So Dave ended up back in town, joined the police force, and steadily rose through the ranks and ended up as detective. He always seemed like the kind of guy who just settled for the career because it was safe and predictable. I don’t know if he was ever a very good cop, but he seemed tired most of the time to me.
Oh, and one story that Gretchen loves telling (probably because she’s always trying to get me to become a Catholic) is about how Dave had cancer about ten years ago. It was something like pancreatic cancer, and the prognosis was bad. He had never been very religious, but he started going to church and everyone started praying for him, and he suddenly got better. The cancer basically disappeared, and since then he had been devout, going to mass every week at the church next to the school. He had two sons who had graduated from St. Ignatius years ago, and another in tenth grade, who I would be teaching soon. He was an avid fisherman, and was always telling stories of fishing trips he had taken with his sons. It seemed to interest him far, far more than his job.
He didn’t end up talking to me until later that day, after the cops had closed off the garden and had spoken to most of the other teachers. He came and found me in my classroom, where I was trying unsuccessfully to grade papers. It’s kind of hard to get work done when someone was murdered on campus.
“Thomas,” he grunted, standing at the door. He was a bulky guy, maybe 300 pounds, and he filled up the door.
“Hi, Dave. It’s a shame we have to meet under these circumstances.”
“You’re telling me. Just need to get a few things from you, if you don’t mind.” He sauntered over to my desk and pulled up a chair, taking out a notebook. “Has anyone come to talk to you yet?”
“No, no…you’re the first.”
“Yeah, this one is weird, Tom. The first murder we’ve had in this town in over twenty years.”
He looked at his notes.
“Tell me…how well do you know this…Pauline Gallard?”
Oh no. It was what I feared. I hadn’t seen her all day – she’d been mysteriously absent from the faculty lounge, holed up in her classroom, brooding apparently.
“She got me to join the Gardening Club. She’s a very committed, hard-working teacher.”
“She’s in your department, I understand.”
“Oh, oh…yeah, that’s right.” I had forgotten that her Art History classes were in the English-Fine Arts Department. I was technically her supervisor.
“Have you observed her in class? Have you written up any performance evaluation of her that I could see?”
“Um, you see, I am supposed to do that. Yes. I’m new – you know, they just made me chair of this department, and I, uh…”
Okay, I’ll just admit it. I had completely forgotten she was in my department and I had forgotten about the evaluations as well. I’d been wrapped up in Katie’s pregnancy and my regular classes and grading and everything else.
He looked at me.
“I can tell you that she’s a very dedicated teacher. The kids love her. That garden is her obsession. She’s a selfless, caring, serious…teacher.”
“A bit eccentric?”
“Yes.”
“What were her feelings about Jim Screbbles?”
“She hated…” I stopped. This sounded terrible. My mind raced. Could she have…? No.
“Look, Dave, they were rivals. She couldn’t stand the fact that Kennedy kept winning that stupid Green Campus competition every year.” He scribbled notes furiously. “I mean, she would hang out every night in that garden protecting it, because she said that people were coming by to mess up the garden. She even said Jim would drive by…” I laughed. “It’s silly, it’s all just silly, I mean she would never…it just…”
He gazed at me.
“So,” I asked, “what have you found? Is there any evidence or anything?”
“There are so many footprints in the mud from all the students, it’s hard to tell what happened. But I talked to Father George, and you know, he’s not that attentive.”
Father George was our campus priest, who was pretty much always reading a Bible, even as he walked across the campus. He was always bumping into the students.
“He was here that night,” Dave continued. “He saw some commotion back there, but couldn’t hear what was going on, and it was dark. He can’t even remember what time it was. And then Pedro…”
Pedro was our groundskeeper, an old guy who’d been here for thirty years. He was kind of an old flake who had his head in the clouds. He could often be seen mumbling to himself and staring in the sky like he was expecting something to appear up there.
“Pedro heard people arguing but couldn’t see how many there were. I’m not getting anywhere with the two of them.” I could see the frustration on poor Dave’s face. I knew he just wanted to be fishing right now. He was just a couple years away from retirement, and he was counting the seconds. “Meanwhile, Screbbles’s wife is telling me that your teacher did it. She’s been on the phone yelling at everyone in the department about how Pauline left threatening phone messages and notes for him. I’m saying, ‘Did you keep any of them? Do you have the recordings? Can you show me the notes?’ That’s what we need in an investigation like this.”
He scratched his head. “Pauline says she wasn’t here at all last night. Was she here when you left?”
“Yeah, I left at about 4:00 and she was still here with a couple of kids, working in the garden.”
“Tell me…you think she could’ve set that fire at the garden at Kennedy?”
“No. She just isn’t the type.”
“And then…he comes here to get revenge, he tries to mess up her garden, and she’s waiting for him like she does every night, and they argue, and she whacks him with the nearest gardening tool that she can find.”
I thought – or tried to look like I was thinking. “Yeaaah…I just can’t see it, Dave.”
