The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Thanks for offering,” I whispered back. “The other pots are almost ready and—”

  Loud hrr-hrrms rattled from the throats of two irritated parents.

  “Do you have regular coffee?” demanded Rhoda Marensky, shaking her head of uniformly chestnut hair dyed to conceal the gray. She still hadn’t forgiven me for the Columbia comment.

  I nodded and plunked a black and gold cup down by her spoon. I dislike giving caffeine to people who are already irritable.

  Julian raised one eyebrow at me. I worried instinctively about how his close-clipped haircut would fare, or rather how quickly the scalp underneath would freeze, in the blizzard raging outside.

  “Are you serving that coffee or are you just thinking about serving it?” The harsh whisper came from Caroline Dawson, Greer Dawson’s mother. Fifty-five years old and pear-shaped, Caroline wore a burgundy watered-silk suit in the same style as her daughter’s. While the style favored athletic Greer, it didn’t look to advantage on Caroline. When she spoke sharply to me, her husband gave me a meek, sympathetic smile. Don’t worry, I have to live with her. I placed a white cup at Caroline’s side with the reluctant realization that all too soon I would be catering to this same group of people again. Maybe the decaf would mellow her out a little.

  “Students moving from high school to college are like—” The headmaster paused. We waited. I stood holding the tray’s last coffee cup suspended in mid-descent to the table. “—sea bass … swimming from the bay into the ocean….”

  Uh-oh, I thought as I put the cup down and raced back to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffees. Here we go with the fish jokes.

  “In fact,” boomed the headmaster with a self-deprecating chuckle into the microphone that came out as an electronic burp, “that’s why they’re called schools, right?”

  Nobody laughed. I pressed my lips together. Get used to it. Two more college advisory dinners plus six years until Arch’s graduation. A mountain of metaphors. A sea of similes. A boxful of earplugs.

  When I came back out to the dining room, Julian was looking more uncomfortable than ever. Headmaster Perkins had moved into the distasteful topic of financial aid. Distasteful for the rich folks, because they knew if you made over seventy thou, you didn’t have a prayer of getting help. The headmaster had squarely told me before the dinner that such talk was as much fun as scheduling an ACLU fund-raiser at the Republican convention. Tonight the only adult not wincing at the word need was the senior college advisor herself. Miss Suzanne Ferrell was a petite, enthusiastic teacher who was also advisor to the French Club and a new acquaintance of Arch’s. I checked Julian’s face. Lines of anxiety pinched at the sides of his eyes. At Elk Park Prep he was on a scholarship that had been set up on his behalf. But the free ride ended after this year, salutatorian or no.

  “And of course,” Perkins droned on, “the money doesn’t rain down the way it does in the Amazon … er—”

  Caught in mid-simile, he attempted a mental swerve.

  “Er, not that it rains on the Amazon

  …” Oh, for the right meteorological metaphor!

  “I mean, not that it rains money in the Amaz—”

  Greer Dawson snickered. At the same table, a senior in a beige linen suit began to giggle.

  The headmaster made his horrible phlegmy noise. “Actually, in the Amazon—”

  Miss Ferrell stood up. Lost in a forest of images, the headmaster shot the college advisor a beseeching look as she approached the microphone.

  “Thank you, Alfred, that was inspiring. Seniors already know they will be meeting with me this week to discuss application essays and deadlines.” Suzanne Ferrell looked down at the anxious young faces with a tiny smile. “We will also be setting up meetings to go over our lists.”

  There was a groan. The list was what colleges the school—in the person of Miss Ferrell—would say suited your child. Elk Park Prep called it finding a fit between a student and a college. But Julian said if you wanted to go somewhere that the school didn’t feel you fit, you weren’t going to get a recommendation, even if you donated the Harriet Beecher Stowe Underground Wing to the library.

  “One more announcement, and it concerns our last speaker.” She beamed at the audience. “Our valedictorian, Keith Andrews, has just been named a National Merit Scholar.” Miss Ferrell began the clapping. The valedictorian, a skinny fellow, got to his feet. Saint Andrews, I thought. He did look somewhat saintly, but perhaps that aura would attach to anyone who was first in the class. Keith had a head that was too small for his body, and his bowl-cut, blond-brown hair, unlike the sprouted-looking things that most of his classmates wore, shone like a halo in the light from the brass wall sconces. Nor did Keith Andrews favor the fashionable clothes of most of his peers. He was wearing a loose, glimmery suit straight out of Lawrence Welk.

