by Olivia Dade
That was him.
He sat in her desk chair, and it was still warm from her body.
Math. That would clear his troubled thoughts. Seven squared was forty-nine. Seven cubed was 343. Seven to the fourth power was 2,401. Seven to the fifth power was—
The overhead lights went out. In the evening, the hallway lights were dim, and they barely penetrated the sudden, choking blackness of the classroom.
“Hello?” he called. “I’m still here.”
There were footsteps in the distance, shuffling and steady. Coming closer.
“Hello!” he called again.
No one answered, but someone was approaching. Only steps away now.
Mildred got what she deserved.
Involuntarily, he shivered and leapt to his feet. He wasn’t staying any longer in a dark room, with mysterious footsteps—
The lights flickered back on, and a moment later, Mrs. Denham, one of the custodians, poked her head in the doorway. “Did you say something?”
His heart was rabbiting, and he gripped the edge of Ms. Wick’s desk with both hands. “The lights…” He pointed at them, as if the custodian couldn’t locate them for herself. “There’s a problem with them. They went out without warning.”
Mrs. Denham’s smile was kind, if a bit patronizing. “In this wing of the school, the overheads use motion sensors to reduce energy consumption. If you don’t move for a while, they’ll go out, but as soon as you wave an arm, they’ll come right back on. Don’t worry.”
“Oh.” Of course. Of course. “Thank you.”
“Next summer, they’ll install the sensors on your side of the school,” the custodian added. “Why are you here, anyway, instead of your own classroom?”
It was yet another question that didn’t have a single, clear answer.
He hated those sorts of questions. Always had, always would.
So before he could make a fool of himself yet again, before he spent another moment contemplating a problem with no solution, he said goodbye to Mrs. Denham and left.
Two
By the following Monday, Simon’s mind had settled itself, regaining its accustomed calm clarity.
Or at least it would have, had he not overheard part of a murmured conversation in the faculty lounge, as he was removing his usual healthy-but-filling lunch from the shared refrigerator. Two members of the science department were huddled up close at the round table, brows furrowed in…was that concern? Fear?
When he heard the word Mildred, he lingered in front of the refrigerator. Bending at the waist, he extended an arm, as if unable to locate the insulated bag positioned directly in front of him, in its normal spot.
“…such a shame, what happened,” one of his colleagues whispered.
The other teacher nodded emphatically. “I feel so much less safe now.”
At that moment, he happened to accidentally knock over a can of Diet Coke in the refrigerator, and the noise halted the conversation behind him. When it didn’t resume after a moment, he admitted defeat, righted the can of soda, gathered his lunch, and left to eat in his classroom.
If the incident left him rattled, that was only to be expected. Anyone would be distressed by the possibility that a longtime coworker had mysteriously vanished, or possibly even met a violent end.
And if the memory of how Ms. Wick had cringed and stepped back from him, hurt dousing the sparkle in those hazel eyes, also came to mind uncomfortably often, surely that was natural under the circumstances. For the purposes of a productive mentor-mentee relationship, open lines of communication would prove crucial. Any logical professional would feel compelled to apologize and make necessary amends as soon as possible.
Accordingly, he’d hoped to arrive in her classroom several minutes before the start of seventh period, allowing him enough time to speak privately with her and offer his regrets for his unguarded, hurtful remark. But one of his sixth-period students had appeared distressed at the results of the test he’d handed back earlier in the period, and he needed to talk with her at the end of class to reiterate the various ways she could receive extra help and/or raise her grade. His regular after-school hours for struggling students, for example, or extra credit work—or even the option of retaking the test at a future date, when she felt more confident in the mathematical concepts covered.
“You can rectify the situation,” he’d calmly promised, after outlining her various avenues for assistance. “I will help.”
By the time the student departed his classroom, no longer near tears, he had no hopes of a private discussion with Ms. Wick. In fact, he arrived at her doorway just as the bell rang for the start of seventh period. Closing the door behind him, he leaned against it and observed.
