The Cereal Murders

by Diane Mott Davidson

  In the kitchen I wrote the boys a note. Gone to rec center weight room. This would engender surprised looks, no doubt. My double espresso spurted merrily into a new Elk Park Prep carry-along mug, a heavy plastic container that the seventh-grade parents had been requested (read “strong-armed”) to purchase at the beginning of the school year as a fund-raiser for the kids’ trip to a self-esteem workshop in Denver. Afterward Arch informed me he wasn’t going to think positive unless he absolutely had to. And nobody can make me, he added. That’s what I should have said when it was mug-buying time.

  The grass underfoot was slick with frost, and my breath condensed into clouds of moisture in the cold October air. The van engine turned over with a purposeful roar. I ordered myself to think strong and muscular. Maybe I needed a positive-thinking workshop.

  The van chugged obediently over streets whitened by a thin sheet of ice. Aspen Meadow Lake appeared around a bend—a brilliant, perfectly still mirror of early light. The evergreens ringing the shore reflected inverted pines that looked like downward-pointing arrows trapped in glass. Early snows had stripped the nearby aspens and cottonwoods of their leaves. Skeletons of branches revealed the previous summer’s birds’ nests, now abandoned. Without the trees’ masking cloak of foliage, these deep, thick havens of twigs looked surprisingly vulnerable.

  Like Keith Andrews.

  And so did our household seem vulnerable now too, with accidents or pranks that were becoming increasingly serious. Julian appeared to be coming apart at the seams. And I had been nastily injured trying to deal with the Stanford rep’s one and only visit to Elk Park Prep. As the caffeine fired up the far reaches of my brain, I tried to reconstruct: Why was someone targeting Arch? If indeed the spider in the drawer was intended for someone, was I that someone?

  Without meaning to, I wrenched the wheel to the left and winced when pain shot up my finger. I’d have to watch the bite area with the weights. Either that or risk passing out. The Mountain Journal’s too cute headline would read: CATERER A DUMBBELL?

  An image of the dreaded simile-speaking headmaster invaded my thoughts. Perkins certainly had not been overeager to find the snake-hanger who plagued Arch. But in the minds of most, which was what Perkins was after all concerned with, he might be considered successful. In his decade at the school, Alfred Perkins had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a much-publicized classroom expansion and renovation. He had masterminded a building program that included an outdoor pool and gymnasium. During parent orientation, some of the friendlier parents—of which I had to admit there were some—informed me that Perkins had superbly weathered the expected crises of administrative purges, teachers quitting or being fired, and students being expelled. Still, it seemed to me that Alfred Perkins hid behind his great wall of similes without letting too many folks know what was truly transpiring in his silvery-haired noggin. Perhaps that was how he and Elk Park Preparatory School had survived together unscarred, if not unruffled, for ten years.

  Still, Perkins must view the past month as being unusually fraught with crises. First there was the splashy story in the Denver Post about the students’ slumping SAT scores. Then, if you believed Marla’s version of town gossip, there had been the threat of local newspaper coverage—by ambitious, clever Keith Andrews—of a sex scandal. Or some kind of scandal. After the coverage the Post had given the SAT scores, what they would do with a teacher-sleeps-with-students firebomb at the same school was barely imaginable. And then the most recent crisis, a whole order of magnitude more severe: the valedictorian had been killed—murdered on school property. Whether Headmaster Alfred Perkins could survive this lethal threat to his precious school’s shaky stability and not-so-pristine reputation remained to be seen. How heavily he was involved in, or even worried about, these setbacks was a question mark too.

  The word from Julian was that Perkins’ tall, center-forward son, Macguire, despite his poor third-quarter standing in the senior class, had a good chance at a basketball school—North Carolina State, Indiana, UNLV. The acne-covered Perkins’ dull voice and drooping eyelids had been eerily impassive even in the face of the chaos surrounding his classmate’s brutal death. Macguire must be quite a disappointment to his status-seeking father, if not to himself. On the other hand, like many comics who acted the dunce, Macguire may have built up his own wall against caring.

