The Academy (30 page)

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I think something’s happened to her.” Suzanne looked around. “I think someone
did
something to her.”

“I believe you,” Linda said.

Diane nodded in reluctant agreement.

“Should I tell the police? Report her missing? What should I do?” Again, she looked around to make sure no one else was nearby. “I don’t want Jody to know that I know.”

“Call the police,” Diane suggested. “Make it an anonymous tip. Call from a pay phone. Tell them you think Yvonne Gauthier, a teacher at Tyler High, is missing. Give them her address.”

Linda nodded. “Spice it up if you need to. You’re anonymous. Tell them you heard screams from her house or something so they’ll have a reason to go in there.”

“Okay,” Suzanne said.

It was three o’clock, the sun was out and they were in the middle of a high school campus, but Linda felt as chilled as if she were alone in a graveyard at midnight. The stakes, it seemed to her, had suddenly been raised.

“We should have a meeting,” she said. “Away from school, where we can all talk freely and get everything out in the open. We need to get a fuller, more complete picture of what’s going on and what everyone knows, instead of just piecing things together ourselves from the bits and pieces we hear at lunch or in the halls.”

“And who knows?” Suzanne said. “Maybe if we all put our heads together, we can figure out something to do about it.”

Diane was already consulting her day planner. “How does Friday night sound? It’ll give us time to get the word out. And I mean spoken word. Nothing should be in writing. We don’t want a paper trail.”

Both Linda and Suzanne nodded.

One of the new custodians approached, pushing a flat cart piled high with folding chairs. They smiled politely at him, but waited until he was out of earshot before they spoke again.

“Let’s do it,” Linda said.

*

Frank groaned. “You know I hate going to teachers’ parties.”

“This is different.”

“Will there be teachers there?”

Linda shot him a don’t-be-stupid look.

“Then I don’t want to go.”

“I told you. It’s not a party. It’s a meeting. About the situation.”

“I don’t see how I can help.”

She faced him, hands on hips. “Don’t you care at all what’s happening? I know it’s just
my
job and it’s not as important as
yours
—”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Besides, I may not even have a job pretty soon.”

“All the more reason for you to get involved.”

Frank sighed. “I wasn’t entirely serious, you know. It was just part of the usual banter I thought we engaged in. Of course, I’m coming. And, of course, I care.”

She put a hand on his arm, took a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m under a lot of pressure lately. You’re supposed to be the rock here. You’re supposed to listen to my problems and reassure me and give me great advice.”

“I will.” He kissed the top of her head.

She couldn’t help smiling. “But you really
don’t
like teachers’ parties, do you?”

“No,” he admitted, “I don’t.”

Twenty minutes later, they were in Anaheim Hills, parking next to the curb in front of Ray Cheng’s house. He had offered to host the meeting because he lived in a different city and they wanted to get as far away from Tyler High as possible.

Frank whistled as he looked at the giant two-story house with its professionally landscaped yard. “Nice place. What’s his wife do? She’s obviously not a teacher.”

“Middle management for some company in Irvine.”

“We picked the wrong occupations.”

They got out of the car and started up the cobble-stone path toward the front door. Frank was carrying a satchel, and she stopped him before he reached the lit porch. “What’s that? Your laptop? Go put that back in the car. I want you to try and be social tonight.”

He smiled. “Don’t worry.”

Before she could stop him, he was up the porch steps and ringing the bell. The door opened instantly, and Ray was there to welcome them, motioning for them to come inside. “Glad you could come,” he said. “Nice to see you. Even if it is under these circumstances.” He gestured toward the dining room, where a long table was sumptuously set. “Get yourself something to drink. Have something to eat,” he said. “Mingle.”

The interior of the home was as impressive as the exterior, and Linda found herself drawn to a picture window that held a spectacular view of half of Orange County. Below them, in the darkness, a river of red and white lights that was the freeway snaked through a randomly lit urban landscape that looked like a reflection of the star-studded sky above.

“Is this where you imagined Ray would live?”

Linda turned around to see Diane standing behind her and swirling a glass of wine. “No,” she admitted. She looked around. “Where’s Greg?”

“He didn’t want to come.”

“Smart man,” Frank said under his breath.

Linda hit his shoulder.

Diane smiled. “Not only are teachers underpaid, but we get no respect.”

“Is everyone here?” Linda asked.

“A lot of people are.”

“Do you think there are any spies?”

Diane sighed. “You know what’s sad—or scary? I was just wondering the same thing myself.”

“Should we do some sort of head count? We pretty much know who’s who, don’t we?”

“Not necessarily,” Diane said. “Why don’t we just wander around, keep our ears and eyes open and find out what we can.”

They started walking through the large living room, saying hello to their friends and colleagues, chiming in with their own criticisms when they heard teachers complaining about the school. Frank started talking shop with Winton Bremer, the computer science instructor, and Linda left him to consult with Steve Warren, who’d just arrived. A few moments later, she saw both Frank and Winton dutifully nodding their heads as Iris Royer, the oldest teacher at Tyler High, chattered away about what the school was like when it first opened.

