“Hello,” she said.
“Mary” – the receptionist stood now – “these are the Deavers. They were hoping to get a tour of the school, but they don’t have an appointment.”
“Lovely,” Mary said. “I’m the principal, Mary Ann Mankoff.”
They introduced themselves again as Greg and Susan Deaver. “We won’t get in the way. We just wanted to walk around the school, if that’s okay.”
“I’ll take you around,” Principal Mankoff said. “It won’t take a few minutes, as you can see.”
“We hate to bother you,” Davis said. Truthfully, they hoped to explore on their own.
“Not a bother,” she said. “Alice, we’ll be back in fifteen.”
Up and down the two parallel hallways, Mary Mankoff quizzed Davis and Joan on their fictional biographies. They had a son who was seven, and they were doctors who were hoping to set up a general practice here in the country.
“Really? Well, out here in the country, you can never say no to a couple of new doctors.”
Joan tried to get the principal in the rhythm of answering questions instead of asking them, and Davis thought Joan sounded appropriately curious about such things as Iowa tests and the percentage of graduates from the high school that go on to university. Principal Mankoff even took them briefly into a classroom, opening the door quietly to a few tiny turning heads. She gave an apologetic wave to the teacher, who returned it with a curious but understanding nod.
Principal Mankoff counted off statistics on her hand – rank in the state, reading scores, ACT averages from the high school – and as they approached the office again, Davis wondered if he’d have to ask specifically, when they stopped at a narrow hall he hadn’t noticed.
“Let me just show you the library,” Mary Ann said. “We’re quite proud of it.”
The room was, indeed, large for a grade school, with books arranged across shelves along every wall, and also on four freestanding stacks that filled up one half. On the other side, fifteen or so children sat on tiny rectangles of carpet as the librarian read them a story about teenaged detectives foiling a smuggling plot. Mary Ann whispered that a locally famous author had donated the library. “He built one for the high school as well,” she said.
They stood for another moment as Davis and Joan pretended to marvel at the built-in shelving and brass plaques counting off the Dewey Decimals. Joan nudged Davis when her eye caught something in one of the stacks. She pointed and he saw it, too: a sign that read : BRIXTON SCHOOL ARCHIVES.
Another teacher, a woman who, Davis presumed, was responsible for these children the other seven periods of the day, tugged at Mary Ann’s elbow. “Can I talk to you a second, Mary? About the assembly Friday?” Mary Ann excused herself and she and the teacher left through the narrow door to the hall.
Davis and Joan walked over to the archive shelves, and Joan quickly skimmed with her eyes and fingers the years on dozens of leather scrapbooks. Davis did the math in his head – Justin’s age today, Jimmy Spears’s date of birth – adding and subtracting from the current year in adjacent columns.
“There. That one. First grade.”
Joan spread the blue volume across the flannel-skirted lap she had forged sitting on her heels and flipped through the acid-free pages as Davis stooped behind her. Each page held, in pasted photo corners, a pair of class pictures, the students divided up by teacher. Unlike the class photos Davis remembered from his own school days, the children were not lined up on expandable bleachers, with short kids segregated on the gym floor. Instead, each class was represented by twenty individual head shots, with a similar picture of the teacher. Underneath each class was a typed listing of the students by row, cut out with scissors and taped to the page (carelessly, with yellowing Scotch tape), and Joan and Davis scanned the years and names together. She spotted it first:
Preston, P.; Spears, J.; Thoms, L.; Yaley, L…
“There.” She pointed.
Davis looked at the photo. He checked the name. He looked at Joan. She shrugged. Young Jimmy looked nothing like seven-year-old Justin.
“Sorry for leaving you like that.” Principal Mankow stood over them. “I see you found our school history. That’s Jimmy Spears. There. Second from left. The football player.”
“Very interesting,” Davis said.
“You must be proud of him,” Joan said.
“We all are,” Principal Mankow said.
A half hour later, at a restaurant called, with extreme lack of irony, the Brixton Diner, Davis and Joan took opposite sides of a window booth, sliding themselves across benches made from nearly equal amounts of old red vinyl and blue vinyl patches. Weiss was to meet them here at 1 p.m., which was now.
The door frame was crowned by a bracket with a bell, and Joan and Davis, the only customers for the time being despite the lunch hour, turned together toward its tinny chimes. The man who entered was very short, with most of that lack of height in legs rather than torso, cursing him with a bit of a waddle. He was also hairy in undesirable places – up from his collar and out from his cuffs – but less so on the top of his pink and freckled head, seen through the thin mesh of his baseball cap.
“Hello, Judge Forak?” Rick Weiss said, shaking hands.
Joan squinted curiously at Davis but didn’t say anything.
“Hello,” Davis said.
He took a seat next to Davis. “What did you find out? Should I notify my banker to expect a deposit?” He said it with a derisive snort that suggested to Davis that Weiss didn’t have a bank, much less a banker.
“He’s not our guy,” Joan said.
The bottom half of the man’s face went slack while the top half became scarlet and taut. “What do you mean? You sent around a bad drawing of Jimmy Spears and I showed you where to find Jimmy Spears.”
“It’s like she told you,” Davis said. “He’s not our guy.”
Rick Weiss slapped his palms on the tabletop and pressed his fingers hard against the Formica until his cuticles were bleached. “You’re trying to rip me off.”
“It’s not like that,” Joan said.
“I knew it! There ain’t no money.”
“If we were planning to rip you off, would we even bother to meet you here?” Davis was disgusted with having to defend himself. He muttered the next at low volume, knowing it should matter, sure that it wouldn’t. “This is a courtesy.”
“It’s him. It’s Spears, I’m telling you.” Ricky was fighting the temptation to yell, and so his words came out in a hoarse cry. He was blaspheming the local hero. He produced a piece of paper with a picture of Spears, clipped from the Brixton weekly paper, pasted next to one of the sketches Davis had posted on the Internet. “Jimmy’s capable of just about anything. I know the man, known him since we were kids. He thinks he’s special. Entitled. You should hear the stories some of the girls used to tell about him. What he forced them to do. How he took advantage because he was this big football star, even back then. High school football is big around here, and that fame, I think it went to his head. Made him psycho or somethin’. Like I said, you should hear the stories. I could get some girls I know to tell you firsthand…”
Davis didn’t want to hear stories. “Jimmy just isn’t the man we’re looking for.” He took a fifty-dollar bill he’d preplanted in his shirt pocket and slid it across the table. “For your trouble.”
Weiss crumpled the fifty in his fist as if he was about to throw it back. He didn’t. “Screw you, Forak.” He pushed himself up from the booth and waddled toward the door. He pointed at Joan. “And screw you too, bitch!” The waitress behind the counter cringed as the door slammed and tinkled behind him. She looked at Davis and mouthed an apology. On behalf of the whole community, he assumed.
That night, back in Lincoln, at the Marriott by the airport, in the bar, under a baseball game on TV, Joan also told Davis she was sorry.
“Sorry?” Davis wondered aloud. “For what?”
“I wanted it to be him,” she said. “I thought it could be him.”
A gulp of the Macallan leaked down Davis’s throat so quickly he didn’t even taste it. He took another sip and let it sit on his tongue. “I didn’t. I mean, I wanted it to be him, but didn’t think there was much of a chance.”
“Seriously?”
Davis shrugged. “Football star by day, rapist/killer by night. It seemed a little far-fetched. The guy who killed
