That night, for the first time in fourteen months, Susan opened her father’s box.
Though Susan thought of it as a sacred object, it was just a brown cardboard box stuffed into the back of the shelf in the hall closet, where her mother kept the vacuum cleaner. It had always been very hard for Susan to reach, and she had to be very quiet while she did it.
She managed that this evening. Merlie was working on student evaluations, and she’d put on a record album (Three Dog Night) to listen to while she worked. So Susan was able to set up the folding steps, reach the shelf, and pull the box forward. It was much easier than it had been the last time she’d done it—a measure of how much she’d grown the past year.
She crept to her room with her burden. By now the objects in it were very familiar. The largest one was her parents’ honeymoon photo album, which her mother couldn’t bear to see these days. And there were framed things: certificates, commendations, and diplomas earned over her dad’s thirty-five years. Underneath those was a small shoebox of pictures of Howard Langley’s childhood, spent in a baffling world of deep snow and canoes in mysterious waters, and relatives Susan had seen only a couple of times. Wisconsin seemed like another world to her.
But after a quick glance, she put all these things aside for her favorite memento: her dad’s high school yearbook. It was almost magical to her, her dad so young and handsome, the clothes so different. Howard Langley had played a game called lacrosse. Susan had never heard of it, but she’d looked it up. The yearbook showed Howard in his lacrosse uniform, and decorating the school for the Winter Carnival (whatever that was), and in a group of athletes giving a talk to younger kids. Those kids were the size of Susan now, so she enjoyed that picture more than all the others. She turned to it now. It was a whole half page.
Her dad was controlling a puppet, its wooden feet against the teacher’s desk, and another brawny boy was manipulating his own puppet to engage in battle with her dad’s, and the kids were laughing, and even the teachers way in the background were smiling . . .
Susan clapped a hand over her own mouth to smother a yell.
One of the teachers was Miss Fondevant.
No, Susan thought. It can’t be. She took a deep breath, clamped her lips together, and looked at the picture again.
The teacher’s hair was in a different style, but not that different. Her clothes were a different style, too, but looking at the other teachers in the picture, they were right for the time and place. Her figure was the same. The way she held her head was the same.
She wanted to run to the TV room to show her mother. But Susan thought, Sit for a minute before you do something. Think about it. She took some deep breaths. She read the caption under the half-page picture.
Lacrosse seniors Howard Langley and Dave Parnell demonstrate their puppeteer abilities to Miss Franklin’s seventh-grade class.
Miss Franklin was Miss Fondevant.
In that crystalline moment, Susan understood how her father had died. He had gone to run at Crystal Lake. He had gone there to run. But that evening, Miss Fondevant had been there as well. He must have seen her at his job at the bank. He had let her know that she reminded him—what an amazing coincidence!—of a teacher from his youth back in Wisconsin, of all places! How shocked she must have been to be starting over in a new place, far away, and be recognized. What had Susan’s father thought when she grabbed ahold of him and wouldn’t let go? Had he not wanted to hit a woman, especially an older one? But then realized she was killing him . . . too late?
The enormity of it made her almost as weak as her father must have felt. Though she returned the box to its place before she went to bed, she kept the yearbook and hid it in her room in an old satchel on her closet floor.
It took Susan two days to recover. She was carrying around something too big for a person her age, too big for a person any age. She told herself that it was good Frieda was not her best friend anymore because she would have had to ignore her while she tried to get back to normal. She missed Frieda bitterly, in every sense of the word.
On the second day after she’d opened her father’s yearbook, Miss Fondevant gripped her shoulder.
Susan had gotten careless, hadn’t been paying the careful attention she’d given the teacher ever since the James Phillip incident. Since James Phillip died, she told herself harshly. She’d been thinking of the picture again, a terrible mistake when she was actually in Miss Fondevant’s presence.
