Missing (10 page)

"The guy killed himself a week ago. The family
hired me to look into it."

"Suicides," Sabato said, shaking his head.
"They’re the worst. Did he leave a note?"

"No."

"Then I’ll tell you, fella, you’re wasting
your time. Ain’t nobody gonna figure out the reason why. I had a
friend who killed himself, so I know what I’m talking about. My
advice would be to tell the family to try to forget it."

"I’ve been getting a lot of that advice."

"It’s good advice," the guy said. "You
should take it."

I wasn’t feeling particularly encouraged as I
walked back down to the ground floor of the CPD building and across
Ezzard Charles to the GUC lot. A lot of people, from Del Cavanaugh to
hatchet-faced Ron Sabato, had been telling me to quit. If it wasn’t
for how I felt about the girl, I probably would have. If it wasn’t
for the girl, I wouldn’t have started in the first place.
 

11

NINE Mile School was located in Madeira, northeast of
the Kenwood exit of I-71, a cluster of white stucco buildings,
vaguely Spanish in style, nestled in the wooded hillside above the
expressway. It was a little past two when I got out there. As I
turned onto the access road that led to the complex, I passed a
couple of riders in jodhpurs and boots, urging their horses up a
trail beside the road. It was that kind of neighborhood, that kind of
school.

I parked the Pinto close by the entrance gate and
stepped out into dappled shade, redolent of spruce and horse piss. A
couple of kids standing by a red Mercedes watched me closely as I
walked across the gravel lot to the white stucco buildings—like I
was someone who bore watching. The lot was filled with Mercedes and
BMWs. An archway in the front building led me directly onto a
pillared portico, running around a quadrangle of sunburnt grass. On
the complex side of the portico, windowed doors opened onto airy
schoolrooms. I followed a series of signs hung from the rafters to
the main office.

Inside, a plump middle-aged woman in a flouncy
peasant dress was sitting at a desk behind a countertop. She had a
haggard face and long gray-brown hair, cut in bangs and worn in a
ponytail down her back. The length of her hair—or perhaps the fact
that she was still wearing it that long into her late forties or
early fifties—made her look a little desperate. The gold in her
smile and the peasant colors added to the air of wilted youth.

Behind her and to her right a varnished wood
letterbox, stuffed with memos, depended from the wall. The polished
wood caught the sunlight coming through the open windows on the lot
side of the building. Everything in the room was bright with
sunlight, floors, desk,  whitewashed walls.

"Can I help you?" the woman said, smiling
amid the glare.

"My name is Stoner," I told her. "I’d
like to talk to your headmaster about one of your teachers, Mason
Greenleaf."

The woman dropped her eyes to the desktop, like she’d
been slugged from behind. "You’re a police officer?"

"I’m working for Cindy Dorn, a friend of
Mason’s."

"Of course. I’m Helen Tobler. Assistant
headmistress here at Nine Mile."

"Would you mind answering a few questions, Ms.
Tobler?"

"No. I wouldn’t mind at all. I was very fond
of Mason. All of us here were fond of him. It’s a terrible
tragedy." She gestured to a chair in front of her desk. "Please
sit."

I came around the counter. As I sat down, I noticed
that the fingers of the woman’s right hand were stained blue with
mimeo ink. She caught me staring at them and shrugged. "Can’t
afford to Xerox everything."

"I would have thought you could," I said,
smiling.

"I know," the woman said. "People see
the cars in the lot and the horses on the trails and think we’re as
rich as our clientèle. Well, I assure you we are not. Private
schools like ours are run on very tight budgets. Most of our staff
and personnel do far less well financially than they could in the
public schools."

"Then why do they teach here?"

"We offer them small classes and the chance to
work with gifted children. You’d be surprised how attractive that
is to a certain kind of teacher. The ones for whom teaching is a
calling."

"Like Mason Greenleaf ?"

She nodded. "Yes, he was extremely dedicated. I
would say he was among the most dedicated and effective teachers we
had."

