Authors: William G. Tapply
“I’ll see you at three-thirty.”
“Well, actually—”
“Unless you’d rather come to my office in Boston.”
“No, no,” he said. “Three-thirty’s fine.”
Dolley Madison Regional High School looked like a hospital—half a dozen joyless two-story interconnected rectangular concrete-and-brick structures with large opaque Plexiglas windows and a forest of chimneys and pipes and vents sticking out of the flat roofs. It was situated at the end of a long curving driveway off a wooded side road a little south of Route 2 and west of 495 on the town line between Loomis and Harlow. I’d found it by stopping at a Cumberland Farms on the outskirts of Leominster for directions.
I parked at a Visitors Only sign in the turnaround near what seemed to be the main entrance, although it was unmarked. I was right on time—three-thirty on the nose—and the place seemed deserted. A large sweep of lush green playing fields off to the right—a baseball diamond, a track, and two soccer fields—were empty. So was the big fenced-in parking area on the other side of the structure. No gaily chatting high school kids were wandering into or out of Dolley Madison Regional.
I figured classes had ended at two or two-fifteen. By now, all the kids were off to their afternoon jobs, or riding around in their cars, or scoring some dope, or getting laid, or whatever it is high school kids do on a sunny afternoon in early June when the birds are singing and summer vacation is only a couple of weeks away. Hanging around the campus was apparently not a popular after-school activity at Dolley Madison Regional.
I sat there in my car with the windows rolled down and smoked a cigarette, determined to walk into Principal Moyle’s office late enough to make him sweat a little. I had nothing whatsoever against the man beyond the fact that he insisted on being called “Doctor.” By my way of thinking, if you sliced into people’s abdomens to remove malignant tumors or fitted their shattered tibias back together or delivered their babies, you had a right to be addressed as “Doctor,” and that title should be distinguished from the one they conferred upon the earnest folks who’d passed classes in Educational Psychology and Modern Multimedia Techniques and Advanced Secondary Administration at the B.U. School of Ed.
I waited until quarter of four to go inside. I followed the Main Office sign to an open area barricaded by a chest-high counter. Behind the counter was a cluster of desks, and beyond the desks were three closed doors. A secretary sat at one of the desks. She appeared to be somewhere in her forties, with short permed brown hair and bright orange lipstick. She was frowning at a computer screen through half-moon glasses and rhythmically poking her chin with the eraser end of a pencil.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me?”
She turned, pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose, and squinted up at me. “Yes?”
“My name is Brady Coyne,” I said. “I have an appointment with Mr. Moyle.”
“Doctor
Moyle,” she said. She glanced up at the clock on the wall, then scowled at me as if I had shown her a note containing a patently trumped-up excuse for being tardy to gym class. “Well, I’ll see if he’s ready for you.” She got up, went to one of the closed doors, tapped on the glass window, then opened it carefully and leaned her head inside. I heard the murmur of voices. Then she stepped aside and held the door wide open. “Come in, please. Dr. Moyle can see you now.”
I went around the counter, wended my way among the desks, and slipped past the secretary, who continued to hold onto the door as if it might otherwise get away. “Thanks,” I said to her.
“Quite all right, sir,” she said with a little sigh, implying that it actually had been a major ordeal for her.
Ronald Moyle stood up from behind his desk, smiled, and said, “Mr. Coyne. Hello.” He leaned over his desk and held out his hand. I took it. His grip was manly enough, and he maintained excellent eye contact throughout, which I figured he’d been taught in his second-year graduate seminar on Public Relations and Crisis Management.
He was younger and more rugged than I’d expected. He wore chino pants and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, no jacket or necktie. Somewhere in his late thirties, I guessed. Shorter than me, but broad-shouldered and slim-waisted and fit. Sandy hair just beginning to form a widow’s peak over his forehead, dark intelligent eyes, long crooked nose, hesitant smile.
A silver-framed portrait of himself along with a severe-looking dark-haired woman and two chubby grammar school girls sat on his desk. Behind it hung two diplomas. The doctorate was from Harvard. Okay, not B.U.
He came around from behind his desk and waved at a pair of leather chairs. “Let’s sit,” he said.
