“You know what I was thinking?”
Pauline’s voice interrupted my thoughts on my impending parenthood. I turned to look at her. She was eating a cheeseburger, though I could tell she despised our greasy American diner food.
“You’re eating that? I’m shocked.”
“It is actually pretty good,” she whispered, not wanting anyone to hear. “Don’t tell anyone. It will ruin my image.”
She pointed at the garden, off in the distance behind the gym. “You know what I thought? How did Jim Screbbles get into the campus the night he was killed? I talk to Pedro. All the gates were locked at 5:00. It was only he and Father George here that night, and no way to come in.”
“He must’ve gotten the key somehow. There’s no other way.”
“But who? Who will give him the key to our campus? No one in their right mind will let this strange man onto our campus late at night.”
“Is there someone who used to work here who could’ve made copies of the key for some reason? Someone who left on bad terms?”
“Thomas, everyone who leave this place leave on bad terms. It could be dozens of people.”
“Who left in the past few years? Were any of them friends of Screbbles?”
Just then Father George walked up with a copy of the Mountain News and handed it to Pauline.
“Looks like you’ve made the news, Pauline,” he said.
“What is this?” She grabbed the paper and we all huddled around to look. It was an opinion piece on the last page of the paper by the “Editorial Board.” It was titled “St. Ignatius Must Fire Pauline Gallard.” It went on to say that she was a “person of interest in a murder,” and that students no longer felt safe going to school, and that parents were going to pull their kids out of school and donors were going to pull their money out of the school because a possible murderer was teaching there.
“This is ridiculous!” she hissed. “I am calling their office right now to demand a retraction.”
I’ll be honest – my mind was on the sex and health of my child, and I’m afraid I wasn’t able to be a very supportive colleague to Pauline. While I was finishing up my burger Catherine came to ask me if I could step into her office. My stomach was instantly filled with dread, and I agreed, feeling my mouth dry up instantly. I followed her to her office. What fresh hell was I in store for now? What new thing would keep me up at night now?
We sat down. She dispensed with the usual prayer, and launched into her speech.
“Thomas, I just got off the phone with two major donors to the school. They have asked to remain anonymous. These are people who helped refurbish the gym a couple years ago, and who totally rebuilt the D building after the fire. They’re keeping us afloat, Thomas. I’m telling you this because Pauline is in your department. They’ve said that they will be putting a halt on all donations while Pauline works here. It’s the murder. They read the story in the paper, and they can’t be associated with her.”
“She’s not a person of interest, she’s not even…”
“I know. I know. I told them. I just got off the phone with Dave Roberts, and he told me that no one has been ruled out. She is not a person of interest, but that’s not enough. The public has decided.”
“That’s just…that’s martial law, or some kind of mob justice, it’s like the old west, everyone’s just out here with their pitchforks, it’s ridiculous.”
“Thomas, I’m as upset as you are. I can’t see this school without Pauline. But I don’t know if we can move forward without these donors.”
“This whole school’s health depends on the whims of these two rich people?”
She sighed. It was a deep, sad sigh. “There are certain realities to Catholic education, Thomas…”
“I know.”
“We’re not like the public schools. Their funding is built in, it’s never going away, it’s decided by law in Sacramento, they can’t make funding changes like this, and they don’t rely on donors.”
“Yeah.”
“But if you were teaching at Kennedy, Thomas, guess how many kids you’d have in your classes.”
“A lot.”
“Forty, forty-five. You’d be doing Common Core, you’d be here doing paperwork until seven at night. You’d have the union looking over your shoulder, the district looking over your shoulder, the school bureaucracy checking in on you all the time, you’d have kids getting in fights and bringing knives to school. You know how much freedom we give you here. You want to change your curriculum right now, Thomas? Go ahead. You want try something new, or experiment with something? Do it. Every kid here has an iPad, they turn in all their stuff online. They don’t have that at Kennedy. Every morning they have to go make Xeroxes and wait in line at the Xerox machine. Sometimes it takes half an hour. We don’t have all that here. All we ask of you guys is that you teach the Catholic identity, and keep Christ in the classroom always.”
“Yeah.”
“If they don’t catch the real killer, Thomas, I don’t think Pauline is going to be here next year. And in the next couple of weeks we’re doing contracts.”
The meeting ended, and when I got out there, Pauline was yelling on her phone to who I assumed was the front desk person at the Mountain News. I was miserable the rest of the retreat and then I got tired and I just wanted to go home and find out if my child would be healthy or not.
“Okay, here it is,” said Katie, looking at her phone and sitting on the couch.
“You got the email?”
“Yep. I just have to sign into my account…what the hell is my stupid password…”
It took her a few minutes to make a new password and figure out where to click to see the test results.
“Okay, remember, this is like ninety percent accurate,” she said. “It’s just the most likely result. So this possibly could change.”
“Okay.”
She opened up the results and we stared at her phone.
“Totally healthy,” she said, scanning the various tests. “Negative, negative, negative.”
“Thank God,” I said. “That’s all that matters.”
“Thomas, let’s look at the gender together. Are you ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
We looked. XY.
