Authors: Gillian Roberts
She whimpered, wiped her nose on her raincoat sleeve. “I wasn’t—we didn’t—it wasn’t like everybody thinks. It wasn’t wrong! We were in love.”
“You don’t have to use the past tense.”
She looked at me blankly. I must have sounded as if I were correcting her grammar. “He isn’t dead.” I hoped that was still true. “You don’t have to talk about him in the past.”
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She shook her head. “I saw his face—his eyes—I heard him scream—”
“He’s in bad shape, yes. He’s been hurt, but he’s unconscious, not dead. And nobody blames you for anything.”
“He smoked. A lot. Whenever he could. I didn’t think it was right, especially in the lab, but he said he knew precisely where everything was, and that nothing was dangerous if you knew what you were doing and took precautions, and he was angry that there wasn’t a single place in this school to smoke. He thought the faculty, at least, should have a place. He said a lot of high schools even had places like that for the students. He said—”
I held her hand and listened, trying to hear more than she seemed able to say.
“—besides, he put it out—he put out his cigarette and that’s when—he shouted ‘Oh, no!’ and all of a sudden, flames and glass and blood and—”
“He shouted before the explosion?”
She started sobbing again, hiccupping out words. “I think so, but—I don’t know—It was so fast—loud—”
“Shhh. What shattered?” I thought about those flying shards and couldn’t help but think of St. Cassian of Imola and death by a thousand cuts.
“I don’t know! Nothing was out, like beakers or bottles, I swear. No gas was on—I would have smelled it. And I didn’t touch a thing!”
I made shushing noises and spoke softly, asking if she was all right, if she had been hurt anywhere. She calmed down, and then words erupted out of her again. “We were—we are in love and we’re both adults.”
“Nobody said anything was wrong.” Of course, I didn’t know what anybody had said. I gave Pip still more points for knowing that teachers didn’t have a clue about what was really going on. I didn’t even know what was going on with other teachers, let alone the students.
“I think,” I said softly and slowly, “you need to go someplace GILLIAN ROBERTS
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where you can rest. Home, probably. Take the day off. You are quite understandably shaken and upset. You probably should make a statement.”
“About what? To whom?”
Indeed. Who was there? Surely not Maurice Havermeyer. I could hear him still booming orders to move on, move on, and report to your assigned homerooms. He was maintaining his longtime record of being completely ineffective.
“Never mind,” I said. “I didn’t think that through. This isn’t a crime scene and there’s no evidence of foul play. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question, however. Where were you when they checked out the lab? They obviously didn’t see you.”
She wailed again.
“Tisha? It doesn’t matter. You weren’t hurt and you were frightened. I can understand why you’d hide; I just can’t imagine where.”
“In the prep room in back. That’s where we—it’s private there. Pretty cramped, though. I hid behind his desk in there.
They only looked around for a second. I think they were looking for bodies. Out-in-the-open bodies. Or more fire or something.
They came near, but they didn’t pull out the chair and look underneath. Everything was peaceful, so they went away.”
“Had you been waiting for him in the prep room?”
“At first, yes. I wanted to surprise him. Usually, we don’t—I don’t get in this early on Wednesday, so we can’t . . . But my dad had an early appointment in Delaware today, and he said he’d drop me off on the way.”
“Did you see any students when you came in here?”
“A few, and I didn’t want them noticing me, so I came in fast.” She looked down at her feet. “I have a key,” she whispered.
I let that pass. “You know who the students you saw were?”
She shook her head.
“Did you wait a long time?”
She shrugged. “Not that long.” She tilted her head and reconsidered. “Maybe a little long.”
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“And he had no way of knowing you were here, am I correct?”
“Well . . . I left the door unlocked, kind of as a warning. But otherwise, right. I was in back and I swear I didn’t touch any chemicals. I never, ever do. I’m scared to death of them!”
“How long do you think you waited for Mr. Reyes?” It felt ludicrous using his surname with his lover, but the man had such a wall of propriety around him that it felt overly intimate on my part to call him Juan.
