An Educated Death (4 page)

At four o'clock Saturday morning the phone rang. I felt Andre go stiff beside me, expecting bad news, and not stiff the way I like him, either. They'd been happy enough to send him away to Mother Kozak's rehab but if the Department of Public Safety decided that it needed him, they wouldn't hesitate to interrupt his San Francisco vacation, haul him back to Maine, and throw him right back into the middle of the job that had hurt him so much. It wouldn't be the first time he'd been hauled out of my bed in the middle of the night. It used to make me nervous, having the Maine Department of Public Safety know who was in my bed. Living together, I got used to it. Now I don't worry about it at all. They don't care who he sleeps with as long as they know where to find him. Actually, he tells me that a lot of his friends think he's lucky to have found a woman as good-looking as I am who doesn't want to get married. He says they meant it as a compliment, but I didn't take it that way. I'm still recovering from the trauma of being a teenage girl with a big chest. I need to be admired for my mind.

The insistent phone kept intruding on my mental meanderings, so I gave up and answered it. I knew it wasn't for me. I work with a much more genteel clientele. During school hours, which start at the unacceptable hour of 7:00 a.m. or earlier at boarding schools, my phone is like an admissions crisis line. If I venture in at a civilized hour, say nine-thirty or ten, my desk will be buried under so many pink slips it looks as though we've had a rosy snow storm, and many days, if I want to get any serious work done, I have to wait until dark. But my clients don't call me in the middle of the night. I'd forgotten that it was three hours later in the East.

"Thea? Thank heavens. I was afraid you'd be out sightseeing or something and I'm desperate." Dorrie Chapin's well-modulated voice wouldn't convey desperation if she were hanging off a cliff by one slipping hand. Dorrie was the first female head of a stuffy old New England boarding school, and she had won the job by dazzling them with her competence, not her smile or her charm.

"Dorrie, it's four in the morning." Beside me, Andre sighed and put an arm around me, pulling me close. I hoped Dorrie wouldn't talk long.

There was an embarrassed pause. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid I got it backwards. I was thinking it was three hours later. We're having a bit of a crisis here. I'm not thinking very clearly."

I didn't point out that she was thinking clearly enough to have tracked me down in a San Francisco hotel in the middle of the night, which meant that she'd already talked with Suzanne and they'd decided this was my department. After years in the business, we collaborate on most things, but when the agenda calls for a classy, soft-spoken professional to charm and cajole a board of trustees, Suzanne goes. When it's a case of crisis management and perhaps bringing staff to heel, they call for me, or, as one trustee put it, send in the big woman with the loud voice and fierce eyes. That's not what I see when I look in the mirror, but it's what the client sees that counts.

"What's up?"

"One of our students fell through the ice in the pond last night and drowned."

Just as surely as if I'd been a knight closing my helmet, lowering my lance, and galloping off to joust, I shifted into consultant mode, my brain churning out a list of responses to Dorrie's crisis. Any serious injury to a student is a headmistress's nightmare, especially at a boarding school. The death of a student, or of anyone in the campus community, calls for prompt and serious damage control. She'd called me because she knew I'd dealt with these things before. It had been a rocky autumn in the independent school world—only December and I'd already been consulted about a suicide; a student with an obsessional crush on a teacher who brought her father's handgun back from a weekend at home and tried to make him sleep with her; and a young athletic star on steroids who tried to force himself on his girlfriend.

Boarding schools were particularly paranoid—no, paranoid was the wrong word since the fears were genuine—particularly worried about suicides because adolescents are so suggestible. Where there's one, there's a significant risk of copycat activity. "Was it an accident?"

Dorrie sighed. "I don't know yet, Thea. We're talking to her roommate and her friends, of course, and the dorm parents. She had been depressed, but she wasn't a very happy girl in general and there doesn't seem to have been any significant increase in her depression." She paused and shifted into gear, unwilling to waste time speculating. Dorrie would wait until she'd gathered her facts. It wasn't that she lacked compassion, she just had a businesslike approach to life. Since I did, too, we worked very well together.

