Last Seen Leaving (29 page)

The name had a definite effect, and not just on the secretary: The girl at the copy machine jerked up with a startled glance, her brown eyes wide and riveted on Kaz and me for the first time since we'd entered. The secretary's expression had gone from guarded to serious in the blink of an eye, and at her young assistant's reaction, she cast a look over her shoulder. “Klara, why don't you take a break now? Come back in fifteen minutes.”

It was not a suggestion, and after the briefest of hesitations, the girl gave a quick, birdlike nod, set down the papers she'd been holding, and made a hasty exit. Skirting the counter, she darted past Kaz and me with her chin tucked low, closing the door to the main hallway soundlessly behind her. Once Klara was gone, the secretary waited a while to make sure the girl was no longer in earshot before she spoke again. “Why are you two boys asking about Cedric Hoffman?”

I wouldn't say that her demeanor had softened, exactly, but a mixture of genuine concern and curiosity suddenly showed through the veneer of disciplined imperviousness. Her hands were folded together on the surface of the desk, and I watched as the skin around her blunted nails turned white with pressure. Carefully, I offered, “He's working in Ann Arbor now.”

“Teaching?” Her tone was agitated, confused.

I shook my head. “No. He's a drama coach at a private school.”

Ms. Bagley's troubled gaze darted to the desktop, skittered sideways, and then moved back up to Kaz and me. One hand reached reflexively for a discarded stress ball, which she proceeded to idly strangle the life out of. “Why did you come here?” she asked at last. “Did he … Has something … happened?”

“Something like what?” I pounced, unable to temper my zeal, and watched as she immediately retreated into her armor again. “What do you think might have happened?”

“I really couldn't say,” she replied with brisk unhappiness.

“What if I told you something
has
happened?” I tried, beseechingly. “Something bad. And even if I can't prove it, it might have involved Mr. Hoffman?”

She watched me for a moment, and I watched her back as shadows appeared around her eyes and a great, tired misery overtook her face. At last, she let out a heavy sigh and said, quietly, “I'm very sorry, but there's really nothing I can tell you. Only … if something … if you really believe that Mr. Hoffman may have …
done something
, I urge you to tell the authorities about it.”

“Please,” I tried again, desperately, wishing I could somehow make her understand the gravity of our situation. I was afraid to say out loud what it was he might have done, and risk having her shoo us and the legal implications of our questions off Hazelton property altogether. “We don't want to go to the authorities unless we're pretty sure we're right, but…”

My brilliant argument fizzled out like a dud firework, and Ms. Bagley's expression slammed the rest of the way closed, her manner once again businesslike and impregnable. “I'm very sorry,” she repeated, “but for legal reasons, I'm afraid that the best I can do is to confirm that Cedric Hoffman was an instructor here, but his employment at the Hazelton School came to an end prior to the commencement of our fall session last year.” She pursed her lips and repeated once more, in a meaningful way, “I'm sorry.”

The fruitless conversation at an obvious end, Kaz and I retreated to the stuffy hallway and started back for the lobby. “What now?” I asked glumly. “Wait till dark, break in, and search the office?”

“Maybe one of the teachers would be willing to gossip.” Kaz remained doggedly optimistic. “If Cedric left on bad terms, I'm sure everyone who works here has opinions to share about him. We just need to find someone less discreet.”

We didn't have to look very long, as it turned out; rounding the corner to the lobby, we almost collided with Klara, the girl who had been working the copier in the office. It was immediately clear that she had been waiting for us. “I couldn't help but overhear you asking Ms. Bagley about … about Professor Hoffman?”

She spoke in a furtive whisper, her voice imbued with an accent—German, I thought, or Austrian—and it occurred to me that between the hardwood floors, paneled walls, and polished stairs, sound probably bounced a good long way through the halls of Hazelton.

“That's right. Did you know him?” Kaz gave her an inquiring look.

