We need to talk…
She replayed the conversation she’d overheard between Walt and Dave. Although, as she’d told Jace, she couldn’t remember it word-for-word, she also couldn’t make anything about it match the story Walt had told him.
Maybe Walt felt he owed her an explanation, but after the last few days, she wasn’t in the mood to hear it. Not now.
She closed the note and slid it back among the other papers in her cubbyhole. Childish, perhaps, but if Walt came back to see if she’d read it, he wouldn’t be able to tell.
She thought about changing the time she’d signed out before she realized that, despite the fact that was after he’d left the note, Walt couldn’t know that she’d come behind the counter to check her mailbox. She could talk to him tomorrow, she decided. Clear up whatever the misunderstanding was.
Except, if she left without seeing him, she’d wonder what he’d wanted. To come clean about the lie? If that were the case, it would be more appropriate to talk to the police.
Maybe he wanted to try and pressure her into recanting
her
version of the conversation. Or to explain why his version didn’t match hers. In any case…
She walked around the counter and down the hall toward Dave’s office. Surely Jace had verified Walt’s story with the principal. And if he hadn’t, she needed to do that before she listened to what Walt had to say.
She tapped lightly on the door. She waited several seconds before she tapped again, more forcefully this time. There was still no answer.
She reached down, her finger seeming to wrap of their own accord around the knob. She hesitated briefly before she tried to turn it and found it locked.
Dave was as exhausted as the rest of them. Maybe, like Shannon, he’d left early. If so, she couldn’t blame him.
Although the faculty had had to deal with the still-grieving students today, the responsibility for the well-being of the entire school fell to the principal. If anything else happened, Dave would be the one who’d be blamed, fair or not.
Five minutes, she decided. She could spare that much time to look for Walt. And then she’d leave, feeling as if she’d done the best she could with her own responsibilities.
L
indsey decided the janitor must have started on one of the other floors this afternoon. The doors to the basement classrooms were all open, although the lights were off. Nor were there any noises that would indicate the cleaning crew was down here. The corridor seemed deserted, her footsteps echoing off the long expanse of tile and concrete.
She’d always been glad she’d never been assigned to one of these rooms, which she found depressing. When the school population had outgrown the building, the board had discovered that the cheapest way to add instructional space was to convert areas used for other purposes.
These windowless classrooms had been created from what had been the original basement. Pipes, ductwork, and beams had been covered where possible and left exposed when the cost to hide them had been prohibitive.
Some of the teachers who worked down here bragged about the fact that they were so distant from the office—and from supervision. A few professed there were fewer distractions. Others, like Walt Harrison, were so single-minded they would have been able to teach in any conditions.
She had already decided by the time she reached her destination that this was a wild-goose chase, but since she was this close there was no reason not to finish what she’d begun. Like all the others, the lights were off in Walt’s room.
She stopped just outside the door, pitching her voice to carry inside. “Walt?”
There was no answer. A glance at her watch revealed it was now 3:30 p.m. He had probably decided she wasn’t coming this late and had gone out the back.
What the hell was she doing down here? If Walt wanted to talk, he knew where her room was. And in the meantime, Shannon was waiting for a friend bearing booze.
Annoyed with herself, she quickened her pace toward the stairs, the click of her steps giving voice to her annoyance. She’d already reached out to grasp the metal railing when she realized there was another sound in the stillness of the deserted hall.
An echo of her heels hitting the tile? She stopped, holding her breath as she listened.
Not an echo. Whatever she’d heard was still there. Subtle and regular. Still unidentifiable.
For the first time, she felt a touch of unease. She was completely isolated down here from the other parts of the building. As she tried to rationalize her anxiety, she remained conscious of the sound. Soft and steady, it underlay the silence around her, like the beat of her own heart.
She lifted her hand from the rail and, careful not to make any noise, turned so that she was again facing the basement corridor. Its waxed tile gleamed under the overhead light.
Straining, she attempted to pinpoint the source of what she was hearing. And realized there was no question.
It was coming from the open doorway of the classroom closest to the stairs. She took the few steps that would bring her back to that door, pausing again to listen.
From here, what she heard sounded like a squeak. The noise a wheel would make turning repeatedly past a place that needed oiling, the intervals between unvaried.
She stepped forward, her right hand feeling for the switch inside the door. The resultant buzz of the fluorescents masked whatever she’d heard, but as the lights came up, they revealed the source of the sound. And despite her growing horror, she couldn’t pull her gaze away.
