Back To School Murder #4 (11 page)

Ted nodded in agreement. “Thanks for your time.”

“Anytime,” said Gilmore with an affable smile.

Lucy and Ted watched as he made his way across the lobby with an optimistic bounce to his step.

“I don't know what he's so darned optimistic about,” observed Ted. “I'm no legal expert, but it doesn't look to me as if Josh's chances are very good.”

“It's something they teach them in law school,” said Lucy. “Defense Law 101. Always remain upbeat, no matter how poor your client's chances really are.”

They began walking to the door, but had to stop when Ted was overtaken by another fit of coughing.

“I know just what you need,” said Lucy. “A cup of Jake's chicken soup. It's supposed to be better than Mom's and is guaranteed to cure whatever ails you.”

“Sounds good,” agreed Ted. “I'll meet you there.”

W
hen Ted arrived at Jake's, he found Lucy sitting at a table, reading the new issue of
The Pennysaver
.

“If only we could have gone to press a little later,” he said. “Then we could have scooped everyone with the story of Carol's murder.”

“Well, I think it's a pretty good issue anyway,” said Lucy loyally. “I really like Jewel's photo. She'll be pleased it's on page one.”

Ted shrugged, and sat down heavily. “You can only do what you can do,” he said. “Did you see the
Globe
?”

Lucy shook her head, so he got up and took one from a pile near the donut counter and proudly placed it in front of her.

“This is great,” enthused Lucy. “You made the front page. They even used your photo of the neighbors.”

“I wish it had been my own paper.”

“Oh, well,” sympathized Lucy, looking up as Jake came over with two tattered menus.

“We won't need those,” said Lucy. “Ted needs chicken soup, and I'll have a bowl as preventive medicine.”

“You can't do better,” said Jake. “Damned shame,” he added, indicating the
Globe
with a tilt of his head. “Still, there's plenty that won't miss that little lady.”

“So I'm discovering,” said Lucy.

“A lot of the teachers stop in here in the morning for coffee. They couldn't stand her. You know that nice kindergarten teacher? The Italian lady?”

“Lydia Volpe?” offered Lucy.

“Yeah, that's her. She was fit to be tied one day. I heard her talking to the others. Said some parent had a complaint or something. I didn't get the details. Anyway, this Carol Crane musta chewed her out real good. She said she wasn't gonna take that kind of language from anyone, and especially not from her—that's exactly what she said.” There was a little twinkle in Jake's eye. “Pretty funny, huh?”

“I guess so,” said Ted, not getting the joke.

“Must be the first time in history that somebody over at the school, somebody in charge, I mean, took the parent's side and chewed out a teacher!” Jake grinned.

“You've got a point there,” said Lucy, recalling a few teacher conferences she had participated in. Even Sophie Applebaum had made it very clear to her that any problems the children were having were certainly no fault of the school's. The school was always above reproach.

“It's no wonder she got killed,” said Jake as he returned to the kitchen. “She broke rule number one.”

“What's that?” asked Ted.

“Weren't you in the Navy?” demanded Jake as he ladled out the soup.

“Nope. Not me.”

“Well,” said Jake as he set the bowls down in front of them. “In the Navy, the first thing they teach you in boot camp is rule number one: Don't make waves.”

Lucy picked up her spoon, scooped up some of the rich, golden broth, and then tilting the spoon slightly, let it run back into the bowl.

“What do you think, Ted? Do you think Josh made the bomb and Carol found out and that's why he killed her?”

“No way,” said Ted. “Somehow I just can't see him as the bomber.”

“Me either,” agreed Lucy. “Although he probably would know how to make a bomb. Could it have been a scheme to discredit Carol that backfired?”

“We know she wasn't too popular with her colleagues.”

“Sophie thought she was after her job, and she got Mr. Mopps fired. Oh, I spoke with DeWalt this morning. He said Carol insisted that Josh be suspended. And do you know what he was suspended for? Suggesting one of the girls on the field hockey team wear shorts for practice. It's against her religion or something.”

“Lucy, go slower. Remember, I have a cold.”

“It's not you—it's the craziest thing I ever heard. DeWalt said some people in the Revelation Congregation believe that girls have to wear skirts. By telling this girl to wear shorts to practice, he was supposedly undermining her religious training and encouraging her to defy her parents. You're not supposed to do that. It's in the Ten Commandments. DeWalt told me.”

