Lie in Wait (5 page)

 

Chapter 11

T
EST'S
P
EUGEOT NUDGED
a speed bump as Test pulled the car into the Lamoille Valley High School parking lot, coffee sloshing from her cup into her lap. “Damn it,” she shouted, wiping at herself. The coffee was cold so it didn't burn her, but it left her pants wet in the crotch. She eased over another speed bump. More coffee spilled. “For fuck sake!” she barked. With the car's old heater now stuck on high and now blowing volcanic heat instead of cool air, she had her window rolled down. A boy on a skateboard alongside her car laughed and kicked off on his board to make use of the speed bump for a trick.

Duly humiliated, Test parked and fished tissues from the console to dab her crotch. She hoped no one drove by her. The only thing worse than entering the school with a wet crotch was to be caught fiddling with her crotch in the parking lot. She grabbed her backpack and got out.

The school was an ugly, pedestrian one-­story mid-­century brick affair, the sort of uninspired and unimaginative box that always made Test wonder what the fuck they were thinking back then.

She pushed through double doors, leaving the bright sunlight for industrial fluorescent lights.

Three girls sauntered by, each dressed in low-­rise jeans and scant tops to reveal belly-­button rings and cleavage. Tattoos peeked above their waistbands, flirtatious etchings on the small of their backs and across hip bones.

A girl bent over to get her books. The waist of her jeans pulled away and her shirt rode up. Her Celtic tattoo stretched and Test could clearly see the crack of the poor thing's naked butt.

The girl forced a pained smiled as she passed Sonja, revealing the type of braces you weren't supposed to notice. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked traumatized. The school superintendent had been notified of the crime too late to cancel school entirely, and the students would have just learned of the crime in an early morning assembly. Grief counselors would arrive soon, if they were not here now. Most of the students Test would speak to would be in shock and grieving. It would be painful to interview them in this state, but it might also be useful: genuine shock and grief were difficult to fake.

The halls were empty now. Sonja's crotch was still damp, so she ducked into a girls' restroom to tend to it.

Inside the restroom, she pressed paper towels to her pants. A dark damp circle stained her shirt, too. She untucked it and placed her 9mm on the sink beside her. She unspooled more paper towels. Taped to the towel dispenser was a pink sheet of paper.

LGBT MEETING TONITE!

If you're Lesbian Gay Bi or Transgender

or a friend

come share your concerns about LGBT issues

and GAY MARRIAGE.

Tonight at 7 pm

at the Brew Ha Ha coffee house

See you there!

Principal Maude Gardiner greeted Test with a hearty handshake and welcomed her into her office. Gardiner had a commanding voice and short, spiked hair.

According to her dossier Gardiner had started at Lamoille Valley High as a softball coach in 1987, then moved into a full-­time slot as physical education teacher when the former phys-­ed teacher was felled by a heart attack while showering, against the rules, in the boys' locker room. Vic Jenkins had found him. Gardiner had worked alongside Vic Jenkins for four years, until she'd risen to guidance counselor for LVHS in 1996. By 2002, she was vice principal. She'd been Principal Gardiner for two years now.

“Sit,” Gardiner said, all business behind a broad wooden desk devoid of papers and photos. “We'd have preferred to have cancelled school altogether, of course, and will be sending students home early; but consider my office yours. I believe it evokes a sense of authority. It's been used more than once for interrogative purposes.”

“I'm not here to interrogate anyone. I just want to talk to Jessica Cumber's friends,” Test said.

“There were few with whom she was close.” Gardiner pushed a folder across the desk. “But I've taken upon myself, as a civic duty, to list each and every friend
or
acquaintance who I, her teachers and her counselor know of. Kids lead very secretive lives. I suggest you fish around for other acquaintances during your interrogations. Follow leads. As they say.” She smiled. She wore braces too, Test noted. The same translucent kind that reminded Test of her mouth guard. Gardiner seemed to have a speck of dark food trapped in the front brace. “I've arranged for each student to show up every fifteen minutes starting in”—­she glanced at her wristwatch “—­eight minutes. There are nine students in all. They will appear in alphabetical order, as you will find on your master list.”

