Killing Mr. Griffin

by Lois Duncan

  “Where did Brian go to college, Mrs. Griffin?”

  “Stanford University.”

  “Does he have any scars or marks, any tattoos—that sort of thing?”

  “No,” Cathy said.

  “And he’s been missing since yesterday afternoon. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. He was supposed to have a conference after school with one of his pupils. Susan—McConnell, I think her name is. That would have made him a little later than usual. And then—oh, I forgot this, he was going to stop at Skagg’s Pharmacy to pick up a prescription for his nitroglycerin pills.Idon’t know if he ever did that. All I know is he didn’t come home.”

  “Has he ever done anything like this before?” Detective Baca asked her. “Gone away for a period of time without telling you?”

  “Never. Brian’s always called me if he was going to be even a little late.”

  “Has he been worried about anything lately? Has he seemed preoccupied with his work or anything else?”

  “No more than usual. Brian’s very serious about his teaching, and he worries a lot over lesson plans and grading assignments, but—no—actually I think he’s been more lighthearted than usual. He’s excited about the baby.”

  “Is this your first child?” Detective Baca asked her.

  “Yes, it is. We got married later than lots of people, and then Brian wanted to wait to start a family until he knew his teaching was going to work out. He used to be a college professor, and he switched over into high school teaching, and he wanted to be sure he could handle it.” Her voice broke. “Brian’s always so precise about everything. I can’t believe he would do this. Something terrible must have happened to him.”

  “There may be a perfectly logical answer,” the detective said. “Let me ask you a couple more questions. Is there anyone, a close relative or friend, whom your husband might contact if he should be in any kind of difficulty?”

  “I can’t think who,” Cathy said. “His parents are dead and he doesn’t have brothers or sisters. Brian is a very self-contained man. Since he stopped teaching at the university he’s more or less lost touch with people there. You know how the college social structure goes; it’s awfully groupy.”

  “You don’t do any socializing together?”

  “Oh, we sometimes have my old friends from work over with their husbands, or maybe some of the neighborhood couples, but it’s very casual, just playing cards once in a while or something like that. And they’re more my friends than Brian’s. The most important people in Brian’s life, besides me, are his students.” Detective Baca set down his pen and leaned back in his chair.

  “That’s it for formal questions. Now, tell me, where do you think your husband might be, Mrs. Griffin? Do you have any ideas?”

  Cathy shook her head miserably. “I’ve racked my brain trying to come up with a logical explanation. The first thing I did, of course, was phone the hospitals in case there had been an accident, but nobody of Brian’s description had been brought in.”

  “Does Brian drink?”

  “Never. In fact, he’s allergic to alcohol.”

  “Does he have any enemies? Has he ever been involved in anything unlawful?”

  “No. No.”

  “How are things between the two of you?” Baca asked her. “It’s not unusual for a first pregnancy to cause waves in a marriage. It means a whole new way of living. The honeymoon’s over; the escape hatch is no longer open, even a crack. Some pretty good men have been known to go into panic during that period of life, and your husband has gone forty-one years before being hit with fatherhood.”

  “You’re implying Brian may just have run away?” Cathy shook her head violently. “That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t mean to offend you,” the man across from her said quietly. “It’s just that we’ve had three husbands reported missing in the past month, and in every case the wife’s been pregnant. One man got as far as his mother’s place in Arizona, had second thoughts, and turned around and came back.

  “The second guy is still gone, but his wife got a postcard from him from California. He wants her to file for divorce. But they’d had a number of problems with their marriage to start with. It does happen, Mrs. Griffin.”

  “Not with Brian.”

  “One final question. What was the last thing your husband said to you before he left for work yesterday? Do you remember?”

  “He said, ‘I love you.’” There was a note of hard pride in Cathy’s voice. “Brian did not run out on me, Mr. Baca. He’s not that sort of person. It just is not possible.”

  “Then there has to be another answer,” the big man said gently. “People don’t disappear ‘into thin air,’ as you put it. Your husband is somewhere, and we’ll do everything we can to locate him.

  “To start things off, I’d like to talk with that student at the high school, the one who may have been the last person to see him yesterday.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Susan McConnell—come to the office, please!”

  The loudspeaker in the ceiling over the door blared the words throughout the room, and Susan, sitting hunched over her history notebook, felt her heart drop into her stomach with a sickening thud. It was the moment she had been anticipating ever since she had arrived at school that morning to see Dolly Luna, bright-faced and cheerful, perched on the corner of Mr.Griffin’s desk.

  “Mr. Griffin isn’t here this morning,” she had explained. “So I’m subbing for him. I haven’t been able to find his notes for today’s class, so we’ll just have to play it by ear, I guess. You’ll have to tell me where you are in the book, and maybe we can read aloud or something.”

  She had smiled brightly.

  “My name’s Miss Luna, but if you promise not to tell anybody, I’ll let you call me Dolly.”