“So I've heard, but I'm not sure God cares an awful lot about what you wear,” said Ted, slurping his soup. “What was that you said? Something about Carol insisting that Josh be suspended?”

“That's what DeWalt said.” Lucy pulled out her notebook and flipped through it. “I've got it right here. He said Carol put her job on the line and insisted Josh be suspended. He also said he looked forward to ‘collaborating with her to restore family values to the schools.'”

“That's interesting,” mused Ted. “DeWalt and Carol were in cahoots. With her support, he probably could have picked up another seat or two on the school committee.”

“That's a scary thought,” said Lucy.

“It would sure change the picture,” said Ted. “Up until now, the school committee and the administration, even the teacher's union, usually present a united front. They've got a virtual lock on the system, and anybody who isn't happy with it is at a real disadvantage. Just like Jake said.”

“So you think Carol was killed because she was upsetting the educational applecart?” Lucy rolled her eyes.

“You don't realize how much is at stake here, Lucy. The school department is a big employer in this town and it pays very well. We all had to struggle through the recession, I know you and Bill had a pretty hard time, but they had contracts with five and ten percent raises built in. Most of them make thirty or forty thousand a year for ten months' work. Even Mr. Mopps was making twenty dollars an hour, not counting overtime whenever there's a meeting or a basketball game.

“And so far, the unions have had a pretty cozy arrangement with the school committee. That school council Carol was proposing could have brought new people into the process. People who might start asking why the teachers should get another raise when SAT scores have gone down for five straight years.”

Lucy put down her spoon. “Are you telling me this whole thing is about SAT scores?”

Ted took another slurp of soup. “You're right,” he admitted. “I'm not making much sense. Maybe it's the cold medicine I took. I don't know why Carol got killed, or who did it, but I do know that people were beginning to ask some hard questions about the schools. Then Carol came and all hell broke loose.”

 

Ted didn't stay long after they returned to the office. His cold got the better of him and he decided to head home. Lucy started working on the obituaries, including one for Carol Crane. The standard form from the funeral home gave only the sparsest details, and no survivors were listed. Lucy padded it out with material from the story about the bombing, and included information from Carol's résumé. There were no visiting hours, she noticed, and no funeral was planned either. There would be, however, a memorial service at the school.

Absorbed in her work, she didn't see Sophie approaching through the plate glass window, and looked up, surprised, when the door opened.

“I have two letters to the editor,” began Sophie, placing two envelopes on the counter in front of Lucy's desk. “One from the teacher's union, and one from the administrator's association. They both state our faith in Josh Cunningham.”

“I was at the arraignment this morning,” said Lucy. “He looked terrible—he must be in shock.”

“Of course he is,” said Sophie. “This is absolutely unbelievable.”

“The police seem to think they have a pretty solid case.”

“Well, I know Josh, and I know he didn't do any of this. If you think about it, all the evidence against him comes from Carol.”

“You think she was scheming against him, before she was killed?” asked Lucy. “Why would she do that?”

“I don't know,” admitted Sophie, the frustration evident in her voice. “But I do know she was a schemer. She had plots within plots. People like that usually end up in trouble, one way or the other.”

“She sure got trouble,” said Lucy. “Smothered. In her own bed.” She chewed thoughtfully on the cap of her pen. “Were she and Josh seeing each other?”

“Not that I know of,” said Sophie. “But then again, she didn't confide in me.”

“She has no family?” asked Lucy.

“Never mentioned anyone. Mr. McCoul told me that nobody has contacted him about her remains. The union is paying for cremation, and we're having a memorial service.” Sophie smoothed the lace collar to her print dress. “It's only decent.”

“It's kind of sad, really,” said Lucy. “Everybody loved her and nobody loved her.”

Sophie snorted. “You could put that on her gravestone, if she were going to have one. Unfortunately, the union's funds are limited.” She leaned across the counter toward Lucy, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Just between you and me, this vote was very close. It took some convincing to get them to ante up enough for the cremation.” She raised her eyebrows above her silvery plastic eyeglass frames, and gave a grim little nod.

“Maybe DeWalt would like to make a contribution,” suggested Lucy.

