I picked up my mail at the front desk of Hill House upon my return from Mara’s. I’d enjoyed my months living there, but looked forward to the day when I’d be able to return to my beloved Victorian home on Candlewood Lane. The reconstruction in the wake of the fire that had almost claimed my life was coming along nicely, after the contractors had encountered some initial setbacks, and they’d assured me that in a few short weeks I’d get a fresh look at all the progress they’d made. While Hill House had proved to be such a blessing during those months, there was no way to surround myself with books the way I could at home. And the first thing I intended to do upon my return to 698 Candlewood Lane was restock my refurbished bookshelves.
The stack of mail, containing the usual circulars and junk, also included an oversized stiff envelope that appeared to contain an invitation of some kind. I opened that envelope first and slid out its contents, a single card with big black text in fancy script.
You are cordially invited to a retirement party in honor of . . .
I scanned the rest of the invitation without absorbing all of its content.
A name I recalled well followed, but the words my eyes fixed on next stoked memories long dormant, until earlier that day, thanks to my interview with Kristi Powell of the Cabot Cove High School Eagle:
. . . Appleton High School.
I’d been a substitute English teacher there for more than five years, up until a quarter century ago. It was where I looked murder in the face for the first time and tried to stare it down.
Tell you what, Kristi. If I ever decide to share the details of the first murder case I was involved in, you’ll be the first person I call.
Right now, though, those details came roaring back front and center in my mind, starting at the very beginning.
Chapter Two
Twenty-five years ago . . .
You’ll catch your death, Grady,” I warned my young nephew, who’d refused to put on a sweater or even one of those hooded sweatshirts he had become increasingly partial to.
“It’s my life, isn’t it?” he challenged me, looking up from cornflakes drizzled with powdered sugar and with bananas floating in the milk, just as he liked.
“Well, yes.”
“Then it should be my death, too,” he pronounced in a fitting example of logic, courtesy of an eight-year-old.
“He’s got a point, Jess,” my husband, Frank, noted, lowering the morning paper to reveal his grin.
It didn’t take much for Grady to get Frank to grin, and that was more than enough for me to be grateful for the boy’s presence in our lives. Our marriage was complete in all ways, save for one glaring exception: the fact that we’d never had a child. It wasn’t that we hadn’t tried, but we’d never bothered to seek professional expertise on why we’d continually been unsuccessful. Neither of us wanted to blame the other, and both of us believed such things were a matter of fate more than of science. If it was meant to be, it would happen. And the fact that it hadn’t after so many years meant it never would. But raising Grady in the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s belief that the boy would be better served living with Frank and me for a time had wondrously filled that void, even as it filled our lives with fresh responsibility neither of us had ever imagined.
As Frank was fond of pointing out, though, we’d “acquired” Grady absent the three worst words in the English language: “some assembly required.” He’d been part of our Appleton, Maine, household for two years now and, after an initial rough patch, he’d adjusted marvelously to his new environment, including Appleton Elementary, where I was acquainted with any number of the teachers. I’d substituted there occasionally in the days before Appleton High principal Walter Reavis brought me on as a full-time sub to step in for teachers who were gone for extended absences. I much preferred this to the daily grind, since it gave me an opportunity to get to know the kids and actually teach them something on my own, once their initial resistance to a substitute wore off.
Teaching gave me time to continue pursuing my passion for writing—a torch that had been lit during my days freelancing for whatever newspaper or magazine I could convince to consider my work. I actually fancied myself a real journalist, even though my portfolio was painfully thin on bylines in journals more prestigious than the Appleton Daily Sun or Maine Monthly. I’d like to say at least it paid the bills, but the meager sums I made freelancing didn’t even come close to that.
The move from journalism into short stories came at the same time Walter Reavis hired me as a full-time sub at the local high school. I was still making only about half what the real teachers made, without any benefits to boot. Coupled with Frank’s income from giving flying lessons at a local airport and his Air Force pension, it was more than enough for us to get by. The costs of raising Grady, meanwhile, were covered by his late father’s insurance policy, giving us no worries there either.
And it was a good thing we weren’t relying on my fiction writing to bring in any income, since it hadn’t so far. I’d gotten one story published in a local literary magazine that was typed, instead of typeset, my one true career highlight having been making a sale to Yankee magazine.
It had been Walter Reavis who’d gotten that story to a friend who worked at Yankee. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more grateful to anyone in all my life. I hadn’t asked Walter to do it, hadn’t even known he had a friend there. He’d done it on his own after reading that particular story and liking it enough to go out on a limb for me. If you want to be a writer, you need a little help along the way. Nobody makes it entirely on their own, particularly not a substitute English teacher with no more than a dream and a Royal typewriter. I resolved to use the first income I made off my short stories to purchase a computer. So, needless to say, I was still using the Royal.
