by Helen Gray
He glanced at Jenny.
“Could we make popcorn?” she asked with a grin.
Toni laughed. “Of course.”
About halfway through the science special Gabe came slinking into the room. “Mom?”
“What’s the matter?” Toni could hear the puppy yipping from their room.
“Uh, we forgot,” he said so low it was hardly audible. “We have a little mess.”
“Oh, no.” Jenny bounced from the sofa, horrified. “I’ll clean it up.”
“No, you won’t,” Toni said firmly. “I’ll get some cleaner, and they can have the joy of cleaning it. They didn’t take him to his box like they promised.”
Jenny started to protest, but Toni cut her off. “If they’re going to keep him all weekend, this will make them more responsible.”
After John and Jenny left later that evening, Toni took a shower and curled up on the couch, restless in the peace and quiet with the boys in bed. For someone known for having both feet firmly on the ground, she felt mighty unsteady. She thought she had learned to handle the constant shifts between mother and teacher, but these past two weeks had knocked the props from under her. She picked up the phone and called her principal’s home number.
“Hello.”
“This is Toni. I know it’s late to be calling you, but I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh oh,” Ken said, trying to sound jovial and failing.
“On the night of December twenty first you said you were at the mall in Cape during the time Marsha was killed. I know this is a long shot, but why don’t we drive over there and trace the route you walked, look for anyone who can identify you, and verify that you were there?”
“I guess it’s worth a try,” he said wearily. “Can you hold a moment?”
She heard him talking to his wife in the background, and then he returned. “Tomorrow morning would work. Sandy says she’ll come over and babysit your boys, along with Tanner, if that would suit you.” Tanner was their two-year-old son.
“That would be better than having to drag the kids along. Oh, the boys are puppy sitting for the Zachary’s this weekend. Will that bother her?”
“Just a moment.”
There was more speech in the background.
“She says that’s no problem. Tanner will love playing with a puppy.”
“Okay, what time can you meet me here?”
“Eight o’clock.”
*
Ken arrived at five till eight the next morning, dressed in jeans and a heavy coat over a warm blue sweatshirt. Toni’s attire matched, except that her sweatshirt was red. “I’ll drive,” he insisted. “It’s my problem, so the trip should be made on my gas.”
About ten o’clock they reached the mall in Ken’s small station wagon. “Park where you did that night,” Toni instructed. “Then let’s walk the exact route you took, including your shopping. We’ll keep track of the time and see how long the whole thing takes us.”
Ken seemed content to follow her lead, appreciative of her support. “I went to Macy’s first.” He opened the vehicle door.
“So far, so good,” Toni said when they got to the sidewalk. She glanced up at the front of the store. “There will be a record of the payment you made for your wife’s Christmas gift. The problem is that it wasn’t late enough in the evening to prove you couldn’t have been back in Clearmount by the time of the crime.”
“I didn’t come straight out of the building,” he said, looking both ways as they went inside. “I wound around by the jewelry department, debating about getting her something from there. But I decided I shouldn’t blow our budget any more than I already had.”
As they paused by the jewelry counter, Toni pointed at a surveillance camera overhead. “We could check with security about that, but the time frame still isn’t late enough to help us.”
They moved on. At the end of their tour of the store, they retraced their steps to Ken’s station wagon. Toni looked around. “Which way did you go from here?”
“That way.” He pointed north, and they set out again. Outside a mini mart he came to a halt. “I stopped here for coffee. How about a Coke?”
Toni grinned. “You know I never turn down a Coke—or in this case a chance to get warm. I’m freezing.”
Inside the store, Ken took two sodas from a cooler and paid for them. He handed the Coke to her and kept the root beer. “My headache is getting bad.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of pills, extracted two tablets, and popped them into his mouth. He washed them down with root beer.
“What time do you think you were here?”
He gazed upward, thinking. “It was about eight when I got to Macy’s. I probably wasn’t in there over a half hour, so it would have been about eight-thirty or eight-forty-five. I think,” he added uncertainly.
As Toni scanned the interior of the store, her eyes stopped on a surveillance camera mounted over the north corner of the room, up near the ceiling. “Here’s another place you might have been videoed.”
“But the time would still have been too early to clear me,” he pointed out.
“Okay, let’s go.”
They walked the rest of the route Ken remembered, ending up back at his vehicle. “Well, that’s that.” He spread his hands in a gesture of defeat.
Toni rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes, waited while he unlocked the car, and pulled the passenger door open. Shivering from the cold, she crawled inside and leaned back, staring upward through the windshield as Ken started the engine. Suddenly she froze.
Ken started backing out of the parking space.
“Stop!”
He slammed on the brakes, jolting them both nearly out of their seats.
She pointed upward. “Look.”
Ken stared for a moment. “That camera overlooks the exit-entrance of the parking lot.” His voice rose with hope.
“It should have caught you driving out of the parking lot.” Her voice also rose. “Let’s go back to the mini mart.”
He looked puzzled.
“Maybe someone there can tell us how to contact mall security.”
