doubled over, grunting and gasping, I jumped out of the car and ran toward the back door of the school.

  “Fabian! Mandy! What the hell is going on? Did you just—I thought I saw you—”

  I’d been so intent on going for the gold, doing my personal best, I hadn’t even heard him pull up, but now, Vincent stood beside his still-running car in a position that suggested he’d leaped out of it. Its door hung open as he looked from one of us to the other. I don’t know why he was astounded. Hadn’t he been in a shouting match with the selfsame Fabian earlier this week?

  “She—” Fabian shouted, or more accurately, gasped, pointing at me, still doubled over.

  “What now?” Vincent asked me.

  “Now? Now? As if I’ve—”

  “The article, isn’t it?” he said. Fabian grunted assent. “Listen, Mandy, stop thinking about yourself all the time. Your credits, your résumé, your income. If you drag our names through the dirt—”

  I stared, trying to really see him. He was my professional colleague and, I’d thought, my friend. And I didn’t know a thing about him, except that he had a mercurial temper, he’d lied to his wife, lied to the police, and in a definitely unfriendly act, used me as his alibi. This was not good stuff to know.

  I didn’t know if Vincent Devaney was a killer. I didn’t know if Fabian was an embezzler and a threat and a killer. Looking at the two men this morning, I did, however, know that no matter what either or both of them had done, even to each other, they were on the same team and I was an interloper, an intrusive outsider. I don’t think Vincent would have rescued me from Fabian if I’d needed him to. He hadn’t made a move, just stood there and been testy with me.

  I was a threat to both men, because I wasn’t one of them, and because of an article that was actually a figment.

  But a person who is perceived as a threat is in danger. That, unfortunately, was no figment at all.

  Sixteen

  THE OFFICE WITCH DIDN’T SAY “GOTCHA!” BUT SHE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE. She didn’t bother hiding her malevolent triumph, either. Caught me as I tried to walk past the office. “Dr. Havermeyer’s waiting for you.”

  “Now?” I was disheveled and trembling from the encounter outside. I wanted to call Mackenzie, tell him about Fabian, get the man off the streets.

  Helga nodded, folded her arms over her chest, and gloated. Being summoned to the principal’s office had the same effect on me as it would have had twenty years ago. “I was supposed to make an appointment with him this morning for—”

  “He’s waiting. You were supposed to arrange this appointment for this morning, but you left in a big hurry, as I recall.” She would have made a great prison matron.

  I couldn’t contemplate, let alone face, Maurice Havermeyer immediately after mad Fabian. Too much terror for one day’s dawning. “My homeroom, I have to—”

  “We’ve sent a monitor to take roll and maintain order.” She glanced at her watch, making the gesture a condemnation even though I wasn’t late and hadn’t done anything wrong except misread a poorly worded memo.

  I stood tall and refused to be intimidated, or at least to look intimidated. Fabian had rattled me, but after my kickboxing round with him, I was also as cocky as my shaking nervous system allowed. Don’t mess with me.

  Unless you’re Maurice Havermeyer, He Who Authorizes the Paycheck. I took a deep breath, nodded, and went to meet my fate.

  It wasn’t only He Who I faced. Renata Field and her parents were also in attendance. That’s why the meeting had to be now.

  The day kept getting better and better. At this rate, I wondered if I’d survive it.

  “Miss Pepper, good to see you!” He Who said, as if this were a surprise social gathering. “Have a seat. Of course, all of us here know Renata, but I also believe the rest of you have met Miss Pepper, Renata’s English teacher, Mr. and Mrs. Field?”

  I hadn’t met her parents. They’d waited to make contact until now, when their daughter’s negligence was out of control. Nonetheless, we nodded and sat back in our chairs, pretending to have a prior relationship. I, for one, didn’t want to go through the motions of introductions, particularly as it might involve something as hypocritical as smiles and handshakes.

  “Mizzzz Pepper.” A sign of desperation when Havermeyer lengthens my name as a delaying tactic. This is a man who will do anything to say nothing, and when, as now, he’s faced with a charged situation, his armory of hot air and euphemisms isn’t enough. He needs to drag every syllable through mucky resistance. “As I have already told Mr. and Mrs. Field, and as Renata surely knows, Mizzzz Pepper is one of our most popular teachers. And, I might add, an outstandingly gifted one as well.”

  Litigation. The way to Havermeyer’s heart. Or at least the appearance of a heart. I had suddenly become a Class-A teacher with Maurice as my cheerleading team. I’d have to remember that the next time I was up for a performance review.

  “This is therefore quite unusual.” He sat behind his enormous desk, leaning back so that his scholastic key—it looked like Phi Beta Kappa, but was not—glinted in the cold, early sunlight. “Unique,” he went on, “I might say, in the truest sense of the word. Indeed, this entire, ah, proposed lawsuit, is the first such action against her. Or, I hasten to add, against any of our excellent staff. Gradewise, we have heretofore never been impugned, so you might call this an historic event.” He chuckled.

  Apparently, the stern-faced Fields did not
find any of this amusing. For all I know, they were puzzling over the word impugned.

  I allowed secondary muscles to relax. Bossman was championing me, defending our record, albeit in typically garbled style.

  “You can imagine my consternation and amazement when I first was made aware of your distress,” he said, swiveling toward the Fields. They were an unhandsome couple, but compensating for nature’s minginess with everything money could buy. He was fit and elegantly coiffed and tailored, and his nails looked as if they’d been buffed. She was all gritted-teeth effort. Hair in a hard, geometric cut, plain features burnished with a practiced hand, workout-enhanced body in a precision-engineered suit. Not to mess with.

  And rich.

  But I had justice and perhaps Maurice Havermeyer on my side.

  “Now, as you have every right to assume, there is a definite set of standards against which our students are measured, and such standards are necessary in order to preserve the integrity of the very idea of education as well as our own school’s accreditation,” Havermeyer said. “I’m sure that’s why you chose this school for your daughter. And within that structure, Miz Pepper’s academic standards, I have been assured and have personally observed, are equitable and reasonable.”

  Renata pouched her lips and emitted an explosion of sneering air. A raspberry, as if we were in a ballpark.

  Everyone overlooked, ignored her rudeness. I figured her whole life had been handled that way.

  “That is one great part of the reasons,” Havermeyer said, “that and her excellent teaching, of course, that we have been so proud to have Miz Pepper as an integral, important part of our staff for these several years.”

  I felt less comfortable. We’d slithered into the murky realm of the too-effusive. I heard the first hiss in Eden. A “however,” large, fat, and lethal, lurked behind his flowery words. The muscles I’d relaxed returned to near-spasm.