by Frank Zafiro
A woman in her fifties sat at the lunch table with a cup of tea and a newspaper. She wore a shawl made of light blue yarn and half a dozen bracelets on each wrist. She didn’t look up as we entered.
“Mrs. Byrnes?” Bill said.
The woman lifted her head, adjusted her glasses and took us both in. Her eyes quickly registered recognition of Bill and turned to me. “Yes?”
“This is—“
“Stefan Kopriva,” I interrupted him and stepped forward. I offered my hand and she shook it lightly. Her touch was warm and her face open. We exchanged pleasantries.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Kopriva?”
“Stefan,” I said and smiled at her. “Or just Stef.”
“Very well. Stef.”
“I’m looking into the disappearance of one of your students. Kris Sinderling?”
Her face paled. “Disappearance? I knew she’d run away, but has something…else happened to her?”
I shook my head. “Her father’s worried and has asked me to try to find her.”
“Are you a private detective, then?”
“No. Just a friend.”
Mrs. Byrnes studied me closely then. Her eyes bore into mine. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, until I began to wonder what she saw there. “So her father knows you’re here?”
I nodded.
She looked past my shoulder at Bill. When her eyes returned to me, she sipped her tea and flashed me a warm smile. “Okay, then,” Mrs. Byrnes said. “What can I do to help?”
I sat down opposite her.
“Tea?” she asked. “I have almost a full box of peppermint.”
“No, thanks.”
She looked up at Bill and her lips pressed together briefly. “We’ll be fine, Bill. Thank you for showing him the way.”
There was a long pause. I imagined Bill struggling with what to do. In the end, he sighed. “I’ll be in the hall,” he said.
“That’s not necessary,” Mrs. Byrnes said.
“Principal’s orders,” Bill said, a touch self-important.
Mrs. Byrnes shrugged and her eyes followed him as he left the room. When the door closed, she turned her eyes to me. “They have to keep us liberals in line, I guess.”
I smiled. I voted Republican in two of the last three elections, but I liked her anyway.
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
“Did you know Kris?”
She nodded. “Of course. Everyone does. All the girls want to be her and all the boys…well, you know what most of the boys want.”
“She’s popular then?”
“Oh yes,” Mrs. Byrnes said. “Very popular. Though I don’t think that is any surprise to you. She is very beautiful and in this society, that is an automatic ticket to popularity. Particularly in high school, where maturity is a rare commodity.”
“You sound a little…”
“Bitter?”
I nodded and she laughed lightly. “No, I’m not bitter. I am resigned, though.”
“Resigned?”
“Yes. I am resigned to the fact the world is what it is.”
“And what is that?”
“Superficial, for one thing. And, in my darker moments, I suppose I would say it can be ugly.”
I thought of my time on the job. I recalled the sharp pain of bullets slamming into my shoulder and through the back of my knee. I saw the crazy eyes of the old woman who dared me to search her home. And I saw the eyes of that little girl later on, still and fixed, on the silver table. Staring up. Silent. Accusing.
I shuddered. Ugly was right.
She didn’t notice my reaction and went on, “I can never change it completely. None of us can. We can only try to make our trip through this world more bearable.”
“How do you mean?”
“With art,” she answered wistfully. “Compassion. Mercy. Any of those will do.”
I wondered if that were true.
“Forgive me,” she said with a warm smile. “You’re not here for philosophy.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “My grandmother used to say something similar.”
“What did she say?”
“That we can’t control other people, only how we react to them.”
She gave me a slightly puzzled look.
“She usually added that if we react in a positive way, we might change the world just a little bit at a time.”
“One deed at a time,” Mrs. Byrnes mused. “Or one person at a time.”
“That was the gist of it, yeah.”
“Your grandmother was a smart woman,” Mrs. Byrnes said. “For my part, it seems the older I get, the more my thoughts tumble out before I have a good look at them. And being a teacher, I frequently have a captive audience, so I become self-indulgent.”
“It’s all right,” I repeated. “Really. How about the teachers? How’d she get along with them?”
Mrs. Byrnes chuckled and sipped her tea again. “Ah, yes. The teachers. Well, we are a strange lot, Stef.” She looked at me again. “You appear to be in your thirties. Do you still remember high school?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Oh, come now. You don’t remember how strange your teachers were? How they didn’t even seem human at times? In fact, for many of my students, it is a shock to their systems to discover that I am very human. That I get ill, that I have emotions and get sad or angry, or that I eat dinner, go to the movies, make love…” She smiled mischievously. “It never occurs to them that I do any of those things. That I live.”
I remembered those feelings. A teacher was a symbol, not a person. In the egocentric world of a teenager, teachers were just bit players who sat all night at their desks, eagerly waiting for their students to return.
She watched me. “You do remember.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So then, there is the answer to your question.”
