by Jane Haddam
Now she realized that she had been staring at the plants for what seemed like forever, and that her free period was going to come to an end sometime, and maybe it already had. She looked up at the clock on the wall—she didn’t understand why they had to have the same kind of clock in here that they had in all the classrooms; it made her feel as if she were still sixteen years old and waiting for the bell like she would wait for a governor’s pardon—and saw with some relief that she’d only been zoning out for maybe fifteen minutes. Her head hurt, badly. She thought she might have another mild concussion, but she had decided, years ago, never to go to the emergency room for anything minor. Never mind the fact that she would have to pay for any treatment she had herself. The system had gone to an HMO a little while back, and now if she wanted her insurance to pay for her trips to the ER, she had to get permission from her primary care physician. He was not, thankfully, one of the boys she had grown up with, but she still hated to see him for every little thing. He had flat eyes, too, when he wanted to.
The door to the teachers’ lounge opened and Shelley Brancowski came in, closing the door behind her with a snap, so that none of the students would be able to look in and see what went on when the teachers weren’t working. Why that would be important, Peggy didn’t know. It wasn’t like any of them smoked anymore, and if any of them did they had to go outside the building just like the students did. Shelley threw her pocketbook into one of the chairs and went to get herself coffee from the big spigoted pot that was kept hot all day long. By the time the final bell rang at three-thirty, the coffee inside it was a thick mud sludge like the mud pies they used to make in the sandbox at Central School after a good hard rain.
“So,” Shelley said. “You okay? You’ve been looking a little distracted all day.”
“I’m fine. I’m just a little tired.” Shelley’s eyebrows shot up. Peggy ignored them. “I’ve been talking to an old friend of mine, sort of by accident. Elizabeth Toliver really is coming to stay here for a month.”
“I know,” Shelley said. “It’s been everywhere, really. It’s exciting, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not like she’s a movie star, or somebody the kids would understand, but it’s still exciting. It’s not every day we get somebody who’s been to dinner at the White House in Hollman.”
“Mmmm,” Peggy said.
Shelley cocked her head. “So, what’s wrong? She was a friend of yours, right, or somebody you knew? She was in the same graduating class. I looked it up in the old yearbooks. She was really remarkable-looking even then.”
“We thought she was ugly,” Peggy said. “And maybe she was. For high school. Your tastes change when you get older.”
“So, what is it? I mean, I know there’s all that about the murder, but I can’t see that it matters. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything, no matter what the tabloids say. I looked that up, too. Were you there, the night that boy died in the park?”
“Everybody was there, really. Wandering around. We used to go to the park on Saturday nights and neck. There was a pine forest there and you could lie down on the dead needles and it was soft. That was one of the few times I ever wished I’d gone away to college. It would have been much easier if we’d had a bed in a dorm room to use for what we were trying to do.”
“Were you and Stu already going out then?”
“Stu and I started going out in kindergarten. Or something like it. Well, I wanted to go out with him, and I just sort of hung around until he got the idea himself. I think he finally made it when we were freshmen in high school.”
“Were you one of the people who locked Elizabeth Toliver into the outhouse?”
“No,” Peggy said, and that was true. Whatever else she had been in those days, she had not been one of those girls—like Maris and Belinda and Emma—who had felt the need to make Betsy’s life as miserable as it was possible to make it. She had only wanted to keep her distance, because she knew that guilt by association really worked. On the other hand, it was also true that she had known what they were going to do, and had listened to Betsy screaming just before she’d run off to look for Stu, and that she hadn’t done anything to stop what was happening.
Now she glanced back up at the clock and began to gather up her things. If Emma hadn’t called here looking for Nancy and if she hadn’t answered the phone accidentally, she would never have heard the news about Betsy Toliver, except thirdhand, from newspapers, the way Shelley had. Guilt by association still worked, she understood that. It was just that, now, she was the one they were all afraid to be associated with. She didn’t even blame them. If it had been one of them in her position, she would have done the same thing. Things. When they saw her in the mall, they pretended not to, and if they were walking toward her they turned around abruptly, or crossed the corridor to the other side to pretend to look at window displays of electronics or candy canes. When they saw her in town, they smiled and said they couldn’t understand why they never saw anything of her anymore, even though they did understand, completely, and so did she.
“It will be exciting, don’t you think so?” Shelley said. “Old Hacker has been talking about asking her to come and speak, and so has Dina Wade. I guess Dina was her English teacher, one year. It’s so, I don’t know, stultifying out here. Nobody ever goes anywhere. Nobody ever does anything. It’s like, if you’re born in Hollman, you’re destined to stay here, do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“It will be good for the students to be able to see somebody who got out and did something with her life. Maybe it will give a few of them ideas. I can’t get most of my students to even consider going away to a college somewhere out of state, never mind applying to somewhere good. Is she nice, do you think? Was she nice in high school?”
