The Cereal Murders gbcm-3

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I got out strawberries, cantaloupe, oranges, and bananas, and began to slice. Soon hills of jewellike fruit glistened on my cutting boards. Worry about Julian again surfaced. Had he been safe at his friend Neil’s house? As far as I knew, he had slept less than twenty hours this entire week. Julian, the college-scholarship kid. Why had someone done that for him?

  When I finished the fruit I started mixing the muffin batters. From the freezer I took the doughnuts I had been making during the smoke episode, along with extra homemade rolls from the clergy meeting. With these set out to thaw, I mixed peanut butter into flour and eggs for the final batch of muffins and set it into the other oven, and then began to put together something I had only been thinking about, something with whole grain but sweet, like granola. My food processor blended unsalted butter into brown and white sugars. I repressed a shudder. Given the school’s reputation, I should call these Cereal Killer Cookies.

  I scraped ice cream scoopfuls of the thick batter onto cookie sheets, took all the muffins out of the oven, then nipped outside with two hot ones wrapped in a cloth napkin. The policeman doing the surveillance accepted them gratefully. He wouldn’t follow me to the school. His orders were to watch the house, not me. Back inside, the enticing scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When they were done, I packed up several gallons of chilled vanilla yogurt along with the rest of the goodies and set out for Elk Park Prep, waving to the officer in his squad car as I pulled away. He saluted me with a muffin and a grin.

  The heavy clouds sprinkling thick snowflakes reminded me of detergent showering into a washing machine. Someone had the foresight to call the county highway people and get the road to Elk Park Prep plowed. At seven, after carefully rounding the newly plowed curves, I arrived at the school driveway, where a pickup with a CAT was smoothing a lane through the thick, rumpled white stuff.

  I skirted the truck, put the van in first gear, and started slowly up the snow-packed asphalt, already much traveled by vehicles carrying test-taking students. In a spirit of Halloween festivity, the elementary grades had carved row upon row of pumpkins to line the long entrance to the school. But the sudden cold wave had softened and crumpled the orange ovoids so that their yawning, jagged-toothed mouths, their decaying, staring faces now leered upward under powdery white masks of snow. A jack-o’-lantern graveyard. Not what I’d want to see the day of a big test.

  The parking lot was already three-fourths full. With relief I noticed the heavily stickered VW bug that belonged to Julian’s friend, Neil Mansfield. When I came through the front doors that were still draped with wilted black crepe paper, Julian spotted me through the crowd of students and rushed over to help.

  “No, no, that’s okay,” I protested as he took a box. “Please go back over to your friends.”

  Cereal Killer Cookies

  2 ź cups old-fashioned oats

  2 6-ounce packages almond brickIe chips (Bits O’ Brickle)

  1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  ˝ teaspoon salt

  1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

  ž cup granulated sugar

  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter

  2 large eggs

  1 tablespoon vanilla extract

  Preheat the oven to 375°. In a small bowl, mix the oats with the brickle chips. Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together. In a food processor, mix the sugars until blended, then gradually add the butter. Continue to process until creamy and smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla and process until blended. Add the flour mixture and process just until combined. Pour this mixture over the, oats and brickIe chips and stir until well combined. Using a 2-tablespoon measure, measure out scoops of dough and place at least 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown.

  Cool on wire racks. Makes 4 to 5 dozen.

  “I can’t,” he said brusquely. He hoisted the box up on one knee of his jeans and shot me a beseeching look. “They’re driving me nuts asking each other vocabulary questions. After that bookstore meeting last night, Neil and I played five-card draw until midnight. It was so great! The only question we asked each other was, How many cards do you want?”

  Neil also came over to help. To my surprise, so did Brad Marensky and Heather Coopersmith. My sudden and unexpected popularity seemed to be owing to their not wanting to test each other on last-minute analogies. I directed the four teenagers to set up two long tables and layout the tablecloths and disposable plates, bowls, spoons, and forks that I had brought. Julian, to my great relief, had already started coffee brewing in the school’s large pot, but he had done it in the kitchen, and I didn’t know how to move the immense pot out to the foyer.

