All's Well That Ends (20 page)

GILLIAN ROBERTS

154

“Like Alice said, start at the beginning.”

“Okay, I’ll start with the date Sally arranged, that McIntyre fellow.”

“You think she’d refer to him as M?”

I shrugged. “Maybe he called himself Mac for her.” I checked the notebook page and phoned him. “I’ll make an appointment, check him out tomorrow.”

“You want it to be him, don’t you?” Mackenzie asked. “Because you don’t know him. You don’t want to believe anybody you do know could have done it.”

It didn’t look as if it mattered what I wanted, because after seven rings, I heard a recorded message. “Can’t come to the phone right now,” a nice-enough male voice said, “but leave a message . . .” All the usual requests and promises. “This is Amanda Pepper,” I said, and I gave my cell phone number. “I’m doing some research, and I’ve been told you could help me on a few points. I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me at your earliest convenience.”

Mackenzie looked sympathetic to my frustration—but sympathetic in a deliberate, theatrical way, as if he might soon say

“boo-hoo.” Then he smiled. “He probably wasn’t going to say

‘Howdy, yes, I killed Phoebe Ennis,’ anyway. So while you wait for a response, you might also want to think about havin’ ‘M’

stand for murder, or motive. Who comes to mind?”

“Merilee,” I said immediately.

And one more reason we stayed married is because he didn’t add “we roll along,” which, I have to admit, played in my head every time I thought of the woman.

Thirteen

Start at the beginning. How wise Alice’s advice was, but her theory worked best in Wonderland. In the real world, it left me nowhere. I didn’t know the story I had to tell, so how to know where it began?

A school is an excellent place to learn impulse control, as long as you’re a teacher. I couldn’t phone and say I’d be late, or leave a class to its own devices while I talked with Merilee. I couldn’t tell my secretary to hold the calls while I dashed off to find Gregory McIntyre. I had no secretary.

The school had Opal Codd, however, and she greeted me as I walked into the office. She was, as usual, dressed in a blouse buttoned up to the lace-edged neck. Today she was in powder blue, a GILLIAN ROBERTS

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color that made her seem even more a refugee from a child’s picture book.

“Is that your handiwork outside?” I asked her.

“Mine?”

“On the bulletin board?”

“Oh, the pamphlet! Yes. I thought it might do some good.

What do you think?”

What did I think of an inspirational pamphlet with an ab-stract arrangement of playing cards and the words: “Gambling!

Gambling? Sure it’s fun, but . . .” written in chubby red letters on the cover, and inside, a bullet-point list of the many pitfalls of betting on anything?

I thought it might do good by provoking a great deal of deri-sive laughter, and they say that laughter is the best medicine. Still, I thought it kind not to say so. “You never know what will touch a teen,” I said instead. “But do you think gambling’s a big problem? Our problem? You said the card-playing was done off-campus.”

She sniffed, prettily, and cocked her head, silently telling me that I was entitled to my—unenlightened—opinion, but . . . “I am not alone in thinking that gambling’s not a healthy diversion for young boys. Or for their elders, for that matter,” she added.

“No matter where it takes place. Or on what. Horses, sports, cards.”

“They see it on all those TV shows. I’m sure it doesn’t seem like gambling to them, but more like what it is—a game.”

She shook her head, the silvery-gray tendrils of hair accentu-ating her movement. “It’s the start of a downhill slide and if nothing else, it’s a waste of hard-earned money. That’s what I’ve always told Mr. Codd, not that he paid me any heed.” She laughed.

“Is Dr. Havermeyer aware of the situation?” I asked.

“Well, he must be, mustn’t he?” she said. “In fact, he can see them in the square from his office window.”

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I wasn’t playing fair with her. She was new and innocent and probably believed that the school’s founder and headmaster actually followed his rules. I knew that his only code of ethics was the bottom line, and that meant that he wouldn’t willingly rock the boat and possibly topple out a tuition-paying student. And if Griffith Ward, son of not only wealth but celebrity, was in that boat, then an office view of gambling wouldn’t matter. Havermeyer would willingly go blind rather than see anything that meant he’d have to take a risk.