"Here's what I'm planning to do," she said. "The students will be gathering for breakfast soon. At breakfast we will announce an all-school meeting in the auditorium, at which I will inform them of their classmate's death. Morning classes will meet as usual but in the afternoon they will meet in small groups with their advisors and a counselor to talk about what has happened. The administrative staff, along with whatever trustees I've been able to assemble, will be calling the parents to explain briefly what has happened. We will follow that phone call with a letter. I wish you were here, Thea. It's her parents I'm really worried about."

"It sounds like you've got the situation under control," I said. "Keep the counselors available for a few days and be sure the students know where to find them. Even if it means you end up paying them to sit for hours with nothing to do. Evening hours are particularly important. It's after dinner, when they've been sitting in their rooms and had time to brood, that they may need someone to talk to. Keep the student center open later, maybe even all night. Tell the faculty to make themselves available, too. Often a troubled student will seek out a trusted faculty member. You'll need to run a workshop for the faculty and the dorm parents so they'll know how to handle this. They're your front line. Oh, and food. Call the food service and tell them you'll need lots of food. In the student center and probably in the lounges of the dorms. That's all I can think of right now."

I shifted myself up on the pillow, turned on the light, and grabbed the pad of paper hotels are so good about keeping by their phones. I always take them home with me to put next to my own phone, but at home there's no maid to be sure they
stay
by the phone. "Tell me what happened," I said. "I'll do some more thinking about it and call you later if I have any more ideas."

"I know embarrassingly little, Thea," she said.

"Don't tell the parents that," I said. "You've called your lawyer?"

"He's on the way."

Dorrie told me what she knew and it wasn't much. The dead girl's name was Laney Taggert. Margaret Delaney Taggert. A junior who had started as a sophomore. Pretty but standoffish. Manipulative. Secretive. She didn't have a lot of friends at school. She had a boyfriend but it was reportedly a stormy relationship. Dorrie was trying to confirm when she'd last been seen, but hadn't yet caught up with the faculty advisor who'd shared her table at dinner. She wasn't there at bed check but her roommate thought she'd gone away for the weekend.

As Dorrie gave me the few facts she knew, my mind raced ahead of her like a frisky dog. The pad in my hand was covered with notes on the questions I wanted to ask. About the system of checks they used to keep track of students. Whether juniors and seniors had greater privileges. What Laney's relationship with her roommate was. Was she in the habit of taking solitary walks? Was there a system in place to warn students about the pond? When she'd last been seen. Who had found her and why had they been out so early?

As soon as Dorrie finished, I started in on my list but she cut me off. "Those are all the right questions, but they can wait until you get here. I'm in the middle of fighting a forest fire now. As soon as you can, I need you to come in and go over all this stuff. I've got to go. I've been standing out by the pond watching them fish her out with a grappling hook and trying to give her CPR. My feet are soaked, the rest of me is frozen, and if it weren't seven a.m. I'd say I need a stiff drink. And the police chief is in the doorway glaring at me. When are you coming back?"

"Tonight. We're taking the red-eye."

"Can you be here by ten?"

"Foggy headed and bleary-eyed."

"I'd rather have you in that state than most people bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. See you tomorrow."

"Wait, Dorrie." I could feel her impatience across three thousand miles. "Stay in touch. And follow the three C's."

"The three C's?"

"Closemouthed, cautious, and caring. And don't let this turn into a media circus. Only one person talks to the press. Either you or Tom. Be sure everyone knows that. Everyone. Be sure the students know that they don't have to answer any questions. Tell them they
shouldn't
be answering questions. Tell the media to leave your students alone. Make sure campus security knows that and is prepared to back you up."

"I will. Anything else?"

"This will sound silly but it isn't. You might consider walkie-talkies."

"For what?" She sounded skeptical.

"For being able to move around the campus and still stay in touch with your office and campus security."

"I never would have thought of it," she said. "I hope it doesn't come to that, but I'll keep it in mind." She was gone but I could picture her crossing her pleasant office and dealing calmly and competently with the waiting police chief.