“Why do they have school when the weather’s sucky if everybody gets sick?” Grady asked, spooning up the last of his cornflakes.
“‘Sucky’ is not a word, Grady,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Well, I am an English teacher.”
“But you’re not my English teacher, Aunt Jess,” he said, at which point Frank raised the newspaper in front of his face again.
“Thanks for the support,” I said to him, and I could see the paper rustling as he stifled a laugh behind it.
Grady pushed his chair out from under the table. “I’ll go get a hoodie, Aunt Jess,” he said, giving me a hug that I took as an apology for his smart remark.
That’s the way it was with Grady. He had too kind a nature to let even the most casually flippant or derogatory remark stand for very long. I believe it must’ve had something to do with a fear of losing the people he had left in his life. The death of his father had left him with a keen, even obsessive inclination to avoid any behavior that might create distance between him and anyone else vital to his life. He was that way with his teachers and friends, too, never the one to start trouble or finish it. Afraid even at times to stand up for himself or respond in kind out of fear of losing a single friend or acquaintance. I learned pretty fast that you can’t reason out such things with a six-year-old, much less an eight-year-old even more set in his ways two years later. There were times when I thought Grady was surviving more than living, but other times when he seemed like the happiest little boy in the world. Occasionally I thought he might be faking it to reward Frank and me for our love.
“Peanut butter and jelly,” Frank pronounced, setting Grady’s brown paper lunch bag before him. “And a surprise!”
“What? What?” Grady asked eagerly, practically bouncing up and down.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise. And you know the rules.”
The boy frowned and blew the wavy hair from his face.
“Don’t look until lunchtime,” Frank reminded Grady. “No cheating?”
“No cheating, Uncle Frank,” th
e boy agreed.
Frank then placed my bag in front of me, and I asked, “I don’t get a preview? I don’t get a surprise?”
“Chicken salad on whole wheat. Hold the celery.”
“What about the surprise?”
“That will have to wait until later,” Frank said, stopping just short of a wink, which left me wondering what he was hinting at.
I slung the strap of my shoulder bag, which doubled as a briefcase for books and papers, over my shoulder and picked up my lunch bag, minus the surprise, just as Grady reappeared with his sweatshirt on backward so the hood was pulled over his face.
“What do you think, Aunt Jess?” he asked before banging his leg against a chair. “Ouch!” the boy rasped, pulling the hood down.
“Enough said.”
Frank wasn’t holding the newspaper anymore, so he just turned away this time before fetching his keys and leading us outside to his car.
* * *
* * *
“Looks like I’m going to need you to fill in for Bill Gower awhile longer, Jessica,” Walter Reavis greeted me when I arrived that morning with the buses. “You’re earning rave reviews teaching remedial English, by the way.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“What?”
“Remedial.”
“But that’s what it is.”
“It makes the students feel inferior.”
He scolded me playfully with his eyes. “They know they’re inferior. That’s why they’re taking remedial English.”
“You make it sound like a badge of shame, Walter.”
“Well, Mrs. Fletcher, you’re looking at a proud graduate of remedial English. You see me wearing a badge of shame anywhere?”
“You must have left it at home.”
“I’ll make sure to check the drawers tonight.”
The bell rang, signaling the beginning of homeroom, which meant I had to get a move on.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
He was good-looking, with strong, rugged features that made him attractive to women and an easy smile that made him approachable to men. “For promising to check my drawers for that badge?”
Now it was my eyes doing the scolding. “For this opportunity.”
He nodded, clearly not used to that kind of compliment. “I’d like to speak to you about another one. You’re free sixth period, right?”
“Why, yes,” I managed.
“Perfect. Come by the office then.”
* * *
* * *
I was filling in for a longtime teacher named Bill Gower who taught three remedial English classes and one advanced honors class to sophomores. The previous week I had distributed to that sophomore class a short story I’d recently written, photocopied at my own expense at Staples. Normally, I would have used one of the high school’s twin copying machines, of which one was almost always down on a rotating basis. Since this particular short story wasn’t on the lesson plan left by Mr. Gower, however, I couldn’t justify spending taxpayer dollars and forked over the twenty dollars for the copies plus stapling.
Today was the day I’d put aside to discuss the story with a sophomore class that had most recently wrapped up “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe.
“I don’t think the story knows what it wants to be,” a straight-A student named Missy noted.
“Could you expand on that a bit?” I asked her, hoping to see more hands shoot up into the air.
“Well, it’s trying to say something important.”
“You agree, Ben?” I asked a boy who was one of my go-tos in the class, but seldom raised his hand.
