4 The Killing Bee (19 page)

"Honestly? Becaus
e none of the fifth-grade teachers wanted to deal with him next year. And neither did Meckel." She stood up and made like she was going to the kitchen. "If you're finished, I'd like to try and salvage what’s left of my night."

I put up a hand to stop her. "One more thing. Susie Powell's kid, Megan. What did you think of Meckel's decision to hold her back?"

"Nice kid. I felt bad for her. I was glad he changed his mind."

I stared at her. "He did what?"

"He talked to Susie. They agreed Megan would get private tutors this summer and then go on to second grade."

"You sure about this?"

"Meckel told me."

But according to Barry, he heard Susie and Meckel having a screaming fight about Megan on Thursday afternoon. "When did they make this agreement?"

Irene scrunched up her face in thought. "I saw Susie in his office, let's see, last Friday."

"You sure it wasn't Thursday?"

"Actually, I saw her both days last week, Thursday
and
Friday. Those are my two days at High Rock."

So Barry's story checked out. But evidently, after
Thursday's screaming fight had come a
rapprochement
the very next day. That would seem to decrease Susie's motivation to kill the man.

What about Irene Topor
’s motivations? I stuck an I-feel-your-pain expression on my face. "That must have been really weird, having to work closely with Meckel when here he was, sexually harassing your girlfriend."

"It was different, that's for sure."

"Did he realize you were going out with her?"

"No." Irene nailed me with her eyes. "Now I've told you everything. You better keep your end of the bargain and shut the hell up about me and Melanie."

This woman was pretty intense. I wondered, if I threatened Irene's affair with the lovely Melanie, and her career as well, would she be angry enough to grab something and hit me with it?

Could that be w
hat happened in Sam Meckel's office that morning? And did Hilda Helquist somehow figure it out?

14

The next morning, Saturday, Latree and Charizard went to the birthday party of Justin Richardson, Barry and Ronnie's kid. My guess is, my sons just barely made the invite list. Latree and Justin weren't all that close, even though they were the same age and I was friendly with Justin's dad. Latree found Justin bossy. Latree can be kind of bossy himself, so they weren't the best match. The main time they had play dates togeth
er was when Andrea and I—or Justin's parents—were going out on a Saturday night and couldn't get a babysitter. Then whichever couple wasn't going out would take care of the other couple's kids.

Given that the Richardsons did invite Latree, I was grateful they invited Charizard, too. Otherwise he'd have felt left out. I re
solved to like Barry's wife Ronnie more, since I assumed she was the one who was in charge of the invitations. That’s the kind of detail work women always get stuck with.

The party was being held at a laser tag place on South Broadway. If you've never played laser tag, I highly recommend you try it. The way it goes is this: you don a suit of armor and grab a large "laser machinegun." Then you fire away at your opponents with a "deadly" red light. You can kill six or seven people in a minute.
It’s highly therapeutic.

When we handed
over our kids to Barry and Ronnie, they invited us to stick around and play laser tag, too. "It won't cost us anything, we got a package deal," Barry said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

"I'd love to, but Andrea and I are hitting the school board meeting."

"What for? So you can hear endless eulogies of the great leader Sam Meckel?"

"I guess it could
get kind of tedious," I acknowledged. I turned to Andrea. "Honey, how about we play just one game? That way we'll miss the eulogies."

So we stuck around and put on our suits of armor, then attacked each other and our kids with abandon for the next forty-five
minutes. It was like eating potato chips—we couldn't stop at just one game.

It's amazing and rather scary how good it feels to have a gun in your hand. For the first half minute or so we kind of joked around, pointing our guns at each other's toes and not really trying to "destroy the enemy," to use laser tag lingo. But soon all our circumspectness and pretense at civility ceased. We charged around obstacles and took deadly aim at our enemies' chests.

I blasted Latree repeatedly, paying him back for all those times he'd kept me waiting and failed to even hear me while he read a book. Latree blasted Andrea for all the times she yelled at him to hold his spoon the right way. Andrea blasted Charizard for being stubborn about going to the bathroom right before bed, even though he sometimes peed in his sleep if he didn't. And Charizard blasted me for not buying him Pokémon cards whenever he wanted them.

