by Kate Flora
"Compounding my sins. Look, I've gotta run. I'll call you this afternoon and we'll make a solid plan for tomorrow. Anything in particular you'd like me to concentrate on?"
"Cognitive impairment would be good. These kids are fast track and Ivy-bound. And they will have read studies about how this stuff is harmless and the big bad grownups are just trying to scare them. Some graphic evidence to the contrary is always good."
I told him about the girl quoting the synthetic drug law.
"So not just scare 'em straight, but scare 'em straight with facts."
"You've got it. Bye, Glen. Go do good."
"Hey," he said. "Before you go. I saw on the news about that thing with the realtor yesterday. That must be hard."
I didn't have to pretend with Glen. "Yeah. I'm struggling."
"How well did you know her?"
"A lot better than anyone else, it seems. Glen, all we did was look at some houses."
"People talk to you," he said, echoing Roland. "So you probably do know stuff that can help. When it wants to come, don't fight it. Let it come."
"But I want to fight it. I want it out of my head."
"Of course you do. But getting past something like this? It's a process. A process that works better if you deal with it. And it takes time. Ask Andre."
I heard keys rattle and a door shut. Like me, he was doing at least two things at once. "Take care, Thea. And don't beat yourself up because you didn't save her. Most likely, the damage was done long before you got there. But what a sicko, setting you up to find her. That's someone who is really twisted."
A car door opened and slammed. Then he said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up. It's not like you needed reminding."
An engine roared to life. Glen drove a big honking double cab truck that sounded like it ate Smart cars for breakfast. "We'll talk later." Then he and the roar of his engine were gone. I went back to focusing on driving.
The traffic conditions improved as I went south. By the time I was west of Boston, it was just drizzle and puddles and the fog was lifting. I wished my mood would lift. Glen had meant to be comforting, but his last remark, that Ginger's killer—the killer who had my name and phone number—must have been sick and twisted, remained stuck in my mind like a splinter.
Chapter 11
A little after seven in the morning and I felt like I'd already done a day's work. Choosing the lesser of two evils, remembering details about Ginger being the greater, I asked Siri to check my messages. More calls to return. Problems. Questions. A couple reporters. A possible new project. Among them was an issue that I'd been ducking—a message from my mother. Another unpleasant duty—our relationship is strained at the best of times. Eventually I would have to call her back, though. She wouldn't give up until I did. I get my persistence gene from her.
Like Suzanne has taken to asking: were we having fun yet?
My mother's voice in my head always answered this one by asking, "Whoever told you it was going to be fun?" She was a world-class iconoclast, a woman who could never be pleased, who shared her dissatisfaction with life by making sure she kept the people around her equally unhappy.
With respect to her, I am a very slow learner. I keep trying to please her. This was the third or fourth message from her that I was ignoring, because I knew what it was going to be. Were we coming for Easter dinner? She would guilt me into agreeing to come and agreeing to cook things I didn't have time to cook, even though dinner with my family gives me heartburn before I take the first bite. Not the least because she would go on at length about her desire for grandchildren. She knew about my situation, yet conveniently forgot both my miscarriage and her own several miscarriages. She acted like my failure to get pregnant was willful.
Maybe this year my brother and his toxic wife would announce a pregnancy and I'd finally be off the hook. Their offspring would be the spawn of the devil, a princess or prince-ling born so corrupt and entitled it would steal drugs and command obedience from the staff in the delivery room, but perhaps my mother would be appeased. Temporarily. She could never truly be appeased.
* * *
Even in the gloom of late March—spring by the calendar, winter by the weather—the Stafford Academy campus looked manicured. Somehow, their maintenance staff had made the snow orderly. It even looked cleaner than snow anyplace else, like someone came daily and dusted fresh snow over the sandy, sooty mess that prevailed at this season. The paths were swept clean of sand and decaying leaves. The shrubs were carefully wrapped in burlap for protection. There was no litter, no cigarette butts, no casually tossed lottery tickets, cans, coffee cups or bottles. The buildings were warm red brick with immaculate white trim.
