Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series) (20 page)

I grabbed it eagerly, unscrewed the cap and took a gulp. It was icy cold, exactly what I needed.

“He said I’d be fine. It’ll just take a little time,” I answered after several more restorative sips.

“What’s wrong, exactly? An ulcer?”

Gil’s expression told me that he was about to conduct an interview. He unscrewed the top of his own bottle of water.

“Can we—can we talk about it later?” I said weakly, leaning a trifle on his sympathy. It was a shameless feminine trick, but not inappropriate, considering the circumstances. “It’s nothing serious, I promise.”

Gil nodded. “Sure, honey; just so long as you’re all right.”

“I’m fine, but I’m a little hungry.” The cold water had been remarkably therapeutic, but it lacked something. “Gil, could you get me a pack of those peanut butter cheese crackers from the vending machine?”

He squinted at me on his return from the machine. “What’s it with you and peanut butter lately?” He tossed the pack of crackers into my lap.

“It just tastes good, that’s all.” I tore open the package greedily, popped a whole cracker into my mouth, and consumed it in record time.

I was beginning to feel better. “Tell me more about the case against Dustin and J.T.” I extracted another crisp orange square from its cellophane sleeve and took a more ladylike bite.

“There’s not much more to tell. The police have finished examining the car, looking for more evidence of firearms. No luck.”

“What would they be looking for?”

“Gunpowder residue, that sort of thing.”

“Doesn’t this prove that somebody has been shooting at them?”

Gil shrugged. “It could, but it’s pretty apparent that they were up to something underhanded. Why, if they’re not guilty?”

I swallowed the last morsel of cracker and frowned. “And if somebody really did shoot at them, why didn’t they tell the police right away?”

“Exactly,” Gil said, leaning forward and kissing me on the forehead. “Are you going to be okay? Got your blood sugar back up to normal and whatnot?” He picked a large orange crumb off my sleeve.

I looked up into his eyes. They were filled with sympathy and concern.

“Yes.” I took a deep breath. Maybe this was the time to tell him, after all. “Gil, I want to—“

But he had already swiveled around toward his desk. “Good, because as stimulating as this conversation is, it’s not getting my editorial written.” He leaned back and hooked an elbow over the back of his seat. “Get Vern to give you a lift home after his appointment with the lawyer, okay? I’ll be there about eight, bearing a pizza from Ernie’s.”

I stood. “That’ll be all right.”

