Mummers' Curse (15 page)

I couldn’t figure out how or why I’d need somebody to work on tax law with me, and then I realized that he meant I might need, simply, a lawyer. Sam had not gotten stuck on the mystery of how a gun got into my handbag. In his unassuming but pragmatic way, he’d accepted that the gun was on my person and acknowledged that I might be in trouble. An offer of help was a kind and practical gesture, but nonetheless, my spirits crashed all the way through the floor, through the several floors, to the gallery below us. Reality often has that effect on me.

“We have to leave.” Beth was stuck on that concept.

“Right,” Billy Obenhauser said. “All of us.” He held the Baggie in his right hand.

He didn’t mean me, too, did he? I lifted my eyebrows and pointed at myself, and he nodded.

“But—I don’t know anything.”

He tightened his mouth and didn’t move. The plastic-shrouded gun dangled from his fingers.

“Couldn’t Mackenzie—couldn’t you take my statement right here, now?”

He looked like a piece of postmodern sculpture. Not exactly a cop, but a damned fine replica of one.

“Usually,” Mackenzie said, “you want people in a neutral location. And it wouldn’t be good for me to be with you during.”

“Why not?”

Now it was Mackenzie’s turn to look at me as if I’d failed an I.Q. test. I remembered again. Billy O. was now suspicious of both of us. He wouldn’t want my answers tainted by Mackenzie’s presence, or cues, or whatever.

Damn.

Here it was, late on the last day of my winter break, now telescoped down from the endlessness of two weeks to a few hours. Soon, it would be back to Renata’s whines and laments. Her classmates’ idiosyncrasies and idiocies. My principal’s insistence on making a small private school akin to the Pentagon for bureaucratic tangles. And endless papers to mark in a futile, doomed attempt to improve language skills.

I deserved these last few moments of solitude and peace.

But my sworn statement had suddenly become urgent.

Just because the murder weapon had fallen out of my pocketbook. Some people really overreact.

On the other hand, I knew I was innocence itself. Getting this over with and getting back to the sanity of a schoolroom suddenly became highly desirable. I lifted the suspect purse and retrieved my coat, then I winked at Billy O., and opened the door.

In the elevator, Beth pursed her mouth, Billy eyed me suspiciously, Karen wailed about her missing marker, and Quentin-the-shrink mused on how very
interesting
this all was. I could feel myself and my life being reshaped as one of the “true stories” she used to amuse listeners.

I pressed
Down
, the only way left to go.

Nine

SCHOOL IS A HABIT THAT IS EASY TO BREAK. AFTER TWO weeks away, the building looked and smelled like nothing I’d seen before.

Small comfort that the rest of the faculty wore what-am-I-doing-here expressions that let me know they also suffered reentry bends.

The only one who looked elated to be back was Vincent Devaney, as well he might. His presence meant the police were still waffling. Even Philly Prep was preferable to leg irons.

I wanted to compare notes on being questioned by Billy O. even though my experience had surely been gentler, since I wasn’t suspected of doing the dastardly deed, only of being a henchperson. Even so, it had been unsettling. I had pointed out, in vain, how ridiculous their theory was. If I’d been consciously hiding the gun, I wouldn’t have let Karen root through my bag.

Billy was unimpressed, reminding me that I hadn’t let her do much rooting, that in fact, I’d tried to remove the bag from her.

Mackenzie wanted to believe in my innocence, but I could tell—and be vastly perturbed by—what a struggle it was. He’d have been easier about helping me deal with the consequences of covering up for a friend or trying to subvert justice than coping with what sounded like deceptive nonsense. To him, I was the child with frosting smeared around its mouth insisting I hadn’t been anywhere near the cake.

I didn’t blame him. It sounded too stupid for words to insist I had no idea how a murder weapon happened to be in my pocketbook right after I’d seen the prime suspect. If Mackenzie did something equally inexplicable and incriminating, I wouldn’t believe his cockamamie story unless I’d had a lobotomy. Still, I didn’t appreciate the wordless head shakes, the requests that I go over everything I’d done the last several days one more time, the question—again—of whether the only places I’d been when I left the parade were the Porta Potti line and the pretzel vendor.