I was lying. I had no idea what this woman could do – I didn’t even know her, and she was French, for God’s sake. They’re liable to do anything, they’re passionate, they’re volatile.
“She religious at all?” Dave asked.
“She never goes to get communion when we have our school liturgies,” I said. “So I guess not. She and I are always sitting there by ourselves while everyone else goes up.”
“You’d think she’d be Catholic, growing up in France. Teaching at a Catholic school.”
“Yeah, you’d think. I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the names of those kids she was with when you left?”
I actually did, and I told him. He would follow up with them – when did they see her leave, was she agitated, did she talk about Jim, that kind of thing.
As I left school the cops were in the garden, looking at the position of the body and the spade, trying to examine the footprints to see what had happened. The problem was that it had rained during the night – who knew if there was any evidence still on the ground?
I had a hole in my stomach on my way home. I was in shock over the possibility – I dared not let myself believe it, but I couldn’t imagine what else could have happened. She couldn’t…she wouldn’t…No.
And I was sad for our garden, and for the students. Would it be a crime scene forever now? Would all the plants just die? Would anyone want to go in there again? What would happen to Madame Gallard?
It wasn’t until the next day that I saw her after school. She had been absent from the assembly and I hadn’t seen her making her tea in the faculty lounge. As I was leaving I saw her over by the garden, which was still closed off. There were still a few cops in and out of the place, and she was silently brooding as she stared through the fence. I went over to her.
“You probably know they conseeder me a pairson of interest,” she said, her accent stronger than usual.
“Why is that?” I said, trying to sound innocent.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. I won’t lie to them. I hated that phony Barnum and Bailey showman. But
I did not kill him.”
“Were you here that night?”
She paused, and then looked at me. “Yes. But I do not need to tell them – it will only confuse their leetle brains.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. I left and went home. It was a quiet night. I was satisfied that he would not come and try to ruin my garden. How wrong I was. His final insult was to come and die under my apple tree. What a foul fertilizer, eh?” And she smiled darkly.
“So you saw nothing? What time was that?”
“From six until about eight. I get my dinner, I come to eat it in the garden, I have some tea, I enjoying the solitude, and I wait. And nothing happen, and I left.” She shrugged.
“Just tell them. You won’t get in trouble.”
“My advice is to tell them as little as possible. They will not find out the killer. Some things are…best left unknown, I suppose.” She gave a fatalistic sigh and started to walk away. I walked with her.
“What is worst is that the students suffer,” she said. “Their garden is closed, I know not when they will give it back to me, or if they ever will. Maybe the diocese turn it into a stupid parking lot now. I will not be surprised. To them the whole place probably reek of death.”
“What about you? Can you go back in there? And what about the competition?”
“It is my garden!” she cried. “Of course I will go back. A garden is a place of life! You always return, always grow new thing. And the competition – it will go on, but without Screbble, and without his garden which burn to the ground, Kennedy will not be entered in the competition.”
“This whole thing looks bad for you, honestly, Pauline. People are going to think…”
“Yes, I know how people talk. I know…but I have been through worse, if you only knew.”
We were at the parking lot, and she gave me a wave as she walked toward her car, and I was left to ponder everything.
3
A couple of days later, as is the tradition at our school whenever a death occurs to anyone remotely connected to the “St. Ignatius family” (a former employee, a teacher at another school in the diocese, the spouse of an employee, a parent, a former student from the class of ’84, etc.) we had an extended, solemn mass for Mr. Screbbles. The school band played the same songs they have for years, which were sort of poppy, sappy rock songs about living in Christ and the kingdom of God and stuff like that. The student singers were a bit overzealous and the violin player was just a tad out of tune, and the guitar was way, way too loud, and the band leader, a well-intentioned, overweight woman named Julia Bamford, did her best with the group of excited students she was working with. And then Father George, who was in his seventies by now I think, began his homily, which threatened to put me to sleep every time. The thing about Father George’s voice is that it’s perfectly tuned to the frequency that tells your brain to start going to sleep – and he talks in a strange, sing-songy lilt, which I don’t understand because it’s not an accent that anyone speaks with in California. He grew up in Orange County, from what he told me, and after graduating from St. Ignatius entered the seminary immediately. He had been working in our diocese for several decades and had lived in Mexico at one point. He spoke fluent Spanish and knew the entire history of the mountain communities back to their early settlement by Mormons and loggers.
Father George was a genuinely kind, good, gentle, and comforting presence – you should know that. His whole life was this school, and he lived next door to the campus behind the church with a couple of other priests. He knew as much as anyone could know about Catholic theology – he could quote St. Thomas Aquinas, he knew Latin, he had the Bible almost memorized, and he would tell you anything you wanted to know. He would stop what he was doing and give advice, or just listen. My students frequently went to his daily mass at 6:45 AM in the chapel, where he provided the same guidance and comfort in the rituals of the ancient faith.
