Murder in the French Teacher's Garden

by Andrew Culver

  My wife had practically grown up at this place. I was not used to private clubs or big families, but I quickly got used to these colossal dinners with the hordes of relatives that would appear from the far-flung regions of Southern California. The menu was lobster, steak, trout, that kind of thing. There was always wine and lots of conversations going on at once.

  Katie’s parents had started their family in their early twenties, and they both looked young for their ages. Gretchen was a housewife and Gene was in love with his job, and everything seemed to come easy for them. I didn’t know how they had done it. As Gretchen poured me a glass of wine, she asked me about that crazy murder on the campus. The whole table’s conversation pretty much shifted toward me at that point, since most of Katie’s family graduated from Ignatius, and this was the biggest gossip in years.

  “Tom, just be honest,” Gretchen said. “What do you think happened? What’s your gut feeling on this?”

  “I…you know, it’s just really strange,” I blurted. “I have no idea.”

  “Was it Gallard?” asked an uncle. “She always struck me as a kook.”

  “Yeah,” a cousin said. “She was crazy in French class. She would sometimes just yell swear words in French at us when we did badly on a test.”

  “Right after the fire at Kennedy!” said Gretchen. “Everyone is saying that she set that fire, Tom. And that she also killed him when he came to mess up her garden. And Dave told me at golf that everyone at the department thinks it’s her, but there’s no evidence.”

  I sighed. “It looks really bad. She did hate him. She really, really hated him. But…”

  “I get it,” Gene said. “She’s your coworker, your colleague, you need to be professional. I would do the same for a colleague. As a matter of fact, I would do the same for mom. And I have,” he joked. “She’s killed several people. I totally lied to the cops to protect her.”

  Everyone laughed, and Katie was loudly attempting to explain the whole conversation to her grandmother across the table, probably unsuccessfully.

  “Well, I’m actually Madame Gallard’s boss now,” I said. “Her Art History classes are technically in my department.”

  “Well,” said Gretchen, “I don’t blame her. Everyone says that guy, Screbbles, is kind of a blowhard.”

  “Yeah, what’s his story?” I asked. “I don’t know much about him.”

  “He goes to my church,” said an uncle who was a born-again Christian.

  “Scott, he goes to Holy Roads?” said Gretchen, forever accumulating information about everyone in town.

  “He went there. He and his wife. Every Sunday.”

  “Do you know anything about him?”

  “He’s only lived up here for about five years. I know because I remember - ” He turned to his wife. “Charlotte, remember the Christ Festival right after Christine got married there?” She nodded and he continued. “He was new that year. So at our church, whenever there’s a new member we all kind of bring them up onstage and welcome them, and pray for them and everything. And he came to the festival that year and said that he and his wife had just moved here from Texas and he’d gotten a job at Kennedy teaching science or something.”

  “Well,” said Katie, “Tom is Madame Gallard’s best friend now. He’s in her Gardening Club and they’re best buds.”

  “Tom,” said Gretchen, “if she confesses to you, you might have to tell the cops.”

  “Also, don’t get on her bad side,” joked Gene. “She might smack you with a shovel.”

  “Yeah,” joked an uncle. “Don’t kill her geraniums or she’ll kill you.”

  “I just can’t see her killing someone,” I said. “I mean, she’s a little old French lady. She can’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds – I can’t picture her doing any damage to that big old Texan.”

  “How was he killed?” asked Katie’s younger sister Caroline with morbid fascination.

  “Someone just hit him in the head with a spade and that was it. He died right under the apple tree.”

  “It was Gallard,” said Gene’s brother Steve, shelling a crab. “I know it. I’ve seen her around town and she just has a look. It’s something in her eyes. She’s a killer.”

  “Yeah, Steve, I think I saw that look in your eyes when we played golf on Saturday,” Gene joked, and the conversation shifted to the disastrous golf game Steve had had with Gene. Gene narrated the whole thing, even getting up to imitate his brother throwing his clubs in rage after shanking a shot that landed in the lake.

  The dinner went on that way as they usually do, until we were stuffed and exhausted and Katie was struggling to keep her eyes open. The pregnancy was taking all the energy she usually had and giving it to the baby, so she was operating on about 50% capacity these days. That night I read Moby Dick to her as she fell asleep with a little smile on her face, and then I went to the backyard to look at the constellations. It was a clear Spring evening and the air was full of the smell of wildflower blossoms and sage. I tried to think about Madame Gallard and what had really happened that night, but it was all a hazy mess in my mind. She was definitely a cranky old curmudgeon, but she wasn’t a killer. My inner Sherlock Holmes was telling me she didn’t do it. I know it was a hunch, but I couldn’t shake it.

  A LITTLE while later Principal Emerson sent me an email that she wanted to meet in her office. I always get my stomach twisted into knots when I get one of these emails, and it’s never anything serious. I spent the whole day fretting, wondering what I was in trouble for, preparing my self-defense like I was going to be on the witness stand, and I walked into her office after school trying to look nonchalant.

