An Educated Death (12 page)

Laney Taggert's mother had just had some more bad news.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

Unabashed, I stuck my head back out into the hall. I noticed that Ellie Drucker was doing the same thing. We got to see Dorrie Chapin bring Mrs. Taggert under control in her best headmistress style. "Are you quite sure," she said, her tone chilly, "that you want that information broadcast to the entire Bucksport community? If not, I suggest you come back into my office and try to get yourself under control." Although headmasters and mistresses bend over backward to treat parents well and keep them in good humor, it is also true that parents—some parents, at least—will take advantage of that balance of power and treat the administration as one group they can abuse with impunity because they're paying customers. It was that instinct that Dorrie was nipping in the bud.

Marta Taggert, silent, but her face a mask of fury, followed Dorrie back into her office, trailed by a man I assumed was Mr. Taggert. He didn't say anything but there was something in his manner that told me he was the one who was truly suffering. I returned to my desk, reviewed the notes I'd taken, and made a list of questions I wanted to ask the next set of interviewees. It looked as though Dorrie was going to be tied up for a while. I was considering driving into Sedgwick and looking for a place to have lunch when someone knocked on my door.

Lori Leonard stuck her head in. "Can you come down to Dorrie's office?" No more information. If I didn't already know what I was getting into, they didn't want to scare me off. I grabbed my notes, stuffed them into my briefcase, and followed her.

The atmosphere in Dorrie's office was so highly charged the air practically crackled. Dorrie and Peter Van Deusen and the Taggerts were grouped around the coffee table, just as we'd been the day before, but there wasn't a shred of warmth or congeniality. Dorrie drew me into the group like a survivor grabbing for a lifeline. "Thea Kozak, this is Marta and Jack Taggert. You've already met Peter."

I shook hands with the Taggerts. Her hand was cold and seemed to be all sharp nails and bones. She had the same build Genny Oakes had described as Laney's. Slight, delicate, and graceful. Instead of dark hair, though, hers was a brittle blond. He had a grip that could crush cans without effort. It matched his stocky workman's body and big wide face. They looked about as well matched as Barbie and Hulk Hogan.

"Thea, I've explained to the Taggerts what you're trying to do for us—"

"What I want her to do," Marta Taggert said, cutting her off, "is to find out who was responsible for getting my daughter pregnant. It is unthinkable that such a thing could have been allowed to happen here! That's one of the main reasons we sent her here... to get her out of our small town and away from its negative influences. A lot of good that did! Not only dead, but pregnant, too. I don't know how I'm going to explain that to people. To all the people who thought I was putting myself above them, sending Margaret away to a fancy private school."

For a minute I was confused about who Margaret was, until I remembered that Laney's full name was Margaret Delaney Taggert. It also seemed to me that Mrs. Taggert had her priorities all screwed up, if she was more concerned about the fact that Laney had been pregnant than that she was dead. Still, I grew up in a small town, and I knew how people could talk. "No one needs to know that your daughter was pregnant, Mrs. Taggert," I said.

She raised a thin, trembling hand to her forehead. "They'll find out," she said. "People always do. What you must do is find the boy who did this and then we'll let Jack deal with him. It's probably that awful Jewish boy she liked. Joe or Jay or Jake or something. He probably seduced Laney and then denied responsibility. That's what young men do these days. Not a shred of morals or a sense of duty. When I think of poor Margaret in such terrible trouble so far away from me..." She paused and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, though I hadn't seen any sign of tears. "It's not right that he should leave my daughter in such despair she took her own life, and walk away without taking any responsibility himself. He must be brought to justice."

"We don't know that Laney's death wasn't an accident," Dorrie said. Her eyes met mine and I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was. Marta Taggert's grief was mostly posturing but according to her dramatic interpretation of the role, she ought to be seeking revenge for her wronged child. Undoubtedly, her idea of a proper resolution would be something along the lines of a public castration of Josh Meyer by her husband in front of the entire school community. Without doing much more than raising an eyebrow, Dorrie was appealing to me to do something.

Dutifully, I waded in, not expecting it to do much good. "Has Mrs. Chapin explained to both of you what I've been brought in to do?" The Taggerts looked blank, probably because they'd so dominated the conversation, or at least she had, that no one had had an opportunity to explain anything to them.

"I'm here to conduct a review of Bucksport's procedures for monitoring students to determine whether they are adequate."

I could feel Peter Van Deusen's glare so I avoided meeting his eyes. He didn't want me to reveal the audit to these people because they might misconstrue it, but I thought I knew what I was doing. "As part of that process, I'm trying to develop a picture of Laney's life here. Who she saw, where she went, what she did. We don't believe the school did anything wrong with respect to your daughter but we need to be sure, to get a very clear picture of what happened, for the sake of all the other students as well."

"Well, it's obvious you did something wrong or she wouldn't have... or that terrible thing wouldn't have happened to Margaret," Marta Taggert said.

Experience has taught me that sometimes even the most vindictive-seeming people are only angry because no one has ever bothered to say they're sorry. "Mr. and Mrs. Taggert," I said, "I know this in no way makes up for your loss, but I want you to know how sorry we all are about Laney... uh, Margaret's accident." Jack Taggert made a sound like a strangled sob, murmured something, and lowered his eyes. I shifted my attention to his wife to give him what little privacy I could. "Were you and your daughter very close, Mrs. Taggert?"

A good lawyer will tell you not to ask questions if you don't already know the answers. I'd made a calculated guess about what Marta Taggert's answer would be and she didn't disappoint me. "Very close," she said. "We were more like sisters than mother and daughter, really. Maybe because I was so young when Margaret... Laney was born."

