Death Comes eCalling (17 page)

Afterward, I toyed with the idea of designing a business card for myself: Molly Masters. Owner of Molly’s eCards, Inc. Mother of Two. Meddles in Murders in Her Spare Time.

By 10:00 a.m., my time was reasonably spare. This was an opportunity for me to visit Jack Vance at the school and try to get a look at the computer logs.

The more I’d thought about it, the more he seemed the likeliest candidate for being Lauren’s lover. Steve had groaned when Jack arrived at my house. Lauren had had a major crush on him in high school, till Howie Brown came along. Jack had brightened when I first said she was coming to dinner. It all made sense.

I drove to school and entered the lobby. As I was already aware from my dealings during school registration, Jack’s office was guarded by a barracuda in a dress. This lady could scare off Dracula. She had permanent frown lines etched in her face, and the reading glasses on her nose were probably fake, worn just so she could scowl over them at those who dared to bother her. She sighed audibly when I asked if Jack was in, then snarled, “And you are?”

“Molly Masters. Mother extraordinaire.” I gestured at the closed door behind her. “If you’re too busy to get up, I could knock on the door myself.”

She puckered her lips. For a second I thought she was going to spit on me, but then she punched a button on the intercom and leaned across her desk, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. “There’s a Mrs. Masters here.”

“Send her in.”

Keeping my distance from his bodyguard, I entered. Jack looked genuinely glad to see me as we exchanged pleasantries. Then he asked. “Have you had lunch yet?”

I glanced at my watch in surprise. “It’s barely after ten.”

“Great. I had an appointment cancel on me, so let’s go grab an early lunch.”

Visions of Tuesday’s junket with Denise haunted me. What if he was the Jack, as in Jack’s Inside Straight? “You do mean at a restaurant, don’t you?”

He chuckled as he rounded his desk and took my arm. “So you’ve heard about my little hobby already.”

Hobby? Such as gambling? Here we go again. Another visit to Jack the heterosexual. “I have to be back before noon to meet Nathan’s bus.”

“Don’t worry. I can only take an hour for lunch. We’ll be back by eleven.”

At least that eliminated the possibility of our roaming the countryside for little hideaways. He drove us in his red sports coupe. Within two miles, Jack pulled into the parking lot of an entertainment complex that featured batting cages. “Here we are.”

I glanced at his face in profile. He looked as excited as a little boy. He pulled a pair of tennis shoes from under his seat and kicked off his loafers. His left sock had a small toe hole. “School hours are the only chance I get to come here. You’d be amazed how fast the kids clear out of the place when I’m around. Nobody wants to have their principal near while they’re hangin’ out. The owners specifically asked me not to come after school or weekends.”

We got out of the car. Jack adjusted the band on his ponytail, then pulled an aluminum bat out of his trunk. He went up to the vacant-eyed man at the counter and bought a handful of tokens. He faced me.

“Would you like to take some swings? Here.” He dropped a token into my palm. “Ten pitches per token. I’ve only got the one bat, though.”

In my jeans, pullover, and sneakers, I was dressed appropriately. I chose a light bat from their selection, all of which were too shoddy for anyone to want to steal.

Having lived in Boulder, fitness-freak capital of the world, I’d played on many a softball team. But this ball machine had a perverse tendency to spit out a pitch just as I’d given up on it. It reminded me of the way my husband took photographs. He would say, “Smile” four or five times and wait until my teeth dried out and I blinked to finally click the shutter.

Thinking of my absent husband only made me lose power in my swing. He would be back in his Manila hotel sometime today. I should have called his office to trace down his temporary hotel and tell him about the threats and the murders. What was I doing in some stupid batting cage, waiting on a ball machine with no arm? I should be with my husband. I should have gone to the Philippines. They probably even have Pizza Huts there, which would’ve appeased Nathan and Karen.

When I’d netted the tenth ball, I returned my bat to the counter and went to watch Jack in the fast-pitch cage.

He flashed me a quick grin. “See that last one, Moll? This pitcher’s trying to brush me back. I might have to charge the mound.”

