Hangman's Curse (6 page)

“Here comes Ms. Wyrthen,” said Carrillo.

Ms. Wyrthen, the high school principal, dressed in gray and looking grim, came at them like a queen in a hurry. “The halls should remain clear until lunch period. We're ready when you are.”

Nate crossed to the front door and pushed it open so a smiling, panting golden retriever could come in, pulling along a well-dressed businesswoman at the other end of his leash. Nate introduced the woman. “Ms. Wyrthen, I'd like to introduce my wife, Sarah.”

Ms. Wyrthen's eyebrows went up as she extended her hand. “Charmed, I'm sure.”

Nate lovingly roughed up the dog's ears. “And this is Mr. Maxwell. We call him Max.”

Ms. Wyrthen smiled and gave a slight nod. “Mr. Loman is waiting for us.”

Ms. Wyrthen, Nate, Sarah, Mr. Maxwell, and Officer Carrillo started down the hall, Ms. Wyrthen's heels
pock-pocking
and Mr. Maxwell's nails
click-clicking
on the floor.

Nate was just about to say something, but Ms. Wyrthen said it first. “Officer Carrillo, it may look a little obvious, four of us all walking together, especially with the dog . . .”

He took the hint—not happily—and turned away after other business.

Sarah handed Mr. Maxwell's leash to Nate. “And if you could show me the way to the library . . .”

Ms. Wyrthen pointed. “Up those stairs, second floor, to the right. Mrs. Aimsley is expecting you.”

Sarah gave Nate a special smile, then headed for the stairs.

Now it was just Nate, Mr. Maxwell, and Ms. Wyrthen.

Ms. Wyrthen spoke softly. “Thank you for being here, Mr. Springfield. I hope you understand that our arrangement with you is tenuous at best, and time is in very short supply. Some of the parents are getting frightened and want to close the school down; others are getting angry and want the school kept open—they don't want us to forfeit our bid for the state football championship. The school board is up in arms. They voted to spend precious district funds on the metal detectors and a security officer, but now the school still isn't safe and they're looking foolish. I'm willing to try anything to protect our kids, but now the parents are pressuring me from opposite extremes and the school board is telling me they don't want to give this problem too
much
attention.”

Nate was genuinely troubled. “I promise we'll do all we can, as quickly as we can, and if we find out our services aren't needed, we'll be out of here before our shadows can catch up.”

She sighed and wagged her head. “This is supposed to be a safe school environment. There are no guns here, no knives, no dangerous weapons of any kind. We have a full-time security officer, the first in the school district. We're the first school in the district to install a metal detector. We've prided ourselves on our ability to maintain order and discipline.” She looked at him. “But trouble still gets through the doors.”

They rounded a corner and met a bespectacled, balding fellow wearing gray coveralls similar to Nate's and a sizable key ring on his belt. His kind, smiling face was certainly a pleasant contrast to Ms. Wyrthen's. “Well, hello there, Mr. Springfield. How are the wastebaskets?”

“Finished up the main hall,” said Nate, “but that one near the lunchroom is going to need a couple extra bags.”

Mr. Loman laughed. “Okay, well done!” Then he scratched Mr. Maxwell's ears. “So this is Mr. Maxwell!” Mr. Maxwell leaned into Mr. Loman's scratches, a happy, dazed look on his face. “How about it, Maxie? You want to be a janitor, too?”

Ms. Wyrthen was getting impatient. “Mr. Springfield would like his dog to smell the three victims' lockers.”

“Let's go,” said Mr. Loman, leading the way, his key ring jangling with each step. “Of course, you know, the police already had their dog in here sniffing for drugs. They didn't find anything.”

“Well, still I'd like to bring Max up to speed,” said Nate. “We might need his services later on.”

Mr. Loman led them to a row of lockers not far from the gym and paused by locker number 392. “This is Tod Kramer's locker.”

Nate examined the locker door. The mysterious symbol of a hanging man was etched in the upper right corner, just as Gessner reported. Nate called no attention to the symbol, but tapped the locker to show Max which one to sniff. Max sniffed, but didn't react.