I took her unappealing hand between mine and held it there. "Then this must be doubly difficult for you, losing a daughter and losing a friend. Maybe it's too soon to ask you to do this, but would you be willing to come along to my office and talk to me about Laney?"

She took the bait the way a trout takes a fly, unable to resist another act in the grieving-mother show. It wasn't like me to be so unsympathetic but I was willing to bet that Laney Taggert's mother knew her daughter less well than she knew the label on a whiskey bottle and that Laney had been sent here not for her own benefit but for her mother's and over the objections of Laney's father. "Would you like to join us, Mr. Taggert?" I asked.

He shook his head without looking at me. His wife might be into the whole scene but Jack Taggert was just a man who'd lost a beloved daughter. He needed to be alone with his grief and no one was giving him a chance. As we left the room, I heard Dorrie suggest he might like to take a walk across the campus and look at the chapel. He just raised his big shoulders and sighed. He didn't seem like a man who was passive about decisions but grief can transform people. I'd seen it happen to my father. My sister Carrie's death temporarily changed him from a real take-charge guy into a helpless, shambling old man.

At my office door, she excused herself to visit the ladies' room. When she came back, her breath was a fragrant combination of alcohol and breath mints. The only person she was fooling was herself. She settled herself into my visitor's chair and assessed me with the practiced eye of a woman who doesn't welcome competition. "You're awfully young for this, aren't you?"

It was the second reference to my youth in as many days and I didn't take this one any more kindly than I had the last. I'd seen my face in the mirror this morning and I didn't look like a kid. It was the same face I'd been seeing for years except for the beginnings of smile lines around my eyes and mouth. The only thing even vaguely youthful about it was an irritating blemish which was starting beside my nose. I hardly thought she was referring to that. "I'm not as young as I look," I said. "This is my seventh year in the business."

I got a fresh sheet of paper and prepared to take notes. "Laney was a junior, right?" She nodded. "You and Laney were in touch on a regular basis?"

"Of course," she said. "I told you. We were very close."

"Tell me about her. What was she like?"

Her eyes widened in surprise at the abruptness of my question. Then she shrugged. "Like any teenager, I suppose. Difficult."

Okay, so I wasn't going to get a description spilling out, I was going to have to work for it. "Was she more the bookish type or a social butterfly?"

Marta Taggert crossed her thin legs and pondered that one for a while. She was wearing a very short navy knit skirt with a long navy sweater over it. She was slim enough to wear it but it was too youthful for a woman of her years. The look was finished with navy stockings and extremely high sling-back pumps. Had I been her daughter, Marta Taggert's attempt to hang on to her youth would have embarrassed the hell out of me. "Neither," she said. "Laney—I might as well call her Laney, I suppose, as that's how she was known here. I always preferred Margaret. She was the arty type. Moody and flamboyant. She craved attention but she didn't like to let people get close to her." She hesitated. "Except me, of course. My friend who has a daughter Laney's age is always saying, 'I don't know how you do it, Marta. Cheryl won't tell me a thing.' Laney always confided in me."

"You say she was moody. Unusually so? Was it normal teenage moodiness or was she depressed?"

"Normal," she said quickly.

"Was she often depressed?"

"Yes," she said, then changed her mind. "No."

"How long had she been at Bucksport?"

"This was her second year."

"So she didn't start as a freshman. Where was she before?"

"At home. At the Ellanville High School."

"Did she have any trouble adjusting to high school?"

"Laney didn't adjust," her mother said bitterly. "She liked the world to adjust to her."

"In what way?"

"She had an aversion to rules. Any rules. Curfews. Chores. Deadlines. Social conventions. Any attempt to impose authority on her met with resistance. And Jack encouraged her. He thought it was great, said it would make her a stronger adult, but I couldn't stand it. She was unmanageable."

"You had trouble disciplining Laney?"

"I didn't say that."

"I'm sorry. I thought you just said she was unmanageable."

Marta Taggert pressed her lips together and didn't respond.

"Was her resistance to discipline one of the reasons you chose a private school?" Resistance to discipline sounded like one of those carefully chosen phrases from a teacher's evaluation selected to try to convey the message without sounding too judgmental. No one had the guts to write the bold truth anymore. It might damage someone's self-esteem. As a result, we were building a world where everyone would have high self-esteem and absolutely no ability to judge themselves critically or take responsibility for their actions or work toward self-improvement. No one is bad. No one is lazy. We are all just different and it is important for us each to recognize and appreciate those differences. Oops. I was letting my mind wander. If I let it go too far down this path, I'd lose my concentration and steam would start coming out of my ears. I snapped my mental whip and brought myself back into line.

Marta Taggert was glaring at me, her glare a pale cousin of the look I'd seen her give Dorrie. She'd said all she was going to about her daughter's discipline problems. She didn't like people who pressed her or argued with her. Yessir, I could imagine exactly what kind of close, intimate, confiding relationship she'd had with her daughter. Two strong-willed prima donnas? Like two fishwives, more likely. "Why did you decide to send Laney to a private school?"

"So she wouldn't be alone so much."

"Is she an only child?" Her mother nodded. It was the only answer I was going to get so I dropped that line temporarily. I'd see what they'd said on her application and what her public school teachers had said about her. "Who were her friends here at Bucksport?"

She pondered that one. "Merri Naigler, of course. And her roommate, Genny. They were very close. Genny was like the sister she'd always wanted. That boy, what's his name... Josh. She always had boys as friends from the time she was a tiny child. So there was Josh and there was another guy, Charles or something, and her house mother, Kathy Donahue. She really liked Kathy a lot. She said Kathy took very good care of her, kind of like a substitute for me. I think she was trying to make me feel better. She knew how much I hated having her away."