Helen Hath No Fury (18 page)

The missing money Clary had mentioned. A loan to bail out Ivan’s brother. I felt still worse.

“We had to call a halt to the remodel. It wasn’t missing material, it was missing funds. That’s why I was so positive nobody was there that day. Nobody was going to be there for a while. Charges were going to be pressed against my brother anyway. My parents are old and fragile. The
shock of having their son …” He shook his head. “I was doing the right thing by my lights, making restitution, but it was a less-than-legal act. Helping him out and helping him away.” He waved his arm at that last word, and I realized he’d also helped his brother evade the law, probably by getting him out of the country.

“The irony of it—that he’d committed the crime, he’d embezzled the money, and I’d kept him out of jail—but that I’d be the criminal and I’d be jailed for aiding and abetting when I explained—was forced to explain—where I’d been. Forgive me for not wanting that scenario, although I now have it.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“What’s done is done. There’s a chance I won’t be in trouble with the law about it. Maybe not even my brother, now that the money’s back in place. We’re all negotiating. In any case, Gretchen and I are leaving, so watch out for yourself,” he said. “Tell the book group to do the same. Somebody crazy is out there. Don’t turn your back.”

Talk about unnecessary advice.

I
WATCHED HIM LEAVE AND
I
FELT SORRY FOR ALL HIS
burdens, and all that had happened. But I also knew that caring, perhaps too intensely and too actively, was the book group’s—and my—only “crime.” No longer suffocating under a sense of guilt, I was ready to face the office witch.

The outer office was empty, the door to Havermeyer’s office closed. Helga’s desk looked unused as usual, and the place was eerily pleasant without her scowling presence. She must have stepped out to the ladies’ room, although I doubted that Helga had any natural functions.

Green paper folders were stacked on her desk. Her in-box was empty. I’d once heard it said that if ever a person’s desk was totally cleaned up with not a thing left undone, the person dies.

I guess it wasn’t true.

I couldn’t remember why I’d come in here, then I realized I was holding the second-warning notices for two students. I needed their addresses. I stepped behind the long walnut barrier that demarcated Helga’s kingdom. There was no actual NO TRESPASSING sign there, and no reason the staff shouldn’t be allowed access. Nothing but the memory of Helga’s witchlike scowl, but that was enough. Entering her turf gave me an illicit thrill.

Such are the highs of my professional life.

I spotted something unsealed, undone. A human flaw for Helga, hidden so the mere mortals on the other side of the barrier wouldn’t know. Next to her desk a carton sat, flaps open. An untaken-care-of item, probably her amulet against that desk-death. I peered in, hoping for something delicious, like sample textbooks that publishers send and Helga refuses to distribute because then we might want them. Or supplies that hadn’t yet made it into supply room purgatory. Instead, the carton contained statues, Roman centurions. A small army of them.

The graduation awards. For each grade’s Athlete of the Year in the least athletically outstanding school on the Eastern seaboard. Fittingly grandiose and absurd trophies. It figured.

But everything except the carton was indeed locked up. I know this because, although I had nothing specific in mind, I tried the door of the supply closet, imagining its wrapped reams of paper, boxes of pens and pencils, stacks of lesson plan and grade books. The large room’s shelves remained well stocked because Helga refused admittance to one and all and made staff members feel positively Dickensian as we begged, “Please, Helga, twenty-five sheets of paper for the copier?”

I rattled the door, but it was locked tight.

As were the drawers in which I might find the needed addresses. I tried the top row and should have been able to generalize from that, but I hoped that maybe this once, Helga had forgotten to shield every inch of her kingdom. I needed Alicia Wortham’s address. She was way at the bottom, and maybe Helga’s back hurt her, so she skipped the bottom locks. I squatted behind the divider and tried the drawer. It didn’t budge.

“Guess you like staying after school a whole lot more than I ever did,” a male voice—most definitely not my
principal’s—said. “But then, I never liked this place,” he continued. “To put it mildly.”

And then I knew who it was, and why he was here, even before I stood up and saw him.

I stifled the impulse to duck back down again. Every organ in my body slipped lower, sank. My heart made a death-defying
tha-whump!
and a shrill voice inside my brain screamed,
“Run!”

I didn’t bother to answer it because all I could have said was
“Run where?”
I was behind one barrier, and if I’d gotten out of it, Zachary Harris would provide another and even more formidable one. He stood there, tall, muscled, still wearing the smooth veneer I’d seen on TV this morning.

It was difficult keeping my voice at normal pitch. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Back to make up classes?”

