Underdead (13 page)

“You want me to sit there and do nothing when my job, my reputation, even my life is at stake?”

“Yes, dammit!”

We stood a few inches apart, glaring at each other. Gavin’s jaw was clenched so tightly the tips of his nostrils turned white.

Gavin broke first. He turned and headed for the front door. “It’s late,” he said, pulling it open and stepping through. “Try to get some sleep.”

The soft click of the door closing behind him was somehow louder than if he had slammed it.

I was not quite sure how to begin my sleuthing. You don’t just sidle up to someone who’s mourning a murdered colleague and ask if they might possibly have had a reason to have killed him. I had to be subtle and tactical, and by that I mean I had to ditch my very sound, very sane silent pledge to stay out of the grapevine. My days of pleasantly burying my head in the sand were over. I would have to keep my eyes and ears open, I would have to start watching the soap opera that is The Bayshore Academy.

In hindsight, I know that was a stupid plan. It can’t be done. You either gossip or you don’t. There are no half measures—if you don’t gossip back, offer up tidbits of your own, no one will tell you anything (anything good, that is), and if you don’t make an effort to listen to what people are saying, you won’t be able to correct rumors about yourself.

An even bigger misjudgment on my part was the idea that I would sort of sneak my way into the gossip pool, wade in gently, if you will. I hadn’t realized that the fact that Bob had died in my classroom had put me smack in the middle of things. The headmaster’s little tete-a-tete the night before took on new meaning as I realized he had been warning me not so much against the murderer who had killed Bob but the dangerous swell of public opinion.

From the moment I got on campus the next morning, I noticed people were treating me differently. The all-school assembly was brief and more We Will Soldier On than informative about Bob’s sudden demise. People filed out quietly, instinctively bunching into small groups and talking in subdued tones or not at all. I was alone in the crowd. I went with the tide as far as the administration building and broke off to collect my mail. Conversation abruptly ceased when I stepped into the faculty lounge. Some teachers who hitherto hadn’t wasted more than a polite smile on me in the four months I’d been teaching there stopped to ask me how I was.

Just as I was naively answering that deceptively simple question, Carol came in, took one look at all the ears swiveled in my direction and got me out of there.

“God, you’re a babe in the woods, aren’t you?” she said under her breath as she pulled me along to the science building. As we mounted the stairs to the second floor at a brisk pace, she warned quietly, “Tell your students you’ll be teaching in Bob’s room today, but that they can’t come in yet because you have to do some prep work.”

I stopped by the group of students huddled a small distance from my classroom door and did as instructed. Under the watchful eye of a uniformed police officer charged with guarding my classroom door against the possible entrance of an intrepid student with a filched master key carefully passed down and hoarded for just such an occasion, the kids shuffled quietly down the hall to regroup in front of Bob’s classroom. As I automatically began to search for a key I didn’t have, Carol pulled out her own master key from a pocket of her lab coat and let me in. She shut the door behind us.

“Roger has a key to Bob’s room for you. He should have been here with it by now, but as long as you have one before you have to close up for lunch, I guess it’s okay.” Both her tone and her frown indicated her personal views on that matter, but she had more pressing concerns than Roger’s sloppy handling of the keys. She turned worried brown eyes to me and pushed her glasses up to a more secure position on her nose.

“How are you doing? No, don’t answer that. No time.” She gave my arm a sympathetic pat in case the answer had been something less than “fine” and continued talking. “Jo, I understand the headmaster talked with you last night, but I’m not sure you appreciate how difficult this may be for you.”

I didn’t. “Geez, Carol. You’re acting as if I’m the one who got hurt last night. Aside from being sad and a little tired,
I’m
fine. It’s going to be a little weird teaching in here, and I’m sure my students are going to react in new and horrible ways, but I’m used to my students acting out.”

She shook her head and regarded me earnestly. “You don’t get it, Jo. Bob died in
your
classroom. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t there, or that you couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. A lot of people are going to think you did, and those who don’t think it are going to wonder it.”

“But—that’s absurd!”

