The Theban Mysteries (11 page)

Suppose she had not come alone, or had been induced, enticed, enforced—could the other person have managed to arrive and depart between dog rounds? It seemed an outside chance, surely. Kate reminded herself that without even those meager facts the police were now collecting, all such speculation was foolish. Well, sensible, perhaps, in that it prevented the picture of that terrified boy and then the terrified woman from occupying her mind.

At the door of the room on the third floor, Kate found Reed. He was chatting with someone, no doubt a detective from the police force. Kate glanced quickly toward the room but saw nothing. “They’ve taken her away,” Reed said. “I was just about ready to go in search of you. Hi.” This last to Julia, whom he knew. “I guess I have something approaching information for your head lady.”

“Do you want to see her now?” Julia asked.

“Is there anywhere we could get some coffee?” Reed asked.

“There’s always a pot going in the faculty sitting room. With the school closed, the place might even be decently deserted.”

It was characteristic of the Theban that, however great the need for space as the student body expanded, the faculty sitting room, which served no practical purpose whatever in the functioning of the school, was retained. It was an enormously comfortable room, filled with rather shabby easy chairs and a hot plate on
which the promised pot of coffee pleasantly perked. Reserved for the faculty and never, no matter what the pressure, used for anything else, the room added greatly to the morale of the teaching staff. It was rumored around the Theban that the opinion of that room was a determining factor whenever the trustees chose a new head of the school. Anyone who found the room impractical (which it was) or space which could more obviously have been used for classrooms (requiring very little expenditure of funds for conversion) or a snobbish affectation, as though the Theban were an English college requiring a senior common room, cast immediate doubt upon herself as a suitable candidate. Such thoughts were considered to emanate from the sort of person who thought you should erect buildings in parks and hot-dog stands in national forests. But what good, Kate reminded herself, is morale in a school closed by a particularly horrible death? Parents had always been a problem to schools, certainly, but schools were not expected to deal with difficult parents by having them devoured, or anyway confronted, by vicious dogs.

“This is nice,” Reed said. “I like your school and I hope it doesn’t suffer too much from this mess.”

“What we wanted to ask you,” Julia said, pouring out coffee, “is if there is any chance the body was dropped here this morning, after the dogs were back up in their cage. That’s what Mr. O’Hara insists, but then he’s awfully defensive about his dogs.”

“He’s going to have to be,” Reed said, reclining happily in a large chair and stretching his legs before him. “I’d like to go up and see them, by the way, but only
after asking nicely and being invited. I’ve no official standing.”

“Did you know those detectives?” Julia asked.

“Oh, yes. One does, you know. That’s why I thought I might as well tag along. Besides, Kate was getting to look rather haunted, and I didn’t want her to faint in a corner only to be discovered by those unfortunate dogs, who would never live
that
down.”

Kate grinned at him. Indeed, the news this morning had rocked her more than she would have thought possible. She had great affection for the Theban, as one does for one’s school if one has been happy there, but more than that she knew how all private schools and colleges were making their perilous ways on the thin line between financial and educational bankruptcy. She hated to see the Theban sacrificed to the peculiar fate of the Jablon family.

Miss Tyringham had telephoned at seven, not the crack of dawn certainly for someone connected with a school which opened its doors at eight-fifteen, but for Kate, a late riser, the bell appeared to be ringing in the middle of the night. She answered it, since Reed was showering (Tallulah Bankhead, when asked why she had never married, explained that all men rose early and took showers, which Kate, on marrying, was astonished to find true, however much it infuriated Reed to be referred to as “all men”) and heard that there was a crisis. There was, indeed, a body.

“Mr. O’Hara discovered it this morning on his way downstairs,” Miss Tyringham explained over the telephone. “Never mind how it got there, or if it died there. Perhaps your clever husband, with all his criminal experience,
you know what I mean, can tell us. Anyway, the police doubtless will. Does your husband
know
the police personally?” she had gone on to ask with less than her usual finesse. Still, Kate thought, finesse under these circumstances would have bordered on the cold-blooded.