  I swerved too late to avoid a muddy puddle, then began the ascent to the rec center parking lot. Built in the seventies, the Aspen Meadow Recreation Center was a long, low redbrick building on the hill behind the town’s public high school. “The rec,” as it was affectionately known in town, predated the athletic club and catered to a different local clientele—working-class folks. Anyone who had to labor for a living didn’t have a prayer of an early morning workout at the infinitely tonier Aspen Meadow Athletic Club, which didn’t even open its doors until ten.

  I pulled the van between the faded yellow lines of a space. To my astonishment, quite a few hardy souls were already parked in the rec center lot. Somehow, I had imagined I would be doing this body-building work in solitude. I devoutly hoped these fitness freaks were swimming laps. The thought that someone I knew might see me in sweats was more than I could bear.

  My shoes gritted over gravel sprinkled with rock salt to melt the snow on the rec steps. Supported by an area-wide tax imposed by the residents themselves (since Aspen Meadow was fiercely proud of its unincorporated status), the rec was a no-nonsense sort of place with an indoor pool (shared with the public high school), a gym, a meeting room for senior citizens, and three racquetball courts. Here there were no steam rooms, no saunas, no massages, no tanning booths, no carpeted aerobics room, no outdoor pool. I didn’t even know where the rec’s weight room was until the woman at the desk, who at the age of forty had decided she needed braces, told me. She took my twelve dollars and then, through a mouth crisscrossed with vicious-looking metal, announced that they’d recently converted one of the racquetball courts.

  “Folks just want to lift weights,” she said with what I thought was too lingering a look at my lower-body bulges.

  I felt my heart sink with each step up to where people actually lifted heavy things because they thought it was good for them. I mean, these people wanted to be big, they wanted to gain bulk, and they didn’t want to do it by eating fettuccine Alfredo and sour cream cheesecake! They used powdered diet supplements! What were they, nuts? With some trepidation, I pushed open the door.

  The place didn’t just smell bad, it smelled horrific. It was as if the walls had been painted with perma-sweat, guaranteed to stay wet. Sort of an unwashed rain-forest-in-the-gym concept.

  When I was about to pass out from the stench, a big guy—I mean a really big guy—with lots of knots and bulges and popping-out muscles on his arms and chest and massive legs, sauntered up to me. He growled, “You Goldy?”

  I swallowed and said, “Aah—”

  His eyes, tiny sapphires set in an expanse of facial flesh, flicked over me contemptuously. “Don’t work out much, do you?”

  Not a good start. I looked around at the different instruments of torture, things you pushed up on, things you pushed down on, things you watched your shoulders dislocate on in thè bank of—yes!—mirrors. Men of all ages, and one woman who I at first thought was a man, were grunting and groaning and pumping. It didn’t look like fun.

  “Really,” I improvised desperately, “I’m just looking for somebody….”

  “You’re looking for me,” said Big Guy. “Come on over here. I’m Blaster.”

  Not one to argue with one so massive, I followed dutifully behind. I had a terrible blinding thought: What if I saw my ex-husband here? John Richard Korman would laugh himself silly. I cast a quick glance around. No Jerk. He preferred the more chi-chi athletic club. Thank God for tiny favors.

  “First we stretch,” announced Blaster.

  Well now, stretching was something I knew about. I said hopefully, “I do yoga.”

  Blaster did a
prune face of disdain and thrust a long metal rod at me. He said, “Do what I do,” and then he threaded his huge arms around an identical metal rod. As he twisted his sculpted torso from side to side, I struggled to follow suit. But in the mirror I looked too much like a chunk of meat skewered on a shish kebab, so I stopped. Unfortunately I also let go. The rod Blaster had given me clattered to the floor with an unhappy thunkety-thunk.

  “Hey!” he bellowed.

  “Oh, don’t be too hard on her,” Hank Dawson said. “She had a really rough day yesterday. And she’s a big Bronco fan.” Unlike the young jocks in their scoopneck sleeveless shirts and tight black pants, Hank wore orange sweats emblazoned with the words DENVER BRONCOS—AFC CHAMPIONS! “Finger okay?” he inquired as he extricated himself from the thing he was pushing his elbows together in and walked slowly up to my tormentor and me. One thing I had noticed about how the men moved in the weight room: They swaggered around bowlegged, as if at any minute they were going to face off against Gary Cooper. Tromp, tromp, tromp, don’t be too hard on her tromp tromp a rough day tromp, draw on three, pod’ner.