  And so they had read—or, rather, Dolly had read, her lilting voice carrying Ophelia gaily through her tunnels of madness to her ultimate watery end—and Susan had thought, this can’t be real. It’s a cartoon—a dream—a nightmare. That’s it—it’s a nightmare. Soon I will wake up and I’ll be at home in my bed with one of the twins banging at the door to tell me I’ve overslept, and I’ll open my eyes, and the sun will be pouring through the window onto the rug and outside in the elm tree birds will be singing.

  But she had already awakened to that scene an hour before, and one could not wake up twice. Actually, she could not believe that she had slept at all. When she had gone to bed the night before, she had thought, I will never sleep, and then exhaustion had rolled upon her in a gigantic, smothering wave, and she had sunk gratefully beneath it. A moment later, it seemed, Alex had been at the door, calling in to her, “Sue! Are you alive in there? Mom wants to know if you’re feeling good enough to go to school this morning.”

  “Yes—I am—I’ll be right down,” Susan had mumbled, opening her eyes to the sunlight and the birdsong and the terrible realization that tomorrow had arrived. She had gotten up and gone into the bathroom and washed her face, pressing the cold washcloth for long moments against her swollen eyelids and puffy cheeks. I must have cried in my sleep, she thought. I must have cried all night.

  When she entered the kitchen the whole family was at the breakfast table. Her mother glanced up worriedly.

  “Your cold must be worse, Sue. You look just awful. Are you sure you want to go to school?”

  “I feel fine,” Susan told her. “You don’t miss school, just for a little cold.”

  “I would,” Kevin said. “I’d miss school for anything. Huh, Alex?”

  “Me too,” Alex said. “Even for nothing, I’d miss school.”

  “Well, your sister isn’t like you two,” Mr. McConnell said approvingly. “She takes her education seriously. If you boys would straighten up and follow her example, we’d have a happier household around here at grading time.”

  “Sue’s a girl,” Craig said. “Most girls are boring. Guys are different. They’ve got other things on their minds.”

 
“My guess would be that David Ruggles makes good grades,” Mrs. McConnell said. “You don’t get to be president of the senior class on D’s and F’s. Right, Sue?”

  “Yes,” Susan said, “David does well in school.” It was a strange situation finding herself on top for a change, being held up to the boys as an example to follow. Normally she would have been delighted. Today she felt ashamed and sickened.

  If they knew—if they had any idea—what sort of person I really am, she thought miserably, they would never, any of them, want anything to do with me again.

  She would have given anything at that moment to have said, “You’re right, I am too sick to go to school,” and left the table and gone upstairs and crawled back into bed with her face buried in the pillow and the covers pulled up over her head, blocking out the world. But the last thing Mark had said to them was, “You guys show up for school tomorrow. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves by being absent. The whole bunch of us are going to be in Griffin’s class, just like it was any old day, and we’ll be as surprised as the rest of them when he doesn’t show. Get me?”

  And when Mark told you something, you did it. She could understand now what David had meant when he had told her, “Mark isn’t like other people.” There was a strength in Mark, an ability to know exactly what to do in any emergency, and when Mark said something, you had to believe it, because if you couldn’t believe in Mark, you couldn’t believe in anything. “Trust me—trust old Mark,” he had told her last night, his arms a comforting fortress around her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Mark knew; he had to know. If they did exactly what he told them, things would somehow work out and the terrible present would one day lie behind them and be the past, and people could forget the past if they tried to. But it was important, terribly important, to do precisely as Mark said.

  And so she ate what she could of breakfast and collected her books and left for school with the boys, parting with them at the corner to continue down Montgomery to Del Norte while the twins turned off toward the grammar school and Craig toward the middle school.

  “Hope you feel better, sis,” Craig said, surprisingly, as they split forces, giving her a look of actual concern, and she had murmured, “Thanks. I’m sure I will.”

  But she had not been prepared for the appearance of Dolly Luna on Mr. Griffin’s desk top. He would have hated it, she thought, just hated it to hear her hacking up Hamlet. She had sat with her head bowed over her book, almost ready to believe that the door might fly open and Mr. Griffin come striding in to take his rightful place and send Dolly flying off to the teachers’ lounge for her morning coffee.

  We cannot get away with it, she told herself. No matter what Mark says, somehow we’ll be found out. Any minute now a policeman will appear at the door or the speaker will call our names.

  Which was why she was not surprised when she heard it at last in history class.

  “Susan McConnell—come to the office, please!”

  Susan raised her head. Two dozen pairs of eyes turned to stare at her.

  Mr. Stanton, the history teacher, nodded his permission.

  “In case you’re not back before the end of the period, the assignment is to read the next chapter and answer the questions at the end.”

  Wordlessly, Susan got to her feet, collecting her history book, her notebook, a ballpoint pen, her purse. Will they let me go to my locker for my jacket? she wondered. It hardly mattered. The cold gripping her came from within and no layer of outer clothing would ever alleviate it.

  She crossed the room and went through the door out into the hallway.

  Mark was leaning against the wall by the water fountain.

  “What are you doing here?” Susan asked him.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Did they call you too?” Susan asked him.

  “Nope.”

  “Any of the others?”

  “No. You’re the chosen one.”