I laughed and watched him clown, pointing a la Babe Ruth at where he was going to send the ball, playing announcer of the unseen game that always had him stepping up to bat at the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded. My, did he miss his boyhood fans.

My thoughts tumbled between new questions and old memories.

When at last he had finished, he buttoned his shirt and replaced his tie. His face was red and damp, his breaths hard. “God, that was fun,” he said, beaming. He shot a glance at me as if he expected me to launch into some “Rah rah ree, Kick ‘em in the knee.” If so, he had the wrong girl. That was Stephanie’s territory, then and now.

All those homecoming parade floats Jack and Stephanie had reigned on. When the cheers faded, so did their relationship. Lauren had informed me in a letter a long time ago that Stephanie dumped Jack their sophomore year in college, when he failed to make first string for the second time. Jack’s athletic prowess in high school had apparently been largely due to his lack of competition among the small upstate schools.

“Can I buy you lunch?” Jack asked.

“No thanks. My stomach doesn’t wake up till after noon.”

Jack bought himself two hot dogs, nachos, and a cola.

We sat at a pea green, circular fiberglass picnic table cemented to the porch. As if anyone would actually want to steal it.

We chatted idly about our careers while he wolfed down his food. At the first opportunity, I asked, “Have you kept up with Lauren much over the past few years?”

“Not really. I heard about her arrest. Hard to imagine why she’d do it.”

“There was a rumor she had another man in her life.”

“Hmm.” He grinned. “That’s interesting. I wish I’d have known she was available. She was a four-star in my little black book in high school. If only Howie hadn’t moved on her first, I might have had another notch on my belt. If you know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did, and it made me tighten my fists under the table. “Tommy said you were dating some young woman at the barbecue last July at Mrs. Kravett’s house.”

“Jane is not all that young. Mid-twenties. Anyway, that’s over. Dropped me like a hot potato soon as she got her boyfriend suitably jealous.”

“Least you got another notch on your belt.”

He grinned, and I tried not to stare at a piece of hot dog stuck on his front tooth. He patted his rounded stomach. “Lately I’ve got to keep letting out my belts.” He stared off into space. “I was the star of every sport in high school. Remember?”

I nodded, but he still had a faraway look in his eye. He was seeing remembered fans and victories, not me.

“You have no idea what it’s like, Molly. To reach the apex of your life when you’re only eighteen. What did Mrs. Kravett predict for me?”

“How did you know about that?”

“The detectives told me when they interviewed me about Mrs. Kravett and Steve Wilkins. So what did she say?”

I remembered well. Insurance salesman. After the job description, Mrs. Kravett had written, “Jack Vance strikes me as a classic case of an ego that knows no bounds in a boy yet to face any hardships. When the real world intrudes on his image, he’ll collapse.”

He read my face. “Don’t answer that. Phoebe always hated me.”

“That’s what I always thought she felt about me. Did you hear about her decision to put me in charge of the scholarship program?”

He ignored my question. “But in my case it’s true. She lobbied like hell to block me from getting the position as principal. She may have wasted plenty of breath claiming it was nothing personal, that there were more qualified teachers at Carlton than I, but it was obvious from the get-go. She resented my success. She wanted the position herself.”

“She did?”

“Absolutely. She made a big show of claiming her heart problems made her ineligible, but that’s all it was—a show. Once I got the job, she never missed a chance to humiliate me.”

“That must have made you angry,” I said, prodding the same way I did when Nathan was struggling to express himself.

“Of course,” he huffed. “But I certainly—” He stopped abruptly. He covered the pause by stuffing a dripping nacho into his mouth. “These are really good. Sure you wouldn’t like some?”

“No, thanks.” Filling in the blanks, I asked, “I heard how dejected she was when she was forced to retire.”

He kept his eyes downcast and ignored me.

“That was your decision, wasn’t it?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. ”I was in charge of the high school at that time. I did what was best for the school. For my students. You parents wouldn’t have me do any less. She was so absorbed when her husband got cancer, she made a mess of her class schedule. Sent her students out on stupid field projects, writing reports on businesses.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“She taught
English
. She was supposed to be teaching the classics— reading for enjoyment. Instead, she was teaching them how to write office memos and technical jargon. She—”

“Mrs. Kravett was teaching her students technical writing? Are we talking about the same person here? The woman who used to preach about how much better off we’d be if we threw out our TVs and stereos and blenders?”

