by Kate Flora
Without crumbs to play with, her hands fluttered helplessly through the air.
"What happened yesterday?"
"I heard about another incident. From a rather timid female faculty member. Something that happened earlier this year. I think she was honestly afraid to come forward until he'd been removed from the campus. It was another totally out-of-control outburst of anger. She had parked in what he believed to be 'his' parking space." A pause. "Faculty don't have assigned parking spaces, but he'd somehow got it in his head that this space belonged to him. Anyway, when he confronted her and she quite reasonably declined to move her car, he picked up a rock and smashed her windshield."
The depleted look she'd worn when she returned from talking to the police had morphed into one I recognized—the one people got when someone they knew and trusted turned out to have a dark side. A stunned mixture of betrayal and disbelief. The look of someone who expected more bad news, yet hoped it was all a big mistake and yes, there really were fairies and unicorns and Santa Claus. I'd seen far too many of these looks from my clients. People naturally want to believe that others are good. That the world is a decent and safe place.
I knew it wasn't. Because EDGE parachutes in when there's a crisis, we often see how an act of kindness, like her being understanding about his violent outburst, can come back to haunt you. Even though it's necessary, it feels foreign to most people to keep defensive personnel records and document incidents like this. It's challenging to teach people not to be so trusting—that there's a difference between business and friendship, and that running a school was running a business. But when things blow up, or when a difficult employee needs to be fired, it's important to have that paper trail.
For all we knew, Harrington had had issues with the previous headmaster that he, too, had let pass. It was a question that needed to be asked. The whole issue needed to be explored, and shared with the police.
For right now, though, I thought we had to move on to the work of managing our current crisis. But when I tried to nudge Trish into action, and mentioned our to-do list, and the ticking clock, and how we ought to plan for the morning, she didn't leap into action. And she still wore the look that said there were things she wasn't telling me.
"What is it?" I said. "There's more?"
"I'm afraid so."
Again she made me wait. Waiting was not my strong suit, especially with so much on my plate. When we'd spoken earlier, I'd been confident that however bad Dr. Harrington's behavior had been, Trish had things well under control and working with this school was going to be straightforward. Now I felt a growing anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I waited for another big, bad shoe to drop.
Her fingers danced over her desktop, fiddling with papers and pens. Finally, in a voice so diminished I could barely make out her words, she said, "Yesterday, when I confronted him with what we'd found on his computer, and told him he had to pack his personal belongings and would be escorted off campus immediately, I saw that rage again. He said I had better think twice about my actions, because if I went through with it, he was going to make me, personally, and the Blackwell School, very, very sorry."
"You had security there with you?"
She nodded. "The head of security and two other officers."
That was a lot of officers. "So you were expecting trouble?"
The hesitation before answering that told me she really didn't want to admit this. "I was. But it was also the proper way to proceed. To be cautious. Take witnesses. Have enough personnel available to remove him, and his property, expeditiously. The last thing I wanted was for him to have any reason to return to the campus, like having to come back for the rest of his things. I delivered my message. Told him what had been discovered, that it was in violation of his contract with the school, and that he was forthwith to remove himself and his property and would be barred from entering the campus again. And that his laptop had been turned over to the police."
"Sounds like you were prepped by your lawyer."
She nodded.
"Did you tell the officers with you about your concerns that he might turn violent? At least tell your head of security that it was a potentially risky situation?"
She shook her head, refusing to look at me. So she'd deliberately withheld important information that might have made her staff safer. Luckily, nothing bad had happened. No sense in lecturing her now.
"Did they hear his threat?"
Another nod.
"Did you tell the police when you called them about the computer?"
"Tell them what?"
"That he could be explosively violent."
She shook her head. "I thought it was enough to get him off campus. I was only thinking about getting him gone and then managing the fallout."
"He hasn't been arrested yet, has he?"
"No."
So he wasn't gone. Not in a way that meant others were safe. That meant she was safe. God. I thought Trish was tough as nails and here she was acting like some apologetic nice girl who doesn't want to damage someone's ego. Who thinks if she ignores it, the bad stuff will go away. I sucked in a breath, ready to read Trish the riot act, then slowly let it out again.
Suzanne likes to remind me to treat our clients gently. "Kid gloves, Thea," is one of her common refrains. But kid gloves under these circumstances were stupid. It would be totally irresponsible for me to sit here and try to nudge Trish toward doing the right thing. The situation was too dangerous. Yet she didn't seem to have put two and two together and seen that danger.
"Then it's not enough," I said. "It's far from enough. You know this yourself. What you've just told me is that Dr. Harrington is someone who indulges himself in fits of rage when he doesn't get his own way. Who smashes things and threatens people when he feels that his privileges and rights have been disrespected. And that's for a minor frustration like a parking space. He's gotten away with criminal behavior for years, believing he wouldn't get caught and now he's been caught. How do you suppose he's going to react to that?"
I waited for her response. I had enough experience with violent people to understand the danger.
