A Function of Murder (21 page)

“You mean how the mayor was accusing Richardson of inflating the grades for funding?”
I’d never heard such an angry tone from Digital Dan, not even the last time a fourth
grader spilled milk on a keyboard in his classroom. “Just so you know, as awful as
it was that the man was murdered, you’re not going to find many people here who will
actually miss him.”

Dan’s flare-up caught me off guard, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hadn’t
I always said how phony it was to praise the dead just because they were dead? No
phoniness here.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to respond right away to Dan. Rina was on me.

“I wondered why you were so chummy today, staying for lunch.”

“Classes are over at the college,” I said in a weak, defensive voice. Grasping at
straws.

“Right,” Rina said, meaning anything but. “You have no idea how hard it is to be beholden
to this one and that one for everything. We don’t know from one day to the next what’s
going to happen to the school library, or whether there will be any field trips for
our kids, or any money for faculty development. Dan did great getting that grant,
but it’s a drop in the bucket, really.”

Dan nodded, more relaxed now. “Even that grant doesn’t cover maintenance or any kind
of continuing ed. It’s nice to have new technology, but what happens when it’s all
outdated next year? We’ll have a graveyard of old chassis and we’ll all be back to
square one.”

“Everything has strings attached,” Rina said. “All of them—the mayor and the school
committee and the parents’ organization—they give us money and they think that gives
them the right to tell us how and what to teach.”

“And how to test,” Dan added.

“Testing is a big thing,” Rina agreed. “We haven’t had charter schools in Massachusetts
for that long. We need to be fully funded to have them work as they were meant to.”

“And cut some slack to really test our methods. One person’s ‘imaginative academic
curriculum’ is another person’s ‘dumbed down school,’” Dan said.

“And everyone’s an expert,” Rina added.

I wanted to break in and tell them that I was merely asking a question, not on one
side or the other. Neither Dan nor Rina was addressing me directly now. They were
letting out their feelings about their school and how it was viewed by others in the
education community. But it was clear that the cause of their increasing agitation
had been my remark, and I wished I could take it back.

“If anyone thinks it’s the worst crime in the world to try to save your school, let
them come here and teach,” Rina said.

“And not for just an hour now and then,” Dan added, with a pointed look at me.

“You’re so right,” Rina threw in.

She and Dan stood together, as if they’d choreographed the move. They gave me a quick
glance, tossed their unfinished meals in the trash, and walked out of the room.

I was left in the dust with the remains of a bagel so tough that not even an entire
bottle of water could soften it.

I sat for a few minutes, utterly regretting what I’d done. Bruce was right. Virgil
was right. I had no business trying to be an investigator. At best, I’d ruined the
day for two people I cared about. At worst, I’d betrayed the trust put in me by Zeeman
Academy’s best teachers, stuck my nose where it didn’t belong, and possibly alienated
two of my friends here.

What made me think that two hours a week of volunteering gave me the right to know
or to judge what went on the other thirty-plus hours?

I gathered my purse and briefcase, and left the room.

As I walked past lively classrooms, I reminded myself that while grade inflation might
be what was making all this creative learning possible, and might not be a capital
offense, murder was. Rina and Dan might justify the means, but not if murder was involved.
I did have the best intentions—routing out Mayor Graves’s killer. But that wasn’t
my job either.

I reached the end of the hall, about to pull on the heavy glass doors. A hulking form
appeared on the other side and pushed the doors in, sending me tripping back.

“Sorry, sorry, are you okay?” asked a familiar voice. “I thought you saw me, Sophie.”

Detective Virgil Mitchell. My first thought was that Rina and Dan had called the police,
asking to have me arrested for meddling at the least, slander at the worst.

“I was just leaving,” I told Virgil, as if he’d asked.

“I see that.”

“I had my class and then stayed for lunch.” I babbled, as if I’d been caught speeding
and pulled over by a state trooper in his jodhpurs.

“Good,” Virgil said, giving me a look that asked,
What’s wrong with you?

I slid closer to the door, first checking to make sure a third collision wasn’t in
the offing. “So, I’ll see you later?”

“Later,” Virgil said, and headed down the corridor.

I left Zeeman Academy with a few bruises to my body and spirit.

I drove home at the start of a light spring rain, predicted to turn nasty by late
afternoon. I used to worry about Bruce, flying a small craft, relatively low to the
ground, in stormy weather, but he’d taught me the MAstar refrain:
Four to say go, one to say no
. Each mission called for a pilot and two nurses in the helicopter, plus the preflight
mechanic on the ground. Any one of them could decide that making the flight would
be unsafe, and the mission would be cancelled.

I wished I had such clear instructions.

I couldn’t seem to get a handle on anything the past few days. I had so many partial
truths rattling around in my head, like someone had taken the pieces of five jigsaw
puzzles and thrown them into one box. With no picture on the cover. I needed answers.

On top of it all, between Elysse’s Facebook attack and Rina and Dan’s responses in
the lunchroom, I felt my whole philosophy of education was being brought into question.
If I couldn’t be sure of the way I taught and what I expected from myself, my students,
and my administrators, what was the point?

