Bloody Lessons (15 page)

Annie gave her another quick hug. She then said, “We need to finish up here. I don’t know about you, but my feet are beginning to turn into blocks of ice. Are you almost done with the valise?”

“Yes I…Annie, what was that
?” Laura stood up quickly and went over to the door. She leaned her head against it and listened. Then she opened up the door and took a step into the corridor. “No one there,” she said, coming back into the room. “It must have been just one of the other boarders coming or going. It’s been as quiet as a tomb; I had forgotten anyone else lived here.”

Annie felt
a sudden sense of urgency to complete their sad task and leave. She said, “It’s getting late. Let’s finish up as quickly as we can. I would like to be heading home well before it gets dark.”

Laura went over to the chair by the window where she had stacked some books and papers. “This shouldn’t take long. There are a few textbooks and novels of hers that I don’t own, so I will want to keep them. I wonder if it would be all right if I kept the valise. We need some way of carrying everything home.”

Annie nodded. “That seems a good idea. You can always send it back to her parents later if they want it. I am almost done with the box. There seems to be a thick envelope at the bottom with no address on it.”

Opening
up the flap on the business-sized envelope, Annie removed several smaller pieces of lined composition paper. When she unfolded the first, she was surprised to see it held nothing but a few lines written in large black capital letters. Assuming that this was some keepsake from one of the children Hattie had taught, she was about to hand it over to Laura when she suddenly took in the meaning of the words.

The note read:

DEAR MISS WILKS

YOU WHORE YOU DONT DESERVE

TO TEACH CHILDREN

A CONCERNED CITIZEN

*****

When Annie and Laura got home from Hattie’s boarding house, Nate was waiting for them. He didn’t usually come to visit her twice in a weekend, but he’d felt he needed to check in to see how Laura was doing after her trip to pack up her friend’s things. Once again
, she and Nate and Laura were meeting in Madam Sibyl’s small parlor in order for them to have some privacy.

“See, there are three of them,” Annie said to Nate, showing him the anonymous notes she’d found in Hattie’s box of correspondence. “All saying pretty much the same thing, although this last one is more explicit, indicating that if Hattie didn’t quit teaching, something bad would happen. See this phrase, ‘Go back to where you came from or else.’ What they don’t do is mention Russell, at all, but we must assume that it was her relationship with him that prompted the writer’s accusations.”

As Nate looked at the notes, Annie asked, “Does this sound at all like it might have come from the same person that wrote the accusatory letters to the school board about Mr. Emory and his friend, Mrs. Anderson?”

“Well, the suggestion of impropriety is similar, but, from Emory’s description, the letters sent to the school board were very businesslike. These look as if they came from a child, not the words
, of course, but the handwriting.”

“I wonder how they were delivered to her? There didn’t seem to be any envelopes. Could they have been put in her mailbox at Clement Grammar? How difficult would that be, Laura?”

“It wouldn’t be hard at all for another teacher, and the door isn’t locked so it wouldn’t be impossible for a student to slip in,” said Laura, who had been pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. “A student could always say they had been sent to put a note in one of the teacher’s boxes; I’ve seen that happen. But I can’t imagine a student, or a teacher, writing anything so awful.”

“Seems to me that if the letter to the school board and Hattie are by the same person, he or she was being very clever,” Annie said. “The school board might dismiss crude notes like this as the product of a diseased mind, but they would take seriously something more professionally written. Yet if you were Hattie and received this note, the very crudeness of it would be frightening. I can testify that the purpose of an anonymous note like this is to ignite fear in the recipient.” Annie looked at Nate, who nodded his understanding.

“Poor Hattie, how upsetting this must have been,” said Laura. “Why would anyone do such a thing to her? I mean, I understand that the purpose was to get her to quit teaching, but why? Unless this was part of Russell’s plan to hound her into marrying him.” Laura picked up the poker beside the fireplace and thrust it at the logs, causing them to collapse in a shower of sparks.

Annie looked over at Nate and shrugged, not knowing what to say about Laura’s continued determination to blame everything on Russell. Finally
, she said, “It seems too coincidental that two different people would be trying to disparage the morals of city school teachers, despite the difference in the letters’ styles. I can’t help but wonder if anyone else has received a similar note.”

Nate, agreeing, said, “I will definitely make sure that Emory, or Mrs. Anderson, ha
sn’t been withholding any information. They both told me they hadn’t received anything directly, but I can imagine that if Mrs. Anderson got something along these lines, she might not admit it.”

