Killing Mr. Griffin

by Lois Duncan

  We’ve got to do something, but what? Susan asked herself frantically. David could not handle the situation alone, and she herself could do nothing to help him. There was one person who would know what to do, one person who always knew what to do.

  Susan entered her house by the front door and went straight through the hall to the stairs. She could hear the voices of her father and brothers, raised in friendly argument in the den; from the kitchen there came the clink of pans and dishes. The warm, familiar odors of the dinner hour filled the stairwell.

  Susan went up the stairs and down the hall to the phone. She looked up a number in the directory, lifted the receiver, and punched in the numbers.

  A woman’s voice answered.

  “Hello, is this Mrs. Garrett?” Susan said. “I’m trying to get in touch with Mark Kinney. Is he there with Jeff ? Oh, good. Please, can I speak to him?”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Sunday paper carried the complete story.

  “Terrible,” Mr. McConnell said. “Utterly unbelievable. What kind of maniac would do such a thing! What sort of motive could there have been? The man wasn’t carrying anything of value. All that was missing when they found him were a couple of dollars and his Stanford class ring.”

  “His poor wife!” Mrs. McConnell exclaimed. “With a baby coming! How dreadful this is for her! It says the funeral will be on Tuesday. You will be going to it, won’t you, Sue?”

  “No,” Susan said. “Mom, I just can’t.”

  She could not shift her gaze from the photograph on the front page. The picture was not a recent one, for it lacked a mustache, and devoid of this protective camouflage the mouth looked young and oddly vulnerable. What could not be denied were the eyes. Susan had looked into those cool, challenging eyes five mornings a week for the past school year.

  Good morning, class.

  Good morning, Mr. Griffin.

  “Sue, dear,” her mother said, “I know how you feel and how hard it must be for you, but I really feel you ought to go. It’s bound to mean something to his wife to see that his students were fond enough of him to turn out for his funeral. Perhaps Dad and I should go with you. After all, Mrs. Griffin was here in our home just the other night.”

  “Does it say how he was killed?” Craig asked with interest.

  “They’re doing an autopsy. There were bruises on the body, but no other signs of violence.” Mr. McConnell was scanning the story. “He had a history of heart-related problems, so they think it’s possible he suffered coronary arrest.”

  “This says police were led to the discovery of the body in‘a secluded area of the Sandias’ by a girl named Lana Turnboldt. She and a former boyfriend used to go hiking in the area. Yesterday she was up there with her fiancé for a picnic and found a medicine vial with Griffin’s name on it, and a few yards away a patch of newly turned earth. She reported this to the police, who investigated and found it wasa grave.”

  “Do you feel real bad, Sue?” Kevin asked respectfully. “I never knew anybody who got dead.”

  “Of course she feels bad,” his mother said, putting her arm around Susan’s shoulders. “It’s a tragic thing. I just pray whoever did this will be caught and punished to the full limit of thelaw.”

  “The one clue they mention is a blue Windbreaker that was wrapped around the body,” Mr. McConnell said. “It was a man’s size, small. It says, ‘Detective James Baca, who is in charge of the investigation, said there were no identifying marks on the jacket. “It came from Sears. Millions of people wear these things,” Baca said.’”

  “We ought to send flowers,” Mrs. McConnell said. “The shops will be closed today, but I’ll order some in the morning.” She gave her daughter a squeeze and released her and went over to the stove. “How many want eggs this morning?”

  * * *

  “John, I want to talk with you about something,” Paula Garrett said. “Jeff has been up since dawn working out in the garage on Mark Kinney’s car.”

  “So?” her husband grunted.

  “Tear yourself away from the income taxes and listen to me a moment. This is Sunday, Jeff ’s one day to relax. He has practice tomorrow and Tuesday, and Wednesday night is the last day of the tournament.”

  “So?” John Garrett said again. “Jeff never misses practice.”

