Killing Mr. Griffin

by Lois Duncan

  “I can,” Jeff said. “We’ve got one in the garage.”

  “What about an extra license plate?”

  Silence followed the question. Then Jeff said, “Maybe Tony—”

  “No way,” Mark said firmly. “We’re not letting anybody else in on this. There are too many of us involved already. If we take the north road down from the mountains we can come into town on Coors Road. That should be pretty safe if we time it to hit the evening traffic. All those people who work in the factories come home that way. We’ll be part of the swarm.”

  “And then what?” Betsy asked. “Once we get the car back to town, what do we do with it?”

  “We can park it at the airport. That lot’s always full, and cars get left there for months at a time. When they do find it, if they do, it will look like Griffin took a plane someplace.”

  “And—the body?” David forced out the question. “You’re planning for us to bury it?”

  “That’s simple enough. Right where it is now is a perfect place. Nobody ever goes there, and the dirt will be soft because of the stream.”

  “No!” The word burst from Susan’s lips like a cry of pain. “We can’t do that, just take Mr. Griffin and stick him in the ground! We can’t pretend it never happened, that we’re not responsible! We killed him, all five of us! Somehow we killed him! I don’t know how, but if we hadn’t done what we did, he would still be alive this minute!”

  “You can’t know that,” Mark said reasonably.

  “I do know it! People don’t just fall down dead for no reason!”

  “And they don’t ‘just fall down dead’ from being tied up for a few hours.”

  “I don’t care what you say, we’ve got to tell somebody! My father—”

  “Sue—Sue—simmer down, baby.” Mark’s voice was suddenly gentle. “I know how you feel. You and Dave were the ones who found him. That was rough, and that’s over now. You don’t have to go up there again. The rest of us will take care of everything. It’s going to be all right, baby, I promise.”

  “It can’t be all right!” Susan cried miserably. “Mr. Griffin is dead!”

  “Did you stop to think he might be dead regardless?” Mark placed his hand under her chin, turning her face to his. “Look, sweetie, we didn’t do the guy in, and you know it. Dolly Luna got kidnapped by her students last semester, right? She didn’t fall dead on them. It’s a sick person who dies like that, without a reason. It could have happened anywhere—in his home, behind his desk at school, walking down the street—when your body quits on you, that’s it. Wouldn’t it have been worse if he had been behind the wheel of his car and plowed straight into a bunch of kids waiting for the schoolbus?”

  “If he had been at home his wife could have called a doctor,” Susan said.

  “My own dad was at home when he died,” Mark said softly. “It would have been better if he hadn’t been. He was in his bed asleep, and the house burned down.”

  “Oh, Mark!” She regarded him with horror. “How awful!”

  “Damned right, it was awful. The point is, when it’s your time to go, you go. You can’t keep saying ‘if this’ and ‘if that’; it doesn’t change anything. You can’t go back and change anything, you’ve just got to keep on living. Wrecking our own lives wouldn’t bring Mr. G. back, now would it? It wouldn’t help at all. It would just destroy us and the people who love us.”

  “My parents couldn’t bear it,” Susan said. “Nothing like this ever happens to people like my parents. They’re so nice and normal. They just think about things like cooking and property taxes.”

  “They don’t have to know. Nobody does. It’s all right, Sue.” He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her over against him. “It’s all right, Sue—Susie—it’s all right, baby. Just trust me, okay? It’s all going to be all right.”

  The tears came at last with the suddenness of a dam bursting, one gigantic sob that seemed to shake the car, and then the wild, heavy weeping. Mark’s other arm came around her, and he held her through the storm, his face still and impassive, the heavy-lidded eyes half-closed, staring out through the front car window into the darkness beyond.

  He held her that way for a long time.

  When the weeping slowed, he turned to David. “Does your mom keep tissues in the glove compartment?”

