Underdead (17 page)

I might lack that essential gravitas seasoned teachers have—that ability to walk into a room and command attention with The Teacher’s Look. But my aide had something nearly as good—it worked effectively on half my charges, the female half. Christopher was a decent-looking young man, and one who would need a prom date in a couple months. If you thought that state of affairs would escape the notice of twelve-and thirteen-year-old girls, due to something so trivial as age difference, school rules or gross unattainability, you have thought wrong.

With Christopher’s help—he leaned against a counter and smiled—I got my study hall relatively under control and went to the back to set up the mineral trays. Christopher followed me back and volunteered to help. I took him up on his offer before he could change his mind.

“What’s this?” Christopher held up a nondescript brownish gray mineral.

How the hell did I know? “The names of all the minerals are on the container lids.” I may not have mastered The Teacher’s Look, but I had gotten very good at temporizing.

He held up a chunk of quartz about the size of his fist. “That one’s huge. You don’t want it in the trays do you?”

“No, that’s a demo specimen. It belongs on the counter there, next to the amethyst—that big purple one.”

Our conversation—or rather the proximity of Christopher—had not gone unnoticed by the girls seated near the back. They hadn’t done a lick of homework since Christopher had entered the room. One of the braver girls spoke, pitching her voice just above a whisper to match ours. “Oooh, I like that one. It’s pretty.” She flipped her hair and pointed to a golden knob of pyrite.

Chris was immune to the hair flip but responded to her comment. He really was a nice boy. I don’t know how he’d made it to eleventh grade. He held up a rather nondescript hunk of rock that looked as if it had had rusted on one side. “This one’s ugly.”

I frowned and leaned forward for a closer look. It hadn’t had that stain last week. And it hadn’t been hidden away in a cupboard. It had been out in the open, on my desk.

I stared at it for a long second before I pulled myself together. “Can you put that down on the counter for a second, Christopher? I just remembered I need to contact the middle school principal about something. If you wouldn’t mind taking a note for me?”

“Sure.”

I refocused the girls’ attention back on their homework and went to my desk in the front of the room to write a note to Maxine. I stuck it in an envelope and sealed it. He was probably too nice a kid to read the note, but under the circumstances I wanted to make darn sure.

Three minutes later, Christopher returned with a note from Maxine requesting that I come to her office during the morning break. I was to leave the rock for the police. As soon as the bell rang, I shooed out the students, carefully locked the door behind me and headed for the administration building. As I rounded the corner toward Maxine’s office, Becky flew by me at a run.

“What’s the rush?”

She spoke over her shoulder. “Gotta finish prepping for my double lab. See you at lunch.” She barreled through the door and disappeared around the corner toward her classroom.

I knocked on Maxine’s door. It was open and she was waiting for me, but something about the administration building brought out my polite gene. “Hey Maxine, it’s Jo. I got your note—” I stopped on the threshold in surprise. In Maxine’s brown leather chair, sitting behind the large, well-polished cherry desk as if he belonged there, was Gavin.

He glanced up briefly from the notes he was making and spoke rather formally, as if to a stranger. “Come in, please, and shut the door behind you.”

Surprise made me do exactly as bid, and I took a seat in one of the cushy blue chairs opposite him. “How did you get here so quickly?” It had been a scant ten minutes since I’d sent the message.

“Never mind that.” Gavin dismissed me in a gesture and bent to his notes.

I regarded his neat, down-turned head in confusion. Why the sudden cold shoulder treatment? After all we been through surely we were…maybe not friends, exactly, but something!

“Were you already here for some reason?” I asked.

His only response was the scratching of his pen across paper.
Fine. Be that way.
“You must have been,” I mused aloud. I recalled my run-in with Becky, who wouldn’t normally have left the prep for her double period chem lab to the last minute. “Ah, I have it. The timing of finding that rock in my classroom was mere coincidence. You’re here on an official visit, something to do with Bob’s death? Re-questioning everyone, are we?”