There would be another time and another opportunity to tell him. And Ernie’s made the best pizza in the known universe.

~~~

An hour later, I was back at the Rousseau door, bearing a sack of groceries in each arm.

J.T. met me at the door. “Thanks!” he said, as he relieved me of one of the sacks. “Dad ’n Dus are still upstairs. Sleepin’, I think.”

I followed him into the kitchen.

“Oh, cool! Bagel Bites!” He pulled the box out and immediately began to prepare them. “I’m starvin’!” He pulled a clean paper plate from a stack on the counter and arranged the little pizzas on it. “Hey,” he asked in a lowered voice, “did you see about the . . . you know?”

He meant the flowers. “Yes, I did.”

“Great.” He grinned and replaced the box of box of remaining Bagel Bites in the freezer. “Thanks.”

“J.T.,” I said softly as I placed the gallon of milk in the refrigerator, “why on earth did you smash your own windshield?”

He froze at the open door of the microwave and stared at me. “How’d you know that?”

“The cops must’ve figured it out, stupid,” said Dustin from the kitchen door. He stretched his arms in the air and yawned. “It was pretty lame, that’s for sure.” He reached into one of the two grocery bags and pulled out a bunch of bananas.

“If you knew it was, then why did you do it?” I asked. “If you could show there was a bullet hole in the back window, it might have helped your case.”

He shrugged, selected a banana and began to peel. “We didn’t know anybody got killed, y’see. Mostly we were scared of Dad finding out we were out on the lake. That’s why we broke it. Then, when this murder stuff came up, we tried to explain, but nobody would believe us. We’re stupid kids, I guess. Our lawyer thought it was pretty dumb too.”

J.T. gasped. “You’re not supposed to talk to anybody about what he says about our legal case! The guy
said
!
” Scowling, he dialed the proper time for the Bagel Bites and punched the on button rather more emphatically than necessary.

Dustin glowered back at his brother. “Like I don’t know you already been down here spilling your guts to Mrs. D.” He turned quickly to me. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Besides,” Dustin went on, his mouth full of banana. “The guy thinks we’re guilty, and he don’t even care.”

Doesn’t
even care
, I thought. But no matter how ungrammatical, what he said was true, I suspected.

“He’s going to make out like we did it, but we couldn’t help it,” he continued bitterly, “’cause our mom’s dead, and Dad’s supposed to be doing a lousy job raising us, and everybody’s against us ’cause we’ve been in trouble before and stuff like that.”

He stepped closer to J.T. “Is that what you want? Huh? Even if we do get off, people’ll think we did it anyways, and we’ll always be those kids that killed a guy on the lake but got off! Like that football player!”

A tear ran down his cheek. He discovered it suddenly and wiped it away with an angry sweeping motion of his knuckle.

“That’s not what I want! I want everybody to know we didn’t do it!” He stifled a sob. “Look . . . look . . . I gotta . . . I gotta go—”

He bolted from the room, nearly knocking over his father, who was entering, wallet in hand, and disappeared up the stairs. The three of us paused uncertainly for a few seconds, looking at one another.

Martin glanced over his shoulder after his son and broke the silence. “He’ll be okay. He’s just a little upset. How much I owe you for the groceries?”

I showed him the receipt, and we settled up.

The microwave buzzed. J.T. moved slowly to retrieve the snack, keeping his back to me. “I’m gonna go up and give some of this to Dus,” he mumbled and exited quickly.

“I don’t like that lawyer guy myself,” Martin Rousseau admitted, “but he’s supposed to be good. And it’s starting to look like we’re really going to need him.”

For the next few days, school was fairly predictable. Occasionally I’d overhear gossip about the Rousseau boys, but it remained highly speculative. It seemed there wasn’t much chance for Amelia, Girl Detective, to investigate the current situation. Maybe her new Faithful Companion, Alec, was having better luck. I resolved to call him when I could, to find out.

Right now, I needed to make some copies of a test paper during the middle of my one free period. As I expected, the room appeared to be empty, with the exception of a large florist’s vase bearing one tall white calla lily.

“How lovely,” I said aloud, and realized that I wasn’t alone, after all.

From where he had bent to pick something from the floor, Blakely Knight straightened himself to full height. He had his grade book clutched to his chest, and his other hand was bunched into a fist.

“Amelia,” he began, frowning at me thoughtfully, “Tell me about this Shea girl.”

“Serendipity?”

“That’s the one. How does she do in your class?”

“Suffice it to say she doesn’t aspire be an English major.”

“That’s what I figured. She won’t be a chem major, either. She’s just trouble all over the place.” His tone changed. “You like flowers?”

“Why, yes. I suppose everybody does.” I busied myself at the copy machine, placing the first page on the glass just so.

“Well, I don’t, so here. It’s yours.”

He placed the vase on the copy machine and looked down at his opened hand. There was a crumpled card in it. He tore it into four neat quarters and dropped it in the wastepaper basket.

He headed out the door with the parting shot, “Don’t ever say I never gave you anything.” Out in the hall, he narrowly missed running over Serendipity Shea and her little group of sycophants.

The door slammed shut, and I was left alone to contemplate this interesting turn of events.

