The Grounding of Group 6

by Julian F. Thompson

  “In fact,” said Mr. Darling, “I have tidings—tiding, really—won’t take but a minute. I could have telephoned, but I was just close by…and it’s a lovely day to drive. I spent last night in Boynton Falls—at that new inn, The Bread and Bundle?—and got the call this morning. But anyway, my news: Rittenhouse is dead.”

  Levi Welch sat up and made a strangled sort of sound, the sound of an emotion being choked, perhaps. Mr. Darling looked at him and shook his head in phony sympathy. This bumpkin was a friend of Rittenhouse? He shouldn’t be surprised, he guessed. He wondered what on earth he taught. Poetry…or pottery; some artsy-craftsy nonsense, Mr. Darling thought.

  “Sad, but true, I guess,” continued Mr. Darling. “I thought you’d want to know. An accident, my office said; they didn’t have the details.” He straightened up a bit and touched a tweed lapel. “As Bursar, I am never out of touch; I leave a number when I’m going out of town. That’s the way you have to play it in ‘Accounts, Receivable.’ ” He shook his head and smiled a thin-lipped smile. “I’ll miss the hunt, the tonic of your woods, this air—I must admit it. We’ll put a lien on the estate for what he owes us, maybe sue the parents, too”—he sighed—“but that’s a different kind of fun.”

  “I know,” said Doctor solemnly. “I know. I had to fire him, myself, but still… De mortuis, and so on, so forth.” He slapped a hand down on the table in a sudden change of mood. “I’ve got an idea! Let’s drink a toast to the poor young man! Say, Bill”— his eyes were daggered straight at Nat—“suppose you pour for us—good fellow! I’ve got a little something ready in the pitcher right behind you, if you could add a bit more ice and give it just a stir.…You’ll join us, Mr. Darling, in a Bloody Mary, won’t you?” Nat got up to do as he’d been told.

  “Er, no,” said Mr. Darling. “Can’t stay another moment; have to run. Sorry to have interrupted, really.” Peculiar school, he thought, extremely. Having drinks in front of students at eleven in the morning? He had a hand upon the doorknob.

  “Oh, just one last thing,” he said. “My man Emfatico, remember? If you see him anywhere, would you be so good as to…inform him of this sad…development? Well, thanks so very much.” He gave the room a wave, a smile. A most peculiar school. He’d have to ask Admissions if they’d ever had an applicant from there. “Sorry for the interruption, all. Good-bye!” And he was (finally) out the study door. A moment later, they could hear the front door closing, too.

  Nat had their glasses on a tray: Bold Ruler, Native Dancer (she scowled, but took it anyway), Gallant Fox, and Buckpasser.

  The four pistols were back atop the table once again, but loosely held, relaxed. “Well,” said Doctor, and he shook his head in the manner of a man who’s just been hearing gibberish, “so much for Mister Know-it-all.”

  He cleared his throat and raised his glass. “I have a toast, but it’s a slightly different one than what I said when he was here. Here’s to us, my friends, and to Group Six (better late than never, kids!), and to a job well done. And to teaching, maintenance, administration, free enterprise, and the real beginning of a new school year. And to you, Rottenhouse, and to you, Homer Cone: so long and hurry back, respectively.”

  With which he raised his glass and took a healthy swig, in concert with Lemaster, Welch, and Ripple.

  But maybe not a healthy swig, at that. Luke Lemaster didn’t look so good, and Levi Welch (whose last thought was: I should have had the Miller), he looked even worse. With Mrs. Ripple it was hard to say; she always looked a good deal less than great, to Doctor.

  “My God”—Doctor looked at Rittenhouse, comprehension dawning in his darkening eyes—“there’s…there’s… ‘a shadow hanging over me,’ ” he sang, and fell, face-forward, on the table.

  Mrs. Ripple stayed upright the longest. Women are the stronger sex, there isn’t any question. Paralysis was taking over her; she couldn’t squeeze the trigger. But still she had a sentence left, and if it wasn’t ladylike, you couldn’t blame her, really.

  “Mr. Rittenhouse,” she said, her lips a-quiver, fighting for control, “you are a plecklerucker micklestitch,” and, looking disappointed, she expired.