I knew what she was facing. I'd been on the scene almost immediately after another school's student suicide, following the headmaster through a grueling eighteen-hour day. They're a special breed of people, heads of schools. I wouldn't want to be one... couldn't be one, I don't suffer fools gladly enough. I'm too impulsive and impatient. Too irreverent to keep a straight face when the bullshit is coming thick and fast. Too much of a loner to be around people that much. But I work well with them and my clients like me. Maybe because I'm allowed to call a spade a spade and then they can use my reports, in their refined but forceful ways, to effect the changes they want to make.

Andre stirred restlessly beside me. "Back to sleep," he murmured. "It's late."

I turned off the light and snuggled down beside him. My mind was running too fast to go back to sleep but if I got up, he'd get up, and he needed to rest. We lay in the sleepy darkness, our bodies entwined, while my mind was back in Massachusetts.

Dorrie Chapin was headmistress of the Bucksport School, a second-tier coed boarding school about thirty miles outside of Boston in the picturesque town of Sedgwick. Bucksport had an extremely photogenic campus with massive trees, rolling manicured lawns, and stately brick buildings, which had made it the setting for several movies. Its strong athletic program was reflected in the acres of well-maintained playing fields and the athletic physiques of the students. There were miles of walking and jogging trails through the woods and a pretty, tree-lined pond about a mile back in the woods that they sometimes used for skating. J. Crew, Eddie Bauer, the Gap, and L.L. Bean did a big business there and all the young men owned blue blazers and gray slacks while all the young women had an adequate supply of dresses. The school had a slightly larger than normal population of students from broken homes.

Dorrie was the first headmistress—women are only beginning to make inroads into the inner sanctums of coed schools—and she was operating very carefully. She was only in her second year at the school, hired after an extensive national search which had gone through two rounds of candidates before the trustees found anyone they liked. Not that all of them had liked Dorrie. She was the majority choice of a split board, a difficult situation for anyone entering a new position. Her job had been further complicated because she'd had to clean up a serious fiscal mess caused by the inattention and inability of the departing headmaster and after that she'd faced a disturbing decline in applications.

She'd taken it all in stride. It was her nature to see things as challenges rather than problems, opportunities rather than obstacles. The fiscal situation was improving and my partner, Suzanne, and I had done an admissions survey and produced a report and recommendations that the trustees had accepted and were acting on. Still, she was just beginning to get on her feet. An incident like this was the last thing she needed.

I tried to picture the pond in winter. I'd seen it in April when parts of the wide path had been soggy wallows of well-churned mud and the overhanging trees just sprouting their first tiny leaves. Everything had seemed soft and gentle and the pond had been still as a mirror. I tried replacing that budding green with the gloomier browns, blacks, and grays of late fall, covering the ground with a light snow and the pond with ice. Maybe it was still pretty, but in my imagination it seemed grim and uninviting. I wondered why anyone would choose to walk there in December and why she would venture out onto the ice. Had it been an accident or had Laney been a troubled teenager looking for a final solution to her problems?

Eventually his warmth and the rhythm of Andre's breathing made me sleepy again. I left Bucksport and Dorrie and the sad end of Delaney Taggert behind and went back to being on vacation in my favorite city, San Francisco, and back to one of the things that I did best—sleeping. There were no more phone calls, and when we woke up a bright winter sunshine was beating down on the fog. Everything gleamed. I couldn't wait to get out and walk.

We wrapped up a splendid Saturday with drinks in the Redwood Room. Andre was staring pensively at his Armagnac as if there were a message for him hidden in the glass. "Are you glad you came?" I asked.

He took my hand and gripped it hard. "Let's not go back. Let's escape into the mountains and live off the land," he said, his dark eyes shining with mischief.

"I wouldn't know how to live without the sound of a ringing phone."

"You're a bright girl. You could learn."

"I'm not a girl, Lemieux, I'm a woman."

He gave me a thorough appraisal. "That's right. You are. Almost too much woman for me."