With Friends Like These... (13 page)

I truly didn’t know. I wondered if Lizzie had always, or at least of late, been unbalanced, although I doubted that her father would have left the hotel in her control while he flew off had she always behaved this bizarrely. Tonight had pushed her off the edge. Maybe she needed to be taken somewhere for psychiatric help. “What happened is terrible,” I told her, “but nobody blames you.” Except Aunt Hattie, I silently added.

Lizzie’s sob was heartbreakingly thorough.

“What’s the name of your family physician again?” I asked, taking unfair advantage of her misery.

“Dr. Burlinghouse?” she asked. “What about him?”

Mackenzie looked as if I’d found the cure for the common cold. I stored that look away for future use.

Thank heavens Lizzie’s doctor had an unusual name. Now if only he was in town and not on vacation, and willing to accept middle-of-the-night phone calls. I looked up. My mother had disappeared, and I knew she’d gone in search of a telephone book.

“Miss, um, Chapman,” Mackenzie said, “we’d be glad to take you to the doctor, and I’m sure Miss Peppah here would go along and—”

“No!” The wail was stretched tight with impending hysteria. “Don’t make me leave! Don’t take me away! Please!”

I looked at Mackenzie, wondering if he found her responses as peculiar and inappropriate as I did. My firsthand crime-scene experience was distinctly limited. Perhaps people often became semicoherent and regressed to near-infantile speech and behavior.

“Don’t be afraid,” Mackenzie said to her.

“I didn’t do it!”

“Do what?”

A worried line appeared between her golden-red eyebrows. “My father knows I didn’t.”

“What?” Mackenzie asked again.

“What?” Her eyes were wide and fearful now.

“Didn’t what?” he said. “What didn’t you do?” They sounded like a bad Abbott and Costello routine, and we were getting nowhere.

“I didn’t…I don’t know.” She slumped and became almost slack-mouthed, as if her brief burst of confused energy had drained her. Shaking her head, the confusion line between her eyebrows etched even more deeply, she retreated into a remote semistupor.

My mother returned with the Yellow Pages. But she returned by a side door.

“Mom?” I said. “Where were you?”

“The phone book was in the kitchen. There’s a door that leads directly in here.”

“Did you notice that yellow police tape on the kitchen doorway?” I asked.

She looked insulted. “Of course. I didn’t disturb it. I crawled underneath, very carefully. Anyway, I have Dr. Burlinghouse’s number.” She handed the information to Mackenzie, who looked about to say something, but apparently decided against it. He went into the hall instead.

My mother jerked her head, signaling me to come close, which I did, afraid of what she’d say out loud otherwise.

“The tarts are gone,” she whispered.

“You told me before.”

“Not just the ones on the plate, although even that plate’s gone. But the tin, too. The entire tin. They suspect me.”

“Mom, they took everything. Just to be sure. Relax.” If I wasn’t careful, there’d soon be two women keening on the bedspread.

I heard dialing at the nearby front desk, and then Mackenzie’s soft voice. “Have him call soon as possible,” he said. Burlinghouse was elsewhere.

“I never meant to,” Lizzie said. “I never meant to!”

“Of course you didn’t,” my mother said, as if this were the most normal of conversations. “And in fact, you didn’t mean to and you didn’t. Do it, I mean.”

“Didn’t I?” Lizzie asked as Mackenzie reentered. “So what? My head hurts. I’m so mixed up.”

Me, too.

I tried for a reality check. I was of no use here; Dr. Burlinghouse would be found without me and would provide pharmacologic relief; Mackenzie would continue to be otherwise engaged; I had to teach at dawn, and my mother and I were behaving like obnoxious guests, overstaying our welcome.

Which I said, more or less, trying for a little levity.

I wrapped my down coat around me, poised my umbrella at the ready, and made my exit, my mother trailing one step behind. Mackenzie, our alloted portion of the city’s finest, escorted us. Then he detained me for a second. I thought he was going to compliment me on extracting the doctor’s name. I thought he might say how happy he was that I had not been poisoned. I hoped he might say that he’d be over later, waiting for me after I dropped my mother off.

But what he said was, “Listen. Thanks for the help.”

“Is there a but waiting in the wings?” Of course there was, but I wanted to give him a chance to retract it.