  11

  It was several days before anyone at the Coldbrook Country School was sure that Doctor, Luke Lemaster, Levi Welch, and Mrs. Ripple weren’t anywhere around. That they, in point of fact, had disappeared, exactly like the man that they’d been looking for. Schools aren’t—or shouldn’t be—perpetual motion machines, but once you get one started, it’ll run all right, even when it’s missing parts or has some out-of-order.

  There were, of course, some instances that very day of people noticing that one or more of them was not in place.

  Example 1:

  “Have you seen Doctor Simms? I gotta ask him something.” This Lucy Bishop said to Francie Foster at the barbecue.

  “No,” said Francie. “Anyway. I can’t imagine anything that he would know that you don’t.” With a giggle.

  “Where he got that yummy jacket he was wearing,” Lucy said.

  Example 2:

  “This steak is pretty good,” said “Ripper” Roth to “Bingo” Broadstreet.

  “You know why?” said Bingo, through a mouthful of the stuff. “They let old Carlos cook it, ‘stead of Luke the Puke. Even my old man can grill a steak better’n Luke.”

  “That’s right,” responded Ripper. “Where is old Luker, anyway, I wonder?”

  “Who the fuck cares?” said Bingo Broadstreet.

  Example 3:

  “Mrs. Ripple! Mrs. Ripple!” Gerry Remmeltree knocked urgently on her English teacher’s door. There wasn’t any answer, and the door was locked.

  “You seen Ma Ripple anywhere?” she asked a passerby.

  “She didn’t get back from the Hunt yet, I don’t think,” the girl replied.

  Gerry smiled and bent and used a nail file to stuff wet toilet paper into the lock of her English teacher’s door. She wasn’t going to have her themes called “puerile and banal” by anyone.

  Example 4:

  There is no fourth example. Maintenance was closed down for the weekend, so there wasn’t anybody to notice that Levi Welch was not around.

  On Monday morning, though, Mrs. Olson had to face the fact, by noon, that Doctor hadn’t had his coffee yet. She knew it couldn’t be the coffee, and so she took a walk across the lawn to see if he was in his house; he wasn’t. Next she went and checked with Mrs. Chilton, Dean Lemaster’s secretary. Not only did Mrs. Chilton not know where Doctor was; it seemed her own boss was also, oddly, missing.

  And so, at lunch, both ladies sought out Sandra Reynolds-Nix who, as the school psychologist and head of Guidance, was pretty well recognized as the most agreeable powerful person on the faculty—or perhaps the most powerful agreeable person, it didn’t matter a hell of a lot. Either way, she was a slender, attractive woman with close-cut brown hair and lilac-tinted glasses, in her early thirties and married to Prosper Nix, the novelist, who had nothing to do with Coldbrook other than eating and living there for free.

  As was her wont, Sandra Reynolds-Nix stayed cool. Being a trained and practicing psychologist, she knew a genuine nut when she saw one, and Doctor (she was sure) was salted, shelled, and boxed—the works. Luke Lemaster came from off a different tree, but he could also qualify; anyone who’d been around a school as long as he had could lose it all at once, though in Lemaster’s case (it seemed to Sandra) there hadn’t been that much to lose. The kicker in the case—that Sandra knew about but Mrs. Olson and her friend did not—was that Mrs. Ripple, also, couldn’t be accounted for.

  “Orgy,” Prosper Nix, the novelist, opined at supper. “Can’t you see it, hear it, smell it?” He smiled, while reaching for the pot roast and his ever-handy notebook, both at once. “The three of them at that motel in Suddington: the one with the vibrating water beds and three-D special movies round-the-clock? If I were you, I’d give ‘em a few days before I panicked.”

  “I’m not going to panic,” Sandra said
. “What’s to panic over? But I do agree with you as far as time’s concerned: I think I’ll wait awhile before I buzz the Missing Person’s even. There shouldn’t be any problem here at all, until Friday at the earliest. That’s when the salary checks are meant to get signed.”

  “Jesus Christ,” her husband said, in obvious distress. “I didn’t even think of that. Look, you better get on the horn to the school’s attorney and find out who can sign them in case the Doctor isn’t back. This is serious, Sandy. Really. You can’t mess around with people’s incomes, you know.” As a man without an income other than his wife’s, Prosper Nix could speak with both authority and feeling.