  Keith extended a bony wrist as he approached the microphone. A number of the parents stiffened up. They had come to see their children shine, not some National Merit nerd, buttoned inside polyester.

  “What is an educated person?” Keith began in a voice that was surprisingly deep for such a slight, angular fellow. I had a sudden flash: With his awkwardness, downcast eyes, and lack of athletic presence, Keith Andrews reminded me of Arch. Was this what my son would look like in six years?

  There was another squeak of laughter from one of the seniors’ tables. Standing beside Keith Andrews, Miss Ferrell gave the group a slit-eyed look. Whispers from the parents filled the close air.

  “Our word education comes from the Latin ducere, to lead, and e-, out,” Keith pronounced, undistracted. “The point of education is to be led out, not to get high test scores, although we could do better in that area,” he said with a grin. More snickers erupted, as well as groans from the head table. Even I knew what this was about: a recent Denver Post article had compared Elk Park Prep SAT scores with scores from area public high schools. The prep school’s scores were lower than their public counterparts’, much to the distress of Headmaster Perkins.

  Keith went on. “Is education attainable only at big-name schools? Or is our pursuit of those institutions just a function of ego?” Parents and students turned to one another with raised eyebrows. This was clearly dangerous territory. “As for me, becoming educated means I’m learning to focus on the process instead of the outcome …” And on he droned as I headed back to the kitchen with empty dessert plates so I could start organizing the dirty dishes to cart home. Predictably, the antiquated kitchen at the headmaster’s house boasted no dishwasher.

  When I returned with coffeepots for refills, Keith was winding up with “… always asking ourselves, is this integrity or hypocrisy? Is this a ticket for a job or an education for a lifetime? Let’s hope for the latter. Thank you.”

  Flushed with either embarrassment or pleasure, Keith left the microphone amid a smattering of unenthusiastic applause. Faint praise, if you asked me, but maybe that was because he’d come off less as a valedictorian than a political candidate.

  “Well, we’ll be seeing you all later …” Miss Ferrell was saying. “And seniors, please don’t forget to check the schedule for college reps visiting this week….”

  My helpers were scooping up coffee cups, saucers, dessert plates, and forks. With my second tray I walked back to the kitchen. In the outer rooms the noise of people bustling about searching for coats and boots rose to a small din.

  Then, suddenly, there was total blackness.

  “What the—” No way had I blown those fuses. I had just turned off all the coffeepots.

  Screams and shuffling filled the sudden darkness. After I stumbled into a cabinet and nearly dropped my tray, my eyes adjusted to the shadows. Neither the oven nor any other appliance, including the refrigerator, had stayed on. I could barely see my tray, and could not see the floor at all. I was afraid to take a step in any direction.

  A loud female voice cried, “Well, I guess that’s the last time the headmaster invites us!” There was more shuffling, the
scraping of chairs, and shrieks of laughter. Frigid air gusted from a door or window that had been opened.

  “Wait, wait, we’ll shed some light on this situation in a moment …” urged a man’s voice that sounded like the headmaster’s. There was a shuffle, a bump, and what sounded like an exceedingly creative curse, then a flashlight glimmered near me. The person holding it clomped across the linoleum and down the wooden stairs to the basement. Out in the dining and living rooms the talking, laughing voices rose in volume, as if cacophony could fight back the terror of unexpected darkness. After several moments the lights flickered. Then they came back on. There were more shouts of laughter, and exclamations of relief from the outer room.

  I looked around for my helpers. Together, Egon Schlichtmaier, Audrey, and I quickly schlepped the rest of the dishes out to the kitchen and clattered stacks into cardboard boxes. I thanked them and told them both to go home; the roads would be terrible. I could load the cartons into the van myself. From the entryway with its huge carved wooden doors came the high-cheer sounds of people calling their final good-byes as they donned their minks and cashmere coats. After my helpers departed, Julian made a sudden appearance next to one of the buckled counters.

