by Leslie Meier
Sara’s eyes widened. “Is he dead?”
“No. His brother found him in time, at least that’s what I heard. He was alive when they took him away in the ambulance.”
“So he’ll be okay, right?”
“I hope so. There could be brain damage and he could have broken his neck.”
“Broken his neck?”
“He tried to hang himself.”
Sara’s face went white and her knees began to buckle. Lucy quickly pulled out a kitchen chair for her to sit on and shoved her head between her knees. In a minute or two she sat up but her color hadn’t improved. “That’s sick. I can’t believe he’d do that.”
“I noticed he seemed pretty unhappy even before his mother died,” said Lucy, dragging another chair out from under the table and sitting next to Sara. “I’ve been hearing rumors that the JV football players are getting bullied and hazed a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mother’s death was the straw that broke the camel’s back and he just couldn’t go on anymore.”
Sara was silent and Lucy knew she had to find a way to get her to open up.
“If there is hazing and you know about it, you have to speak up. What if some other kid decides to kill himself? How would you feel then?”
“C’mon, Mom. Tommy was screwed up, right?”
“So it’s his fault he tried to hang himself?”
“Well, nobody did it to him, did they?”
“I think we all bear some responsibility, everybody who knew him.”
“How could they know he’d do something like this?” she demanded, her face flushed with anger.
Aha, thought Lucy. She’d finally hit a nerve. “Who couldn’t have known?” she asked.
“The varsity guys.”
“All of them?”
“Pretty much,” admitted Sara. “It’s what guys do. No big deal.” Sara shrugged, and then, to Lucy’s amazement, began sobbing.
“Oh, honey,” she cooed, wrapping her arms around her but Sara shrugged out of her hug, wiping her eyes.
“I’m being stupid. I don’t know what came over me.”
“You have a right to your feelings,” said Lucy. “If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?”
Sara sighed and paused, as if weighing her options. Finally she spoke. “Some of the players got a little obnoxious today after practice, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lucy. It was gradually dawning on her that Sara was upset about more than Tommy’s attempted suicide. “Did they do something to you?”
Sara looked at the ceiling. “They kind of cornered a few of us, me and Sassie and Renee, and well, Renee’s really busty and they wanted to know if her boobs were real so they made me squeeze them and say if they were.”
Lucy was appalled. “You did that?”
“Renee said it was okay.”
“And where was the coach during all this?”
Sara shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Does this sort of thing happen a lot?”
“No, Mom.” She was on her feet. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Then she flounced out of the room and pounded up the back stairs to her bedroom.
Lucy’s emotions were in turmoil and she dashed after her, catching her in the upstairs hallway. “I think we have to talk about it,” she said, grabbing her by the shoulder and spinning her around. “This is serious.”
Sara was so shocked by her mother’s unusual behavior that she simply stood in the tiny hallway as if waiting for her to regain her senses. Lucy was too upset for that, though. She was out of control.
“You’re going to quit cheerleading, that’s what you’re going to do,” she said, waggling a finger at her daughter.
Sara shook her head. “No, I’m not and you can’t make me.”
“Oh, yes I can,” insisted Lucy. “Just you see.”
Then she whirled around and marched down the stairs, determined to give Coach Burkhart a piece of her mind. She didn’t like the way the football team was run and she was going to let him know exactly what she thought. The players had no business harassing cheerleaders and the coaches had a responsibility to protect the girls from that sort of behavior. It was insulting, it was demeaning. It was unsportsmanlike, that’s what it was. She was panting and red-faced when she crossed the tiny square of emerald green lawn punctuated by a dwarf Japanese maple and knocked on the Burkharts’ door.
Luckily for her, she thought, and unluckily for him, the coach answered the door.
“I just want to let you know,” she began, spitting out the words faster than she could think, “that I am absolutely disgusted by the behavior of the football players towards my daughter and the other cheerleaders and I happen to have good reason to think this sort of thing is not only tolerated but encouraged and you ought to know better!”
The coach folded the newspaper he had been reading and tucked it under his arm. “Why don’t you come in?” he suggested. “We can talk inside.”
“You just want to get me inside to shut me up and I’m not going to shut up,” proclaimed Lucy. “I want everybody to hear.”
Coach Buck nodded. Over the years he’d developed a few tactics for dealing with angry parents and had learned that direct confrontation was to be avoided at all costs. “Fine, fine. We can talk here. Now what exactly is the problem?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. All this pretending that hazing doesn’t exist when you know it does. I know Tommy was having a rough time…”
Coach Buck nodded his head sympathetically. “We’re all upset about Tommy, but it wasn’t hazing. It was his family that was the problem and there’s only so much the school can do in a situation like this.”
Lucy realized she’d let her emotions carry her away but she was too angry to yield the ground entirely so she backtracked. “What about what happened today? To the cheerleaders? Did you know that some of the older players cornered them and wanted to know if their breasts were real?” she demanded, challenging him.