She nodded quickly, her mouth a taut line, and I asked, “Why did he leave his job?”

“Not here,” she replied in a hiss, glancing left and right exactly as if we were in a cartoon spy movie. “Follow me.”

She led us down a labyrinth of corridors, slinking nervously past classrooms in active use, her crepe-soled shoes making not so much as a squeak against the flooring. Finally, she ushered us through a stairwell and out of the building. We stood in the doorway alcove of what appeared to be a side entrance to the school, looking out at an expanse of leaf-strewn lawn that stretched between Hazelton and what looked like a small wedge of forested land. It reminded me uncomfortably of the Walkers' backyard. The clouded sky was darker now, smelling unmistakably of impending rain, and a cold wind hurled itself at us, scraping our faces from time to time with missiles of dried leaves.

Klara stared out at the treetops with pensive, worried eyes, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, while we waited for her to speak. At last, Kaz prompted her, “What can you tell us about Professor Hoffman?”

“Why are you asking about him? What has he done?” she countered, her gaze shifting between us interrogatively. Then she shook her head, putting up her hands. “No, never mind. I think I … I'd rather not know.” Her face was pale and heart-shaped, her eyes massive, and with her tortured expression she was an Emily Brontë character come to life. “To begin with, he did not exactly
leave
his job here. Not the way that it sounds, at least.”

“He was fired?”

Klara shook her head, frustrated. “Not exactly that, either.” With an anxious sigh, she added, “I should tell you how it was. How it happened.

“Professor Hoffman taught English here—British literature to the underclassmen, and the history of drama to older students. He was nice, but strange. He would comment all the time about how ‘lovely' the girls at Hazelton looked in their uniforms, and every day, at the beginning of class, he would compliment specific girls—always the same ones—telling them how pretty they were.” Her voice was soft, but her tone was grave, as though she were reciting an elegy. “Three years ago, there was … an incident. One of the girls was down in the stacks, a sort of spillover library in the basement, doing research for a paper; she had a workstation set up, with her books and notes and a cup of iced tea, and she was listening to music—her iPod. She was alone.

“At one point she simply … fell unconscious. She said that one minute she was writing in her notebook, and the next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor, and Professor Hoffman was there, with his hands on her … her skirt. He said he found her like that,
exposed
, and was trying to cover her up, but she didn't believe him. She was in some pain and insisted on a medical examination, but the doctor found nothing. There were some bruises, but there was no … DNA, if you understand me?” She blushed at her own inference, and we nodded. “She was convinced she had been
interfered with
by Professor Hoffman, but she couldn't prove it. There were no witnesses.”

“Had she been drugged?” Kaz asked, and Klara nodded.

“She suspected the tea, but by the time she thought of it, it was too late.” Anticipating our next question, she continued, “It was from a café in the city, but she had been away from her workstation often to look for books, so anyone could have gone in and out of the library without her being aware.”

Kaz and I exchanged a black look as I thought about my conversation with Reiko.
The guy slipped her something so she was unconscious when it happened
. It made me sick to realize that Cedric might actually be a serial rapist, moving from school to school. “This occurred three years ago.… What happened prior to last year?”

“The same thing, more or less. Another student of his, this time in one of the classrooms. She was working on a makeup test after regular school hours. Professor Hoffman brought her a cup of coffee and then excused himself from the room. She woke up on the floor, again with him kneeling over her. She had been … well, this time there was no doubt she had been … attacked, but once again, there was no DNA, no witnesses, no actually incriminating evidence.”

“What about the coffee?” I demanded. “He brings her coffee and, whoopsy, she mysteriously blacks out? Isn't that evidence?”

“It was her word against his,” Klara said, a spark of anger glimmering in the depths of her brown eyes. “He poured it down the sink before she could stop him, so there was simply no way to test it.”

“Fucking
asshole
!” Kaz exploded.

“The girls tried to bring charges, but what they had was all circ-circ-”

“Circumstantial.”