Her fingers were still dancing and she had a faraway look. Either she wasn't really listening to me, or she was formulating defenses.
I raised my voice. "Trish, this situation is very serious. I can't emphasize this strongly enough—Dr. Harrington poses a major threat to you and your community. You have to tell the police about this immediately. You have the lead investigator's number, right?"
When she still didn't respond, I left my chair and leaned over her desk, right into her personal space where she couldn't ignore me. "You need to call him right now and tell him what you just told me."
Trish didn't move.
"Now, Trish. You need to do this right now."
She made shooing motions with her hands, trying to push me away. "It can wait 'til later. In the morning. I... we... have so much to do and I've already spent so much time with the police."
But I don't shoo easily. I stayed right there in her personal space where she couldn't ignore me.
"Trish. Listen to me. There's no sense in moving on to the other things we have to do if we don't deal with this. They're all damage control and image preservation. No amount of damage control regarding your present situation will do any good if he commits some violent act, especially if you knew it was possible and didn't try to prevent it. What if he hurts someone?"
She blinked like she was waking from a trance. "You really think he might?"
"After what you've just told me? I do. And if you're honest with yourself, so do you."
She sighed—deep, troubled sound from down in her chest—and located the lead detective's card. Then, with another sigh, she picked up the phone. She listened, then spoke briefly, leaving a message asking him to call her, and hung up. She looked at me guiltily. "Voicemail," she said.
"What's his number?"
"I already left..."
I grabbed the card, and di
aled the number for Det. Leonard Furst on my own phone. When I got voicemail, I said, "Detective Furst, I'm calling for Patricia Gorham. She wasn't sure she'd adequately conveyed her concerns about Charles Harrington's propensity for violence. We're very worried about the possibility of an incident on campus. Please call me back at this number or Trish in her office immediately."
I disconnected and said, "Call your head of security and be sure that they're aware of the possibility of Dr. Harrington returning to the campus. Enforce in the sternest possible terms that he presents a danger to the community and make sure that whoever is controlling entrances and exits should be on the lookout for him."
She looked at me like I'd just done something obscene, when the real obscenity would be if Charles Harrington returned to this campus and carried out his threat. There were a dozen ways he could make her sorry—kill a student, kill a faculty member, kill her, start a fire, run into something or someone with his car—and, coupled with his threat, she'd just described enough incidents to make that a very real possibility. Could she honestly fail to understand the implications of what she'd just told me?
"Thea, I know that you think I don't understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure you appreciate my position. I'm trying to preserve a sense of normalcy on this campus. To minimize the police presence. Who knows what kind of a response this might bring. Do you really think this is..."
"Necessary? It's way past necessary, Trish."
I had such a bad feeling about this. Maybe because she'd buried it. Because she'd almost 'forgotten' to tell me about it and I'd had to pry it out of her and it had taken multiple conversations to get the whole story. Maybe my unconscious was busy communicating with the psychic hotline. Or this was my version of the cop's gut, developed from being around them so much. I could be overreacting. She'd only described two instances in the three years she'd been here. Three, counting his reaction when she fired him. But all of those had occurred when Harrington's sense of honor and entitlement was offended, which being fired, escorted off campus by security, and interviewed by the police unquestionably did.
"I don't want to alarm them when we don't know..."
Didn't she get it? We wouldn't know until it was too late. People who execute vengeful acts of violence don't normally give warnings first. She'd already had her warning—from his past behavior and his own words.
"You won't alarm them, Trish. Security is their job. What else do you need to know? That's he's currently contemplating violent behavior? That he's done something? What, exactly, might you be waiting for?"
Okay. Okay. Time to rein myself in. My client was looking shell-shocked and yelling at her wouldn't help. And it was a fact that Trish and I had a lot of other stuff to get through.
I counted to twenty and took a couple of calming breaths. "I know this is hard for you. You're feeling betrayed by someone you trusted and those detectives have just put you through the wringer. Believe me, Trish, I'm not trying to make your life worse. I'm trying to make it better. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, which is protect you and The Blackwell School. I'm anticipating potential damage and trying to head it off."
She nodded and took some calming breaths herself. I watched her resolutely push the shell-shocked look away and become the take-charge woman I admired. "I'll call security and alert them," she said.
From my listener's stance, I got the impression Trish was very surprised by her security chief's reaction. At first I thought it was because she had to talk her way past the common assumption that Harrington was a good guy and this was all a mistake. But when she hung up, she just looked at me and shook her head. "This is looking worse than I imagined. He said he'd already put the word out, anticipating something like this. I couldn't exactly ask why, since he seemed to think I already knew. But something odd is going on here. It's like there's a conspiracy regarding Harrington, some body of knowledge I'm not a party to."
Neither of us had to say it. This was very bad news. Trish's bent head looked penitent, though I didn't know yet what she had to do penance for. It looked like she didn't, either.
With her head bent, the overhead light illuminated the part in her hair. Trish had thick gray hair professionally colored with dramatic dark streaks. Today, too much gray was showing. It was time to visit her colorist.