“That is certainly deplorable behavior and I certainly don’t condone it,” he said, giving Lucy encouragement. He paused, apparently deep in thought, then asked, “Did one of the players actually touch the girls’ breasts?”
“Well, no,” admitted Lucy, a bit deflated. “They made one of the girls do it.”
“Well, then, it was one of the girls who actually harassed the others, wasn’t it?”
Lucy couldn’t believe it. This was the classic tactic of blaming the victim. “Where were you? If you’d been doing your job there’d be no opportunity for this kind of thing, would there?”
“I can assure you that I make every effort to supervise the players and I’m going to take immediate action and get to the bottom of this. If what you say is true, I can assure you that the offenders will be punished.”
Lucy knew how these things worked. First thing tomorrow he would call the girls to his office to question them. They’d be embarrassed and humiliated and in the end it would be their fault, not the players.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” she said. “But thank you for the offer.”
The coach’s expression oozed concern. “Are you certain?”
Lucy knew she’d lost the battle. “Absolutely. And I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for. Now, have a nice day.”
Lucy’s anger had subsided into a simmering resentment when she left Coach Burkhart’s house and she paused for a moment before turning onto Prudence Path to look at the Stantons’ house. Its situation at the end of the cul-de-sac made it a focal point for the entire development and, building for himself, Fred Stanton had lavished extra care on its construction. The house was larger and grander than the others with a two-car garage and a large, landscaped lawn enclosed by a fence. She was starting down the road when a movement caught her eye; someone was running along the fence.
Curious, she turned in the opposite
direction and walked towards the Stantons’s house but, when she got to the end of the cul-de-sac, the fleeing figure had vanished. Who was it? she wondered. Certainly not Fred or Preston, they would be at the hospital with Tommy. She stood, searching for a trace of the trespasser, when she spotted a figure standing at the edge of the woods. It was the homeless man, or at least she thought it was, from the brief glimpse she got before he disappeared into the shadows.
Chapter 11
Lucy’s spirits were low as she made her way home on the path that wound through the lilac bushes. So much had happened in such a short period of time that she felt completely overwhelmed. Mimi’s murder and the funeral had been depressing and frightening, but Tommy’s suicide attempt had totally unnerved her because she felt she bore some responsibility for it. She’d known he was troubled but she hadn’t really tried to help him.
But what could she have done? Tears sprang to her eyes and she leaned against a tall pine tree, pounding her fist against its rough bark in frustration. This was one situation where she could see the problem but was unable to act. It was like being in a maze—she was constantly finding herself at dead ends.
She knew that Tommy was unhappy on the football team, but when she spoke to his father he wouldn’t hear of it. She knew hazing was taking place, but when she complained to Coach Buck he had shifted the blame right back onto Sara and the other cheerleaders. If was quite clear to her that if she pursued the story, it would be the victims who suffered and not the perpetrators. And, finally, there was the elusive figure of the homeless man. She was certain he was connected to Mimi and suspected he might hold the key to her murder, but he remained just out of reach. If only she could talk to him!
Lucy sighed in frustration and rested her back against the tree. She had never felt so powerless. It was like watching some awful disaster approach and being unable to do anything to stop it. Feeling something crawling on her hand, she shook it, sending a large black ant into space. It landed on the ground near the foot of the tree and promptly righted itself and headed straight back to the tree. Lucy watched, fascinated, as the little half-inch creature made its way along the fissures in the bark, apparently determined to climb the tree.
“Okay, ant,” she said, straightening her shoulders, “I get the point. You can’t give up when you meet an obstacle, you have to pick yourself up and try again.”
She was starting back along the path when a chickadee landed on a pine bough quite close to her, making its characteristic “dee-dee” sound. She smiled at the tiny creature’s boldness, amazed that a wild creature would come so close to a much larger animal. But the chickadee wasn’t at all interested in her, she realized. It was fixing its beady black eye on the ant, which was stubbornly climbing into pecking distance.
“Shoo!” exclaimed Lucy, waving her hand at the chickadee, which took flight. “Don’t bother to thank me, ant,” she said, hoping that whatever guiding hand was running the universe would be watching out for her well-being, too.
Another anonymous letter was waiting for Lucy when she got to work on Friday morning, detailing the same incident that had upset Sara. Not only was the letter proof positive that the writer was telling the truth, it also demolished her theory that Mimi was the writer. It was just her bad luck, she thought, that now she knew beyond doubt that the writer was telling the truth that she would have to give up following the story. Ted would never let her continue now that Sara was involved.
“You’re too close, too involved,” he would say, and that’s exactly what he did say when Lucy told him how the players had harassed Sara and the other freshman cheerleaders.
“But we have to follow this story,” she argued. “The letter writer’s account is virtually the same as Sara’s.”
“That’s just one incident,” said Ted. “We have no verification that the rest—the naked Twister, the soccer balls—happened. We only have the anonymous writer’s word for those.”