I plucked a tiny Krackle from the dish of mini candy bars Maxine kept on the corner of her desk and relaxed back against the plush fabric of the chair. It crossed my mind that ten-thirty might be a little too early to start eating chocolate, like drinking before noon, but I decided I didn’t care. It seemed a little like closing the barn doors after the horse had gone to try to hide an embarrassing chocolate habit from a man who’d seen me lick the juice off raw hamburger packaging.

Gavin ignored me so studiously I knew I was right, and I couldn’t resist needling him. “Poor Detective Raines. Did his boss send him to the principal’s office? Are we in twou-ble?”

Gavin’s mouth stretched taut in a grim line, and somehow, despite the fact that his square jaw was cleanly shaven and his button-down shirt still crisp across his large, trim frame, he looked as if he already had put in a long day. “I’d like to ask you a few questions…”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” I said, leaning forward. “A few concerned, well-connected parents called your boss and complained that no one had been arraigned for Bob’s murder yet, so he told you to get over here ASAP before they started complaining to
his
boss. Hah! Welcome to my life, puppet!” I sat back in my chair and grinned widely.

“Are you quite through, Ms. Gartner?”

“Please,” I said graciously, with a small elegant wave of my hand, “call me Jo.” I popped another Krackle bar in my mouth and chewed happily.

“Dammit, Jo!”

I decided I liked him better when he was acting like a big brother and buying me sundaes. “Okay, okay. I’ll behave. I assume you want to know about the rock Christopher found in my room.” Thinking about it had a sobering effect, and I put down the next Krackle only partly unwrapped. I explained briefly how we’d come across the rock.

Gavin continued scribbling a few moments after I finished. When he was done, he regarded me from across Maxine’s desk, a frown darkening his face. “Show me.”

I led the way back to my empty classroom. Here.” I pushed aside a glitter-encrusted foam comet and pointed to the rusty-looking specimen I’d stowed behind it. “Christopher found it, in a box of quartz, on the shelf up there but it’s feldspar.” I realized I was starting to babble and forced myself to focus. “The night Bob died, it was on my desk. I used it as a paperweight.”

“Looks like we found the murder weapon.” Gavin turned to face me. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to kick you out of your room again.” He didn’t even try to sound sorry.

The next morning before work I hesitated like a coward in the administration building’s elegant parquet hallway before slinking through the back door into the faculty lounge to get my mail. I didn’t think I could handle more of the ostracism I’d experienced after Bob died.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to. My colleagues just went about their business as usual, yawning, bustling, filling coffee cups, reading mail, and generally ignoring me, for which I was truly and ridiculously grateful. I never thought I’d be so delighted to be ignored! It was so much better than being
avoided,
and had Gavin been in the room I would have thrown my arms around him in gratitude. He had managed the impossible and kept my discovery of the murder weapon quiet. It was just as well he was back at the station—he probably would have hurt himself trying to get away from me, and my reputation as a treacherous fiend would have been cemented for good.

In my mail cubby, under a pink phone message and a still warm recycled-paper copy of the daily announcements, lay a creamy white envelope with the Bayshore Academy insignia in the upper left-hand corner and my name in perfectly slanted script across the front. It was from Maxine. She was the only one I knew who still used a fountain pen. I could never get the things to work, myself. My words always came out as invisible dry scratches framed by vast puddles of ink that got smeared across the paper when I wrote the next line.

I ripped open the envelope and pulled out a matching correspondence card embossed with the Bayshore crest. Maxine was happy to inform me the police had finished with my classroom and I was free to begin using it again.

My shoulders sagged in relief and I offered up a silent prayer of thanks. I’d been forced to show a movie yesterday and I didn’t think I’d survive another day of it. My students were even harder to control than usual when the only diversion was a flickering twenty-inch image of badly dressed scientists with hair at least twenty years out of date and a tendency to talk in sleep-inducing monotones. I know I’m promoting an unfair stereotype, but even
I
had trouble focusing on what the eminent scientists were saying under the runaway eyebrows. I kept waiting for the Queer Eye guys to rush in and do a group makeover. You can imagine my disappointment when they failed to show up, four times in a row.

Shortly after the bell rang for morning break, Becky and Carol appeared at my door, bearing coffee. “Hey, guys. What’s up? Ooh, Starbucks! What’s the occasion?”