“Maybe. It may be trying to say a whole lot of things,” he responded, “but it ends up saying nothing at all.”
Ouch, I thought.
“And I didn’t like the characters,” Ben continued.
Double ouch.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to like them,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t say it right,” Ben said, trying again. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about them, so I never really cared.”
“It’s like, well, they’re boring,” suggested a Goth girl named Becky. “They never do anything. Nothing ever happens.”
“Except that one part with the car accident,” noted Will from inside his ever-present football letterman’s jacket. “That was cool, ’cause there was nobody behind the wheel, so what happened to the driver?”
“Why’d he run away?” Missy asked.
“Maybe he was never there,” suggested a boy named Trevor who delighted in carving his name wherever he went, like a dog marking its territory.
Will again: “Maybe he was running from something. The accident happens, and he has to run before he gets caught.”
“What do you think he did?” Missy wondered.
“Killed someone!” a voice rang out.
“Dealt drugs!”
“Stole money from his boss!”
Right before my eyes, the discussion had veered hopelessly off track, fixating on a small, relatively insignificant part of the story. And, try as I might, I couldn’t get the class’s focus back on the subject at hand, which was the story as a whole.
“Is this a mystery?” Missy asked finally, restoring a semblance of order to things.
“What makes you ask?” I said.
“Everything comes back to that car accident, the missing driver. It has to be one of the other characters, right? That’s what the story, the mystery, is about. Figuring out who the driver is. But it ends with us never finding out.”
“Ugggghhhhhhhhh,” Becky added to the pronouncement Missy had just made. “I hate when writers do that.”
“Too bad we can’t ask the writer who the driver was,” Ben lamented.
“Mrs. Fletcher,” Missy said, holding up the photocopied set of pages, “who is the writer? There’s no name on this.”
“You know,” I said, “I forgot the author’s name. Nobody well-known—that’s for sure.”
* * *
* * *
I lived with my students’ comments for the rest of the day, playing them over and over in my head after making the bold move of teaching one of the unpublished stories I had lying around. Craving some kind, however limited it might be, of feedback.
Is this a mystery? Missy had asked.
Maybe it was. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I wasn’t the writer I thought I was or wanted to be.
Except that one part with the car accident. That was cool, ’cause there was nobody behind the wheel, so what happened to the driver?
I didn’t know and had never really thought about it until now. But I spent much of the rest of the day thinking about nothing else, concocting an entire scenario that swept the story away in an entirely different direction, if not on paper, at least in my imagination.
Until sixth period, that is, because sixth period was when Principal Walter Reavis had asked to see me in his office.
I rushed down to the main office, located at the back end of the building, as soon as fifth period ended, just before one o’clock. Walter’s secretary, Alma Potts, was out sick that day, and her harried replacement was juggling phone calls, so I headed down the short corridor to his private office and knocked on his open door.
“How’s your first day as a full-time teacher going, Jessica?” he asked, grinning broadly after I’d sat down before his desk.
I was so excited, my knees wobbled and I literally felt faint. The sun streaming through the open blinds forced me to squint and then shield my eyes to regard him. Alma Potts made it a habit to close those blinds every single day, but since she was out today, there was no one to save visitors to Walter’s office from the bright rays of the sun.
“If Bill Gower stays out
, I’m going to make you a permanent part of the faculty,” he continued.
“Wow,” I managed.
“He and I are speaking in the next hour. I should have news for you by the end of the day,” said Walter, framed by the sun’s bright glow. “Stop by before you leave the building.”
I raised a hand to shield my eyes. “I . . . I don’t know what to say, Walter.”
He rose behind his desk, a clear signal it was time to take my leave. “End of the day, Jessica?”
I stood up, too. “End of the day, yes.”
* * *
* * *
After school ended, I sat at my desk—well, Bill Gower’s desk—on the pretext of correcting papers. But I ended up continuing to think about what had happened to the driver in the story my sophomore English class had skewered and why he, or she, had fled the scene of an accident. How would the story read if it opened with that scene and went from there? Maybe that was why this story, and many of the others I’d penned, had proved so hard to write. Maybe I was fighting my instincts, trying to be a different writer from the writer I really was.
But mysteries? Really?
I kept fixating on that to the point where I forgot all about Principal Walter Reavis having asked to see me at the end of the school day.
The light was starting to bleed from the late-afternoon Maine sky when I stuffed my belongings into my shoulder bag and raced to the main office, my shoes clacking against the tile floor, drawing a tinny echo in the now-empty building. The main office was still open and lit, even though Alma Potts’s replacement had left for the day. I moved to Walter’s office and found the door closed. I was about to knock when I heard his voice boom from inside.
“Stop!”
Followed by a pause.
Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder Page 2