It got so that I doubted myself, wondered if I could have confused taking my niece to a chemical toilet with the furtive swap of a gun. Maybe I did have multiple personalities. The Three Faces of Amanda. One of which looked like a gun moll.

I wondered whether Vincent had had a similarly troubled night. Did Barbs look at him sideways, on the sly, wondering?

The expression he now aimed at me was anything but the one given to an accomplice. Or even someone you trusted enough to use as a fake alibi. Matter of fact, he looked unhappy to see me. I felt hurt until I realized I was a question mark, a potential problem because I was the only person at school who knew he was a suspect in the dead Mummer case. “Trust me,” I whispered as I passed him. I was about to go on, to tell him that I, too, was being watched by the police, that we were in this together, but I was stopped by a shiver of apprehension.

I was in this, too, because of him, because of his lies. It was acutely possible that he had not only murdered someone with the gun that wound up in my pocketbook, but that he or his wife had planted the weapon on me while I was at their house.

The strangeness resumed as I entered the unfamiliar room designated as mine, and encountered alien creatures who behaved as if I had forced them to spend time with me.

There is no real new year in a schoolhouse, at least not in January. Our year begins in September and ends in June, and winter break is a parenthetical insert, not the end of anything. So on this bleak morn there was an overwhelming sense of unwilling ongoingness, of sameness and moreness. Of the coppery aftertaste of two weeks that had looked infinite in length and possibility in December, and now in January were known to have been brief as an eye blink and not even as much fun.

The visitors from a far planet continued to shuffle in, their eyes bleary, as if irritated by the vision of the dark months stretching ahead with nothing filling them but school. One could hardly count the February closures to commemorate Martin Luther King and long-dead presidents. Single-day breaks weren’t oases worth anticipation.

All that, and report cards three weeks away.

For my senior classes, there was at least a sense of finality. The three weeks ahead held the last exams and papers that mattered, the last performance records tallied into the last grades college admission committees would see. After that, they put their brains on hold. They might not have learned a lot, but one thing they knew was that from this report card on, they could essentially go on life support.

That was the good news, except for Renata Field, who had dug herself a deeply final grade of
F
.

As for me, I had three weeks, fifteen days, in which to do any possible teaching or to feel even a modicum of authority with this group. Three weeks from now, their individual dies cast, unable to change the past—except in Renata’s delusions—they’d throw caution, humility, attention, and civility to the wind. What the hell, each little mind would say as it went on cruise control till June. What the hell!

“Miss Pepper.” Renata turned the relatively soft syllables of my name into a whine, a cry of pain.

“We agreed to talk after school,” I reminded her. “Not during.” As much as it annoyed me, her barrage of calls had forced me to argue the issue with myself. In the greater scheme, did it matter if I cut a deal so that Renata got a grade she hadn’t earned, in fact had not
tried
to earn?

Truth was, no reputable college was going to admit her, and odds were against her lasting in even the most mediocre citadel of learning. The girl refused to work, except at cheating, conniving, and whining. She didn’t need others to punish her; she herself was her own worst punishment.

But in the still greater scheme, would it be worth rupturing personal ethics in order to get Renata, her family, and, ultimately, my principal off my case? I wished I could confer with Mackenzie, but I didn’t think the time was right for us to discuss sliding scales of right and wrong.

Eventually, as the hour inched on, the walls resumed a normal shape and the aromatic medley of tennis shoes, sweaters, tomato soup, perspiration, and chalk dust became my life breath again.

Renata alternately sulked and attempted to compensate for a wasted four months, waving her hand hysterically each time I asked a question, even when it was rhetorical. “I wonder if anyone, anywhere, has ever kept his entire list of resolutions,” I murmured at one point. Up went Renata’s hand to address my wondering. When there was an actual answer in the offing, she never knew it, but responded like somebody speaking in tongues. I stopped rising to the bait and ignored her hand-waving. She sank into head-clasping depression. When I asked for a three-paragraph composition on what resolution they thought they might keep and why, Renata was in too much despair to lift her pen.