  “I know. That’s just my point. He throws himself so hard into his sports, he needs to get rest when he can. Mark takes advantage of their friendship to a point where it’s disgraceful, and as far as I can see, Jeff never gets anything back from it.It’s all give on one side and all take on the other.”

  “You worry too much,” John Garrett said. “What’s this about Mark Kinney’s car, anyway? I didn’t think the kid had a car. If he’s got his own wheels, how come Jeff drives him around all the time?”

  “Mark just bought the car, or I guess he did,” Paula said. “It’s a beat-up old thing, purely secondhand. He and Betsy came over in it yesterday afternoon and drove it straight into the garage. Jeff says he’s going to help him fix it up, but there’s no ‘helping’ about it. Mark got a phone call from some girl a couple of minutes after he got here and took off immediately. Now this morning Jeff ’s out there painting that car all by himself, and it’s not even his.”

  “Jeff likes working on cars. He had some other kid’s car out there for a while last month. You didn’t hit the roof over that.”

  “No, I didn’t, because Greg Dart was out there with him working right alongside him, and besides that, he paid Jeff for his work. You can be sure Mark isn’t going to fork over a penny. I bet Jeff ’s even buying the paint.”

  “They’ve been friends for a long time, Paula.”

  “I know,” Jeff ’s mother said. “I can remember the first time he brought Mark home with him. I thought then that their friendship couldn’t last a week. That weird little weasel of a boy and our Jeff—why, they had nothing in common. Jeff would beout back shooting baskets, and Mark would be slouching against a tree, staring off into space like he was half-asleep. I thought Jeff was just being kind because the boy was new in town and didn’t have parents.”

  “Well, likely he was,” her husband said. “And I think it shows the goodness in Jeff that he’s continued to help the kid. From the things Mark’s let drop when he’s been over here, I gather he’s got no kind of home life. He’s got an uncle who beats him and an aunt who won’t fix his meals; the only nourishment he gets comes from that greasy-spoon diner or out of our refrigerator. No wonder he’s attached himself to a solid, well-adjusted guy like Jeff. It’s his anchor in life.”

  “Maybe so,” Paula said more slowly. “I could be over-reacting. It’s just that I’ve never been able to get really fond of Mark. He and Jeff are together so much, and he’s in and out of here every day, and he’s polite enough, but I don’t feel I know him at all as a person. Do you?”

  “I never thought about it,” John Garrett said. “Maybe there’s not much there to know. The kid’s a shadow of Jeff, trailing along in his footsteps. It’s kind of pitiful actually, since he’ll never be able to begin to measure up to him. You can tell he’s got a crush on Betsy, but what girl would look twice at him with Jeff around? It’s sort of sad.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” Paula said. “I guess Jeff ’s a big enough boy now to handle his own relationships. It’s up to the strong in this life to take care of the weak, isn’t it? And our boy’s pretty special.”

  “Darned right he is,” John Garrett said, turning back to his tax return. “All you have to do is open the paper or pick up a magazine, and you see a bunch of messed-up kids in trouble. It makes you wonder where the parents are while all that’s going on.”

  Cathy Griffin lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. She had slept, dreamless, through the night as a result of the sedative they had given her. When she wakened, it had been slowly, in stages. Consciousness had inched upon her, first with the knowledge that she was no longer sleeping, then as she automatically turned and reached into t
he bed beside her.

  It was empty.

  He’s up ahead of me, she had thought drowsily, but even as the words formed in her mind she had known there was something wrong with them. There were no sounds of movement in the room, no thumps of dresser drawers being opened and closed. The shower was not running in the bathroom. There was no hum of an electric razor.

  Where is Brian? And then, quickly, she had shoved the question away. I will not ask myself now. I’m not ready to think about that yet. Desperately she tried to shove herself back into the safe cocoon of oblivion, but it had sealed itself behind her. I must sleep—I have to sleep some more! But while her arms and legs lay weighted upon the mattress, and her body remained a leaden lump, too heavy to think of lifting, her mind kept opening, inch by dreadful inch.