“Don’t know.” She was probably a visual whiz, but she left a lot to be desired verbally. “A while. Just . . . a while. Is this going to . . . am I going to flunk now? Not get my degree?” Her nose reddened dangerously again.
“I doubt it. Nobody’s going to know, anyway. Let’s get you out of here, all right?”
She looked at me appraisingly before she whispered, “I need my clothes.”
I looked down at her buttoned-up raincoat.
She swallowed hard. I nodded, and she stood up and tiptoed carefully. The telltale red marks on her socks meant she’d already had enough contact with the broken glass.
While she put her jeans and sweater back on, I crunched around. The room was dim. The police or paramedics must have turned the switch back off. I wondered if turning the switch had set off the explosion. I tried to remember Reyes as he staggered out of the room. He’d still been in his raincoat.
I couldn’t have said what I was looking for, but I found only glass and stains. Blood, I thought, and something else. On the floor, on the counter, in the sink where the skeletal remains of Reyes’s umbrella also rested.
Tisha re-entered the lab as Havermeyer poked his head in.
“What is going on here?”
“Ms. Banks and I realized that Mr. Reyes’s briefcase was still in the room.” I raised my arm, showing it to him. “She’s taking it to him. We’re sure it will be a comfort to him to know it’s safe.”
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Tisha timidly nodded at the headmaster.
He peered at the lab, his bottom lip jutting out in perturba-tion. “What are we going to do about the classes scheduled—”
“Ms. Moffat and her crew can have it back to normal in a jiffy,” I said. “It’s only glass and . . . whatever. Then we need a substitute teacher.”
“I’m aware of that. I meant . . .” I don’t know what he meant.
He inhaled, seemed about to present an oration, but instead looked at the pocket watch he wore on a fob right next to his faux Phi Beta Kappa key. “I believe your homeroom is already in session, Miss Pepper,” he said sternly, and then he turned and lumbered off toward the staircase.
Tisha watched his retreat, then looked at me. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t think he knew who I was.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“But I’ve met him three times and—”
“Trust me. It’s nothing personal.”
“I don’t think he realized I was in there and—”
“He didn’t. You’re safe. And I’m sure Miss Jouilliat—” I rushed through the art teacher’s name because nobody I knew of was sure of its pronunciation. I, for one, was willing to swear that she herself pronounced it differently each time, as a sort of performance art of her own. “Want me to go upstairs with you to talk with her?” I was hoping she’d say yes. Getting to the light and air of the third floor art room—which was half glass and always reminded me of a Parisian studio, or Hollywood’s version of the same—would be a relief.
She considered, then shook her head. “Thanks, but she’ll know what happened. Do you really want me to take his briefcase to the hospital?”
“If you change your clothing first. I don’t think the sight of his blood all over your coat will make for an easy visit or help him. Besides”—I glanced out the window—“you don’t need it.
Looks like it’s clearing.”
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She was a few steps away when I realized I still had questions.
“One second more, please,” I called out.
She looked at me apprehensively.
“Was Louis Applegate angry about your dating Mr. Reyes?”
“Louis!” She looked disoriented, furrowing her brow. “No. I mean, who would ever know? Louis is so . . .” She shook her head.
“He never said anything, if that’s what you mean.”
I didn’t know if that’s what I meant, or what Louis Applegate might have felt or done.
And one more question, please. “While you were waiting for Mr. Reyes, were you wearing—”
She blushed, and said, “You know already. I told you, I—”
“—headphones?”
She swallowed and cleared her throat and her skin regained its normal peachy tone. She was a pretty girl, fair, with Titian red-gold curls, and she and Juan Angel must have been a lovely-looking couple. “Oh. That. Sure. I was listening to music.”
Headphones, earplugs, loud music. She wouldn’t have heard a marching band enter that laboratory. “How did you hear Juan Angel enter the lab?”
“I didn’t!” She smiled briefly. “I
smelled
him. It. He must have closed the door behind him, locked it, and lit a cigarette. I smelled it and went in and he was standing there, looking around the lab. He looked surprised, but glad, and I said . . . I made a joke about smoking, said that was for . . .” Her voice dropped to near inaudibility. “. . . after. I . . . I was there, near the prep room, and I . . . I was kind of dancing and I . . . you know.” She grabbed imaginary lapels of the raincoat and opened and closed it, flash-ing the memory of Juan Reyes.
