“Well, I was thinking about starting to work out myself!” Arch protested. “And you know they’re always having those shows on TV about guys dying because they use those hormones. And now you have to be checked before races and games ? “
“Arch,” I said. It was not the first time I longed to throw a brick through the television. “What were you saying about tattling?”
“So Schlichtmaier goes, ‘Steroids? Ach! Swear you won’t tell?’” Arch’s mouth twisted. “He laughed, though. I thought, weird, man. Anyway, that was a couple of days ago. Then the next day he says, ‘You won’t tattle on me?’ I say, ‘No problem, Mr. Schlichtmaier, you want to die of cancer, that’s up to you.’ He says, ‘You promise?’ Boring, man. I say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ And then the snake thing happened and I forgot all about it.”
Great. I looked at Schulz, who shrugged. Better to let go of it for now, especially after all we’d been through that day. Arch got up to clear the table. Julian offered to do the dishwashing. I walked out in the cool October night with Schulz.
“Sounds like a joke, Miss G.,” he said, once again reading my mind. “Way to get a twelve-year-old kid to relax, have a relationship. Make a joke about artificial hormones.”
“But you’re willing to suspect Audrey Coopersmith of murder based on the age of her truck.”
He said, “You know we’re already checking on Schlichtmaier because of what you told us about the other gossip. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know.”
When we arrived at the doors of his squad car, we did not kiss or hug. We did not act as if we were anything other than police officer and solid citizen. You never knew who might be looking. I felt happiness and sadness; I felt the tug of a growing intimacy drawing me as ineluctably as the receding tide takes the unwary swimmer out to unexpected depths. I looked into his eyes and thanked him aloud for his help. He saluted me, then pulled slowly away from the curb.
I ran back inside and picked up the phone with the thumb and little finger of my right hand, then dialed with my left. In the dining room I could hear the cheerful voices of the boys as they constructed their ship.
“Aspen Meadow Recreation Center,” came the answer on the other end after six rings.
“What time does the weight room open in the morning?” I whispered.
“Six. Why, you haven’t been here before?”
“I’ve been there, just not to the weight room.”
“Y’have to have an instructor the first time,” said the voice, suddenly bored.
“Okay, okay, put me down for an instructor,” I said quickly, then gave my name. A flash of inspiration struck. “Does, uh, Egon Schlichtmaier teach over there, by any chance? I know he’s a language teacher somewhere ? “
“The German guy? Nah, Egon doesn’t teach. Sometimes he’s here in the morning, brings a teenager. I asked if he knew Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he goes, ‘He’s from Austria,’ like I was so dumb.” There was a pause. I could hear papers rustling. “I’ll put you down for Chuck Blaster. Twelve bucks. Wear sweats.” A dial tone.
Oh, God. What had I done? Chuck Blaster? That couldn’t possibly be his professional name, could it? But I replaced the receiver and crept up to bed.
He who wants to be a tattler…
I was not convinced it was a joke.
12
The throbbing in my finger woke me up Wednesday morning just as the sunrise began to brighten the horizon. I was lying there, feeling exceedingly sorry for myself when the radio alarm blasted me six inches off the mattress. Blasted, yes. Not unlike Blaster, now part of my ruse for a confrontation with Egon Schlichtmaier. But an early morning session lifting weights with one hand virtually out of commission was not my idea of fun. It seemed the mattress was begging for my return. I ignored its siren call and slipped carefully into a gray sweatsuit, stretched through the yoga salute to the sun and five more asanas, and tried not to think about lifting anything.
In the kitchen I wrote the boys a note. Gone to rec center weight room. This would engender surprised looks, no doubt. My double espresso spurted merrily into a new Elk Park Prep carry-along mug, a heavy plastic container that the seventh-grade parents had been requested (read “strong-armed”) to purchase at the beginning of the school year as a fund-raiser for the kids’ trip to a self-esteem workshop in Denver. Afterward Arch informed me he wasn’t going to think positive unless he absolutely had to. And nobody can make me, he added. That’s what I should have said when it was mug-buying time.