  Just to get him off her back, Sandra Reynolds-Nix found out that Mr. Kulman, lawyer for the school, was authorized to sign the checks himself, and would be pleased to do so, if necessity demanded. She instructed Mrs. Olson to make them up, as usual, on Thursday, and then if Doctor wasn’t back by Friday, to take them into Suddington for Mr. Kulman’s signature first thing in the morning.

  The day before that happened, though, there was some real excitement on the campus. On Thursday, just as lunch was ending, six strange people wandered in the dining hall and asked for Doctor Simms. Five of them were kids and one a blond young man who looked a touch like Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet, Sandra thought. They had that unwashed look about them that you see on hikers near the Appalachian Trail, and, in fact, they’d left some heavy packs outside the dining hall.

  Sandra Reynolds-Nix identified herself to them. By then, these strange new kids—two boys, three girls—were greeting certain students who were members of the school as if they knew them. The blond young man seemed very much at home, as well, and answered her in quite a friendly way.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Nat Rittenhouse and this is Group Six. I’m afraid we got tired of waiting for Doctor to call us in.”

  The story was quickly told. The five kids and this teacher of theirs had indeed come up on the bus from New York almost four weeks before. All the other new kids from the bus remembered having seen them. But Doctor had, apparently, given them a different set of instructions than he had the other groups. He’d told them to stay in the woods—some spruce grove, maybe fifteen miles away—until he sent for them. Which he never had done yet. So, finally, the Group had gotten tired of waiting, and they’d come in on their own. They wanted to start school sometime, they said.

  To make things even stranger, it appeared that Doctor had never entered these kids’ names—or this teacher’s—on any of the school’s official lists, or rolls, or files, even though a folder containing their applications and carbons of Doctor’s letters of acceptance were later found in a drawer of his desk in his study.

  At first she had to improvise like mad. She got the kids all placed in rooms by making use of space reserved for VIP-type visitors and medical emergencies. Nat she put in Homer Cone’s apartment, warning him it might be just a temporary thing, depending. She also asked if he would substitute for Cone in Basic Math and also, if he didn’t mind, in two of Mrs. Ripple’s classes. That was really good of him, she said. The following week, she called up the parents of each of the five new students and, imitating a confused and apologetic secretary (it was handy to be a woman sometimes!) asked them if, by any chance, they’d gotten back the canceled checks they’d used to pay tuition. All of them avowed they had, and even offered to send copies. And three of them informed her they had drawn the checks to Doctor Simms in person, which had seemed slightly strange, until they realized he owned the school himself.

  When Sandra Reynolds-Nix hung up, she called the local sheriff’s office, and the state police.

  As soon as Mrs. Ripple’s forehead hit the table, the members of Group 6 started to look at each other again. Up until that moment, no one dared.

  But only Ludi seemed to comprehend what she had seen.

  “They got our poison, didn’t they?” she said to Nat.

  He nodded solemnly. “I couldn’t think what else to do,” he said.

  Coke said, “They’re dead?” And he started to reach out for Doctor’s hand before he caught himself and got up fast and walked on down the room, as if he’d just then thought that being dead was catching, maybe.

  After that, there was a lot of motion in the study. Everybody got up from the table (except, of course, for Doctor, Luke Lemaster, Levi Welch, and Mrs. Ripple). Nat started behaving like a person in a detective story, Ludi thought. He took all the glasses, and the pitcher, into the lavatory and washed them thoroughly, washing his hands a few times in the process. Then he dried the glasses and the pitcher, and wiped the bottles with the dish cloth. Ludi watched this closely, nodding.

  Sully watched him, too, but he also kept sneaking glances at the dead people. Killing them was something Nat had had to do, he thought; no question about it. Sara touched his arm, which made him jump.

  “We’re safe, aren’t we?” she said. He’d never seen her look so white. She looked sick. “Can’t we get out of here?” she said, and looked around, sort of in a panic, as if she were in a cage or something.

  Marigold had gone and sat down on the sofa, and leaned over and put her head on her knees. Coke stood beside her and put his hand on her head.