  “I wanted to start the coffee out here,” Julian informed me as if he were reading my mind, “but I couldn’t find the extension cord that’s usually with the thing.”

  Oh, spare me. For the hundredth time since finding Keith Andrews’ battered body out in the snow, I pushed away the thought of the dark cords twisted around his body. “Julian,” I said as I searched for a sugar spoon, “never say the words extension cord to me again. Please?”

  He gave me a puzzled look that abruptly changed to a knowing one; He and Neil brought out cups of coffee on trays. When the bowls and platters were uncovered, kids began to come up to me to ask if they should eat now, where were they supposed to go, were the classrooms marked?

  Desperately, I turned to Julian. “I need to do the food. Would you please find a faculty member or somebody to shepherd everyone around?”

  He sighed. “Somebody said Ferrell went to get the pencils.” Before we could worry about it further, thankfully, a pair of faculty proctors appeared. The kids could take another twenty minutes to have their breakfast, they announced. Then alphabetized assignments were made to classrooms. The students crowded around the serving tables, shouting encouragements and vocabulary words to one another as they juggled muffins, doughnuts, cookies, bowls of yogurt with fruit, and cups of coffee. I was so busy refilling platters that I didn’t have a chance to talk to Julian again until just before he went into the P-Z classroom.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Okay.” But his smile was halfhearted. He clamped his hands under the armpits of his gray sweatshirt. “You know, it’s funny about that scholarship. Somebody – somebody besides you – cares about me. Maybe an alumnus, maybe one of the parents of the other kids. Not knowing who did it is kind of neat. I kept waiting for Ferrell or Perkins to say, Well, you have to do this, or you have to do that. But nothing happened. So now I think it doesn’t matter so much how well I do on these tests. They’re not the be-all and end-all. And that gives me a good feeling. I’m all right.”

  I said, “Great,” and meant it. Egon Schlichtmaier, his hair fashionably tousled and his hands in the pockets of a shearling coat, came up and shooed Julian along to the classroom. I went back to clean up. The foyer was empty except for one lone student. Macguire Perkins stared morosely at what was left of the Cereal Killer Cookies.

  “Macguire! You need to go take your test. It’s starting in five minutes.”

  “I’m hungry.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m usually not up this early. But I can’t decide what to have.”

  “Here,” I said, quickly grabbing up a handful of cookies, “take these into your classroom. Follow Schlichtmaier down the hall.”

  Still not meeting my eye, Macguire stuffed them into the pouch of his baggy sweatshirt. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Maybe they’ll make me smart. I didn’t have any last year, and I only got 820 combined.”

  “Oh, Macguire,” I said earnestly, “don’t worry…” His miserable pimpled face sagged. “Look, Macguire, everything’s going to be okay. Come on.” I scooted out from behind the long table. “Let me walk with you down to the classroom.”

  He shrank from my attempt to touch his arm, but slouched along next to me without protest toward the clas
sroom where Egon Schlichtmaier had just closed the door. I glanced up at Macguire. The boy was shaking.

  “Come on!” I exhorted him. “Think of it as being like basketball practice. Do it for a couple of hours and hope for the best.”

  He looked down at me, finally. His pupils were dilated with fear. Dully, he said, “I feel like shit.” And without waiting for my response, he opened the door to the classroom and slipped inside.

  I scolded myself all the way back to the foyer, where I scooped up dropped napkins and paper cups, cleared away paper bowls and plastic spoons, and covered the remaining muffins, bread, and fruit. There were crumbs everywhere. Basketball practice? Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.

  The SAT was scheduled to take three hours. There would be only two five-minute breaks. The headmaster and Miss Ferrell had determined that it would be best not to try to serve the food more than once. And speaking of the college advisor, I had to find out where we were supposed to meet after the test. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked down to Miss Ferrell’s classroom. Unlike the other unused classrooms, it was unlocked but dark. I turned the lights on and waited. The desk was a mess of papers, indicating perhaps that she had been in to do some work but was coming back. Sipping my coffee, I waited for her over an hour, through the two five-minute breaks, but she was obviously involved with students.

