by Liz Jasper
I turned around to face her. She stood a few yards away near the small copse of trees outside the science building that the students like to sit under on warm days. As usual, she looked like a million bucks, in a lookin’-for-Sugar-Daddy sort of way, with a short tight skirt, a skimpy low-cut shirt and four-inch heels. I opened my mouth to reply, but instead of answering, I ran full tilt in the other direction toward the parking lot.
For once, luck was on my side. I got my car unlocked on the first try and was squealing out the gate before she’d made it even halfway across the quad in her tippy little heels. If I’d ever deserved a speeding ticket, it was that night.
A little way down the street from my apartment, I saw a blue Jetta parked in front of a hydrant and pulled up alongside. I honked, flicked on my hazard lights and got out. Gavin came around the car to intercept me.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“Na-Natasha.” My teeth were chattering so badly I could barely get the words out. “Sh-she was waiting for me a-at school. I d-didn’t even see her.”
Gavin plucked the keys out of my fingers, locked my car door, and steered me up to my apartment. “I’m going to park your car. I’ll be back in a second,” he told me. I nodded and sat on the couch, turning on the TV for comfort.
By the time he returned, I had mellowed out a bit and could form coherent sentences.
He listened patiently. “So…nothing happened.”
“Because I got away!”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean it that way—”
“I don’t know why you don’t take her seriously. She scares the crap out of me.” I stood back up and took a step closer to him. “I’m damned lucky I got away. You know, you spend all these resources watching my apartment, and half the time I’m not even here. How does that help me? Jeez, Gavin, do you want to help me or not? Don’t you care if something happens to me? Don’t you care if another person goes missing, if another person is found dead?”
His eyes blazed like molten silver. “That’s a stupid question,” he bit out.
“Is it?” All at once, my anger deflated. “Never mind. Go back to your car. I’m inside for the night. You don’t have to worry.” I headed toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To get my phone out of my purse,” I said tiredly. “I want to call my mother. Is that okay with you?”
He didn’t reply, just fished his wallet out of his back pocket, pulled out a card and wrote a couple numbers on the back. “This is my private cell. And my home phone. From now on, I want you to call me every night by six and tell me where you are. I’d prefer it if you were home by dark, but I understand you have a life to live. Make sure you use it.”
He turn and left, waiting long enough for me to lock the door behind him before heading back down the stairs to his car.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
* * *
Because of Roger’s stupid practice Olympiad, I stayed at worked until nearly dark every night that week and still had to go back again over the weekend to get things ready. Roger dropped by Sunday night as it was getting down to the wire. Not to help, to make sure I wasn’t screwing up. After a little teeth gnashing, we came to an understanding—he would hover officiously over my shoulder giving advice on how I could organize things more to his liking and I would try very hard not to kill him.
As I stood there gratuitously rearranging supplies under Roger’s micromanaging eye, I began to have trouble remembering just what my problem was with becoming one of the Undead. Vampires didn’t have to work thankless jobs, or go home to tiny apartments. They wouldn’t have to take it as Roger instructed them to move a box of paper six inches to the right. A vampire would have hauled off and killed Roger back when he complained how the paper clips were being laid out.
Unless he had some secret death wish, I didn’t even know why Roger was here. Surely the whole point of dumping the prep work on me was to free him up. Did he have nothing better to do on a Sunday night than hang out on campus? Silly question. Of course he didn’t. The real question was, Why was I there? I didn’t have to be. I had options, one in particular that was pretty damn appealing right about now. Will was gorgeous and intelligent and his kisses turned me to jelly. How bad could an eternity spent with him be?
Luckily for Roger’s continued existence—and my karma—Kendra popped by on her way to check her events, and Roger followed her out. I took a much-needed break. I felt wrung out like a dishrag and it was only seven o’clock.
I knew exactly what time it was because my cell phone rang with my daily phone call from Gavin. He had gone from being annoyingly hard to reach to annoyingly punctual. I didn’t kid myself that his sudden attentiveness had anything to do with me. He was scared my mother would come after him if anything happened to me—and believe me, you don’t want to be on her bad side.
He called to make sure I was safe at home. Obviously I wasn’t, and after some mild abuse when I refused to go home immediately, Gavin informed me he’d call again at eight and slammed the phone with as much force as one can muster with a cell.
I decided I needed some company—the past hour with Roger hardly counted—and went down the hall to see how Kendra was getting on in the computer room where we’d stored the kids’ entries. It was a risky move. If Roger was still with her he would cleave back onto me like a jumping cactus, but I really did need to touch base with my co-captain before I spent any more time on this thing.
Kendra was bent over one of the kids’ Rube Goldberg apparatuses holding a clamp. She stopped her tinkering for a moment to greet me. “Hey, Jo. What’s up?”
She’d gotten rid of Roger. I wish I knew how she’d done it. “Oh, nothing.” I swallowed my envy. “Just taking a break.”
“Been here long?” She adjusted the position of a lit candle that wasn’t quite cutting it as a fuse. A chain of things went wiz and bang and a ping-pong ball shot off across the room and bounced off the whiteboard.