  David opened the compartment, and found no tissues, but there were some paper napkins. He extracted one and handed it to Susan, who took off her glasses and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Let’s head for the diner,” Mark said to David. “We’ll hang around there just long enough to have a soda so people will see us. Then we’ll go home.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Is he gone already?” Irv Kinney asked.

  His wife Jeanne glanced up from her coffee.

  “Jeff came by for him earlier than usual this morning. He was honking the car horn out there at seven thirty, and Mark was out the door before I could even ask him if he’ll be here for dinner.”

  “Why should he be here for dinner?” Irv asked her, getting a bowl out of the cabinet and opening the top of the new box of breakfast cereal. “Sometimes I wonder if the kid lives here at all. Days go by and I never see him. He sleeps in till his friend blows the horn for him in the mornings, and he doesn’t come home at night till after we’re in bed. Where does he eat, anyway?”

  “I think he picks up hamburgers,” Jeanne said. “You know how kids are.”

  “I know how our kids were, and it wasn’t like that. We had our ups and downs with them, sure, but they sat down at the dinner table with us like they belonged to the family, and we saw enough of them evenings and weekends to remember what they looked like from one month to the next. Mark’s been living with us four years now, and I swear, I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation.”

  “Our kids were real outgoing. Everybody’s not the same.”

  “That’s for sure.” Irv carried the cereal bowl over to the table and sat down with it. He reached for the milk carton. “Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing, taking him in like that. We raised our family once, and starting all over again at our ages—what made us think we could do it?”

  “We didn’t have much choice, did we, with your brother Pete dead and Eva with a nervous breakdown? Mark was only thirteen. He’s your nephew. Who else would have taken him?”

  “That’s it, of course. There wasn’t anybody but us. I kept thinking Eva would come around after the shock was over. Still, if we’d said no, the courts would have had to come up with something for him, a foster home, maybe, with people there who were used to handling weird kids.”

  “Mark’s not weird,” Jeanne said. “You keep comparing him to our kids, and you just can’t do that and be fair about it. He’s gone through things they never had to go through. Imagine, seeing his own house burn down with his father inside it, and then having his mother crack up and turn on him like that and say she never wanted to see him again—why, that’s enough to make any boy—different.”

  “ ‘Weird’—‘different’—what does it matter what word you use? What it boils down to is that the kid gives me the creeps. I say that, even if he is my brother’s boy. I’ve tried to reach him, Jeanne. You know that. You remember how I stuckup for him after he got in that trouble at school? I went inwith him and stood behind him and tried to get them to givehim another chance in another English class.”

  “He appreciated that, Irv.”

  “Did he? I never could tell. Why did he do that anyway, crib on that paper? He’s smart enough. He didn’t need to do that.”

  “Maybe his girlfriend put him up to it. She was older than he was. Young boys can be influenced a lot by girls like that.”

  “Where does he go nights, that’s what I want to know. You ask him, and he says, ‘Nowhere much.’ Now, what kind of answer is that—‘nowhere much’? Last night I heard the front door open and close around eleven thirty. That’s the earliest he’s come in all month. You don’t thin
k he’s into drugs or something, do you, Jeanne?”

  “I don’t know any better than you do,” his wife said. “If he is, there’s nothing we can do about it, so what’s the sense agonizing? He’s almost eighteen. He’ll be graduating in another month or so. There’ll be enough left from his father’s insurance so he can make out until he gets his feet on the ground. You and I will always know we did the right thing.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Irv said with a sigh. “I just have this feeling—” He let the sentence fall away, incomplete. “I wonder if he’ll keep in touch with us after he leaves.”

  “Probably not,” Jeanne said, taking a sip of coffee.

  “You’re not eating much this morning,” David’s mother commented at breakfast. “Are you upset about something, David? You and your friend didn’t get in a fight last night, did you?”

  “No,” David said. “We met up with some friends and went out with them for food around eleven. My stomach’s still full from that.”