“Well, we took everything out of it,” Mr. Loman explained, glancing at a tattered notebook for the combination and spinning the dial. “All the contents of the lockers in question are being stored in Officer Carrillo's office.”

He turned the latch and opened the door.

Max stuck his head in the locker and sniffed the corners and everywhere his head would reach. He seemed bored.

Nate was satisfied. “Okay, let's move on.”

They headed down the hall. Two more lockers to go.

Second lunch period. The lunchroom was full of students with sack lunches, vending-machine snacks, soft drinks, salads, and sweets. Music was playing over a sound system. Lockers up and down the halls were banging. Kids were talking loudly to each other so they could hear each other over all the kids talking loudly to each other.

At first glance, they were one big, noisy crowd, but at second glance, this crowd had its subgroups, its tribes. At the center row of tables, the athletic ones were bragging and jabbing about sports, any sports, who was good and who was better; a few rows over, the math and science geeks hunched and huddled over their equations and pocket computers; on the far side, the artistic types talked about drama,
The Crucible,
a video project; against a row of lockers, a bunch of rowdy males performed their daily ritual of leaning against the cold metal and looking down their noses for weaker kids to pick on; and on a bench along the wall, a clump of dark-clothed, bizarre-looking outcasts glowered and formed a group by being different from everyone except each other.

Elijah Springfield, no longer posing as a dope-peddling misfit from Montague, Oregon, had found acceptance among the math and science bunch. He was a handsome, sandy-haired young man of average height and wiry build, his soft hazel eyes framed behind wire-rimmed glasses. He was not especially outgoing, but his smile was warm and welcoming, and he'd managed to find something in common with two megabrains from calculus class, skinny Carl and pimply-faced Trevor. Right now, Trevor was trying to show Elijah the ropes in calculus.

“Okay,” said Trevor, scribbling on a piece of paper as he spoke, “to differentiate this function, just use the Quotient Rule. In this case we would have
x
plus 1 times the derivative of
x
times
x
plus 3 . . .”

“Which is the derivative of
x
squared plus 3
x,
which is 2
x
plus 3,” said Carl.

“Brilliant, as always,” Trevor quipped.

“Thank you.”

Elijah listened intently, watching Carl and Trevor make their point.

“Subtract the numerator times the derivative of the denominator. . . .” Trevor continued, still scribbling, “
x
squared plus 3
x
times the derivative of
x
plus 1, and then divide the whole . . .”

Trevor stopped. He looked a little blank.

“Didn't work,” said Carl.

Elijah scanned Trevor's calculations. “Umm . . . don't you have to square the denominator?”

Trevor scowled. “Where do you get that?”

“Well,” said Elijah, taking his own pencil and scribbling on the same piece of paper, “it's the way the original integration formula works out: In the denominator you get the limit of
v
of
x
as
h
approaches zero, times the limit of
v
of
x
plus
h
as
h
approaches zero, and bingo, it's the same as
v
of
x
squared. Am I right?”

Trevor looked it over and broke into a grin. “Brilliant!”

“Above adequate!” said Carl.

“Thank you,” said Elijah.

Elisha Springfield was fitting in very nicely. She was naturally outgoing, had a gift for being comfortable around new people, and her attractiveness—there was no need to disguise it—had already turned some heads in the halls. By lunchtime, she'd made several new friends, both male and female—all had learned to pronounce her name E-
lee
-sha and not E-
lie
-sha—and right now she was sitting with two girls she'd met in drama class, chatty Karine and philosopher Sondra.

“I think Tituba's the heroine of the play,” Karine was saying. “I mean, Arthur Miller was trying to point out the evils of religion and, I mean, isn't there a Tituba in all of us? We all want to be free to believe whatever we want without being judged for it.”

“Well, of course.
The Crucible
is a cry for tolerance,” Sondra agreed. “It's wrong for anyone to impose their morals on others. Very simple.” Then she noticed Elisha smiling as if something was funny. “What?”

“You just said that something is wrong,” Elisha replied, still smiling.

Sondra didn't get it. “So?”