Her students had already settled at their two-person tables and were beginning to write in notebooks they’d evidently retrieved from the open cabinet near the doorway. On the whiteboard, Ms. Wick had written their initial task for the class, a five-minute writing prompt to settle them down and channel their thoughts toward the day’s lesson: What one topic do you wish people understood more fully? Why? What do you wish they knew about that topic?
He’d known, of course, what work awaited the students. Ms. Wick had e-mailed him her week’s lesson plans on Saturday, attaching the agendas and objectives for each day and listing the state standards her lessons satisfied.
Her thoroughness had surprised him, although perhaps it shouldn’t have. Not once he’d seen the orderliness of her classroom, despite all the potential for mess and chaos inherent in art classes.
He blamed those droopy buns for misleading him so badly.
Today, as she set up her laptop and prepared her presentation about Frances Glessner Lee, she looked much more professional in her clothing choices and overall appearance. Her black dress fell softly to her calves, swirling as she bustled around the room. Her chunky amber-colored necklace and dangling earrings framed her round, lively face.
Only one bun today, it seemed. It perched high atop her head, still messy, but in a way that looked somehow deliberate and neat nevertheless. Wavy, fine tendrils caressed her cheeks.
She was the prettiest witch in the forest.
Startled by his uncharacteristic flight of fancy, he jotted a note in his legal pad: Discuss faculty dress code.
Speaking of witchy, there was an unusual number of young women clad entirely in black in this class. If he wasn’t mistaken, all members of the state-champion girls’ softball team.
When Ms. Wick turned away for a minute, producing something large and cloth-covered from behind her desk and setting it on an empty table nearby, he heard one girl whispering to another.
“Freakin’ finally,” the student with cornrows hissed excitedly. “The murder unit.”
The other young woman, her skin powdered pale, extended her fist for bumping. “This is our moment, Tori.”
Then Ms. Wick called the class to order, and he watched over twenty years of teaching experience at work. Using a well-organized PowerPoint presentation, she relayed Frances Glessner Lee’s story with enthusiasm, covering various objectives while inviting student interaction and gearing it toward their interests whenever possible.
And their interests all appeared to tend toward one topic, and one topic alone: bloodshed.
“Dude,” Tori muttered to her friend. “Look at those stab wounds.”
In the current slide, projected onto the whiteboard, a male doll lay face-down on the floor of a meticulously crafted and detailed bedroom, red splotches marring his blue-striped pajamas. A female doll lay equally dead and bloody in the bed nearby.
“—included witness statements,” Ms. Wick said. “Her attention to detail was remarkable, as you can see. Let’s focus on another scene, which includes a calendar with flippable pages. Using a single-hair paintbrush, she would write tiny letters, one by one. And please note those amazing stockings on the victim here, knitted by hand with straight pins, as well as the working locks she created for windows and—�
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Given the subject, Ms. Wick’s enthusiasm was inappropriate at best.
Nevertheless, her students seemed enthralled. Whenever she paused, various hands waved in the air, while other kids took feverish notes.
“Wasn’t it weird for a woman to do things like that, back in the ’40s and ’50s?” the pale-powdered girl asked.
Ms. Wick considered her answer for a moment. “Although forensic science was a relatively new field then, police work was dominated almost entirely by men. Some bristled at her intrusion into that domain, yes.”
A greasy-haired kid, slouched in his chair, raised his hand. “I bet it helped that she was rich.”
“You’re exactly right, Travis.” Ms. Wick smiled at him. “Because of her family’s prominence, she had influential supporters. Her money also allowed her to woo students to her week-long courses, complete with a concluding banquet at the Ritz-Carlton.”
Several students groaned at that, while one boy in a hoodie muttered, “The Ritz? Sweet.”