"You think it would be possible for me to talk
to any of his students?"

The woman sighed, drumming her blue-stained lingers
on the desk. "If it were up to me, I’d see no problem with it.
But the headmaster, Tom Snodgrass, might object. Frankly, some of the
parents might object, too. You understand that one of the things
we’re supposed to offer is privacy."

"Perhaps I could talk to Snodgrass myself?"
I asked.

She nodded. "He’s at lunch, but he should be
back shortly."

I cleared my throat, trying to think of some decent
way to broach the question of Greenleaf’s motive for suicide. But
the woman didn’t need coaxing.

"Obviously, you want to know why Mason did what
he did?"

"Yes."

"Of course, I’ve thought about it quite a
lot," she said, leaning back into a sloping beam of sunlight.
"And all I can say is that whatever problems he had, he didn’t
say a word about them to any of us here at Nine Mile. In fact he was
such a sweet, positive soul that it makes what happened especially
disturbing.

"Frankly, I can’t understand it," she
said, dropping her eyes again. "Unless something just
overwhelmed him, like somebody dying, or maybe finding out that he
had cancer, or Cindy leaving him . . . ?"

There was an undisguised note of curiosity in her
voice. And who could blame her for being curious? I told her the
truth. "He wasn’t ill, and he had no recent problems with
Cindy."

I didn’t mention Del Cavanaugh—given the clean
bill of health that Dr. Mulhane had reported, there was no need to
broach the subject of AIDS. But I did bring up the solicitation
incident from six years past. The off-chance that he’d been
enmeshed in a similar situation at Nine Mile was the chief reason I’d
come to the school.

"You do know that he’d had a problem with a
student some years ago?"

Helen Tobler pursed her lips as if she wanted to
spit. "The school board thing was a travesty. But those are the
times we are living in. When Mason came to us after being
disciplined, we did not hesitate to hire him—and believe me, our
standards are the highest. They have to be—they’re what our
reputation is founded on."

She didn’t mention that Greenleaf had apparently
had an in with Tom Snodgrass. It made her umbrage slightly less
impressive. "You aren’t aware of any such incident that might
have occurred here at Nine Mile?"

"Absolutely not," Helen Tobler said flatly.
"In fact I don’t believe there was an 'incident' to begin
with—just an overzealous father who had lost custody of his son in
a divorce hearing and was trying to score points against his ex-wife.
Mason became his whipping boy, thanks to the prosecutor’s zeal to
persecute homosexuals."

"Prior to the week that he dropped out of
school, did Mason seem distant or preoccupied to you?"

"Not to me he didn’t," Helen Tobler said.
"But our schedules were such that we didn’t see a lot of each
other that week. He may have complained a bit about the heat, about
having trouble sleeping at night. He didn’t look particularly well
rested, but then neither do I. I mean it’s been hot, and our
classrooms aren’t air-conditioned. You really ought to talk to Tom.
He’s a longtime friend of Mason’s and would have seen more of him
than I did. He should be back any minute."

I glanced at my watch, which was showing a quarter to
three. Since I wanted to talk to some of Greenleaf’s students, I
decided to wait.

I sat in the office for a good quarter of an hour,
watching Helen Tobler run circulars oif the noisy mimeo machine.
After a while she gathered a bunch of the papers in her blue hands
and walked around the counter to the door.

"I’m going to distribute a few of these up and
down the quad. You’re welcome to keep waiting here until Tom gets
in."

A few minutes after she left, a boy came through the
door. He was about seventeen, thin, dark-haired, with a
sharp-featured, handsome face. He stood by the counter for a second,
staring at me.

"Where’s Ms. Tobler?" he said with a
touch of suspiciousness, as if I’d done something to her. It dawned
on me that he was one of the kids giving me the eye in the parking
lot.

"She’s delivering some forms to the
classrooms."

"Uh-huh. Who are you?"

