McGuire’s face fell, but he stood. “Thank you, sir.” He nodded at me and then, with a glance at Paul, he walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the plastic bag I had found in Terence’s lava lamp and placed it on Ren’s desk. He looked at it and then at me. “Where did you get that?” he asked evenly.
“I found it in Terence Jarrar’s room.”
Ren’s eyes widened slightly, and he tilted his head to the left, as if it had been momentarily imbalanced by the news. “When?” he asked, his voice sharper.
“Last weekend, when I cleaned out his room.” So far Paul Simmons had done nothing but flick a glance at the bag of pot. His face showed no emotion other than a clear desire to be somewhere else.
Ren raised his chin and looked at me as if sighting down the barrel of a gun. “Last weekend,” he said softly. He was livid—his lips were pressed together, and his face was flushed, accentuating his round, staring eyes.
I turned to Paul. “Do you have anything you want to say, Paul?” I asked.
Startled, Paul looked at me. I could sense the calculations going on behind that blank stare. “I—what?” he asked.
“Do you have anything you want to say? About that?”
Paul looked at the bag of pot on the desk and then back at me, then at Ren and back to me, a roving searchlight looking for answers in the dark. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a skullcap, which I also placed on Ren’s desk. Inside the skullcap was another plastic bag. It, too, contained marijuana buds, two of them, along with a handful of white oval pills. I looked at Paul, who had gone very still.
“I found this outside of Saint Matthew’s,” I said, still looking at Paul. “In a planter off to the side of the entrance. Where you put it before I caught you in Vinton.” I had thought saying this, making a big J’accuse! statement, uncovering a truth, would give me a small rush of triumph. Instead, I felt resentful and a little sad.
Ren stared at Paul. “Is this true?” he asked.
Paul worried at his thumbnail for a moment and then said, “I want to talk to my father.”
There was a pause. Ren set his jaw. “In due time,” he said. “First, I want to know if what Mr. Glass said is true. Did you put this bag in the planter by Saint Matthew’s?”
Paul looked at him, malevolence now rolling off him like heat from pavement. “No,” he said. I thought this is what the police must feel like after interrogating someone they know is guilty and the suspect smiles, sits back, and says he wants a lawyer.
Ren looked at me. “Did you see him do it?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. But he did get to the chapel before I did, and instead of running away and hiding somewhere before I came up the Hill, he made sure he’d gotten rid of it. Probably thought he could pick it up tonight after chapel. Be pretty easy to do in the dark.”
“I didn’t do it,” Paul muttered.
“You said that in Vinton,” I said. “Several times. ‘No! I didn’t do it! I swear!’ But you weren’t talking about that,” I said, pointing at the bag. “Or about opening a door into my face. You were talking about Terence, weren’t you?” Paul stared at the floor, picking incessantly at his thumbnail. “Did you go down to the river with him last weekend? Did you take the shotgun out of the locker?”
Paul shot me a look of such loathing, I almost stopped. Ren was sitting forward. “Mr. Glass—”
“Did you smoke with him down at the river?” I said hurriedly. “Is that what happened, Terence was stoned and the gun slipped—”
“That’s enough!” This time Ren’s voice was a whiplash. “Paul, go across the hall and sit outside your father’s office, next to Mrs. Robinson’s desk. Do not move from there, not an inch. Go.”
After a moment, Paul got to his feet and went to the door, not without another poisonous look at me. Then he was gone.
As soon as the door shut, Ren said, “I don’t know what the hell is going through your mind, but it will stop, right now.”
“Look, I’m sorry that I interrupted you —” I began.
“Interrupted me? Sweet Jesus, man, you all but accused Travis Simmons’s son of manslaughter.”
“I made an inference based on a gut feeling—”
“A gut feeling?” Ren looked incredulous. “You shouldn’t be listening to your gut. From where I sit, your judgment is seriously clouded. You find marijuana hidden in a student’s room, and you hold on to it for over a week, without telling me or anyone else. Then you make this baseless accusation—”
“It’s not baseless.”
“This baseless accusation about Paul Simmons somehow being involved in Terence Jarrar’s death.”
I took a breath. “That boy knows something about Terence’s death,” I said. “He was panicked when I grabbed him, Ren. Not angry, or scared of me. He was panicked.”
“You pulled him out of a window. I’m not surprised he was panicked.”
“I pulled him back in through a window because he was trying to climb out onto the roof! You can’t tell me he did that because he was scared of detention.”
Ren sat back in his chair and gave a disgusted sigh.
I continued. “I think he feels guilty over Terence’s death. He knows something, Ren. I think he and Terence got stoned, and Terence shot himself, accidentally or otherwise. The marijuana in that bag I found outside Saint Matthew’s looks an awful lot like the marijuana I found in Terence’s room. I’m no botanist or pot expert, but I know there are different kinds, like different brands of beer. Both of these look the same. That means they might have gotten it from the same place. And those pills? They’re Vicodin. Look, you can see it stamped into the pills.”
Ren looked at me through narrowed eyelids. “You still haven’t explained the marijuana you supposedly found in Terence’s room.”
Now it was my turn to be incredulous. “Supposedly found?”