“But whatever encouraged investigators to take her classes,” she continued, “by the end of their week of instruction, after studying her dioramas, those students found themselves much better able to evaluate crime scenes in a systematic way, gather evidence, and draw logical conclusions from what they’d seen. And her work was so brilliant, her Nutshell Studies are used to train investigators to this day. That’s why the solutions aren’t publicly available.”
A girl at the table next to him twitched suddenly. As her hand shot into the air, her face alight, she began to grin.
Revelation. Watching it dawn on a student’s face was a privilege, one he didn’t take for granted. He’d been chasing that particular expression for over twenty years, day by day.
“Go ahead, Amanda,” Ms. Wick said to the young woman.
“If you think about it, what she did was really clever.” Amanda waved an impatient, dismissive hand. “I mean, obviously her dioramas were smart, and awesome in an artistic sense and all, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Ms. Wick rested her elbows on her lectern. “Okay.”
“If she was going to barge into a male-dominated field, what better way to do it than with dollhouses? Something that was considered girly or whatever.” Amanda twisted her mouth, trying to find the right words. “She used the things girls were allowed to do, the things they were taught, to elbow her way into things she wasn’t supposed to do.”
If he’d been the recipient of such an approving beam from Ms. Wick, he imagined he’d feel exactly as pleased as her student currently looked.
“I think you’ve touched on a key point there, Amanda,” she said. “Let’s talk a bit more about that, and then discuss the specific techniques Lee used to recreate her scenes in three dimensions, as well as how art and public service are often intertwined. After that, you’ll have some time to consider what you’d like your own educational dioramas to include. I’ve also brought one of my own dioramas for your inspection. If any of you manage to solve its mystery before the end of the week, I have a reward for you.”
Over twenty heads swiveled toward the table near her desk, where her cloth-covered diorama was evidently waiting.
“I Googled her dioramas, and they’re extra-gory,” Tori whispered to her friend. “This is the best day ever.”
“Bring on the carnage,” the pale girl declared with unmistakable glee. “Do you think the reward is, like, an invitation to watch an autopsy?”
Pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, Simon sighed.
As the students spent the end of the class planning their own dioramas, Simon claimed one of the magnifying glasses provided by Ms. Wick and studied her work up close.
The diorama she’d created included three rooms of a small house: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. The living room was charred almost beyond recognition, with a blackened corpse on the floor. The edges of the bedroom also showed evidence of fire, but the room hadn’t been incinerated in the same way as the living room. The bathroom, in contrast, appeared entirely undamaged, pristine other than the hair clippings glistening with faux-moisture in the marble sink’s drain.
According to the written information provided, two brothers had lived in the house. One, Kaden, lay dead in the living room. The other—Barron—had managed to escape through the bedroom window in a panic, the encroaching flames too intense to attempt to save his sibling.
Outside the dwelling, a police officer stood near her four primary witnesses and suspects. The surviving brother, of course, but also an ex-girlfriend of the victim, who was suspected of having violated the restraining order Kaden had filed against her. Lingering nearby were a neighbor with a grudge—the two brothers had a habit of throwing loud parties late at night, evidently—and a landlord who’d threatened consequences if Kaden didn’t stop smoking inside the unit.
Simon had all week to solve the mystery, so he decided to study the witness statements another day and focus on the diorama itself today. Not so much the evidence of murder contained within and outside the miniature home, but rather the evidence of Ms. Wick’s labors. The diorama as a piece of art, rather than a crime scene.
Simon could not claim to be an aesthete, by any means.
Still. Her artistry, however macabre its inspiration, was…astonishing. Rigorous precision coupled with unbounded creativity and skill. Some of the furnishings she’d bought as is, perhaps, but no miniature store provided half-burned recliners or stacks of papers on a desk, their written contents just visible with a magnifying glass and the use of tweezers, or the impression of a heeled shoe in the dirt outside the living room window, or a bandage on an elderly landlord’s arm.
