Jefferson William Shermon considered himself a genius and knew he was a sadist. He decided to become a school superintendent while still in grade school. It had occurred while he was waiting in the principal's office with three of his friends. They had been caught smoking in the bathroom. Although he was afraid, he reveled in the fear being generated by his friends as they were called into the office one at a time. Jefferson loved the fear so much, he became the school informer. Always careful to avoid being caught tattling, he would turn in a student and covertly watch their anguish as they were brought to the office. He became skilled at setting up his friends and enemies.
The more he learned about his chosen profession the more he loved it. The only group that could wield as much power as he could were the teachers, and they were on the defensive. It had started years ago when some bright authors with an axe to grind started to pick and choose educational statistics. Who cares if most of the world envies our education system, you can always make it look bad. Sure we graduate a much higher percentage of students than the rest of the world and still are only a couple of percentage points off the best scores but you can always point out that there are a half a dozen countries that rank higher in those few percentage points. If the ratio of failing students goes down in one area, you can point out that raw numbers of failing students are going up and just neglect to point out the student population increased as well. Besides, there is always a survey done somewhere that points out a problem. By the end of the Reagan administration, the myth of massive numbers of bad teachers and bad teaching had become an accepted fact. The politics of destruction dictated that the people put in charge of education had to be chosen by how much they wanted to destroy the current system. The current mythology had even penetrated the educational system itself. It was an accepted axiom of all education administrators that a bad student is always the teacher's fault, even if the student is a Charlie Manson or a Ted Bundy.
When Jefferson was taking his graduate courses to become an administrator, he discovered a study buried in the literature that showed huge increases in student performance. Out of curiosity, he looked further and found the study had been done over and over again showing the same results. At first, he didn't understand why the studies had been buried. When he finally realized why, he became even more proud of his chosen profession.
The studies showed that the smaller the class size the better the students did, no fancy teaching scheme, no miracle system, just more teachers. Over the last few decades, the money and power in the schools had shifted dramatically to the administration of the system. Smaller class sizes would mean more teachers. More teachers would mean less power to the principals, superintendents, school boards, etc. Better to attack the teachers' unions and try to privatize education then to let the reins of power go. Privatization had never worked and never would, but the breaking apart of the current public education system would mean even more power to those controlling the flow of money, the administrators. By the time Jefferson got his first job as a principal, his pride in the deviousness of his job knew no bounds.
The day was going great. He sat in on a review of the new history teacher with the high school principal. By the end of the review he knew that his principal, Joe Kawalski, would try to pressure her into bed before she got her tenure. That excited him because he would then be able to blackmail her into bed himself. The sex didn't excite him as much as forcing her and seeing Joe's face when he let him find out about it.
Right now he was going through his one-hour preparation for the monthly school board meeting. His school board was in many ways a standard small town board. A retired teacher and one smart mother-he enjoyed thinking of her in that way-were the two troublemakers. The remaining board members were easily controlled. The third member was the twenty-seven-year-old son of the local banker. His father wanted him in state politics and ordered him to run for the school board as a starting point. The fourth board member was a local doctor. He felt he should be on the board as his part of community service but was so busy with his own work he just rubberstamped whatever Jefferson wanted. The fifth member had been on the board so many years that he had grown senile. The sixth member was a mother who had five children. The oldest, a nineteen year old, had just been sentenced to twenty years to life in the state penitentiary. The mother blamed all her troubles on her children's teachers.
In order to get _Them_, the teachers, she convinced her church, a strict fundamentalist denomination, to back her election. The seventh and last was a wife of a local hardware storeowner. She was dumber than the doorknobs her husband sold but she worshiped strong people. She would look at Jefferson with those big doe eyes your hear about but seldom see.
The only way the day could get better was if he had an excuse to fire a teacher. He always thought it was funny how the politicians would, during their campaigns, complain how you couldn't fire a bad teacher because of the union-backed tenure laws. You could always fire a teacher if you had an excuse. You just had to do your job. All teaching contracts had simple procedures that could be followed to fire a teacher for cause. Jefferson was always disgusted by the superintendent or principal who couldn't follow the rules and fire a teacher. He voted ultra- conservative Republican because he wanted to be able to fire a teacher for fun.
Jefferson fantasized for the next few minutes about being able to walk down the hall and into the teachers' workroom and fire a faculty member one month before his retirement benefits started. The smile was erased from his face by the knock on the front door.
'Thelma, I told you no disruptions before the board meeting.'
'Sorry, Mr. Shermon, but two sheriff's deputies are here. They want to talk to you about a complaint they received about a teacher.'
Thelma missed the smile that erupted on Jefferson's face. By the time the two cops entered the room, all that could be seen on Jefferson's face was a scowl of great concern. Jefferson was barely able to control his glee when he heard the name James Makinen. He knew that after the divorce, James had nearly broken down. If he handled the allegations correctly, he should be able to completely destroy James. He had only completely broken one other person before, and he still relished the look of abject despair on his former girlfriend's face those twenty years ago the night before her suicide. Tonight after the board meeting, he would use the leather straps on his wife. His wife's face twisted in pain would be the jewel crowning the best day so far in his life.
* * * *
James lived on a three-acre plot he purchased on the corner of his cousin's farm. He had pulled onto the lot a rebuilt fourteen-by-sixty trailer house. The land and trailer had been purchased using a loan his father had given him after his ex-wife had left for California. The payments to his father and the utilities, child support and food bills left him the grand total of seventy-five dollars per month for luxuries such as furniture and clothing. The trailer had been delivered with a complete kitchen and built-in closets. In the living/dining room, he had a used 19-inch TV and VCR on an old coffee table, a frayed recliner and three mismatched wooden chairs.
Originally, the trailer had three bedrooms. He had a mattress in the largest bedroom, nothing in the second, and had removed the wall from the third to add its space to the living room. With all that empty space, he was able to do all his katas and T'ai-Chi without bumping into walls or chairs. The only other piece of furniture in the whole house was a barstool for the counter in the kitchen. He ate his meals at the kitchen counter sitting on that ratty old barstool.
James had been working on his T'ai-Chi for an hour and was just about to change to a kata when the knocking on the front door interrupted him.
* * * *
_The light switches on. The shadowed figure reaches to the deck and turns over a card._
On the card face, a young man caught in mid-stride is holding a sword
aloft.
_The hands lightly tapped the table in curiosity before turning off the light. Steps are heard followed by the creaking of a door hinge._
CHAPTER 3: The Page of Swords
Al Gallea squirmed in the seat. His first time out on an investigation! This was why he left the police force in Minneapolis to join a county sheriff's department. If he had stayed in Minneapolis, it would have been about five more years before he would have gone out on an investigation.
Although he took notes, he could not remember any of the details of their conversation with Jefferson William Shermon, other than the man's name. He was that excited. He did get the impression that the superintendent
