The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  Gerald worked the latch and revealed a staircase. I climbed it in his wake.

  We came out in a pantry closet.

  “There’ll be enough light from outside once we get into the kitchen,” said Gerald, shutting off his flashlight.

  He was right. A small parking lot lay just beyond the kitchen windows, and its streetlight was plenty to navigate by.

  We made our way past the old stove and through another pantry, then cut through the Mansion’s formal dining room on our way to the grand front staircase. Three flights up, he slid a key into the lock of Sookie’s office. We could still see dimly by the light of the parking lot below.

  “Pull down the shades and close the drapes, Madeline.”

  When I’d done so, I couldn’t see shit.

  “Okay,” I said, “coast is clear.”

  He hit the light switch by Sookie’s door, blinding me for a second. When I took my hands down from my eyes, he was sitting at her desk, working another smaller key into its locked bottom drawer.

  “Pull up a seat,” Gerald said.

  I dragged the wobbly chair over from beside the radiator and sat down next to him.

  Gerald reached inside a thick file folder and took out several sheets of paper.

  The first page was a xeroxed photograph depicting a dirt road with a small wooden sign posted beside it.

  “Bob was calling from Guyana,” I said.

  I’d read the words on the sign: GREETINGS. EVERYTHING GROWS WELL IN JONESTOWN, ESPECIALLY THE CHILDREN.

  I looked up at Gerald. “Dhumavati put something to that effect on the garden gate down at the Farm.” I said.

  “Across from the bench with the date of her daughter’s death.”

  “November eighteenth,” I said, “1978.”

  The remaining photos just showed piles of corpses, bloated and rotting in the jungle heat.

  “Nine hundred and twelve people,” said Gerald. “Of which two hundred and seventy were children. Most of the bodies were never autopsied, or even identified. The threat of disease . . .”

  He didn’t have to finish.

  “We can nonetheless presume,” I said, “that one of those kids was an eight-year-old girl named Allegra.”

  He nodded. “The parents made sure their children drank the punch before swallowing it themselves,” he said. “They used syringes to get it down the throats of the babies. Anyone who refused was shot, most of them with crossbows. But they’d all had a lot of practice and conditioning. Jones started running rehearsals before they’d even left the United States. He called them ‘White Nights.’ In Guyana, they’d make announcements over the loudspeakers in the middle of the night, calling everyone to the central pavilion.”

  He pulled out another Xerox, this one showing bodies grouped around a dais with a white wooden chair at its center. There was another sign nailed to a post just behind that chair.

  This one read, THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT.

  “The needlepoint pillow on Dhumavati’s sofa,” I said. “The one you kept fussing with when we all had to meet in her apartment.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you know then?”

  “I couldn’t prove it.”

  “And now you can?”

  “Too late,” he said. “Too goddamn late.”

  37

  Santangelo knew,” I said. “He had the bench made, and the plaque.”

  “They grew up together,” said Gerald. “Childhood friends in Indianapolis. Dhumavati’s parents were early members of Jones’s church there, even before he was ordained by the Disciples of Christ. She ran away from home and followed him to San Francisco after he started telling his congregation they had to move to Northern California to escape the coming nuclear holocaust.”

  “Where was David?”

  “His family had moved east. He went to college in New England.”

  “I guess he and Dhumavati kept in touch?”

  “He started this school in 1978. Hired her when she showed up in January ’79.”

  “How the hell did they get away with it? Weren’t there any records?”

  “She uses a social security number that can be traced to a girl who died in her teens back in Indiana. Gloria Landry.”

  “So what were you waiting to find out tonight from your detective?”

  “The date a girl going by that name got on a plane out of Georgetown,” he said.

  “It was January twelfth,” said Dhumavati, stepping into Sookie’s office. “David left me rotting down there for two months before he wired the money.”

  She was wearing gloves, and of course she had a gun.

  She kept it trained on Gerald as she walked over to him. Then she shoved the barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The force of it knocked him back against the wall behind Sookie’s desk before he slumped over onto me. The whole back of his head was gone.

  “Push him off you,” said Dhumavati.

  She had the gun trained on me now. “Go ahead. It’s not like you’re going to hurt him.”

  I couldn’t bear the idea of shoving him onto the floor. I did my best to get out from under his weight, leaving him splayed across the seat of my chair. I couldn’t stand up, just squatted on the ground next to him, soaked in his blood.

  Dhumavati reached into her overcoat and pulled out a second pistol. She put the first one down on the desk.

  “It’s empty,” she said. “So pick it up and wrap his hand around it.”

  “Even if this has his prints on it, they’ll know he didn’t kill himself,” I said. “There won’t be any gunshot residue on his hands.”

  “Maybe they’ll figure you did it, Madeline,” she said, pressing the tip of the second barrel to my head. “Since your prints will be on it, too. They might even think that was why you jumped.”

  “From where?”

  “The roof.”

  I felt that second gun twitch against my scalp when she cocked the hammer. I took the first off Sookie’s desk and pressed Gerald’s fingers against it.

