Ronnie had been moping around all week, sullen and resentful that Chase was still under suspicion. But he hadn’t been arrested yet, so there was that for her to be thankful for. However, he hadn’t returned to school, either. Phyllis had a feeling the undercover operation had been called off.
She had kept busy all week getting ready to be in charge of the hospitality room at the math meet. She and Carolyn were making three different kinds of breakfast casseroles and muffins as well as cookies and brownies for dessert at lunch. Eve had volunteered to pick up the giant deli sandwich from the store that was making it.
“I’ll have them load it in my car,” she told Phyllis, “and then you can send some of those high school boys out to fetch it in when I get here with it.”
At times in the past, when she’d been plagued by a particularly difficult problem, Phyllis had turned her attention to other things like this, clearing her mind, as it were, in the hope that the answers to her questions would drift to the forefront of her thoughts. The tactic had worked more than once.
But not this time. Whatever it was nagging at her brain, it consistently eluded her. Something she had seen . . . something she had heard . . . maybe both . . .
She had everything ready to load into the car early Saturday morning so she could head to the high school and get the hospitality room set up by the time the coaches and volunteers began to arrive. She had just put the last of the casseroles in the refrigerator when the cell phone in her pocket rang. She took it out and saw Jimmy D’Angelo’s name and number on the display. The lawyer was calling her on his cell phone.
“Hello?”
“I just got some news,” D’Angelo said without preamble. “Appleton, that sheriff’s department investigator, just picked up the Hamilton kid and brought him in to book him for murder. A contact of mine in the department tipped me off. He remembered I’d been there last week asking about the kid.”
Phyllis had caught her breath as soon as D’Angelo told her what was going on. She said, “Why now? Why wait a week? Do you think they have some new evidence?”
“No idea at this point. I’m on my way there now to see if Chase will let me represent him. Could be the DA has been feeling some pressure and decided to go ahead with the case he’s got, which is pretty circumstantial. But a murder inside a school, folks want that solved and an arrest made.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do,” Phyllis said. She hesitated. She hadn’t told D’Angelo what she and Sam had discovered about Chase Hamilton. If he was going to represent the young man, he would need to know that. “Jimmy . . . there’s something I should tell you about Chase.”
D’Angelo’s voice was sharp with suspicion as he asked, “What’s that?”
“He’s actually an undercover police officer.”
“What! Geez Louise, Phyllis, I almost ran off the road there. How long have you known this?”
Phyllis spent the next couple of minutes giving him the details, with D’Angelo interrupting now and then to ask a question in a clearly irritated tone. By the time she finished, though, he seemed somewhat mollified.
“So the cops already know about this?” he asked.
“Well, Victor Appleton does, anyway. And I’m sure Sheriff Haney does. Probably a few other people in the department. I should have told you sooner—”
“No, no, you gave the kid your word that you’d keep quiet about it. I understand that. And since he hadn’t actually been arrested yet, there was really no need to spill it to me. You told me now, and that’s what matters.” D’Angelo paused, then said, “Listen, you know that Hamilton being a cop isn’t a get out of jail free card, right? Undercover cops have been busted plenty of times in the past, especially when they were mixed up in something that wasn’t directly related to their assignment. Some of them do such a good job of pretending to be bad guys that they actually turn out that way.”
“I don’t believe that’s true of Chase. I still think he didn’t kill Ray Brooks.”
“Well . . . now would be a good time to prove it.”
Phyllis knew that, and the fact that she hadn’t left her feeling that she had let the young man down, even though it wasn’t really her responsibility.
“Look, I’m here at the detention center,” D’Angelo went on. “I’ll be in touch when I know anything, okay?”
“All right. Thank you, Jimmy.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t done anything. And with a murder charge, it’ll be hard to get the kid out on bail, even, until Monday. But I’ll try. So long.”
The lawyer broke the connection. Phyllis slipped her phone back into her pocket as Sam came into the kitchen. He said, “I heard you talkin’ to somebody and figured Carolyn or Eve was in here.”
Phyllis shook her head. “No, I was on the phone with Jimmy. He’d heard that Chase has been arrested, and that this time they’re actually going to charge him with murder.”
“Dadgummit.” Sam looked around. “Ronnie doesn’t know?”
“She’s upstairs, I think.”
“You reckon we can keep it from her?”
“I don’t see where telling her would do any good,” Phyllis said, “although she’s bound to find out sooner or later, and then she’ll be angry with us for keeping it from her.”
“More than likely. But I’d like to keep things on an even keel for as long as we can. I even got her to agree to come to the meet with us tomorrow and work as a runner, pickin’ up tests and takin’ ’em to the gradin’ room. Let’s see if we can get that behind us before all hell breaks loose.”
“All right,” Phyllis said. “I hate keeping secrets, though.”
“We’re just lettin’ discretion be the better part of valor, as the old sayin’ goes.”
“That’s not exactly what that saying means. And wasn’t it coined to refer to battles in a war?”
“Dealin’ with a lovestruck teenager sometimes is a war,” Sam said.