Elisha explained, “You can't say it's wrong to impose your morals on others because, when you tell us something is wrong, you're imposing your morals on us, and you can't do that because you just said it's wrong to do that.”

“Whooaa!” said Karine.

“Well, you know what I meant!” Sondra countered.

“Sure, but you see the problem? If the message of
The Crucible
is that everybody can believe whatever they want, and nobody's right and nobody's wrong, then why does the play disturb us? Where'd we ever get the idea that Tituba and John Proctor are the good guys and the Puritans are the bad guys? What makes us think that an injustice has been done or that there's anything right or wrong about
anything
in the play if there's no right or wrong?”

Sondra stopped to ponder that.

“That boy's looking at you!” Karine tittered. Elisha and Sondra started to look. “Don't look!” They didn't look.

“You mean Ian Snyder?” Sondra whispered.

Karine made a disgusted face. “
Eeugh
, don't make me sick!” She tried to point. “It's that other guy, that stud with the red hair . . .”

“Who's Ian Snyder?” Elisha asked.

“You don't want to meet him,” said Karine. “He's really out there somewhere. I think he's a witch!”

“Just like the Tituba in all of us,” Sondra observed.

“Huh?”

“Oh, nothing.” For Elisha's benefit, she deftly pointed him out with her eyes and a barely discernible point of her finger. “Over there, by himself.”

Elisha looked just long enough to see a thin, bizarre-looking kid sitting alone at the end of a row of tables. He seemed obsessed with the color black. He was dressed in black, had black hair—almost too black, as if he'd dyed it that way—and . . . had he even used something to blacken his lips and eyebrows? “He's a
witch?”

Karine and Sondra made quick, downward motions with their hands. “Shhh.”

“Time to tell her,” Sondra said to Karine, and Karine nodded.

Elisha waited.

“You should know, there are weird things happening around here,” Karine began.

“Ready to hear about our ghost?” Sondra asked, and she was serious.

“Oh, it's not news to me,” said petite, gray-haired Mrs. Aimsley, bringing another stack of high school annuals to the table and setting them down with a thud. “We've had a ghost in this high school for as long as I can remember.”

Sarah had set up her own little research center in a corner of the school library, one study table now burdened under stacks of yearbooks and enrollment records. Mrs. Aimsley turned out to be a very good source of information on the school and its traditions. She'd been the Baker High School librarian for the past forty years and had seen and heard just about everything. “So how did the legend start? Is there a true story behind it all?”

“
True
story?” Mrs. Aimsley had to laugh. “Well, which
true
story would you like to hear? There have been several.”

“The one about Abel Frye,” Sarah said.

“He went to this school back in the 1930s,” Karine explained, intrigued by her own tale. “And one night he hanged himself in the old school building.”

Sondra added, “He lost his true love and decided to end it all.”

“Abel Frye. That name is new this year,” said Mrs. Aimsley. She pulled one high school yearbook from the bottom of a stack and began to page through it. “There
was
a young man who hanged himself in the old school building, but his name wasn't Abel Frye.” She kept flipping pages as she tried to remember. “Lawrence . . . Macon? Masters? Matthews? I think it was the Class of 1933.”

Sondra had a photocopy of the Crystal Sparks painting in her notebook. She brought it out and showed Elisha. “Wholesome-looking character, isn't he?”

“So, was he a real person or is he just made up?”

“He was real, but the whole story's been covered up,” Karine said in a hushed voice.

“It was such a terrible public relations nightmare that the school board destroyed all the records,” Sondra explained. “They reprinted the high school yearbook and took Abel Frye's name out of it.”

“And then there was a fire,” Karine added with a spooky tone. “All the yearbooks with Abel Frye in them just happened to be burned in that fire.”

Sondra was startled to hear that. “Since when?”

“You haven't heard about that?”

Mrs. Aimsley found what she was looking for. “All right, here he is. Lawrence Matthews.” She handed the yearbook to Sarah and pointed out the picture of a gaunt, homely kid with squinty eyes and oversized ears. “He was a farmer's son, I understand, and the Great Depression had left his family nearly destitute.”