  “Actually,” I said, turning pained eyes up to Blaster, “I did suffer from a terrible spider bite yesterday….”

  But Blaster had already clomped off to what looked like a stretcher lying on an angle. Hank Dawson gave me a grim apologetic look. “Are you sure you’re well enough to do this, Goldy? Did you hear Elway pulled his shoulder in practice yesterday? I’m surprised you’re here.”

  I said feebly, “So am I.”

  He grinned. “You know they hate food people here.”

  “I’m beginning to think this whole idea was a mistake.” I meant it.

  Blaster roared, “Hey, you, Goldy! Get on this thing head down!” Several men turned to see if I would do as commanded. I scurried over to Blaster.

  “You don’t seem to understand, I’ve changed my mind …”

  He pointed at the stretcher. It was a long-fingered commanding point, not unlike when God brings a flaccid Adam to life on the Sistine ceiling. “Decline sit-ups,” he boomed.

  “You see,” I ventured tremulously, “there was this black widow …”

  The remorseless finger didn’t waver. “Best thing for it. Get on.”

  A man of few words.

  And so I started. First, sit-ups with my head lower than my feet on the stretcher, which seemed unfair. Why not at least be level? Then incline leg raises and crunches (sit-ups on a level surface—why bother when I’d just defied gravity the other way?), then more torso twists with the skewer rod, then leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, bench presses, and front lat pulls.

  I’m dying, I thought. No, wait—I’ve died and I’m in hell. In the mirror, my face was an unhealthy shade of puce. My finger throbbed. Rivulets of sweat ran down my forehead and turned into a veritable torrent inside my sweatshirt. Blaster announced we were almost done, and that I would do better next time. Hey, Blaster! There ain’t gonna be a next time.

  Finally, finally, Egon Schlichtmaier walked in with none other than Macguire Perkins. Why I had not made an appointment just to see Schlichtmaier at the school was beyond me. I was going to need a heating pad for a week. No, not a heating pad—an electric sleeping bag and months of physical therapy.

  “I need to talk to you,” I panted when the two of them sauntered, John Wayne—like, over to where I was slumped on the floor, collapsed and terminally winded. Before they could greet me, however, Blaster loomed suddenly overhead. I was looking straight at his calves. Each resembled an oven-roasted turkey.

  Blaster’s beady blue eyes had a bone-chilling God-surveying-Sodom-and-Gomorrah look. “You’re not done.” His voice echoed off the dripping walls.

  “Oh, yes, I am,” I said as I scrambled to my feet, not without exquisite and hitherto undreamed of pain. “Stick me with a toothpick. I’m as done as I’ll ever be.”

  But he was waving me over to the Stairmaster, unheeding.

  Egon Schlichtmaier said, “It’s not so easy the first time,” only it came out, “Id’s not zo easy ze furst time.” He gave me his big cow-eyed look. “Like sex, you know.” The muscles in his back and arms flexed and rolled as he escorted me over to the aerobics area.

  I hated him. I hated Egon Schlichtmaier for his muscles, I hated him for sleeping with those undergraduates, and I hated him for comparing what we were doing in this chamber of horrors to making love, which I had just begun to enjoy lately, thank you very much.

  Blaster was punching numbers into the Stairmaster’s digital readout with that meaty finger I had come to dread. He looked at me impassively. “Get on. Ten minutes. Then you’re through.” And joy of joys, he stomped away. I faced Egon Schlichtmaier and scowled.

  “Better do what Blaster says,” came the unnaturally low voice of Macguire Perkins. “Guy has eyes in the back of his head. We’ll get on the treadmills and keep you company.”

  With such sympathetic exudings, the two of them mounted the treadmills and effortlessly began to walk. I wanted Macguire to go away, because what I was about to say concerned only Arch, Schlichtmaier, and me. Perhaps Macguire sensed my disapproval. He pulled out a headset while he was walking, tucked on earphones, and obligingly blissed out.

  I stepped off the Stairmaster. Let Blaster come over and bawl me out. I dared him. I crossed my arms in front of Egon Schlichtmaier’s treadmill as Macguire Perkins began to screech along with his tape: “Roxanne!”