“Of course it is. Nonetheless, you have to be prepared for a lot of uncomfortable questions. People who barely know you are going to ask you seemingly innocent questions, and read all sorts of things into your answers. I can see you don’t really believe me, but please, be careful what you say—oh, darn it, that’s the bell. I’ve got to go. Just try not to talk to anyone, as much as possible.” With that last bit of advice, she gave my arm a squeeze. “Hang in there, kiddo.”

She left, moving adeptly from years of practice against the chaotic tide of students pushing into the classroom.

I directed them to take a seat and pull out their homework. “Ms. Gartner?” One of my students raised her hand and kept on talking, as if the gesture alone gave her the floor. “Is it true Mr. Bob died in your classroom last night and the policeman’s there to guard his dead body?”

A chorus of
eews
and a couple dramatic squeaks and shudders met the idea that there was a dead body next-door in their science classroom. A couple of boys immediately took advantage of a popular girl’s distress by making creepy crawly fingers on her back, causing her squeaks to escalate into shrieks, and her posse immediately joined in the chorus. Into this melee, Roger arrived, looking down his nose at me in the best way a man two inches shorter can, and held out a set of keys.

My day went downhill from there.

By lunchtime, I felt like a wrung out dishrag and I was seriously debating whether or not I should leave Bayshore. Not for the rest of the day, permanently. Carol had been right, as always, and while her warning had probably saved me a great deal of unnecessary angst, there was plenty more to take its place.

I collected some food on a tray and headed for my usual table, but stopped before I’d gotten halfway. Not only was my usual seat taken, extra chairs had been pulled up to accommodate all the extra bodies eager to hear the latest straight from the mouths of the science teachers they had trapped there. I stood uncertainly, not sure where I should go, until I spied Roger and Alan sitting alone at a table in the corner.

“Mind if I join you?” I sat down before they had a chance to tell me to go away.

Alan, who looked as haggard as I felt, told me to suit myself. Roger was too busy bragging about how well his parent conferences had gone to pay me any attention. With a sigh I was too weary to let out, I kept my head down and ate my hotdog in silence. Eventually, Roger finished the story about how wonderful he was and packed up his dishes and left. Alan and I exchanged glances.

“Too bad he didn’t get it instead of Bob,” Alan said.

Twenty-four hours ago, Alan never would have said something like that to me. But the fact that
he
had found Bob dead, and that Bob had died in
my
classroom had forged some sort of bond between us. We were fellow pariahs. The fact that I understood his pain probably meant that I should have felt sorry for him, but I didn’t. I was glad—no, thrilled—to have someone in the pit with me.

I leaned across the table. “I know. I’d settle for seeing the police throw him in jail, but I’m not sure they’d buy my theory that Roger irritated Bob to death.”

Alan’s wry half smile turned into a wide grin. “I would. I’m sure people have killed for less. I’ve got a better theory than that though.” He lowered his voice and leaned in a little further. “Bob was going to give him a bad teaching review.” He opened his eyes wide, as if he’d told me the world’s dirtiest little secret, which in a way he had. Teaching was Roger’s life, Bayshore, his world. The idea that Roger would have a black mark on his record was almost heretical.

“You’re kidding me,” I said, delighted.

“Nope. I’m the alternate on the faculty review committee so I have his notes.”

“Real-ly.”

Alan just grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him so animated. “Yup. And I don’t think my review’s going to help the average.” He put down his hotdog in disgust. “The man teaches from ten-year-old overheads he keeps filed in a drawer.”

“I know. He’s supposed to be my mentor.”

A look of horror crossed Alan’s face.

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “He’s too busy to do more than stop by occasionally and point out what I’m doing wrong, and even then I run it by Carol before I change what I’m doing.”

“Good girl. We’ll make a teacher of you yet.”

We finished lunch and as I walked slowly back to the science building, I thought over what Alan had told me, and began to wonder if Roger could have killed Bob.

