“Until what?”
“Until the first shift of your surveillance shows up.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why? I mean, why now?”
He counted off on his fingers as he enumerated. “Two murders, broken glass, anonymous phone calls, a poisonous snake followed by a poisonous spider, booby-trapped steps, and a vandalized chimney, which I didn’t get to see until now. And a woman with two boys who won’t move out, despite the best advice of her local cop.”
“Arch will call his friends,” I retorted mildly, “focus on the squad car with his high-powered binoculars, and pretend we’re in the middle of a coup. Your cops will think we’re nuts.”
“You’d be surprised at how many loonies we get.”
“Actually,” I ventured, “why don’t you just do the surveillance?”
“I wish.”
I pulled on a bathrobe and stood by a bedroom window. Glowing pumpkin-candles illuminated the silky night air. Schulz went outside to his car. Five minutes later, an unmarked police car showed up. I watched Schulz leave, then I watched the jack-o’-lantern flames flicker and die. Eventually I slipped back into my empty bed that smelled of Tom Schulz. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, until the alarm surprised me.
Groaning, I slipped out of bed to start stretching in the dark. My yoga teacher had told me once that if you were just going through the motions, it wasn’t yoga. So I emptied my mind and my breath and started over, saluting to the east, where there was as yet no sun, then breathing and allowing my body to flow through the rest of the routine until I was revitalized and ready to meet the day, even if we were only four and a half hours into it.
Too bad they didn’t have a resident yogi at Elk Park Prep, I mused on my way downstairs. How could you have class rank with yoga? Its whole essence was noncompetitive, the striving with one’s own body rather than being obsessed with the accomplishments of others. Which is what education should be, I decided as a jet-black stream of espresso spurted into one of my white porcelain cups. Stretching oneself. But no one was asking me. My eyes fell on the folded papers still on my kitchen table—the article printout from Keith’s computer disk. Correction: Schulz had asked me. I sat down with my coffee and started to read.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
—Anatomy of a Hoax
As a senior at Elk Park Prep, this fall I have visited ten of the top colleges and universities in this country. The qualification “top” is commonly given by the media and, of course, by the colleges themselves. I went to these schools because this higher-education journey is one I will be taking soon. It’s a journey I’ve been looking forward to. Why? Because of what I thought I would find: 1) enthusiastic teachers, 2) a contagious love of learning, 3) academic peers with whom I would have mind-altering discussions, 4) the challenge of taking tests and writing papers that would give me 5) an introduction to new fields of learning so that I would have 6) the chance to develop my abilities.
I expected to find these things, but guess what? They weren’t there. My parents could have shelled out eighty-plus thousand dollars for a hoax!
The first place I visited I went for two days of classes. I never saw a full professor the entire time, although several Nobel prizewinners had prominent photographs in the college catalogue. I went to five classes. I wish I could tell you what they were about, but they were all taught by graduate students with foreign accents so thick I couldn’t tell what they were saying….
I went to an all-boys school next. I never even saw humans teaching courses, only videotaped lectures. Over the weekend I wanted to have intellectual discussions. But all the guys had left to go to the campus of a girls’ school nearby.
The next place had real people teaching. So I went to a section meeting of the introduction to art history. It turned out the class was concentrating on thirteenth-century Dutch Books of Hours. The instructor said at one point that something was a prelude to Rembrandt, and one of the kids said, Who’s Rembrandt? After the class I asked why the instructor was teaching such an obscure topic, and one of the students said, Well, that was the subject of the instructor’s dissertation, and he was trying to do his research while teaching the class….
I knew somebody from Elk Park Prep at the next place I visited. She graduated from our school five years ago and was now a graduate student. She needed to talk to her advisor about her dissertation, but he was doing research in Tokyo, and hadn’t been at the college for two years….
Finally I visited a school with a fantastic teacher! I went to his class on modern European drama. It was jammed with students. They were having a lively discussion of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and nobody was using Cliff’s Notes. The professor was storming back and forth, asking why did Hedda Gabler just keel over at the end. After all the disappointment at the other schools, I came out feeling great! But when the class was over, the other students were glum. When I asked why, they said that this fabulous assistant professor, who had just won the Excellence in Teaching award, had been denied tenure! He hadn’t published enough….
Who is supporting this hoax in higher education? Certainly not yours truly. Do American students really want this false pedigree? Do we want good teaching, or an empty reputation? Do we want an educational process, or an impersonal stamp of approval? Students in the schools, unite….
Well, well. He sounded like a valedictorian, all right. In a number of ways the article resembled Keith’s speech the night he died. But this essay was not an expose. There was really nothing in it anyone would kill to keep secret. Not that anyone else knew that, however.
Keith Andrews must have posed a threat to someone. Julian hadn’t liked him, and neither had a number of the other students. And in the last two weeks, somebody or bodies had been trying to hurt Arch and me. Why? What was the connection between the murder and the attempts on us? Was the murder of Kathy Andrews in Lakewood part of the killer’s scheme? How did the Neiman Marcus credit card figure in what was going on? None of it added up.