We sat—under a framed reproduction of an oil painting of Dolley Madison, if I wasn’t mistaken. She was stitching together an American flag. “Mr. Moyle,” I began. “Excuse me. Doctor.”
He smiled quickly. “Ron,” he said. “Please. And I have a pretty good idea why you’re here. Mrs. Fallon, right?”
I nodded. “I’m her husband’s attorney.”
“I know. I did a little checking.” He shook his head. “This is a terrible, shocking thing. Our students are very upset. Well, all of us are, of course. Kaye was very popular. We’ve had a moment of silence in her memory every morning this week in homeroom. Some of the kids are talking about starting up a scholarship in her name.”
I smiled and nodded.
“I know she’d been through a lot lately,” he continued. “Separating from her husband, the divorce pending. She found fulfillment here at Madison, Mr. Coyne. Our little community was like a family for her, I believe. Kaye was just a wonderful person. Warm, patient, caring. Everybody loved her. She was a good teacher, very dedicated, very versatile. I could assign her to anything and feel confident that she’d actually teach something. Most subs, you know, the best you can hope for is that they take accurate attendance and keep the kids in their seats.” He waved the back of his hand at me. “Well, I don’t guess you wanted to see me about Kaye’s professional qualifications.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m trying to figure out who murdered her.” I noticed a square glass ashtray on the corner of his desk. “Okay if I smoke?”
He grinned. “Madison is a strictly a no-smoking campus, Mr. Coyne. But I’ll tell you a secret. Late in the afternoon, when everyone is gone except me, I sometimes pull the blinds, lock the door, and puff on a cigar. I hope no one ever sees me, of course. But if they did, I guess I wouldn’t mind being an object lesson in independent thinking. Hell, I’m the damn principal, and I am frankly appalled at the extremes to which political correctness has gone. We’ve got three pages of guidelines in the student handbook, and it’s even infiltrated the curriculum. There are community watchdog committees, for heaven’s sake. I must get a dozen complaints a month about some poor history teacher who hasn’t given equal billing to the Native American or the African American or the Greek American heroes and heroines who made this country great, or about some veteran Brit Lit teacher who spends more time on Shakespeare than on female poets.” He smiled. “Why do you think they named this school after a president’s wife? Sometimes I just want to smoke a cigar, you know? It makes me feel like an autonomous human being. Go ahead. Smoke if you want.”
I lit a cigarette and held out my pack to Moyle.
He waved it away. “I thought Kaye Fallon was murdered by her husband.”
“He hasn’t been arrested for it,” I said.
“Innocent until proven guilty, huh?”
I nodded. “Something like that. I happen to think he
is
innocent, and—”
“And you’re trying to figure out who really did it,” he said. “So how can I help you?”
“To be precise,” I said, “I’m trying to round up ammunition for the defense, anticipating the possibility that Mr. Fallon could be arrested.”
Moyle frowned. “I don’t believe I ever even met the man. I don’t think anybody here at Madison did. Kaye lived in Lexington, you know, which is a whole different world from our little blue-collar communities out here. She drove in every day, did her job, and left.”
“But she was well known here.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Popular, I think you said.”
He nodded. “I said she was loved.”
“By the faculty as well as the students?”
“Well, Kaye wasn’t much for socializing in the faculty lounge during free periods, and I’m not sure she had any close friends among her colleagues. But I’m positive she had no enemies, if that’s what you mean.”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I don’t know if that is what I mean. I’m just trying to track down people who knew Kaye.” If I’d wanted to tell him the actual truth, I would’ve asked about the boy Gretchen Conley had mentioned, the boy who’d tried to kiss her. But I wanted to see if Ronald Moyle would volunteer that himself.
He stared up at the ceiling for a minute. “Well,” he said, “I guess I knew her better than anybody. She wasn’t in any one department. As a sub, she circulated to wherever I needed her. Most mornings she reported right here to me, and I sent her off. I hired her to substitute for one of our math teachers, oh, seven or eight years ago, I guess it was, and then three years ago I offered her the position of permanent sub.”
“What’s a permanent sub?” I said.
