Fit to Die

by Joan Boswell

  I didn’t expect the guy to give me a medal, but I sure didn’t expect him to flash me a look like I’d handed him a squawking turkey in church or something. Then he stood up to let me know I was dismissed, which I thought was pretty rude considering.

  “Thank you, Allison, this is very helpful. As I said, we’re looking into many possibilities.” Yeah, I’ll just bet he was. The way I saw it, the cops were so busy figuring out why the local jewellery stores kept getting robbed, they practically had to write off a kid like Caitlin as some crazy teenager.

  Boy, I was ticked. I mean, it was bad enough that Caitlin died in the first place, but to have to sit there while Detective Stewart got snotty and told me he was wasting time on possibilities? That really burned me.

  It burned Dex, too. I saw him the night before school opened again, in Walters’, our local department store, mostly because he saw me first.

  “Can you do me a favour, Allie, and take this stuff through the cash for me?”

  Geez. I still don’t get how Dex can say he’s all comfy about being gay and then go and ask me to buy his silk undies for him when he decides to get experimental. Hasn’t he figured out yet that anybody who single-handedly beats the Panthers five games in a row can pretty much do anything he wants in this town? I vetoed the yucky stuff he’d picked out and took him back to the ladies’ department. He shouldn’t have been asking the jockettes for fashion advice.

  “I am so cheesed about Caitlin,” I told him while we looked for a leopard print thong in his size. I’d just told him about the stupid police thinking she might have done the depressed diva dive. “What did you do to get your name lined up with hers on that change room stall, anyway?”

  “Nothing. Well, I helped her with her math homework a few times. Last time was the day before she died.” He looked really sad, and I knew how he felt. We were probably the only two kids in school who’d even bothered to get to know Caitlin.

  “Who could have seen you together? Where did you study?”

  “In the library, after last period.”

  Well, that ruled out most of the planet. The library at our school isn’t exactly a zoo in normal hours, and once classes are over for the day, it’s deserted.

  “Okay, so maybe whoever killed Caitlin just picked you because you’re popular and wrote your names on the inside of the stall door after stabbing her.”

  “Was there enough time?” Dex is so practical. “If I’d done it, I would have been outta there right after doing my thing with the knife.”

  “Okay, maybe the killer went early, wrote the graffiti inside the privacy stall, then waited for Caitlin to come in from the pool. Everybody knows she always used that stall to change.”

  “Everybody? You mean the other kids, right?”

  “Who did you think I meant?”

  “Nobody gets a spare at the end of the day, Allie. All the other kids would have been in a class, not sneaking into the change room with a knife.”

  “You mean, you think one of the staff did it?”

  I was still thinking about what Dex said at school the next day, but I was super confused. Why would one of the staff want to kill Caitlin Anderson? Or any of us, for that matter? And how many of the staff would know about Caitlin always using the privacy stall? It’s not like that was a hot gossip item. Whoever it was must have known her pretty well. Maybe she’d been having an affair with a teacher? It happens, but I couldn’t imagine even Caitlin being dopey enough to want to sleep with any of the ones at our school. They’re all so geeky, like Mr. Dorbinette, who’s a birdwatcher, for God’s sake. Still, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to find out who’d been roaming the halls that afternoon.

  “I didn’t hear about your special project, Allison. How nice.” Mrs. O’Reilly is the cutest school secretary ever, I swear. She looks like one of those sweet little garden gnomes, but without the hat.

  “Oh, it’s really interesting, Mrs. O’Reilly. I get to draw a map of the school and then plot out where people go all day long, and figure out which rooms get used the most, and when, and stuff like that.”

  “It’s unusual to get such a complex assignment this late in your final year though, isn’t it?” Mrs. O’Reilly went through the school schedules and waddled over to the copier, and I tried not to feel guilty about lying to her.

  “It’s a makeup thing. You know, I’ve missed a lot of class time lately.”