“What on earth?” I asked nobody in particular.

As the copy machine hummed, I regarded Blakely’s spontaneous gift. It was a gorgeous flower, standing in tall, solitary splendor and framed by deep green leaves, its thick stem cleverly supported by a green wooden stake fastened with bits of green tape.

It was not unheard-of for flowers to be sent to a female teacher in school, and the logical place to leave them without disturbing classes or being trampled in the hallway was the copy room, where we had our message boxes. I had never, however, seen a man receive flowers here.

Perhaps the fact that the flower was a lily had significance. Lily, as in Lily Burns? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. It wasn’t typical of her, but she had been acting strangely lately.

Besides, why shouldn’t a man receive flowers?
It is a new era,
I reminded myself.

Flower arranging was considered quite a masculine pastime in Japan, I had once read. If a man enjoyed them . . .

But clearly Blakely didn’t enjoy receiving this flower. He’d given it away. I sniffed the creamy blossom and pondered. When I’d entered the copy room, he had been bent over the wastebasket. Perhaps he’d planned to throw away the flower when my arrival had given him another idea.

I switched pages in the copy machine and punched in a request for 36 copies, then moved around the counter to where the wastebasket stood. There, on top of a stack of discarded error copies were the four card fragments. A tiny torn envelope just under them was blue and white striped.

It had to be the note that accompanied the flower.

I looked down again.

Dare I? I thought, picturing myself as Pandora, about to lift the lid of the storied box.

I hesitated.

Lily Burns’ voice popped into my head. “Pandora, Schmandora! Grab it and hide it before somebody comes!”

Picking up the pieces of the envelope and card, I thrust them into my skirt pocket. Clumsily balancing the vase on one hip, and carrying the copies in my other arm, I managed to arrive back at my empty classroom without encountering anyone.

I looked at the clock. Just twenty minutes before the bells rang and my classroom would be filled again with students. I deposited the test papers on my desk. They hadn’t been collated, nor were the pages stapled together, but my students would just have to deal, I quoted Hardy Patchke yet again.

Now, where to place the flower? Obviously, it would arouse curiosity on the part of my students. Perhaps they’d assume Gil sent it to me. But after all, what business was it of theirs? Defiantly, I placed the vase squarely on the corner of my desk, in full view.

Then I pulled the pieces of the envelope and card from my pocket and put the small crumpled pile on my desktop. It wasn’t hard to reconstruct the note, nor was it difficult to make out what was written there in large, handwritten block letters:

YOU’VE KILLED HIM.

There was no signature.

The strong, sweet fragrance of Blakely’s calla lily, so pleasant at first, was causing my nausea to act up. Holding my breath, I carried the vase to the rear of the room and set it on a windowsill.

Will this ridiculous sensitivity to smells end once I give birth
? I wondered.

Give birth.
The words, though not spoken aloud, caused me to pause in my pre-class chores. I hadn’t ever thought of them in terms of myself, at least not since childhood, when I had played mama to my dolls, long before I had been introduced to the words
inability to conceive
.

Seated at my desk, I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes, and asked Heaven,
What is this all about?

Motherhood.
The word popped into my mind as the class bell rang.

I would soon be a mother. It was an immensely humbling thought. Could I possibly be as good a mother as the one I had? I knew that doing a good job wasn’t necessarily automatic; as a teacher, I’d known too many parents who were, in my opinion, going about it all wrong.

As if on cue, Exhibit A of my thesis on faulty parenthood, Serendipity Shea, strutted from her place in the center of her giggling coterie and slid into her front-row chair, her eyes flashing and what can only be described as a sardonic lift to the corners of her mouth. While I watched, she pulled out a stick of gum and began to peel it.

I cleared my throat.

She looked up at me in mock surprise, smirked, and replaced the gum in its wrapper.

I don’t have time to analyze her any further
, I told myself, passing out the corrected test papers. “I recommend that you save these papers, people. They’ll prove invaluable when you study for the final.”

Serendipity looked me in the eye and methodically crumpled her test paper, sheet by sheet, into three tight balls which she lined up in a row at the front of her desk.

Uh, oh.

~~~

Mr. Berghauser’s summons arrived at the end of the school day. “Mrs. Dickensen,” he said in his most solemn tone as I hesitantly entered his office, “I have something important to discuss with you.”

He gestured to the familiar chair opposite his desk. I sat.

“I try to be understanding when it comes to the lives of our staff outside of school, but we simply can’t have our teachers harassing parents.”

My jaw fell. “Harassing? Me? Whom did I harass?”

He frowned and his moustache frowned with him. “Now, don’t try to pretend you didn’t go to Shea’s Sporting Goods and create a scene.”

I yelped, “What?”

He smiled now, and his moustache wobbled. “Of course, I’m the first one to admit that Sa—Sa—that daughter of theirs is a handful, but we need to be adult about all this, don’t you think?”