  Catherine Emerson was a good principal and I liked her. She had been at St. Ignatius since long, long before I was there, maybe fifteen years or so. She was a heavy-set Hispanic woman of indeterminate age – she could’ve been 35 or 50, and she had looked the same her whole life based on old pictures she had on the shelves behind her. From what I’d gathered, she’d started working at St. Ignatius as a swim coach and somehow became the Peer Ministry Coordinator, then at some point became Dean of Students, and did a stint as Assistant Vice Principal and for a few years was the Coordinator of Student Life. I do know that when I started at St. Ignatius she was the Assistant Vice President, before our old president Dr. Shockley left and the position was abandoned. Oh, and Catherine had taught various classes throughout the years when the school had a last minute scheduling vacancy: she’d taught art, English, Freshman seminar, even Spanish (which she doesn’t speak). She was really born to be an administrator, and she loved the job. She cried at every faculty meeting, usually when telling us how much we all mean to her and how we have all helped her get through another year full of challenges. She spoke at all our weekly school-wide assemblies and cried maybe half of the time, usually when praising a specific student for exemplifying our Catholic values. Numerous students would hang out in her office, mostly girls, and they appeared to adore her.

  Caroline was a devout, devout, devout, lifelong, born-and-bred, dyed in the wool Catholic, and you could often see her praying alone in her office. There were three statues of the Virgin Mary in her office, a photo of the pope, a photo of the Bishop, and a statue of Christ on the cross. Regarding her personal life, I knew that her husband owned a landscaping business, Emerson Lawn Maintenance and Landscaping, and that she had at least four kids in the Catholic school system: two at Blessed Virgin Elementary down the street, and two here at St. Ignatius. Her whole family seemed to be involved in the diocese: her brother was a priest somewhere down the hill and her sister Maria was a coach of several girls’ sports at St. Ignatius, and usually if you called in sick it was Maria who subbed for you. Catherine and her sister ate lunch every single day in her office, and Catherine had pretty much always been on a diet that I’m not sure was working. She ate a very small salad for lunch, which she would take out of a tiny Tupperware container.

  “Do you mind if we start the meeting with prayer?�
� she asked, and I was momentarily terrified that she would ask me to say a few words. But I just said “Of course,” and she put her hands together and bowed her head. I dutifully followed suit as she began:

  “Lord, please bless this meeting that we are about to have. Please give us the wisdom to discuss these matters with compassion and intelligence. Please guide us in the way forward as we do what is best for our students and our community. Amen.”

  She looked up. “Okay, Thomas. I’m wondering how I should best start this, because it’s such a strange situation. We’ve really never had this issue at this school before.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Of course I’m talking about Madame Gallard.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Now, here’s the thing. The police have named her as a person of interest. You’ve been working with her in the garden. She’s in your department. You know as well as the rest of us that she was there that night, and that she…had her conflicts with Jim.”

  “Yes.”

  “The diocese is very uncomfortable with a possible murderer working at the school.”

  “Yeah, of course. I would be too.”

  “Parents are screaming at me,” she said, nodding toward the phone. “It’s nonstop. They basically think she’s a killer. They’re telling me to fire her, saying horrible things. There’s a lot of pressure. Have you done your classroom observation of her? She’s in your department, you know.”

  “Oh yes, I know. I was about to do that observation. Before all this blew up. Yeah, I was heading in there possibly this, or next week, yes.”

  “Okay. Get in there soon and fill out the evaluation form. Please be very detailed. We need her file up to date for any action that we take. I mean, here’s the thing: legally, our lawyers are actually telling us that we can’t fire her for being a person of interest in a criminal case. Not until she is actually indicted. But…parents will start taking their kids out of the school, we already have parents who are taking their kids out of her classes, and things are heating up.”

  “Okay, I’ll go do my observation. For sure. And I really, for the record, I really don’t think she had anything to do with this. Just my professional opinion. I can’t see her doing such a horrible thing.”

  “Absolutely, Thomas. I’ve known her for almost twenty years and she’s never even been written up for anything – I’ve looked at her file. I’m with you on that. But at this point she’s on our radar and I’m getting pressure from the parents and the higher-ups at the diocese.”

  And that was that. I went back to my classroom and searched through my drawers for those old evaluation forms…where the hell were they? I eventually found them and started thinking about when I could go in to see her AP Art History class.

  I WALKED into Madame Gallard’s class in the middle of one of her talks. The lights were off and she was projecting a work of art on the white screen. Madame Gallard’s classroom feels like you’re in a French café. The seats are in a kind of U shape, and some of them are actually circular tables where I could picture students sitting with the newspaper and an espresso, eating croissants. There were a couple of big, soft couches against the walls where students would lounge back during her lectures. The walls were completely covered with art – everything from the cave paintings of Lascaux to da Vinci to Monet and Van Gogh, and a few moderns as well. Some of them looked like Jackson Pollock. There were photos of Paris, maps of France, pictures of her hiking through the Alps, and a “cheese chart” explaining all the varieties of French cheeses. There were always fresh flowers on her desk and the whole place smelled like a French marketplace.