  Returning to the foyer, I decided to consolidate the food and wash my own empty dishes and bowls rather than haul them all home dirty. I found liquid soap, filled the porcelain basins of the old hotel kitchen with hot soapy water, and got to work, humming. Without a dishwasher the task took quite a bit longer than I anticipated. Oh, well, at least I wasn’t in one of those classrooms, trying to figure out the meaning of words like eleemosynary.

  Once the dishes were laid on the counters to dry, I came back out to the foyer. Crumbs and bits of fruit still littered the floor. I had only fifteen minutes before the kids would be done. On their way out, their shoes would grind every last morsel into the smooth gray rug. The things a caterer has to do, I thought with great self-pity. I wiped the crumbs off the tables. No telling what my chances were of finding a vacuum among the plethora of closets in the kitchen. Well, process of elimination, as Julian had told me of the multiple-choice SATs. The first closet held phone books and boxes. The next one I opened was the storage area for old Elk Park Prep yearbooks. I never did find out whether the third one held a vacuum cleaner. When I opened the door, I faced the dead body of Miss Suzanne Ferrell.

  18

  Her petite body swayed in the slight stir of air I had created by pulling open the door. I touched the bruised skin of her arm. No response. I stumbled backward. Incoherently, I called for help, for someone, anyone. I scanned the kitchen wildly: I needed something – a footstool, a ladder – to climb up and cut her down. Maybe I could help her. But she couldn’t be alive. There was no way. I had just spent the last hour cleaning in this room and I would have heard her. If she had been alive, if there had been a chance…

  Julian and a gray-haired, hunched-back teacher, a man I had seen earlier that morning, hurtled into the kitchen. Their voices tangled in shouts.

  “What? What’s wrong? What’s the problem? The testing is still – “

  “Quickly,” I rasped, gesturing helplessly, “cut her – ” I choked.

  The older man limped forward and gaped at the contents of the open closet. “God help us,” I heard him say.

  Voices clamored at the kitchen door. What’s going on? Is everything all right?

  “No, no, don’t come in,” I yelled at two startled students who rushed into the room. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, they stood motionless, staring at the closet.

  “Keep everybody out,” I ordered Julian tersely. He nodded and pivoted toward the kitchen entrance, where he motioned to the students to leave. Then he stationed himself at the door, where he spoke in low murmurs to the people there.

  The voice of the older man broke as he asked me to get a knife. I groped for one in a drawer and handed it to him. At the door, Julian watched my every move. I think the sight of my face scared him.

  Once the gray-haired man was at the top of a stepladder he’d pulled from the first closet, he said brusquely, “Have the boy go back to his classroom. I’ll need your help.”

  Julian nodded and left. Together, the man and I grasped Miss Ferrell’s tiny body and lowered her to the floor. I could not look at her grotesquely frozen grimace again.

  The teacher told me to call the police. He choked slightly and coughed, then asked me to find a teacher who could pick up the answer sheets from his room. Yes, the one he and Julian had left when they heard my shouts. He would wait with the body. I did not need to see medals to know this was a war veteran. His impassive tone and the grief in his eyes said all too clearly that he had seen death before.

  There was no phone in the kitchen. My head pounded. The kitchen door fanned me as it closed, and a sudden sweat chilled my skin. When I arrived in the hall, there was the beginning of distant scuffling from the classrooms. The clock in the hall said five to eleven; the SATs were almost over. Dizziness swept over me. Should I make some kind of announcement? Should I tell the students to stay? That the police would be here soon, and they would all be questioned? I walked quickly to the phone in the hallway.

  I pressed 911. I identified myself and where I was, then said something along the lines of, “I’ve just found a body. I think it’s Miss Suzanne Ferrell, a teacher here.” There was a whirring in my ears, like being inside a wind tunnel.