A little while later, by the drink table, Linda saw Frank still nodding politely at Iris’ reminiscences. Winton had somehow escaped, but Frank was trapped. “This is fun,” Iris said, touching his arm. “We ought to get together like this more often.”

Frank shot Linda a look over Iris’ head. “Yeah,” he lied.

Linda turned away, trying not to laugh. But she felt sorry for him, and smiling, she told Iris it was time for her to reclaim her husband. The two of them returned to the area next to the big window, where they met up once again with Diane.

“Where’s Suzanne?” Linda asked worriedly. “I didn’t see her.”

Diane nodded. “She was supposed to be here.”

“Maybe she’s late,” Frank offered.

Linda looked at her watch. “A half hour late? I don’t like that. It’s not like her.”

Ray finally emerged from the entryway and, since it was his house, got the meeting officially started by tapping a fork on his wineglass and announcing: “Attention, folks!”

All heads turned toward him.

“I think we all know why we’re here. So why don’t we get down to it. The floor is open.”

Suddenly everyone was talking at once, and Ray held up his hands and said in his sternest teacher voice, “Quiet!” There was scattered laughter, and he grinned. “Sorry. Habit. But it looks like we need a little more structure. So I’ll start off. Then we’ll go around the room and everyone can say their piece.”

Nods of assent all around.

Ray told of finding the feces atop his desk after helping Linda look for a ghost that had appeared in her room the night before. At the word “ghost,” Linda saw several teachers look at one another meaningfully. She wasn’t the only one! Others had seen ghosts, too! She was filled with a sense of relief and a sudden feeling of unaccountable optimism.

Ray went on to talk about different stories he’d heard and various conversations he’d had.

The teachers who spoke after him had more specific incidents to relate. A lot of them revolved around the principal. Lisa Piccolo, who lived with and took care of her invalid mother, said that Jody had called her mother while she was at work, and that her mother had still been sobbing from the conversation when Lisa had arrived home hours later, although neither the principal nor her mother would talk about what had occurred. Joel Grazer told of a meeting with Jody and Bobbi two weeks ago in which he’d informed them that he was going to be taking a personal day on Friday in order to take his son to see Thomas the Tank Engine in Perris. The two women said that if he did so, they would both claim that he had sexually harassed them. He’d taken the day anyway. Nothing had happened yet—but he was still waiting for the ax to fall.

Each teacher who spoke was more open than the last. It was as if hearing the experiences of their coworkers gave them the courage and strength to reveal not just the facts of what had occurred to them but their feelings and impressions about the school overall. There’d been hints of this in some of their conversations in the lounge or in the parking lot, but never before had they shared so openly or so freely compared notes, and the effect was liberating.

“I don’t like the library,” Jackie Linden admitted. “I never have, and I don’t think I’ve said two words to Janet Fratelli in the entire six years I’ve been here. But now I’m
afraid
to go in that building. It scares me. I won’t take my classes there anymore, and I’ve changed my syllabus so that my students don’t ever have to check out a book from the library.”

Linda went even further. “Ray told you that I’d seen a ghost in my room, although I’m not sure he believed me at the time. But I did. And it was on Back-to-School Night.”

A murmur went through the assembled group.

“I think Back-to-School Night was kind of a catalyst,” she continued. “I think it’s when the old school finally died and the charter took over completely.”

A lot of the teachers were nodding. “Back-to-School Night,” several of them murmured.

“That’s the night Yvonne disappeared and that Carlos and Rakeem quit,” Diane chimed in.

Linda nodded. “Something happened that night, something at the school that we still don’t know about. But I think it’s affected everything that’s happened since. It’s ratcheted everything up a notch.”

“Speaking of Carlos and Rakeem, has anybody noticed those two janitors they hired to replace them?” Lisa asked. “They’re creepy. I get, like, a childmolester vibe from that one guy, Mel.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said. “I thought the district had some sort of screening process, a background check that they did.”

Linda jumped in. “That’s just it. The
district
does. Tyler does not. And ever since we turned charter, Jody and her committee are completely in charge of all new hires.”

There was dissatisfied grumbling among the teachers.

“The question is,” Ray said, “what can we do about it?”

Next to her, Frank cleared his throat. Opening his satchel, he took out a sheaf of papers. “I’ve been doing some research on charter schools. Do you know that, contrary to conventional wisdom, charter schools, on average, fare no better and even slightly worse in the percentage of students who graduate and go on to college? Dropout rates are almost identical. What’s more, even though they’re allowed to basically cherry-pick their students, scores on standardized achievement tests are lower overall than in traditional public schools. And they also have an unacceptably high failure rate. I’ve printed out a list of bankruptcies and cases of gross financial negligence or malfeasance. As the adage says, ninety percent of all businesses fail. Well, public institutions can’t afford to fail. So maybe it’s time to stop applying so-called business solutions to education and just accept that in some instances the for-profit model does not and should not apply.”

Linda looked at him in surprise. Sometimes, he astounded her. Here she’d been thinking that he was being dragged here against his will and was going to sit alone in a corner and drink, and he had actually come prepared with facts and figures. All she had to offer were impressions and theories, but he’d done research. She shook her head, smiling. That was just like him, and at that moment she did not think that she had ever loved him more.