He didn’t. “But—no offense, all right? I need to make sure that this is the end of it for you. No Nancy Drewing. No Jessica Fletchering. You have this tendency—”

“Thanks for the warning, officer, but I don’t have anything to do with this, and I don’t want to.”

“Good,” he said. “Keep that in mind. No Miss Marpling, either.”

And that was all he had to tell me.

I didn’t want to think of what the city’s worst might be if this was what it considered its finest.

Next morning I FELT HEADACHY and queasy, which seemed distinctly unfair and definitely unearned. There had been no overindulgence whatsoever. I had post-traumatic shock disguised as a hangover.

Entering the school office was not much of an upper at the best of times. I emptied my mailbox of assorted inane messages and flipped through them. Next to me, Harvey Porter, a part-timer teaching psych while he finished his Ph.D. dissertation, did the same, histrionically. Harvey works a twenty-six-hour day and radiates pure irritable tension for at least twenty of them. Our low-quality mail wasn’t helping his mood.

Junk today, yesterday, almost always. Nagging reminders and make-work from the principal, or his handmaiden, Helga the office witch. But it was bad form to dump it into the wastebasket before pretending to look it over, so I glanced through.

A notice on Day-Glo orange paper was headed important!!! It seemed staff was to be ever-alert and prevent false alarms. I had no idea how we were to do this, since the gongs inevitably were set off while class was in session. In fact, emptying classrooms was their entire point.

Another wasted piece of paper reminded us that seniors in danger of failing were to be notified by mid-April, and in writing. Pro forma. Nobody whose tuition was paid in full failed to graduate.

A slick brochure described an exciting, sure-to-entice grammar text, but alas, even if the hype were true, we had no budget for new texts this year.

My professional journal had arrived, bulging with breakthroughs in the teaching of our native tongue. As usual, I felt an idiotic, unjustified flare of hope that this issue, at long last, would contain the magic secret that actually worked.

“At least there aren’t any bills,” Harvey said as he rather violently tossed the entire contents of his mail slot into the trash can. And, swinging a hand-knit scarf over his shoulder—teenage girls love his affectations—he left.

No bills, but other irritants: a note from a student—never was a note left with good news in it—asking for an extension for her paper, no reason or excuse offered; a pink telephone message slip requesting a parent-teacher conference; another note on three-ring paper that said, Miss Pepper! The Cavanaugh burned down last night!!! What will we do????? At least on this issue I had an ace up my sleeve via Richard Quinn.

I opened a sealed envelope with a great deal of curiosity. My mailbox generally contains reminders and brochures, not envelopes of any sort—and this one was unlabeled. I pulled out a piece of heavy bond and several newspaper clippings. The white paper had a drawing of a tombstone with an apple sitting on top of it. R.I.P. Teach was written on the stone. Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it? was printed on the bottom of the page.

I looked up, looked around, to see if the practical joker was watching. But everyone else in the office was intent on his or her own mail and looming day. I had an immediate, unpleasant conviction that this was not intended as a joke.

No signature. The clippings all concerned violence to teachers. A college student who’d killed his professor because he didn’t get a fellowship. A high school teacher held hostage. A junior high coach stabbed. Et cetera.

“Helga,” I asked, “did you notice who left messages in my mailbox?” I knew it was a stupid question as it left my mouth, perhaps before.

The school secretary looked at me as if I were vermin. “She thinks I have time to monitor every to and fro to the mailboxes!” she told an invisible friend—the only sort of friend who’d have her.

I tossed everything but the manila envelope and its contents and went to my first period class, my false hangover now doubled in intensity and my legs slightly unsure of where they were landing with each step, as if I’d suffered a mild stroke.

R.I.P. Teach. Who on earth had sent that to me? I thought of my teacherly sins—disciplinary actions, bad grades, harsh words, boring lessons—but I couldn’t think of anything I’d done, or anything a student had done, that warranted such an extreme reaction.

I didn’t know what to do about the packet. I didn’t know the point of telling anyone else at school yet. Anybody I’d show it to would only repeat my unanswerable questions, add to my fear. I told myself that I was overreacting, that the afterimage of Lyle Zacharias’s death was still blinding me, making me see menace everywhere, including a note that surely had some rational, nonthreatening explanation.