“Susan!” said the teacher. “Pay attention.” For the first time, Susan felt Miss Fondevant’s hand on her, felt the cold of it pulling the warmth out of her . . . felt a strange lassitude creep over her. Susan called it “sleepiness” to herself, but it was both more and less than that. For the rest of the school day, Susan was able to cope only because she feared the consequences. She did everything Miss Fondevant told her to do, because otherwise Miss Fondevant would touch her again.
As Susan watched Miss Fondevant make her way to the teachers’ lounge, after the lunch bell, Susan came to a horrible realization. Miss Fondevant was able to walk and talk because she had stolen some of Susan’s life from her.
That afternoon, she got into her mother’s car like a puppet with slack strings. “Are you all right?” Susan’s mother asked, her face worried.
“Miss Fondevant touched my shoulder,” Susan said. She looked directly into her mother’s eyes.
“She hurt you?” Susan’s mom said incredulously. “I’ll tell her not to put a goddamned finger on you again. Just you wait.”
“And what’s she going to say?” Susan asked, her voice merely tired.
Susan’s mother was disconcerted. “What do you mean?”
“She’s going to say, ‘Oh, Merlie, I just tap them on the shoulder to make sure they’re listening to me.’ And you’re going to say, ‘Emily, something you’re doing to those kids is really having an effect on them. I wish you’d find some other way to make your discipline felt in the classroom.’ And for a while she’ll lay off, but it won’t last forever.”
Susan’s mother looked at her strangely. Susan could see her struggling with what to say. As they got out of the car at their house, her mom said, “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, okay?”
If Merlie hadn’t gone right to the kitchen to use the telephone, Susan might have had some hope. But Merlie was calling Donna Lynn. After a moment they would laugh, and the problem would shrink. They’d think of something else to talk about, and the problem would shrink some more.
The next day in a far corner of the playground, where Susan pretended to be making a clover blossom chain while Taylor was bouncing a ball off the fence and catching it—just within hearing distance—they talked over ways and means. “If we could figure out how to do it,” Susan said, “we could hook her up to something that would drain her. She would lose all her energy and die.”
“My dad has a gun,” Taylor said. “I don’t know if I could take it without him knowing, but I bet I could. We could just shoot her.”
Susan stared at him, her hands lying limp in her lap full of clover blossoms. “I never thought of that.” She mulled it over for a minute. “It would make a big noise, like it does on TV, I guess,” she said uncertainly. “And it would be real messy. And people would come running.”
“Yeah, it’d be hard to act like we didn’t know anything about it,” Taylor said. “My dad’s gun, after all.”
“She drinks coffee all the time—maybe I could put something poisonous in her coffee. Like the stuff we put out to kill roaches.”
“That stuff has a pretty strong smell,” Taylor said. “My dad uses it in his shop.”
Susan pictured a flower shop, full of sweet scents and beautiful blooms. “What does your dad do?”
“He fixes cars, sometimes. He works for a construction company, sometimes. What does your dad do?”
“My dad is dead. Miss Fondevant murdered him, too.”
“He died out at the park, right?”
“Yeah, but she
was there. They knew each other from before, and she looked the same. She couldn’t let him live.”
They looked at each other briefly. Then Taylor went back to bouncing the ball.
Susan had to say something. “What about your mom?” Of course, Tyler would know that her mother was a teacher.
“She married someone else. She’s got three kids with her other husband. She doesn’t need me.” Blessedly, Taylor did not ask her any questions about her father. At that moment, Susan came close to genuinely liking Taylor.
“We have to keep thinking,” Susan said, and she did.
Susan carpooled to gymnastics class that afternoon. When she returned, she found her mother sitting in the kitchen with her dad’s yearbook open before her on the table. It was turned to the page Susan had marked with a torn piece of paper—the picture of Susan’s dad with Miss Fondevant.
Susan stopped in the doorway, uncertain of what to say or do. Her mom was not crying, and that was good. Susan couldn’t stand it when her mom cried.
“Susan, I’m sorry,” her mother said.
Susan came a little farther into the kitchen, still waiting to be sure she understood.