Outside, the chilly Halloween night had given way to a snowy All Saints’ morning. Because the first Saturday in November is notorious for heavy snowfall, the College Board opted to give the SATs locally in the mountain area rather than have all the Aspen Meadow students attempt the trek to Denver, forty miles away. In the spirit of noblesse oblige, Headmaster Perkins had ordered me to prepare quadruple the amount of morning snack, so we could serve—his words—“the masses.” Time to get cracking.
I got out strawberries, cantaloupe, oranges, and bananas, and began to slice. Soon hills of jewellike fruit glistened on my cutting boards. Worry about Julian again surfaced. Had he been safe at his friend Neil’s house? As far as I knew, he had slept less than twenty hours this entire week. Julian, the college-scholarship kid. Why had someone done that for him?
When I finished the fruit I started mixing the muffin batters. From the freezer I took the doughnuts I had been making during the smoke episode, along with extra homemade rolls from the clergy meeting. With these set out to thaw, I mixed peanut butter into flour and eggs for the final batch of muffins and set it into the other oven, and then began to put together something I had only been thinking about, something with whole grain but sweet, like granola. My food processor blended unsalted butter into brown and white sugars. I repressed a shudder. Given the school’s reputation, I should call these Cereal Killer Cookies.
I scraped ice cream scoopfuls of the thick batter onto cookie sheets, took all the muffins out of the oven, then nipped outside with two hot ones wrapped in a cloth napkin. The policeman doing the surveillance accepted them gratefully. He wouldn’t follow me to the school. His orders were to watch the house, not me. Back inside, the enticing scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When they were done, I packed up several gallons of chilled vanilla yogurt along with the rest of the goodies and set out for Elk Park Prep, waving to the officer in his squad car as I pulled away. He saluted me with a muffin and a grin.
The heavy clouds sprinkling thick snowflakes r
eminded me of detergent showering into a washing machine. Someone had the foresight to call the county highway people and get the road to Elk Park Prep plowed. At seven, after carefully rounding the newly plowed curves, I arrived at the school driveway, where a pickup with a CAT was smoothing a lane through the thick, rumpled white stuff.
I skirted the truck, put the van in first gear, and started slowly up the snow-packed asphalt, already much traveled by vehicles carrying test-taking students. In a spirit of Halloween festivity, the elementary grades had carved row upon row of pumpkins to line the long entrance to the school. But the sudden cold wave had softened and crumpled the orange ovoids so that their yawning, jagged-toothed mouths, their decaying, staring faces now leered upward under powdery white masks of snow. A jack-o’-lantern graveyard. Not what I’d want to see the day of a big test.
The parking lot was already three-fourths full. With relief I noticed the heavily stickered VW bug that belonged to Julian’s friend, Neil Mansfield. When I came through the front doors that were still draped with wilted black crepe paper, Julian spotted me through the crowd of students and rushed over to help.
“No, no, that’s okay,” I protested as he took a box. “Please go back over to your friends.”
Cereal Killer Cookies
2¼ cups old-fashioned oats
2 6-ounce packages almond brickle chips (Bits O’ Brickle)
1⅔ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 375°. In a small bowl, mix the oats with the brickle chips. Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together. In a food processor, mix the sugars until blended, then gradually add the butter. Continue to process until creamy and smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla and process until blended. Add the flour mixture and process just until combined. Pour this mixture over the oats and brickle chips and stir until well combined. Using a 2-tablespoon measure, measure out scoops of dough and place at least 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on wire racks. Makes 4 to 5 dozen.
“I can’t,” he said brusquely. He hoisted the box up on one knee of his jeans and shot me a beseeching look. “They’re driving me nuts asking each other vocabulary questions. After that bookstore meeting last night, Neil and I played five-card draw until midnight. It was so great! The only question we asked each other was, How many cards do you want?”
Neil also came over to help. To my surprise, so did Brad Marensky and Heather Coopersmith. My sudden and unexpected popularity seemed to be owing to their not wanting to test each other on last-minute analogies. I directed the four teenagers to set up two long tables and lay out the tablecloths and disposable plates, bowls, spoons, and forks that I had brought. Julian, to my great relief, had already started coffee brewing in the school’s large pot, but he had done it in the kitchen, and I didn’t know how to move the immense pot out to the foyer.
“I wanted to start the coffee out here,” Julian informed me as if he were reading my mind, “but I couldn’t find the extension cord that’s usually with the thing.”
Oh, spare me. For the hundredth time since finding Keith Andrews’ battered body out in the snow, I pushed away the thought of the dark cords twisted around his body. “Julian,” I said as I searched for a sugar spoon, “never say the words extension cord to me again. Please?”
He gave me a puzzled look that abruptly changed to a knowing one. He and Neil brought out cups of coffee on trays. When the bowls and platters were uncovered, kids began to come up to me to ask if they should eat now, where were they supposed to go, were the classrooms marked?
Desperately, I turned to Julian. “I need to do the food. Would you please find a faculty member or somebody to shepherd everyone around?”
