Hush Puppy

by Laurien Berenson

  “What’s it to you? And how do you know my name anyway?”

  “We met last week, remember? Upstairs, in the prop room behind the stage.”

  “I guess.” Jane hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her grimy jeans. “You were with that nasty old guy, Krebbs.”

  “Actually, you were the one with Krebbs.” Casually, I took a step closer. The room was empty; I couldn’t see any reason why Jane would have been in there. “As I recall, he was asking you to leave.”

  “Yeah, well I did, didn’t I?”

  “But you came back.”

  “Obviously. With smarts like that, I guess it’s no wonder you’re a teacher.”

  “And with an attitude like that, I guess it’s no wonder Krebbs figured you for trouble. Were you enjoying the play?”

  Jane stared at me suspiciously. “What play?”

  “Much Ado About Nothing. I found it on the couch in the prop room after you’d left.”

  “That wasn’t mine.” Her answer was quick and defensive. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Too bad. Shakespeare’s one of my favorite writers. I thought maybe we could talk about him sometime.”

  “Why?”

  Despite the sharpness of her tone, Jane appeared genuinely puzzled, as if no one had ever taken the time to seek her opinions and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would.

  “Why not?” I asked. “That’s what people do. They talk about the things they enjoy.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “How come?”

  I looked around for a place to sit. Jane seemed to be relaxing a little. Maybe if I did the same, she might hang around long enough for me to get some answers. There weren’t any chairs or boxes; I ended up leaning against a shelf.

  “ ’Cause it’s nobody’s business what I like,” she said.

  “Surely it’s somebody’s business,” I said gently. “What about your parents?”

  “That’s nobody’s business either!” Jane strode past me toward the doorway. “I gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what?” She paused.

  “Where are you in such a hurry to get to?”

  “Away from here.”

  I followed her out into the main room of the basement. Jane was heading toward a door in the far wall that led outside. “Hey!” I called after her. “Are you hungry?”

  Her steps slowed, then she spun around angrily. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? How come you keep asking so many questions? Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Because I can’t,” I said honestly.

  Jane made a disgusted sound and waved a hand through the air. She shoved the back door open, bolted through, and disappeared.

  Who was she? I wondered. Not a student, yet she obviously knew her way around the campus. But if she didn’t belong in a classroom at Howard Academy, why wasn’t she in school somewhere else?

  It was the question about her parents that had made her run, I thought. She had to have a family somewhere. Did anyone know where she was during the day? Didn’t anyone care?

  I’d tried not to come on too strong so I wouldn’t scare her off; it hadn’t seemed to help. Next time we met, I’d probably be better off grabbing her and holding on until I had some answers.

  Two doors down from the wine cellar was the room where the archives had been stored. It was easy enough to find; that was the only door with a lock on it. Though I used the key Russell Hanover had given me, the gesture seemed superfluous. The lock rattled in its casing and the door fell open easily. A child with a bobby pin could have picked it.

  Most of the other rooms in the basement had been empty. This one was crammed full, stacked from floor to ceiling with crates and trunks. The light fixture looked only slightly younger than Edison, but its hundred-watt bulb illuminated the space easily. As Russell had promised, there was a table. Though old, it was made of wood and looked sturdy enough. It had to be, to hold the boxes stacked on top of it.

  Looking around, I realized for the first time the enormity of the job Russell had handed me. I wondered if he’d had any idea. I walked over and lifted the top of the closest box. A yellowing piece of paper caught my eye.

  Bill of Sale. Purchased this day, July 19, 1923, by Joshua A. Howard for the sum of eight dollars, forty cents. Twenty chickens. Good brood hens. Signed Raymond H. Floyd.

  Smiling, I lifted the paper and read the one beneath it. It was a receipt for roof repair to a barn, dated four years later. Below that was a playbill from the 1960s, Camelot, starring Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet.

  I thumbed through the rest of the box, skimming through odds and ends that didn’t seem to be organized by date or function. Reaching the bottom, I straightened and gazed slowly around. Howard Academy had been founded in the 1920s. Basically, what was stored in this room was three-quarters of a century’s worth of debris.

  I looked at my watch and sighed. Though I’d barely begun to look through the records, my free period was just about over. Students were due in my classroom in ten minutes.

  I shoved the top box aside and picked up the one beneath. I might as well take it upstairs with me. That way, I could sort through it during the rest of the day.

  Lunchtime at Howard Academy is a carefully scripted event. Students are seated at large, round tables, set with tablecloths and linen napkins. A member of the faculty presides at each one. The kitchen staff serves the food, which is usually hot and always delicious. Conversation is quiet and respectful.

  Teachers take turns eating with the students. Those who are free usually sit together at the end of the dining room. Michael had scheduled another committee meeting over lunch period, however, so I fixed myself a tray in the kitchen and carried it down the hall to the teachers’ lounge.

  I was the first to arrive, but Sally Minor walked through the door a moment later. She was an ample woman in her early fifties, who had the privilege of being highly respected by both students and administration alike. She was sharp, canny, and fiercely committed to the educational process. I didn’t know her well, but I liked her a lot.