He said it like he had a right to ask anybody
anything he wanted. Which was probably how he’d been raised and
educated. It gave me a slightly different feel for the nature of the
student body than the official version I’d gotten from Helen
Tobler. "I’m a truant officer," I said.

The kid smiled. "No, you’re not. You were
asking about Mr. Greenleaf." I wondered just how the hell he
knew that, until he glanced at the open window. "I heard you
talking."

"You always snoop at the window?"

"I heard you mentioning his name." The kid
ducked his head. "It’s awful what happened to him."

"You were a student of his?"

The boy nodded solemnly. "I was in his senior
honors seminar this summer. I’m Lee Marks."

He held out his hand across the counter, and I
started to feel a little better about his manners.
"Harry
Stoner," I said, shaking with him.

"Do you know why he did it?" Lee Marks
said, resting his elbows on the countertop and staring at me with an
earnestness that was touching.

I shook my head. "No, I don’t, Lee."

"I couldn’t believe it when I heard," Lee
Marks said with emotion. "None of us could. He was such a nice
guy. It’s so unfair."

It’s a hard lesson, that one about what’s fair.
And it’s surprising how often you have to learn it before it
sticks, if it ever really does.

"Trimble’s taken over the class now," the
boy went on. "But it’s not the same. Greenie was like a kid
himself. I mean, he knew how to connect with his students. He wasn’t
snotty or condescending like most of them are. He made you feel the
relevance of whatever he was teaching. It was a gift." Lee Marks
shook his head again. "I won’t forget him."

In spite of the fact that we’d gotten off on the
wrong foot, I liked Lee Marks who, as Helen Tobler had said about
Greenleaf, seemed to be a sweet, positive soul.

"You’re going to college in the fall?" I
asked him.

"Harvard."

Behind him the door opened and a tall, balding man
with a thick-lipped, scowling face came into the room. His knobby
cheeks were red and sweaty from the heat, adding to his general look
of unappeasable ire, like a Hindu god. No one had to tell me that he
was the headmaster.

"Who are you?" he said to me in a
no-nonsense voice.

I told him who I was—quick, like a bunny. "Your
assistant, Ms. Tobler, told me to wait here for you."

The man turned the thermostat down on the red,
irritable look. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he tamped the
sweat on his brow as he walked around the counter toward Helen
Tobler’s desk. Almost as an afterthought, he glanced back at the
boy.

"What is it, Marks?"

"Nothing," the kid said, straightening. "I
was just talking to Mr. Stoner."

That didn’t sit well with Tom Snodgrass. "Get
back to class," he snapped.

As Snodgrass turned away from him, Lee Marks gave me
an odd, inquisitive look. He was out the door and Snodgrass was in my
face before I had a chance to make anything of it. But I figured I’d
already heard what I needed to hear—that Greenleaf was as
well-liked by the groundlings as he’d been by the staff.

"Helen didn’t give you permission to talk to
the students, did she?" the man said, sitting down at the desk.

"No. She said I’d have to ask you."

"Then let me tell you right off that I’d
prefer that you didn’t talk to them. When a popular teacher like
Mason passes away, it’s like a death in the family. And when he
takes his own life—well, it’s even worse. The kids need some time
to heal. So do I."

"Ms. Tobler told me that you two were friends."

"We went to grad school together, Mace and I,
twenty years ago. He’s known my wife, Sheila, even longer than
that—since college. Quite frankly, neither Sheila nor I can
understand why he did this. He was a survivor, Mason."

I thought about Del Cavanaugh, who was not going to
survive, and said, "Sometimes survivors feel guilty."

Sighing, Headmaster Tom Snodgrass folded the
handkerchief up and packed it neatly into a pocket. "I’ve said
the same thing to myself. A lot of Mace’s friends, a lot of our
friends, have died recently. It adds to the weight, no question. You
get up in the morning and you feel heavier, more burdened. Nothing
ages you like friends dying, Stoner. It’s the real clock on the
wall."