  “Now get the hell up,” she said, “slowly.”

  I rose to my feet, blood-gummed shirt sticking to my belly.

  Dhumavati slid the tip of the gun to the back of my neck. “Put the papers back in that folder and pick it up.”

  After I had, she said, “Walk out into the hallway, then take a left.”

  She pressed hard, making me move quickly.

  “The next door down,” she said. “After the radiator.”

  I stopped in front of it.

  “Open the thing,” she said.

  I did, then started to climb the narrow stairs it concealed, with her at my back.

  “Stop,” she said when I’d reached the fourth step.

  I heard her shut the door behind us.

  “Dhumavati,” I said, “is protecting David really worth this much to you? Worth killing four people?”

  I didn’t want to think about the likelihood that she was about to make it five.

  “I’m not protecting David,” she said. “I’m protecting myself.”

  “So why does he protect you? You called him from Guyana, and he not only paid your way out, he gave you a job once you got here. Don’t tell me he took you in out of the kindness of his heart.”

  “He took me in so I wouldn’t tell anyone he was Allegra’s father. Or that she was conceived when he raped me.”

  She poked me harder with the gun, and I started climbing again.

  “Can you imagine people trusting their children to him,” she said, “if they knew that? Especially the daughters.”

  “Would they have trusted you once it got out that you killed your own child in Jonestown? David knew. That’s why he had that bench made with the date of her death on it. It wasn’t a gift, it was a threat.”

  “Our secrets keep us in stalemate,” she said. “Yin and yang. Mutually assured destruction.”

  We’d almost reached the top of the s
tairs. I wanted to slow her down before we got to the door.

  “Why drag me into it?” I asked. “You knew Fay was pregnant long before today. What was the point of framing me for two murders that would have looked like suicides?”

  “You posed a threat to the happy equilibrium.”

  She gave me another shove with the gun.

  “Up,” she said.

  I wanted to convince her there was a reason not to kill me, or at least keep her talking long enough that I could figure out how to get away from her.

  I had a sudden epiphany.

  “Sookie knows,” I said. “Gerald told her everything. She’ll tell the police.”

  “Sookie’s already dead, Madeline,” said Dhumavati. “I took care of that an hour ago.”

  “So that makes five people you’ve killed on campus?” I said. “Don’t you think six will look a little suspicious? I mean, three in one night is a lot, even for you.”

  “Three’s nothing,” she said. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  I shivered, thinking of the piles of bodies in Gerald’s xeroxed photos. “And then what, you take off for a little R and R at David’s place in San Miguel? Not like they don’t have cops down there.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Madeline, I was never going to Mexico.”

  “David sure seemed to think you were.”

  “David thinks what I tell him to think. So you might as well go ahead and open that fucking door.”

  It swung outward onto a broad, chimney-studded meadow of snowy sheet copper. The waning moon had just come up above the trees. It lit everything blue-white and flawless.

  There were wind-etched scallops of snow and ice all the way across the flat expanse of roof, out to its mansard edges that sloped down toward a widow’s-walk railing, the iron filigree of which glittered with icicles.

  Unfortunately, that fence stopped at my knees, so I didn’t think it would keep me from going over the side.

  “Another White Night,” she said. “I’ll give you a bit of advice, something Jim said in Guyana: ‘You’ll have no problem with the thing if you just relax.’”

  “ You didn’t relax,” I said, “or we wouldn’t be up on this stupid roof. What happened, you killed Allegra and then chickened out?”

  “That bitch Christine kept going on and on about how we could still make the airlift to Russia, and then Jim told her”— Dhumavati frowned a little, as though she’d fumbled a word in some poem she knew by heart—“ Father told her that we’d all die anyway.

  “It was too late, because the killing had started. There would only be more congressmen.” She smiled, her eyes and voice gone tender with sentiment. “And people parachuting in to butcher our children. ‘It’s not worth living like this,’ he said, ‘it’s not worth living like this.’ And he was right.”

  She might have been describing the cherished memory of her first kiss.

  “If ‘Father’ was right,” I said, “how come you’re still alive?”

  “I should have listened. I could have had peace. Father said, ‘Death is not a fearful thing, it’s living that’s treacherous,’ and that’s the truth. He died to give us all peace, and I was too weak to understand.”

  There was a catch in Dhumavati’s voice. Perhaps it was evidence of some genuine regret that she’d survived Jonestown, and her daughter. More likely, it was false as her grief on the morning Fay and Mooney died, her excuse to hug me so she could slide the crescent necklace into my pocket.

  “Funny how you weren’t too weak to get away,” I said, “once you didn’t have a child slowing you down. I thought they shot anyone who didn’t drink the punch.”

  She lost the dreamy look.

  “I’d made myself part of the inner circle,” she said. “Someone with the authority to give orders. You may have noticed I’m good at that.”

  More lights came on in the floors beneath us, projecting the glow of paned rectangles across the snowy ground four stories down.

  “Guess they heard the gunshot,” I said.

  “It’ll take them a few minutes to find Gerald. Plenty of time to finish up.”