“Are you supposed to be doing that? I mean, if the project sucks, shouldn’t you let it?”
She straightened up and regarded me coldly. “Plenty of them will suck tomorrow, believe me. But some of the kids have good ideas, and a project like this one here probably worked before it made the trip to school Thursday morning. You really think they should be eliminated in front of the headmaster and all their friends because the bus ride was little bumpy?” She expertly tightened something and this time, the ping-pong made it into the trash can.
I felt like the lowliest grade school tattletale. I left before I said anything I’d regret, but by the time I got back to my classroom I was so angry I had to splash cold water over my face until I calmed down. If I were honest, Kendra wasn’t really the problem. She was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I was sick and tired of dealing with so many precious egos and being too low on the totem pole to do anything but take the abuse.
I patted my face dry with a couple of brown paper towels from the holder above the sink and took deep yoga breaths until I calmed down. As I relaxed back against the counter, I stared abstractedly at the pile of old textbooks, still stacked in that odd way. A faint smell of lit candles had followed me from the computer room and I was suddenly transported back to the last time I’d smelled candles in my room—the night Bob had died.
And then I knew. I knew how it had been done, how someone could have been two places at once. It was so simple, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t put it together before. I owed an apology to the kids who’d had a sword fight with those conjoined meter sticks. They’d been telling the truth about finding them duct-taped that way.
I pulled the meter sticks out from under the sink and re-created the makeshift sword as best I could, which wasn’t hard because the boys had left on most of the tape. A piece of charred string dangled from one end, and I kicked myself for not having noticed it before.
I tucked the stringless end of the doubled meter stick between the long part of th
e T of those funny back-to-back book stacks, and re-adjusted the heavy books on top and voila! the base of the stick was secure. I grasped the charred string and slowly backed up toward the sink fixture, where I’d removed a matching bit of string the night of Bob’s funeral, until the meter stick arched. When I let go the meter stick swung sharply forward, grazing the top of the nearest lab bench before clattering to the floor. If the bench had been closer to the back sink, as it had the night of Bob’s death, any glassware on top would have been swept to the ground in a loud crash.
My mind raced as everything clicked into place. All that was missing was a way to break the string after a short delay, giving the killer time to race downstairs and establish an alibi.
A candle would work just fine. After a few minutes the flame would burn through the string, the arched meter stick would snap straight and knock the glassware to the floor. And the killer would be in the clear.
It was only natural for us all to have assumed Bob’s death was coincident with the noise. But it hadn’t been. He had died earlier. And now I had proof.
I reached for my phone, but before I could get a call through to Gavin, Roger came in, followed by Kendra. I jumped, nearly dropping the phone. I had been so engrossed in my thoughts, I’d forgotten they were still there.
“What’s wrong?” Roger’s raisin eyes anxiously scanned the neat supply piles. “I heard things falling up here.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I lifted my shoulders up in what I hoped was a careless shrug and forced a bland smile across my lips.
Kendra glanced at the meter stick on the floor near my feet and her lips quirked up in a smile. “What in the world are you doing in here?”
“Just trying out a new demo for class. It doesn’t work very well.”
“Aren’t you doing the rock unit?” asked Roger. “Why aren’t you using the rock trays? What do you need with a demo?”
For moment, my hands clenched into tight fist and I forgot all about Bob’s murder. Why couldn’t Roger just let me teach the way I thought best? How come everything I did to make earth science more fun for the kids was shot down? It wasn’t as if I pulled stuff out of the air. I got my ideas from respected earth science journals, from the new lab books that came with the text, from the websites of master earth teachers all over the country. I carefully researched and tested every new lab, every new demo, every new bit of software. The kids liked it a hell of a lot more than listening to me talk and they soaked up information like sponges.
Kendra was standing behind Roger. She caught my eye and shook her head in silent sympathy, and my anger left as suddenly as it had come. “Do you need a hand?” she asked.
“No, that’s all right. I’ll just stick to my rock trays.”
“If you change your mind, I’m happy to help. I’ve prepped all my events for tomorrow, but I’ll be down in my classroom for a bit if you need me.” Kendra turned and left. Roger, quieted by my unexpected agreement with him, glanced suspiciously once around the room and followed her out with a wordless grunt. I crossed the room and stood in the doorway, watching as they left the second floor to go down to their classrooms.
My hands were shaking a little as I called Gavin. He didn’t pick up. I swore under my breath. What was the point of finally having his cell phone number if he didn’t answer the blasted thing? I left increasingly addled messages on his home phone, his work phone, and with the dispatcher in case he was hiding from me at the station. Served him right if they thought I was hounding him like a jealous girlfriend.
As I hung up after my last message, I realized I didn’t know the answer to the most important question of all. Which one of my colleagues had done it? Kendra was the obvious choice, but she and Mrs. Mudget had been talking in the hallway when they heard the glass shattering. Gavin would know for sure how long they had been there, but the fuse wouldn’t have bought more than a few minutes’ time, and I thought one of them would have mentioned it if the other had conveniently appeared, tired and breathless, just before the glass broke.