  “Oh, yes.” She gave me the gnome smile that scrunched up her eyes, and she pinched my cheek. “Our little athlete!”

  Of course I didn’t go over the lists in the hallway where a homicidal teacher or attendance cop might find me. I mean, I was skipping gym. I did it in the yearbook room, which was mostly deserted now that everything had gone to the printer, except for when some jockette decided to use it as extra locker space. It took me right up to the end of the last period, but I finally figured out that the only teachers not in a class when Caitlin was killed were Miss Rumsey and Mr. Clark, and everybody knew those two had taken off early that day for a long weekend in Vegas. We all figured they’d do a quickie wedding there, but it turned out they didn’t even get engaged.

  I was writing down which teachers were close enough to the change room to kill Caitlin on a bathroom break when Sarah Ann Felding came in and yanked a jean jacket off the coat rack in the corner.

  “Oh, hi, Allie!” She was acting all bubbly at me, but she looked like she was cheesed underneath, as usual. She’s one of those jockette girls who carries around grudges like they’re fashion accessories. I didn’t really care, since I’d just remembered she had English class in her last period, with geeky Mr. Dorbinette, whose classroom is just up the stairs from the pool and the girls’ change room.

  “What are you doing here?” She was accusing me of something, God knows what. I thought I’d play her for a minute before I pumped her for information about birdwatcher boy.

  “I’m so upset, I just had to have a few minutes to myself.” I put on a teary pout. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  Sarah Ann got that breathless look she gets when she thinks there’s good dirt coming, and she whipped a chair out from the table and sat down on it. “Of course I won’t tell. Is it about Dex? Did he dump you?”

  “Dump me?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but I knew she’d fill me in if I gave her half a chance.

  “Yeah. I saw you guys in Walters’ last night. Looked like you two were getting ready to, you know, hook up.”

  The lingerie. She thought he was choosing stuff he wanted me to wear. Gross! I had to put my face down so she wouldn’t see me laugh. “It was so…heartbreaking,” I choked out after a minute. “We were just about to…you know…and I found out he was really fantasizing about my being…another girl!”

  I peeked up and saw Sarah Ann looking like her head was going to explode. “Who?”

  “You!” I just choked out the word, threw my head down on my arms and really let myself go. I figured she’d see my shoulders shaking and assume I was crying my eyes out. It was crappy of me, but I’d had a bad week.

  When she started patting my back, I brought my head back up and made a big fuss about drying my eyes. I knew the only way I’d keep her attention now would be to spill some more stuff about Dex lusting after her. I launched into this story about his telling me that he’d tried to get her attention the other day in English class when Dorbinette went out of the room, but that Sarah Ann hadn’t noticed, and then everybody found out about Caitlin, and he hadn’t had another chance to make his move yet.

  “But Dorbinette was out of the room for ages that day!” Sarah Ann’s eyes went all sticky-outie. “How could I have missed Dex like that?”

  “Maybe it only seemed like a long time to you. Dex told me he hardly had a chance.”

  “No way. Dorbinette was gone for nearly twenty minutes. He said he wasn’t feeling well and gave us an open book test. He was in the john forever.”

  The look on her face was funny, and I really did l
augh, which meant I had to cover by getting all bitter and jealous. “And you just did your test like a good girl instead of noticing Dex trying to make you be bad.”

  “Well, I’m not going to make him wait any lo—” she hesitated, looking at my flushed face.

  “It’s okay,” I said like I was being all noble and giving up the last rocky road bar on earth to a kid who’d never had one. Then I squeaked out “It’s you he wants” and threw my head back down onto my arms. This time she didn’t bother patting my back, and when I looked up she was gone. Well, Dex was more than paying his dues for getting me a reputation as a lingerie-buying slut down at Walters’.

  Now I had more stuff to chew on. Like, if Dorbinette killed Caitlin, how come? I looked at my watch and decided I might as well check out Dorbinette’s classroom for a clue. He’d probably be on his way home by now.