◄♦►
Instead of calling her, D’Angelo sent Phyllis a series of text messages later that evening. Chase Hamilton was still in custody but had not been charged officially yet. D’Angelo’s theory was that the authorities were dragging their feet and wouldn’t charge him until Saturday because that would insure it would be Monday morning before a bail hearing could be held.
The only bit of good news was that D’Angelo had been permitted to talk to Chase, and the young man had agreed to let him act as his attorney. According to D’Angelo, it was his association with Phyllis that had led Chase to agree. Chase seemed to trust her, and Phyllis wondered if that was because she instinctively trusted him.
D’Angelo promised to be at the jail bright and early the next morning to make sure that Chase was treated fairly and according to the law.
Phyllis was in her bedroom but hadn’t turned in yet when she got the messages. She went to Sam’s room, knocked softly, and when he told her to come in, she opened the door and found him sitting up in bed reading a paperback.
Phyllis went and sat on the foot of the bed as she told him what D’Angelo had said. Sam nodded. “I wonder if they’re stallin’ because they hope they’ll find some more evidence over the weekend.”
“I don’t know what evidence there could be to find at this late date,” Phyllis said. “Surely they’ve gone over all the physical and forensics evidence by now.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes that forensics stuff takes a lot longer in real life than it does on TV.”
“True. Maybe they think Chase will break down and confess. They could threaten to put him in with the other prisoners and let it leak that he’s really an officer.”
“Somethin’ like that might occur to the DA, but I don’t figure Ross Haney would go along with it.”
“You’re probably right about that,” Phyllis said. She and the sheriff had clashed on occasion in the past, but she had never doubted his fundamental honesty and dedication to doing his job the right way . . . unlike her feelings about the district attorney.
<
br /> “I don’t know of anything we can do for Chase right now,” Sam said, “so let’s just go to the math meet and trust Jimmy to look out for his interests.”
Phyllis stood up and nodded. “I agree.” She went to the head of the bed, leaned over, and kissed Sam on the forehead. “Good night. We both need to get a good night’s sleep . . . although I’m not sure how well I’ll do that with so many things going around and around inside my head.”
“Maybe instead of countin’ sheep, you should count murderers. You’ve rounded up enough of ’em.”
“That’s not funny. I never expected things like this to happen. This . . . this whole business of solving crimes seemed to come out of nowhere, and now it just won’t stop!”
◄♦►
Despite what she had said to Sam, Phyllis did sleep fairly well. Well enough that it took the alarm to get her out of bed the next morning. A lot of mornings, she woke up before it ever went off.
She was the first one in the kitchen, so she got the coffee going. The previous evening, she had set aside some of the muffins for them to eat this morning, so she got them out. Carolyn and Eve came in, both yawning, followed a few minutes later by Sam and Ronnie, who appeared to be equally sleepy.
“I just don’t understand this,” Ronnie said as she sat down at the table with a cup of coffee.
“What?” Sam asked her.
“Getting up this early on a Saturday morning to take tests! What kind of kid does that?”
Sam chuckled. “Math team kids are a special breed. I’ve just started bein’ around ’em, but I can tell that already. You know what? They’re a lot like the band kids, and the ball players. They all get up early to practice, too. I reckon when you find somethin’ you really enjoy, somethin’ that you’re driven to be good at, you don’t mind as much losin’ a little sleep.”
“Well, I sure wouldn’t want to do it all the time.”
Eve said, “What do you want to do, dear? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about what your plans are for when you grow up.”
“Do you have to make plans this early? I mean, when you’re sixteen?”
Carolyn said, “Good grief, parents these days start thinking about their children’s careers when they’re in pre-school. Most of them have the future all mapped out by the time they’re in junior high, let alone high school.”
“Well,” Ronnie mused, “I think I might like to be a doctor. Not a cut-people-open kind of doctor, but maybe a psychiatrist. Something like that.”
Sam said, “Wantin’ to help people is a noble ambition.”
Ronnie grinned. “Maybe I just think it’d be fun to mess with people’s heads. What better way to do it?”
Carolyn said, “That . . . that’s terrible!”
Ronnie shrugged, stood up with her coffee, and grabbed one of the muffins. “I’m gonna go get dressed. Time and nerds wait for no man.”
“A literary reference,” Eve said when Ronnie had left the kitchen. “Maybe she should be an English teacher . . . or a writer.”
Carolyn had stood up and moved over to the counter, where she muttered something. Phyllis couldn’t make it out, but she didn’t ask her friend to repeat it.
Less than an hour later, they were all ready to go. Phyllis and Sam loaded all the food for the hospitality room into her Lincoln. Sam and Ronnie would take the pickup, Carolyn and Eve would go in Carolyn’s car. The sun hadn’t quite peeked over the eastern horizon when the little convoy headed toward J.C. Courtland High School. Buses and SUVs from the other school districts competing in this meet would be on their way there, as well, carrying the teams vying for trophies and ribbons and bragging rights. Phyllis found herself looking forward to it. This would be something new in her experience, and at her age she was always glad to encounter something fresh and exciting.
Early it might be, she thought, but this was going to be a good day.
Like Amber had said a few days earlier, it would be fun.