I thought I could safely rule out Rachel, who taught English at another school when she wasn’t coaching soccer, and Mrs. Farryll as lacking the necessary skills to whip up a simple machine from odds and ends in an earth science classroom.
Alan was still in the clear. In order to be on the other side of Maxine’s office around the time of the crash, he would have had to pass by Maxine’s window in the other direction after setting off the fuse, and we would have noticed.
Becky had been in conference with the Campbell twins’ parents for a solid half-hour before Bob’s murder. Carol had had back-to-back conferences. Thankfully, I could rule them both out.
That left only one person—Roger.
He had come out of the men’s room after hearing the glass break. The men’s room was at the front of the building, near the foot of the stairwell. He could have come down from my classroom, ducked into the men’s room, and waited there until he heard the beakers go crashing to the floor.
Those pictures I’d found of Roger receiving commendations by the Olympiad officials popped into my head, clear as day. Roger not only knew how to build simple machines, he was a whiz at it.
I had thought his motives too petty to lead to murder, but maybe his motives were just petty to me. For Roger, that horrible teaching review Bob was about to release really was everything. Killing Bob allowed Roger to salvage his reputation and put him in line for the biology job he so coveted. The fact that that job had been filled by someone else was immaterial; he’d already started a subtle smear campaign on Leah, a few more whispers and the job would be his for the taking.
The murder attempt on me had happened after I had recommended to the headmaster that Leah be hired as a permanent replacement. And Roger had been on campus during the shooting. I had assumed he hadn’t shown up until after the police came because he was too concerned with saving his own skin to risk helping someone else, but maybe he had been slow to the scene because he was getting rid of the gun.
And when shooting me hadn’t worked, he’d engineered a way to get me on campus late on a Sunday night!Kendra would leave soon and I would be left alone in the science building with him. I needed to get out of there. Now. I grabbed my purse, shook it once to make sure my keys were still in it and sprinted for the outer door.
I stopped before I crossed the threshold into the night air. What was I thinking? I couldn’t go out there. The sun had gone down. Natasha was out there, waiting for me. And she scared me more than Roger.
I went back my classroom. It was the safest place for me. For now. I closed the door behind me and locked it.
My cell phone remained frustratingly silent. Where was Gavin? I paced the floor, my mind racing. I decided I was pretty safe as long as Kendra stuck around. Roger would hardly want a witness when he came after me.
I opened a window and stuck my head out, craning my neck to see if the lights were on in Roger’s room. They weren’t.
Where was he?
My teeth started to chatter. I told myself he was probably over bothering Kendra in her room, but since her room was downstairs on the other side of the building, I had no way of knowing if she was even still on campus unless I left my room to check.
What if he wasn’t over talking to Kendra? What if she’d gone home? What if he was on his way back up to my room?
I left another, more urgent round of messages for Gavin, not caring if he heard the panic in my voice, only wanting him to come get me. I stuck my head back out the window to check if the lights had gone back on in Roger’s room. They hadn’t. I wedged myself in the corner facing the door and felt a tiny bit safer with two walls at my back.
I tried not to think about Roger coming upstairs and breaking down the door with an axe. Think of something else.
Dammit, where was Gavin when I needed him?
I looked over at the sink at the leftover bits of the device Roger had made. I wanted Gavin to eat crow. I wanted all the Is dotted and Ts crossed
when I told Gavin how I had figured it all out.
Textbooks, meter sticks, duct tape, string. The only thing still missing from the scenario I had created was the candle itself. I hadn’t actually seen one.
I forced my brain back to that night. I went in the room, I checked Bob’s pulse, I went to stand in the back of the classroom. Think, Jo, think! The string had been tied around the faucet. The candle must have been in the sink. Had I looked in the sink?
I hadn’t.
I had been looking at Bob. I had watched as Kendra tried to resuscitate him, and my attention had stayed on Bob when the paramedics took over. I cursed myself for being such a looky-loo.
But so what if I hadn’t seen the candle. I’d smelled it. I knew it had been there. The police would just have to take my word for it. But would they?
What I didn’t understand was why their crack CSI team hadn’t put it together. It seemed so obvious. I know it’s a little harder to sort out the relevant clues from the irrelevant ones than they make it look on TV, but this was too much. When you find a six-foot long meter stick with a bit of charred string at one end, a candle in the sink, and another bit of string tied to the sink nozzle near the candle, doesn’t it occur to you that someone may have rigged a little timing device for themselves?
I hadn’t put it together immediately, but then I hadn’t seen the candle in the sink, and frankly, with all that had gone on I’d forgotten all about smelling one until tonight. But they had no excuse. Unless…
My anger dried up as suddenly as it had come, and my body froze with fear as I whispered the inevitable conclusion. Unless they hadn’t seen the candle either. Without that, the rest of the pieces would just seem like innocent classroom props. And Lord knows I had enough crap around my classroom to overwhelm the best of CSI teams. I stared blindly at the sink as my mind wrapped around the truth.
