Angel in the Snow

by Glen Ebisch

  When I sat down next to her in the dining room the conversation got tense for a few minutes, because I didn’t know the other girls real well, but after I told a couple of jokes and kidded around a little the situation improved. And after dinner we walked back as a group to the dorm. At the front door the other girls excused themselves with meaningful glances in Elaine’s direction, which she tried to ignore.

  “How did it go last night? Any problems?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “How about today? Are there enough girls around in the dorm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you think of anything else about Vicki that we should know?”

  “No.”

  She kept looking around and not meeting my eye. At first I thought she might be lying again and was afraid I would find out, but then it struck me that she wasn’t nervous. She was bored. Bored and hoping I would go away. Here I was, trying to help catch someone out to kill her, and she couldn’t even be bothered to concentrate on what I was saying.

  She shivered theatrically. “Maybe I should go in now. It’s kind of cold out here, and I don’t want to be real conspicuous.”

  “Right. Do that,” I said roughly. The hurt and worried expression that instantly came over her face made me regret my attitude.

  “I’m sorry if I can’t quite focus on things,” Elaine said. “It’s just that so much has been happening lately.”

  “Sure, I understand. I guess I’m a little strung out by the whole thing myself,” I said more gently. “Are you all set to pass along a copy of Vicki’s card to me tomorrow at ten?”

  She nodded.

  “Then the three of us will meet with Hawthorne at two. He’s usually in his office then, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s when I work for him on Mondays. But, you know, I’m really not looking forward to this. He’s always been so nice to me, and I’m not into confrontation.”

  “Was he nice to you last night?”

  “I can’t believe he could do all those horrible things and still be so nice to me to my face.”

  “Yeah, well sometimes people aren’t the way they seem.”

  “Yeah. I’d better go in now. See you tomorrow.” With a sort of sad smile goodbye she went up the steps to the dorm.

  I walked across the campus to Stoneham Hall, moving kind of slowly because all that waited for me there was an English paper to write. When I was almost to the front door, some strange impulse made me turn and look back toward the girls’ dorm. Elaine, or someone who looked almost exactly like her, was standing out front talking to some guy. I was too far away to recognize him.

  I started to run back. This could be the murderer. But by the time I was halfway across the campus, I could see they were holding hands. I stopped, turned quickly, and headed back to my dorm. I certainly wasn’t going to rescue her from some guy she wanted to be with more than she wanted to be with me. If he turned out to be the murderer, she’d have nobody to blame but herself, I thought bitterly. But just before I went inside I took another look back to make sure everything was okay. They were still standing there. Everything looked fine—just fine.

  When Templeton finally came in I told him about Foster’s threat. It didn’t seem to worry him, but by then it wouldn’t have mattered to me if it had.

  Chapter 13

  I sat in English listening to Jameson go on about some poet and wondering why time only went by too fast when you were enjoying yourself. I had told Jameson at the beginning of class that I had to leave ten minutes early for an appointment. His face had clouded for a minute, but suddenly cleared into an artificially sunny smile, “Of course, Charles, no problem, no problem at all.” He had given me a wink that said, “You covered for me, now I’ll help you.”

  Actually, I would have told the police about him even if it meant flunking English, if only Templeton hadn’t seemed so sure that he was innocent. Too bad Jameson wasn’t the one. It would have been the perfect solution: one less murderer and one less sarcastic English teacher, two for the price of one. Now I felt like turning him in just so he’d stop treating me like a buddy. Some folks you’re proud to have as enemies.

  At ten o’clock I was planted right inside the front door of the administration building, a few steps away from the entrance to the headmaster’s office. Five minutes later Elaine came out the door to his office. Trying to look casual, which made her seem like the winner of the thief-of-the-year award, she slipped a piece of paper into my hand. Without a word she headed upstairs.

  I stepped out onto the steps in front of the building. A surprisingly warm winter sun reminded me that spring wasn’t a myth as I opened the sheet and held it side by side with the transcript of Vicki’s grades that we had found last night, expecting to see that her lower grades had been raised on the headmaster’s card.

  They were identical!

  Jeez!

  * * *

  Hawthorne’s secretary, old Prune Face, stared down her nose at me when I came into her office, as though I’d worked in a kennel all morning and hadn’t showered. It was nice to see that some things never change.

  “May I help you?” she asked frostily.

  “I’m with him,” I said, pointing at Templeton, who was slouched in a chair directly across from Hawthorne’s door and seemed to be contemplating the ceiling.

  She gave a dramatic sigh. “As I told your friend, Mr. Hawthorne is a very busy man, so if you don’t have an appointment, he may not have time to see you.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll take a chance and wait.”

  She took off her glasses and let them hang from a thin gold chain around her neck. You could tell she was trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to get someone with more authority to throw us out. After a few seconds she must have decided it wasn’t. Putting her glasses back on, she returned to her typing.

  I slipped into a chair next to Templeton and silently showed him the two sheets, looking for some sign of surprise at the fact that they were the same. He merely nodded.