I slammed on my brakes at a red light, which at least stopped my head from going into
overdrive. The mayor’s murder, and his repeated desire to connect with me, had thrown
me off-kilter. Not only that, I was hungry. A couple of bites of stale bagel didn’t
cut it as lunch. But I could do this. I could put things in order. That was my specialty.

While I was on the lookout for food, I’d create a mental lineup of murder suspects.
That should be safe territory. There was no one around to hear me and take offense.

I tapped on the steering wheel with my index finger for the first suspect. Principal
Douglas Richardson. It was obvious to me that the mayor had uncovered his fraudulent
scheme or schemes to get continued funding.

Maybe that’s why Virgil showed up at Zeeman today, to take Richardson into custody.
I wished I knew for sure; I’d have given anything to call off my own pseudo-investigation.
I wondered if Virgil traveled to Zeeman Academy because he’d tracked the mayor’s schedule
for the last couple of days, or because I’d introduced the school into our first conversation
at the crime scene. I hated to compound my accusatory stance against Zeeman by telling
Virgil what I’d just learned at lunch.

In any case, it was more likely that Virgil was visiting the school today only for
routine questioning, not to arrest someone. I knew from television that it took at
least two cops and flashing lights to arrest a guy, and that they wouldn’t want to
have a perp walk at an elementary school. That’s how informed I was.

I let Rina and Dan off the hook as suspects even though they had all but admitted
that Principal Richardson was guilty as charged by me and that they saw nothing wrong
with it. I sympathized with their plight, but, hard as I tried, I couldn’t agree with
them. A little exaggeration about student performance on Parents’ Night was harmless,
but submitting bogus official report cards up the funding chain to state and federal
organizations qualified as criminal behavior in my book.

I couldn’t say I’d be relieved if Virgil had evidence of fraud and could tie that
crime to Mayor Graves’s murder. Dan and Rina’s argument and description of life at
their charter school had reached me, teacher to teacher. I declined to place them
on my suspect list, wanting to think their motives were pure and that they’d done
nothing wrong themselves.

Superintendent Collins probably knew of the grade
inflation and that might have been the subject of his argument with the mayor on graduation
day. Which side would he be on? Were Richardson and Collins in cahoots? I had no idea
of the chain of command when it came to submitting grade reports. The two school administrators
might have been quarreling today over why they’d had to kill the mayor. Or over the
merits of chain versus independent electronics stores.

I thought of the triangle Kira had presented to me yesterday—Collins and Richardson
each having something yet to be determined on the other, and both possibly having
something on Graves, that something perhaps being Kira herself. A strange image came
to me, from my high school chemistry text—a ring of snakes each biting the other’s
tail. It had something to do with how the shape of the benzene ring came to a famous
(but not to me) chemist in a dream. Sometimes I had to admit that science had as many
interesting stories as mathematics.

Another possibility was that the superintendent was in danger. What if Principal Richardson
was killing off anyone who was aware of the fraud and didn’t agree with his little
scheme to keep his school open and hold on to his job? From snippets in the news and
the way he cavorted with higher-ups, Richardson had always struck me as more than
a little ambitious for his career. A shiver ran through me. If Rina and Dan squealed
on me, I could be in danger.

I brushed away the silly thought as I checked that my car doors were locked and that
all the systems displayed on my dashboard were at normal levels.

With all this dubious behavior in high places, I wondered if the city of Henley was
a candidate for appropriation by the state government. I recalled a precedent. About
five years ago, the citizens of the Commonwealth watched the news as the government
authorized the complete takeover of a city on the North Shore, something that hadn’t
been done since the Great Depression. The city had been
collapsing under the weight of the various mob bosses who ran the mayor and even the
police. The state seized control, ousted the mayor, and installed a set of Commonwealth-approved
managers to turn the city around and eventually return it to its citizens. I wouldn’t
put it past my home state to revive the tradition.

But I couldn’t believe Henley was as bad as that. And surely Mayor Graves wasn’t so
corrupt. Hadn’t Kira loved him? A questionable recommendation at this point.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

My car rang. I hated to interrupt my brilliant organizing session. I was at a stretch
of busy city street where it would have been tough to pull over to check the caller
ID on my phone. I’d have to either take potluck and answer through my Bluetooth, or
let the call go to voice mail. It wasn’t as if I were getting far with my suspect
analysis. In fact, I was getting nowhere, other than a few miles closer to home. I
might as well take the call.

I clicked the lever to answer my phone through my hands-free system.

“Hello,” I ventured, in the suspicious-sounding tone I used for callers who blocked
their ID or whose ID I couldn’t see, as now. My response was meant to carry the attitude
that, one, I don’t like taking calls from unknowns; two, you’d better have a really
good reason for calling me; and, three, if you’re a solicitor, you can expect an immediate
hang-up.

“Professor Knowles?”

I didn’t recognize the voice, “Yes?” Wary, in case this was a call from a textbook
publisher trying to influence my choices for the fall semester.

“Hi, it’s Elysse. Elysse Hutchins.”

As if there were more than one Elysse in my life at the moment. I felt a twinge of
annoyance. If there had been a receiver in my hand like the old days, I might have
hung up. Of course, now all I had to do was push the tiny off
button. I didn’t want to risk justifying such a move in a court of law.