The grass underfoot was slick with frost, and my breath condensed into clouds of moisture in the cold October air. The van engine turned over with a purposeful roar. I ordered myself to think strong and muscular. Maybe I needed a positive-thinking workshop.
The van chugged obediently over streets whitened by a thin sheet of ice. Aspen Meadow Lake appeared around a bend ? a brilliant, perfectly still mirror of early light. The evergreens ringing the shore reflected inverted pines that looked like downward-pointing arrows trapped in glass. Early snows had stripped the nearby aspens and cottonwoods of their leaves. Skeletons of branches revealed the previous summer’s birds’ nests, now abandoned. Without the trees’ masking cloak of foliage, these deep, thick havens of twigs looked surprisingly vulnerable.
Like Keith Andrews.
And so did our household seem vulnerable now too, with accidents or pranks that were becoming increasingly serious. Julian appeared to be coming apart at the seams.
And I had been nastily injured trying to deal with the Stanford rep’s one and only visit to Elk Park Prep. As the caffeine fired up the far reaches of my brain, I tried to reconstruct: Why was someone targeting Arch? If indeed the spider in the drawer was intended for someone, was I that someone?
Without meaning to, I wrenched the wheel to the left l and winced when pain shot up my finger. I’d have to watch the bite area with the weights. Either that or risk passing out. The Mountain Journal?s too cute headline would read: CATERER A DUMBBELL?
An image of the dreaded simile-speaking headmaster invaded my thoughts. Perkins certainly had not been - overeager to find the snake-hanger who plagued Arch. But in the minds of most, which was what Perkins was after all concerned with, he might be considered successful. In his decade at the school, Alfred Perkins had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a much-publicized classroom expansion and renovation. He had masterminded a building program that included an outdoor pool and gymnasium. During parent orientation, some of the friendlier parents-of which I had to admit there were some ? informed me that Perkins had superbly weathered the expected crises of administrative purges, teachers quitting or being fired, and students being expelled. Still, it seemed to me that Alfred Perkins hid behind his great wall of similes without letting too many folks know what was truly transpiring in his silvery-haired noggin. Perhaps that was how he and Elk Park Preparatory School had survived together unscarred, if not unruffled, for ten years.
Still, Perkins must view the past month as being unusually fraught with crises. First there was the splashy story in the Denver Post about the students’ slumping SAT scores. Then, if you believed Marla’s version of town gossip, there had been the threat of local newspaper coverage -by ambitious, clever Keith Andrews ? of a sex scandal. Or some kind of scandal. After the coverage the Post had given the SAT scores, what they would do with a teacher ? sleeps-with-students firebomb at the same school was barely imaginable. And then the most recent crisis, a whole order of magnitude more severe: the valedictorian ,had been killed-murdered on school property. Whether Headmaster Alfred Perkins could survive this lethal threat to his precious school’s shaky stability and not-so-pristine reputation remained to be seen. How heavily he was involved in, or even worried about, these setbacks was a question mark too.
The word from Julian was that Perkins’ tall, center-forward son, Macguire, despite his poor third-quarter standing in the senior class, had a good chance at a basketball school-North Carolina State, Indiana, UNLV. The acne-covered Perkins’ dull voice and drooping eyelids had been eerily impassive even in the face of the chaos surrounding his classmate’s brutal death. Macguire must be quite a disappointment to his status-seeking father, if not to himself. On the other hand, like many comics who acted the dunce, Macguire may have built up his own wall against caring.
I swerved too late to avoid a muddy puddle, then began the ascent to the rec center parking lot. Built in the seventies, the Aspen Meadow Recreation Center was a long, low redbrick building on the hill behind the town’s public high school. “The rec,” as it was affectionately known in town, predated the athletic club and catered to a different local clientele-working-class folks. Anyone who had to labor for a living didn’t have a prayer of an early morning workout at the infinitely tonier Aspen Meadow Athletic Club, which didn’t even open its doors until