  “Shouldn’t we get out of here?” I whispered. “We don’t have any proof that Hawthorne did anything.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he replied and went back to studying the ceiling.

  Ten minutes later Hawthorne came bustling in with folders under his arm and a briefcase in his hand. It was the old genuine leather type with a deep, rich shine and fancy gold trimmings. I wondered if he polished it with oil every night before going to bed, like a kid with a new baseball glove. Maybe he got it at the same place he got the fancy shoes.

  “Hi, guys,” he said, struggling to open his office door, cheerful but busy. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to see you right now. If you make an appointment with Miss Davis, we can get together on Wednesday.” The secretary watched with an I-told-you-so smile.

  Templeton walked up close to Hawthorne like he was going to give him a kiss and whispered something in his ear. At first Hawthorne seemed confused, then without saying a word, he opened the door and motioned for us to come it. I couldn’t resist giving the stunned secretary a quick grin as I closed the door.

  “Now what do you mean, ‘You want to talk about Vicki Girard and me’?” he asked with a confident but puzzled smile. Sitting in his official advising chair had helped him regain his composure, but Templeton wasn’t about to give up his advantage.

  “We know all about your grade-changing business, and are only here to listen to your side of the story before going to the headmaster.”

  Hawthorne gave a good imitation of someone simultaneously shocked and outraged. “This is a very serious accusation. I hope you have the proof to back it up because I assure you I can show conclusively that there has been no tampering with Vicki Girard’s grades. A simple comparison of her the official transcript from her previous school with the headmaster’s card will reveal that.”

  “Yes, we know it will. We’ve already checked,” said Templeton calmly, while I wondered how I could phrase my expulsion from North
Hill in as few words as possible in a cable to my parents. No sense wasting money on bad news.

  “So what evidence do you have to support this outrageous charge?” Hawthorne asked with increased confidence. “And if you have gained illicit access to confidential records, you are the ones who will be facing charges.”

  Templeton pulled several sheets of paper out of the inside pocket of his coat. “I have signed statements from four students who transferred here during the past year and a half to the effect that you raised their grades in exchange for money.”

  “Let me see those,” Hawthorne said, tearing them out of Templeton’s hand.

  “Needless to say, those are photocopies. I have the originals in a safe place.”

  As Hawthorne read, you could see him change from a smooth, competent, fast-talker into someone who was almost ready to cry.

  “How did you get the boys to sign these?” he asked, half-curious and half-angry.

  “By suggesting that you were involved in Vicki’s death, and if they didn’t confess to me, they would have to tell the police.”

  “I had nothing to do with her death. I don’t know how she died.”

  “C’mon,” I said, “she was blackmailing you, and you couldn’t take it any more.”

  “She was blackmailing me,” he admitted. “At first it was just small favors, and she asked nicely. I didn’t even realize that she was just testing me. Then all of a sudden she started demanding money.” He looked up and blinked tears out of his eyes. “Dammit, I knew I never should have offered to change her grades. There was something about her, something unstable. I should have known she was dangerous.”

  “How did you decide which students to ask? You never offered to change my grades,” I said.

  “They were too good. I only picked students who had done badly in their last school. You’d be surprised how many kids with poor grades get into a supposedly high ranked prep school like this—as long as the parents can afford to pay. The kids jumped at the chance, and I figured I was giving them the opportunity to make a new start. To wipe the slate clean and begin over again, as it were.”

  “Spare us,” said Templeton shortly. “Next you’ll expect us to believe that you did it as an act of charity.”

  Hawthorne gave a humorless laugh. “No, I always picked kids whose records showed that their parents had money, and I made them pay. I made them pay good. Why shouldn’t I? Do you know what my salary is? Your fathers get more in a month than I get in a year. If they want little Jennifer or Jason to get into an Ivy League college, why the hell shouldn’t they pay?”

  He was leaning forward in his chair, cutting off each word and almost spitting them out at us. Even though he was only about half my size, I moved back.

  “If you hate the rich so much, why don’t you quit? Go work in a ghetto somewhere? There are plenty of poor folks around,” I said.

  “I don’t hate the rich. I want to be rich.”

  “So when Vicki threatened to expose your scheme unless you paid and kept on paying, you killed her?” I asked.

  “No, I paid her,” he said in a tired voice. “I put the money in her mailbox here at school. Three hundred dollars: that’s almost two weeks salary.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “In this instance, your instincts are partially correct, Wood,” said Templeton. “You haven’t told us the entire truth, have you?” he asked Hawthorne.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As soon as Vicki demanded money, you knew that the only way to end her blackmail would be to change her grades back to what they were supposed to be. It would be easy for you to remove her headmaster’s card, fill out a new one with the actual grades that were on her transcript, and then return it to the file. You must have been very surprised when you went to take her transcript out of your files and found it was missing. Did you guess immediately that Elaine must have removed it?”