That random thought conjured up an image of Ginger, bent down to get a house key from a lockbox. The sun shining on her head and showing me that she was indeed a redhead. I remembered thinking how odd it was for someone with lovely red hair to dye it brown, even a warm, pleasing brown. Until this moment, I'd forgotten about that. It explained the major discrepancy between the Ginger I'd known and the girl in the photograph.
My mind went zinging out of this room, where it needed to be, to one of those odd thoughts nice people shouldn't entertain. Would they be able to tell at autopsy that she was a redhead, or did I need to share this information with Roland?
Focus, Kozak. Focus. I massaged my forehead as I dragged my attention back to the here and now.
I was surprised that one of us hadn't gotten a call back from Detective Furst, but for all I knew, he was still deeply immersed in exploring Harrington's porn collection. Or interviewing witnesses. Or conferring with other detectives. Or snoring happily in his warm, comfortable bed. Or reading a story to sleepy little Fursts. It was unreasonable of me to expect him to be sitting by the phone, eager to return my call. He was gathering the necessary information to make an arrest. Perhaps he was even making the arrest. If that was the case, of course he didn't need to instantly respond to an issue regarding Harrington's potential for violence.
I hoped he was making that arrest. Saving us from some explosive event that would put Blackwell on the front page for all the wrong reasons. There was nothing more I could do about that. Trish and I had both been diligent about reporting the threat. I only hoped my sense of urgency was the product of too many bad guys in my own life, and not something I was reading from this room.
Chapter 26
I tucked my anxiety away, and the two of us went to work. I couldn't quite shake off my sense of impending disaster, though, and suggested to Trish that she contact her predecessor and see if he had had, or knew of, any disturbing encounters with Dr. Harrington.
It was late, so she decided to do that in the morning. Putting anything off seemed wrong to me, but I reminded myself, yet again, that she was the client. Delay didn't do anything for my anxiety levels.
At ten, we gave up, both too tired to work any longer. She headed for her stately home and I to my unknown inn. Crossing the parking lot, I had that uneasy feeling again, but the night was still and quiet. I reached my car without any trouble, checked the backseat and underneath, then got in and quickly locked the doors.
Would anyone, seeing this, really believe I was a consultant?
It was a quick five-minute drive, and by the time I'd tucked retrieved my luggage, and staggered inside, I could see that my fears about lumpy mattresses and forty-watt bulbs were unfounded. Magda had come through for me. The elegance of the front hall told me there would be light, and a wonderful mattress, hot water and a decent breakfast. It was the first thing that had gone right in days, and I had to hold myself back from doing a happy dance. It would have been a pretty minimalist dance. I ached from head to toe.
A pleasant-faced woman appeared to greet me, signed me in, swiped my card, and led me up the broad stairway. When she opened the door, I almost hugged her. A perfect room right down to the welcoming gas fire and comfortable armchair, appliances for making coffee or tea and a tray of scones in case I wanted a late-night snack. The only thing missing was Andre, and right now, he would not have been a benefit.
"We don't have a minibar," she said, "but if you'd like something—a drink or a glass of wine—I can bring it. And there's wifi. You don't need a password."
I wanted half a bottle of bourbon and oblivion. I opted for tea and scones. That sandwich in Trish's office seemed very long ago. A deep bathtub i
n a pretty bathroom beckoned but there was something else on my agenda first. Ginger's locket. I settled in by the fire with my tea and pulled it out, delicately using the tip of a nail file to work loose the frames that held the photos. On the back of hers, faintly in pencil, Penny 98. And on the back of the little girl, Babette. That was all. No hidden key or lock of hair or secret message. I carefully replaced the photos and snapped the frames back into place, then put all of Ginger's materials back in the envelope.
Babette. Did I have enough clues yet? If I did an internet search, would Penelope and Babette, or Penny and Babette, bring me anything? Did something happen in or around 1998? Was that too long ago to locate news articles? No way to answer that question but to try.
Nothing for Penelope and Babette. Nothing for Penny and Babette. I thought of the things that Ginger's death or her fears suggested. I tried fires. I tried drownings. I tried accidents.
What had the relationship between Penny and Babette been? Not her child, I thought. Little sister? It had to have been some significant relationship for Ginger—Penny—to have had the child's photo in a locket. Even then, it seemed like an odd thing for a teenage girl to have made for herself, unless she'd been a very sentimental one. Ginger hadn't seemed sentimental, but people changed. Maybe Babette was a sibling's child to whom she had been a doting aunt? Maybe little Babette's mother had given it to her. Whatever the source, it was a strong enough connection for her to have kept it all these years. Kept it when she'd carefully sanitized the rest of her life and assumed someone else's identity.
I closed my tired eyes and tried to think of other search strategies. Without any last names, this was going to be tough. Babette was such a distinctive name. Maybe I should try searching for it by itself. If that didn't pan out, next I'd try Penny and Stafford Academy. Penelope and Stafford Academy. Maybe she'd been a track star or some other athletic standout.