  “Hey, let me help you with that,” he said, heaving up a box holding roasting pans. “What a drag! All night I had to listen to the kid on one side of me talk about how his folks had spent a thousand bucks on a prep course for the SATs, and did I know an antonym for complaisant? Then on the other side was this girl who told me that all the women in her family had gone to Smith since the beginning of time. Finally I said, ‘I swear, those women must be old.’ But before she could get pissed off, the lights went out.” Julian looked around at the boxes scattered everywhere in the old kitchen. “You want me to close those up?”

  “I’d love it.”

  Julian folded in the flaps of the boxes containing coffee cups. When the crowd had dispersed, I trundled the first box of silverware out to the dimly lit entryway. There was no sign of the headmaster. Maybe Perkins was already off dreaming of a metaphorical Milky Way. With a groan I shoved open the massive front door. Sharp cold bit through my caterer’s uniform, and I scolded myself for leaving my jacket in the van. At least the snow had stopped. I was determined to get home as quickly as possible. After all, I still had six boxes of dishes to wash.

  Luminous scarves of cloud floated across the inky sky. The moon lifted from behind a shred of silver moisture, illuminating silhouettes of mountains to the west. The bright, frosty landscape rolled away from the headmaster’s house like a rumpled fluorescent sheet. Puddles of shadow from the guests’ footprints formed stepping-stones out to the van. At one point I skidded forward into a shelf of snow and the heavy box slid from my hands. It landed with a loud metallic chink. Cursing, I decided to take my first rest of the evening. I inhaled deep icy breaths, sighed out steam, and looked around. Snow clung to the branches of the stand of pine trees next to the house. The little grove looked like an ice castle inside a Fabergé egg. At the end of the grove, someone had overturned a sled and left it abandoned in the snow. Gritting my teeth, I tried to worm my hands underneath the box to get some leverage. I took a deep breath, heaved the box up with iced fingers, and headed for the van.

  It was slow going. Lumps of snow fell into the sides of my shoes; pinpricks of ice melted into my ankles. Approaching the parking lot, I could see my van wore a trapezoidal hat of snow. It would probably take me fifteen minutes to warm up the engine. I lugged the carton to the van door, slid it open, and heaved it inside. The moon dipped behind a cloud. The sudden darkness sent a shiver down my back.

  I opened the driver-side door, turned on the engine, then flipped on the headlights. They shone on the evergreens frosted with new snow. Next to the overturned sled, half-buried in a hollow, lay a coat. I groaned. One of the unwelcome punishments that comes from catering big dinners is that you end up being the guardian of a bewildering cache of lost-and-found objects.

  By the pale glow of the van headlights I trudged through snow and by trees to where the sled was upended. Skidding down the slight incline, I leaned toward the edge of the coat. It was dusted with snow; perhaps it had been dragged or dropped. I brushed some of the icy powder off. Something was wrong. The coat did not respond to my attempt to pick it up. It was too heavy. My near-frozen hands moved rapidly to find edges of cloth.

  I could hear my breath rasping in the cold. The night air was frigid. I turned the heavy, hard thing over just as moonlight blazed out again.

  It was not a coat. It was the valedictorian, Keith Andrews. Blood from the back of his head darkened the snow. Instinctively, I felt for a pulse. There was none.

  2

  “Oh, no. Please.”

  I shook Keith’s shoulders. The boy didn’t move. I couldn’t touch his head. His slick hair lay in a dark puddle of blood and snow. The moon lit his frozen grimace. The openmouthed expression was ghastly, contorted with the fear of death. My fingers caught on an icy cord that had been wrapped around his torso and attached to the sled.

  I pulled away. My voice made high, unhuman sounds. The deep snow disintegrated like quicksand as I clambered backward. I raced to the headmaster’s house, careened across the slate floor of the empty entryway, and dialed 911.

  The operator impassively took my name and asked for the fire number, a standard localization procedure in the mountainous section of Furman County. Of course I didn’t know it, so I screeched for somebody, anybody, in the house. Julian appeared from the kitchen. A bewildered-looking Headmaster Perkins came tripping down the stairs from the living quarters. Behind him was a lanky, acne-scarred teenager who looked vaguely familiar—the one who had made the Stanford comment. The headmaster’s tweeds were disheveled, as if he had begun to get undressed but had abruptly changed his mind. He couldn’t remember the fire number, turned to the tall boy, who crinkled his nose and mumbled off six digits. Perkins then trotted off quickly in the direction of the kitchen, where, apparently, he believed I had started a fire.