  She was in the middle of a unit on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, as I had gathered from looking at her lesson plans. She was evidently going from fresco to fresco explaining the huge enormity of the ceiling to the students in a piecemeal fashion. She didn’t bat an eye or miss a beat when I walked in with my iPad, clearly there to do my observation.

  “So here we have the fresco of the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise,” she was saying. “Recall that the other day we looked at the creation of Adam, with Eve in the mind of God, and remember the brain-like structure in which Eve and the other characters are, who have yet to be created. And of course we just examined the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam. So here, we have perhaps the most fateful of all events in the creation story, the reason we are not living forever in a beautiful garden,” she said with a smile. “So you have Adam and Eve to thank for the fact that you must labor and suffer and do homework. So take a look at the work. What do you see? Well, on the left here we see Adam standing and Eve sitting down, and notice that they are both grasping for the apple from the tree. Interesting, no? I do not recall this from Sunday school. I seem to remember Eve alone taking the apple, but Mr. Buonarotti has another version of the story. And then, what do you notice about the demon?”

  No one said anything.

  “He is looking strange, no? How many times do you see a demon who look like a human completely? However, he is wrapped around the tree, showing that his human body come out of a long snake. This tree, as you notice, is in the middle of the picture, and separates the two events. And symmetrically, on the other side of the tree, you have the expulsion which follow immediately after. We have the Archangel Michael casting them out, with a sword that look like it is going into Adam’s neck. And see the looks of despair on the faces of Adam, who look away from the angel and hold his hand up against the tree, and Eve, who hide her face in shame. They look old and ugly, do you see? Compared to before they take the apple, where they are young and beautiful and carefree. So beware of temptation, eh? This will happen to you,” she chuckled. “If you do the vape, this might happen. So where are they before the expulsion?”

  “It’s like a garden with leaves and stuff,” said a voice in the darkness.

  “And where are they now, as they exit in shame?”

  “Just a big empty desert,” said someone else.

  “Yes, they leave paradise.” She paused to let the kids take in the scene in all its drama. “Every garden has its snake, no? So be careful. And notice that the snake does not always look like a snake. And you may reflect, those of you in my Gardening Club, that when we create a garden, in a small way we are returning to the paradise we have lost – if only for a moment.”

  She went on to explain to them the completeness of the ceiling in relation to the walls of the chapel, which had been painted by earlier artists and depicted Jesus’s lineage from the long line of Old Testament prophets, and connected Jesus through the early apostles to Michelangelo’s patron Pope Julius II in an unbroken line of prophets and messengers of God’s word. I had never taken much time to study the ceiling, other than a vacation I’d taken there with my parents in high school, and the beauty and order of the ceiling was overwhelming now that I was learning about it. The whole thing was a complete narrative, and all the events, while not placed in order of their appearance in the Bible, were in three separate trilogies that had their own inner logic. I felt instantly humbled. How was I this woman’s boss? She was way, way smarter than me – wiser, more knowledgeable, more comfortable as a teacher, more patient and dedicated to the students. It all came easily to her. I tried to remind myself that she’d been doing it for twenty years, or even more. This was part of the reason I was doing this – to learn from the elders.

  I went back to my room and wrote up my evaluation, which was glowing, and gave it to Catherine. The rest of my classes were uneventful, and I was getting ready to leave for the day at 3:00 when a parent came in and introduced herself. She was the mother of one of my students who had stopped turning in homework about a month ago and his grade was now tanking. I’d sent emails home and gotten nothing, and he was sometimes absent or late to class. The mother apologized and unloaded a laundry list of problems at home. It was a litany of chaotic situations, personal problems, and things I’m lucky I didn’t have to go through when I was in high school. I told her
he could turn in his assignments late, and I would still give full credit, and that she should let me know if there was anything I could do to help, and then I just listened as she unloaded, and she seemed to feel better. She was about to leave when she turned and said, “Mr. Jenkins – Madame Gallard is in your department, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, her Art History classes are.”

  “Well…people have been talking. I mean the other parents. There’s the opinion that she may have killed that poor man, Mr. Screbbles, from Kennedy. And my daughter has a lot of friends who go to Kennedy and that’s the feeling over there as well. They’re talking about having a get-together at one of our houses, or maybe a public demonstration. I’m just wondering…do you see her as a killer?”

  “Mrs. Howard,” I said (that was her name), “the police are completely competent to find out who did this. She has fully cooperated and they haven’t pressed charges, so in my mind she is innocent until proven guilty. I think something weird happened that night that we may never fully understand, and she just got caught up in the middle of it.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that… but do you see her as a killer?”

  “I…I work with her every day, Mrs. Howard, and she’s never shown any violent tendencies. I think she’s a dedicated, caring teacher.”

  She sighed deeply. This seemed to bother her more than all the problems her family was going through. Finally she left my classroom and I went out to the parking lot, ready to get home and take a walk and put my mind on something else.