Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_02 (33 page)

It was an odd time to be in a school.

The antique clock mounted midway down the hall read fifteen minutes past five. Not even the earliest scholar was here yet.

Two aspects of this hallway differed from any school hallway I’d ever visited.

This hallway was clean.

The lockers had no locks.

The fingerprint technician brushed black powder in gentle, even, curved strokes on the surface of locker number forty-five. And on the handle. So far, Lieutenant Berry had been the most pleasant person on this somber outing. She’d made no complaint about the hour.

Fragments of prints overlapped on the gray metal in a bewildering array. But I knew enough to be patient.

Captain Walsh took turns glaring at me, then at the locker.

Desmond leaned against the peach wall. His face was
deeply lined with weariness. He, too, stared fixedly at the locker.

Chuck Selwyn, outrage clear in every taut line of his body, stood with his legs apart, his hands jammed in the pockets of his khaki slacks. Unshaven, in a gray sweatshirt, he didn’t look quite as boyish.

Berry took her time, used a magnifying glass. I wondered if she realized how tensely we waited, how lightly we breathed.

Her answer—when it came—was matter-of-fact. “Bingo.” She gave me a swift glance. “I’ve found seven prints made by Patty Kay Matthews.” Berry pointed at several spots, at the top of the locker, midway between the top and the handle, and on the inside top rear of the handle “… a fragment of the second finger, right hand …” The technician used the wooden tip of the brush to pull the handle up and ease the locker open.

I looked at the locker’s contents. A school pep sweater hung from a hook. Books and papers were piled haphazardly. There was nothing especially notable about this particular locker except that its owner had touched the sweater and the papers less than a week past, but would never touch them again.

Berry began to brush the powder on the interior of the locker door.

But I was on the homestretch. It didn’t matter whether there were prints inside the locker, though now I knew there would be. What mattered was that even a single fragment of one of Patty Kay’s fingerprints had been found on the handle of this locker.

Walsh rubbed a bristly cheek.

Selwyn stared at the locker like he was watching a cobra undulate from its basket. The serpent in Eden, I thought again.

I concentrated on Walsh. I still had a selling job. “There is no reason for Patty Kay Matthews’s fingerprints to be on this locker.”

The police chief shrugged. “Mrs. Matthews was a teacher here.”

But the headmaster’s brow creased in a tight, puzzled frown. “Not in this building.” Like me, he knew it was odd, inexplicable.

I was willing to be generous to the opposition. “Let’s imagine for a moment that Patty Kay was in this building— perhaps to talk to another teacher—and let’s even imagine her walking down this hallway and reaching out and happening to touch this particular locker. That still can’t explain the print inside the handle. There’s only one reason Patty Kay would have gripped the handle: to open the locker.”

“From a partial print on the inside of the handle, from that you jump to murder?” Walsh demanded.

“Yes.” I knew I sounded grim. I felt grim. Grim and angry, so angry. The snake in Eden had been so deadly, had brought so much harm and pain and needless suffering. “Here’s what must have happened. She drove into the campus Thursday night.” I looked at Desmond. “Are the gates locked at night?”

He shook his head. “We’ve never had a problem with security. We close the main gates unless there’s a program or reception. But there’s no lock.” No, there had never been a problem with security in Fair Haven.

“So Patty Kay arrives. It’s quite late. Nobody’s here. She probably parked close to the languages building. I’m guessing it’s right next door?”

Desmond nodded.

I didn’t know the campus. But I knew what had happened, what must have happened. I met Walsh’s unwavering
gaze. “Patty Kay came out of her building in time to see someone entering this building. Or she arrived just as someone came into this building. Something about that figure attracted her attention. Being Patty Kay, what did she do?”

Desmond knew. He’d already figured it out. “She was never afraid of anything. She’d go look.”

