Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (7 page)

At that moment Ron Clemson appeared at the door to the lab, and he made his presence known. Forcefully. “What’s all this?” he bellowed. He was breathing hard, and he put one hand on the doorframe to support some of his weight. He took several deep, loud breaths, as if to emphasize that trudging all the way down to the computer lab was not something to be taken lightly. “There are three teachers here when there should be only one,” he added, and he shook his head with disapproval.

“My class is gone,” Kevin said. “I’m on my way out.”

“Excellent,” Ron said gruffly.

“Not me,” Emily said. Her voice was light and conversational. Unconcerned. “I reserved the lab for this period.” She turned her bright eyes to Ron Clemson. “Did you?”

“I
teach an art class,” Ron said, not quite meeting her gaze. He adopted a tone of righteous formality. “We do much of our design work on computers.”

Emily smiled sweetly at him. “Yes,” she said. “Naturally. And I teach French, and we use lots of games on the computers for repetition and drilling. More importantly,
I reserved the lab
. Which brings us full circle, doesn’t it?”

Ron grimaced. He looked as if something he had eaten was not agreeing with him. He stared at the floor. “Are you going to take your class out of here?” he asked her.

“Certainly not.” Still in that easy, friendly tone.

Ron muttered under his breath.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. With an effort, he raised his head. “My class!” he bellowed. “4th graders! Clemson Art! Follow me! We’re going back up to the classroom.” He sighed heavily. “
All
the way back up.”

Half of the students in the room stood and turned reluctantly, and then they began filing out of the lab behind Mr. Clemson. They moved slowly, many of them looking wistfully over their shoulders as they left the room. They had briefly been sharing an actual classroom with Ms. Beck.
The
Ms. Beck. Most of them had never been in a class with her, because she taught only the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, but they had all heard
about her.

And of course they had all noticed her.

Ms. Beck began speaking to her class. Her students were happily setting up their computers, sitting up and listening carefully, ready to do anything and everything she might request of them. Her voice was a song. She smiled at them. She touched them on the tops of their heads – only on the tops of their heads, but still that was something to hang onto – and she praised them for the littlest things, for conjugating the simplest verbs, for taking an extra moment to try saying the French ‘u’ more carefully than last year. And they were constantly trying to do more, trying to impress her, trying to get her to smile at them, look at them, anything.

One 4th grader, a boy who was at the point of leaving the lab on the way to his fate in Clemson art, stopped walking suddenly. He was a very small 4
^th
grader, and he had a too-short back-to-school hair cut. He was near the end of the line of Clemson students, and now he took a moment to look ahead of him. Mr. Clemson was clearly visible, shuffling along slowly and painfully, doling out a steady stream of barked criticisms and complaints to any student within earshot. The boy glanced back at the scene he was leaving behind. The lab, Ms. Beck, her light blue skirt and her pretty eyes. Already she was in the process of telling her class that she could not believe, could not possibly understand
how she had managed to get, yet again, a class of such brilliant boys. She was absolutely jumping with excitement over everything they would be doing that year together, she said.

The student with the too-short hair, whose name was Elias Worth, decided he had had enough. It had been a difficult first day back at school. Everyone had made fun of his hair, his shoes didn’t fit right, and he had tried to be funny during first period but no one had laughed. And now he had been tricked, faked out. He had been presented with the possibility of Ms. Beck, only to be given Mr. Clemson instead. It wasn’t fair, and it was too much for this particular 4th grader to handle. Too much for Elias Worth.

He would not take another step.

It was suicide,
suicide
in an all-boys school, but he couldn’t help himself: very quietly, Elias began to cry.

Kevin felt himself on the verge of taking drastic action. He had no experience with how to handle such a situation, but he knew that this boy needed support of some kind. And fast. A diversion, perhaps. He could pull the fire alarm. He could call in a bomb threat. He could –

But Emily was already there. She put herself quickly and gracefully in a position to create privacy; the others could not easily see Elias’s distress. Then she began speaking to him gently. Reassuringly. Whispering that she hoped Elias could work on homework with her later today. During study hall this afternoon.
I run a study session with a group of students
, she told him in a whisper.
They’re mostly older, but you could come too today. If you want. We meet in the library. Sound good?

The effect was immediate. Elias Worth was comforted. Saved. He nodded gratefully.

“Okay,” Emily said, so that everyone could hear her now. “Off you go.”