  “You were out awfully late for a school night,” his mother said. “I hope this isn’t going to become a regular thing. You know I need my sleep, and there’s no way I’m going to get it if I’m worrying about you out driving around till all hours.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  To please her, he picked up a slice of toast and took a bite out of it. The bread was hard and dry and crumbly, and the butter felt slimy on his tongue. He was afraid he couldn’t swallow it. He picked up his glass of milk and took a gulp, willing the mouthful down.

  “I can’t believe it—our little Davy dating.” His grandmother regarded him fondly from her place at the end of the kitchen table, her gray hair still uncombed, her flowered robe hanging open to reveal the pink cotton nightgown her daughter-in-law had given her for Christmas. “Young people grow up so fast these days. Why, on that game show with the newlyweds, you’d swear there wasn’t a one of them any older than sixteen.”

  “I’m seventeen,” David reminded her automatically.

  “Yes, I know, dear. You told me that yesterday. Or was it yesterday? One does lose track of time when one gets old. Yesterday was the day you went out with that boy with the funny eyes and rode around with him and his friends and never came home till dinner.”

  “It was not!” David set his glass down so hard that the milk splashed over onto the table top. “I came straight home from school yesterday. I got you Jell-O, and you and I sat all afternoon and watched television. You do remember that, don’t you, Gram? That was yesterday.”

  “It was?” The old woman reached up a wrinkled hand to shove a strand of hair back from her forehead. “I get confused. One day gets to be the same size as the next when you’re my age.”

  “You’re not that old; you can remember.” David’s voice rose sharply. “Yesterday was Thursday, right? It was Wednesday I went out with Mark and the other kids for a while. Yesterday—Thursday—I came right home from school and got you the green Jell-O I’d made that morning for you, and you ate it, and I turned the television on, and we sat there together all afternoon long. I was right in the room with you all afternoon.”

  “David, for goodness’ sake,” his mother said. “You don’t have to shout at Gram that way.”

  “I want her to remember!”

  “I remember—I remember.” Old Mrs. Ruggles nodded agreeably. “I remember the green Jell-O, after all those weeks with the orange stuff. Where’s the rest of it, Davy? I want some for breakfast.”

  “There isn’t any more,” David said. “You finished it.”

  “A whole package? She couldn’t have,” his mother exclaimed. “That makes four bowls.”

  “Well, I ate some of them.”

  “You didn’t,” his grandmother contradicted. “I do remember now. You didn’t eat any of it. I asked you if you were going to eat something, and you said no, you weren’t hungry. Maybe you dumped the rest of the Jell-O out because it tasted funny.”

  “Why would it taste funny?” David’s mother asked. “Jell-O is Jell-O. It’s all the same. That’s the same powder in every box.”

  “It tasted great,” David said. “That’s why I ate all the rest of it. I just got started and I couldn’t stop, and I ate it all, and I washed out the bowls and dried them and put them away. Is that a crime, being hungry after school?”

  “You didn’t eat them,” his grandmother said stubbornly. “I would have seen you do it.”

  “You were asleep! You fell asleep almost as soon as I turned the TV on. Admit it, now, you don’t remember anything at all about the shows, now do you? What were the questions they asked the newlyweds? Can you tell me?”

  “They asked about—about—” The old woman closed her eyes and wrinkled her forehead. “Goodness, I don’t recall at all. Did I really sleep? I never sleep in the daytime. But, you’re right, I ate that Jell-O and I just went right to sleep like Snow White did when the queen gave her the poison apple. You didn’t give me a poison Jell-O, did you, Davy?” She opened her eyes and laughed delightedly at her witticism.

  “I told you, I ate all the rest of it. If there had been something in the Jell-O, I’d have gone to sleep too, wouldn’t I?” He seemed suddenly to have no control over his voice. It was rising higher and higher.

  His mother was staring at him in bewilderment.