Roger had been in the downstairs men’s restroom when Bob died. I wondered how quickly he had come out after hearing the commotion upstairs, and whether there was another way in. Determined to satisfy my curiosity, I took a detour around the side of the science building and pretended to tie my shoe as I scanned the part of the building that housed the restrooms. There were, as I had suspected, a line of windows high along the outer wall of the men’s room, but they were small and dusty, more for light than ventilation.

Unreasonably disappointed, I made my way back up to Bob’s classroom and braced myself for my afternoon classes.

The memorial service Friday afternoon had to be held in the auditorium, the school’s pretty Chapel too small to hold all the students, teachers and parents who’d come to pay their respects. It was long and weepy and rather awful. Every time someone got up and shared a bittersweet anecdote, I clenched my hands as a terrible anger flowed through me. Someone, maybe even one of the people who eulogized him so generously, had killed this beloved teacher and coach.

After the service I let myself be herded with everyone else to the reception in the cafeteria but avoided the trays of hard little cookies and punch bowls of overly concentrated pink lemonade that were Bayshore’s signature “occasion” fare. I knew better than to partake of the refreshments, particularly the lemonade that no amount of ice hogging could make palatable. Besides, the science department was going out for a memorial dinner as soon as we could decently get away.

The crowd had separated me from Becky and Carol. I was looking rather anxiously for them, lest I get waylaid by yet another curious student or parent who realized I had been “on the scene”, when a police officer tapped me lightly on the shoulder, breaking my reverie, and asked if I were Miss Jo Gartner.

I nodded and let him pull me aside. He informed me politely that they—he didn’t specify who “they” were—were done with my room, and that I was free to begin using it again. I had a good half-hour at least before anyone would think of leaving for dinner. No one would notice if I snuck away for a quick look around my classroom. The last time I’d seen it, it had been a disaster, and it could only have gotten worse after the crime scene unit or whatever had gone through it. If I needed to spend a chunk of Saturday cleaning up after them, I wanted to know now. I dodged the gossipy librarian heading my way and slipped out and over to the upstairs science wing.

The door to my classroom looked rather barren without the yellow crime scene tape. I unlocked the door, flicked on a light and stared at my room in surprise. It was clean. Someone had swept up all the glass, whether through kindness or because it was evidence, I didn’t know. It was tidy, too. The sloppy piles of paper that habitually adorned the counter near the door (my little shrine to entropy) had been neatened, and the dioramas that covered the rest of the counter had been tucked neatly under the upper cabinets. Even the set of old textbooks I kept for reference at the back near the sink had been restacked neatly. Usually I kept them in three sloppy piles. Now, two short stacks had been flip-flopped so their spines touched, a third stack placed perpendicular to them so their spines all formed a T. The remaining books were piled on top, covering the T. One of the CSI people must have been very, very bored.

I wandered slowly around the room, making small adjustment to things, approaching the far end of my classroom reluctantly, gingerly, finally halting near the place where we had found Bob. The back lab bench was still askew from when Bob had crashed into it. My eyes went immediately to the corner that had been coated with Bob’s blood. It had been cleaned too.

I grasped the opposite edge of the lab bench, intending to push it back into alignment with the rest of the tables, when I noticed a faint outline on the floor that marked where Bob’s body had lain. I released the table as if it were contaminated.

I pulled a large bottle of rubbing alcohol from the back cabinet and grabbed a wad of paper towels from the holder above the sink, pausing in a rare fit of cleanliness to remove a piece of string that a student had wound around the faucet and to put away a lone glass beaker that had survived by dint of having been left in the sink. I knelt down near the outline, poured out a stream of liquid and began to scrub. Rubbing alcohol can get permanent marker off a whiteboard, and it got up whatever they had used on the floor pretty easily, but I continued to scrub long after all traces were gone. I poured a good quarter bottle of the stuff over the lab bench. When I was done, I washed my hands and face and blew my nose and sat down heavily on one of the lab stools.

After a while, I became aware of the ticking of the classroom clock and realized I had been in my classroom for almost an hour. “Oh, no,” I cried. “Dinner!”