  “Are you there?” The operator’s voice sounded impossibly distant.

  “Yes, yes,” I said.

  “Don’t let anybody leave that school. Nobody. I’ll put in a call to get a team up there right away.”

  Groping for words within my mental fog, I hung up and stumbled to the P-Z classroom. I tersely told Julian to announce to his class and the others’ that after their booklets were collected, they must wait.

  “If they ask, you know, because they heard me screaming, don’t… tell them anything else,” I said hesitantly.

  Julian turned back to his class, his face tight with worry. Sweat now covered my skin like a mold. The pounding in my head intensified agonizingly. I walked in slow motion back to the kitchen door.

  “The police are on their way,” I told the gray-haired man. Down on one knee, he had stationed himself next to the body. An unfolded white napkin shrouded Miss Ferrell’s face. The teacher acknowledged my announcement with a grim nod, but said nothing.

  The room felt oppressive. I could not stay there next to Suzanne Ferrell’s corpse. In a daze, I went back out to the foyer. I found paper and pen in my supplies bag to make signs for the doors. Gripping the pencil was difficult. My shaking hand wrote, Do not leave until the police say you can. The room looked like the abandoned set of a surrealistic foreign film: What was all the debris, where did these bits of fruit come from, why were boxes of mine up on the tables? I grabbed a corner of one table to steady myself.

  The recollection washed back, horrid, filthy. I saw my hand opening that door, saw a body swaying heavily in a bright orange and pink dress, saw a grotesque purple face that in no way resembled the perky French teacher. My fingers had blanched the darkening skin when they touched her. Her body had been strung up like the snake in Arch’s locker. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  The police arrived in a blur. I glanced at my watch: 11:45. The sky through the foyer’s windows had begun to drop millions of snowflakes. An extremely tight-lipped Tom Schulz strode in. He was all business as the homicide team bustled around him, taking orders, falling into the grueling routine brought on by sudden death. They took the kids in the classrooms one by one. I knew the drill. Name. Address. When did you arrive, what did you see, and do you know anyone with a grudge against Miss Ferrell?

  And of course the question that pressed in on my brain, caused throbbing at my temples, was the inevitable corollary: Who hated both Keith Andrews and Miss Suzanne Ferr
ell?

  I sat on one of the benches and numbly answered Schulz’s questions. When did I arrive? Who else was in the school at that time? Who had access to the kitchen this morning? Pain still knocked dully at the back of my brain, but I also felt relief. This horror was now in the hands of the police. In the kitchen, their team would be painstakingly processing the scene: taking photographs, making notes, sprinkling black graphite fingerprint powder everywhere. Julian came through a doorway, crossed the room, and slumped down next to me. “Ninety-eight percent of the people who were here can be eliminated,” I heard Tom Schulz say to a member of his team. Julian and I were mute while the other seniors, finally dismissed, somberly filed past. I could feel the students’ eyes on me. I didn’t look up. All I could hear was my heartbeat.

  When the lobby was again empty, Schulz sat down on the bench next to Julian and me. He said that Julian and his friend Neil had been the first to arrive that morning after the gray-haired faculty member, whose name was George Henley. Henley, it appeared, had found the outer doors unlocked upon his arrival shortly before 8:00. He had been given a set of keys by Headmaster Perkins, and had assumed Miss Ferrell, who was assigned to help him set up that morning, was “around somewhere,” because the door to her classroom was open, although the light was off. No, the unlocked doors had not puzzled him because of the headmaster’s much-touted belief in the “environment of trust.”

  “What we’re looking for,” Schulz said wearily, “is how this could relate to the Andrews murder. Know anyone who had problems with this woman? Someone who maybe disliked Keith too?”

  I repeated what I had already told him about Egon Schlichtmaier and the supposed romantic link with Suzanne Ferrell. He asked if we had seen any exchange between them-we hadn’t. Or between her and anyone else.