All in all, it was good clean family fun.

It reminded me of something I heard once: a healthy family is one where the love overcomes the psychological torture.

In the middle of it all, the Richardsons' dog Miata, a large brown Doberman pinscher that you wouldn't want to mess with, wandered in. He took one look at all the crazy humans charging around in the strobe-lit darkness, attacking each other with red laser rays, and ran out yipping like a chihuahua.

Who could blame him?

Eventually Andrea and I tore ourselves away from the carnage and drove down to the junior high school, where the school board was meeting in
the auditorium.

In the car we practiced the two-minute speeches we were going to make at the meeting. The school board would be taking audience comments on the budget, and Andrea and I wanted to hit them with our most eloquent shots when we asked for more bucks for the gifted and talented program. We were pushing for a full-time coordinator who would work with teachers and the gifted students themselves to create individualized programs for these kids. Also, we were plugging for special pull-out programs for gifted kids at least three hours a week.

"How about this for a speech?" Andrea said. "'Ladies and gentlemen of the school board, I'd like you to imagine the most horrible job you've ever had. Cleaning toilets for eight hours a day. Telemarketing.

"
'Then imagine you were stuck at this job for the next twelve years. Twelve years of getting bored half to death. And there's no escape, because you're not allowed to quit. Sounds like torture, doesn't it?

"
'Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's what life is like every day for highly gifted children in our schools.'"

Andrea turned to me. "What do you think? Good speech?"

"It makes me nervous."

"Why?"

"Because it's perfect. How am I ever gonna follow an act like that?"

"You'll think of something. You're the writer."

"Yeah, but you're forgetting my writer's block."

"Something like this oughta be able to get you unblocked."

"I've got it," I said, and cleared my throat. "Ladies and gentlemen of the school board, you better treat my kids right or I'll grab a gun and make you sit there for five hours while I read you
Berenstain Bears
books."

"Well, at least
it’s heartfelt," Andrea said. "But maybe we better keep you away from laser tag from now on."

As it turned out, though, all our speechmaking preparations went for naught. We got there just as the eulogies were ending and the business part of the meeting was beginning. We soon learned that the budget was not part of today's agenda, after all.

The president of the school board, a forty-five-year-old guy with a white shirt and blue tie who looked like an accountant, and in fact was an accountant in his day job, stood behind the podium and adjusted his glasses.

"Fellow school board members, and members of the public," he began, "we have a surprise change in the agenda. I am happy to announce that this week the superintendent's
office received the official results of this year's Terra Nova tests."

Instantly the entire audience stopped coughing, undoing candy wrappers, and shuffling in their seats. Everyone reali
zed we were about to hear… drum roll, please… The Test Results.

It
’s amazing, the hold that these standardized tests have on the psyche of America. All over the country, everybody from conservative politicians to inner-city mothers use these scores as a measure of how well our schools are doing.

I hate these tests, and not just because George W.'s demagoguery about them helped him get elected president
—or should I say, selected. For about one month every spring, our children's school gets fanatical about preparing for the darn things. The kids take practice tests at school and get practice test questions for homework. We parents get inundated with dittos and Xeroxed pages from the teachers and the principal advising us how to get our kids ready for Test Week.

But the reality is, these tests do absolutely
nothing
to help my kids. No matter how dull their teachers and how worthless their classes, my kids will always pass these tests. They're a waste of time for them, and a distraction.

And in fact, standardized tests are useless for
most
kids. They don't measure how exciting or fun or truly valuable the school experience is. They're only useful for making sure the lowest common denominator for a certain kind of knowledge doesn't go below a certain level. The tests don't measure the ability to think creatively. They measure the ability of students to do well on multiple-choice tests, and the ability of teachers to "teach to the test."

As I listened to the school board prez describe the results, I realized an even bigger reason why I hated the tests: they encouraged people to get complacent. Like the prez was demonstrating right now.

"Once again," he said, a smug smile playing on his lips, "the Saratoga Springs public schools have shown their continuing excellence. All of our elementary schools, across the board, have either stayed the same or improved since last year. The complete statewide scores are not yet in but it’s fair to predict, based on last year's statewide scores, that our schools finished above the sixtieth percentile in every grade. In reading, our first-grade students scored approximately sixty-eight percent. At the second-grade level, we reached the sixty-ninth percentile. . . ."