The majority of students seemed healthy and lively. Even first thing in the morning, they were striding to class, not shuffling with hoodies up and shoulders hunched. They were talking to each other, not isolated by dangling earbuds. This was a jacket and tie school. Skirts or neat slacks for the girls. There were none of those crotch-between-the-knees pants, swaths of boxers or girls with cleavage, or hoodie-wearers with swaggering attitude.
For a moment, I thought Stepford students. A little too easy to segue from Stafford to Stepford. Then I squashed the notion. Spring break in exotic locales could do wonders for the end of winter blues. Their minds might not be any more engaged, but they were rested, well-fed, and had had massive doses of Vitamin D. Jonetta, who runs a school for underprivileged girls in New York City, probably spent as much money to educate her students as these kids spent on grooming products. But I was not here to campaign for economic equality. I was here to help this school deal with a real-world problem. I shelved my politics and went to find Reeve.
Halfway to his office, I had another one of those damned moments of recall. Ginger and I had been in the car, parking outside a house. I was on the phone—when was I not on the phone?—talking to a client school, and when I was done, she'd said, "Is that one of those jacket and tie schools? Where the poor boys have this one ratty jacket that hasn't been to a cleaner in months?"
She'd surprised me with that. I'd said, "Did you go to a private school?" She'd shaken her head and made a face and changed the subject. But later she'd seemed subdued. Was it because she'd accidentally revealed something?
I wished it would stop happening. Remembering was a distraction I couldn't afford right now. I put on a burst of speed, arriving at Reeve's office out of breath. The same order that was evident outside had not found its way in here. There were message slips everywhere. His desk and the conference table in his office were strewn with papers, and he had worried his hair into two strange tufts that stood out like toddler's ponytails on the sides of his head. On toddlers they are adorable. On a middle-aged man, not so much. He rushed at me the moment I'd set down my briefcase, and grabbed my hands in his like a drowning man grips a lifeline. I thought I felt a few small bones snap in response as pain from yesterday's burns flared. I blinked away tears.
"You're here!" he said.
I hadn't remembered him as such a big man. Nor had I realized he was so strong. Maybe his whining and dithering had reduced him in my mind. Today he towered over me like a slightly disheveled bear. An agitated bear. I glanced around for a whip and a chair but all I had to tame him with was experience and reassurance.
I wrestled my hands back and converted my grimace to a reassuring smile. "I'm here." I waved a wounded hand at two comfortable chairs. "Let's sit a minute and you can catch me up."
He perched on the edge of his chair, if it is possible to imagine a bear perching, and clasped his hands like a supplicant. "The trustees are meeting at 9:30."
It was now about quarter to nine. "About Joel?"
"About everything. They'll deal with Joel, of course, but before that they want an update on the situation."
"What is the situation?"
He looked at me like I'd lost my mind and I realized I'd been unclear. "I mean, what has happened since we last talked? What is the situation with th
e police investigation, if you know? Where do you stand with the two students who were allegedly selling drugs? What is the status of your hospitalized student? What is happening with Alyce's parents?"
I got out my iPad and prepared to take notes. Reeve was chatting at me, but he wasn't saying anything. I put a hand on his arm. "Slow down. Calm down. Let's take this step by step."
Like an engine that didn't want to stop, he sputtered a few times, spewing disconnected information, before he finally fell silent.
"The names of the students suspected of selling Molly?" He'd told me on the phone, but I wanted full names and correct spelling.
"She's Alyce Crimmons. He's Jonathan Wylie Gordon. Known as Flash." He spelled out what I needed spelled.
"What's the relationship between them, if you know?"
"Passionately intertwined since the day he arrived on campus. I think I told you. He's a junior. She's a senior. And she's the wild one. Johnny's pretty conservative. He's a head down, do his work, low profile kid, except when Alyce talks him into doing something crazy. Like this."