He sighed. “Somebody said Ferrell went to get the pencils.” Before we could worry about it further, thankfully, a pair of faculty proctors appeared. The kids could take another twenty minutes to have their breakfast, they announced. Then alphabetized assignments were made to classrooms. The students crowded around the serving tables, shouting encouragements and vocabulary words to one another as they juggled muffins, doughnuts, cookies, bowls of yogurt with fruit, and cups of coffee. I was so busy refilling platters that I didn’t have a chance to talk to Julian again until just before he went into the P—Z classroom.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay.” But his smile was halfhearted. He clamped his hands under the armpits of his gray sweatshirt. “You know, it’s funny about that scholarship. Somebody—somebody besides you—cares about me. Maybe an alumnus, maybe one of the parents of the other kids. Not knowing who did it is kind of neat. I kept waiting for Ferrell or Perkins to say, Well, you have to do this, or you have to do that. But nothing happened. So now I think it doesn’t matter so much how well I do on these tests. They’re not the be-all and end-all. And that gives me a good feeling. I’m all right.”
I said, “Great,” and meant it.
Egon Schlichtmaier, his hair fashionably tousled and his hands in the pockets of a shearling coat, came up and shooed Julian along to the classroom. I went back to clean up. The foyer was empty except for one lone student. Macguire Perkins stared morosely at what was left of the Cereal Killer Cookies.
“Macguire! You need to go take your test. It’s starting in five minutes.”
“I’m hungry.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m usually not up this early. But I can’t decide what to have.”
“Here,” I said, quickly grabbing up a handful of cookies, “take these into your classroom. Follow Schlichtmaier down the hall.”
Still not meeting my eye, Macguire stuffed them into the pouch of his baggy sweatshirt. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Maybe they’ll make me smart. I didn’t have any last year, and I only got 820 combined.”
“Oh, Macguire,” I said earnestly, “don’t worry …” His miserable pimpled face sagged. “Look, Macguire, everything’s going to be okay. Come on.” I scooted out from behind the long table. “Let me walk with you down to the classroom.”
He shrank from my attempt to touch his arm, but slouched along next to me without protest toward the classroom where Egon Schlichtmaier had just closed the door. I glanced up at Macguire. The boy was shaking.
“Come on!” I exhorted him. “Think of it as being like basketball practice. Do it for a couple of hours and hope for the best.”
He looked down at me, finally. His pupils were dilated with fear. Dully, he said, “I feel like shit.” Arid without waiting for my response, he opened the door to the classroom and slipped inside.
I scolded myself all the way back to the foyer, where I scooped up dropped napkins and paper cups, cleared away paper bowls and plastic spoons, and covered the remaining muffins, bread, and fruit. There were crumbs everywhere. Basketball practice? Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.
The SAT was scheduled to take three hours. There would be only two five-minute breaks. The headmaster and Miss Ferrell had determined that it would be best not to try to serve the food more than once. And speaking of the college advisor, I had to find out where we were supposed to meet after the test. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked down to Miss Ferrell’s classroom. Unlike the other unused classrooms, it was unlocked but dark. I turned the lights on and waited. The desk was a mess of papers, indicating perhaps that she had been in to do some work but was coming back. Sipping my coffee, I waited for her over an hour, through the two five-minute breaks, but she was obviously involved with students.
Returning to the foyer, I decided to consolidate the food and wash my own empty dishes and bowls rather than haul them all home dirty. I found liquid soap, filled the porcelain basins of the old hotel kitche
n with hot soapy water, and got to work, humming. Without a dishwasher the task took quite a bit longer than I anticipated. Oh, well, at least I wasn’t in one of those classrooms, trying to figure out the meaning of words like eleemosynary.
Once the dishes were laid on the counters to dry, I came back out to the foyer. Crumbs and bits of fruit still littered the floor. I had only fifteen minutes before the kids would be done. On their way out, their shoes would grind every last morsel into the smooth gray rug.
The things a caterer has to do, I thought with great self-pity. I wiped the crumbs off the tables. No telling what my chances were of finding a vacuum among the plethora of closets in the kitchen.
Well, process of elimination, as Julian had told me of the multiple-choice SATs. The first closet held phone books and boxes. The next one I opened was the storage area for old Elk Park Prep yearbooks. I never did find out whether the third one held a vacuum cleaner. When I opened the door, I faced the dead body of Miss Suzanne Ferrell.
18
Her petite body swayed in the slight stir of air I had created by pulling open the door. I touched the bruised skin of her arm. No response. I stumbled backward. Incoherently, I called for help, for someone, anyone. I scanned the kitchen wildly: I needed something—a footstool, a ladder—to climb up and cut her down. Maybe I could help her. But she couldn’t be alive. There was no way. I had just spent the last hour cleaning in this room and I would have heard her. If she had been alive, if there had been a chance …
Julian and a gray-haired, hunched-back teacher, a man I had seen earlier that morning, hurtled into the kitchen. Their voices tangled in shouts.
“What? What’s wrong? What’s the problem? The testing is still—”
The Cereal Murders Page 22