  “Grab a seat at the table while you still can,” she said, staking out one end for herself. “Let Ed balance his lunch on his knees. Maybe that will slow him down enough to keep him from arguing too much.”

  “What’s the matter now?” I walked over to the sideboard and poured a cup of coffee from the pot. “He can’t still be upset about that smoking thing. The whole building’s nonsmoking, he’s always had to walk outside when he wants a cigarette.”

  “Or sneak into the boys’ room,” Sally muttered.

  “He really does that?”

  “Does it? He makes a habit of it. What kind of example do you think that sets for the kids?”

  I added a dollop of milk to my cup, carried it over, and sat down. “Why doesn’t Mr. Hanover stop him?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t care. Anyway, the newest problem had nothing to do with that. After you left the last meeting . . .” Sally’s eyes flickered up toward Honoria’s portrait, now gazing down upon us from the east wall. “. . . we all just started throwing out ideas. Everyone was feeling pretty desperate by then.”

  I nodded, remembering. I’d been just as happy to escape.

  “Anyway, Ed started talking about how Joshua Howard was rumored to have made some of his money bootlegging during Prohibition. He seemed to know a little bit about liquor being brought in from Canada across the Great Lakes and somehow he managed to parlay that into the notion that the pageant ought to be a play about pirates.”

  “Pirates?” I laughed. “Joshua Howard was no saint, but I don’t think he was a pirate.”

  “Of course he wasn’t a pirate! Everybody knows that. This is just another one of his harebrained schemes.”

  “You must be talking about Ed.” Rita Kinney opened the door and carried her tray inside.

  “How can you tell?”

  “For one thing your face is all red
.” She came and sat down beside us. “That’s pretty much your usual reaction whenever he’s around. And speaking of which, he’s right behind me so watch what you say.”

  “I’ll say whatever I please,” Sally said firmly. “Ed’s the one who can watch out.”

  “Ah, Sally.” The door pushed open once more and Ed Weinstein appeared. He held his tray in front of him like a shield, and the thick, black mustache that adorned his upper lip was twitching like a rabbit’s nose. “Is that your tender voice I hear, or is there a foghorn blowing on the Sound?”

  “Oh stuff it, Ed. Now that Melanie’s back, you can consider your pirate idea voted down. She didn’t like it any better than the rest of us did.”

  “Fine. Be that way.” Ed pushed Rita’s tray to one side and made a place for himself at the table. “I don’t see you coming up with anything better. At least the pirate idea had potential. I don’t know what we’re killing ourselves for, anyway. It’s not like this is a big tradition or anything. There’s never even been a spring pageant before. I’m beginning to think maybe we should just scrap the whole idea.”

  “Good thought,” Sally said sarcastically. “Do you want to be the one to tell Mr. Hanover his pet project’s been abandoned, or should I?”

  “Everybody here? Excellent!” Michael Durant was the last to arrive. He entered the room on the run and went straight to the coffeepot to pour himself a cup. “How’re we doing, people? Who’s got something great for me?”

  “I’m sure Sally must,” Ed said snidely. “Since she seems to think that all my ideas are unworthy.”

  Michael hadn’t brought his lunch with him, and he didn’t join us at the table. Instead he paced around the room, coffee cup in hand, a study in frenetic energy. “Sally? Thoughts?”

  “The chicken’s excellent,” she said.

  At this rate, the spring pageant was never going to take place.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “It’s not a great one, but at least it’s something we could discuss.”

  “Go on,” Michael prompted, training his intense gaze my way.

  “What if, instead of aiming for a huge theme, we tried doing something smaller? A slice of life kind of thing. There’s a whole storeroom full of records in the basement. I was down there looking at them this morning.”

  Ed was already shaking his head, but Michael ignored him. “What kinds of records?”

  “So far, I’ve hardly done anything more than open the first box. It was filled with pretty mundane things, a couple of receipts, a bill of sale for some chickens.”

  “Chickens!” Ed snorted. “And you thought my pirate idea was bad.”

  “I’m not saying we should build the pageant around the chickens.” I decided to ignore him, too. “Just that we might find something useful there. And barring that, we might find enough information about how Joshua and Honoria lived in the early years of this century to reconstruct a day in their lives. I think the kids might enjoy that.”

  “Speaking as their history teacher, I think that’s an interesting idea,” Rita said. “Students are always asking why it’s important to study the past. This could be a way to make a piece of that past come alive.”

  Sally’s no pushover when it comes to her kids, but even she was nodding. She was probably afraid that a “no” vote might have us all talking to parrots and sewing eye patches come spring. “The idea’s got potential,” she agreed. “You say there’s a whole room filled with records?”

  I nodded. “Mr. Hanover gave me the key this morning. So far, I’ve only looked at one box—”

  Outside the room, someone ran past the door and down the hall, the tread of their footsteps echoing loudly. As teachers, it was our duty to punish such infractions. We all glanced toward the door, but nobody got up. A moment later, a second set of footsteps, sounding equally hurried, followed. I wondered what was going on.

  Michael turned back to me. “Do you have any idea what’s in the rest of the boxes?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Judging by what I’ve already seen, I doubt that it’s anything earthshaking. Still, I imagine we’ll be able to reconstruct quite a bit of information about the early years of the school.”