Back inside the mini mart, they approached a clerk and asked to speak with the manager. When they explained who they were and what they needed, the young man who presented himself as the manager called the head of mall security for them, explained what was needed, and then gave them directions to the security office.
“Ask for Monty,” he instructed. “He said he’ll try to find what you need. Good luck.”
“Thanks a lot.” Ken produced a genuine smile for the first time in a long while.
They followed the clerk’s directions to the security office and were met at the door by an older, uniformed man. “We only keep those tapes for a few weeks,” he explained once introductions were made. He led them inside the office and closed the door. “What was the date you said you’re looking for?”
“December twenty-first,” Ken supplied eagerly.
“Have a seat. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared through a door behind the desk.
“I’m afraid to hope,” Ken muttered, dropping onto the chair next to the door.
About ten minutes later ruddy-faced Monty reappeared. “Boy, are you guys lucky,” he announced in a near growl. “We only save these routine surveillance tapes for thirty days. Then we erase and reuse them. Today is the twentieth, so sometime this week our secretary would have recycled this batch. I think this is what you want.” He held up a tape. “It’s a six hour tape of the six to midnight hours.”
“May we have it?” Ken held out a hand.
“As far as I’m concerned you can, but I better not give away company property,” the security guard said, pulling it back. “And I don’t have time to play it for you.”
Ken’s hand dropped. His shoulders sagged.
“If you’ll pay for the cost of a blank tape and wait for me, I’ll get my boss’s approval to make you a copy of it. It can run while I finish what I was working
on.”
“You bet,” Ken reached for his wallet.
“We’ll watch it when we get home,” Toni said.
Ken nodded. “I’m hungry. Let’s stop for a burger on the way.”
*
Puffs formed in front of their mouths as they exited the station wagon about one-thirty. Sandy opened the door, and they hustled inside.
“How did it go?” she asked Ken as he scooped a charging Tanner into his arms.
“Good, we hope.” He hugged Tanner and gave her a quick kiss. “We have a surveillance tape we need to watch.”
Sandy’s eyes widened. “You think it shows you on it?”
His worried expression held a hint of eagerness. “We don’t know, but we’re hoping. It’s from the spot overlooking the entrance-exit of the mall parking lot.” He put Tanner down, and the toddler took off down the hall.
“The boys are in their room, so the living room television is free,” Sandy explained. “I’ll go check on them.”
Toni and Ken put their coats away, and then Toni took the tape to the entertainment center. She was just putting it in the player when they heard a shriek from the boys’ bedroom. “What have you boys done?”
Toni dropped the tape and ran down the hall, Ken at her heels. At the bedroom doorway they stared in disbelief at the small puppy in the middle of the room. Bingo had been stuffed backward into a plastic bread sack. His feet stuck out through small holes in the plastic. A ribbon looped around his neck and tied in a bow at the back of his head held the sack closed. His small head resembled a Mr. Potato Head. As for the sack, it looked like a huge balloon, sagging with the weight of yellowish liquid.
Toni was horrified. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, kneeling by the poor dog. She reached to release the ribbon, and then stopped, realizing what would happen.
“He has accidents,” Garrett said quietly. He squatted on the floor near a pile of Legos, his eyes huge and round.
“We didn’t want him to have another accident on the carpet,” Gabe explained.
“So you …so you …” Toni sputtered, unable to describe what they had done. Then her voice changed to fury. “You were supposed to take him to his box every forty-five minutes.”
Garrett hung his head. “We were afraid we might forget again.”
“Young men,” Toni said low and evenly. “You will take that puppy into the bathroom, and you will give him a bath, and then we’ll …”
“I’ll take care of this,” Sandy interrupted. “It’s my fault. It happened on my watch.”
Toni took a deep breath, and then another one. “Maybe you’re right,” she said when she could speak again. “Not that it’s your fault,” she corrected quickly. “But you should see that they take care of it, because I’m afraid of what I might do to them.” She glared at her offspring.
The boys sat perfectly still, recognizing the depth of the trouble they were in.
“You and Ken go ahead and watch your tape while the boys and I take care of Bingo,” Sandy ordered.
Toni slowly turned around. But Ken, who had been right behind her, was gone. She went out into the hallway, then to the living room. He was not there. Puzzled, she crossed the kitchen to the utility room. From there she saw the door to the garage standing open. She went to it and peered out.
There stood Ken, propped against a wall of the garage to keep from collapsing. His arms were wrapped around his waist, clutching his gut, as he laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. She watched him sink to a sitting position and lean back against the wall with his knees up to his chest.
She stepped out into the garage, hands on hips. “So you think it’s funny, do you?”
“I think it’s f-f-f-funny,” he choked. “But it’s even funnier to see … to see the unflappable Toni Don…Donovan…flapped.” He went off into another spasm, wiping his eyes and slapping his stomach. “Oh, it hurts,” he moaned.
Toni stared at her normally staid principal, sprawled on her garage floor out of control.
“It’s just what I needed,” Ken managed to say between gasps.
Toni thought about it. “Maybe it is,” she allowed, her mouth twitching. “But they have to be punished. They didn’t live up to their responsibility and promises.”
