The Crazy School (31 page)

3 0 1

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 301

28/5/08 2:45:14 PM

46

Wiesner vanished long before I reached the ground fl oor. One second he was behind me on the stairs, the next he was gone.

I guess he knew more of the Mansion’s secrets than even Gerald had.

A stunned crowd had gathered at the foot of that odious grand staircase, all of them gawping up at me as I made my fi nal descent like I was some murderous Scarlett O’Hara.

Mindy was the fi rst to speak.

“What have you
done
? Did you kill Dhumavati and Gerald
both
?” she said, sounding so pissed I half expected her to slap me.

Disappointing that she didn’t, as I would have relished the opportunity to punch her back.

“Dhumavati did it,” I said. “Dhumavati did fucking
all
of it.”

“Oh
sure
,” she said.

I ignored her, walking toward the front door, the crowd part-ing to let me through.

3 0 2

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 302

28/5/08 2:45:15 PM

There was dead silence at my back as I opened the front door and stepped outside.

I walked across campus and got into my car but didn’t start it up. The shakes had set in pretty bad by then, and I needed to wait until my teeth stopped chattering.

Once they had, I drove slowly back toward the Mansion, parking across the lawn to wait for the cops. I got out to sit on the hood with the windows rolled down, a cassette of Vivaldi playing in the tape deck.

The opening song was his “Gloria,” which seemed fi tting enough.

On the stroke of the very fi rst “in excelsis Deo,” Sitzman climbed up on the car next to me, wearing slippers and striped pajamas beneath his overcoat.

“You heard what happened,” I said.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“The cops are on their way and everything?”

He nodded.

I pulled out my Camels and got one out for each of us.

“Promise me something,” I said, lighting his.

“Name it.”

“Get the hell away from this place,” I said. “You deserve better. You all do.”

“I appreciate that,” he said.

We were quiet for a minute, smoking. There were a lot of things that still didn’t make sense to me.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Sitzman, like he knew how tangled up everything was in my head.

“Wiesner saved my life tonight,” I said.

Sitzman took a drag. “He’s cool like that sometimes.”

3 0 3

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 303

28/5/08 2:45:15 PM

“And Dhumavati killed Fay and Mooney,” I said.

“I know.”

I snapped my head around to stare at him. “You
know
?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “For a good long time now.”

“How long?”

“That girl Mary-Claire died right before I got here,” he said.

“All the kids were still talking about it, how they couldn’t believe it was suicide.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’d told too many people how excited she was about her brother coming to visit, and how she knew he’d be taking her home.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Look, Madeline, I didn’t know right away. Let’s just say I picked up on a few things over time. Saw some patterns, some possible connections . . . It all seemed pretty obvious once I saw the date on Dhumavati’s bench, fi rst time I got sent to the Farm.”

I was too stunned to say anything.

“Kind of surprised me it didn’t occur to you, what with being hip to the Flavor Aid and everything. I mean, you’re supposed to be a history teacher,” he continued.

“Why didn’t you
tell
anyone?”

He took a drag off his Camel and shrugged, expelling a smoke-blue cumulus into the cold night air. “I’m insane.

Who’d’ve believed me?”

The fi rst cop car screeched to a halt about twenty yards away, siren blaring. Its headlights illuminated Dhumavati’s body, smashed into the snow.

“You never told Wiesner?” I asked.

To my relief, Sitzman shook his head.

3 0 4

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 304

28/5/08 2:45:15 PM

“Did Gerald really grab that kid Parker’s dick last year?”

I asked.

“No. Parker just wanted to go home. So did Mooney.”

“Then why’d Wiesner knock out Gerald’s teeth?”

“He didn’t know they were lying.”

“You’re sure?”

“Mooney was planning to tell him eventually, but then he fi gured the truth would just piss Wiesner off more. We all did.”

People were starting to come out of the Mansion.

“Would it’ve made any difference, Wiesner knowing?”

Sitzman asked.