“Have you made sure …” Kate began, and then stopped. “Shall I come over now,” she asked, “with Reed in tow if he hasn’t fifteen unbreakable appointments?”

“My dear, would you? Julia is on her way. You both were here, really so comfortably
here
the other time, and this does seem so similar, alas, except of course that the poor woman is dead. First the boy and now his mother—they really are a most
unfortunate
family.”

“But what on earth was the mother doing there—I mean,
she
wasn’t hiding out, surely?”

“What she was doing here, my dear, is the whole point, I’m certain. But dead men tell no tales, unless the criminal investigation department can make them, if it is called the criminal investigation department. Mr. O’Hara says if they say the dogs did it they’re not worth a tinker’s damn, which is the nearest he gets to cussing before ladies, even under extreme provocation. In my more frivolous moments I used to amuse myself by wondering how he cussed in the army.”

“Not with any words your fourth graders don’t know these days, I assure you,” Kate said. “We won’t be long, I hope. Reed’s shower has just stopped. I guess he only sang one show this morning.”

“One show?” Miss Tyringham sounded pitifully willing to have the conversation achieve a note of lightness.

“He sings his way through Rodgers and Hart or Cole Porter. Occasionally Berlin or Kern, but only if he’s feeling springlike, which he rarely is, even in spring.”

“Tell him to sing ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ for me,” Miss Tyringham said. “Maybe it’ll bust out sooner.”

“He hates Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Kate said. “Too gooey, too wholesome, and too many missing final g’s. But I’ll suggest ‘Easter Parade’ and he might feel near enough to the occasion to try that. I’ll hang up now and see you soon.”

It was all very well to try to pretend that life goes on, but when Reed and Kate had arrived at the school and talked with Miss Tyringham in the lobby, the sense of doom began settling over them like a cloud.

“Tell me what happened, from the beginning,” Reed said.

“The police are upstairs now,” Miss Tyringham nervously observed.

“Never mind. They’re doing the usual routine, and waiting for the medical examiner. Who found her?”

“Mr. O’Hara. Will they remove her soon?”

“Oh, yes. As soon as they get pictures, measurements, and the rest. Go on.”

“Mr. O’Hara called me at, oh, about six I guess. I was up as usual practicing the cello. He had taken the dogs out in the usual way. When …”

“What is the usual way?” Reed asked, ignoring the fact that Miss Tyringham’s usual way was to play the cello at six in the morning. He had often pointed out to Kate that one of the most extraordinary aspects of murder investigations was the habits you discovered being
practiced by the most conventional-appearing people. He supposed to so busy a woman, six o’clock in the morning provided the only undisturbed hour she could count on when she was not too weary from the demands of the educational world to hold the cello up between her knees.

“Very early in the morning he takes the dogs out for their run in the park. He takes them down in one of the elevators to distinguish this outing from business—I gather that’s important with dogs. Seeing-eye dogs, I understand, are taken out for their personal tours by someone other than the blind person they lead. Not that that’s either here or there. I have unfortunately noticed that one of the effects of the strain of all this is that I tend to go on, and on, and on. Perhaps,” she added sadly, “it’s age.”

“Don’t worry,” Reed said. “It’s your way of holding on in the dark, and not a bad way either. So he didn’t see the body, one supposes, on his way down in the elevator.”

“No, he did not. After the dogs have gone back up in the elevator, however, he brings down the second elevator and waits for Mrs. Shultz, who’s in charge of the kitchen, to come, which she does at seven. He lets her in, and she runs him back up to the roof, and brings the elevator down again so that they are both on the main floor when the children and faculty arrive, the elevator operators having arrived in the meantime. I do hope that’s clear.”

“Perfectly.”

“Good.
Then
he walks down having a final look at each floor and turning off the alarms on each floor.”

“Can’t they be turned off by a central switch upstairs?”

“That would have been expensive and, in any case, he fastens some sort of bolt on each one as he turns it off so that the children, should they bounce up and down on the darn thing, won’t rattle it.”

“I see.”

