I sipped and looked at the clock. Ten o'clock. The odd feeling of being alone in my home with Schulz brought full wakefulness despite the fact that catering in the evening usually exhausted me. My mind traveled back to the Marenskys and the Dawsons, Brad Marensky morose and silent, Macguire Perkins embarrassed when ordered to shut up. When our tiny glasses were again empty, Schulz stood and walked out to the living room. I followed. The place still smelled faintly of smoke, and the pale yellow walls were the color of toasted marshmallow. In the near future I would have to hire someone to do a cleanup. Schulz got down on one knee to peer up the chimney.
"Any ideas? Did you ever hear anything out on the roof?"
"No ideas, no weird sounds. My theory is that this is the same person who did the rock and the snake. I wish I knew who was so pissed off with me. Arbitration would be cheaper than making glass repairs and paying for professional cleaning."
"Somebody strong, somebody athletic," Schulz mused. "The only thing all these things have in common is a threat to Arch. Scare him while he's home alone, put something in the locker, fill the house with smoke while he's here with you and Julian... but that part wasn't planned, was it?"
"Being home? No, he fell on the icy front steps, prelude to Marla. Maybe that one was meant for me," I said wryly, remembering the spider-bite incident.
"Who's mad at you? Or Arch?" His eyes probed mine and he gently took my hand, then reeled me in like a slow-motion jitterbug dancer.
"I don't know," I murmured into his chest. He was warm; the clean smell of aftershave clung to his skin. I pulled back. Around his dark pupils was only a ring of green luminosity.
"All this talk about starting fires..." I said with a small smile.
And up we tiptoed to the silent second story. The cognac, the desire, the comfort of Schulz, seeped through me like one of those unexpected warm currents you encounter in the ocean. In the dark of my room he stood beside me while we looked out at the glowing jack-o'-lanterns in the neighborhood. He rubbed my back, then kissed my ear. I set my alarm for four and then slipped out of my clothes. We both laughed as we dove for the bed. It was a good thing Schulz always used protection. Ever since we had started making love, I had forgotten the meaning of the word caution.
When he pulled me next to him between the cool sheets, his large, rough hands brought calm to nerves inside and out. When he kissed me, something in my brain loosened. Before long I had abandoned not only caution but all the other petty worries that had crowded into my brain.
After our lovemaking Schulz went downstairs. He came back up and said, "Twenty minutes," then got dressed.
"Until what?"
"Until the first shift of your surveillance shows up."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, why? I mean, why now?"
He counted off on his fingers as he enumerated. "Two murders, broken glass, anonymous phone calls, a poisonous snake followed by a poisonous spider, booby-trapped steps, and a vandalized chimney, which I didn't get to see until now. And a woman with two boys who won't move out, despite the best advice of her local cop."
"Arch will call his friends," I retorted mildly, "focus on the squad car with his high-powered binoculars, and pretend we're in the middle of a coup. Your cops will think we're nuts."
"You'd be surprised at how many loonies we get."
"Actually," I ventured, "why don't you just do the surveillance?"
"I wish."
I pulled on a bathrobe and stood by a bedroom window. Glowing pumpkin-candles illuminated the silky night air. Schulz went outside to his car. Five minutes later, an unmarked police car showed up. I watched Schulz leave, then I watched the jack-o'-lantern flames flicker and die. Eventually I slipped back into my empty bed that smelled of Tom Schulz. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, until the alarm surprised me.
Groaning, I slipped out of bed to start stretching in the dark. My yoga teacher had told me once that if you were just going through the motions, it wasn't yoga. So I emptied my mind and my breath and started over, saluting to the east, where there was as yet no sun, then breathing and allowing my body to flow through the rest of the routine until I was revitalized and ready to meet the day, even if we were only four and a half hours into it.
Too bad they didn't have a resident yogi at Elk Park Prep, I mused on my way downstairs. How could you have class rank with yoga? Its whole essence was noncompetitive, the striving with one's own body rather than being obsessed with the accomplishments of others. Which is what education should be, I decided as a jet-black stream of espresso spurted into one of my white porcelain cups. Stretching oneself. But no one was asking me. My eyes fell on the folded papers still on my kitchen table - the article printout from Keith's computer disk. Correction: Schulz had asked me. I sat down with my coffee and started to read.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
- Anatomy of a Hoax
As a senior at Elk Park Prep, this fall I have visited ten of the top colleges and universities in this country. The qualification "top" is commonly given by the media and, of course, by the colleges themselves. I went to these schools because this higher-education journey is one I will be taking soon. It's a journey I've been looking forward to. Why? Because of what I thought I would find: 1) enthusiastic teachers, 2) a contagious love of learning, 3) academic peers with whom I would have mind-altering discussions, 4) the challenge of taking tests and writing papers that would give me 5) an introduction to new fields of learning so that I would have 6) the chance to develop my abilities.
I expected to find these things, but guess what? They weren't there. My parents could have shelled out eighty-plus thousand dollars for a hoax!
The first place I visited I went for two days of classes. I never saw a full professor the entire time, although several Nobel prizewinners had prominent photographs in the college catalogue. I went to five classes. I wish I could tell you what they were about, but they were all taught by graduate students with foreign accents so thick I couldn't tell what they were saying.... I went to an all-boys school next. I never even saw humans teaching courses, only videotaped lectures. Over the weekend I wanted to have intellectual discussions. But all the guys had left to go to the campus of a girls' school nearby.