Moyle waved a hand in the air. “You come in every day and you cover anything that needs to be covered. Most days, you’re on duty every single period. It’s a lousy job, actually, but you’d have thought I’d told Kaye she won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. She started down at the bottom of the salary schedule, but it gave her a regular paycheck.” He smiled. “When she told me she was getting a divorce, she seemed very grateful to have a secure source of income.”
“Did she express that to you directly?” I said.
He cocked his head at me. “Well, yes, actually. She came to me sometime this past winter and point-blank asked if her job was secure. I told her I intended to put her name in for tenure. She seemed very pleased. I inferred she did not feel confident that her husband would be able to support her.” Moyle arched his eyebrows at me, asking for confirmation.
I did not bite. “Was there anybody on the faculty who she was friendly with, had a relationship with?”
“I can’t think of anybody. Like I said, she didn’t socialize much. A substitute teacher doesn’t get much opportunity for socializing.”
“How about you?” I said. “Would you say you had a relationship with her?”
“Relationship?”
“Would you say you were friends?”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he said. “I was her principal.”
“But she confided in you about her marriage, her pending divorce, her financial insecurity.”
“Well, yes. In the context of her job. I don’t see—”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said quickly.
“If you’re asking me if she ever mentioned anyone who might want to murder her,” he said, “the answer is no. Not her husband, certainly no one here on the staff. Not anyone. If you’re asking me if I myself had any reason to—to harm her, the answer is emphatically no.” He cocked his head at me. “Were you asking me that?”
I waved my hand. “Of course not.” I smiled reassuringly. “What about students?”
“Students?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Students.”
“Who might have reason to…?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “I can’t…Well, there was one boy.” He shook his head. “No, that’s absurd.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“It was a year and a half ago,” he said slowly. “In the fall. Not too long before Kaye separated from her husband, as I recall. This boy apparently had quite a crush on her. Lingered after school, walked her to her car. That sort of thing. Finally Kaye told me about it. She said her husband was concerned.”
“And what happened?”
“She was covering for one our special ed teachers who’d taken a maternity leave. I needed her to handle that class for the entire term. So I transferred the boy out.”
“And that was the end of it?”
He shrugged. “I believe so.”
“Did the boy actually do anything? Threaten Kaye?”
“Not as far as I know. She was quite fond of him, actually, very apologetic that she had to speak to me about it.”
“And what about the boy? How’d he react when you switched him?”
“I don’t remember any unusual reaction.” Moyle combed his fingers through his hair. “Will Powers was his name. Actually, he dropped out of school shortly after that.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“Last I knew, he was working the pit at the Jiffy Lube.” He turned to face me. “Look, Mr. Coyne. Will Powers has a learning disorder. He’s quite bright, but he doesn’t process information in the normal way.” He laughed quickly. “Sorry. ‘Process information.’ Jargon. What I mean to say is, the boy reads at about the fourth-grade level, okay? But he’s not unstable or emotionally disturbed or antisocial. He’s a pretty good kid who probably only connected with one teacher in his entire educational experience. He was held back a couple times in elementary school, ended up with younger kids as peers. A bit alienated, some minor acting-out behavior, but not really what you’d call a troublemaker. We have a lot of kids like Will. Sometimes we get somewhere with them and sometimes, I’m afraid, we fail. Will might’ve graduated and gone on to college if he’d had Kaye Fallon working with him. But…”
“Did Kaye tell you Will tried to kiss her?”
“Huh? Kiss her? God, no. She said nothing like that.”
Moyle shook his head. “Where’d you hear that?”
I waved my hand. “Secondhand information, Ron. What we lawyers call hearsay. Maybe it’s just a rumor.”
“Well, I never heard that rumor, but even if it’s true, it doesn’t mean—”
“No,” I said quickly. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Still, I’d like to talk to Will Powers. So how do I get to this Jiffy Lube?”
When I pulled out of the school’s driveway, I found myself at a figurative as well as a literal crossroads. Take a right and I’d be on Route 2 in ten minutes, heading west to the Swift River. A fly rod, a pair of waders, a fishing vest crammed with boxes of flies, and other essential gear always rode in the trunk of my BMW with me, and I had at least three hours of daylight left. In June, little sulphur-colored mayflies hatch on the Swift about the time the sun leaves the water, and the trout come to the surface to eat them. I could be there in an hour.