“C’mon, Ted. How many times have you told me that where there’s smoke there’s fire? Something is definitely going on and I have a hunch it was part of the reason Tommy Stanton tried to kill himself.” Lucy paused. “I know everybody thinks he was upset because of his mother and that’s true, I’m sure, but he was pretty messed up even before that. I saw him one night after a required run and he was awfully strung out.”
Ted was scratching his chin. “I could write the story,” he said slowly, “but I’d have to interview Sara.”
“Do you have to use her name?”
“I might,” said Ted.
Lucy bit her lip. It was a dilemma she’d faced before. How could she insist on preserving her family’s privacy when she asked people to tell their stories for publication every day? It would be hypocritical to insist on keeping Sara’s name out of the paper when she wrote about other people’s personal problems all the time. Why, the paper even printed an annual list of real estate tax delinquents in a blatant effort to embarrass them into paying up, and the court report listed everyone who got into trouble, from housewives who accidentally wrote a bad check at the grocery store to upright citizens who insisted on finishing that expensive bottle of wine at the Queen Vic and then attempted to drive home.
Her instinct was to protect Sara, of course, but she understood that refusing to go public about the hazing would be more dangerous in the long run because it would continue. The only way to stop it was for victims to come forward, and she knew that when one person came forward it often encouraged others to tell their stories, too.
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to do this,” said Ted.
“I do want to get it out in the open, believe me, but I don’t think Sara will go along with it and I don’t blame her. She has to face those kids every day.”
“Now that the Warriors have won a few games, most people in town think the coach walks on water and the team are his disciples,” said Phyllis. “Even Elfrida was raving about what a terrific quarterback Matt Engelhardt is and until now the only sport she had any interest in was curling.” Seeing Ted and Lucy’s puzzled expressions she continued. “Her husband’s a curling fanatic.”
“You’re right. People are already talking about how they might take the Moose Bowl this year,” said Ted.
“There has to be a way of approaching this that makes the administration the focus, not the kids. We need to go right to the top.”
“Well,” said Phyllis, who was typing the school calendar into the events listings, “it says here that the superintendent’s monthly administrative meeting is in fifteen minutes.”
“And who goes to that?” asked Ted.
Phyllis consulted the calendar. “All the principals, the guidance director, the student services director, the curriculum specialist…and the athletic director.”
“Then let’s go,” he said, turning to Lucy.
As Lucy grabbed her bag and followed Ted out the back door to the parking lot, she kept one very large doubt to herself. She had a feeling the administrative meeting wasn’t covered by the state’s open meeting law and therefore not open to the press except by invitation.
And in fact, when they arrived at the Superintendent’s office, the first words out of his secretary’s mouth were, “Administrative meetings are private.”
“This state has an open meeting law,” said Ted.
“I have a copy of the law right here,” she said, handing him several sheets of paper that had been stapled together. “I believe the relevant portion is section four paragraph five.”
“I believe we can attend if we’re invited,” said Lucy, while Ted pored over the fine print.
“You’re not invited,” said the secretary.
“I’m quite sure the superintendent will want to hear what we have to say in light of the fact that some serious allegations have been raised concerning the sports program. Perhaps you could check with the superintendent?”
She picked up the phone and, a minute or two later, Superintendent Bob Sabin popped out of his offi
ce. “What can I do for you?” he asked, smiling genially.
With his reddish hair and round cheeks, Lucy always thought the superintendent looked a bit like a chipmunk. His slightly protruding front teeth added to the image, but nobody dared mention the resemblance. Sabin was a former Marine officer who turned to education when he retired after putting in his twenty years and he maintained a rigorous fitness routine that included running twenty laps around the track every morning.
The smile wasn’t genuine. It was a defense he employed whenever trouble loomed. He was on alert, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to leap into action to protect his little fiefdom, the Tinker’s Cove Public Schools, from any threat, whether it be a bomb scare, bathroom graffiti, angry parents, or the teachers’ union.
“It’s about the football program,” began Ted, planning to ease into such an uncomfortable subject.
“Allegations of hazing,” said Lucy, eager to get to the point and earning an evil look from Ted for interrupting him.
“Absolutely absurd,” said Sabin. “Hazing is not tolerated in the Tinker’s Cove Public Schools. The student handbook is very clear on that point.”
Lucy wasn’t about to wait for Ted to get around to a follow-up question. “It’s happening, nevertheless.”
“Do you have something specific in mind?”
“Yesterday my daughter and two other cheerleaders were harassed by a group of varsity players.”
Sabin seemed relieved. “One incident, while unfortunate, is hardly worthy of a Pennysaver story. If you will make an appointment with the assistant principal, I’m sure he will take care of it.” He had shifted his weight in the direction of his office. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention and now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to my meeting.”
“It’s more than one incident,” said Lucy. “It appears to be a ritualized process that new players are subjected to as part of their preseason training.”
“That’s absurd,” insisted Sabin. “On what basis are you making these accusations?”