Kevin watched this exchange without saying a word. In another moment Emily had returned to teaching her class, and Kevin slipped silently out of the room. He hurried back up the stairs, past the slowly moving line of Clemson Art scholars (and Ron Clemson himself, who was still muttering curses), back toward the lounge.

Emily Beck glanced once, furtively, over her shoulder after Kevin had left. She shook her head gently. An expression that might have been sadness passed briefly over her face.

Then it was gone.

A Rising Sense Of Dread

When the last student had left
Kevin’s
classroom
for the day
, he stood for a few seconds in silence, wondering if there was anything else he was supposed to do. He made a conscious effort to avoid looking at the clock.

He hoped it was still moving.

After another moment he left the room and made his way down to the teacher’s lounge one more time. It
knew it
was only 2:30, and he worried he might be expected to coach something. The lounge was empty when he arrived, so he sat down in one of the chairs and waited
.
He
wonder
ed
if Ms. Stewart might be about to come striding through the door to ask him why he wasn’t already on his way to the football fields, the buses were waiting, and why wasn’t he in his coach’s uniform, and what was wrong with him anyway?

To which, again, he would have cheerfully replied that he had no idea.

But no one came. There were no knocks on the door, no sounds of running steps, no shouts from people searching for him.

The building suddenly seemed deserted.

Where do teachers go after their last class?
Not the lounge? Are they all at a bar somewhere?

He sat there in silence, waiting. For what seemed like a very long time.

Please, not again
.

With a rising sense of dread, he turned slowly to look at the clock.

Damn it.

Stuck again. The red hand wasn’t moving. And this would have been disturbing enough, except that Kevin could feel that other thing coming back again, too. That
panic
thing.

The voice.

You’re supposed to be doing something
.
Something important.

He could recognize it as his own voice now, but this was not a source of much comfort. Because all at once he was convinced that he should be anywhere but here, that the last thing he should be doing was sitting alone in a teacher’s lounge, wasting valuable time.

Get ready
.

“For
what?
” he said out loud, to the walls and to the empty chairs.

As if responding to Kevin’s voice, Danny Fisher came barreling into the room like a defensive lineman looking to make a tackle. Kevin steeled himself for the inevitable blow to the shoulder, but this time the big man spared him. “Okay!” Danny said happily. “Made it through the first day. You walking home?”

Kevin nodded. He supposed he was. Anything was better than sitting here, soaking up his own paranoid delusions. And he was glad to find out that he had no more responsibilities, because he had quite a lot he wanted to do this afternoon. There were three months’ worth of questions he needed to start asking.

They walked down the stairs together. As they emerged onto the sidewalk, Kevin realized he had never been so glad to be a native New Yorker. He had no memory of having ever been at this school, but that didn’t stop him from being able to locate himself. There was Park Avenue over there, to his left. And on the right, along Lexington, he spotted the corner of a supermarket he recognized. Which meant this was 74th street. Upper East. Piece of cake.

Across the street, parked one behind the other, were
two
large vans.
Two
large, white, Ford e250 vans. But neither Danny nor Kevin noticed them. There was no reason to.

Kevin turned for home.

“Hey,” Danny said, and stopped in his tracks. He gave Kevin a questioning look. “What’s up? You getting some groceries or something?”

“What?”

“Isn’t your apartment this way?”

Kevin was on the verge of saying no, of saying listen, I may have had a weird day, and I may not remember what I’ve been doing all summer, but I think I can remember where my own damn apartment is. But then he stopped himself.

It’s been three months. Plenty of time to move. New job, new place.

“I’m low on eggs,” Kevin said smoothly. “Quick detour.”

Danny shrugged. “Fair enough. I need some burger meat anyway.”

Kevin breathed a little sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if Danny had simply waved goodbye and said he’d see him tomorrow.

I don’t even know where I live.

When they left the market, Kevin was careful to let Danny walk a half-step in front of him. He tried not to let it show that he was suddenly feeling lost in his own city. When Danny came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sidewalk after a few minutes, Kevin worried there
might be
something wrong.

But Danny only put out his hand. “All right, my friend,” he said, flashing that wide, happy grin at him. “Good first day. See you in the morning.”

Kevin shook his massive hand and tried to nod along. He was struck again by the man’s curious combination of obvious intelligence and sheer physical size. Maybe it was the suit that threw him off. Or the glasses. Or maybe just the constant good cheer.