“I don’t really know what she was like in high school,” Peggy said, and that was true, too, since she had made such a point of not knowing. She made sure her papers were in an orderly stack. She had meant to correct a few of them, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. She put them back into her big work bag and rummaged through her small purse for a comb. She really did have a mild concussion. Her head throbbed. She kept going in and out of dizziness. Maybe Stu would come back dead someday from hunting, but if he did, what would she do without him?
“So,” Shelley said. “Take it easy.”
Peggy went out without answering her, because that was a statement in code, and she couldn’t handle statements in code on this particular afternoon.
5
For Nancy Quayde, anger was a familiar feeling, so familiar, she no longer recognized it for what it was. Still, this particular anger had made her jumpy, and as she walked down the wide corridors of Hollman High School with her sharp high heels clicking against the vinyl tiles of the east wing first floor—noise control undersystem my foot—she found herself running through the reasons that Hollman ought to find a way to fire Peggy Smith. It wasn’t the first time, and, Nancy thought, it probably wasn’t going to be the last. Peggy had tenure and sympathy. Most of the other women on staff thought she was heroic for putting up with Stu all these years, and even if they didn’t they would have resisted firing Peggy, who would need the job if she ever did leave the jerk. The problem, for Nancy, was that she saw Peggy’s troubles with Stu to be practically a matter of will. Peggy’s will was to dither and refuse to make decisions, just as it had been Peggy’s will to dither and refuse to make decisions all those years ago in high school, when people like Maris and Belinda and Emma were torturing the hell out of stupid Betsy Toliver. The past always came back to bite you on the ass. Nancy could have told them that when they were all only fourteen years old, but she had known, even at the time, that the effort would be futile. Belinda was the next best thing to mentally retarded. Emma was not much better. Maris was—
Nancy had come to the fire doors that separated the East Wing from the main body of the school. She pushed through, strode across the little breezeway where the stairwells were—damned fool
janitors must have forgotten to turn off the heat—and wondered what Betsy Toliver was actually like these days. In high school, she hadn’t been much better than Peggy, and she’d been clueless on top of it. All those shirtwaist dresses a little too long at the knee, and the hair bands, and the knee socks that didn’t actually match her sweaters. Somebody had taught her to dress in the years since she’d left Hollman, although that could be the result of television stylists and network publicists, so that, left on her own for the weekend, Betsy might look just as odd now as she had then. What Nancy couldn’t believe was that Betsy still had the attitude she’d had back then, that cringing fear, that wounded vulnerability that practically asks to be hit again, and again, and again. All things considered, Nancy had never been able to blame Maris and Belinda and Emma for the things they’d done. If she’d been a less careful person, she might have done the same things herself. Lord only knew, she had wanted to, over and over again, whenever she ran across Betsy in the halls or in the lavatories, because Betsy really had seemed to be coming right out and asking for it. There was something about that kind of fear that made Nancy Quayde want to explode, and she had exploded, time and time again, over the years. Lab partners, sorority sisters, boyfriends, best girlfriends, classmates, all the people who wanted to break down and cry, who felt hurt, who felt scared, who let you know that if you tapped them on the shoulder they would fall apart and fall down—they worked on her like a trigger, so that all she wanted to do was swat them down, make them move, get some sense in them. She had had sense all her life, for as far back as she could remember. That was why, in the end, she hadn’t hit the same wall all the rest of them had. Even Maris had hit that wall, she’d just waited to hit it when she graduated from college. Nancy graduated from college with her first job tucked neatly under her belt and with a record anybody who wanted a career in education would have found enviable. She hadn’t ended up at Johnstown just because it was only half a mile away and easy to commute to. She hadn’t dropped out sophomore year, or gotten married senior year, or hooked up with some damned idiot boy who would end up resenting the hell out of her competence and ambition. It was all a matter of planning, and none of them had ever wanted to plan, not even Maris, so of course, they had ended up, at fifty, not knowing what had happened to their lives. She wondered if Betsy had planned, if not in high school, then later. Maybe some sea of change had come over her at Vassar and the quivering vulnerability had dropped off her like leaves off a tree at the beginning of November. Nancy was sure that nobody could end up on CNN, or nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, or teaching at Columbia University, without having planned it all down to the last smear of eye makeup. At the very least, she must have had drive, and drive was what Nancy admired in people more than anything else.
