The Academy (35 page)

“The chick on the paper? You knew her?”

Myla nodded.

Brad was surprised, too. He probably didn’t know all of Myla’s friends, but he thought he knew most of them, and he didn’t think she’d ever mentioned Rachel. He wasn’t even sure he knew who she was, though the image in his mind was of a pretty, dark-haired girl in his Intermediate Spanish class last year.

“She was a good writer,” Ed said. “She did that thing on the football players’ grades. . . .”

“She was doing an article about the school.” Myla’s voice was low. “About what’s really going on. I went with her yesterday to see some things she’d learned about.” Myla shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me,” Brad said.

She told them about the PE class and Coach Temple, about the square-dancing class and the female scouts.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this last night?” Brad wanted to know. “We were on the phone for over an hour, and you didn’t even mention it.”

“You wanted to talk about that band and that book, and after that, we went over the homework, and you talked about colleges.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“I don’t
know
why, okay?”

“Okay.” He could sense that she was near tears. “I understand. But where were you this morning? I was worried.”

“I was supposed to meet Rachel, but she didn’t show up. So at break I went to the newspaper office to try and talk to the editor and the adviser. They’re the ones who told me what happened. And they know more than they’re saying. The adviser especially. Mr. Booth. Richard, the editor, almost seems like he wants to talk, but he’s afraid. I was waiting, trying to get him to talk on his own, but then I just ended up wandering around, thinking.”

“You weren’t written up? No scouts found you and took you to the office?”

She shook her head. “I guess I was lucky. I wasn’t even paying attention to what I was doing, really. I was just walking aimlessly.”

Ed had been unusually silent. Brad would have expected some smart-ass remark from him, especially about the naked PE teacher, but his friend seemed surprisingly subdued.

Cheryl, Cindy and Reba passed by. “Harvest Festival meeting after school,” Cheryl reminded Myla.

The three girls neither stopped nor slowed down. “Nice to see you, too!” Brad called after them.

“Sluts,” Ed added.

As one, the girls froze, turning their heads to fix Brad and Ed with stares so cold and hard that they might have been looking at a pair of child molesters. Brad stared right back until the three turned away and continued walking. A shiver of fear tickled his back. “Don’t go to that meeting,” he told Myla.

“I have to. I’m on the committee.”

“All those things you saw, all those things that are happening? They’re part of it.”

“I know,” she told him. “But, theoretically, I’m one of them. And if I dropped out, if I wasn’t one of them anymore . . .” She left the thought unfinished, but Brad knew she was thinking of her friend Rachel.

“Be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

Students were walking more quickly, some of them sprinting, and it was obvious that the bell was about to ring. The three of them said hasty good-byes. He and Ed hurried to their lockers and then to their respective classrooms.

Brad and Myla met up again in economics, but there were too many people around—including three scouts—and they couldn’t talk. There was also a pop quiz, which Brad wasn’t really prepared for, that took up half the period and conspired to keep them apart. Outside class, before leaving her, he gave Myla a hug intimate enough to provoke whistles from some of their departing classmates and a “You’d better knock that off” from one of the scouts.

He held up a middle finger, then kissed her on the forehead, on the cheeks, on the lips. “Stay strong,” he told her.

He met Myla by her locker after school, the way he always did, but this time there was a pair of scouts positioned at the end of the hallway and the two uniformed boys walked slowly forward, holding batons, ordering students to stop talking, stop loitering and leave campus immediately.

“What’s the problem?” demanded a kid several lockers away. “School’s over. We can—”

One of the scouts shoved a baton into his midsection, and the boy doubled over. “Get a move on!” the scout ordered.

Brad and Myla hurried down the hall and off campus, walking through an opening in the nearly completed wall out to the sidewalk. Neither of them wanted to go home right away. They needed time to digest what had happened and talk it over, so they walked down the street to McDonald’s, where they got two straws, ordered a single large Dr Pepper and commandeered a booth.

“I don’t think it’s safe to talk at school anymore,” Brad started out.

Myla nodded. “You’re right.”

“So anything we have to say, anything important, we save for off campus.”

“I just want to know what happened to Rachel.” She took a deep breath. “I know this sounds crazy, and I can’t even believe I’m saying it myself, but I think she was murdered.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Brad assured her. He paused. “You know, my friend Brian Brown’s on the paper. He’s a good guy. I’ll talk to him, see what he knows.”

“What are we caught up in here? Haunted lockers? Security walls? Bottomless cheerleaders? Girls with spears? Naked teachers? Missing students?”

“And I saw a ghost,” he offered. “Van Nguyen’s.” He explained what had happened.

“A lot of stuff seems to be centered around that PE area, doesn’t it?”

“And the library, Ed says. And the office.”

“Who are we kidding?” Myla sighed. “It’s everywhere.” She jumped up suddenly. “Oh my God! The Harvest Festival meeting! I forgot all about it!”

“Don’t go,” Brad said. “I don’t want you to—”

“I have to!” she called out, hurrying toward the exit. “I’m sorry! I’ll call you tonight!”

“But—” he began.