Besides, he had a nation filled with poker-loving gamblers to cite as a reason to ignore what was going on. Poker seemed second to baseball as the national pastime these days, positively patriotic.

“Well,” Opal said, “I put the pamphlet up because it felt better than doing nothing. We’ll see.”

I nodded, but perhaps not brightly enough.

“Oh, my!” she said. “I thought I’d cheered you up, but I still see a glum expression! Is this a case of matutolypea?”

“Matu-whato?”

“Now, now—the English teacher! Surely you know what that means! Or are you having a case of the mubble-fubbles?”

Cards weren’t her game. Words were. Obscure words that hindered communication. “Honestly,” I said. “I don’t have a clue for either word.”

“You had such a long face, you looked as if you’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“Which is in itself a puzzling expression. But I digress. I was saying I didn’t know what those words meant.”

“That’s what matutolypea means: getting up on the—”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it. But I generally say ‘getting up on the wrong side of the bed’ when that’s what I mean.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“And mubble-fubbles?” I didn’t know what it meant but, in fact, it felt as if mumbling and fumbling and fuddled and mut-GILLIAN ROBERTS

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tering and muddled had all been compressed and packed into it, and I liked it. Whatever she thought it meant—I had the mubble-fubbles.

“A fit of depression,” she said with a big smile.

“Ah. Then no, I don’t have the mubble-fubbles, but I like the sound of it. I’m keeping that one.”

Her smile looked cartoon-strip wide.

“How did it go?” I asked before I left the room.

“Go? What?” Her eyebrows pulled together above the granny glasses and she shook her head.

“The money-counting with the ninth graders.”

“Ahhh. Of course. Splendidly! Our tally was precisely what it should have been, according to their predictions. I’m not sure what you thought I could teach them about bookkeeping. He’s a math whiz and she’s no slouch herself. And both of them are businesslike and delightful! What a lovely group of students you’ve got here, and I’m impressed and surprised by the student body’s burst of holiday generosity!”

Good. Everybody was happy now. I gathered up my notices and waved good-bye, and didn’t stop till I was halfway out the door. “Ms—”

“Opal. Please.”

“Opal, why were you surprised by the students’ generosity? I mean, today. Why today?”

She blinked, and looked as if, were she a less polite person, she might have told me how far from bright she considered my question. Then she cleared her throat. “Well, it’s been months since the hurricane, and grown people—let alone adolescents—

just plain forget, get bored, or lose interest in much less time than that. Then, you think we’ve been doing this for nearly three weeks, and that’s enough to bore a young person. But here it is, nearly Christmas, and they open up their hearts and give more than ever. Wouldn’t you also be surprised?”

I would indeed have been surprised. Stunned. Dumbfounded. “And this ‘burst of generosity’ was how recent?” I asked.

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“Very,” she said with a merry smile and a small laugh. “Like yesterday. All of a sudden, two hundred dollars more than the daily average last week. This jump is pretty significant, wouldn’t you say?”

“I certainly would.” Margaret and Eddie had been correct.

When the money was coming in from each homeroom separately, somebody had intercepted it and siphoned off funds, but I couldn’t believe Opal Codd would dream of such an action.

Somebody else.

I said nothing more about the sudden burst of generosity.

Sweet Mrs. Codd thought the students were angels. Let her hold on to that idea as long as possible. Also, it was easier to ignore what was so evident, to play the game that if I didn’t acknowledge a problem, it wouldn’t actually exist and I wouldn’t feel compelled to do a thing about it. I have learned this loathsome way of

“handling” things from my headmaster, so I knew he wouldn’t blow any whistles.

Feeling guilty but saying nothing, I managed to leave the office.

Griffith Ward was again holding court near the door. That seemed his spot. I wondered if there were turf wars on our no-campus school. In any case, Griffith owned that corner, and stood in his usual cocky stance in his WWII-bomber jacket. I’d seen the reaction to the jacket days ago—outright envy and enthusiastic claps on the back. He wore it as if he’d earned it shooting down enemy planes, and he wore as well his signature smirk.