“Thank you.”

“I put them in alphabetical order because I did not want to prejudice the process by having you think I believe one way or another about any student's involvement. If I had suspicions I would tell you. There are three boys and six girls on that list. I know each very well. I've mulled it over and believe none is in connected, directly, consciously, to Jessica's . . . end.”

“I see,” Test said, and had to restrain herself from saying she guessed she didn't need to waste her time any further, if the high-­school principal had there was no connection. Gardiner's deduction and bold claim might have been insulting if it weren't so preposterous.

“I'm not a professional detective, obviously,” Gardiner said. “I do, however, read detective novels, a lot of them, and I have a feel for the procedure.” She glanced at her bookshelf. Two rows of paperback detective novels lined the top shelves, each spine flush with its neighbor, arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name. Softball trophies served as bookends.

Gardiner sat straighter and adjusted her long wool skirt.

“That does not preclude the idea that they
may
know something.” She stood. “Please. Take my seat. You'll find the students focus on you much better when you're behind the desk. I'll send the first student in”—­she glanced at her watch—­“four minutes and twenty seconds.”

T
EST STARED AT
the spines of Gardiner's paperbacks:
Murder 1-­2-­3
,
Murder After Dark
,
Murder at First Light
,
Murder by Number
. What pleasure did Gardiner take from them? Test wondered. Was it the mystery? Test had lost interest in mysteries in junior high, when she'd read
Story of O
and abandoned the mysteries of Nancy Drew for the dark and ecstatic mystery of sexuality that bloomed in her. Pulp mysteries were written to make the reader feel clever, as if no one else could be cagey enough to see the clues sprinkled throughout the early chapters as obviously as blood splattered on a white bed sheet.

And the killers. The vogue seemed to require killers be cold and monstrous but also somehow forever charming. Ingenious and coy, enigmatic, worldly and dashing.
Empathetic.
Someone by whom you might not mind being murdered, if you had to be, of course. The cops were drunks with failed marriages and in possession of preternatural criminal minds that linked them mystically to their quarry, a telepathic contrivance to forward an improbable plot. The hunter and the hunted, two sides of the same brain. Twins of darkness.

What shit. Detective work took diligent, thankless, tedious effort and focus.

The victims in most books were for mere body count.

Test wished she could take Gardiner down into the creamery's cellar and put her face to Jessica Cumber's face.
Smell that
? She'd ask. Why does that odor want to make you vomit? Because it's the smell of what's
supposed
to be inside the girl leaking out of her ruined skull. And why's the cellar stink of shit and piss? Because when one puts into single furious swing of a hammer all the rage one can no longer contain, and blasts your skull with it, your bowels and bladder let go. You soil yourself like the baby your mother once held when you needed her for your very survival and she knew it, and she was afraid of it. So she rocked you, knowing she could not rock you forever; knowing one day the world would get its seedy paws on you, and only by the grace of God and by luck and by fate, even in the
best
of worlds, would you be spared. And in the worst of worlds? Deep in her mind, under a trapdoor where a mother's nightmares lurk, she feared most that before her daughter reached Sweet Sixteen, she would wind up on that dirt floor, head ruined like an egg splattered against a brick wall. Her dreams. Her future. Her life. Spilled by someone who decided she would die here. Die now. And now she's gone. And everyone she ever touched—­part of them is gone with her too.

How did Gardiner like her mysteries now?

Test stared at the paperbacks. She thought of George and Elizabeth. As a mother, her role was not to protect her children from the world, but to prepare them for it. It was all she could do.

“Excuse me.” Gardiner stood in the doorway. She'd caught Test studying her books. “If you want to borrow one,” she nodded to her shelf, “The
Murder My Love
series is the best.”

“I have my fill just now,” Test said.

“Well.” Gardiner turned from Test to summon a girl from out in the hallway.