The prez went on to rattle off statistics and pass around handouts to a
ll the parents. Most of the parents read their stapled pages with rapt attention. I just jammed them into my jacket pocket.

I guess I was happy that most of the Saratoga kids were scoring above average. And I felt a small surge of pride when I heard that High Rock had finished slightly ahead of all the other local elementary schools this year. As the prez pointed out at great length, Sam Meckel would have been proud.

But mainly, I wished I could burn all those stapled pages. Those pages, and pages like them throughout the country, doom our schools to mediocrity. And it wasn't just my kids who would have to endure years of deadly dull classes; Andrea and I would have to deal with it, too. Sometimes I wished my kids weren't quite so bright.

Unfortunately, private schools weren't really an option. The only ones in Saratoga are Catholic schools and a Waldor
f school, and neither choice appealed to us.

The prez kept on rolling with his mighty stats, and the parents kept on reading those heartwarming pages. Andrea and I looked at each other and, by mutual consent, stood up and walked out.

When we got back to the laser tag place, Barry was standing out front with Miata. "The dog and I needed a break from all the heavy violence in there," he said. "So how was the meeting? You put in your two cents?"

"Not exactly." Andrea went inside, and I told Barry how the standardized tests had taken over the meeting.

"Sounds exciting," Barry said.

I snorted in response. Then I told him what Irene Topor had said about Susie—namely, that Susie and Meckel had worked out an accommodation about her younger daughter.

Barry just sat there rubbing Miata under her left ear. He was oddly silent.

"Barry," I said, "you're oddly silent."

He bestirred himself. "So the killer isn't Laura, it's not Susie
—"

"I haven't ruled Susie out. She still could've bopped Meckel on the head because she was mad about her
older
daughter."

Barry let go of Miata's ear and started rubbing his own. "Listen, Jake, I have a confession to make."

"Confess away."

"Well, I was in there playing laser tag with the kids. And I was listening to them shouting and screaming, you know?"

He paused. "Uh-huh," I said encouragingly.

"And it hit me all of a sudden. The way they were shouting . . ."

I began to sense what was coming. "Uh-huh," I said, not so encouragingly this time. Miata gave me a questioning look.

"Well, it sounded a lot like the shouting I heard that morning."

"Jeez, Barry. First you think it’s a woman, then maybe a man, then a kid. . . . Remind me never to use you as a witness."

"I'm really sorry, Jake, I was just trying to help."

"Next thing you'll be telling me there was no screaming after all, just a mouse squeaking."

"Look, maybe
I could get hypnotized or something, do you think that might help?"

"Skip it."

"I'm serious. My wife knows a doctor at the hospital who was telling her about some guy—"

I stood up. "If you think
it’ll help, try it. Listen, when Andrea comes out, tell her I took off for a little while. She can go ahead and drive the kids home."

"Where are you going?"

"To pay a friendly visit to Mark Robinson and his illustrious parents."

"Are you sure
that’s safe? Didn't Lou get rough with you the other day?"

"Let's hope he got it out of his system," I said, and walked off.

It was a short five-minute trek down Broadway and up Grand to L & S Copies. The sky was blue, the daffodils were blooming, the girls were wearing miniskirts, and I was on my way to track down a double murderer.

As I passed Kinko's, I looked in. The joint was jumping. Skidmore College students, housewives, elderly folks. . . . There were ten or twelve customers packed in at the gleaming new self-service Xerox machines, and more customers at the big long service desk, manned by fresh-faced young employees.

But when I went up to L & S Copies, it was forlorn and empty. The peeling sign on the window claimed that the store was open
from ten to five on Saturdays—unlike Kinko's, which was open twenty-four seven—but nobody was visible inside, not even Lou and Sylvia.

I pushed the front door anyway. It opened. I went in.

At first I couldn't hear anything, except for mechanical buzzing and groaning from the machines, most of which were of early '90s vintage. But then I thought I heard voices coming from the back. "Hello?" I said tentatively.