I watched a jigsaw of prints materialize on the inside panel. “She saw someone, and she knew it wasn’t right. Being Patty Kay, she came to investigate. We’ll never know exactly what happened, but we can be sure of one fact. She saw a student at this locker, a student who shouldn’t have been at this locker. Maybe the student tried to brazen it out, claimed to be here to get a book, something of that sort.”

“It’s all assumption. What student? Why a student?” Selwyn’s voice was shrill. He was protecting his students. He would always protect his students, no matter what the cost. “If we’re going to pretend, let’s pretend it was an adult she knew.”

I ignored him. “Or it might have happened quite differently. Maybe the student ran away when Patty Kay came in. But whatever happened, Patty Kay saw enough to link the person to this locker. We know that because she came to this locker, opened it, and found what the student had left.”

“You can’t be sure of any of this.” Walsh didn’t like me very much. I was making his life too complicated.

“Yes, Captain, I can. This locker belonged to Franci Hollis.”

“Hollis.” Captain Walsh hunched his shoulders. His dark eyes were bleak. “The kid who committed suicide last week.”

“Yes.” Hounded to death. So young and so terribly vulnerable. “You know why. The anonymous letters. Dreadful anonymous letters. No one’s told us how they reached her.
Surely her parents would have noticed if she’d started receiving mail at home that upset her. It makes a lot more sense to assume she got those letters at school. How could she receive them anonymously? Very easily—if someone slipped them into her locker.”

“Sure.” Walsh looked at the headmaster.

We all did.

Selwyn’s face was rigid. “This is all supposition. Every bit of it.” He stared at us defiantly.

“No.” The police chief spoke quietly. “Franci Hollis is dead. We found the letters in her bedroom. All right, Mrs. Collins. What’s the connection?”

I put it on the table. “What do you think”—I looked at each of them in turn—“that Patty Kay Matthews would do if she knew who was writing obscene notes to Franci Hollis?”

“Oh, Christ.” Desmond pushed away from the wall, his face sick.

“I think I know.” I was sure I knew. Because in these last days I’d come to understand Patty Kay Matthews, her strengths and her weaknesses. And her courage. “She set up a meeting of the board of trustees. She told the letter writer that he or she must confess and take public responsibility before that meeting—or Patty Kay would reveal the writer’s identity.”

Selwyn’s look of incredulous dismay was world-class. “You can’t mean—surely you aren’t intimating—you can’t possibly think a
student
shot Mrs. Matthews to prevent her speaking out!”

“Right on all counts, Mr. Selwyn.”

“You’re accusing a child of
murder
!” The headmaster swung toward the police chief. “This is absurd, patently absurd!”

Walsh ignored him. “That dinner party at her house.
That’s where she was going to spring it if the kid didn’t own up. Is that how you see it?”

“Exactly.”

“Captain Walsh, I strenuously object to this absurd deduction.” Selwyn practically danced with impatience. Edging on panic. “It’s ridiculous. Why, it’s
libelous!
Walden School is already suffering great trauma from Franci’s death. It has cost us her brother Walt, one of our finest students. Walt is magna cum laude. He’s been accepted at Yale. And now he has withdrawn from this school. I’m hoping to persuade him to change his mind. But if any kind of public revelation is made about this tragic situation, it may drive even more students away—”

My temper finally snapped. “You prefer to hide a murderer from prosecution?” I demanded.

The headmaster’s face flushed. “I’m appalled, simply appalled at the unconscionable coupling of this school with Mrs. Matthews’s murder. There are many who might have profited”—he slid me a quick look—“from Patty Kay’s death. To make this jump, this absurd connection merely because she went out to the school on Thursday night—”

I pointed at Franci Hollis’s powder-smeared locker.

“—is totally unreasonable and may do grievous damage to Walden School.”

Walsh nodded politely. “I understand your concerns, Mr. Selwyn. However, it will be necessary to interview your students.”

“A student assembly is scheduled at ten this morning.” I like to be helpful.

Selwyn was horrified. “Under no circumstances will I agree to police invading the campus.”