Chapter 31
There was only one car parked at the school when Phyllis got there, a sporty little two-door. She wasn’t surprised to discover that it belonged to Amber, since the vehicle fit the young teacher’s personality.
Amber must have seen her coming, because she was at the main entrance holding one of the doors open when Phyllis walked up carrying several casserole containers. She was dressed stylishly and expensively, as usual, wearing the gemstone-decorated jacket that Phyllis had seen her wearing several times in the past.
“Hospitality’s going to be the first classroom on the left down the second hall,” Amber said, pointing across the mall, “right across from the library. That’ll be the grading room, so everything is handy to each other. I guess there’s more stuff in your car? Can I help you?”
“No, Sam should be here any minute, he can help me with everything else,” Phyllis said. “You won’t need him for a while, will you?”
“No, the proctors’ meeting isn’t until eight-thirty,” Amber said as they walked across the mall. “Thanks again for doing this, Phyllis.”
“I’m happy to.”
“You don’t know how happy I am that this day is finally here. Maybe now things can start getting back to normal.”
“I hope so,” Phyllis said as they reached the corner where the second hall extended to the right.
“I have to go put up signs on the testing rooms, but I’ll be around. Holler if you need me.”
“Of course.” Phyllis turned and headed for the hospitality room while Amber walked on the way they had been going, her high heels clicking rapidly against the tile floor.
Phyllis found that some folding tables had been set up in the hospitality room. She placed the containers on one of them but didn’t uncover the casseroles just yet. They would stay warmer if she left them covered until people began arriving to eat breakfast.
She had just done that when Sam and Ronnie walked in, carrying some of the other containers from the car. Sam had a key to Phyllis’s Lincoln, so she wasn’t surprised that they had brought in more of the food.
“We’ll get the rest of it,” Sam said. “You can go ahead and start settin’ things up in here.”
Ronnie said, “That little pest Walter is outside. His dad dropped him off just as we got here. He wanted to help us and come in, too, but I told him he had to stay outside.”
“That boy likes you, you know,” Sam said.
“He’s two years younger than me!”
“There’ll come a time when that won’t be important. Two years is nothin’.”
“Well, it’s something now,” Ronnie said. “Anyway, we don’t have a thing in common. And I’m nowhere near as smart as he is.”
“You don’t know that. Shoot, y’all are at an age when you’re just startin’ to figure things out. Everything will look a lot different five years from now, ten years from now.”
“Maybe, but I have to live today, not five or ten years from now. Anyway, nobody’s guaranteed that, are they?”
That was true, Phyllis thought . . . but it was a shame that someone as young as Ronnie already felt that way.
They left to fetch the rest of the food while Phyllis got out paper plates, plasticware, and napkins from a big plastic tub where all those things were stored. There were ice chests for drinks, too, and she took them down to the ice machine next to the band hall and filled them. She was starting to realize that putting on one of these meets was probably a lot of work. It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, and she was already getting tired.
Sam and Ronnie returned, followed by parent volunteers bringing boxes of donuts, packs of canned drinks, bags of chips and candy, and other things they were donating for the meet. Phyllis saw students out in the hall, too, including Walter, and knew that the members of the math team were being allowed in now.
Carolyn and Eve arrived, ready to help any way they could. People began getting plates and plasticware and lining up for breakfast. The noise level in the school rose as more studen
ts came in. Phyllis felt more excitement in the air than she would have expected from an academic competition. It really did have a little of the same feel as a football game, she realized as she uncovered the casseroles and put out big plastic spoons so the volunteers and coaches could help themselves.
Even though the cookies she had brought were intended primarily for dessert at lunchtime, she put them out as well. She left the brownies covered, though, so they wouldn’t dry out. She had baked sugar cookies again, this time with the white icing. She left off the splatters of red icing, so they weren’t exactly what she had dubbed killer sugar cookies, but they weren’t plain, either.
Amber passed by in the hall, hurrying here and there to make sure everything was going according to schedule. After a while, she poked her head through the open door of the hospitality room and said, “Sam, you need to get to the proctors’ meeting.”
“On my way,” he said. “Ronnie, you come along, too, since you’re gonna be a runner. We’ll gather them up on the way.” On his way out, he paused at the end of the table where the cookies were and picked up one of them.
“Ooohh,” Amber said with a smile when she saw it in his hand. “Are those Phyllis’s sugar cookies?”
“Yep.”
“They’re so good! I got the last ones at the dance and wished I had tried them earlier.” She stepped into the room, picked up two of the cookies from the plate, and smiled at Phyllis. “These’ll keep me going. No time to stop and eat!”
She hurried out after Sam and Ronnie. Phyllis watched her go. Then Carolyn said, “Do we have more donuts? One of the boxes is empty.”
Phyllis bent and retrieved another cardboard box of the donated pastries from where she had placed them under the table.
They were very busy for a while, with a steady stream of coaches and volunteers coming through the hospitality room for breakfast before the competition got underway. After a while, Carolyn said, “That’s it. We’ve run out of the casseroles. People will just have to make do with muffins and donuts now.”
“And from the looks of the muffins, they won’t last much longer,” Eve added. “But we have cookies, too, of course. Everybody likes cookies.”
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