He leaned on the other side of the walnut divide. His sneer looked so natural, it must have been encrypted in his muscles. “What am I doing here?”

People who repeat questions instead of answering them really annoy me. Zachary, I thought. His father’s clone. Zachary Harris, the former pain in the butt, petty criminal, and sluggard, who’d fallen in love with politics and potential power. Surely willing to do the dirty work. Zachary Harris, who had precisely as much as his father had at stake.

I’d thought about his father. I’d thought about his stepmother. Why had I been too blind to put Zachary on my mental screen?

“What are you doing here?” My turn to repeat. I needed time. Maybe that’s why people like Zachary repeated, too.

“What am I doing here? Beats me,” he said. “This is
about my least favorite place. Being here was like being in hell. Or jail.”

“So I heard.”

“You heard? So my reputation outlasted me, I guess.” His smirk intensified.

If you won’t run, then at least think! the brain-screamer howled. Think of something!

Prissy voice. Why not come up with a plan instead of carping?

Zachary’s smile was an upturned sneer. He certainly wore a different face when he was out politicking with Dad. He straightened and paced back and forth the length of the room, trailing a finger over the polished countertop, like someone inspecting for dust. “The only day I didn’t hate this place was graduation. Good thing you guys graduate everybody who’s able to stand up and grab the diploma.”

We are a tolerant school, and we cater to children who don’t fit in the larger systems. But as I recall, when Zachary Harris graduated, his teachers all but danced in the streets. One, a Brit, called him “bent,” and it always stuck with me, that image of a boy who hadn’t grown straight up.

“Well, in that case, it’s amazing you’ve chosen to come back,” I said. “Given your feelings about your experience here.” Where the hell was Helga? Surely she could affect him as lethally as she did me.

And where was my headmaster? This made no sense. Ivan Coulter had spoken with someone about Gretchen. I’d met him as he exited from the office, and nobody else had followed him out. There were no alternate exits from here that I’d ever heard of. It was hard to believe in secret passageways or trapdoors.

Damn peculiar. Wherever Havermeyer and Helga had
wandered, for the first and only time I could recall, I wanted them near me.

And if they brought along a militia, that wouldn’t be bad, either.

Like Zachary, I, too, paced, running my hand along the back of the divider, bouncing it off all the drawer pulls. And then I found the switch, a small toggle, and followed it up, to a wire, to the microphone.

The damnable Philly Prep PA system. Primitive, annoying, and disruptive. Loud and squawky. Precisely what I needed. I flipped the toggle and kept moving.

“I wanted to come to your room. Certainly never wanted to be in this office again, that’s for sure. But you split, and then I had to wait till that guy left.”

He’d been in the building for some time. Watching. Waiting to pounce. And he wanted me to know that.

I figured the only weapon in my armory was Zachary’s hated high school experiences. The wrath of teachers. The repeated chewings-out. “You shouldn’t be here, Zachary,” I said loudly, aiming my voice for the microphone. “You know the office is off limits.” Where are you, Helga? Don’t you hear me? Your turf has been invaded by the barbarians. Hurry!

“And yet I am here,” Zachary said. “Life is interesting, isn’t it?”

He was very calm, with a smooth sound to him. It was much more frightening than any show of emotion would have been.

“Times have changed since I was a student,” he said. “I thought this place would have changed, too.”

“In what way?” As if I cared about his observations. How long was I going to have to do this? The PA reached every crevice of the school—except the room we were in. Can’t you hear us, people? Aren’t our voices deafening you wherever you are? Mr. Hall! The janitor had to be
somewhere. And where was the principal? Had Ivan Coulter killed him? Left him dead in his office? Because if not—where was the man?

I didn’t want to use the microphone to openly call for help. Not yet. If nobody was listening to it, it was worthless, and all that would do was make Zachary still more dangerous.

“In what way did I think it would change? I’m talking security,” Zachary said. “Don’t you people read the papers? Don’t you realize the things that go on in high schools these days? Don’t you
learn
from others?”

“How did you get in?” Did he have a gun? Was he planning to mimic recent school atrocities? Or was he doing it his way—with a club, one by one.

“How did I get in?”

He was never going to make it in politics. It wouldn’t be the murdering that kept him out, it’d be that tic of repeating the questions.

“I walked in, Miss Pepper,” he said. “That’s what I did. All nice and politelike. Somebody came out that back door. I said, ‘Could you hold it there?’ He did, and …” He shrugged. “I thought for sure there’d be a cop in the halls. What is wrong with you people?”