  “Then, how did you know—”

  “I sit by the window facing the parking lot,” Mark said. “I’ve been keeping my eye out for a squad car. I was pretty sure when they got the report Mr. G. was missing they’d send somebody over here to check things out. This is the last place he was seen, and you’re the last person to see him, so it stands to reason they’re going to want to ask you some questions. I’ve got a biology lab this period, so I slid out of the room and came down to see how you were holding up.”

  “I’m scared,” Susan said. “I don’t know what to tell them. If they’ve found out everything—”

  “They haven’t found out anything,” Mark said. “Not one thing, and don’t you forget it. All they know is that Mr. G. didn’t go home last night and didn’t come to work this morning. That’s it—that’s all. Nothing else. The only way they’re going to find out anything else is if you tell them.”

  “They’ll ask me questions—”

  “And you’ll give them answers. You’ve got nothing to hide, right? So tell them the truth. You wanted a conference with Mr. G. to talk about your grade on that last test. You met him when school let out. You talked about—what? Whatever it was, tell them. There’s no reason to hide anything there.”

  “He said I was bright enough, but sloppy. That I messed myself up by not paying attention to details. He said that in his class an A meant ‘perfect,’ and that nobody in that class including me was doing perfect work, but that I was probably capable of it if I made the effort.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “He said that I was spoiled—that we were all spoiled—because we’re used to over-grading. That so few high school students take their work seriously that anybody who seems to be doing anything stands out, and teachers reward them with A’s, even though they don’t deserve them, because they’re better than the others. And because they get A’s, they think they’re doing great, and they never even try to push themselves into doing the best work they can possibly do.”

  “That sounds like him, the bastard. F’s for everybody so they’ll try harder. Anything else?”

  “Not really. We talked about the test—where I had mademistakes and stuff like that—and some about Shakespeare—what he meant by certain lines that I hadn’t understood. When it was over and we started to leave, he started talking about Hamlet’s feeling of guilt over Ophelia’s death and whether or not that really changed him as a person. That’s why I had to walk out to the parking lot with him. I hadn’t meant to, but I couldn’t just say ‘See ya’ and walk away from him when he was in the middle of a sentence, and he seemed to take it for granted that I was going out that way.”

  “So you walked him out to the lot, and then?”

  “He asked if he could give me a ride home.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He—didn’t?” Susan asked blankly.

  “Nope. He had other plans, and taking you home would have interfered with them. In fact, all the while you were having your conference, he acted sort of peculiar. He kept checking his watch and glancing out the window. Sometimes you’d ask him a question, and he’d act like he didn’t hear it. His mind was on something else.”

  “But, that’s not true,” Susan said.

  “Sure, it’s true. How else would a guy act who had a lady friend on his mind?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you walked out to the parking lot with the guy, you started off in the direction of home, and then something about the way he’d been acting made you look back. He was getting into his car, and there was a woman in it.”

  “But there wasn’t!”

  “A real doll, blond and foxy. Young—maybe twenty-two or so, and really sexy. Sitting up front, right next to the driver’s seat.”

  “I can’t say a thing like that,” Susan exclaimed.

  “Of course, you can. You can say anything you want to. You’re the last one who saw him, aren’t you? Who else is going to know who was in that car? You’re the one who saw him get
into it and drive away.”

  “But why?” Susan asked. “Why make up something like that? What good will it do?”

  “It’ll lead them away from us. Right now, who do they have to suspect of having a hand in this? Students. Maybe not us, exactly, but students in general; who else did Mr. G. have in his life? And when they start going over the students in his classes, they’re going to zero in on a few people who’ve had some bad problems with him. That means me. And maybe Jeff. And once they hit on us, it’ll follow pretty quick that the rest of you get nailed too.

  “So what do we do? We throw in a girlfriend, and right away there’s a whole new look to things. There’s a secret part of Mr. G.’s life that nobody knows about. Who is this woman? Where did she come from? How come they were driving off together? Who’s going to think about students when there’s a sex scandal to worry over?”

  “I can’t do that, Mark,” Susan said shakily. “Mr. Griffin was married, you know. How would his wife feel, hearing something like that? She’d think—”

  “She’d think he ran out on her. What’s so bad about that? It’s a kindness, baby. If she loved the guy—and it’s hard to believe anyone could—wouldn’t she rather think of him off having a good time someplace, even if it wasn’t with her, than dead?”

  “Well—when you put it like that—”

  “You’d better get moving. We’ve been standing here talking five minutes, and they’re down there at the office waiting for you.”

  “Mark, come with me!” Susan said pleadingly. “I just can’t do it by myself. We could say you were with me after school—that you waited for me till the conference was over—that you and I both saw the woman in the car.”

  “No way,” Mark said firmly. “You’re Miss Innocence. Stick me in the picture, and we’ve lost the ball game. You can do it, Sue. You’ll do just great.”

  “I’m scared!”

  “Don’t be. It’ll be simple as pie. A girl like you—who’s going to doubt her? Now, on with the show, babe, and remember—I’m counting on you.” He laid his hand briefly on her shoulder.