He then walked over to Laura and put his hand on her shoulder, forcing her to look at him before he went on. “I can only imagine how difficult all this is. But it is possible that your friend was the victim of a political or personal campaign to smear certain administrators in the school system. Russell is, after all, a Vice Principal. The letter Emory showed me accused the Vice Principal of Girls’ High of hiring Mrs. Anderson out of favoritism. Didn’t you tell us that Hattie suggested that she quit teaching at Clement Grammar because she didn’t want Russell to be accused of the same thing?”

Laura frowned, then sighed. “I guess so. I just wish she had confided the truth to me. I need to look at all this more objectively. Hattie always said…
Hattie
always said
that I needed to be careful not to try to fit my facts to prove my point but let the facts lead me to my conclusions. She had such a scientific mind.”

Annie interjected, “Well, I think it is much too soon to come to any conclusions.” She then turned to Nate and said, “Laura has granted me permission to read Russell’s letters first. You can be sure I will be looking for any evidence that he knew about these poisonous notes or Hattie’s pregnancy.”

“I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of you reading the man’s letters,” Nate responded. “But given the circumstances, I suppose someone must. I would be interested in the timing. If he refers to when Hattie received the notes or if the letters reveal when in the term Miss Wilks decided to quit, we might be able to see if it corresponds at all with the anonymous letters that were sent to the board this fall. I will also get Emory to investigate if any other people in authority got similar letters. It is possible, for example, that the Clement Grammar Principal got a letter making an accusation about Hattie and Russell but simply ignored it.”

“Oh, my heavens,” Laura said, her voice rising. “If these notes aren’t from Russell but some sort of broader attack against teachers or administrators, then it is possible that the person who wrote these letters continued to pressure Hattie in some fashion. That last note suggested something bad would happen if Hattie didn’t ‘go away.’ Hattie quit teaching, but she certainly didn’t go away…and then she died.”

Chapter Twenty

Wednesday afternoon, January 21, 1880

"With other members of the Committee on Salaries, I consider that a reduction of 30 per cent on the salaries of primary teachers would tend to destroy the usefulness of the School Department. Take away our good teachers and replace them by inexperienced ones, and the interior towns will reap the benefit of it, and their gain will be our loss" ––San Francisco School Board Director McDonnell,
San Francisco Chronicle
, 1879

“Miss Dawson, Johnny is jiggling in his seat so I can’t do my essay properly,” Betsy Clarke complained, looking smug. Since her desk, like most school desks, was attached to the seat in front of her, occupied by the fidgety John Jenkins, this had become a constant refrain.

“Mr. Jenkins, would you please get up and move to the chair next to Miss Blaine; take your paper and pen with you. And, Miss Clarke, I will expect that the second half of your essay will show extraordinary improvement in both content and form. Now class, back to work.”

Laura smiled at Kitty Blaine, who got Johnny settled and back to work in short order. There were now forty-two students in her seventh grade class, down from the fifty who were enrolled in the fall, and this meant that she had been able to ask the janitor, Mr. Ferguson, to remove the entire back row of desks. This left just two extra desks by the window at the back, where more often than not Johnny Jenkins sat under the watchful eye of her practice teacher. At first, Laura had made the mistake of being sympathetic to Betsy Clarke’s complaints; now she realized they were based primarily on the petite blonde’s desire to be the center of attention.

As the students returned to their work, she looked out over their bowed heads and realized that the more she got to know their distinct personalities, the more affection she had for them. The challenge was to figure out a way to reward their good qualities and not reinforce the less-than-admirable ones. She’d found, for example, the less fuss she made when Betsy complained, the better. On the other hand, the girl’s need for attention could be directed into getting her to work harder on perfecting her handwriting, which was often sloppy, whether Johnny was jiggling or not. And then there was Zachary Martin, who had grown so tall that he could barely contort his legs enough to fit under the rigid desk. He handled his embarrassment over how clumsy he’d become by acting the class clown. Annie had discovered, by accident, that the more she asked him to use his height to help her by opening up the top windows or taking down the globe from the top of the supply cabinet, the less he engaged in any tomfoolery. He was also very gentle with the smaller children, not at all a bully, so she had put him in charge of taking up the rear when they all walked to assembly.