"So, as far as you know, she's the one who procured the drugs and brought them to the campus?"
"That's what she says. She says Johnny's not involved. Except that Nina Varshovik—that's the victim, if you can call her that—says she got her pills from Johnny."
"Complicated. And Alyce's parents?"
"Peter and Isabelle Crimmons," he said. "They're here. In town, I mean. With entourage. Their lawyer and his personal assistant. They've demanded a meeting with Joel this morning. He's supposed to call them at their hotel to schedule it."
"What about his mother? Flash Gordon's?" I loved saying that, even though Reeve had called him Johnny. "There's no one representing him?"
"There's no father in the picture. We've left a message for his mother about this morning's meeting but there's been no response." He shrugged. "She works, so she may not have gotten it."
"And Nina's parents?"
"Overseas. So far, just a flurry of angry phone calls." He shrugged. "I think she would have let it slide, but the cops pushed her, and now the parents are squawking about how we've let their little darling down and put her at risk." He shrugged. "In the three years Nina has been here, her parents have shown no interest in anything we've sent them. Never responded to calls and e-mails from her advisors when they were concerned about Nina and her previous antics. And now this."
"Sounds like Nina has been on your radar before?"
He nodded.
"Tell me about that."
He glanced at the clock. "Do we have time?"
"You want me in this meeting, right? Well, I can't go in there and be effective if I don't have a clear picture of what you're... what we're dealing with."
He talked and I typed notes as fast as I could. The teeny keyboard wasn't as easy for me as pen and paper, but I could read what I'd written later, assuming autocorrect hadn't translated it into something truly odd, and the notes would be available on all my devices. Given a choice, I wouldn't have all these electronic pals. But necessity was the bother of invention.
In ten quick minutes, I'd learned that Nina was a party girl for whom studies were far down on her priorities list; a manipulative hedonist who broke rules for the fun of it. Alyce was a neo-hippie who wanted to skip college, go live on a farm in Vermont and grow organic vegetables. She had a taste for drugs, but they had to be "good" drugs. Reeve didn't know if she'd been selling other drugs or if this was just a bit of "letting loose" with graduation on the horizon. Johnny Gordon was an African-American scholarship student, quiet and studious, an unlikely person to be involved, except that he was joined to Alyce at the hip and, being more of a follower than a leader, probably had only delivered the pills to Nina because he usually did what Alyce wanted.
I also knew that Alyce's parents would arrive with a far different vision of their daughter, one that probably blamed this lapse on her unfortunate association with this unsavory minority student who had led their perfect daughter astray. Were the situation not so serious, it would have been amusing to turn Gordon's parents and Crimmons's parents on each other and see how their different scripts would play out. It wouldn't have been fair, though, since Johnny "Flash" Gordon only had one parent, one who wouldn't be there to advocate for her son unless Jonetta found someone to step into that breach, and Alyce's parents had arrived with a whole team.
I'd learned the local police chief was sympathetic to Stafford's situation and would do his best to help the kids avoid legal trouble so long as they got some suitable punishment. Reeve thought Chief Hatchett would be very cooperative and our expert would be welcome to analyze the drugs. Bottom line: his challenge, and ours, would be to manage Alyce's parents. And perhaps Nina's, though that was, as they liked to say on the news, a developing situation.
"What do you know about the source of the pills?"
"According to Alyce, she has a friend at MIT who made them." Reeve shook his head in disbelief. "She won't divulge the friend's name, of course. She says 'sorry but that's just how it is.' That's when she quoted the stuff about synthetic drugs. She's remarkably cool about the whole thing. Except, of course, when I told her that Johnny could get charged with drug dealing and her parents were going to lay the whole thing off on him."
I was thinking that it would be interesting to meet this trio, then realized that there was another question I'd forgotten to ask. "So what's the relationship between Nina and Alyce? Or, for that matter, between Nina and Johnny?"