  “They’ll see your footprints in the snow,” I said. “They’ll know you were here with me.”

  “I ran up the minute I realized what you were going to do. I tried so hard to stop you . . .”

  “So you’ll say Gerald shot himself and I jumped off the building?” I asked. “And what, the cops are supposed to believe he still felt guilty about grabbing Parker’s dick after the two of us killed Fay and Mooney to cover it up?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “And who killed Sookie?”

  “You did.”

  “What the hell for?”

  She shrugged. “There doesn’t have to be a reason. You were mentally unbalanced.”

  “Too many loose ends,” I said.

  She didn’t answer that, just gestured toward the edge of the roof with the barrel of her gun.

  “It’s not going to look like suicide if I’m shot in the back,” I said, turning to walk away from her, keeping close to the line of chimneys.

  “No need,” she said, crunching through the snow behind me. “I’m perfectly happy to give you a push.”

  I have no doubt she would in fact have been pleased as, well, punch to inflict that helpful shove if Wiesner hadn’t leaped out from behind one of those chimneys and yelled, distracting Dhumavati long enough that I managed to send her over first.

  She only had time to scream a little before there was this nasty wet smacking thud at the very instant her wailing stopped.

  I looked away from the sight of her body in the snow, her limbs bent in all the wrong directions like an ill-made swastika. She’d been flailing when she hit.

  “Oh, Wiesner,” I said, “you’re the six-six-sixiest . . .”

  Then my knees gave, and I crumpled down onto that ice-cold field of metal.

  Wiesner came over and crouched beside me. He lifted me gently by the shoulders, cradling my head against his shoulder.

  Then he leaned down and stuck his tongue in my mouth.

  I bit it—just hard enough to make him yank it back behind his own teeth—and shoved him away.

  “Dude,” I said, “don’t be an asshole. I was just starting to actually like you.”

  38

  Wiesner vanished long before I reached the ground floor. One second he was behind me on the stairs, the next he was gone.

  I guess he knew more of the Mansion’s secrets than even Gerald had.

  I found a stunned crowd at the foot of that odious grand staircase, all of them gawping up at me as I made my final descent like I was some murderous Scarlett O’Hara.

  Mindy was the first to speak.

  “What have you done?” she said. “Did you kill Dhumavati and Gerald both?”

  She sounded so pissed I half expected her to slap me.

  Disappointing that she didn’t, as I would so have relished the opportunity to punch her back.

  “Dhumavati did it,” I said. “Dhumavati did fucking all of it.”

  “Oh, I’m so sure,” she said, pronouncing that last word “sher.”

  I looked at Tim beside her, but this time he didn’t tell the bitch to shut the hell up or even poke her in the arm.

  More’s the pity.

  I started walking toward the front door, and the crowd parted to let me through.

  “Tim!” whined Mindy from behind me. “Stop her!”

  He didn’t, which was a point in his favor.

  The only thing left between me and the door was Pete.

  “Pete, can’t you do something?” More shrillness from Mindy. “Don’t just let her get away!”

  I looked him in the eye and smiled.

  Made him blush.

  “ Hare Rama, candyass,” I said, busting through him like he was a cheap finish line.

  There was dead silence at my back until I opened the front door and stepped outside. I closed the thick slab of oak behi
nd me, muffling the surge in volume as they turned on each other.

  I walked across campus and got into my car but didn’t start it up. The shakes had set in pretty bad by then, and I wanted to be alone until my teeth stopped chattering.

  Once they had, I drove slowly back toward the Mansion, parking across the lawn to wait for the cops. I got out to sit on the hood with the windows rolled down, a cassette of Vivaldi playing in the tape deck.

  The opening song was his “Gloria,” which seemed fitting enough.

  On the stroke of the very first “in excelsis Deo,” Sitzman climbed up on the car next to me, wearing slippers and striped pajamas beneath his overcoat.

  “You heard what happened,” I said.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “The cops are on their way and everything?”

  He nodded.

  I pulled out my Camels and got one out for each of us.

  “Promise me something,” I said, lighting his.

  “Name it.”

  “Get the hell away from this place,” I said. “You deserve better. You all do.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said.

  We were quiet for a minute, smoking. There were a lot of things that still didn’t make sense to me.

  “You want to talk about it?” asked Sitzman, like he knew what I was thinking, how tangled up everything was in my head.

  “Wiesner saved my life tonight,” I said.

  Sitzman took a drag. “He’s cool like that sometimes.”

  “And Dhumavati killed Fay and Mooney,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I snapped my head around to stare at him. “You know?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “For a good long time now.”

  “How long?”

  “That girl Mary-Claire died right before I got here,” he said. “All the kids were still talking about it, how they couldn’t believe it was suicide.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’d told too many people how excited she was about her brother coming to visit, and how she knew he’d be taking her home.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “Look, Madeline, I didn’t know right away. Let’s just say I picked up on a few things over time. Saw some patterns, some possible connections . . . It all seemed pretty obvious once I saw the date on Dhumavati’s bench, first time I got sent to the Farm.”