“We assume decency.” It probably was a big mistake. We had locks and a security protocol, and because of the recent hysteria, all of that was supposedly going to be upgraded during the summer break—along with the PA system. But Philly Prep, like the schools and churches and synagogues that had been defiled by violence, wasn’t, no matter how Zachary felt about it, a prison, so of course it was breachable. Parents, students, teachers, and administration needed flexibility about meetings and conferences. There weren’t gun towers from which all approaches were covered. There wasn’t a central list on which each person’s calendar and appointments were
coordinated, and so the doors weren’t locked instantly after the last student left. There’d been plenty of time for Zachary to enter the building.

“Looka me,” he said. “Following the rules for once. I’m checking in at the office, just like it says at the door.”

I imagined his voice crackling and hissing static through all the empty rooms. Maybe I hadn’t made it clear that this was bad trouble. “You aren’t supposed to be here,” I said. “This is illegal. Leave the office right now.”

“Don’t talk to me that way!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare talk to me that way! You aren’t my teacher! You never were my teacher! Don’t tell me what to do—I’m here, see? And I’m staying as long as I want to. As long as you do. We’re leaving together.”

Now they’d know. Anybody hearing that would immediately leap on a white horse and come to my rescue. Surely.

And somebody had to have heard it. Two somebodies.

I asked my question again, more loudly, looking him directly in the eye. “Why are you here, Zachary Harris? You know you shouldn’t be—and people will be back in a minute. The principal—you remember Dr. Havermeyer, don’t you?”

For a split second, his lashes fluttered and he looked down at his feet.

I moved my vocal cords into Nightmare-Teacher Mode. “You’re in big trouble, young man,” I barked.

He looked startled, almost stepped back from the divider, but caught himself.

This place must really have felt like hell to him.

And so it was beginning to feel to me. How could I be all alone in the office? And why did I keep thinking I heard elevator music?

I looked again at Havermeyer’s office, locked and
dark. It had a pebbled glass window through which I could see nothing.

I looked in the other direction, at the solid wooden supply room door, a door I’d rattled earlier. No window on it, no way to see through. No way for anybody to see in.

I shocked myself with my own thoughts, but where else could the two have disappeared into? I’d spoken with Ivan Coulter for some time. They must have thought he was the last person in the building….

I couldn’t believe my own logic. Maurice Havermeyer and Helga the Office Witch … a couple? Trysting to elevator music in a supply room? It was too ugly to imagine.

Zachary pounded the countertop with his fist. Just once, but it sufficed. “You know damn well why I’m here.”

He wasn’t that schoolboy anymore. He was a political aide. He had status, he could look ahead to power. Just as long as his Daddy’s coattails were still flying.

“My condolences about your stepmother,” I said. “How is she? Seems you bungled that job along with the one you did on Susan.” I got as close to the mike as I could without alerting him to the fact it was on. “You didn’t kill either one, did you? Tried to, but you couldn’t get it right. One out of three tries. Bad stats, Zachary.”

Do You Hear Me Out There? This Is a Killer!

That had to be what Denise was coming to tell me. She’d found out what Zachary had done—for his father, for himself. She’d fed him all the necessary information—inadvertently, I was sure. Table talk, maybe, including the misconception she had that I was very tight with Helen. Table talk and, perhaps, more than that. A quarrel, a heated discussion once Helen had called and Denise knew her husband’s complicated history.

All Zachary had to do was listen. He’d know about the remodeling, about the gathering after Helen’s death, about what was said and planned.

He’d even been with Denise at the fund-raiser. He’d been standing there, part of the group when Susan appeared with the folders. He’d been around all afternoon and evening, as far as I knew. He could have seen what was in the folder, could have read some of it right through the clear plastic.

Besides, hadn’t Denise asked me about “gathering information” about Helen? And then I’d made it clear that I was there to get something from Susan.

And the Dumpster. The stupid, petty graffiti. How had I not realized that an adult wouldn’t have done that?

“You and your lying friends are not going to ruin everything. You are not going to destroy my life!”

“How do you know what my friends and I might do, Zachary? How could you possibly know that?”

“When somebody is stupid enough to threaten my father—to write him letters—then I know. I open my father’s mail. Sort it. Who can he trust more than me? So I knew. Like my father knew, and Denise knew. Only Denise never thinks I know anything. Denise …” He shrugged.

A letter. Helen had written Roy Stanton a letter of protest. Helen had behaved like a citizen of a democracy. I felt so sad, for the innocent and honest impulse, the sense of fairness that had led Helen to write the candidate and request the completely unrealistic.