The topic of bullies made her think of Buck, and this of course led to Seth Timmons. She was forced to reassess her opinion of him, once again, when she discovered letters from him among the correspondence she had brought home. She had left Russell’s letters and the anonymous nasty notes to Annie, but she read the six letters from Seth that she found when she went through the letters to Hattie. Two of the letters were written last summer, revealing that he had been working on a cattle ranch down near Los Angeles. These letters were very short, primarily asking after Hattie’s health, telling her about his success in solving a math problem that she had given him to work on, and commenting on the second volume of Martineau’s translation of the Frenchman Comte’s work on positivism, which he was reading in the evenings. Laura wasn’t sure whether she was more nonplussed to discover he was reading such a difficult work or that he seemed to agree with Comte’s views about human society. She couldn’t imagine how the men who worked with him would have reacted to a ranch hand who read Enlightenment philosophers.

The greatest shock, however, came when she read the third letter, written the second week of September, right after Seth’s first visit with Laura in Cupertino. From what he said, it was clear that Hattie had asked him to check up on her. Each of his subsequent letters reported on his visits to Laura, where they went each weekend––
up the trail into the Santa Cruz Mountains, a picnic along the Cupertino River, a drive to San Jose
, her health––
she looks tired, she doesn’t appear to be eating enough, she has a cold, the fresh air seemed to do her good
, and her state of mind––
she is anxious, she is having trouble with some of her students, she appears much happier after her visit home, and she won’t confide in me what is worrying her
.

Laura didn’t know whether to be touched that Hattie had been concerned about her or furious that she had enlisted Seth to spy on her. Mostly
, she was embarrassed to think of the way she had treated him last Sunday. Reading these letters, which she’d done several times in the past few days, hearing in her mind his calm and unemotional voice, she wondered how she could have ever thought that he had been the one to attack her. The idea now seemed absurd. His attention to her last fall had simply come from his desire to do Hattie a favor.

Probably, if he hadn’t figured out that
she was being harassed by Buck, he wouldn’t have come as often. He certainly wasn’t personally interested in her, given the unflattering nature of his comments.
How boring it must have been for him to drive around such an anxious, scrawny, sickly, incompetent woman every weekend.
All he had gotten for his pains was Laura’s public abuse when he tried to find out about Hattie’s death.

The least she could do was apologize. To that end
, she had sent him a short note, addressed to the Pine and Larkin School where he was teaching, asking if he would be willing to meet with her. She would have preferred to simply write an apology and leave it at that. However, since Seth’s letters made it plain that he was responding to letters he had gotten from Hattie, she needed to know what Hattie had written to him about Russell and her reasons for quitting teaching. It now seemed possible that Hattie might have confided details to Seth that she hadn’t been able or willing to confide in Laura.

Noting the time on her pocket watch, she brought her thoughts back to her job. She stood and announced that the students needed to put down their pens and pass their papers to the front. As usual, this spurred a flurry of last-minute
scribblings by some of the students and the rise of noise in the classroom as others opened their desktops to put their pens away.

Laura raised her voice. “Please, everyone be still until Miss Blaine has collected all of your papers. I want to remind you that there will be a spelling test first thing tomorrow. All of you using the
Fourth Reader
, make sure to bring your books to school because Miss Blaine is going to lead you in your discussion. I want you to show her how prepared you are.”

After Kitty walked over and placed the pile of collected essays on the desk, Laura turned back to the students and announced, “Dismissed.” Pandemonium ensued, but she was pleased at how cheerful everyone sounded as they chattered to their neighbors while they got out the books they needed for doing their homework and made their way to the back of the room to get their coats. Hattie always…yes, she wouldn’t shy away from the memory…Hattie always said that a classroom that was too quiet was a classroom where the students were too frightened to learn.

“Is there anything else you would like me to do, Miss Dawson?” said Kitty in her usual deferential manner, so at odds with her ease with the students. “I could erase the board before I go.”

Trying not to sound irritated, Laura replied, “No need, thank you. I will see you tomorrow then.” Since she would be waiting for Barbara, who had her weekly meeting of the Literature and Debate Society at Girls' High, Laura had plenty of time to clean the board and set it up for the next day. She would write the spelling words for their test, then cover it by hanging up the roller map of the United States. She had a suspicion that the janitor, Mr. Ferguson, might be letting some of his pets among her students sneak a peek at the board ahead of time, and this was her solution to that problem.

