“This took place at the school. Because of what’s already happened here, we need to look at the school first,” Schulz insisted. “Is there anything else?”
A number of people, I told him numbly, might have resented Miss Ferrell. Why? Schulz wanted to know. Because of their own highly emotional agenda concerning grades, recommendations, the college issue. She was the college advisor, after all. And there were things she might have known. From what I had learned about the school in the past couple of weeks, the place seemed a veritable repository for secrets.
“Jesus Christ,” Schulz muttered under his breath. “When does anyone around here have time to learn? What about this headmaster? Any animosity there?”
“None that I know of,” I said, and turned to Julian, who opened his hands and shook his head dumbly.
“We’ll talk to him.” Schulz looked at me. I could see the strain of this second murder in a week in his bloodshot eyes and haggard face. “She’s been dead about six hours. Our surveillance guy can verify when you left your house, so you’re not a suspect.”
“For once,” I said dryly. I felt no relief. “Either one of you feel okay to drive?” Schulz asked. Neil Mansfield of the bumper-stickered VW was long gone. Julian said, “Let me take Goldy home in her van.” His face was bone-white. “Will you call us later?” he asked Schulz.
Schulz gently touched the side of Julian’s head. “Tonight.”
Snowflakes powdered the smooth lanes made by the CAT. Snow continued to swirl. The pumpkins edging the drive were now mounds of white, their leering faces long ago obscured. Julian edged the van around State Highway 203’s winding curves. I wondered how I would tell Arch about Miss Ferrell’s murder. After a long stretch of silence, I asked Julian how the tests went; he gave a noncommittal shrug.
“Know what I feel like doing?” he said abruptly.
“What?”
“I need to swim. I haven’t been near a pool in two weeks. Probably sounds crazy, I know.” He fell silent, concentrating on the increasingly treacherous road. Then he said, “This stuff at the school is getting to me. I can’t go back and sit in that house. Do you mind?” He gave me a quick sidelong glance. “You probably don’t feel like cooking.”
“You got that right. A swim sounds good.”
We parked in front of the house. With the heavy snow, it was hard to tell if anyone sat in one of the cars lining our street. Schulz’s surveillance cop had to be there, I told myself. Had to.
Once inside, I gratefully stripped off the caterer’s uniform and quickly slipped into jeans and a turtleneck. We gathered swimsuits and towels. There was a message on the machine from Marla: Could we come by for an early dinner? She had finally located Pamela Samuelson. Pamela Samuelson? Marla’s taped voice reminded me: “You know, that teacher out at Elk Park Prep who was involved in some kind of brouhaha with the headmaster. She really wants to see you.” Marla added cryptically, “It’s urgent.”
I dialed Marla’s number. The private nurse said her charge was taking a nap. Don’t disturb her, I told the nurse. Just tell her when she wakes that we’ll be there at five.
We switched to the Rover because of the roads. As we drove to the rec center, my heart felt like a knob of granite. Or maybe it wasn’t my heart that felt that way, but some unexpressed emotion that had solidified inside my rib cage. Was it fear? Anger? Sadness? All of the above.
I wanted to cry but could not, Not yet. I wanted to know if Arch was all right, but I reassured myself that of course he was. After all, he was in Keystone with his father, miles away from these ugly events. Just keep going, some inner voice said. Of course, that was what I had always done. But the rock in my chest remained.
At the pool Julian dived in at once, landing with an explosive crack that sprayed water everywhere. He plowed down his lap lane like a man possessed. I eased myself with infinite care into the water, then moved like a person drugged to the lane to Julians left. Closing my eyes, I allowed my arms to wheel into a slow crawl. Warm water washed over me. Twice I started to think about the events of the morning and accidentally inhaled water. I sputtered and changed to a backstroke, while in the next lane Julian repeatedly lapped me. After I had done a halting, uneven set of about twenty laps, I stopped Julian as he was about to do one of his rolling turns off the concrete wall. I was taking a shower, I told him. He said he was almost finished.