Reeve made a face. " I believe Nina and Alyce are what's called BFFs. I don't know if Johnny is a BBF, but the three of them are close."
"So none of them wants to get any of the others in trouble?"
"Except that they're already in trouble."
"More trouble?"
Reeve bounced out of his chair. "We're making the trouble. Us. The police. Alyce's parents. And possibly Nina's parents."
I nodded. The mean old grownups were the problem. "How is Nina doing?"
"She's fine," he said. "The young. They recover so fast. First she's nearly dead, and now she wants out of the infirmary because she's missing her friends and falling behind in her classes."
He was pacing the room now, anxious about the upcoming meeting.
"I thought you said she didn't care about classes?"
"Academics are pretty far down her list, but she has to keep her grades up or her mom and dad will jerk her out of here and send her somewhere else. And Nina likes it here. Easy to take the train down to the city. A couple decent clubs she can sneak out to..."
"Stop!" I said. "You know that she sneaks out and goes to clubs?"
He put his hand over his mouth like a naughty child. "I mean we do now."
Did he really mean now or had the administration's hand on the wheel been shaky for a while now? Had administrative laxity sent students the message that rule-breaking was okay? Not good news for handling upset parents and the local police if that was true. I sighed, made another note, and said, "Let's move on."
"We're going into the conference room in ten minutes," he said. "And we haven't got any kind of a strategy."
We didn't. I was developing one, but I needed more information. "About Joel. What's going on with that? Is he confined to quarters? Will he be at the meeting? Have the two of you been talking?"
He held up his hand like a traffic cop. "One question at a time, Thea. Please."
My silenced phone was dancing again. I needed to take a couple minutes before we met with the trustees to be sure there were no new emergencies. I forced myself to be calm. I was supposed to be helping, and I couldn't help Reeve if he imploded before we even got through the door.
"Will he be at the meeting?"
"Yes. Well. First they'll discuss things and then invite him in."
"Have you been consulting with him about this situation—with students and drugs?"
"No." An unconvincing no, if ever I heard one.
"Because?"
&n
bsp; "Because Charlotte Ainsley, Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees, told me not to."
His hesitation suggested there was more to the story. Reeve so desperately wanted not to be in charge. A change from many of the people I dealt with—people so eager to be in charge they'd step over their predecessor's dead body if necessary. Some who would step on the body. Oh, that was an ugly thought. I hoped it didn't show on my face. Reeve was too busy pacing to be observant anyway. Too full of himself and his own angst.
I was getting a pretty good picture of the situation here, not from what had been said but from what hadn't.
"So is he in the loop at all? Did you fill him in before he was sent to his room?"
Reeve looked so guilty I figured he'd had strict orders to stay away from Joel. "I've tried to keep him informed."
"But while things were happening, while your student was being sent to the hospital, and you were learning who had sold her drugs, he was unavailable?"
He nodded.
I checked the clock. "I'm going to run to the ladies' room," I said.
Reeve wore a 'please don't leave me' look.
"I'll only be a minute." I set a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Reeve, it's going to be okay."
I left him looking like a man going to his execution and took my dancing phone down the hall to the rest room.
Chapter 12
Ordinarily, I don't believe in using phones in the bathroom. It's become a habit for many people, I know, but I find it repulsive and disrespectful. Right now, I didn't have a choice. With Reeve hovering like an aggressive BMW on my bumper, I needed a place to check my phone where he couldn't follow me. At least I wasn't surrounded by flushing toilets.
Despite the angry bee buzzing, there was nothing that couldn't wait a few more hours. Reporters again. Mom again. People who could be called back later. They probably heard my sigh for a hundred miles around—relief, exhaustion, and the effort of pulling myself together to go into the meeting and be effective. I've had the thought more than once that some days it doesn't pay to get up in the morning but by the time we know this, we're already up. I'd been up almost five hours.