How varied and surprising were the preschool activities at Philly Prep.
“He laughed. He was soaking wet, and he put his umbrella in the sink and turned on the water so he could put his cigarette under it while he watched me dance—and—he shouted ‘oh, no!’
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and there was this flash, and noise, and glass and blood—” Her voice rose again, up toward ranges only dogs could hear. “I was dancing, he was laughing—and then, and then—”
“It’s all right.” I hoped I spoke the truth.
She shook her head. “He was
laughing
!”
The image of that solemn man laughing touched me, and I couldn’t bear to think of what had happened then.
“I don’t understand,” she whimpered.
That made two of us.
Nine
My room swarmed with students, not one of whom seemed able to settle down.
I couldn’t blame them. If they were like me, their pulses and blood pressures were still circling the stratosphere.
The image of Juan Reyes ripped, bloody, and falling was un-shakable, as were worries about how he was and when we could find out and what had happened. I shushed my homeroom into their seats, while I fielded questions.
“Will he live?”
“We all hope so,” I said. “He looked seriously injured.”
“Will he be . . . you know, all scarred and—”
“The Phantom of the Opera!”
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keep you informed with anything we find out, but you have to give it time.”
“Did a student do it?” a freckle-faced girl asked.
“Do what?”
“It. We were all around there,” she said. “I just guess . . . why did it happen if nobody . . . ?”
I tried to think of who “all” I’d seen near the chemistry lab and I could remember some of my tenth graders, and a few seniors—the “tennis boys and their girls,” I thought, but was it relevant?
“Some people didn’t like him,” a normally silent girl whispered.
“It had to be on purpose,” another ninth grader said. “I heard—” He grimaced as if squeezing his brain to recall what he’d heard.
“What?”
“People talking funny.”
“Meaning what?” I heard the rumblings of protest from the rest of the class.
“Like . . . somebody saying, ‘Did you do it?’ ”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know when, but before the explosion.”
“Who said it?”
“Cut it out, Hatch,” somebody called from the back of the room.
“Hatch always says he knows stuff,” another voice said.
“Makes him feel big.”
“Whatever he says—he’s lying.”
This produced laughter, and I didn’t know whether to take the remark seriously or not. Instead, I tried to ignore their voices, and focus on Hatch, who was also ignoring them. He stared straight ahead, biting his lower lip, his eyes focused on nothing except, I hoped, his memory. He tilted his head to the side, and said, “I’m not lying. I don’t know them. They’re older and aren’t in my classes.”
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“See? That’s what he always does!”
“Grow up, Hatch!”
“Boy or girl?” I asked.
He looked defeated, and shook his head. “It was like a whisper. But loud enough for me to hear.”
“See? See?”
“It coulda meant anything.”
“If he heard it in the first place.”
“Thank you for trying,” I said, quieting the rest of them down. “And if you remember anything more—any of you—feel free to tell me, or Dr. Havermeyer, or any of the faculty. But you should know that the police consider it an accident. Sometimes we want terrible events to have a reason, somebody to blame, but that isn’t always the case.”
Warring camps blasted each other inside my brain. Accident!
one side screamed while it fired away. The room was locked by the time I and most of the students were up there; the student teacher hadn’t smelled gas, and she would have had to, given the long time she waited for Reyes. And she had no reason to blow up her lover.
The other side of the battlefield was filled with logicians who pointed out that the police had no reason to suspect anything but an accident, and may have ignored signs pointing otherwise.
They thought Juan Reyes had been in there alone, and had himself created the explosion. And he was unconscious and unable to tell them otherwise. So the fact that it wasn’t declared a crime scene didn’t mean there had not been a crime.
“I heard it was terrorists.” That was George, a pudgy ninth grader whose voice was in the process of changing, quite publicly, and who was normally taciturn, presumably waiting until his vocal cords found their range and stayed there. This sentence had cost him.
Heard
broke in the middle and
terrorists
ended on a brittle high note.