“Now there's an idea,” crowed Sophie. “Of course, I've never heard of him actually making a contribution himself, at all. He's much better at collecting them.” With that, she marched out the door, letting it bang behind her.

 

That evening, as Lucy sat in class waiting for Professor Rea to arrive, she thought about Carol Crane. Right from the start she had sensed something phony about her; she was certainly not the person she was pretending to be. But why? What was it all for?

She looked up as Professor Rea hurried into the room a good ten minutes late. He wasn't quite himself, she thought. He hadn't bothered to style his hair and it hung in flat clumps around his face. He didn't seem to have his usual energy either. Instead of pacing back and forth in the front of the room as he usually did, he sat down at the big wooden desk and, leaning his head on his hand, apologized for failing to finish grading the Matthew Arnold papers.

“I'll try to have them for you next time,” he said. “Tonight we're going to talk about the force of convention in Victorian society. By way of example, I'm going to tell you about Professor Wilfred Owen Herbert Hewson, an extremely distinguished mathematician at Oxford.

“To all appearances he was the typical bachelor academic. Absentminded. Head in the clouds. Lived by himself in a comfortable house with one servant, his maid. When he died, his colleagues were astounded to learn that he left his entire fortune, which was quite considerable due to the family coal mine, to the maid.

“The only explanation for his unexpected generosity to the domestic that his colleagues could come up with was to assume that she had been his mistress. They were very shocked indeed to learn that she had actually been his wife. This was even more upsetting to them than a possible illicit affair. Why?”

He scanned the class with dull eyes. When Mr. Irving raised his hand, he nodded at him.

“Class differences were very marked at that time,” offered Mr. Irving. “Chances are the woman didn't even know how to read. She couldn't have filled the role of a gentleman's wife—think of Shaw's
Pygmalion
.”

“Maybe she wasn't like Eliza Doolittle—maybe she didn't want to change,” offered the pretty blond girl who always sat in the front row.

“Maybe he didn't want her to change,” said Lucy. “Maybe he loved her the way she was.”

“Exactly,” said Professor Rea. “Mrs. Stone has it. The really shocking thing about Professor Hewson was that he loved his wife because she wasn't a lady. She was coarse, and vulgar, and uninhibited and very passionate. The professor's diary reveals he was both madly in love with her and deeply ashamed of it.”

Shame, thought Lucy, thinking of Carol. It was true that some people had no relations whatsoever, but it was very unusual. Carol must have a family somewhere; she didn't spring up in a cabbage patch. Whoever they were, and wherever they were, there had certainly been some sort of rift.

But if Carol had maintained any sort of contact, the police would certainly have found it. An old address book, insurance forms, it wasn't that difficult for an investigator to find surviving relatives in order to notify them of a death. The only way that Carol could be so completely alone, thought Lucy, was if she had cut herself off entirely. Chances were, she guessed, that Carol had a past but she was ashamed of it.

After class, as the students filed out of the room, Professor Rea drew Lucy aside.

“I had no idea Carol was dead—why didn't you tell me?” he demanded. Lucy noticed that his hands were trembling.

“I'm sorry,” she said, feeling guilty for taking advantage of him. “We were trying to keep the story from breaking as long as we could.”

“Just doing your job,” he said bitterly.

“I didn't realize you were that close to her, or I wouldn't have done it,” said Lucy. She was shocked to discover that as much as she felt absolutely terrible about tricking him, she was still hoping he would tell her about his relationship with Carol. She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with empathy.

“Well, it's over now,” he said, giving an abrupt little shrug and snapping his briefcase shut. “I don't know why Carol's death came as such a shock. She lived close to the edge. She played games. Sooner or later she was bound to push somebody too far.”

“The police think that person was Josh Cunningham. Do your?”

“All I know is what I saw on the news.” He picked up his briefcase and turned to go. “It's ironic, really. This poor devil thought he was getting rid of Carol by killing her. All he's done is get himself in more trouble. That's Carol for you. Always having the last laugh.”

With that, he strode out the door.

Lucy gathered up her books, and walked slowly down the hall. She thought about the Oxford mathematician with the secret life, and she thought about Carol Crane. Who was she really? How much did anyone in Tinker's Cove know about her?