that would just be a waste of money-and so they did nothing.”
“It’s a sweet old school,” Des said. “Seems a shame to level it.”
“I couldn’t agree more. It has its problems, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Superintendent Falconer has tried to tell Mrs. Leanse-she’s our school board president.”
“Ben’s mother?”
“That’s right. But you know it’s very hard to argue with a parent who feels his or her child’s health is endangered. They want to do the best they can for their children. They’ve spent hundreds of hours working the phones, licking envelopes, packing the school board meetings. They even raised twenty-five thousand dollars of private funds to produce a ten-minute video that went out to every voter in town. All I keep thinking is, if you really care that much about the school, twenty-five thousand would buy us a lot of plumbing repairs. Or computers. Or a security system. Besides, the reality is that it’s not the size of the building that matters. It’s the size of the class and the caliber of the teacher and…” She glanced at Des apologetically. “I’ll shut up now. You asked me a perfectly innocent question about mold and you’re getting an entire lecture.”
“I’m getting insight. I need that.”
They pushed open the double doors at the end of the hall and started out onto the playground behind the school. The superintendent’s office was in the middle school, a twenty-year-old flat-roofed brick building that was located across an expanse of blacktop.
“You handled the children very well,” Miss Frye said, leading Des past the swings and monkey bars.
“I was thinking I could have been a little less confrontational with Ricky.”
“Not at all. You were straight with him. He needs to be talked to that way. They all do. I’m sorry about his language. His older brother, Ronnie, was a handful, too. He’s over at the high school now. Ronnie was just incredibly disruptive. Him they put on Ritalin, and he did better, but the mother was around then. Jay’s raising the boys alone now, and he has his own problems. It’s a real shame, because they’re both very bright. Ronnie’s probably the brightest student in our entire system. His IQ tested exceptionally high. But he’s bored and he’s angry, so he self-medicates.”
“He’s a garbagehead?”
“They caught him inhaling a computer keyboard cleaner out behind the Science Building last year.”
“What was it, Duster Two?”
“That’s it. He and two other boys. All three of them were suspended.”
“Is there a lot of huffing in this town?”
“You wouldn’t think so, but Dorset isn’t Oz.”
“Even Oz wasn’t Oz,” Des pointed out as they passed through the door into the middle school. “What happened to Ricky’s eye?”
“He gets in a lot of fights.”
“This I can well imagine. Are you sure it didn’t happen in the home?”
Miss Frye puffed out her cheeks. “Trooper, I’m not sure of anything.”
When they arrived at Superintendent Falconer’s outer office, Des encountered a harried, frantic secretary and a short, big-chested woman with bushy hair who was about to explode.
“Okay, what seems to be the problem?” Des asked them calmly.
“The problem is that I have been waiting out here like a piece of garbage for thirty minutes!” the short woman retorted angrily. “The superintendent is supposed to meet with me. Colin is in there. I saw him go in there. I have never encountered such rudeness, such-such-”
“Trooper Mitry, this is Babette Leanse, president of our school board,” Miss Frye said quietly.
“You must be Ben’s mom,” Des said, smiling at her.
“I have an appointment!” she blustered, unswerving in her rage. She was an intensely focused, hard-charging little human blowtorch in a cashmere cardigan sweater and finely tailored wool slacks. Des made her for about forty. Her shock of black hair was streaked with silver. “That man knows I’m out here!”
“I see,” Des said patiently. “And the problem is…?”
“I’ve buzzed him repeatedly,” spoke up Colin’s frazzled secretary, whose desk nameplate identified her as Melanie Zide. She was a dumpy, moon-faced young woman with a pug nose, limp henna hair, eyes that looked sneaky behind clunky black-framed glasses. “I called out his name. I knocked. H-He just won’t answer. And his door is locked from the inside and I don’t have a key. I’ve got the custodian searching for one, but…”
Des jiggled the knob. It was locked all right. “Is there a window in there?”
“There is,” Melanie said, chewing nervously on the inside of her mouth. “But it has security bars over it. And his venetian blinds are closed. You can’t see anything.”
Des tried rapping on the door. “Superintendent Falconer!? Colin!?” Then she put a shoulder to it. It didn’t give. The frame was solid. There was a transom over it, of frosted glass. She pulled a sturdy chair over in front of the door and climbed up on it, placing her at eye level with the transom. She tried to pry it open with her pocket knife, only it was latched shut from the inside. She pursed her lips, frowning. “You’re sure he’s in there?”
“Positive,” said Babette Leanse.
“For at least a half hour,” Melanie added, her voice strained.
Des asked the others to get away from the door and used the butt end of her Sig on the frosted glass, smashing a jagged hole that she could see through.
What she saw was Colin Falconer slumped face-down at his desk, unconscious. On the desk, next to his left hand, there was an empty prescription pill bottle.
“Call nine-one-one,” she ordered Melanie Zide sharply. “Tell them we need EMS now. We’ve got a possible overdose.”
Miss Frye let out a gasp as Melanie lunged for the phone.
Babette Leanse just stood there with her mouth open, speechless.
The custodian still could not find a key to the superintendent’s door. Des asked him for a pry bar instead. He returned with a foot-long crowbar that she applied to the lock while he threw his weight against the door. The frame gave with a sharp crack and they went in, the broken transom glass crunching underfoot.
Colin was breathing. His respiration was shallow, his pulse rapid, skin pale and cool. “He’s in shock,” Des said, checking the pill bottle. It was diazepam, the generic name for Valium. The bottle, if full, would have held fifty tablets, ten milligrams each. “We’ll need blankets.”
The custodian ran to get some from the nurse’s office.
“Colin, you fool,” Miss Frye said from the doorway, her voice heavy with sadness. “You stupid, stupid fool.”
The ambulance got there in less than five minutes, pulling right up onto the playground next to the building, its siren silent so as not to alarm the children. Margie and Mary Jewett, who headed Dorset’s volunteer ambulance corps, were no-nonsense sisters in their late fifties. Des had already encountered them at a couple of fender benders and found them to be well-trained and unflappable.
Margie checked Colin Falconer’s blood pressure while Mary hooked him up to a cardiac monitor, the two of them barking shorthand at each other. They did the Roto-Rooter thing on his stomach, then gave him oxygen and administered two hundred milliliters of saline solution through a large-bore intravenous catheter while they continued to monitor his vital signs. He was now semiconscious, murmuring incoherently under his breath.
“He’s still a bit shocky,” Margie told Des. “But he’s healthy and strong and it’s pretty hard to kill yourself on Valium.”
“Unless you’re blind drunk to boot,” Mary added.
When they had him stabilized Margie wheeled in the stretcher and they loaded him onto it. “Let’s move!” she called out.
“Moving!” Mary affirmed.
And they hustled Colin Falconer out the door and off to the Middlesex Clinic in Essex, leaving Des to notify his next of kin.
“I guess that would be his wife, Greta,” Melanie Zide spoke up. “She should be at the gallery by now.”
Des thanked Melanie for the information, and Miss Frye for her help. The young teacher smiled at her tightly before she returned to her classroom, leaving Des with Babette Leanse. And the distinct impression that Dorset’s school superintendent had tried to take his own life rather than face this woman.
“Mrs. Leanse, exactly what was this meeting between you two about?”