The girl chewed her bottom lip. Her eye makeup had bled and been swiped at but not cleaned from her cheeks, so what remained looked like faded bruises. Just behind her stood a man and a woman, distraught and fidgeting, clearly unsure what to make of this new world into which they'd all been thrust, and from which they would never fully depart.

“Olivia,” Gardiner said, her voice unexpectedly warm. “This is Detective Test. Just answer her questions as best you can.” She looked at the parents. “If you wish to wait in the counselor office next door,” she said.

“If Olivia needs you for anything at all, I'll get you immediately,” Test said to the parents.

“Is she in trouble?” the mother asked, her voice breaking.

“I only hope she might be able to help answer a few questions. If you prefer to stay—­.”

“I'll be OK,” Olivia said.

The mother kissed her daughter on the forehead, then Gardiner shut the door as she turned to lead the parents to the office next door.

Olivia sat with her knees together and her hands in the lap of her long denim skirt, twirling a turquoise ring around her pinkie finger. The laces of her left sneaker were undone.

Test opened the folder Principal Gardiner had given her and glanced at the list. Olivia Grable, Age: 14, GRADE AVG: 3.4 PARENTS: MARRIED, SIBLINGS: none

“I'm just going to ask you a few questions,” Test said.

Olivia nodded. She wore no earrings, no makeup. Her hair was straight and brown and parted in the middle and fell to her shoulders. She wore cat's-­eye-­style glasses Sonja's mother had worn long ago, a style that Test had not known was back in fashion. Perhaps it wasn't. They begged for a neck chain. Olivia's lips and tongue were free of piercings. But, maybe beneath her clothing her flesh was riddled with piercings, solid blue with tattoo ink. Maybe she'd learned of her friend's death before school and had come to be among her friends and not bothered to wear what she'd normally wear. Perhaps she had dressed plainly on purpose, suspecting she might be asked questions by someone in authority and wanted to portray a dowdy, simple look. Or perhaps this was her real look, regardless. Who knew? Test considered Olivia for a moment and decided the clothes were her usual. The glasses. It was the glasses that made her think this.

Test retrieved a pair of eyeglasses from her backpack and put them on. They were not prescription and had no function other than to lend her an air of seriousness. She had first bought a pair of glasses like this when Olivia's age, to make herself look smarter. She had a drawer full of them. Claude found it amusing and disconcerting. “You
are
smart,” he said.

“They're just an accessory,” Sonja had said.

“To what crime?” he'd ask.

Test adjusted the glasses and hit the red circle on her recorder.

“How did you know Jessica?” she said.

Staring at her hands, Olivia said, “She was my best friend.”

“I'm sorry,” Test said.

Olivia shrugged.

“How long had you been best friends?” Test asked.

“Forever.” Olivia scuffed her sneakers back and forth.

“Do you know if she had a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“No, you don't know? Or no, she didn't have a boyfriend?”

“No. She didn't.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm her best friend.”

“How about a boy she liked, then? Not a boyfriend. But a crush.”

“No one special.”

“Anyone though? Any boy at all you can think of that she even talked about?”

“She never talks about boys. I mean, she does. Just not lately. She likes them. Boys. She's not lez or anything.”

“How long had it been since she talked about a boy?”

Olivia worried her ring. “I don't know. Maybe, like, a few months. Maybe longer. No one that, you know, sticks out in my mind.”

“What about before? Did she ever have a boyfriend before?”

“Before what?”

“Before she stopped talking about boys. Did she ever have a boyfriend? Or a guy friend that she liked a lot or that liked her a lot, maybe more than she liked him?”

“Jessica never had a boyfriend. I mean, we're fourteen. I am. She just turned fifteen a month ago. We didn't really get into boys much till like the past year, you know?”

Test knew.

“So never anything serious?” Test said.

“Uh-­uh.”

“What about things that weren't serious?”

Rachel hesitated. “Maybe one kid. Jeremy Lang. She liked him. But he didn't even know she existed. “