At the end of class, I walked over to the window. The view I thought of as mine seemed altered. The street looked diminished—used and abandoned—by the snow of two days ago. Its asphalt was marked by shiny runoff rivulets and edged with slush the color of watery coffee.

The snow in the Square looked equally left over and secondhand, the shrubs and trees, desolate and chilly. Only one pathetic soul, insulated with newspapers and presumably without warmer options, occupied a bench. I turned back.

Sally Bianco, the other player in the purloined essay caper, hadn’t left with her classmates. “I’m humiliated,” she said as soon as I was facing her. “I want to start the year right. I want to say…I’m ashamed.”

I shrugged. “We talked this through before break. People make mistakes. That’s how we learn.”

“I didn’t need to learn that way. I knew right from wrong.”

“Sally, it’s over, no need to—”

“It’s just that…I worked so hard. Before I came to this school, I was a goof-off, I know. But I changed. Now, I feel…tarnished. My hard work was for nothing and my good name is gone. I shamed my family.”

Tarnished. Humiliated. Shamed. Undoubtedly echoes of parental ranting. Sally was, indeed, one of our success stories, a child who thrived in our smaller classes and bloomed with increased attention. Her parents, always overly concerned with her every move, were—or had been—enormously proud of her turnaround. And now, they were obviously overreacting to her temporary fall from grace. “Nobody knows, Sally, except the three of us. I’ve told you. We’ve even worked it out—everybody gets to drop their lowest grade. Remember?”

“She shamed me,” Sally said.

“Make it a learning experience. Let it help you with difficult decisions in the future.” What else could I say? I didn’t, don’t, like cheats. Unless you do it on an enormous scale and write a bestseller about it, it hurts everyone.

“I didn’t know she’d do that, Miss Pepper. I thought she was going to read my essay just to get the idea.”

“I know,” I said gently. “You’ve already told—”

“She said she was confused.”

I knew all this, but let her go on. She seemed to be releasing a head of steam that had been building all vacation long.

“She said she couldn’t understand the book, that she had heard it was about getting married. She expected a romance, like the ones in the drugstore.”

The class had been given a free choice from a selected reading list. Both girls had chosen
Pride and Prejudice
on which to base their take-home exams.

“She said if she could read what I’d written, she’d understand the book, then she’d write her own essay. I never, ever thought she’d copy me word for word. I was still wrong, because I knew in my heart she was lying, that she was supposed to use her own ideas, that she hadn’t tried to read the book, but all the same, I didn’t want to seem mean, and I didn’t feel like I was cheating.”

I was sure that was what had happened.

“And then, okay. So we were punished, and we deserved it, and maybe then we could get past it, but Renata called me ten times over break. We’re not that kind of friends. Then, worse, her mother called my mother. I can’t stand it! They want us to go to the principal, they want to…to get you…”

Fired. That’s what she was trying not to say. Get me fired. And they could. My principal’s backbone melts at low temperatures. The threat of tuition withdrawals, the potential for bad press would outweigh any concern about cheating, school standards, and meaningless final grades. The world did not have a shortage of English teachers, either.

Unemployment beckoned. However, on this particular winter’s day, that didn’t sound all that bad. Perhaps I’d think of it as early retirement. It wasn’t as if I’d need money, since my future would be spent in an all-expense-paid prison block because a murder weapon had been in my bag, so it wasn’t the worst thing. It wasn’t like being homeless, wrapped in newspapers on a park bench.

“I hate her!” the normally docile Sally said. “Her cheating gives me a bad reputation, too! I could kill her!” Her smooth, small features contorted.

“I hope you won’t add murder to your extracurricular activities. Admission committees don’t give it a lot of points.”

Sally’s anger wasn’t assuaged by my feeble attempt at humor. Then the fire in her eyes slowly dissipated, and her facial muscles relaxed. “I got angrier every time she called. My mother, she…” She shook her head. “I mean, what I did was cheating, but I meant it like help, like peer tutoring, not the way it happened.”

Her mea culpas were becoming as tedious as Renata’s mea-not-culpas.

My ninth graders, who always looked diminutive after the seniors and enormous by the end of the hour, reluctantly entered the room. “You don’t want to be late for your next class,” I reminded Sally.