I pondered that.

If Wiesner hadn’t come to my apartment to tell me about Gerald, I wouldn’t have ended up at Gerald’s place tonight.

Without me, would he and Sookie still be alive?

But it was Dhumavati who’d sent me to see Sookie in the fi rst place, and Sookie who’d taken me to Gerald’s apartment.

Dhumavati must have known what he was going to tell me before we ever got there. Otherwise she’d have had no reason to kill Sookie, no reason to follow Gerald and me back to the Mansion with two guns in her pocket.

“No,” I told Sitzman. “In the end, Wiesner knowing the truth about Gerald wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too,” I said. “Can you promise me something else?”

“Name it.”

“Should you happen to run into Wiesner, please tell him I said thank you.”

“No problem,” he said, fl icking his cigarette out onto the lawn.

We watched more cops drive up. State police this time.

3 0 5

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 305

28/5/08 2:45:15 PM

I climbed off the hood, clenched my Camel in my teeth, and reached through the Porsche’s passenger window to turn off the music.

When I stood up, Sitzman was gone. You never would have known he’d been there except for his slipper prints in the snow.

They were spaced farther and farther apart across the lawn, as he’d picked up speed for the woods.

I looked back toward the crowd and saw Mindy surrounded by cops, her fi nger raised to point at me.

3 0 6

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 306

28/5/08 2:45:15 PM

Part VI

“Madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty,
and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes . . . When
and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they fi nally burst
through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no
longer called affl icted or insane.

They are called saints.”

—
Mark Helprin

Winter’s Tale

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 307

28/5/08 2:45:16 PM

This page intentionally left blank

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 308

28/5/08 2:45:16 PM

47

They buried Mooney and Fay in Stockbridge, side by side.

A bitter day: hard and cold and with a lacerating wind.

Nobody from Santangelo but Lulu and I went to the service, or to the cemetery afterward. Markham stood beside us, having told the fi rm back in Boston that he needed several more days to wrap things up. Dean had offered to drive us, but I didn’t want him to miss work, and he’d already had to see me cry enough about all of it.

Most of the kids had been taken home by their families once the news about Dhumavati and David and all the events of the past few weeks hit the wires.

The
Globe
and the
Times
had had the gall to run op-eds extol-ling David’s selfl ess work on behalf of troubled children—citing his perennial best seller,
Decrypting Your Teenager,
as a constant, much-needed font of comfort and enlightenment to tens of thousands of desperate parents across the country.

We were very pleased to learn that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had fi nally, nonetheless, pulled the school’s license to operate.

3 0 9

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 309

28/5/08 2:45:16 PM

A few kids remained in the dorms even so, while the skeleton staff awaited instructions as to which institutions their parents desired to have them forwarded.

Snow eddied and whirled around us in the cemetery. Lulu and I clutched each other and wept as the offi ciant spoke the kindest words he was able to muster for a pair of dead kids he’d never known—fi rst over their closed caskets in the chapel, then at the edge of their graves as we watched those dark coffi ns descend into the ground.

Fay’s parents seemed numb with grief—her fragile pretty mother all in black, her father decked in a somber suit and tie.

Mooney’s dad was there too, looking terrible. We hadn’t expected his stepmother. Someone said she was in Nassau.

Lulu announced she despised her for that, and I of course agreed.

We’d heard that David was already out on bail, whiling away the hours by practicing takeoffs and landings from his helipad, instructor in tow.

It was our third funeral that week, following close on the service for Gerald and the one for Sookie.

No one bothered with Dhumavati’s.

Gerald’s mother, Mary, was scheduled for burial on Friday, and his fi ve remaining brothers and sisters had gathered at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. They’d come today, wanting to pay their respects to these children whom their eldest brother had tried so hard to save—and to honor his courage for having done so.

When the hired priest closed his prayer book, everyone stood in line to shake hands with Fay’s parents and Mooney’s father.