He would have bet his 401K that the suspects’ clothes were hand-stitched. She hadn’t missed a detail, not the miniscule lighter just poking out of the neighbor’s back pocket, not the way all the men’s shoelaces were double-knotted, not the spurned ex-girlfriend’s choppy haircut.
To complete her gruesome creation, Ms. Wick had to have mastered an astounding array of mediums and techniques, and her hands must have been steady as a neurosurgeon’s.
Everything was exactly in scale, which required mathematical skill too.
The realization pleased him more than it should have.
The final bell rang while he was still lost in contemplation, but he barely noted the buzz of students chatting, packing up their backpacks, and heading out the door, bound toward home or work or extracurricular activities.
“Are you ready to make an arrest?”
Her voice, though mischievous, didn’t quite contain the warmth of their previous meeting, and he knew why. But her body next to his, their shoulders almost—almost—touching, radiated heat in a way that made him want to close his eyes and simply breathe in her faint scent of turpentine and soap.
He didn’t, of course. Instead, ignoring her question, he turned stiffly and gestured toward the nearest table. “Let’s discuss my initial observations.”
With a mocking little bow of her head, she sat in a student chair. Tempted to choose the one beside her, he instead selected a seat safely across the table.
They were both professionals. No small talk was necessary.
“If today’s lesson is any indication, you’re obviously a teacher of great experience and skill, well able to keep the attention of a roomful of students while covering all necessary topics and meeting all required objectives. Your rapport with your students is remarkable, as is your ability to elicit participation from them. Your classroom is impeccably organized.” He kept his voice cool, as befitted an objective mentor. “If the rest of this week’s lessons prove similar to today’s, I can only conclude that Marysburg High is fortunate to have you amongst its faculty.”
He flicked a glance up from his notes, meeting her wide eyes.
An unkind observer might have described her mouth as agape, and a more whimsical man might have been tempted to throw a grape in there.
Thos
e soft lips snapped shut quickly enough, however, when he continued.
“That said, the faculty’s dress code appears to have escaped you. Today’s outfit is appropriate and very, uh, becoming—”
Shit.
“—um, becoming for a professional teacher.” There. Saved it. No room for misinterpretation. “But your clothing at the faculty meeting did not meet the standards set by school guidelines. No jeans, except on Denim Fridays, and all garments worn by teachers must be clean.”
Since her eyes were currently narrowed slits of hazel affront, he was smart enough not to mention the faculty meeting’s droopy buns. Those could wait for a debriefing session later in the week.
In the spirit of tearing off a bandage as quickly as possible, he continued hastily, before her glare lasered actual holes through his skull. “The contents of today’s lecture, while fascinating and well-presented, also put you at risk for student and parental complaints. The topic was, in short, overly macabre and ghoulish. I would suggest you pick more school-appropriate topics in the future.”
One of her pale eyebrows arched high. “Would you?”
She’d settled back in her chair, affront replaced by steely calm.
The expression bolted down his spine in a way he couldn’t interpret. Was that electric jolt warning him he’d erred somehow? Was it a visceral response to the challenge betrayed by her pugnacious, upturned chin and haughty stare? Was it because, beneath that witchy, alluring dress, her plump thighs had shifted and rubbed—
No, it wasn’t excitement. Professional evaluations did not prompt passion of any sort. Not for him, anyway.
If his tie suddenly constricted his breath, he’d merely fastened it a bit too tightly that morning. The prickling heat spreading lower and lower, making his button-down tease against every nerve ending his skin possessed, was simply the result of the school’s inadequate HVAC system. Nothing more.
His throat might be dry, but he would remain entirely businesslike.
“I also believe you left the student diorama assignment too open-ended, given the limited time available for this unit. You might consider providing a handout of preapproved topics in the future.” That was the last item on today’s list, but he continued looking down at his legal pad. “Finally, I inadvertently insulted both you and your work last week. My remark was rude and uncollegial.”