I shampooed my hair four times. The pine-scented shower gel would dry it out to straw, but I didn’t care. The sharp, woodsy scent brought back memories of boarding school with its comforting routines: history class, field hockey, wearing pearls to dinner and gloves to church. Too bad Elk Park Prep was not nearly so safe a place.
Waiting for Julian in the lobby of the rec center, I stood at the window, watching the snow. It drifted down like bits of ash from a distant fire. I suddenly realized that I was famished. Julian came out shaking droplets from his hair, and we drove in silence to Marla’s house in the country club area.
Marla greeted us with a shriek of happiness. Her leg was in a thick plaster cast that already bore a number of colorful inscriptions.
“I thought you might be along,” she said to Julian, “so I ordered you a grilled Gruyere sandwich along with our cheeseburgers. There’ll be jalapeno-fried onions and red-cabbage coleslaw too,” she added hopefully. Embarrassed to be so attended to, especially by someone in a cast, Julian flushed and mumbled thanks.
“Come on, then.” Marla hobbled forward. “Goldy’s been bugging me to find this person since last week.” Over her shoulder she said to Julian, “You may know her already.”
Pamela Samuelson, former teacher at Elk Park Prep, sat perched at the edge of a muted green and blue striped couch in Marla’s living room. A generous fire blazed inside a fireplace edged with bright green and white Italian tiles.
“Oh, Miss Samuelson,” Julian said in a surprised tone. “Eleventh-grade American history.”
“Hello, Julian.” Pamela’s hair had the look and texture of a much-used Brillo pad, and the fire reflected in her thick glasses. She was about fifty years old and slightly doughy, despite Marla’s introduction of her as “one of the regulars” at the athletic club. “Yes,” she said with a touch of irony, “eleventh-grade American history.”
“Pam’s selling real estate now,” Marla interjected with genuine sympathy. Realtors were not Marla’s favorite people. “She got shafted out at that school.”
I said, “Shafted?” Pamela Samuelson threaded and unthreaded her plump fingers. She said, “One hates to hang out dirty laundry. But when I heard about Suzanne, and Marla phoned me “
“You’ve heard already?” I exclaimed. Why was I surprised? My years in Aspen Meadow had certainly taught me the terrifying efficiency of the local grapevine.
“Oh, yes,” Pamela said. She touched her wiry hairdo. “The fall SATs. First Saturday in November.”
I glanced at Julian. He shrugged. I said, “Please, can you tell me more about the school? I hate to say it, but … dirty laundry may help us figure a few things out.”
“Well. This was what I was telling Marla. I don’t know if it’s relevant.” She fell silent and looked down at her hands.
“Please,” I said again. She remained silent. Julian got up and added a log to the fire. Marla studied her cast, which she had propped up on a green and white ottoman. I heard my stomach growl.
“Before I was dismissed,” Pamela said at last, “I gave a final exam in American history. The essay question was, Discuss American foreign policy from the Civil War to the present.” Her eyes narrowed behind the thick lenses. “It was the question I myself had had on a preparatory school American history exam. But several Elk Park Prep students complained. Not to me, mind you,” she said bitterly, “to Headmaster Perkins. Perkins gave me hell, said he hadn’t had such a challenging question in a test until graduate school.”
I said, “Uh-oh.” “I said, ‘Where’d you go to graduate school, the University of the South Sandwich Islands?’
And oh, that wasn’t the worst of it,” she continued sourly. “It was soccer season, don’t you know. The weekend before exams, Brad Marensky performed brilliantly as goalie down in Colorado Springs. But he hadn’t studied for his history exam, and on this essay question he unfortunately left out both World Wars.”
Julian said, “Oops.”
Pamela Samuelson turned a face contorted with sudden fury toward Julian. “Oops? Oops?” she cried. When Julian drew back in shock, she seemed to will herself to be calm. “Well. So I flunked him. Flat F.”
No one said oops.