  The voice on the other end of the phone patiently asked me to repeat what had happened, what was going on. He wanted to know who else was around. I told him, then asked the tall teenager his name.

  “Oh,” said the boy. He was muscular in addition to possessing great height, but his acne made him painfully repulsive. His voice faltered. “Oh, uh, don’t you know me? I’m Macguire. Macguire … Perkins. Headmaster Perkins is my father. I live here with him. And I, you know, go to the school.”

  I told this to the operator, who demanded to know how I knew the boy in the snow was dead.

  “Because there was blood, and he was cold, and he … didn’t move. Should we try to bring him in from outside? He’s lying in the snow—”

  The operator said no, to send somebody out, to check for a pulse again. Not you, he said. You stay on the phone. Find out if anybody in the house knows CPR. I asked Julian and Macguire: Know CPR? They looked blank. Does the headmaster? Macguire loped off to the kitchen to ask, then returned momentarily, shaking his head. I told them please, go out and check on Keith Andrews, lying still and apparently dead in the small ditch in the pine grove.

  Stunned, Julian backed away. The color drained from his face; bruiselike shadows appeared under his eyes. Macguire sucked in his cheeks and his ungainly shoulders went slack. For a moment I thought he was going to faint. Go, go quickly, I told them.

  When they had reluctantly obeyed, the operator had me go through the whole thing again. Who was I? Why was I there? Did I have any idea how this could have happened? I knew he had to keep me on the phone as long as possible, that was his job. But it was agony. Julian and Macguire returned, Macguire slack-jawed with shock, Julian even paler. About Keith … Julian closed his eyes, then shook his head. I told the operator: No pulse. Keep everybody away from the body, he ordered. Teams from the fire department and the Furman County Sheriff’s Department were on their way. They should be at the school in twenty minutes.

  “I’ll
meet them. Oh, and please, would you,” I added, my voice raw with shock and confusion, “call Investigator Tom Schulz and ask him to come?”

  Tom Schulz was a close friend. He was also a homicide investigator at the Sheriff’s Department, as Julian and I knew only too well. The operator promised he would try Schulz’s page, then disconnected.

  I began to tremble. I heard Macguire ask if I had a coat somewhere, could he get it for me? I squinted up at him, unable to formulate an answer to his question. Was I okay? Julian asked. I struggled to focus on his faraway voice, on his anguished eyes, his pallid face, and bleached, wet hair stuck up in conical spikes. Julian rubbed his hands on his rumpled white shirt and tried to straighten his plaid bow tie, which had gone askew. “Goldy, are you okay?” he repeated.

  “I need to call Arch and tell him we’re all right, that we’ll be late.”

  The area between Julian’s eyebrows pleated in alarm. “Want me to do it? I can use the phone in the kitchen.”

  “Sure. Please. I don’t trust myself to talk to him just now. If he hears my voice, it’ll worry him.”

  Julian darted toward the kitchen with Macguire Perkins striding uneasily after him, like a gargantuan shadow. I was shivering uncontrollably. Belatedly, I realized I should have told Macguire my jacket was in the van. Moving like an automaton toward the front hallway closet to look for a blanket, shawl, jacket, something, I could hear Julian’s voice on one of the phone extensions. I pulled a huge raccoon coat off a protruding hanger. I had an absurdly incongruous thought: Wear this thing on the streets of Denver and you’d get spray-painted by anti-fur activists. As I was putting the heavy coat on, one of my coffeepots tumbled out of the dark recesses of the closet, spilling cold brown liquid and wet grounds on the stone floor. What was it doing in there? I couldn’t think. I was shaking. Get a grip. I kicked at the hanging coats to make sure no other surprises lurked in the closet corners. Then I walked down the hall, looking into each of the large, irregularly shaped rooms with their heavy gold and green brocade draperies, dark wood furniture, and lush Oriental rugs, to see if there was anybody else around.