The answer. The answer was that the geometry instructor saw nothing but the pentagon and rhombus and the C2=A2+B2 equation. The English teacher was too busy chasing the French teacher. The history teacher had a year’s worth of chalk dust on the sleeves of his wool coat and cared more for the glory that was Rome and the genius that was Thomas Jefferson than the faces in front of him. The computer teachers saw bits and bytes and programming strings, but little else.
The teachers didn’t notice the students any more than the students noticed them. High school was a microcosm of the real world.
Mrs. Byrnes stared at me, a curious smile playing on her lips. “Haven’t thought about high school in a while, have you?”
“No,” I answered truthfully. Hardly ever, until Matt Sinderling came along. I cleared my throat. “What do you teach, Mrs. Byrnes?”
“Marie,” she said. “Please. And I teach Spanish. All four years of it. And I am one of the drama advisers, as well.”
And drama is where her passion lies, I realized in a flash. I had a brief vision of Marie Byrnes thirty years ago. Her hair was a deeper black then, I was sure, and had none of the gray streaks in it today. I imagined her expectant eyes looking for a challenge, her teaching certificate in hand and the theater beckoning. Or had she tried her hand at acting first, and slipped into teaching because she hadn’t made the grade? I wasn’t sure.
“Are you close to Kris?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly. “No, not really. She’s in my Spanish class and received good marks, but she could have done much, much better. This absence will be difficult for her to overcome.”
“Is she outgoing?”
Marie Byrnes gave me a look that was part conspiratorial, part jesting and then said, “Outgoing? I suppose. Outwardly so, at least. But I don’t think many people really became too close with Kris.”
“Why not?”
“Have you ever met her, Stef?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “I think she is very much apart.”
“Apart? You mean different?”
“Yes and no.
She has a different quality, a sense of overwhelming beauty, I think. But there is also a distance that she exudes. A distance in age and station.”
I thought of the glamour picture that Matt had given me and I knew what she meant.
“She is already an adult,” Marie said, “even though she is only a junior. Too adult for her classmates, even the seniors, including the boys who try to date her. And…”
“And what?”
Marie Byrnes smiled again. “She doesn’t really have a whole lot of time for us adults, either. That’s where the difference in station came in, I believe.”
“She told her dad she was going to be a star.”
Marie nodded. “In some ways, she probably thinks she already is.”
“Is she?”
Another nod. “In this very small pond, yes.”
I paused, thinking about what she’d told me. Kris was every bit of what I had thought she’d be. Perhaps even more than I thought.
Marie Byrnes watched me and drank her tea.
Finally, I asked, “What about drama?”
She nodded. “I believe Kris is taking drama this year.”
“I thought you taught it.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, here in District 17, drama is not a class. It’s an extra-curricular activity, just like athletics. In fact, our students are even able to letter in drama.”
“But I thought you said you were the coach.”
“I am. As is Mr. LeMond. We alternate years and this is his year.”
I heard the distaste in her voice and noted that she did not use LeMond’s first name.
“You don’t like him, do you? Or the arrangement of alternating years?”
She shrugged. “I would prefer to coach every year, if that’s what you mean.”
“But it’s more than that,” I said. “I can tell. You don’t like him.”
She glanced down at her cup of tea. “Perhaps I’ve said too much. Aside from teaching in the classroom, I don’t have many conversations anymore. I suppose I’m becoming exactly what the students think all of us are. Teach and go home.” She looked up. “And I don’t know you.”
“Sure you do,” I told her. “I’m Stefan Kopriva.”
Marie smiled again, but this one had less warmth. “Stefan. That’s not a very common first name. And that last name. Is it Polish?”
“Czech.”
She nodded her understanding. “Of course. These days we get every variation of common names. Daniel somehow spawns a Y, Christopher comes with a K, that sort of thing. And then there are some names which are just plain made up and not very original at all.” She shook her head. “It seems sad to just throw away tradition so glibly, doesn’t it?”
“Not a very liberal sentiment,” I observed, watching her.
Warmth touched her smile again. “Touché,” she whispered.
15
Bill wasn’t very happy about being banished to the hallway during my conversation with Marie Byrnes and his cold silence let me know it. I said just two words to him—“Mr. LeMond”—and he grunted and led me to the teacher’s offices.
From my time on the job, I didn’t remember District 17 security officers being such assholes. In fact, most of them had limited commissions and worked hand-in-hand with the police department. But that had been ten years or so ago. There was a different Chief of Police now. And who knows how many administrators the school district had gone through. And maybe Bill was an anomaly. It could be that he was the only one who looked like a post-retirement brown shirt with a belly.
The analogy made me grin slightly. I half-expected Bill to chastise me for daring to show a smile in his presence, but he still wasn’t talking to me.
He wasn’t taking any chances on being dismissed again, either. When we reached a door that opened into a short hallway, he merely pointed and held up three fingers. I walked in and he remained in the hallway.