“Wow!” I said. “What is that?”
“The Y means boy, Thomas.”
“Wow! Okay!”
“Are you going to be okay with that?” she asked. “I mean, I know you didn’t…”
She didn’t know how to continue. She was talking about the fact that I’d only met my own father for the first time a few years ago. I’d never been taught what the “dad” thing was all about.
“Yeah, it’s great,” I said. “I’m excited. I’ll read some books about being a dad.”
“You’ll be great. You’re good at taking care of me, and I’m like a kid sometimes.”
We sat there and processed the news. A boy. She couldn’t picture herself raising a little boy, because she’d grown up in a household of girls. Growing up with a single mom, I wasn’t sure how the whole father-son relationship was supposed to work.
“I just don’t know what this will be like,” she said. “I can’t even imagine it. So I guess we need to talk about boy names now.”
We spent the rest of the night talking about boy names. We came up with some good ones. All I cared about was that he was healthy – the boy or girl thing was an abstraction to me. I was having a healthy child. I repeated that to myself many times that night.
THE night of Pauline’s dinner party was a warm, fragrant spring evening, and the air was alive with the scent of jasmine, pine, sage, and other mountain springtime plants that I could not name. There was also the soil up here: it was different. It had its own subtle scent. We walked over to her house with two bottles of good French white wine, which I’d picked up at the wine shop that day. When we got there we heard voices in the backyard, so we went around to the gate and let ourselves in. She was back there with a c
ouple of people, but all I could notice was the garden. I hadn’t seen it the other day – this was an unbelievable sanctuary. It was very meticulously structured, with rows of hedges surrounding a pond, punctuated by apple trees and the native red-barked Manzanita trees, with planters full of wildflowers that were blooming wildly. Beyond all this was a large yard full of big, bushy native grasses and pathways meandering through. In this area were some very large trees, which looked like oaks and sycamores, and they must’ve been at least thirty years old. Way in the back I could see what looked like a vegetable patch, where zucchini, carrots, tomatoes and other things were growing together. I was astounded.
Pauline rose to greet us, and soon we were introduced to Donna and her husband Troy, and we were sitting in a trellised gazebo next to a pond where fish were swimming languidly as we drank wine and ate cheese, marcona almonds and figs.
I forgot about Donna’s use to our investigation and spent a couple of minutes eating, sipping the wine, and looking around me at this miraculous place. Finally I simply interrupted whatever they were talking about (I think it was local politics; Pauline hated the mayor).
“Pauline, I have to ask you how you created this garden.”
“It take me many years. And Donna help me with it, right?”
“I sold you a lot of these plants,” she said.
“But you tell me what will grow here, and what plants will bloom at different parts of the year, et cetera. I cannot take credit.”
Pauline’s modesty was genuine – she had really labored back here. I believed it had been a struggle.
“Many things I plant simply did not grow, or some fungus take them, or the aphids get them, or the gophers or some other devil,” she chuckled.
“You first came to my place a long time ago,” Donna said. “Maybe fifteen years?”
“Oh, longer than that. Because it was just after my divorce when I start gardening. This was a labor for me.”
“What are these hedges?” I asked.
“These are California coffeeberry. It is a perennial shrub that is native here. See, I take the French style, which I am familiar with, and is very regimented and structured, and I find native plants here so the pollinators will like them. Do you see the little buds? The bees are all over.”
I walked over to look up close. I hadn’t seen before, but the hedges were alive with bees. You had to stop and look closely before you would see the constant movement and hear the buzzing.
“This pond was here when we move in, but it was empty and we never did anything. That was a totally different headache, but I finally get it to work and get the right filtration system. A man come once a month to clean because I refuse to do it.”
I wandered down the rows of hedges and came to a large empty spot in the ground.
“What’s this?” I asked. Pauline got up and the rest followed.
“I plant salvia here just a few days ago. Do you know Baby Sage? Or they call it Lipstick Sage sometime. The flower is red and the hummingbirds love it. It smell like berries, it is very pleasant. This is another native who love the long dry summers here. I plant also some of the white sage.”
We walked around the garden like this, with our wine, talking about flowers and trees as the sun sank behind her house. Lizards were racing around between our feet, darting into the bushes as we approached. A jackrabbit pounced through the garden at one point, and moths were starting to come out to take over from the bees and the birds. Pauline pointed in the air and we looked up to see two bats, circling weirdly above her garden.
“Every night I have the bats. They love the insects here.”
It was time for dinner, and she went in and tinkered around for just a few minutes, bringing out an appetizer of stuffed zucchini. She had hollowed out zucchinis from her vegetable patch until they looked like long boats, and then stuffed them with raclette cheese and tomatoes and herbs and then baked them. We sliced off pieces of these and ate them, and they thankfully paired with the dry white wines I had brought. After this she brought out a giant pot of ratatouille, the thick stew of eggplants, tomatoes, zucchinis, bell peppers, and onions. Most of these ingredients she had grown in her garden, and she was unsurprisingly modest about the ratatouille itself (“It is peasant food”). This she served with big loaves of crusty, hearty bread which she had baked, which we had with some butter that she insisted on ordering from France. The whole thing was marvelous.