  “She was Vicki’s roommate, and the only person who had easy access to my office.”

  “And my guess is that without that transcript you didn’t know how to change Vicki’s grades back to the correct ones because you couldn’t remember which ones you had raised and by how much.”

  Hawthorne nodded. “I was furious. I had the perfect way to stop her blackmail, but I had to wait until her previous school sent me another transcript. While I was waiting Vicki demanded a payment, so I made it. Then her transcript arrived, and I replaced her card with an accurate one.”

  “Was that the same day you contacted the motorcycle gang?” asked Templeton. “Once you had eliminated Vicki’s hold over you, the only thing left to worry about was whether Elaine had looked at the original headmaster’s card. If she had, and if Vicki had a strong enough hold over her, the headmaster might have taken their word over yours, so you hired the bikers to frighten her into acting strangely. If she had a relapse no one would believe her.”

  “It was more than that,” Hawthorne said wearily. “I couldn’t trust her; she would have done anything for Vicki. They might have found out the names of the other people whose grades I had changed, and started blackmailing me all over again. I couldn’t have her working in my office, but I couldn’t fire her without giving the headmaster a good reason. Her father’s some sort of famous Hollywood producer. This seemed like the only way.”

  “The only way was to have a bunch of hoods attack her at night!” I said.

  “I told them not to hurt her. Honestly, I only wanted them to scare her. And I never murdered anyone, you have to believe that.”

  “We have to believe that you’re a blackmailer and someone who likes to frighten girls, but that you’re basically too decent to be a murderer. I don’t believe that,” I said. “And what about last night? Was that noose hanging from the ceiling a little joke or don’t you know anything about that either?”

  Hawthorne shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I do,” Templeton said quietly.

  “You do!” I exclaimed, then asked more calmly, “You do?”

  “Yes. I never understood, as I told you yesterday, why the murderer would kill Vicki but only attempt to frighten Elaine, when it would have been relatively simple to kill them both. You put me on the right track when you suggested, quite accidentally I suspect, that there might have been two people who were being blackmailed by Vicki. Mr. Hawthorne was one, and he hired the bikers. But there was no reason for him to kill Vicki once he had replaced her headmaster’s card. And if he had met her behind the Midtown Restaurant and killed her, why transport the body back here and place it behind his own bungalow?”

  “Sure. Why would I do that?” Hawthorne asked with an anxious smile.

  “Okay, but why would anybody else put her body there?” I asked.

  “Because Vicki told the murderer that she was blackmailing Mr. Hawthorne in order to show that she meant business. But instead of frightening the murderer into paying off, it made him desperate and dangerous.”

  “Okay,” I said impatiently, “let’s skip the preliminaries and get to the main question. Who killed Vicki?”

  Templeton smiled. He was enjoying this. “You figure it out. It had to be someone with a car. Someone who could get away evenings without anyone asking questions. Someone who knew Elaine well enough to be concerned that she might know more than she realized. And finally, do you remember what Vicki said to Elaine that night in the restaurant? She thought she might meet an ‘old friend.’ That implies that she was blackmailing someone she knew before she went here.”

  “Her old high school transcript was from Connecticut,” I said. “Is it another student who transferred here from Connecticut? Someone who is also friendly with Elaine?”

  “Good. And only a student who was floor monitor could have sneaked into town with his own car on a weekday night. So it had to be a floor monitor who went to school in Connecticut and has a car. A few conversations with some people in o
ur dorm, and I found that only one person met all those criteria.”

  “Randy?” I asked.

  Templeton nodded and turned to Hawthorne. “A brief glance at your file on Randy Anderson might even reveal what Vicki was blackmailing him about. I believe he transferred here in the winter of last year.”

  “Why should I help you?” Hawthorne asked with a childishly stubborn expression.

  “Because otherwise I will take these letters directly to the headmaster,” Templeton replied without hesitation.

  “Blackmailer! You’re no better than Vicki Girard was,” he responded.

  “It’s up to you,” Templeton replied calmly, “but it might be difficult to get another job without references.”

  “Do you mean you really won’t tell the headmaster if I help you?” Hawthorne asked, torn between suspicion and hope.

  “Let’s see the file,” Templeton demanded.

  Hawthorne slid his chair back, and opened the third drawer in the gray metal office file that filled the corner of the room. After thumbing through the stuff for a few seconds, he pulled out a manila folder and skimmed through it.

  “It’s hard to tell from this. Schools are very reluctant to say if a student has had a problem with the law. But reference is made to a change of schools being desirable because of ‘an unresolved question involving the loss of other students’ property and some instances of antisocial behavior.’”

  “He was a thief?” I asked. “But he’s got plenty of money.”

  Hawthorne put on his advisor’s face again and said, “Some people steal because they need money, others because it’s something to do.”

  “Yeah, and we all know which category you’re in,” I said before he could get his sob story cranked up again.

  “Where is Elaine?” Templeton asked suddenly. “Wasn’t she supposed to be here?”