Even Desmond was concerned. “Captain, parents will be upset if police address the students about murder. This has got to be handled carefully.”

Walsh rocked back on his heels. “Would you gentlemen prefer for these kids to be interviewed at the police station?”

It was the optimum moment.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I believe I have a solution that will satisfy everyone concerned.”

It was just past seven
A.M
. I punched the bell at Gina Abbott’s house. Not a proper hour to call. But I still had things to discover before the assembly at ten.

The door opened. The decorator was shrugging into a seersucker robe. Her expressive face looked both worried and weary.

“Gina, I need to talk to your daughter. About those letters Franci received. Patty Kay knew who wrote them.”

“Oh, no. If Patty Kay knew, she’d have done something about it.”

“She did.”

Gina’s face was abruptly very still. Her dark eyes widened. Sudden comprehension gave way to horror. “Oh, no. Do you think … Oh, God. You’d better come in.”

The living room was a nice mixture of periods, a comfortable, embracing room lightened with lemon and accented with plum.

“Chloe!” Gina stepped into the main hall. “Chloe!”

Chloe Abbott was midway into the living room when she realized her mother wasn’t alone. She stopped, her cool gray eyes surveying me. “I’m not dressed. I’ll …”

Gina shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, honey. You know Mrs. Collins, Craig’s aunt. She wants to talk to you about those letters Franci got.”

Chloe remained in the doorway, her face blank, her eyes wary.

Gina looked at her daughter sharply. “What’s wrong?”

The teenager’s plump face was sullen, withdrawn. “Nothing. I just hate talking about it. Can’t you understand that?”

Her mother wasn’t fooled. She reached out her hand. “Chloe, what do you know?”

“Nothing. Nothing!” But she wouldn’t look toward her mother.

“Actually, Chloe,” I said quietly, “I’m interested in anything you can tell me. What you think, what you guess.”

Reluctantly, Chloe came in the room. She perched on the arm of an easy chair. “I hate thinking about it. I
hate
it.”

“We all hate it!” Gina yanked a package from her robe pocket, frantically pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. Her hands were shaking. “But we’ve
got
to think about it. Please, Chloe. Tell Mrs. Collins what you can.”

“I don’t know much. And now everybody’s blaming me because I didn’t tell anybody. But I didn’t know what Franci was going to do …”

Again I tried for reassurance. “Nobody’s blaming you.”

“Mother is.” The accusation was hot and swift.

“Chloe, no. It’s just—if you’d just told me!” She drew deeply on the cigarette.

“If I had, what would you have done? Call Mrs. Hollis. And that’s why I think Franci did it. She didn’t want her mother to know.”

“Let’s not worry about that right now, Chloe.” I almost asked Gina to leave us alone, but one glance at the woman’s strained face told me I’d get nowhere. “When did Franci tell you about the notes?”

Chloe pushed her hair away from her face with both hands. “She didn’t exactly
tell
me. It was last week. Wednesday afternoon. After field hockey. I was walking back to the girls’ gym and I saw Franci underneath one of
the evergreens. Kind of hiding there. I thought it was odd, so I ducked under the branches. She was lying on the ground, in a ball, sort of. I thought for sure she was sick. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was waiting until everybody left before she started home. I asked why. She said she didn’t want to see anybody. She started to cry. She said she didn’t have friends anymore and she never wanted to see anybody ever again. I told her that was dumb. I was her friend and she had lots of friends and whatever made her think she didn’t have friends? And she held up this envelope. I took it and—” She stopped, didn’t look at us.

Her mother understood instantly. “It’s all right. You didn’t write those words. But you have to tell us. We know it isn’t you, Chloe.”

Haltingly, Chloe repeated what she remembered.

Nasty, yes.

Worse than that, spiteful and cruel.

And cruelest of all—

“… ended up saying if Franci ever told anybody about the notes, Walt would get one telling him all about Franci and he’d be so disgusted he’d say she wasn’t his sister.”