  Where is Brian? Where—is—Brian? Where—is—he?

  I—know. I—know.

  There was a crack in the ceiling over the bed. Brian hadbeen planning to fix it during Easter vacation.

  “It won’t take much. Just some sort of plaster filler.”

  “You’ll never get around to that and you know it. You have a million books you’re going to read that week.”

  “Well, I’ll make the sacrifice. I’ll hold myself down to a million minus one, and fix the ceiling. We can’t have the whole roof caving in on top of Brian Junior.”

  In the far corner of the room there was a cobweb, a wisp of lace caught in a beam of morning sunlight. Had some industrious spider created that masterpiece overnight, or had it been there, unnoticed, for days? It was strange the things you saw when you looked at the ceiling—really concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else. The plaster ran in waves and swirls, and here and there, there were little lumps in it, as though it had been spread too slowly and had dried before it was smoothed. “People who do halfway jobs shouldn’t do them at all,” Brian used to say. If Brian had been a plasterer, the swirls in the ceiling would have been symmetrical and all the lumps would have been smoothed away.

  Where is Brian? …I know—I—know.

  I—know.

  Somewhere in the house a telephone rang. It rang only once.

  A moment later the bedroom door opened a crack and then came open wider.

  “Oh—you’re awake,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Semi-awake,” Cathy said. “I feel like I’ve got a hangover.”

  “There was a call from your parents. They’re getting an afternoon flight and will be in late this evening.” The owner of the voice came into the room and stood next to the bed. “What can I get you, hon? Coffee?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, coffee, I guess. You haven’t been here all night, have you, Rose?”

  “Of course I have. What are neighbors for if not to be on hand when—things happen?” The woman said, “It’s a good thing you turned off your cell, or you’d have been up at dawn. There have been a lot of calls on the house phone. Brian’s principal called, and several of the teachers, and some professor at the college who said he was head of the English Department there. I’ve kept a list of the names.”

  “That’s good of you, Rose.” Cathy pulled herself, with effort, to a sitting position. “Well, Brian Junior’s still with us. He just kicked me a good one. How do they all know about it? Is it in the paper?”

  “There’s a big write-up on the front page,” Rose said. “They even have Brian’s picture, though it doesn’t look much like him without the mustache. I don’t know where they got that.”

  “It was probably taken back when he was at the university. They must have gotten it out of a yearbook file or something.” Her tongue felt thick and her head ached when she fell back onto the pillow. “Can I see it?”

  “You don’t want to read it all, hon. It’ll only upset you.”

  “What is, is,” Cathy said. “Reading about it isn’t going to make it any worse. Maybe when I read it, it will go into some sort of perspective. Maybe it will start to make sense. Who could possibly hate Brian enough to do this thing? What kind of person hates like that?”

  “They’ll find him. That’s what police are for.”

  “But they don’t know where to start. All they could talk about was the Windbreaker. There has to be something more than that, some better starting place. When I was with them yesterday I must have been in shock. I couldn’t think. Everything they said to me seemed to run in and out of my brain like water. I kept trying to grab hold of things, but they kept sliding away from me before I could put them together to make any sort of meaning.”

  “That was a blessing, maybe.”

  “There was something—the name of somebody—that meant something to me. I remember having a feeling of recognition when I heard it. I started to tell them, and then Icouldn’t remember any longer what it was I was going tosay.”

  The telephone rang again, clearer, now that the bedroom door was open.

  “I’ll get that,” Rose said, “and then I’ll bring you coffee.”

  “And the paper,” Cathy said.

  * * *

  At eleven ten on Sunday morning, Mrs. Irma Ruggles sat in a chair by her bedroom window and played with the circle of gold on the fourth finger of her right hand. First she turned it so she could see the tree and read the German words; then she released it and let its own weight twist the ring so that all she could see was the band.