“Yes. So when they couldn't get anywhere with the police, the girls' parents threatened to sue Hazelton. The administration tried to dismiss Professor Hoffman, but because the accusations against him couldn't be proved,
he
sued the school instead. Wrongful termination. In the end, Hazelton
paid
him to go away—and they paid the girls' families, too, to make sure they would not talk to the media.”

It explained why I'd found no mention of scandal associated with either Cedric's name or the school's, why the man had abandoned his prestigious job and title, and why he was still allowed within a country mile of any occupation involving teenage girls. What it didn't explain was what I should do next. If there was truth in what I was being told, then Cedric was a predator who had gotten away with the same crime at least twice before, leaving nothing behind to convict him.

He had been extremely careful in the attacks on his victims at Hazelton—perhaps he'd even used condoms—but if he was the one who'd assaulted January, I was determined she would be his downfall. All I had to do was somehow find solid proof of a crime I only knew about because I had heard it from a dead girl. No sweat, right?

“He's done it again, hasn't he?” Klara's tone was flat and resigned, and when I nodded my confirmation, she looked away, cursing under her breath. “
Scheißkerl.
” When her eyes returned to mine, they gleamed with moisture. “One of those girls was a friend. A good friend. Even after they bought that
arschloch
off, she still couldn't bear to return to school. She had nightmares and panic attacks.…” Klara took a shaky breath. “Whoever he did it to, tell her to make him pay.”

“He'll pay,” I promised. “You can count on it.”

 

TWENTY-FOUR

“I THOUGHT THE
drama kids at Dumbass would be more fun and, like, laid-back—the way they are at Riverside,” January remarked morosely one early fall afternoon. The summer heat was taking its time dissipating, fingers of humidity still gripping the city with uncomfortable intimacy, and we were having ice cream at a local place not far from downtown. January's flavor of choice was lemon custard—a nice enough pick, if you go for things that don't have chocolate in them—and my cone was Mackinac Island fudge, a Michigan specialty. “I thought they'd be kinda alternative, you know? Cooler than the rest of the assholes who go there? Instead, they're just more … dramatic.”

“Sounds like you fit right in.”

“Fuck you,” she retorted good-naturedly. “I'm serious, though. I'm starting to feel like I'll never have any friends again. You should hear the shit they talk about, Flynn! Fashion magazines and Caribbean vacations and dressage horses … like, what in the actual
fuck
is a ‘dressage horse'?”

I made a face. “It sounds like a French horse drag queen.”

She cackled. “I made the exact same joke, and this girl glared at me like I'd just spit on her grandmother's corpse! So you see what I'm dealing with.”

“No one is nice at all? Not even a little?”

“Oh, no, they're all super ‘nice.'” She gave a hugely fake, toothpaste-ad smile with the word. “That bitchy-girl kind of nice, where they say something that should be friendly and still manage to make it sound like ‘fuck off and die.' Like, ‘Wow, January, I wish I had the courage to wear something like
that
to school!'”

“Yikes.”

“And the guy who runs the drama club is a total freak.”

“How so?”

“I don't know. For one thing, he always wants to explain scenes in their ‘original historical context,' which he couldn't possibly make sound less interesting, and he's also a perv. The other day, he spent twenty minutes talking about Louis XIV and the Duke of Orleans, and the entire time he was looking me straight in the boobs.”

“Gross. Didn't you say he was, like, old?”

“Yes! He's like sixty! It's like … it's like having Santa pat his lap and then lick his lips at you.” She performed a parody of this, folding her lips to mimic toothlessness and then slurping her tongue around like a golden retriever while stroking her thigh with her free hand. I couldn't help myself and started laughing. “Yeah, it's really funny when you're not the one Santa wants for his little ho-ho-ho!”

She was laughing, too, though. I nudged her. “Tell him your boyfriend will beat him up if he keeps staring at your bazooms.”