  “Please, dear, don’t yell! I’ve never seen you act like this, David. Gram was joking about the Jell-O, of course. And there’s nothing wrong with catching a little nap in the afternoons, Mother Ruggles. I’d do it myself if I were home and able to.”

  “But I missed my shows,” Irma Ruggles said mournfully. “I like that girl with the curly hair who won two days now. I wanted to see her win again. Did she, Davy?”

  “Yes,” David said desperately. “Yes, she won. They gave her an electric mixer.”

  “Only a mixer? The third time winning, they usually give them something really big like a new refrigerator.”

  “They offered her one, but she said she didn’t want it. She already had a refrigerator. She wanted a mixer.”

  “But if she’d taken the refrigerator she could have sold it and bought the mixer and had money left over. They ought to think of things like that, those young people, but they’re just not very sensible. It takes an older head to figure things out.” She paused and then asked, “Is there another package of that Jell-O you could make up for me?”

  “There certainly is,” David’s mother said. “I bought some yesterday. David will make it before he leaves for school, won’t you, dear, and it will be all ready by this afternoon.”

  “Sure, Gram,” David said, weak with relief at the turn the conversation had taken. “I’ll be glad to.”

  “That will be nice, dear.” His grandmother smiled at him benignly. “And this time, Davy, be very careful what you put in it, won’t you? That last stuff was awfully bitter.”

  * * *

  “I want to talk to Detective James Baca.”

  “Can you tell me what the problem is, ma’am?” the young man at the front desk asked pleasantly.

  “My husband’s missing,” Cathy Griffin told him. “I phoned here last night and talked to somebody—I’m not sure who—and he said to come in this morning and ask for Detective Baca.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Catherine Griffin.”

  “One moment, please.” The young man picked up his phone, dialed an extension, and spoke quietly into the receiver. Then he replaced it on the hook. “Go on down the hall, ma’am. Room one-oh-seven.”

  “Thank you.”

  Clutching her purse tightly against the front of her maternity blouse, Cathy walked down the hall, counting doorways, 103–105–107. The door stood partially open, and she gave it a push and stepped inside.

  The man seated in a captain’s chair behind the large, paper-covered desk was stocky and broad-shouldered, his black hair streaked with gray. He did not rise when she came in but glanced up, nodded, and gestured toward a chai
r beside his desk.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Griffin. I got the message about your call last night. Your husband still hasn’t turned up?”

  “No,” Cathy said, sinking into the chair, her hands tightening convulsively around the purse. “There hasn’t been a word. I’m about out of my mind.”

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “He didn’t come home from work yesterday,” Cathy told him. “I called the principal last night—Brian’s a teacher at Del Norte—and he said Brian was there for all his classes. It’s as though in the few miles between the school and our house, he vanished into thin air.”

  “Okay. Let’s get some basic information down and then we can see where to go from there.” The detective drew out a pad of letter-sized forms and picked up a pen. “Your husband’s full name and address?”

  “Brian Joseph Griffin, Ten-twenty Ashwood, Northeast.”

  “His age and place of birth?”

  “Brian’s forty-one. He was born here in Albuquerque.”

  “Would you describe him for me, please?”

  “He’s—oh, about five foot ten or so, I guess. He’s slender. His hair’s dark, almost black, and he wears it short. He has blue eyes and wears glasses. He has a mustache.”

  “Do you know his Social Security number?”

  “No, not offhand. Is that important?”

  “Not necessarily, but it helps because it’s an identifying number. It might be the same as his service number. Was he in the service?”

  “No,” Cathy said. “He has a heart problem that kept him out.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “Angina. It’s a circulatory thing; sometimes the muscles around the heart clutch up and not enough oxygen gets through. It’s painful, but it’s controllable, not like a real heart attack. All he has to do is take a pill.”

  “Does your husband get these attacks often?”

  “Usually they come when he’s tense and under pressure. He can feel one coming on, and if he takes a pill immediately he can prevent it. But it was enough of a problem to keep him out of the service.”