The next place had real people teaching. So I went to a section meeting of the introduction to art history. It turned out the class was concentrating on thirteenth-century Dutch Books of Hours. The instructor said at one point that something was a prelude to Rembrandt, and one of the kids said, Who's Rembrandt? After the class I asked why the instructor was teaching such an obscure topic, and one of the students said, Well, that was the subject of the instructor's dissertation, and he was trying to do his research while teaching the class.... I knew somebody from Elk Park Prep at the next place I visited. She graduated from our school five years ago and was now a graduate student. She needed to talk to her advisor about her dissertation, but he was doing research in Tokyo, and hadn't been at the college for two years... Finally I visited a school with a fantastic teacher! I went to his class on modern European drama. It was jammed with students. They were having a lively discussion of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and nobody was using Cliff's Notes. The professor was storming back and forth, asking why did Hedda Gabler just keel over at the end. After all the disappointment at the other schools, I came out feeling great! But when the class was over, the other students were glum. When I asked why, they said that this fabulous assistant professor, who had just won the Excellence in Teaching award. had been denied tenure! He hadn't published enough.... Who is supporting this hoax in higher education? Certainly not yours truly. Do American students really want this false pedigree? Do we want good teaching, or an empty reputation? Do we want an educational process, or an impersonal stamp of approval? Students in the schools, unite....
Well, well. He sounded like a valedictorian, all right. In a number of ways the article resembled Keith's speech the night he died. But this essay was not an expose. There was really nothing in it anyone would kill to keep secret. Not that anyone else knew that, however.
Keith Andrews must have posed a threat to someone. Julian hadn't liked him, and neither had a number of the other students. And in the last two weeks, somebody or bodies had been trying to hurt Arch and me. Why? What was the connection between the murder and the attempts on us? Was the murder of Kathy Andrews in Lakewood part of the killer's scheme? How did the Neiman-Marcus credit card figure in what was going on? None of it added up.
Outside, the chilly Halloween night had given way to a snowy All Saints' morning. Because the first Saturday in November is notorious for heavy snowfall, the College Board opted to give the SATs locally in the mountain area rather than have all the Aspen Meadow students attempt the trek to Denver, forty miles away. In the spirit of noblesse oblige, Headmaster Perkins had ordered me to prepare quadruple the amount of morning snack, so we could serve - his words - "the masses." Time to get cracking.
I got out strawberries, cantaloupe, oranges, and bananas, and began to slice. Soon hills of jewellike fruit glistened on my cutting boards. Worry about Julian again surfaced. Had he been safe at his friend Neil's house? As far as I knew, he had slept less than twenty hours this entire week. Julian, the college-scholarship kid. Why had someone done that for him?
When I finished the fruit I started mixing the muffin batters. From the freezer I took the doughnuts I had been making during the smoke episode, along with extra homemade rolls from the clergy meeting. With these set out to thaw, I mixed peanut butter into flour and eggs for the final batch of muffins and set it into the other oven, and then began to put together something I had only been thinking about, something with whole grain but sweet, like granola. My food processor blended unsalted butter into brown and white sugars. I repressed a shudder. Given the school's reputation, I should call these Cereal Killer Cookies.
I scraped ice cream scoopfuls of the thick batter onto cookie sheets, took all the muffins out of the oven, then nipped outside with two hot ones wrapped in a cloth napkin. The policeman doing the surveillance accepted them gratefully. He wouldn't follow me to the school. His orders were to watch the house, not me. Back inside, the enticing scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When they were done, I packed up several gallons of chilled vanilla yogurt along with the rest of the goodies and set out for Elk Park Prep, waving to the officer in his squad car as I pulled away. He saluted me with a muffin and a grin.
The heavy clouds sprinkling thick snowflakes reminded me of detergent showering into a washing machine. Someone had the foresight to call the county highway people and get the road to Elk Park Prep plowed. At seven, after carefully rounding the newly plowed curves, I arrived at the school driveway, where a pickup with a CAT was smoothing a lane through the thick, rumpled white stuff.
I skirted the truck, put the van in first gear, and started slowly up the snow-packed asphalt, already much traveled by vehicles carrying test-taking students. In a spirit of Halloween festivity, the elementary grades had carved row upon row of pumpkins to line the long entrance to the school. But the sudden cold wave had softened and crumpled the orange ovoids so that their yawning, jagged-toothed mouths, their decaying, staring faces now leered upward under powdery white masks of snow. A jack-o'-lantern graveyard. Not what I'd want to see the day of a big test.
The parking lot was already three-fourths full. With relief I noticed the heavily stickered VW bug that belonged to Julian's friend, Neil Mansfield. When I came through the front doors that were still draped with wilted black crepe paper, Julian spotted me through the crowd of students and rushed over to help.
"No, no, that's okay," I protested as he took a box. "Please go back over to your friends."
Cereal Killer Cookies
2 ¬ cups old-fashioned oats
2 6-ounce packages almond brickIe chips (Bits O' Brickle)
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
« teaspoon salt
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
_ cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 375ø. In a small bowl, mix the oats with the brickle chips. Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together. In a food processor, mix the sugars until blended, then gradually add the butter. Continue to process until creamy and smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla and process until blended. Add the flour mixture and process just until combined. Pour this mixture over the, oats and brickIe chips and stir until well combined. Using a 2-tablespoon measure, measure out scoops of dough and place at least 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool on wire racks. Makes 4 to 5 dozen.
"I can't," he said brusquely. He hoisted the box up on one knee of his jeans and shot me a beseeching look. "They're driving me nuts asking each other vocabulary questions. After that bookstore meeting last night, Neil and I played five-card draw until midnight. It was so great! The only question we asked each other was, How many cards do you want?"