The third office belonged to Mr. Gary LeMond, according to the placard outside the door. Behind a cluttered desk, a man in his late thirties leaned back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head and his eyes closed.
I took the opportunity to study him. He was slender, though not the kind of slender a runner or a swimmer tends to be. More like the kind of slender that is simply a gift from God—blessed to never be fat, but denied every attempt to develop some muscle anywhere. His sandy brown hair seemed too long for a high school teacher in such a conservative town. He hadn’t shaved, as there was intermittent stubble on his cheeks and chin. His mustache cut sharply downward over his lips and along the sides of his mouth. Another half-inch on both sides and it would fall into the category of porn mustache.
His face was relaxed, but I didn’t think he was asleep. He wore a pair of black Dockers and a gray sweater with a severe design on it. A pair of John Lennon glasses sat on the desk in front of him.
I knocked on the threshold and his eyes popped open. “Yes?”
“Mr. LeMond?”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”
“Sure,” he said with a deep breath. “Sorry about that. Just envisioning some blocking for the play we’re producing.”
I stuck out my hand. “Stefan Kopriva.”
“Gary LeMond,” he said and took it. His handshake was negligible, all touch and no grip. “Sit down.”
I took a seat next to his desk.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, his hands clasped behind his head again.
“I’m trying to locate Kris Sinderling for her father,” I said.
There was an uncomfortable flicker in his eyes, then it was gone. He rotated slightly left and right in his seat and watched me.
“You’re not the police,” he finally said.
“No,” I told him. “I’m just looking into this for her father.”
He nodded and continued to rotate left and then right. “Well, anything I can do to help, you got it.”
“Thanks.”
“Kris is a special kid. I hope she’s okay.”
“Special how?”
LeMond smiled then. “Come on. Have you ever met her?”
I shook my head.
“Seen a picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you know.”
I shrugged.
LeMond’s smile darkened. “Okay, go ahead and play dumb, Mr…what was it?”
“Kopriva.”
“Okay, Mr. Kopriva. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you don’t see Kris’s special qualities, even in a photograph?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose?” His dark smile deepened. “Well, let me tell you this—if all you saw was a picture, you have no idea what kind of magnetism that young woman has. She commands the attention of a crowd, draws them to the edge of their seats and leaves them haunted afterward.”
“Powerful words.”
He shrugged. “True words.”
“Still,” I said. “Pretty powerful description for a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“Art has no age,” LeMond said. “And she is beyond her years, anyway.”
“You seem quite taken with her.”
LeMond’s eyes snapped to me. “Be careful, Mr. Kopriva.” He waggled his hand, indicating the adjoining offices. “Teachers are the worst gossips known to man.”
“I’m just saying—“
“And I’m just saying, be careful. That’s how rumors start and become fact, as far as anyone cares to look, anyway.”
I didn’t answer, but the small hairs on the back of my neck bristled on end.
“I am a teacher,” LeMond said after a moment. “And an artist. My art is the theater. That is the context I was speaking in.”
“Kris was in your class, then?”
“In my English class and she was involved in drama after school.”
“Did you work closely with her?”
LeMond nodded. “I did. I was trying to produce a one-act
play that I wrote. She was going to star in it.”
“Before she ran away?”
“No,” he said. “Before Principal Jenkins became involved.”
“What does that mean?”
LeMond sighed. “What type of work do you do, Mr. Kopriva?”
“None,” I said. “I’m retired.”
He raised an eyebrow questioningly, but when I didn’t offer any further explanation, he shrugged it away. “Well, you are aware of the term ‘office politics,’ are you not?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that is what I’m referring to. School politics.”
“I still don’t understand what—“
“Essentially,” LeMond said, “Marie Byrnes carped at Jenkins long enough and hard enough that he probably got tired of listening, so he came down here to my office and told me that we would not be producing my play. We would produce a play that had more parts instead of just the one. He said it was so that more students could participate in acting roles.” He gave a disgusted snort. “As if there wasn’t enough lighting and set and costume design to keep everyone busy.”
“So he cancelled your play?”
“Exactly. Even though it is my year to produce and direct and with that comes the privilege of selecting the work to be produced.”
“How’d Kris take that?”
LeMond shrugged. “I didn’t notice.”
You didn’t notice? I thought with surprise, but then I realized that he had probably been too intent on how the decision affected him to notice the fallout it caused with anyone else.
“I suppose it must have upset her,” he offered. “She quit drama shortly after the cancellation.”
“Before that happened, had she seemed upset about anything?”
“No.”
“Mention any problems?”
He shook his head.
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
LeMond’s eyebrows raised in surprise, then he smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Girls like Kris spend most of their time brushing aside clumsy attempts to court them by high school boys.”
“How about college boys?”
He shrugged. “I doubt it. At least nothing steady.”
“Again, why not?”
“She spent a lot of time rehearsing,” LeMond said. “I don’t think there was a lot of time for dating. Not for her.”