  On my way to Dorbinette’s end of the building, I passed Dex looking all wild and sweaty, like he’d been running. “You’re in big trouble, Allie,” he said as he speedwalked toward me.

  “Aw, you know you love it,” I told him when we passed each other, and he slapped my tattoo-free tush.

  Sarah Ann nearly knocked me down as I turned the corner to the change rooms, where Detective Stewart was standing with some other cops. Even though they’d had a whole weekend, plus another day when school was closed for the kids to have a grief break after Caitlin’s so-called suicide, it looked like the cops still hadn’t finished doing their detecting. There was yellow police tape over the door to the girls’ change room and everything.

  “Hey, Detective Stewart,” I said when he saw me. “Taking a pretty close look, huh?”

  “Just making sure, Allison,” he told me in that way-too-soothing voice of his. Aren’t cops supposed to be authoritative? Maybe he was trying to go easy on me, what with me being the one to find Caitlin and all. Please.

  “Sure you’re making sure. You know I’m right, don’t you?”

  He didn’t say yes or no, but he did tell me to come to him if I had any more information.

  “I might,” I told him. “I mean, I will if I do, and I might. I’m not sure yet. I have to check something, and then I’ll come back, okay?”

  I don’t think he liked that, but one of the other cops came over then, so I headed up the stairs.

  Dorbinette’s classroom was empty, all right. I went in and over to the window to check the parking lot in case his car was still there, and it was, but since he was just opening the driver’s door, I figured I was okay to check his desk. Just as I was stepping back, though, I noticed a woman come out from the trees behind Dorbinette’s car and start talking to him. She looked like she was being sneaky. I squinted to see if I knew who she was, but the sun was too bright, and she was too far off. I decided I should go through the guy’s desk fast, while whoever it was kept him busy.

  Even while I did it, I figured it was probably really stupid to bother looking. I mean, if they’d been having an affair and he killed her to keep it a secret, Dorbinette wouldn’t have kept nude photos of him and Caitlin in his desk at school. Would he? After I had checked all four drawers, I figured I was right about that if nothing else. He just kept ordinary things like his birdwatching binoculars and a calculator and a lot of rulers. But then I had a smart idea. If he did have something that he wanted to keep a secret, something most people would look for at his house, then it’d make sense for him to hide it at school. My mom does that all the time with her diamond rings when she goes out without them. She finds a place no thief would ever check, like underneath her treadmill, and she puts them there.

  So I got under Dorbinette’s old oak desk. The only interesting thing was this gap at the back, between the drawers and the front part of the desk that all the kids see. I ran my hand up into the gap on either side and sure enough, I found a purple flannel drawstring bag taped to the back of the upper right drawer.

  After I’d gotten up from under the desk and dusted myself off, I looked back toward the window and remembered the binoculars. Now that I knew he was hiding something for sure, I figured it was worth checking to see if that lady was still out there talking to him. I took the binoculars over and looked out and saw that she was Caitlin’s mother. I was just thinking how weird that was when Dorbinette looked up at the window.

  I jumped back right away. Not that he would have recognized me behind those big black goggles, but I guess anybody standing at the window of his classroom with the binoculars from his desk drawer might make a guilty guy a bit mad. Then I looked down at myself and realized I was wearing my lime green flowered shirt, which a guilty guy might remember if he went looking for the kid who was messing around with his desk and watching him talk to some woman in the parking lot who was acting like she knew him as a lot more than just the English teacher of her dead daughter.

  I crammed the binoculars back into the desk drawer and got out of there fast. I mean, I really flew down the stairs to the first floor, but Stewart and all his buddies were gone already. While I tried to decide what to do next, I weighed that drawstring bag in my hand, wondering what was in it, and stupid me, I checked it first instead of going straight to the office where Dorbinette couldn’t bother me without looking pretty suspicious.