A rope had been looped over one of the exposed metal beams in the ceiling. The body hanging from it swayed slightly in the draft flowing out of a vent in the exposed ductwork. An overturned student desk lay directly below the dangling feet.
Since the face was turned away from her, she couldn’t make an identification. Her impression was that this was a male, but she couldn’t be sure. Not from here. With that realization, the paralysis of shock dissolved, allowing her to think again.
Maybe he wasn’t dead. If she could get him down—
She rushed forward, frantically pushing aside the overturned desk in order to get closer. By then her eyes had found the face, blackened and distorted from the effects of the rope, unrecognizable still, but definitely a boy’s.
She righted the desk, climbing onto its seat to grasp his legs. If she could raise him and ease that terrible pressure…Or somehow get him down…
She could do neither. Her stretching fingers couldn’t begin to loosen that cruel knot. Not even when she put one foot up on the flat part of the desk to allow her a longer reach.
As she worked, struggling to do something that might change what was happening, she became aware of the sounds emanating from her own throat. They were guttural. Unintelligible. Like an animal caught in a trap.
And then finally—irrevocably—she knew there was nothing she could do alone. If she were to have any chance to save this boy, she had to get help.
She turned to climb down from her precarious perch only to have the desk literally tip over with her. She jumped, preventing herself from falling only by stumbling into another of the disordered desks.
Her purse lay near the door, exactly where she’d dropped it when she’d identified the noise. She ran to grab it, scattering its contents onto the floor as she frantically searched for her phone. Panting, she flipped open the case and pressed in 9-1-1. It seemed an eternity until the dispatcher picked up.
“Lowen County 9-1-1. What’s your emergency, please?”
“I’m at the high school. Down in the basement. First room to the right of the stairs. A boy has hanged himself. I can’t get him down, and I don’t think there’s anyone else down here.”
That’s what she should have done, she realized. Run upstairs for help. She knew there were people still up there.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
She swallowed to ease the dryness of her throat while she concentrated on the dispatcher’s question. “Lindsey Sloan. I’m a teacher. You have to get somebody here right away. They’ll have to cut him down. I tried to loosen the rope and—”
“This is at Randolph-Lowen High School, ma’am?”
“That’s right. In the basement.”
“And this person is still alive?”
Was he?
Her eyes went back to the body, still gently moving in the flow of the air conditioner. The image of the blood-suffused face was in her mind’s eye, but she denied what it told her.
“I don’t know. Please. Just get somebody over here.”
“They’re already on their way, ma’am. Maybe you could get somebody upstairs to direct them to your location.”
“I don’t think—Okay. Okay. I’ll do that.”
There was no point trying to explain. Beth had been in the guidance office minutes ago. And Jay was still here, although the choral room was at the other end of the building. Surely there would be someone closer. Someone stronger.
She needed to get upstairs and find someone. They could probably get the body down before the paramedics arrived.
“Don’t hang up, ma’am,” the dispatcher cautioned. “You stay with me until they get there.”
“Okay, but I have to go upstairs. There may be somebody there who can help.”
With the open phone in her hand, Lindsey scrambled up and began to run. As she reached the stairs, she began to scream, and she kept screaming until finally somebody answered.
Jace got to the school only a few minutes after the paramedics, but not in time to watch them cut the kid’s body down. He did what he could to secure the scene, but everybody’s focus was, as it should have been, on trying to save a life.
As the EMTs worked over the boy, Jace turned his attention to the room. He’d seen enough dead people to understand that nobody could help this kid now. At least not medically.
He hadn’t seen Lindsey, but he knew from the dispatcher that she’d placed the original call. He hoped that didn’t mean she’d discovered the body. He couldn’t imagine what that would do to the fragile hold she’d managed to keep on her emotions.
When the paramedic finally looked up at him and shook his head, Jace asked the question he’d been wondering about for the last five minutes. “Any ID?”
“Haven’t had a chance to check.”
Obediently the medic began searching for a billfold. He appeared to be not too many years out of high school himself. And currently green around the gills.
“Here you go.” The EMT held a wallet out.
Jace weighed the risks of contaminating any evidence against waiting for the techs to arrive, which might be as much as an hour. He decided that, as quickly as news traveled in this town, he needed a name for the deceased. Besides, from what he could tell, there was no reason to think this was anything other than what it appeared—the copycat event everyone had warned might happen.