“You didn’t bring it up until now. According to you, you’ve held on to it for a week.”
I shut my eyes briefly, trying to regain my equilibrium, and then opened them again to look evenly at Ren. “I tried to bring the bag to you when I brought that box of Terence’s stuff over to your office. I wanted to give it to you then, but his parents were here. I couldn’t tell you what I’d found in front of them.”
“And what kept you from telling me later?” His voice was withering. “Is your schedule so busy you couldn’t stop by my office once this entire week to let me know that you had found drugs on campus?”
I thought of meeting Deputy Briggs at the Fir Tree, listening to what he had to say about Fritz’s disappearance and his suspicions about the Davenports. If I offered this up as an excuse to Ren, he would think I was even crazier than he did now. “I just . . . Other things came up,” I said lamely. “I made a mistake, clearly. And I’m sorry.”
Ren reached forward and jabbed at a key on the laptop computer on his desk, bringing it out of sleep. “Let me tell you about the consequences of your mistake,” he said. “On Wednesday afternoon, I received an e-mail from Mrs. Jarrar. She was quite upset. She had been looking through her son’s things, including his composition notebook. A notebook he had for your English class.” Ren looked at his computer, seeming to search for something, and then turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. “Read this,” he said.
Reluctantly, I leaned forward. On the screen was an e-mail exchange between Mrs. Jarrar and Ren. Ren had scrolled down to the bottom of the screen so I could read the first e-mail, from Mrs. Jarrar.
From: Samah Jarrar
Date: Friday, November 19, 2010, 8:52 p.m.
To: Ren Middleton
Subject: Terence
Dear Mr. Middleton,
I needed to contact you regarding something I found in one of Terence’s notebooks. It was his composition note
book for English class, and apparently he had been writing in it as a sort of journal. Terence was fond of writing poetry, and it was in his poems that I discovered something disturbing. In two different entries, Terence makes references to smoking and one reference to “grass.” As you can imagine, this greatly upset my husband and me. We are trying to come to terms with our son’s death, and while we have no desire to disrupt the Blackburne community, which has been so gracious and supportive as we deal with our grief, we wish to understand as much as we can how this tragedy came to pass. Do you or anyone else at Blackburne have any idea if Terence could have been involved with smoking marijuana? Or how he could have had access to that shotgun? I apologize for being direct, but we must know the truth, or otherwise we shall be haunted by uncertainty. The police have conducted an autopsy, including a drug test, but the results will not be available for at least another week.
Of course, we wish for this to be investigated as discreetly as possible. These poems of Terence’s may simply have been creative exercises rather than evidence of any hidden truths, and we do not wish our son’s name to be blackened, nor do we want to do anything that could harm Blackburne’s reputation.
Any assistance you could give us would be most appreciated, as always. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Samah Jarrar
From: Ren Middleton
To: Samah Jarrar
Date: Sunday, November 21, 2010, 12:38 p.m.
Subject: Re: Terence
Dear Mrs. Jarrar,
First, my deepest apologies for not responding earlier. I was away from campus and without Internet access for most of Saturday and did not return to Blackburne until a few minutes ago, when I read your e-mail.
I completely understand your need to know the circumstances, and the school and I shall do everything we can to assist you. I can tell you that, given the structure and amount of faculty supervision here, it is extremely unlikely that students could engage in such behavior. We have, as you know, a zero-tolerance policy for the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, which has been an effective deterrent for many years. I will speak with Terence’s English teacher, Mr. Matthias Glass, about the composition notebook, although I am sure that if Mr. Glass had had any concerns, he would have forwarded them on to me or his department chair. You are probably correct that the entries you read were of a creative nature. I will be back in touch with you by Monday afternoon at the latest.
Again, please accept my deepest sympathies. The entire school community stands ready to support you and your husband in any way we can.
Sincerely,
Ren Middleton
Associate Headmaster
The Blackburne School
I looked up at Ren, beginning to feel squeezed by a sense of dread. I tried to shake it off. “Seems like my theory isn’t so ridiculous.”
Ren ignored me. “This notebook,” he said. “Did you read it?”
I felt comforted for a moment, on familiar ground. “It’s a journal I ask them to write in occasionally—free writes, personal reflection, creative exercises, that sort of thing. I take them up every few weeks. I haven’t read them this month so far. I don’t recall reading anything like that in Terence’s notebook, or anyone else’s for that matter. Maybe if I could see the notebook again, I could—”
“No.” It was blunt as a hammer stroke. “You said yourself that students wrote creative exercises in these notebooks. We leave it at that.”
I blinked. “But—if he was stoned, and if Paul Simmons was with him, we ought to find out how they got the drugs in the first place so we don’t have another accident.”
“We won’t,” Ren said. “I learned today how they got the shotgun.”
“What?”