“She was in the room—the body, I mean, Mrs. Jablon I should say—right across from the alarm on the third floor; it’s an art studio, and the sun comes in in the morning. He couldn’t miss seeing her, which was fortunate, considering what might have happened if he hadn’t, if she’d been in some other room, and the children had all trooped in …” Miss Tyringham’s voice trailed away at the impossibility of describing
that
. “As it was, you see,” she went on, “we were able to call through and stop most of the children, and the ones who had left too early to get the message were turned back at the door with a vague story about breaking and entering. Not,” she drearily added, “that I have any hopes of keeping this out of the newspapers. A body is a body, and in a schoolroom it’s a damn bloody corpse—the adjective is vulgar, not descriptive: I gather from Mr. O’Hara that there was no blood.”

“It may not be important,” Reed asked, “but how in the world could you call five hundred children in what must have been well under an hour by then, or slightly fewer, I suppose, allowing for siblings.”

“TAS,” Miss Tyringham said, clearly happy to be back on familiar ground. “The Theban Alert System—it’s been called TAS affectionately since long before my day. No doubt Kate remembers it?” She turned questioningly to Kate.

“Oh, my, yes,” Kate said. “When there was a snowstorm
one always hovered over the phone to see if TAS would call. If it didn’t by eight, off to school you went.”

“As you suggested,” Miss Tyringham explained, “it would be close to impossible to call five hundred people, certainly in under an hour. And we must have an absolute rule that, if there is any question about the school opening, no one, no one, is to telephone to ask. We would simply have a swamped switchboard, Miss Strikeland would have hysterics, and everyone’s phone would be so busy while they were trying to call that they couldn’t be reached. If the school is to be closed for any reason, and I make such a decision in consultation with the section heads, four parents are called. They in turn each call three parents, one from each class, and these mothers now call others in her daughter’s class, who call others, all pre-arranged. It works very well, though I’m not explaining it as clearly as I might.”

“It couldn’t be clearer. So you managed to close the school for the day, a wise decision. Then what happened?”

“It wasn’t so much ‘then’ as ‘meanwhile.’ When Mr. O’Hara had called me, I told him to get in touch with Dr. Green as soon as possible, before calling the police, and to leave Mrs. Shultz downstairs to prevent anyone’s entering the building except Dr. Green—that seemed sensible.”

“I do admire people who can think clearly in a crisis,” Kate said.

“Thank you for those kind words. Dr. Green came quickly; she’s the school doctor and is used to our ways and devoted to the school. She realized immediately
that she mustn’t move the body, but she did make certain that the body was dead, something I have always thought to be rather difficult, unless one held a feather before the mouth like King Lear, and of course he was fooled even by that. But Dr. Green said not only was she positive, but rigor had set in, so the woman must have been dead some hours. ‘You’d better call the police,’ she said to me, ‘and let them take over. There’s no question of my signing a death certificate, even if I suspected what the woman had died of, and I don’t. I don’t want to move the body, which apparently doesn’t appeal nearly so much to the police once it’s lost its first fine careless rapture, but I don’t
think
she was shot, or stabbed, or hit over the head. She may have been poisoned, but not by anything corrosive or cramp-inducing. Cheer up; she probably had a fit and died from natural causes’, were her last kind words.

“ ‘But why here?’ I of course asked. Dr. Green couldn’t answer that, needless to say, so the police came and here we are. Julia as always came round and rallied. I don’t know why I should have screamed in Kate’s direction for help, except that she seems to have been rather involved with the Jablon family lately and—oh, I don’t know, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“Don’t worry more than you have to,” Reed had said. “These things are like shouts from mountain tops, terribly loud and attention-getting at first, but dying down eventually to inaudible echoes.”

“Time heals all, I know. Or at least covers it over with the scar tissue of forgetfulness. But, oh Lord.”

And then Reed had gone upstairs to look at the body and talk with the police.

• • •

Now he sipped his coffee, leaned back yet further in his chair, and addressed himself to Julia’s question.

“Could the body have been dumped here? I don’t know what the medical examiner will find, but the answer is probably yes. It could have been. That doesn’t mean that it was.”