“Thanks.” Jace took the billfold, allowing it to fall open.
The first thing he saw was the driver’s license, with its smiling picture. The second was the name.
Tim Harrison.
He knew then that his first instinct hadn’t been wrong.
Maybe this wasn’t a crime scene. Maybe this kid had thrown that rope over the metal girder and put the noose around his own neck. Even if that
was
the way it had gone down, whatever had driven Harrison to that act was somehow connected to everything else that had happened in this town since that first fire.
And maybe, just maybe, this was the thread that would help him unravel all the others.
“What made you think this was from Harrison?”
Jace looked up from the note Lindsey had handed him to find her eyes clinging to his. She looked shell-shocked. Even more traumatized than the night of the fire at the stadium.
The urge to take her in his arms was so strong Jace deliberately broke the connection between them by looking down at the paper he held. Right now, Lindsey was a witness. And that meant their relationship was strictly professional.
“Jay told me Walt was looking for me. When I saw that,” she nodded toward the note, “I assumed it was from him.”
“And if you hadn’t run into Jay? Who would you have assumed this was from?”
“Walt prints everything. I would still have thought it was from him. Maybe to clear the air between us, if nothing else.”
“And when you got to his room, no one was there.”
“I figured, as late as it was, he’d already left. I started back to the stairs and that’s when I heard the sound. I don’t know why I hadn’t been aware of it on the way
to
Walt’s room. Thinking about what he might want to say, I guess.”
“What kind of relationship did they have?”
“Tim and Walt? They were father and son, Jace. They were close. They loved one another.”
“They ever fight?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure they did. Every parent and teenager fight. Ninety-nine percent of the time it doesn’t mean anything. A kid trying to assert his independence.”
“Was Tim doing that?”
“I didn’t know them that well. All I can tell you is that they seemed close. Walt was very concerned about Tim after Andrea’s death—” She stopped, her eyes locking on his.
“Why would he be ‘very’ concerned?”
“We were all concerned. About
all
the kids. Especially those in the program. It’s a relatively small group. Most of them have gone to school together all their lives.”
Every word she’d said was careful. Deliberately chosen. As if she didn’t want to plant any ideas about Tim Harrison that Jace might take and run with.
“Did he have a history of depression? Any kind of psychological problems? Anything that would make his father feel he was especially vulnerable after Andrea’s suicide?”
“Not that I’m aware of. If he
did
have problems, I couldn’t tell from his attitude or his performance.”
“Good kid?”
“Absolutely. Sharp. Funny.” Her voice broke on the last, but then she outwardly controlled the emotion he could still read in her eyes. “This is going to devastate this community.”
“You said Walt always printed. Did everybody know that?”
“The faculty certainly did. His students, too, of course.”
“What if it were printed and phrased to make you
think
it was from Harrison?”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“To get you down there.”
“You think Tim wanted
me
to find him? But…he wasn’t
in
Walt’s room. Why send me there, if that’s what he wanted?”
Jace hadn’t considered that Tim might have written the note, but it
was
a possibility. Something else Harrison might be able to clear up. And maybe it was better to let Lindsey think he’d been talking about the victim. Less frightening than the possibility he had been considering.
“The room by the stairs is the only one where they couldn’t enclose the ducts without lowering the ceiling below standards. It’s the only one left with exposed beams. Maybe he figured that if he could get you down here…”
“Why me?”
“Maybe for the same reason Andrea came to you. He knew you’d care.”
Jace couldn’t know if he was on track with either scenario until he’d talked to Harrison. After all, the history teacher might have written the note himself. Just as Lindsey thought originally.
Since Walt’s car hadn’t been in the parking lot, he’d sent two patrolmen to his house to deliver the news. Normally that was something he’d feel an obligation to do himself, but judging from the teacher’s animosity when he’d questioned him about the conversation in the field house, Jace figured he’d be the last person from whom Harrison would want to hear this.
“If Walt
did
just want to talk, then I guess your being the one to find the body is another coincidence.”
“I know you think this is all connected, but what if it’s not? What if we just have two troubled kids—”
“I’d say there were more than two, wouldn’t you? Unless you’re implying that Andrea and Tim set the church fires.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I just don’t think there has to be a connection between these suicides and the church fires.”
“And the attacks on you? Any connection to those? And the fact that these two ‘troubled’ kids are in your program, Lindsey? Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It tells me you’ve targeted them from the beginning. You had made up your mind on that the first time we talked.”