It was nearly impossible to believe what I told myself.

I had to squelch the urge to enter the classroom as a person with problems, rather than as a teacher. I wanted to say that a man had died in front of me last night, and that now someone was threatening my life. But that wasn’t my role—or my students’. Luckily, I had a low-energy morning ahead. Two sections were having exams—could that be what had ticked somebody off?—and the ninth graders were spending the week rehearsing their adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I had lots of passive time ahead in which to speculate and tremble.

The eleventh graders moaned through yet another S.A.T. Prep drill, this time on analogies. This is to this as that is to what? Tests are to hell like school is to…

R.I.P. Teach. Why? Who? How?

I was mixing up the letter writer and Lyle Zacharias’s killer, making their dark thoughts and impulses one and the same. I tried to shake the ensuing confusion out of my head.

Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it? I felt nauseated as I corrected the analogies next period while my tenth graders wrote what they insisted on calling an S.A. exam about Lord of the Flies. I had tried to disabuse them of their error, explaining the meaning of the word essay: to try, or a trial, its roots in Latin and Old French.

S.A. they insisted.

I asked what on earth they thought the initials could stand for. Stupid Ass seemed their hands-down favorite, although there were riper suggestions as well.

The ninth graders were behaving with atypical seriousness about their Dorian Gray playlet.

“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true,” a character told Dorian.

I listened. I tried to apply the Gospel according to Wilde to my own situation, to wring some reassurance from it. The problem was, I didn’t feel absolutely certain about anything this morning, including the meaning or message in the epigram.

End of easy morning.

En route to the teachers’ lounge for a cramped and Spartan lunch, I composed a mental to-do list. I had the S.A./essays to mark, two more sections to teach, and a free period which was anything but since I was the faculty advisor for the school paper, which met in my room, under my supervision, every Monday.

Faculty was required to have outside interests: hobbies, sports, or nonacademic pursuits that so enchanted us we needed to share our passion with a herd of adolescents. If you didn’t happen to have a congenial interest that minors could share, you were assigned one. I had been offered either girls’ basketball or the school paper, and as the latter sounded less noisy, sweaty, and desperate, I picked it.

Today, I knew, the work of the paper would be put on hold while the seniors discussed the really big news, the catastrophe at the Cavanaugh. We might as well make the hunt for a new prom site the big story in the next edition. I was already hopelessly involved, anyway, as I was not only the newspaper advisor, but this senior class’s prom advisor as well. Being so selected by the students is said to be an honor, but only by those who were not so honored and who therefore get to stay home and enjoy themselves on prom night.

I was absorbed by my agenda and by paranoid fears that I’d encounter the note-writing teacher terminator as I made my way down the wide marble staircase to the first floor.

Somebody called my name. My unvarnished name, sans the usual Miss or Ms. that students add, even here, in these informal halls. I had a rush of panic, but the woman waving at me would never be coy or oblique about her threats. “Sybil,” I said with real shock. “Mrs. Zacharias.” I remembered that she wanted Reed to come to Philly Prep—had wanted me to pull strings if possible—but today?

“I’m early,” she said as she approached. “My appointment isn’t until one. Reed’s coming separately. His cab hasn’t arrived yet.”

Had she forgotten that her husband—ex or not—had died the night before? The father of the boy who would soon taxi in? I would have assumed that the business of life, including private school applications, would take a rest stop, in memoriam. A moment of silence. Twenty-four hours of not pursuing temporal goals? Time for a thought or two about the transience of life?

“Surprised to see me, aren’t you? Want me to be a hypocrite, but if I skipped this appointment, it would have been for appearance’s sake alone. Am I supposed to act like I’m stricken with grief?”

I couldn’t think of a response that would be both honest and polite, so I said nothing. She seemed cold to the core, capable of operating on a purely intellectual, pragmatic, and self-serving plane.

Students swirled around us en route to the lunchroom or the great and freshly scrubbed outdoors. A few nodded in my direction or called greetings. Most completely ignored the two of us. Sybil returned the lack of concern and seemed neither to hear nor notice them. “You’re reading Wilde,” she said, with a half nod to the book I was carrying. “I didn’t realize people still did.”