  It was so weird. The bag was full of marbles. Big ones mostly, with amazing colours and stuff in the centre, sort of like the kind Caitlin’s mother had shown us how to make when our art class had a field trip to her glassblowing studio, but nicer. More sparkly, somehow. I’d just dropped them back into the bag and pulled the drawstring when I saw Dorbinette coming down the hall toward me. He didn’t exactly look thrilled.

  I had limited options at that point. He was blocking the easiest route to the office, and with the change rooms taped off, I could either go into the gym or through a plate glass window into the courtyard. I picked the gym.

  One good thing about all the sports they make me play at this school is that I didn’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Dorbinette knows the layout too, because he directs our school plays. But he didn’t know that a bunch of us had already set up the gym for a big obstacle course competition.

  I heard him fall in kind of a breathy, squishy way, which probably meant he was still at the inner tubes before I was over the low jumps, and it sounded like he’d fallen twice more by the time I swerved around the big plastic tunnels you’re supposed to crawl through. Then I dove out the doors that lead to the playing field at the back of the school.

  I thought I was so smart. I’d scaled smaller fences than the one that divided the field from the school parking lot, where I could see Stewart and the other cops talking around their cars as I ran. Then I looked up and saw that the school board had been busy putting up a taller fence with barbed wire along the top. How could I have missed that? They’d been talking about better security forever, but they hadn’t done anything about it. There was no way I could climb that thing, not with a guy like Dorbinette on my tail. I screamed really loud, but Stewart didn’t seem to hear me. I guess he was too far away. I’m a fast runner, but without any exits from the field except back into the gym, which you can’t get back into without a key anyway, Dorbinette would be chasing me around in circles for a long time before somebody noticed and did something about it. If he ever got out of the gym, that is. Last I’d heard from him he was cursing about his head. I hoped he’d hurt it bad.

  That was when I had my bright idea, the one that made me think I’m pretty smart after all. I ran to the equipment shed, zipped open the combination lock, and hauled out Coach Flannigan’s golf clubs. I figured his five iron was my best option, given the distance I was dealing with. And then I just dropped those marbles down in a row and shot them, one after another, over the fence and into the parking lot. Turns out marbles break up pretty good when you smack them like that, but I made my point. I got Stewart’s attention by dropping a marble right into his cap when he took it off to wipe his head. By the time Dorbinette staggered out into the field about
fifty yards away from me, the cops had him covered.

  Detective Stewart was pretty happy with me. Turned out Dorbinette had been behind all those jewellery store hits, and he’d been hiding a lot of diamonds and stuff in Caitlin’s mother’s marbles until he could sell them to somebody else. Mrs. Anderson kept saying that she didn’t know he was a criminal and that she wouldn’t have kicked out her husband if she’d realized Dorbinette was just using her to hide stolen goods, sneaking down to her studio when she was asleep. I figure she’s got to be pretty stupid if she really didn’t notice what he was up to. But either way, Caitlin must have caught him, and he’d killed her at the school after marking up that stall door so people wouldn’t go snooping around back at the Andersons’ house.

  Coach Flannigan was even happier. I guess some of those shots I made with his five iron were super-amazing, and not just because I didn’t bean any of those cops with a broken marble. He made some calls, and I did some tryouts. It turns out I’m one of the best new golfers anybody’s seen in years and years. So now I’m going to be rich and get to do whatever I want, because a bunch of companies want to give me tons of money to wear their clothes whenever I play golf. And I’ll probably get to do the LPGA tour next year, too. Pretty good, huh?

  MARY KEENAN is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose first novel was shortlisted in the annual St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic contest for Best First Traditional Mystery. Her short story, “The Bedbug’s Bite”, won first place in a contest run by A&E Television on its www.mysteries.com website.

  STRAIGHT LIE

  Was the ball that killed the golf pro

  An accidental shot?

  The detective who was on the case

  Felt that it was not.

  The suspect pleaded innocence:

  “Sir, I just play for fun.”

  The thing that really cinched the case?

  His second hole-in-one.

  JOY HEWITT MANN