  Nat finished wiping the bottles, and he put them back on the shelf, holding them with the dish towel.

  “I had to do it, didn’t I?” he said to Ludi.

  She nodded.

  “Can’t we get out of here?” Sara said again. She looked around at everyone, and she spoke much louder this time. “Can’t we just get out of here?” This time she spoke to Nat.

  Sully and Coke looked at Nat and nodded.

  Marigold sat up and shook her hair in place. She took a deep breath. “I think the thing we have to do is ground them. Drop them into those bottomless holes in the ground you were telling us about. Just the way they were going to do to us. I was thinking. I thought it all through. They were going to poison us, and they got poisoned. They were going to drop us in those holes… well, that’s what should happen to them. That way”—she shrugged—“they’d disappear, you know? Just like the one that was going to shoot Sara.” She looked at Nat and Ludi. “What do you guys think?”

  They looked at each other. Ludi put her lower lip between her teeth, but they both nodded. Clean up as you go along. The campus was deserted; they could do it.

  “Then we ought to go back to the Lodge,” said Marigold. “That’s what I was thinking. We need a couple of days. Go somewhere and call our parents—tell them we have the letters, so here’s what they have to do. Then we show up at the school. Here’s our story.” She flicked at her bangs. “We’re tired of waiting for Doctor to send for us. What’s going on? When does school start? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We’re just a bunch of innocent kids.” She smiled a crooked smile at Nat. “And an innocent teacher, of course. I’ve thought it all through,” she said again, “and we have to get rid of the bodies.”

  Everyone stared at Marigold. They wouldn’t have been more surprised if they’d seen Jerry Lewis cast as Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, telling how he planned to stick it to Napoleon at Waterloo.

  But Sara was moving her head back and forth in small shakes. “I can’t touch them,” she said to Marigold. “I really can’t. I don’t even want to look at them. I just can’t do it.” She started to cry, and she walked over behind Doctor’s desk with her back to the room and put her face in her hands. Coke followed her. He wasn’t too crazy about the idea of touching them himself. How the hell would they feel? Might anything come out of them? Better he should make himself useful consoling Sara. Sully followed Coke. Sara was his responsibility, not Coke’s. If she was going to cry…well, he would tend to her, because he could understand her best. She was his girlfriend, wasn’t she?

  Nat said to Marigold, “I can get the car, the Pumpkin. I’ll do it. You all head back to the Lodge, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Ludi made a mouth. “Are you kidding? I’m goi
ng to help you. It’ll take two, you know that.” She turned to Marigold. “Really. I can do it. You go with them. That’d be the best.”

  Marigold nodded, and the three of them walked over to the other three. They didn’t have to do a whole lot of convincing.

  “I’m really sorry,” Sara kept saying. She had to keep her head turned away as they left the room.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me and Coke to help you?” Sully had to ask. But his eyes swung back to Sara.

  “Sure I’m sure,” said Nat.

  Coke nodded judiciously. He could see the present plan was best, all things considered.

  Nat and Ludi walked through the woods to where the Pumpkin was, not saying an awful lot, but not at all isolated from one another either. They both were thinking, some, about the job they had to do. Nat didn’t think he was bothered by the thought of doing it at all; he just didn’t want to get caught. He also didn’t want it to do bad things to Ludi—give her nightmares or something. He wondered how come it had been so easy for him to put the poison in the Bloody Marys, when he’d always thought, and said, he was a pacifist.

  Ludi was hoping Nat was all right. He’d taken on so much, and none of it really for himself. If it were just him, he wouldn’t be within a thousand miles of this place, probably; he never would have had to kill those people. She sort of knew how it seemed to him, how it must be to be him, but not completely, yet. As was so often the case, she didn’t think much about herself at all.

  It didn’t take long to do the job: getting the car, loading the bodies into it, driving the short distance they had to go. At the end, they made four trips on foot, carrying the bodies the last two hundred yards between them, resting once along the way. They left no tracks that anyone would notice.

  When they had hidden the van again and were hiking back to the Lodge, Ludi said, “They were just like my father. Just as bad, and just as crazy.”

  “Yeah,” said Nat. “If bad is crazy; I don’t know. They all thought they were doing the best thing, I guess.”