the classroom.”
He shrank from my attempt to touch his arm, but slouched along next to me without protest toward the classroom where Egon Schlichtmaier had just closed the door. I glanced up at Macguire. The boy was shaking.
“Come on!” I exhorted him. “Think of it as being like basketball practice. Do it for a couple of hours and hope for the best.”
He looked down at me, finally. His pupils were dilated with fear. Dully, he said, “I feel like shit.” And without waiting for my response, he opened the door to the classroom and slipped inside.
I scolded myself all the way back to the foyer, where I scooped up dropped napkins and paper cups, cleared away paper bowls and plastic spoons, and covered the remaining muffins, bread, and fruit. There were crumbs everywhere. Basketball practice? Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.
The SAT was scheduled to take three hours. There would be only two five-minute breaks. The headmaster and Miss Ferrell had determined that it would be best not to try to serve the food more than once. And speaking of the college advisor, I had to find out where we were supposed to meet after the test. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked down to Miss Ferrell’s classroom. Unlike the other unused classrooms, it was unlocked but dark. I turned the lights on and waited. The desk was a mess of papers, indicating perhaps that she had been in to do some work but was coming back. Sipping my coffee, I waited for her over an hour, through the two five-minute breaks, but she was obviously involved with students.
Returning to the foyer, I decided to consolidate the food and wash my own empty dishes and bowls rather than haul them all home dirty. I found liquid soap, filled the porcelain basins of the old hotel kitchen with hot soapy water, and got to work, humming. Without a dishwasher the task took quite a bit longer than I anticipated. Oh, well, at least I wasn’t in one of those classrooms, trying to figure out the meaning of words like eleemosynary.
Once the dishes were laid on the counters to dry, I came back out to the foyer. Crumbs and bits of fruit still littered the floor. I had only fifteen minutes before the kids would be done. On their way out, their shoes would grind every last morsel into the smooth gray rug. The things a caterer has to do, I thought with great self-pity. I wiped the crumbs off the tables. No telling what my chances were of finding a vacuum among the plethora of closets in the kitchen. Well, process of elimination, as Julian had told me of the multiple-choice SATs. The first closet held phone books and boxes. The next one I opened was the storage area for old Elk Park Prep yearbooks. I never did find out whether the third one held a vacuum cleaner. When I opened the door, I faced the dead body of Miss Suzanne Ferrell.
18
Her petite body swayed in the slight stir of air I had created by pulling open the door. I touched the bruised skin of her arm. No response. I stumbled backward. Incoherently, I called for help, for someone, anyone. I scanned the kitchen wildly: I needed something ? a footstool, a ladder ? to climb up and cut her down. Maybe I could help her. But she couldn’t be alive. There was no way. I had just spent the last hour cleaning in this room and I would have heard her. If she had been alive, if there had been a chance…
Julian and a gray-haired, hunched-back teacher, a man I had seen earlier that morning, hurtled into the kitchen. Their voices tangled in shouts.
“What? What’s wrong? What’s the problem? The testing is still ? “
“Quickly,” I rasped, gesturing helplessly, “cut her ? ” I choked.
The older man limped forward and gaped at the contents of the open closet. “God help us,” I heard him say.
Voices clamored at the kitchen door. What’s going on? Is everything all right?
“No, no, don’t come in,” I yelled at two startled students who rushed into the room. Wide-eyed and open- mouthed, they stood motionless, staring at the closet.
“Keep everybody out,” I ordered Julian tersely. He nodded and pivoted toward the kitchen entrance, where he motioned to the students to leave. Then he stationed himself at the door, where he spoke in low murmurs to the people there.
The voice of the older man broke as he asked me to get a knife. I groped for one in a drawer and handed it to him. At the door, Julian watched my every move. I think the sight of my face scared him.
Once the gray-haired man was at the top of a stepladder he’d pulled from the first closet, he said brusquely, “Have the boy go back to his classroom. I’ll need your help.”
Julian nodded and left. Together, the man and I grasped Miss Ferrell’s tiny body and lowered her to the floor. I could not look at her grotesquely frozen grimace again.
The teacher told me to call the police. He choked slightly and coughed, then asked me to find a teacher who could pick up the answer sheets from his room. Yes, the one he and Julian had left when they heard my shouts. He would wait with the body. I did not need to see medals to know this was a war veteran. His impassive tone and the grief in his eyes said all too clearly that he had seen death before.
There was no phone in the kitchen. My head pounded. The kitchen door fanned me as it closed, and a sudden sweat chilled my skin. When I arrived in the hall, there was the beginning of distant scuffling from the classrooms. The clock in the hall said five to eleven; the SATs were almost over. Dizziness swept over me. Should I make some kind of announcement? Should I tell the students to stay? That the police would be here soon, and they would all be questioned? I walked quickly to the phone in the hallway.
I pressed 911. I identified myself and where I was, then said something along the lines of, “I’ve just found a body. I think it’s Miss Suzanne Ferrell, a teacher here.” There was a whirring in my ears, like being inside a wind tunnel.
“Are you there?” The operator’s voice sounded impossibly distant.
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“Don’t let anybody leave that school. Nobody. I’ll put in a call to get a team up there right away.”
Groping for words within my mental fog, I hung up and stumbled to the P-Z classroom. I tersely told Julian to announce to his class and the others’ that after their booklets were collected, they must wait.
“If they ask, you know, because they heard me screaming, don’t… tell them anything else,” I said hesitantly.
Julian turned back to his class, his face tight with worry. Sweat now covered my skin like a mold. The pounding in my head intensified agonizingly. I walked in slow motion back to the kitchen door.
“The police are on their way,” I told the gray-haired man. Down on one knee, he had stationed himself next to the body. An unfolded white napkin shrouded Miss Ferrell’s face. The teacher acknowledged my announcement with a grim nod, but said nothing.
The room felt oppressive. I could not stay there next to Suzanne Ferrell’s corpse. In a daze, I went back out to the foyer. I found paper and pen in my supplies bag to make signs for the doors. Gripping the pencil was difficult. My shaking hand wrote, Do not leave until the police say you can. The room looked like the abandoned set of a surrealistic foreign film: What was all the debris, where did these bits of fruit come from, why were boxes of mine up on the tables? I grabbed a corner of one table to steady myself.
The recollection washed back, horrid, filthy. I saw my hand opening that door, saw a body swaying heavily in a bright orange and pink dress, saw a grotesque purple face that in no way resembled the perky French teacher. My fingers had blanched the darkening skin when they touched her. Her body had been strung up like the snake in Arch’s locker. I squeezed my eyes shut.
The police arrived in a blur. I glanced at my watch: 11:45. The sky through the foyer’s windows had begun to drop millions of snowflakes. An extremely tight-lipped Tom Schulz strode in. He was all business as the homicide team bustled around him, taking orders, falling into the grueling routine brought on by sudden death. They took the kids in the classrooms one by one. I knew the drill. Name. Address. When did you arrive, what did you see, and do you know anyone with a grudge against Miss Ferrell?
And of course the question that pressed in on my brain, caused throbbing at my temples, was the inevitable corollary: Who hated both Keith Andrews and Miss Suzanne Ferrell?
I sat on one of the benches and numbly answered Schulz’s questions. When did I arrive? Who else was in the school at that time? Who had access to the kitchen this morning? Pain still knocked dully at the back of my brain, but I also felt relief. This horror was now in the hands of the police. In the kitchen, their team would be painstakingly processing the scene: taking photographs, making notes, sprinkling black graphite fingerprint powder everywhere. Julian came through a doorway, crossed the room, and slumped down next to me. “Ninety-eight