  The ring was loose on her finger, but not too terribly loose. If it had been even a fraction of an inch smaller it might have been difficult sliding it over her knuckle.

  Whomever this belongs to has a thin hand for a man, thought Mrs. Ruggles, turning the ring again so that the tree appeared ontop.

  She could not have said exactly when it was that she had stopped thinking of the ring as belonging to her son and had inserted a nameless owner in his place. Yesterday morning, when she had found it in David’s dresser, she had been so certain that he had gotten it from his father. The shock of seeing it there, among the dimes and nickels in the box she always visited for candy money, had jolted her terribly. It had been like hearing her son’s voice crying out to her across the years.

  But later, when she had confronted David with her suspicions, things had not occurred as she had expected. He had been rattled, yes, and he had certainly acted guilty, but not guilty as a boy might be who had a glorious secret. “I haven’t seen my dad since I was a little kid,” he had told her, and the words had rung true. David was not good at deception. Hecould not have falsified the pain in his voice, any more than he could have injected convincing sincerity into his next statement: “I found it.”

  And the girl—the plain, mousy, bespectacled girl, who was so exactly the opposite of any girl she would ever have picked for David—that girl had lied so badly that anyone with half a brain could have realized she was not telling the truth. And then, the look on her face when she had been told, “There was no stone in the ring. There was a tree.…” Her eyes had gotten a wild, glazed look, and then she had closed them and stood there, silent, as though wishing herself a million miles away.

  Irma had not accepted it then, perhaps because she did not want to accept it. But little by little in the long hours since, the dream had fallen away. Her son was not in town. He would not turn up suddenly on the doorstep, his beautiful face alight with joy and love. Her David, the first David, had vanished from their lives with the finality of a bright bird flying straight into the sun, leaving nothing behind him but the memory of a feathered touch and the rustle of restless wings. She would not see him again in this world and perhaps, if the things the Reverend Chandler preached were true, not anywhere.

  “Those who refuse to shoulder their earthly burdens will never know the glory of everlasting life,” the reverend had said straight from the pulpit seven years ago, and Irma had refused to attend church since.

  This had upset her daughter-in-law terribly.

  “He didn’t mean anything personal, Mother Ruggles,” she had said. “My goodness, with the hundreds of people he has in his
congregation, he can’t stop and worry about the effect every single thing he says will have on every one of them. How’s it going to look, if you stop attending services with David and me? People will think I won’t take the trouble to bring you.”

  “They won’t think that,” Irma had told her. “They know how responsible you are. Just tell them I’m feeling poorly.”

  “Every Sunday?”

  “I’m an old woman. When you get old, you can feel poorly whenever you want to.” She had meant this as a little joke, but her daughter-in-law had not found it amusing. The fact was, she seldom found anything amusing. Irma was sure that was one main reason why Big David had left her. The winds of freedom are filled with laughter.

  But now she was wandering. She knew she did that lately; concentration became more difficult when you grew old. The thing she wanted to think about now was the ring. If David had not found it and had not gotten it from his father, then where had it come from? He was not going to tell her, that wasevident, and his refusal was a challenge to her innate stubbornness.

  This morning he had come to her again, scrubbed and shining, dressed in his church clothes, as handsome as his father had ever been as a boy, and had said, “Gram, please let me have it.”

  “Have what?” she had asked with feigned puzzlement, knowing that his mother was right in the next room and wondering if he would mention it in her hearing.

  He wouldn’t.

  “You know,” he had said in a low voice. “Gram, look, it’s really important to me. You don’t know how important. It belongs to somebody, and I have to give it back to him.”

  “To who?”

  “You don’t know him, Gram. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you. Where are you keeping it? If you’ll get it for me, I’ll—”

  “David, aren’t you ready yet?” his mother had called from the living room. “We’re going to be late and have to sit in the back.”