Today he was tasked with commemorating Jim Screbbles, a guy none of us knew or really cared about, who taught at our rival school, and who had had the misfortune of dying on our campus. Father George’s homily touched on the standard stuff he would say for anyone’s death, really.
“Christ died for our sins, and in his death he gave us everlasting life,” he said as the kids fidgeted in their seats and I struggled to stay awake. “May angels greet the soul of Jim Screbbles and may God welcome him home. In life he was a dedicated teacher and shepherd to his students, and he met his end too soon. As the gospel of John tells us, ‘I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord. He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet he shall live. And whosoever lives and believes in me, he shall never die.’ After the mass, I would like the school to join me in the garden to bless the spot of his death, and to open the garden up again to the students and Madame Gallard, who have done such a beautiful job creating a sanctuary of prayer and meditation for the community. So please join me for that.” I looked at Pauline, who was crossing her arms and glaring. It struck me that her rival got gotten the last laugh by dying in her garden, forever staining it with his memory. I pictured his students from Kennedy making the place a shrine to his memory, coming over and putting his pictures up and placing candles and thank you letters to him. Pauline would be infuriated. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought.
The mass continued. There were songs, and standing and sitting, and then everyone took communion, and Pauline and I were alone in the pews. She looked at me and smiled, almost ruefully. I could tell what she was thinking – “Thiss seely Medieval superstition, can you believe it?”
After the mass we all went to the garden, where Father George said some prayers and sprinkled holy water, and some students were inexplicably crying. Pauline was miserable, standing away from everyone else, probably afraid that people were going to trample her plants. Eventually she came over to me.
“Finally we can get back in here and continue our work,” she said. “These few days of neglect have had a catastrophic effect. The drip line is not completely set up and everything is dying.”
It looked fine to me, but I guess she was the artist and she knew what her creation needed to look like. It was like listening to an unfinished composition of Mozart’s. To me it would sound amazing, but I wasn’t going to tell Wolfgang it sounded great. I mean, all the plants were still alive. The trees were sprouting blossoms. The spinach and chard were a little withered and a lot of stuff hadn’t been planted yet. Yeah, I thought, looking at the garden, she’s right, I guess. The garden does need work.
That afternoon we did more work with the students and she lectured me on the beauty of the California poppy, which some students were planting in a wildflower area of the garden.
“The poppy dies completely every year. It re-sprouts from the same seed, you see. It die and regrow, die and regrow, and if she is happy, she reseed and spread. You don’t need to water, you only need to plant. That is the beauty of native species. They have been here since time immemorial, and they adapt to the conditions. There is nowhere they would rather be. They open their petal to the sun in the day, and close them at night. They are like a student, no? With a good teacher, they will open, and without, they close.”
I nodded.
“A good gardener knows how to plant a seed, like a teacher, eh? And grow a seed into a wonderful flower that can someday survive the seasons of life on its own.”
“You’re right.”
“You see, there is poetry here, English teacher,” she smiled.
Now everyone was filtering out of the garden and going to lunch. She stayed behind with her loyal cadre of student gardeners, and as I left she was showing the kids how to prepare the soil to plant chard. It was hard to reconcile Madame Gallard’s prickly exterior with the warmth she showed to the kids, but then again, it’s the same with a lot of teachers. Life is hard, unpredictable and unforgiving – but in the classroom, you’re in charge, and when you’re teaching everything is in its right place and eve
rything proceeds in a logical order. I suppose, thinking about it now, that I have more in common with Madame Gallard than I was ready to admit at first.
That first day after the garden reopened, I noticed that my student Gabriel was in there working with the others, this time planting and weeding the soil. He had turned in his assignments and gotten his grades back up and was now talking to me incessantly about gardening in class. I kept an eye on him, and periodically he would go up to Madame Gallard and ask a question, and she would show him how to do something or explain some principle of gardening to him.
WE were at one of the many big family dinners my wife’s parents host. This one was at the Yacht Club at Big Bear, right on the lake next to the resort, where her whole family has been a member for several generations. Her mom’s sister and brother and their families were there, and her dad’s brother and his family was there, and her older sister Jen was there with her husband and their two little girls, and her younger sister Caroline was there with her boyfriend. And of course, all four grandparents, still alive, were there.
The Yacht Club is a private dining, boating, sailing, and fishing club with a fancy restaurant, a lakefront bar, a marina, and several outdoor fire pits where it is perfect to smoke a cigar on a summer night. You can sit there and watch the orange glow of the setting sun on the quiet ripples of the lake. There’s an indoor brandy room with a fireplace that is always burning during the winter, and you can sit there after dinner and shoot the breeze with the old timers and look through the big windows out onto the snowy hills and the frigid lake outside. The old timers will tell boating stories, and many of them are big-time boaters all over the world – they’ve been in sailing competitions in the Caribbean, the Greek Islands, that sort of thing. Most of these people are from LA or Orange County or San Diego, and they’re rich, and they have houses here in the mountains, and they come to the club to catch up with old friends and to go boating around the lake.
Murder in the French Teacher's Garden Page 3