The Crazy School (18 page)

“Are there any spare copies?” I asked.

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“Probably. But would it matter?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there was still poison on the fl oor, wasn’t there? Whatever got put out for the actual rats . . .”

“And Mooney would know where those little piles were,”

I said.

“That’s not how it works,” she said. “We had a ton of rats in our barn back home. They don’t just walk up to a pile of straight poison and lick it.”

“So what do you do, spread it on cheese?”

“We mashed it up with peanut butter, in the old days. But now you’re more likely to buy it pre-mixed in little cardboard containers. The tops are perforated, and you rip them open when you want to use them.”

“Did you see any in the cabinet?”

“No,” she said. “Just the traps. But ask Pete. He was there last week, right?”

“I will,” I said, “and thank you again for taking such good care of me last night.”

“You can repay me by going up there to kick some ass on behalf of Fay and Mooney. I’ll call Dean.”

I put on my jacket, hugged her, and opened the bedroom door.

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25

Lulu asked Pete to drive me up to the dining hall, assuring us she’d stay to wait for Dean.

“You go in there with her, Pete,” she said. “Call me if you need anything. I can leave a note for Dean, worst case.”

She took a woolly hat and a scarf from the coatrack by the front door and bundled me up in them. “Flu or no fl u, you’ve been through a ton of shit, and it’s goddamn cold out there.”

She hugged me again, hard, then pushed us out the door.

Pete had an ancient hatchback, and it took a minute for the engine to turn over.

“There we go,” he said when it fi nally caught and came to life. He gave the accelerator another pump to make sure, then put it in reverse and threw his arm around my seat, looking over his shoulder to back out.

“She’s a good friend, Lulu,” he said.

“She is,” I replied.

We were going fi ve miles an hour across campus. I couldn’t see the dining hall yet.

“Listen, can I ask you something?” I said.

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“Sure.”

“Mooney was on rat duty last week, when you had overnight at the Farm.”

“He was,” said Pete. “Do you think that’s how they . . .”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wondered what kind of poison you guys were using. Lulu said it’s usually these little cardboard things you rip open.”

“Exactly,” he said. “There’s a gross of them, locked up in the kitchen.”

“But some are left out at night, right?”

He nodded. Then he hit the brakes.

“This was my fault. I’m the one who put Mooney on rat duty.”

“Pete, I still don’t believe this was suicide.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Even if I’m wrong, it wasn’t your idea to use poison in the fi rst place, was it? I mean, we’re all told how dangerous Wite-Out is, but somebody thought it was okay to leave a bunch of little boxes of strychnine lying around?”

“Arsenic,” he said. “At least that’s what’s printed on the box.”

“Arsenic,” I said. “That’s just brilliant.”

“I should’ve realized. Should’ve said something.”

“Sure,” I said. “Me, too. And Gerald and Cammy and anyone else who’s been on duty since they stopped using traps down there. If anyone’s responsible for that negligence, then we all are.”

“I’m still the one who chose Mooney,” he said.

“But you’re not the one who mixed it into his cup of punch,”

I said. “Or Fay’s.”

“I might as well have.”

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“Pete, you’re forgetting that somebody put it into mine. And I sure as shit wasn’t planning to kill myself last night.”

“You’re right,” he said, lifting his foot off the brake pedal.

“You’ve got me convinced. I think this was murder.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Two things,” he said. “First, if you had the same fl u that’s going around New Boys, you’d still be feverish and throwing up. You’re not.”

“Second?”

“I can believe Fay and Mooney might commit suicide, but there’s no way they wanted to take you with them.”

“And if I got dosed at the party, they couldn’t have,” I said.

“The poison was still locked up, right?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “And we only put out six a night. They got counted in the morning, so Mooney couldn’t have kept one back for himself. Even if they killed themselves, it wasn’t until after you left the building last night that he had access to any poison.”

We’d reached the dining hall. Pete pulled up in front and turned off the ignition.

“When we go inside, you should explain all of that to the cops. I’ll tell them what happened to me,” I said.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

But we didn’t get out of the car. We just sat there staring at the building in silence for a minute.

“Can we fi nd out who was wearing the key to that cabinet last night?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There are spares to everything down at David’s house—dorm keys, fi re alarms, meds cabinets . . .”

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“Who has access to those?”

Just David?

“Too many people to narrow it down,” he said. “Everybody on staff, pretty much. I had to borrow a spare master for New Boys one afternoon last week, after I locked mine in the car.

Not to mention there’s probably more than one set of copies on campus: maintenance, Dhumavati, security . . . David wouldn’t want to be woken up every time somebody got locked out in the middle of the night.”

“Great,” I said.

And then we just sat there staring at the dining hall some more.

Pete pulled his keys out of the ignition and held them up.

There had to be more than a dozen of them hanging off the carabiner he used for a chain.

“I hate to admit it, but I wish this were ‘just’ suicide. Hard to say whether it’s worse thinking any one of us could have killed two kids, or fi nding out which one,” he said.

“Going in there is gonna suck, isn’t it?” I said. “Even more than everything already does.”

“Big-time.”

“Okay, then,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

Dhumavati walked over to us the minute we got inside the building.

“Madeline, I just can’t . . .” she started then broke down and wept.

“I know,” I said.

She stepped forward and went slack against me. She didn’t even have the strength to raise her arms to my waist—her hands just fell limp against my hips.

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I snaked an arm tight around her upper back, worried she’d slide to the ground if I let her go, then reached up to cradle her head on my shoulder. We stayed like that for a long time.

“Have you talked to the police yet?” I asked her.

She pulled back. “I just fi nished.”

“Then go home,” I said. “You need sleep.”

“Madeline’s right,” said Pete.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “There’s too much to do.”