“It’s Miss Fondevant, isn’t it?” her mother said, and Susan’s heart soared with joy. Merlie believed her! But her mom looked wrong, not “avenging angel” but more like “soft mama.”
“This woman looks so much like her,” Merlie said, “I can see why . . .”
The crush of the disappointment made Susan run past her mom down the hall to her little bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Susan didn’t know whom she hated more—Miss Fondevant or her mother.
It was a bad night in the Langley household.
Susan didn’t sleep well, and she was in a grim mood the next morning. Susan wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to be a grown-up, if grown-ups were that stupid.
She was glad when Taylor passed her a grubby note on his way to his desk that morning. It read I thought of a way.
It took some elaborate maneuvering for Susan to engineer a moment to talk to him. She sat on a bench on the playground, apparently absorbed in a piece of paper, and he sat on the other end facing in the opposite direction, studiously taking off a sneaker and shaking it upside down to get out an imaginary pebble.
“My dad showed me a stick of dynamite,” he said over his shoulder. “I remembered a couple of days ago. It took me until now to find it. He keeps it at the back of his shop in a lockbox. I found the key last night.”
“But we can’t blow up our classroom.”
“We can blow up her car. While she’s in it.”
“Okay.” That seemed simple enough to Susan. “Is it like the cartoons? You just light the thing at the end?”
“Pretty much. That’s what my dad told me, back when he was showing it to me. He stole it off a demolition job.”
Though they were planning to kill Miss Fondevant, Susan was still shocked when Taylor confessed so casually that his father had stolen something. She didn’t want Taylor to see it, so she instantly created a crime for herself. “I’ll take the lighter my mom uses to light candles,” she said firmly. It was an old Zippo that her father had used for his rare cigarette. “We’ll have to put it under her car when she gets into it.”
“So we need to watch to see when she goes to her car,” Taylor said. “I catch the bus.”
“Okay,” Susan said, understanding. Since she waited at the school for her mom, she was the obvious choice for the job.
Even this would take some doing. Before today, she’d waited inside the school at the main entrance, so she could watch for her mother’s car to pull up. “Tomorrow,” she told her mother that night, “I’m going to wait at the side entrance by the teachers’ parking lot.”
“Why? Not that it really makes any difference, but . . .”
“I had a fight with Frieda, and I don’t want to wait with her.” It was the most childish reason Susan could think of, and it worked like a charm.
The next day it was raining, and Susan sat on the floor just inside the glass doors. Miss Fondevant was the second teacher to leave. She stopped beside Susan.
“Is everything all right, Susan?” she asked in her formal way.
“Yes, ma’am. My mom told me to wait at this door today.” Susan hoped she was imagining the gleam of suspicion in Miss Fondevant’s eyes, behind the glasses. The gold ring seemed to wink at Susan in the fluorescent light.
“All right, then. See you tomorrow,” Miss Fondevant said, and went down the steps and to her car, a Ford Fairlane. It was 4:02 p.m., Susan ascertained by glancing up at the big hall clock. For the next three days, Miss Fondevant left at the same time. The fourth day, she stayed longer for a teacher meeting. Susan’s mother got used to picking Susan up at the side entrance, and she even said it was a little easier than the front.
While she waited to execute her schoolteacher, Susan tried to remember what it had been like before she knew about Miss Fondevant, about her father. Frieda and her other classmates seemed like real children to her now, while Susan was not. She began wearing sweaters or jackets with pockets, so she could put the lighter in them. Since the weather was cooling off, her wardrobe was not peculiar, but if she’d been caught with the lighter, the consequences would have been dire.
Taylor seemed almost buoyant that Thursday, running on the playground and playing basketball with his buddies like a demon, energy flying off in all directions. When he came in from lunch recess, sweaty and disheveled, he dropped his geography book while Miss Fondevant’s back was turned, and she jumped. Some of the children laughed; it was so strange to see Miss Fondevant surprised by anything.