And then she was gone. Through the window, he saw her dashing down the sidewalk back toward the school. Glumly, he stared down at his cup with the two straws. He was half tempted to follow her, or, at the very least, wait for her. He didn’t like the thought of her being on campus after hours. It wasn’t safe. Hell, it wasn’t safe in the middle of the day with all those people around. But he knew she would get mad if he stalked her like that, and he didn’t want to get in an argument with her. Her friend had died; she needed his support right now. The last thing he wanted to do was put more pressure on her or make things more difficult.

He finished the Dr Pepper, refilled the cup, then carried it outside. He took one last look down the street toward the school—that eyesore of a wall was visible even from here—then turned and headed in the opposite direction.

Brad arrived home just in time to see a Tyler Scout leaving his house through the kitchen door near the driveway.
What the hell?
His heart was hammering in his chest, and he watched from the back of a hedge as the scout strode boldly out to the street and then crossed it, turning north in the direction of the school. He couldn’t make out who it was—Todd Zivney, maybe?—and he waited until the figure had turned the corner at the end of the block before he stepped out from behind the hedge. He wasn’t sure why he was so afraid, but he was, and he hurried up the front walkway to his house.

“Mom!” he called out as he sped up the porch steps. “Dad?”

Were his parents even there? Both of them worked, and often he beat them home, especially since his dad had gotten a new job that required him to commute to L.A. every other day. He reached for the knob, turned it. The door was unlocked. Somebody was home.

“Mom? Dad?”

Why had that scout been here? What possible reason could he have had for visiting Brad’s parents? Best-case scenario: he was dropping something off, delivering some sort of paperwork from the office or from one of his teachers. Worst-case scenario? Brad didn’t even want to think about it.

There’d been no answer to his calls, and Brad sped through the living room toward the kitchen. The scout had been leaving through the kitchen door. Which meant that it had probably been his mother the boy had come to see.

“Mom?” he called, hurrying in.

She was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, her back against the refrigerator, her dress hiked up far above her knees. He could see bruises on her upper thighs, though that was a place he didn’t even want to look at. Her eyes had been closed when he entered, and her mouth open, but she quickly opened her eyes, closed her mouth and tried to immediately rearrange the expression on her face so that it didn’t look like she was in pain.

She attempted to smile. “I fell,” she told him. “Slipped on water or something. Just give me a minute.”Her eyes closed again, and he saw that there was discoloration in the skin around the left one. She was going to have a black eye.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said weakly. “I’m going to volunteer to help out with the Thanksgiving food drive at your school next month. It’s a good cause. And Tyler does a fine job of helping the community.”

“Mom . . . ,” Brad said, kneeling beside her. He was trying hard not to cry.

She patted his hand, then used his shoulder to help draw herself to her feet. “I’m fine. Just slipped.”

“I saw him leaving,” Brad said. “The scout. That kid from my school. Why was he here?”

An expression of fear passed quickly over her features but was gone before it even registered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I
saw
him, Mom. He went right out that door.”

“Thanks for helping me up,” she told him. “I’d better get dinner started.”

“You’re not in any shape to—”

“I’m fine.”

“Mom . . .”

“I’m going to be volunteering more at your school, I think. It’ll be good. It’s a good thing.” She turned away, lurching over to the sink. “It’ll be good for both of us.”

Brad saw, on the tiled floor in front of the refrigerator, where she’d been sitting, a small drop of smeared blood.

This time he did cry. “Mom,” he said. She turned toward him, and he grabbed her, hugged her and held her tight. She reached a tentative arm around him and squeezed, and then both of them were sobbing.

Nineteen

The phone rang, and as usual, Frank let the machine pick up. More likely than not, it was something to do with Linda’s school, and he didn’t want to get dragged into one of
those
conversations again. The last time he’d actually answered the phone, an angry PTA parent had threatened to castrate him for not showing up to the Dinner-with-Dads event. He’d tried to explain that he was not a PTA member, that he had no children attending the school, that he wasn’t even a dad, but the furious woman had vowed to feed his genitals to her koi fish. The time before that, someone had called to confirm his address before dropping off a shipment of one hundred calf fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. When he’d politely pointed out that he had not ordered any calf fetuses preserved in formaldehyde, the man had become irate and said that he held in his hand an order form signed by Jody Hawkes that said one hundred of them were to be delivered to the residence of Frank Webster. The man was yelling obscenities when Frank hung up on him.

So lately he’d been letting the machine take the calls, although he always deleted the messages before Linda came home, and he never told her about any of them. She had enough to worry about already.

The answering machine beeped, and he listened in on the message as it was recorded. This time, it was a contest Linda had supposedly won. The pitchman’s smooth voice said that out of all the teachers at John Tyler High School who had automatically been entered in a contest for a free, all-expenses-paid Las Vegas weekend, Linda had been selected. . . .

Frank ignored the message, went back to work. He stared for a moment at his frozen monitor. He was starting to get frustrated. Somehow, he’d gotten a virus on his computer, although he had no idea how such a thing was possible. He’d constructed a firewall strong enough to withstand almost any assault, and he was always ultracautious about what software he used and which Web sites he visited. Right now, he was using a series of utilities to try to locate the virus because if he didn’t, all of today’s work—which he hadn’t had time to back up—would be lost. He was already close to a week behind on his current project, which, during these unsettled times at the company, could conceivably put him on the chopping block.