Ken took a deep breath and slowly relaxed against the wall. “I know you’re right, but please don’t be too hard on them. It was just the pressure release I needed.”
“Okay, maybe I won’t kill them.” She held out a hand. He took it, and she gave him a boost to his feet. “The trouble is, I don’t know what punishment would be appropriate. Let’s watch the tape, and I’ll think about it.”
They went back to the living room, and Toni put the recording in the player. Then they settled on the sofa with the remote. “Monty said there are six hours recorded on this,” Toni said as she turned on the television. “But it’s dated and shows the time. Let’s fast forward to about eight-thirty.”
“Bingo is spic and span again,” Sandy announced from the doorway. “I’ll stay with him and the boys while you two watch that.”
“Okay,” they both mumbled absently, glued to the grainy images on the screen. At first it wasn’t too bad, watching the traffic flow in and out of the parking lot, but it soon became tedious and boring. Toni was just about to nod off when Ken jerked forward. He pointed. “There. That’s my truck, and the license number will prove it.”
Toni hit the pause button and checked the bottom of the screen. “Look at the time. It says nine-sixteen. It’s over seventy miles between here and Cape.”
“Crooked, winding miles,” Ken added with a wry twist of his mouth.
Toni knew what he meant. “Marsha’s phone log showed a call at ten-twenty-eight, so she was probably killed about ten-thirty. It takes me close to an hour and a half to make that drive. My brothers drive it faster,” she added with a roll of her eyes. “But you would have had to be flying to have driven from there to here and committed a murder in an hour and twelve minutes.”
“My old truck won’t go over seventy miles an hour,” Ken pointed out with a wry twist of his mouth.
Toni drew a deep breath of relief. “This should satisfy Chief Freeman.”
“Thanks for everything.” Ken retrieved the tape and tucked it under his arm.
When he and Sandy were gone, Toni fixed a quick meal for her and the boys. While they ate, she didn’t mention the incident with the dog. Later that evening she went to their bedroom and peeked inside. Both boys were in bed, but she was sure they were feigning sleep. Her heart surged with emotion. They were so precious to her. But they had to be punished. “I know you’re not asleep,” she said softly through the doorway. “But it’s okay. We’ll discuss things in the morning. Good night.”
She closed the door. Let them sweat. That was a form of punishment in itself.
Just then she heard Kyle’s truck pull into the drive. She met him at the door and gave him a hug. “How was your flight?”
“Smooth.” He deposited his bag on the floor to remove his coat. “How have things been for you?”
“Interesting. Are you hungry? I’ve got leftover meat loaf and …”
“A meat loaf sandwich sounds good,” he cut her off. “I’ll take a shower while you fix it.”
Toni made the sandwich, got out some chips, and poured a glass of iced tea. When Kyle came from the shower, she sat at the table while he ate and brought him up to date on her efforts to clear Ken of suspicion. Then she told him what the boys had done to the puppy.
Kyle stopped eating when she told him about the dog. “They did what?”
“You heard me.” Toni tried to maintain a stern demeanor.
His mouth twitched. “What did you do about it?”
“I let them and Sandy give the dog a bath.” Her tone dared him to laugh. “As for them, I haven’t done anything yet. I’m letting them sweat.”
Kyle did laugh then. “Are you going to beat them to death?”
She could
n’t prevent a grin. “Believe me, I’ve considered it. But I guess I’ll give them a lecture and suggest that they write notes of apology.”
“Apologize, huh?” He grinned and went back to eating.
Later that night, Toni lay wide-awake in bed. “You awake?” she whispered.
“Barely,” he mumbled. “What’s wrong?”
She snuggled closer to him. “A little classroom problem won’t let me sleep.”
He rolled over and nestled her in the curve of his arm. “Same student it’s been all year?”
Toni nodded in the dark. “Dustin’s attitude is getting worse. He really pushed the boundaries this week.”
“Have you written him up?”
“Not yet, but I guess I’m going to have to. He doesn’t exactly refuse to work. He just makes it clear in devious little ways that he considers the class a waste of time. He ignores instructions and spends more time finding ways to flirt with Sidney, or other girls, than doing his work. I can’t watch him every second,” she said wearily. “I have other students who are willing to work and need my attention. I think Sidney is more hung up on him than he is on her.”
“Are you afraid to write him up because his dad’s president of the school board?”
“No,” she answered without hesitation. “That shouldn’t matter, even if it upsets Dennis. The boy thinks the rules are for everyone but him. He also thinks he’s a Romeo.”
“Do what you have to do. Don’t worry about your job.”
Chapter 10
The next morning Toni got up a few minutes earlier than normal for a Sunday and went into the boys’ room. When she turned on the light, they both opened their eyes. Their beds occupied opposite sides of the room. Gabe’s coverlet was a fluffy red one with a Superman design on it, Garrett’s blue and featuring Spiderman.
“Time to talk.”
They both sat up, and Toni pulled a chair away from the computer desk. She positioned it between their beds and sat, wearing her sternest schoolteacher face. “Do you two realize what you did wrong?”
Garrett nodded, his eyes huge and dark in a solemn face.