“When the honor roll came out at the end of the year,” Pamela went on, “there was Brad Marensky. He could not have gotten there with an F, I can assure you.” She spread her hands in a gesture of incomprehension. “Impossible. I demanded a meeting with Perkins. His secretary told me the Marenskys had protested Brad’s grade. Before the meeting I checked the master transcript kept in a file in Perkins’ office along with old grade books. The F history grade had been changed to a B. When I confronted Perkins, he wasn’t even defensive. Smooth as silk, he says he gave Brad Marensky credit for the soccer game. I said, ‘You have a pretty screwed up idea of academic integrity.’ “
Not to mention American foreign policy.
“Perkins told me I was welcome to seek employment elsewhere, in fact, that he already had a superb replacement for me in mind. I know it was some young German man that a friend of his at C.U. was pressuring him to hire. I’d heard that from the secretary too.” Pamela hissed in disgust. “The article in the Post about the lower SAT scores at Elk Park Prep made me feel better for a little while, but it didn’t make me happy. I’m still trying to sell five-thousand-square-foot homes during the worst real estate recession in a decade.”
I murmured sympathetically. Marla rolled her eyes at me.
“Suzanne Ferrell was my friend,” Pamela said with a large, unhappy exhalation of air. “My first thought was, She wouldn’t cave in to them.”
“Them who?” demanded Marla.
“The ones who think education is just grades, class rank, where you go to college.” Pamela Samuelson’s voice thin with anger. “It’s so destructive!”
The high peal of the doorbell cut through her fury. Marla started to lift her cast from the ottoman, but Julian red her.
“I’ll get it,” he said. When he returned, Marla smiled handed the goodies she had ordered all around. Pamela Samuelson announced hesitantly that she couldn’t , and left, still radiating resentment. Clearly, the disgruntled teacher had said all she was going to on the subject of the headmaster, Egon Schlichtmaier, and the altered grades. Marla sweetly asked Julian to retrieve a miniature Sara Lee chocolate cake from one of her capacious freezers. I sliced and we each delved into large, cold pieces.
“Let me tell you what I think the problem is,” Marla matter-of-factly, delicately licking her fingers of chocolate crumbs. “It’s like a family thing.”
“How?” I asked. She shifted her cast on the ottoman to make herself more comfortable and eyed the last piece of cake. “Who are the people you most resent? The people closest to you. My sister got an MG from my parents when she graduated from college. I thought, If I don’t get a car of equal or better value, I’m going to hate my sister forever and my parents too. Did I resent all the other girls my age who might have been out in Oshkosh or Seattle or Miami getting new cars? No. I resented the people close to me. They had the power to give me the car or deny it, I figured, reasonably or unreasonably.” She reached for the piece of cake and bit into it with a contented mmm-mmm. I nodded and conjured up Elk Park Prep. “There could be seven thousand people out there applying for a thousand places in the freshman class at Yale. If you’d kill to get into Yale, do you stalk all seven thousand? No, The killer doesn’t worry about all those people out there who’ might be better than he is. He thinks, I have to remove the people right here who are standing in my way. Then I’ll be guaranteed of getting what I want, Fallacious reasoning, but psychologically sound.”
“You just better be careful,” Marla told me, “Somebody out there is vicious, Goldy. And I have the broken bone to prove it.”
When Julian and I arrived back on our street, I was relieved to see a cop sitting in a regular squad car right outside my house. Schulz had called and left a message that the investigators were working all day Sunday, and that the school would have counselors on Monday to deal with the kids’ reactions to the latest murder. I should not worry, he added. Not worry. Sure, Sleep came with difficulty, and Sunday morning brought weak sunshine and a return of the headache.
Overnight, we’d received ten inches of snow. Not even the brilliant white world outside raised my spirits.
I brought the newspaper in from my icy deck and scanned it for news of Suzanne Ferrell. There was a small article on the front page: PREP SCHOOL SCENE OF SECOND DEATH. I started to tremble as I read of Suzanne Joan Ferrell, 43, native of North Carolina, graduate of Middlebury College, teacher at Elk Park Prep for fifteen years, whose body was found while seniors took their Scholastic Aptitude Tests, . . parents in Chapel Hill notified … her father an architect, mother the chairman of the French Department at the University of North Carolina … police have no explanation, no suspects… death by strangulation… .