I had to force myself to broach the unpleasant subject of the dead man who was still doing damage to Madame Gallard and her garden.
“So, Donna, Pauline told me that you have worked with Jim Screbbles before?”
“Yes I have. I delivered lots of plants to his garden at Kennedy. You know, it was weird – I thought it was supposed to be a school garden where the kids were working and learning how to take care of a garden and everything. But I never saw any kids there. Just other adults, who were kind of advising him and telling him where to plant things and where everything should go. And Jim would tell me about this competition, how he knew he would win it again this year, how it was a sure thing. He just had so much confidence. And then sure enough, I’d see in the paper that he won again. But these people – I couldn’t figure out who they were. They weren’t from the school, and they were just telling him where to put stuff and they had their own kind of professional guys planting it. I don’t get it.”
Pauline gave me a deadly look and then looked back at her friend.
“If we don’t figure this out, Donna, I will get fired. This is unavoidable.”
“So they think you killed him? Pauline, that’s crazy.”
“Yes. But this is a crazy world we live in.”
“Where would you go?”
“Some other school. I would have to leave this place,” she waved to the garden around us. “I maybe could get some classes at Redlands, UC Riverside, Cal State San Bernardino. I would have to move down the hill probably. I don’t know.”
“Oh, one other thing he told me once,” Donna said, dipping her bread in her ratatouille. He said, ‘I’ll win that damn competition and prove ‘em wrong back home. Wait’ll they hear about this back in Texas, the bastards.’ I didn’t ask what he was talking about.”
“He was disturbed,” Pauline said. “Why was I cursed for this terrible man to die in my garden?”
Katie chimed in to steer the conversation to a more cheerful tone, which was a habit of hers.
“I think you and Thomas will figure it out, Pauline. You two are both pretty smart.”
“Well, I hope that is enough,” Pauline said. “We may have to be lucky as well.”
“Remember, Tom, we’re going to meet Crystal White with my sister? You had a question about her brother?”
I told them about the Bruno White possibility.
“This could be a convincing suspect,” Pauline said. “Let us hope.”
THE next day was the Spring Fling Dance, which they held at the school, and I was chaperoning. As usual they had twice as many chaperones as they needed, and so my job was to patrol the area behind the gym and make sure kids weren’t back there smoking or making out or something. There was also a fear that people would be entering the campus by climbing over the fence, and I’m not sure how this fear entered anyone’s mind, but there I was, behind the gym, listening to the distant thumping of the music from the PA system, thankful that I wasn’t inside suffering hearing damage. It was about nine o’clock and I would be here until 11:30 or when all the kids had left campus and had a ride home, whichever happened first, and I stood there and yawned, wondering what I was supposed to do for the rest of the night to occupy my mind. I heard footsteps approaching in the dark. It was Bill Faulk.
“They sent me back here to provide backup,” he laughed.
“Thanks. I might need it. I’m overwhelmed by enemy forces.”
“Yeah, they’re unstoppable. Look at all these kids coming over the fence! Call for backup! Call for backup!”
We chuckled a
nd talked about the dance and complained about the excessive number of chaperones, and then thankfully Father George approached. Maybe there would be some spiritual wisdom on how to deal with boredom or doing one’s professional duty, even when it was mind-crushingly monotonous.
“Oh, Father!” Bill said, turning to him. “I have a theological question.”
“I hope I can help,” he chuckled softly.
“We’re doing ethics in my philosophy class. I want to have a discussion on Just War Theory. I want to do a thing where I divide the class into two groups and make them both argue one of the sides.”
“For Just War Theory and against it?”
“Yeah, the pros and cons. One of them would argue that you can have a just war and one side would argue that you can’t, and that pacifism is the only ethical option. But I forgot the main points of the argument. Are you familiar with it?”
“That’s funny you say that,” Father said. “I was just at a symposium at the Catholic Scholars Association of America and one of the speakers had a long talk about it.”
“I haven’t heard of the theory,” I said.
“Its origins are with Saint Augustine and to some extent Saint Ambrose,” Father George went on in his sing-songy voice. “It was during the 5th century and Christians were debating whether or not they should fight on the side of the Roman empire against the invading barbarians. There was considerable debate. The argument for a just war ended up with a list of requirements. For a war to be just, it would need to be, let’s see…” He counted on his fingers as he listed the requirements: “A last resort. So you’re fighting after you’ve exhausted all other possibilities for resolving the conflict. It would need a just cause. So the war is being fought to end some grave evil, like Nazism. It would need valid authority, meaning there is law or principle that causes you to fight, in this case we would be fighting to uphold Christian principles of love and mercy, et cetera. It would also need possible success, meaning it’s not a lost cause. You aren’t sending men on a suicide mission. It would need proportionality, meaning you aren’t sending a massive army to do unnecessary damage to innocent people. You’re sending the amount of troops necessary to win the war and end the fighting. And then you must have an exit strategy. It can’t be a forever war.”
Murder in the French Teacher's Garden Page 9