“She was a lovely girl,” I told Fay’s mother and father. “Kind to everyone. I will miss her a great deal.”

Mooney’s father teared up, shaking my hand.

3 1 0

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 310

28/5/08 2:45:16 PM

I’d like to think that Fay’s mother was still too much in shock for anything to register, to so much as alight upon the delicate elegant, pink-and-gold shell she inhabited. She was so like her daughter, except for the utter lack of feeling betrayed by those otherwise-doppelgänger gray eyes.

She smiled at me, staring off somewhere beyond my left shoulder. “Thank you so very much for your gracious condolences, in our time of sorrow.”

She said the very same thing to Lulu, and to each of Gerald’s siblings in turn, before the chauffeur ushered Mr. and Mrs. Perry to their waiting limousine.

They’d made no further arrangements.

No reception.

No wake.

No chance for the thin crowd of their daughter’s mourners to gather in her memory, out of the cold.

So as that long black car started with a purr to bear Fay’s parents away, Markham invited each of us to join him for lunch back at the Red Lion Inn.

“The very least those poor kids deserve,” he said, reaching for my hand, warming it in both of his.

We were all just milling around, getting ready to walk back to our cars, when Lulu stepped over to the head of the two graves and began to sing, fi rst “Swing Low”, then “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

It was a gift, the sound of her.

She made us all stand up taller.

She made sure Fay and Mooney were embarking fully blessed.

After she’d fi nished we shook hands, we remaining people who didn’t mind the cold, didn’t have any planes to catch, didn’t 3 1 1

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 311

28/5/08 2:45:17 PM

think there was a damn thing in the world more important than what we’d come for.

And we started off toward the road to Markham’s car. As we drove toward the cemetery gates, I could’ve sworn I caught a glimpse of Wiesner and Sitzman in the mirror—heads poking out from behind a putti-bedecked mausoleum’s white marble.

I turned to look out the rear window, but the yard was empty.

Markham stood up at the head of the table, his wineglass raised.

The conversation around him, already subdued, died down to nothing at all.

“I’d like to make a toast to the memory of Fay Perry and Mooney LeChance—may they long be remembered.”

“Hear hear,” said someone, and we lifted our glasses to drink.

I stood up as Markham took his seat. “And here’s to the memory of Gerald Jones and Sookie Hamilton, and to Mary-Claire and Mary Jones. May we be inspired by their courage and kindness. They will be sorely missed.”

We drank again, and when I resumed my seat, Gerald’s sister Caroline reached across the table to touch my hand.

“I know my brother must have liked you a great deal and I only wish Mother and Mary-Claire had known you, because I’m sure they would have agreed with him, as I do.”

“I wish I’d known them, and I wish I’d known Gerald better.

If I could have done more . . .”

“You did what was necessary and what was right,” she said.

“That’s all any of us can hope to do in this life.”

Across the Red Lion’s dining room, I saw a man in the doorway who was searching the assembled diners for familiar faces.

3 1 2

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 312

28/5/08 2:45:17 PM

“Will you excuse me for a second?” I said to Caroline, then pushed back my chair and stood up, rushing forward to greet my godfather, Uncle Alan.

I brought him back over to the table and he pulled up a chair on Markham’s left and across from me.

Markham signaled the waiter to bring another glass.

“I am so grateful for your help, Uncle Alan,” I started. “I never would have expected—”

“Think nothing of it, Madeline. Least I could do,” he replied, then turned to Markham. “What remains to be wrapped up here?”

“Your goddaughter and her friends have done the heavy lifting, sir,” said Markham. “I just want to make sure that justice is done as a result. This man Santangelo . . .”

Uncle Alan nodded. “Of course.”

“This is on my dime, sir—the follow-up. We all feel it’s important, back at the fi rm.”

The waiter placed a wineglass in front of Uncle Alan, then fi lled it.

My godfather took an approving sip, then turned back to Markham. “You’re to be commended on the very fi ne work you’ve done so far, young man. Most impressive.”