*****

She had just finished putting the spelling list on the board and taken the roller map from the supply cabinet when she heard a sound behind her and turned around, assuming it was Jamie coming in to see if she needed any help. Instead, she saw Seth Timmons standing at the back of the room, black Stetson in hand.

He nodded politely. “Miss Dawson, you asked to see me?”

She hadn’t expected to see him in person this soon, hadn’t really planned out what she wanted to say, so she just said, “Yes, thank you for coming.”

Then, aware that she was still holding the map, she decided to take advantage of his height, and she asked, “Would you mind unrolling this map and putting it up on those hooks so it hides the spelling list?”

He put down his hat and gloves on one of the desks and walked in an easy stride towards the front of the room. When he came over to take the map from her, their hands touched, and she noticed her fingers were all covered in chalk dust. She resisted the impulse to go over to the mirror at the back of the supply cabinet to see if she had transferred any chalk to her hair or face during the afternoon. It was an occupational hazard he would be familiar with, but she didn’t want him to think her untidy.

As he finished hanging the map, she said, “You mentioned that you were teaching at Pine and Larkin Primary. What grade?”
How stupid, of course I know he is at that school since I sent the note there. He must think me an idiot.

“Fourth.”

Taking out the handkerchief she kept tucked in her sleeve, she swiped ineffectually at the chalk on her hands and started talking quickly to fill the ensuing silence. “And how do you find your class? Pretty lively I might expect, at least from my limited experience. I must say I like teaching seventh-grade students much more than I did the younger students at Cupertino Creek. I was surprised that they hired you…I mean not you personally…it just was my understanding that schools generally hired women for the primary grades. I really think that is a mistake, but then what man would want to accept the low salaries that the school board is now offering primary teachers?” Laura stopped, aghast at where her nerves had taken her conversation.

Seth didn’t respond but simply looked at her, raising one eyebrow in the irritating way he had. She tried to rescue herself, saying, “I expect that teaching young boys and girls is an interesting alternative to herding cattle, which I gather you did this summer.”

“Yes, Miss Dawson, it is. But I don’t expect you asked to meet with me to discuss the relative merits of teaching and cattle ranching.” A slight smile deepened the indentations in his cheeks that echoed the curves of his mustache.

After reading his letters to Hattie, she’d realized that in all their rides together this fall she’d never thought to ask him how he had spent the previous summer. He must have thought her very rude and self-involved. But then, his one-syllable answers to the questions she did ask hadn’t encouraged her to press any further into his personal life.
But positivism and Comte, if I’d only known, what interesting discussions we could have had.

Taking a deep breath, Laura tried again to find her conversational footing. “I’m sorry
, Mr. Timmons; I don’t mean to waste your time. First of all, I do want to apologize for my reaction to seeing you at the Gardens. I confess that the death of Hattie, Miss Wilks, has seriously upset me.”

Seth made a dismissive motion with his right hand. “Miss Dawson, no need to apologize.
Being with Miss Wilks when she died must have been unsettling.”

“Yes, and I want to clarify. I didn’t really think you had followed me or attacked me
. It is just that…well, I never quite understood why you were being so attentive to me this fall. Now, having read Hattie’s correspondence from you, I realize you were simply responding to a request from her and that she had given you my address.”

Seth stiffened and said, “You read my letters?”

“Yes, Hattie’s parents asked me to go through her things, decide what needed to be kept.” Laura felt on the defensive at the accusatory tone in his deep voice. “I…well…I needed to know if she had confided in you about…I’m sorry…I am not explaining myself well.”

Laura had been so determined to find out what
Hattie’d told Seth in her letters to him that she hadn’t thought about how he might respond to this invasion of his privacy. Looking at how his grey eyes darkened under his frowning brows, she scrambled to make him understand her motivation. “You see, I wouldn’t have read them except that I am desperate to find out more about why Hattie decided to give up all her plans and marry Mr. Russell. There are some very suspicious circumstances around her death. I am afraid…”

“What do you mean, suspicious?” Seth asked, his voice rising as he took a quick step towards her.

“She was being persecuted by someone who made vicious accusations and may have hounded her to death. We found these notes…they said awful things, and it isn’t clear how she fell. In her last words to me, Hattie said something that makes me suspect that it might not have been an accident…so you can see…” Laura faltered, now afraid she may have said too much. Just because Hattie had trusted him didn’t mean that he was trustworthy. Oh, why hadn’t she taken the time to check with Annie or Nate about the wisdom of meeting with Seth? Or at least have planned out how to approach this conversation.