“Then at least take fi fteen minutes,” I said. “Let Lulu make you some tea.”

She agreed to that, and Pete and I stepped through the inner doors into the dining hall.

The fi rst thing the cops did was separate us. They’d spread out at various points around the room, taking preliminary statements from everyone who’d been at the Farm the night before. There was a young woman in uniform standing in the foyer, sorting everyone out. She’d already dispatched Gerald, Tim, and the kids who’d been on the Farm to separate tables.

Pete and I were promptly assigned to distant chairs.

I waited for a couple of minutes but then got nervous about how much area they were protecting around the ostensible suicide scene down at the Farm. I got up from my solo table and walked back across the room toward the clipboard woman.

She glanced at me but was busy speaking into a handheld radio. I didn’t want to interrupt her but fi nally worked up the nerve to say, “Hi?”

“Ma’am,” she said, “please remain at your table. We’ll take your initial information as soon as we can, okay?”

“I don’t know if you’re the right person to ask this, Offi cer”—

I looked at her name tag—“Offi cer Baker, but I have a question 1 7 2

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about how much of the area you’ve cordoned off down at the scene.”

“Ma’am, if you could just—”

“I know this sounds kind of out there, but I think you guys may be looking at a homicide here, and I was hoping to, um, run something by whoever is in charge of evidence collection?”

“Ma’am?”

“I was at the birthday party last night, and I think something was slipped into my punch. I was . . . I threw up outside the dorm and was really disoriented for a number of hours afterward, and . . .” I was sounding like a complete lunatic, even to myself. I half expected her to send me back to my quaran-tine table, but she held up a “don’t move” index fi nger instead, while bringing the radio back up to her mouth. After a burst of static, she told the guy on the other end to fi nd Cartwright, ASAP. I thanked her, and she motioned to another uniformed guy across the hallway.

He grinned at her as he walked over. “Whatcha need, Kas?”

Baker ignored him. “This is
Offi cer
Hoyt,” she said to me.

“He’s going to take your information.”

Hoyt walked me back into the dining hall. We sat down at a corner table, and he got set with a clipboard and pen. He was maybe a few years older than me. Wiry guy. Pleasant and polite.

All his questions were general, open-ended. He started out with the basics: my name, my address, how long I’d worked at Santangelo.

I told him what I’d told Baker, but he didn’t bring the conversation back around to any of that at fi rst. Didn’t interrupt me at all—just let me talk until I was emptied of words, after 1 7 3

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a question—giving space and time for each of my answers to play itself out.

I told him where I thought I’d gotten sick, near the fence of the Farm’s garden, and told him why I thought it might be important.

“Do you want me to show someone where, exactly?” I asked.

“I’ll let them know. We want to keep people out of the scene as much as possible, ma’am.”

“The guy I came in here with,” I said, “Pete?”

I looked for him across the room. “Blond hair. Wearing a blue sweater, over there by the salad bar.”

“Yes, ma’am, with Offi cer Stinson.” He looked down at his clipboard to jot another note.

“Pete and another teacher—Lulu Costigan—found me down there in the snow last night, unconscious. I know where I started to throw up, but it sounds like I crawled farther afterward, and I don’t know where to, exactly. You might want to ask Pete.”

“I’ll double-check, make sure we get that information.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m not sure it matters, but just in case.”

“Better too much information than too little, ma’am,” he said.

I nodded.

Hoyt looked up at me, pen at rest again. “So you think there was opportunity to slip something into your drink?”

“I kept losing track of my cup,” I said. “I went back for a new one twice. It was hot, with the woodstove going. I was really thirsty. Gerald didn’t mind.”

“Gerald?”

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“Another teacher,” I said. “The guy who found Fay and Mooney this morning. He was serving the punch, but it could have been anyone.”

“We’d like you to go down to the station, Ms. Dare—do some follow-up on your preliminary statement. I’m sure Detective Cartwright will want to ask you some further questions once he reads my notes. He might like to get your fi ngerprints as well, see if we can match them with the cups you drank out of.”

“Certainly,” I said, trying not to look unsettled by that idea.

“Our crime lab’s in Sudbury. They can analyze the punch, let us know if there’s anything of concern.”

“My husband’s on his way down from Pittsfi eld,” I said.

“Lulu told him I’d be waiting at Dhumavati’s apartment, across campus. In fact, he may be here already. Could I let him know before I leave?”

“We’ll make sure he’s brought up to speed,” said Hoyt.

“Would you like him to meet you at the station?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “And thank you for taking my concerns seriously. I may be absolutely wrong. I don’t want to think anyone here could have done something like this, but if it wasn’t suicide . . . I just wanted you to know there might be another way of looking at what happened last night.”

“Suspicious deaths are investigated as homicides at the outset,” he said. “We don’t make any presumptions. No way to have a handle on what’s important until we’ve had a chance to refl ect on everything.”

A dark panel van drove slowly past the front windows of the dining hall. There was an offi cial-looking seal painted on its door.

Maybe the coroner’s. Maybe Fay and Mooney were inside.

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It was snowing again. Bleak and gray.

“Offi cer Hoyt?” I said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I know this place must have a strange reputation. I mean, it’s not the fi rst time the police have had occasion to come up here.”

His expression didn’t betray any opinion on that.

“It’s just . . .” My throat got all tight, and I could feel tears coming up at the corners of my eyes. An ache, a soreness.

I stopped for a minute, wanting to get the words out right without breaking down.

“Sir?” I said fi nally. “They were
good
kids, Fay and Mooney.

I want you guys to know that.”

Then I lost it. I coughed up sobs and covered my face with my hands and felt the loss of them cut through me, hard and sad and awful.