In the foyer at the center of the main corridor, Nancy stopped to review the exhibits in the glass cases. One was full of trophies for the football and basketball teams. In her day, Hollman had had terrible sports teams, so that it was embarrassing to be a cheerleader, although she had been one. That was planning, too, because even then she’d known that cheerleading would look good to the sororities she wanted to check out when she got to college, and the sororities would be important to her later, when she was looking for a job or a change or a promotion. By some miracle, though, the last few years had been good for Hollman sports. They had a lot of trophies, and some banners, and the display case did not look barren. The other display case did not look barren, either, but Nancy liked it less. It was one of those cheery pastel and primary colors booster projects the language clubs were so fond of, and like all such projects it had created a stir in “the community.” Citizens of the World! the felt letters across the top of the display case shrieked, and then, across the bottom: Hollman High Celebrates Fifty Years of the United Nations! Dickie Baird and his little crowd of true believers had come out of the woodwork at the last board of education meeting, cackling away about how Hollman High was in league with the Satanic Freemason Popish global conspiracy to impose a one-world government under the rule of the Antichrist and destroy the United States and all the Christians in it. Really, Nancy thought, if she hadn’t already decided she wanted the superintendent’s job when it became vacant next year, she would have stood right up and told that idiot off. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from telling the language clubs that the U.N.’s fiftieth anniversary had been over a year ago, and their celebration was somewhat out of time.
She got to her office door—NANCY QUAYDE, PRINCI-PAL—and went through to the anteroom where her secretary was tapping away at a computer keyboard. She actually liked her secretary, this time, and it hadn’t been easy to find somebody she could live with. She’d been through three in the last two years. Lisa Bentkoop had come to her from a secretarial school in Pittsburgh and would probably go back to Pittsburgh as soon as her husband got transferred out of whatever job had brought him here, or so sick of the country that he was willing to quit, and then she would be back to square one again, saddled with some teenager who thought the most important thing in life was her emotional atmosphere. Nancy was sure that she, herself, didn’t have an emotional atmosphere. Her mood was steady at all times, and if she needed to express herself or wallow in the maudlin and ridiculous, she went to the kind of movie that made her cry. Needless to say, it wasn’t the kind of movie that made other people cry. When she was in college, she’d gone to see Love Story in a packed theater where every seat was taken, and right at the crucial moment—right at that point where Oliver climbs into his dying wife’s hospital bed to give her one last kiss—Nancy had burst out laughing.
On the walls of her inner office, she had everything that defined herself: her bachelor’s degree from Penn State, her master’s degree from Penn State, her doctorate, in education, also from Penn State. She had exactly one photograph, and that was of her with the Alpha Chi Omega pledge class in the fall of 1972, her senior year, when she had been pledge chairman. She had not kept pictures of herself from high school or from her earliest days at college, because they had seemed unnecessary to her. You came through a phase and then it was over. What was the point of reminding yourself, again and again, that you had once been much stupider than you were now? Sometimes she told herself that she wished she had taken time out to have a husband and children, but she knew it wasn’t true. Men drove her to distraction. They wanted too much not only of her attention but also of her “inner self,” and she had never seen the point of allowing anyone to have anything of her inner self. That got you what Peggy had, and what was the point of that? Children she simply hated, the way other people hated field mice that had managed to gain entry to the house. She had not even liked herself very much as a child, and by the time she was ten years old, she had found herself looking at her parents in puzzlement, wondering why they had bothered to do it. Neither she nor her brother seemed to give them much satisfaction, and in the end, when Nancy was a senior in college, they had taken off to Florida to live among people they didn’t even know. Nancy saw them now and again the way she saw her brother. They were always uncomfortable when she was around, and she was impatient.
She sat down behind her desk and buzzed for Lisa. The buzz was unnecessary. She had left the inner door open, and Lisa would have been able to hear her if she called. She rubbed her forehead while she waited for Lisa to come in and went over, one more time, what the issues were. There were a lot of issues. There was, especially, the issue of what Betsy would think about all this, because there was nothing to say that Betsy would be flattered to be asked to speak at her old high school, if indeed they did ask her to speak. There was something else Nancy didn’t understand, and that was the way so many people harbored grudges, as if they wanted desperately to hold on to any emotion at all, even a bad one. Nancy thought she was incapable of that kind of emotional confusion, but the truth was that she had only one emotion that she really enjoyed, and it never left her. At any rate, she would never allow it to interfere with anything she wanted to do
, and maybe Betsy wouldn’t either. It was just more than possible that the Betsy Toliver of CNN and Columbia University would not much want to do something bush league like speak at a high school.
Lisa came in carrying her steno pad, although she didn’t take shorthand. Nobody did, anymore. Nancy waved her into a seat.