Jack snorted and nodded. “She even took some computer course at night last year. Claimed it was time English curriculum reflected the real world.”

An overwhelming sense of sadness enveloped me. I could see her so clearly in my mind’s eye. There she was at the blackboard, hands on her hips, frowning at us in our seats as she asked, “Haven’t any of you turned off all that electric junk in your house, just once? Grabbed a good book, sat in front of the fireplace, and read aloud to a loved one?” After class, we’d snickered about how “out of touch” she was. Now, it felt so awful to know that even she had surrendered to some extent and had tried, at the last, to get with the times.

Jack continued, “The whole thing was just an excuse so she wouldn’t have to grade book reports and give lectures anymore.”

“Good Lord, Jack! The woman was sixty-six and she showed more guts and innovation than you, thirty years her junior!”

Jack clenched his jaw and glared at me. “I’ve got to get back to school.” Jack rose. He didn’t look at me as we walked to his car. I felt sure he wished my head was in the way when he flung his bat into his truck.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I said, “Tommy Newton told me you showed him some computer records to determine when Steve had logged on. Could I look at them?”

Jack shook his head. “The police took ‘em.”

“Why didn’t anyone know Mrs. Kravett’s password?”

“Steve was wrong. She didn’t
have
a password in the first place: She never used the computer.”

“You’re sure about that?”

He gave an angry shrug. “Unless she lied about it. We have forms for the staff to fill out that have them log their passwords, just in case they forget or—”

Die an untimely death, I mentally filled in.

“The forms are kept in a locked cabinet in my office,” he continued. “She wrote there that she didn’t use the computer and didn’t have a password.”

“You can always get a password out of a system if you know what you’re doing,” I said. “I remember something in my computer training about a memory dump…getting a printout of storage buffers. And at my party, Steve said something about his plans to do that on Sunday.”
Except he was killed on Saturday.

Jack nodded. “He said he was going to shut down the system to get her password last Sunday. I already told him he’d be wasting his time, since she didn’t have a password.”

I clenched my jaw and looked out the window. We were almost at the school. If Steve said Mrs. Kravett had a password, she had a password; that’s not a mistake a computer expert would make. Apparently Jack’s arrogance made him oblivious to such an obvious conclusion. Regardless of what Jack had said earlier on the subject. he was also arrogant enough to assume that Lauren had locked her door by mistake and to set off an alarm trying to open a window to tell her so.

“Can I try something on your computer? It will just take sixty seconds, tops.”

He raised his eyebrows, but before he could protest, I added, “It could have something to do with why Steve was murdered.”

“So now you’re Molly Masters, P.I., huh?”

We pulled into the school lot. “Something like that.”

We entered the front lobby. The barracuda was sitting at her desk. She peered over her glasses at me, then went back to work at her terminal. Behind her, against the wall of Jack’s office, sat two girls who looked a year or two older than Karen. Both were whimpering. Their knees were scraped, their clothes muddy and tousled. Jack leaned toward them, hands on hips and said kindly, “Let me guess. You both got kicked off the chess team.”

The girls looked at him in confusion and shook their heads.

“Football? Track? Bobsledding?’

The girls managed small smiles through their tears, finally realizing he was teasing.

“No? We’d better all step inside my office and see if we can get to the bottom of this.”

Listening to him, I was relieved to see he was much better at dealing with children than with adults.

He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Molly, you can run your little experiment on Ms. Nelson’s terminal.”

By the gesture of his head, I took it to mean that Barracuda’s name was Ms. Nelson. She turned her laser eyes to me. “Make it snappy.”

“Can you log out of this program, please?”

She not only got out of the program she was running, she turned the computer off. I flipped the switch back on and got a screen asking me to sign on. I typed MASTERS and pressed enter; The screen returned a message: Unauthorized User. I entered KRAVETT and got the message: Enter Password. So she had indeed used the computer and had established a password.