Ren leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk. “Porter Deems came here today after lunch, to my office,” he said. “He confessed to being careless with his master key. He would let his advisees use it if they had to get back into the library for their backpacks or if they wanted extra toilet paper out of the supply closet. His advisees knew he kept it in his desk drawer. Two weeks ago, just before Porter took Terence and his other advisees to Charlottesville for a movie and dinner, Porter couldn’t find his key in his drawer. The next day, it reappeared in the drawer. He said he keeps nothing else in that drawer other than a legal pad and a few pens, so he’s positive the key had been missing. Porter now suspects that Terence took the key, had a copy made in Charlottesville, and then brought the original key back the next day when he stopped by Porter’s apartment with a question about his history homework.”
I sat back in my chair, floored. Porter? It seemed incredible. And yet he could be reckless in just this sort of way. “What’s going to happen?” I managed. “To Porter?”
Ren turned his laptop back around and shut the screen. “Porter resigned. Effective immediately.”
“That’s not . . . This isn’t all Porter’s fault.”
“He took responsibility for his actions. He is the one who suggested resigning.”
I shook my head, unwilling to let it go. “We have to talk to Paul. His father could get him to talk, maybe.”
“That will be between Paul and his father,” Ren said.
Then I remembered the shotgun cabinet. “What about the combination lock on the gun cabinet? Did Porter open that up for Terence, too?”
It was the only time I saw Ren look uncomfortable during that entire conversation. He blinked and glanced away from me for a moment before saying, “Terence must have found out the combination. Perhaps he watched Porter open it once and remembered the numbers.”
He was bullshitting. I knew it, and he did, too. Terence had gotten the combination from someone else. Maybe it was written down somewhere and he’d copied it. Or someone else knew it—someone like Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son. “We need to talk to Paul,” I said.
“No.”
“Ren, I get that you want to protect the school. But—”
“I said no.”
“If you would just listen to me for—”
“I don’t need to listen to you!” Ren stood behind his desk, his outrage palpable. I found myself on my feet, as if ready to physically defend myself. A vein forked in his forehead, thick and dark under the skin. “You deceived me, Matthias,” he continued angrily. “You made me look like a fool. And we are not telling the Jarrars about any of this. A faculty member was negligent, and a boy stole his key, resulting in a tragic accident. That is what happened.”
So this was why the school would say nothing: aside from the threat of a potential lawsuit, this was about Ren’s anger over looking foolish to the Jarrars. If I hadn’t been horrified by the whole thing, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it. “So we just ignore it?” I said. “We don’t even look at the possibility that Paul Simmons has some sort of responsibility?”
“Travis Simmons will take care of his son,” Ren said. “I suspect he will withdraw and continue his education elsewhere.”
“It’s a lie.”
Ren didn’t blink. “It’s an omission.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Ren came around the side of his desk and stood a few feet from me, the fingertips of one hand balanced on the desktop. “Some truths are best left uncovered,” he said quietly. “All of us face that fact at some point.”
“Lying, omitting the truth, whatever you want to call it, it’s just wrong.”
Ren nodded slowly, in consideration. “And what about you, Matthias?” he asked. “What about that physics test your sixth form year?”
I stared at him, stunned. How in the hell did he know about that? After a moment, I said, in an utterly unconvincing voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All of us keep things hidden,” Ren continued. “Not because we want to lie, but because it’s necessary in order to function in society. Otherwise we have messy stories to tell, uncomfort
able truths about ourselves we would rather not share with others. Colleagues, for instance. Or future employers.”
I managed to find my voice. “Are you threatening me?”
Ren looked disappointed. “No, Matthias,” he said. “I’m simply pointing out that all of us do such things, so you can better understand why the school will do so as well. For the greater good.” Ren reached over and picked up the two bags of pot, opened a drawer in his desk, dropped the bags in, and shut the drawer. “Your contract, as you know, is for one year,” he said. “I can’t say if we’ll continue to have the same position available next year. But should you decide to seek employment elsewhere, I would write you an excellent letter of recommendation.” The look on his face was inscrutable, tight as a closed fist.
After a moment or two of silence, I realized I had been dismissed. Without protest, I walked out of the office and shut the door behind me. Going down the hall in a daze, I felt as if I had suddenly woken from a dream and found myself alone, in unfamiliar country, with no idea of how to get home.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Porter Deems packed his bags the same Sunday night I had my conversation with Ren. A grad student from UVA who was working on his dissertation took over Porter’s classes. Paul Simmons transferred to a school out in Utah, the official rumor being that he had struggled academically at Blackburne and needed to attend a school where his father was not the headmaster. I soon learned that “out in Utah” was code for residential treatment or therapeutic boarding school.
The same week that Paul Simmons left for whatever educational experience awaited him in Utah, I ran into his father outside the dining hall before dinner. He and Ren Middleton were walking together, engaged in deep discussion, when I came upon them from the stairwell by the doors to the dining hall. Dr. Simmons came to an abrupt halt so as not to run into me, and as I stammered an apology, he gave me a look that stopped my words in my throat. His expression was a mixture of sorrow, disdain, and fear. At that moment, he looked old and worn. The look vanished, and he smiled and asked how I was getting along, and then passed into the dining hall. Ren Middleton followed him after giving me a warning glance. I turned away, my appetite gone. The message Ren had given me in his office the day I had brought Paul Simmons in had been very clear: Keep your nose clean and I’ll help you find another job—just not here.
Shadow of the Lions Page 20