  To Egon Schlichtmaier I said, “I understand you’ve had some difficulty with my son.”

  Surprise flickered in his eyes. “I do not teach your son.”

  “Roxanne!” squealed Macguire. “But was there something you didn’t want him to tattle about?” I replied evenly. “He said you were teasing him about something he said. He said you teased him day after day, and it was about tattling on you for using steroids. I simply will not stand to have my son harassed, by you or anyone else.” I narrowed my eyes at him.

  And then I had a horrible thought: Maybe Arch wasn’t the only one Egon Schlichtmaier didn’t want to have tattle on him. A chill of fear scuttled down my back.

  Damn. I should have left this whole thing to Schulz, as he was always telling me. Egon Schlichtmaier quietly turned off his treadmill and stepped off. He flexed his solid wall of muscles and I felt my heart freeze. Here I was among a bunch of bodybuilders, facing a possible multiple murderer.

  “Roxanne!” screeched Macguire. His tall body rocked and heaved along the treadmill. His muscular chest shimmied to the beat. “Roxanne!”

  In his thick German accent Egon Schlichtmaier said, “Yes, I did tease your son. But that was all it was. Your son has had a hard time fitting in socially at the school, as you may or may not be aware.” He crossed his arms: a standoff. “When he accused me of using steroids, which is no small accusation, as you know—”

  Especially with all the other accusations you’re facing, I thought but did not say.

  “—I tried to joke him out of it. I mean, I work out, but I’m no Schwarzenegger, although we sound alike, no? I think your son has been watching too much TV.”

  I really hate it when people criticize Arch. Egon Schlichtmaier put his hands on his hips. He was muscled, this was true, and superbly proportioned. Just because I didn’t like him didn’t mean he couldn’t have an athlete’s body. But I had learned a few things about steroid use from one of the many parenting books I had read. Steroids cause mood swings. Egon Schlichtmaier may have been subject to these, who knew? His reputed sex life certainly pointed to an abundance of testosterone. But he had none of the acne, no sign of the female-type breasts that chronic steroid-users frequently develop.

  Drug abuse. What was it that Hank Dawson had said to me at church the day after Keith’s murder? I understand that kid’s had quite a history with substance abuse. The kid was the headmaster’s son. At the time, I had just ignored it; no one else had seemed to think the rumor was worth looking into. And if the police suspected marijuana or cocaine deals were going
down at the school, Schulz would have at least mentioned it.

  “Roxanne!” bellowed Macguire Perkins joyously as he jounced along the treadmill. My eyes were drawn to him. Not just his face, but his entire body, was covered with acne. And he looked as if he could use at least a Maidenform 36C.

  13

  “Why did you drive Macguire over here?” I demanded.

  “His license has been suspended for a year. Drunk driving.” Egon Schlichtmaier screwed his face into paternalistic incredulity. “I try to help these kids. I do not threaten them.”

  “Just trying to help, eh?” I didn’t mention the dalliances at C.U. Sometimes teachers didn’t know their own power. One thing I did know about steroids was that a large percentage of students who took them got them from coaches and teachers. “Does Macguire have problems with other drugs? I mean, that you know of.”

  “Sorry?” Egon said as if he had not understood me.

  “Like steroids, for instance?”

  His shoulder muscles rippled in a shrug. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

  I peered hard at the darkly good-looking face of Egon Schlichtmaier. He was an oily sort of fellow—evasive, glib, hard to know.

  I said, “Because of Keith’s death, I’ve been extremely concerned about things happening at the school. There was this snake, this … threat to Arch. Do you know anyone who would want to hurt my son?”

  “No one.” And then he added fiercely, “Including me.”

  “Okay.” I stalled. Perhaps I was overreacting. “I guess I misunderstood the tattling banter the two of you had.” Egon Schlichtmaier shrugged again. He closed his eyes and sighed asin, I’ll let it go this time. I tried to adopt a cheerful tone. “Think you’ll be staying at Elk Park Prep? I mean, past this year?”

  He pondered the question. “What makes you think I would not?” I raised my eyebrows in ignorance. He seemed to accept that and shrugged again. “I have not decided.”