I had to retool my thinking. His expression could be described as a benign relaxed smile. Not by me now, but perhaps in the future, when I’d be able to be more objective.

But then I saw him put his hand around the shoulder of a small brown-haired girl. She looked startled. Griffith said something, and the boys in the group laughed. None of the girls, including the one he was holding, joined in the laughter. Griffith said something more. I was still standing at the office door, too GILLIAN ROBERTS

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far to hear what was said, only able to read their body language, to see Griffith’s lips moving.

The girl shook her head.

Griffith cocked his, imitating flirtation, but making it clear that he was only imitating it, mocking it at the same time.

She shook her head again.

He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, kept his mouth on hers for several beats too long, then slowly pulled back.

She twisted her neck, so that she was looking as far away from him as it was possible while being held.

The boys in the group laughed again.

This time he released his grip on the girl’s shoulder. She jumped back, her eyes wide, head swiveling to look at the handful of girls in the group. Griffith smiled, nodded at her knowingly, and winked at his friends.

The bell rang, the group dispersed, and I walked so as to wind up near the girl. “Was that okay with you?” I asked when I was beside her and we were walking up the stairs together.

“What?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“The way—that kiss. From where I was, it didn’t look as if the whole thing was your choosing.”

She had pretty eyes, a sort of green-gray, with heavy dark lashes, but at the moment, they were vacant, uncomprehending.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice was sullen.

“Griffith. Griffith Ward kissing you like that.”

She tightened her lips. “Did we break some school rule or what?”

The “we” did not fit my take on the situation, but stupidly, I plowed on. “No. Not a school rule per se, but I thought perhaps he broke a federal rule about sexual harassment.”

She looked shocked. “He kissed me! He didn’t rape me!”

“But it looked as if you didn’t want him to. And you don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”

“God!”
she said, making it a prayer, a curse, a shout of indignation, a cry of incredulity at my stupidity and crassness. We’d 161

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arrived at the top of the long staircase and paused. She looked at me with that special look of horrified awe teens reserve for adults. I knew she wouldn’t say what was going through her brain to me, a teacher, but I could almost read it nonetheless. I’d been an idiot. It had all been a game downstairs, and she wasn’t “it.”

I thought she was wrong. I thought she was either dazzled or intimidated by Griffith’s aura, his reflected glory, the fact that he was two years ahead of her in school—anything, everything. But it didn’t matter what I thought. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I misread the signals. I was only trying to help.” I could have said that the school might be liable for charges of sexual harassment. We had programs, we had built sensitivity training into the curriculum, but the impulses that fed sexual bullying weren’t going to be quashed by an hour or two in the syllabus.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. She didn’t say anything, merely shrugged and nodded, and went off to her class.

“I’m sorry,” I said to myself. Not for trying to help, but for most likely leaping to a wrong conclusion. For disliking Griffith Ward so profoundly that I saw malevolence in whatever he did.

Day after day I observed him back-slapping, chuckling, and smirking, and I could not shake the idea of a smug Pied Piper.

Only he’d let his followers disappear into disaster while he remained in comfort, that smirk still on his face.

At the same time, I knew he’d done nothing to make me feel that way.

His supposed victim had looked at me as if I were crazy.

I was sorry for feeling that way about Griffith, and for thinking that maybe she was right.

Fourteen

he morning did not go well. Lessons proceeded, life went Ton, but I didn’t feel fully present. I’d entered school towing massive weights tied to my ankles: two women dead. Murdered.

They couldn’t be ignored or removed.

And though the episode with Griffith might well have been a misperception, it added still more drag to every step I took. If I couldn’t trust my reactions, what could I trust?

By lunchtime, I knew I needed to do something positive, to move forward, ankle weights and all, so like most of the student body, I braved the cold to leave the building and find food or company—or, for some of them, a poker game—elsewhere. I was going to Top Cat and Tails, and since I couldn’t take a place with 163

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that name seriously, it should have lightened my mood, but it didn’t.