  Michael walked over and perched on the edge of the table. “I think Melanie has something here. Unless anyone objects, I say we go with it. A Day in the Life of Joshua and Honoria Howard.”

  Broadway would never come calling, but for our purposes, it just might do the trick.

  “Who’s going to write the script?” I asked.

  “That’s my job,” said Michael. “And I’d like to get started as soon as possible. Keep me informed of everything you find that you think I might be able to use. In fact, I might just go down and have a look around myself.”

  As he finished speaking, the class bell rang, long and loud, in the hallway outside.

  “That was quick.” Sally stuffed the last bite of crumb cake into her mouth. “Have we been here that long?”

  I looked at the wall clock. “No, it’s early. We should have fifteen more minutes.”

  “That’s odd,” said Ed. “You don’t suppose one of the little pranksters has sneaked into the office—”

  “And rung the bell that would call them back to class early?” Rita asked skeptically. “I doubt it.”

  We all heard the sirens at the same time. Automatically, our heads turned toward the window, but since the teachers’ lounge was in the back of the building, facing the parking lot, there was nothing to be seen.

  “Fire?” asked Michael.

  “No alarm.” I got up and opened the door. “If there were a fire, someone would pull that first thing to get the kids out of the building.”

  Across the hallway, I could see into the classroom beyond and out its wide windows. A silvery blue police car was speeding up the long driveway, followed by an ambulance from Greenwich Hospital. Leanne Honeywell, the sixth grade math teacher, was hurrying down the hallway toward her room.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She stopped, glanced around, then whispered, “I’m not really sure, but whatever it is, Mr. Hanover looked like he was going to have a stroke when he heard about it. He told us all to stay calm, go to our classrooms, and keep the kids inside. He was heading down the hill to the caretaker’s cottage.

  “All I can think is that something terrible must have happened.”

  Six

  The faculty lounge emptied faster than you can say Kibbles ‘N Bits.

  Ed, Sally, and Rita went straight to their classrooms. Not having students to attend to, Michael and I volunteered to clean up and return the lunch trays to the dining room. When that was done, there was a certain sense of inevitability to the way we found ourselves standing next to the back door.

  “We ought to go see what’s happening,” said Michael. My kind of guy.

  “Maybe we can help,” I said.

  “After the police and an ambulance crew have already arrived? Don’t bet on it.” His steps matched mine as I hurried out the door and down the stairs. “I just want to see what all the fuss is about.”

  The caretaker’s cottage was a euphemistic name for an old wooden shed that stood next to the soccer field and housed most of the tools used by Krebbs and the groundskeeping crew. Erected at the same time as the original house, it had obviously suffered periods of neglect and haphazard repair. Two of its windows had broken panes, and the back wall tilted alarmingly. Though I’d passed by the building numerous times on my way to the sports fields, I’d never had occasion to go inside.

  From the top of the hill, we could already see a knot of people gathered around the door to the cottage. Police and EMTs were bustling in and out. Russell Hanover was standing off to one side, looking deeply troubled. Michael and I headed his way.

  “What is it?” Michael asked. “What’s happened?”

  The headmaster wasn’t pleased to see us. “I asked everyone to stay inside. I don’t want the children alarmed in any way. Please go straight back t
o your classes.”

  “We don’t have any classes,” I said. “Michael and I were working on the pageant. Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Russell considered his answer for a long moment. This was the first time I’d seen his composure shaken. He looked like a man who had no idea what to do next.

  “We seem to have all the help we need,” he said finally. “I’ve been asked to stay out of the way, and I suggest that both of you do the same.”

  Michael craned his head around the group, trying to see inside the shed. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Apparently there’s been an accident. Mr. Krebbs has suffered an injury, and the authorities are seeing to him now. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Looking at what was happening around us, I didn’t share his confidence. Though I couldn’t see into the building, none of the emergency personnel seemed too concerned about the condition of Eugene Krebbs. He hadn’t been brought out, and nobody was rushing to his aid. Instead another patrol car had arrived, and an officer with a video camera had begun to tape the proceedings.

  Having had the misfortune to be present at the scene of several murders over the last few years, I was pretty sure this sort of activity meant that Krebbs was anything but fine. The arrival of a dark blue sedan containing Detective Thomas Shertz, whom I’d met when a member of Aunt Peg’s kennel club had been murdered the year before, only confirmed my suspicions. He parked his car at the edge of the field and climbed out, his topcoat flapping around him in the wind.

  If Detective Shertz had been born a dog, he’d have been a Chow. The attributes were all there: squat build, bushy hair, pugnacious features. Once I’d gotten the image in my mind, it was almost a disappointment to find that he didn’t have the requisite black tongue. The detective conferred with the officers at the scene, then came over to speak with Russell.

  He introduced himself, then pulled out a small pad of paper and began to take notes. “I understand you’ve identified the man in the shed as Eugene Krebbs.”

  “That’s correct. He’s the school’s caretaker. Krebbs has been employed at Howard Academy for decades. Longer than anyone else, I think.” Russell’s voice choked. “Is he . . . ?”