Miss Fondevant turned, smiling, and instantly all the laughter died away. “Taylor,” she said, “please come up here.” Taylor looked across the room at Susan and she saw the fear in his eyes. Taylor, who really had no choice, got up and walked to the front of the room. Susan held her breath. Surely Miss Fondevant wouldn’t dare to kill him? Susan thought, She can’t, he’s healthy. And she had the vague conviction that two dead kids in one room would be very suspicious, even for someone as respectable as Miss Fondevant.
Taylor’s hands, dangling, were visibly shaking. Daniel (who sat to Susan’s left) opened his mouth to jeer, but Susan glared at him. Daniel’s grin faded and he looked down.
Miss Fondevant put her hand on Taylor’s shoulder. He looked sick almost immediately, so Susan knew the teacher was gripping hard to cause pain as well as to suck the life out of Taylor. The children watched, their eyes wide, though some looked away and behaved as if nothing were happening.
Susan tried desperately to think of something to stop the teacher. She looked at the door, with its big glass pane, and she said, “Mr. Kosper!” in a voice designed to carry.
When Susan looked back at Miss Fondevant, the teacher was standing a couple of feet away from Taylor, who had put one hand to the corner of her desk to keep upright. Miss Fondevant looked from the door to Susan when Mr. Kosper didn’t appear. Her teacher’s face was smooth but Susan could see under her skin now, and she knew the look. It was like when her always-dieting mom pushed away her dinner plate before she was satisfied.
Susan knew she was doomed. Miss Fondevant would never forgive and forget.
Luckily for Susan, there was a peremptory crackling from the public address system, and the school secretary’s voice said, “Miss Fondevant, Mr. Kosper says it’s time for your class to go to their exams.”
The scoliosis exam. Everyone had it when they were in the sixth grade. Today was their room’s time slot. Susan exhaled, unaware she’d been holding her breath until she let it out. And the mention of Mr. Kosper’s name had somehow made it seem as though he had looked into Room 2.
“Line up,” Miss Fondevant said briskly. “We’re going to the PE classroom over in the gym.”
Miss Fondevant made sure they formed a line silently, and then she started them marching in the right direction. The halls were full of kids returning from and going t
o the exam site. The other classes were jostling and talking, and in some cases the children were laughing out loud.
But the kids in line behind Miss Fondevant were silent. Taylor was walking under his own power, but his face was white as a sheet. Susan could see that he’d thought he was going to die. As he went past Susan, he said, “The lighter?”
She nodded.
“Today.”
She must have gotten through the scoliosis exam without doing anything very strange, though she saw Frieda looking at her funny once. It touched her in a tender part, that Frieda still knew enough about her to tell when something was wrong.
When the final bell rang for the end of school that day, Taylor headed for the school bus pickup door, as always. She wanted to scream at the idea of being abandoned. She was the only one who noticed, she hoped, when he ducked inside a boys’ bathroom. He stayed inside until after his bus left, and then he walked down the hall to where Susan stood waiting at the door to the teachers’ parking lot. He looked like an old little boy, Susan thought, and then she couldn’t figure out what she’d meant.
But it was true. Taylor’s dark hair looked dusty and tousled, and his shirt was rumpled, and one of his sneakers had a loose sole. But there was something scary in his brown eyes. He had his ancient backpack slung on one shoulder as he always did. She fell into step beside him, her own books clasped in her arms, as they walked into the parking lot together.
One large tree had been left standing in the parking lot, and Miss Fondevant got there early enough to park underneath it. They hid behind it; if another exiting teacher saw them, she would certainly feel obliged to do something about their presence in an odd place.
Taylor put his backpack on the ground and unzipped it. He pulled out a recognizable stick of dynamite. It didn’t look exactly like it did in the cartoons (it was brown instead of red), but Susan never doubted that what Taylor held was the real thing. She shuddered at the sight of it.
In turn, she got the Zippo out of her pocket.
“So we wait till she gets inside the car,” Taylor said, becoming the boss by virtue of possession of the dynamite. “You light it, I roll it under her car, and we both run like hell.” He tacked on the hell defiantly.
Seize the Night Page 16