My happy smile faded a little as Becky, looking unusually somber, reached back to shut and lock the door behind her.

“Uh, oh. What’s up? Am I in trouble or something?”

Becky’s eyes opened wide. “In a matter of speaking,” she choked.

Carol looked appalled. “Becky!”

I looked from one to the other. “What’s going on?”

Carol opened her mouth to speak, but Becky got there first. “Well, the good news is, you’re not bulimic.”

Huh?

“Really, Becky, that’s enough!” Carol said. I was really worried now. Carol never spoke sharply. Never to one of us, anyway. She put a comforting hand on my arm and regarded me earnestly through her gold-rimmed glasses. “Jo, you were seen throwing up in the bathroom the other night at the restaurant, after Bob’s memorial service. We weren’t the only people from Bayshore there, you know. In fact, quite a number of Bayshore families stopped in after the service.”

“Didn’t I warn you that you became a public figure the second you signed that teaching contract?” Becky demanded.

“So what?” Frustration crept into my voice. I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. “I had some bad shrimp and threw up. People do that sometimes.”

Carol shook her head. “Not so quickly after ingesting the item—unless you have a seafood allergy, which you clearly didn’t show signs of—at least according to Dr. Gossip at the next table. And,” she added gently, “people who have food poisoning, or the flu, don’t stop for a burger on the way home.”

“You shouldn’t have spurned the nachos at the game on Saturday,” Becky chided.

“At least I have some standards,” I said. Becky made a face at me but Carol just looked worried. “Look, am I missing something here? I feel as if we’re having two different conversations. I mean, who gives a rat’s ass what the hell I eat?”

Becky and Carol exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

“What?”

“Jo, people are saying you’re pregnant,” Carol said quietly.

“It’s not true, is it?” asked Becky.

“No! Of course not. What? I—” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t get the words out.

“It gets worse,” Becky said. “They’re saying it’s Bob’s.”

I opened my mouth to respond but this time not even a sound came out.

The bell rang signaling the end of break. Amid a flurry of sympathetic pats on the back and admonitions not to worry, they rushed off to teach their classes and my students began pouring back in. I just stood there, leaning against my desk for support, staring helplessly down at my cardboard coffee container.

When I noticed the barista’s order notes, in thick black ink down the side of the cup, I closed my eyes in defeat. They’d gotten me decaf.

>A couple hours later when I stepped into the cafeteria for lunch, two hundred pairs of eyes swiveled instantly in my direction, killing any remaining hope that Becky and Carol had exaggerated the pregnancy rumor. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die, or at least take a tray up to my room and hide out there for a while, but the way things were going, if I left now people would probably think I was rushing off to the bathroom to take care of my new prenatal body functions.

I stiffened my spine, sat at my usual table and I pretended I didn’t notice everyone watching what I ate, said and did, just as I ignored the huddled heads and lowered voices as people speculated whether or not the rumor was true. I ate mechanically, forcing every scrap on my plate down my throat, though I was almost defeated by the carrot sticks. They had a funny bitter taste that made me want to gag and a last two went down through sheer willpower alone. On the plus side, it was probably the healthiest meal I’d had in weeks. I resisted the impulse to flee the second I was done eating, and sat laughing and joking with Becky and Carol and Alan until the bell rang. I should have won an Emmy Award for my performance.

By the time the school day was over, I was exhausted from pretending the gossip didn’t bother me. Getting drunk had definite appeal, but I was tired of dealing with people and really wanted nothing more than to hole up in my apartment with some books and a
lot
of junk food. Unfortunately, I was all out of books—I seemed to be going through them rather faster than usual of late—so I made a quick detour over to the library on the way home.

I lucked out at once, finding several out-of-print mysteries on the For Sale rack, perfect for restocking my Shitty Day Drawer since I wouldn’t have to return them. I tucked them under my arm and then wandered through the stacks, looking for something strong enough to assuage today’s indignities. I picked up a couple of science fiction books and then headed to the classics rack to look for a copy of anything by Jane Austen. I picked up three for good measure, and then found myself fingering a paperback copy of
Dracula
. After a moment’s hesitation, I added it to my pile.