I took out a sheet of notepaper and performed that most difficult of tasks, writing to Suzanne’s parents. My note to Keith’s parents had been short, since I had not really been acquainted with the boy. This was different. I knew her. I wrote to the unknown architect and professor, she was a wonderful teacher. She cared deeply about her students … and then the tears came, profusely, unapologetically, so many, many tears for this unexplained loss. I allowed myself to cry until I could not cry anymore. Finally, painfully, I penned a closing. I signed my name, and addressed the note to the Ferrells in care of the French Department at U.N.C. Perversely, I found the university’s address inside one of Julian’s college advisory books. I slammed the book closed and heaved it across the kitchen, where it hit a cabinet with a loud crack.
With shaking hands I measured out espresso. While it brewed, I stared out the kitchen window and watched Stellar’s jays fight for supremacy at my bird feeder.
I turned away. One thing was clear. Suzanne Ferrell had not killed herself. My espresso machine hissed; a fragrant strand of coffee streamed into the small cup. Had Suzanne Ferrell preferred café au lait? Had she been enthusiastic about French food? Did she leave a lover? I would never know.
Let go of it. I wiped a few fresh tears from my face and sipped the espresso. Julian appeared and thankfully said nothing about my appearance or the college; advisory book lying facedown on the floor. When he finished his coffee, he reminded me that we had another Bronco half-time meal to cater for the Dawsons. An Italian feast. I had specified on the appointments calendar. I groaned.
“Let me fix the food,” he offered. When I was about to object, he added, “It’ll help me get my mind off of everything.” I knew how cooking could help with that particular emotional task, so I agreed. Julian rattled around, collecting ingredients. As I watched, he deftly grated Fontina and mozzarella, beat these with eggs, ricotta, Parmesan, and softened butter before blending in chopped fresh basil and pressed garlic. I felt a burst of pride in him as he sizzled onion and garlic in olive oil and added ingredients for a tomato sauce. The rich scents of Italian cooking filled the room. After he had cooked the manicotti noodles, he stuffed in the Fontina-ricotta mixture and ladled thick tomato sauce over it all.
“After it heats, I’m going to garnish it with more Parmesan and some chopped cilantro,” he informed me. “I’ll make it look good, don’t worry.”
Julians Cheese Manicotti
Sauce:
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, pressed (preferable) or chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 6-ounce cans tomato paste, plus water
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh oregano leaves
1
small bay leaf
1 teaspoon salt
˝ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Pasta:
1 teaspoon olive oil
14 manicotti noodles
Filling:
1 ˝ cups ricotta cheese
6 large eggs
ź pound Fontina cheese, grated
ź pound mozzarella cheese, grated
1/3 cup freshly grated best-quality Parmesan cheese
6 tablespoons soft butter (not margarine)
1 teaspoon salt
ž teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil leaves
freshly grated Parmesan cheese for sprinkling on top
Preheat the oven to 350 . To make the sauce, gently sauté the onion and garlic in the olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat until the onion is translucent, about five minutes. Add the tomato paste and stir. Slowly add 4 tomato paste cans of water and stir. Add the seasonings and allow the sauce to simmer while you prepare the manicotti and filling.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the olive oil, and drop in the manicotti. Cook just until al dente, about 10 to 15 minutes. Drain and run cold water over the manicotti in a colander. Set aside.
To make the filling, beat the ricotta with the eggs until combined in the large bowl of an electric mixer. Add the grated cheeses and softened butter; beat until combined. Add the salt, pepper, and basil. Beat on low just until everything is combined.
Gently fill the cooked manicotti with the cheese mixture and arrange in 2 buttered 9-by 13-inch pans. Cover the pasta in each pan with half the sauce; sprinkle on additional Parmesan. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the cheese is thoroughly melted and the sauce is bubbling. Makes 7 servings.
Food was the least of my worries. I pulled myself up from my chair, tore fresh greens for the salad, and mixed a lemon vinaigrette. I had made some breadsticks and frozen them the week before. Julian said he would put together a mammoth antipasto platter. I would bake a fudge cake when I returned from church, and that would be that.
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