The Main Line Is Murder Page 15

"Dad? How long has he been home?" I asked.

  "Twenty minutes. He's napping. We're supposed to call him for dinner."

  Poor guy. Although if he was able to sleep, he couldn't be too worried about the meeting–or about me.

  "How long have you been home?" I asked the kids. My estimate was less than a hour; rehearsals usually lasted till four-thirty.

  "Forever," Garry said. "That dinner?"

  I handed him the box and addressed my daughter. "Chelsea," I said. "You're old enough to babysit other kids. You've been trained by the Red Cross to babysit other kids. Why the inquisition all of a sudden?"

  "Somebody got killed, Mom. We were worried about you."

  Damn. She was right. I had violated the first rule of adolescent freedom: call home.

  "Sorry, Chel. I got held up taking a Bryn Derwyn student home. Won't happen again."

  My fluff-topped pre-teen gave me a see-that-it-doesn't scowl, and arms-folded, turned into the kitchen to get glasses of milk for her and Garry.

  "Cokes for Dad and me," I called after her.

  I trotted upstairs and quietly approached my husband, who lay on his back snoring. "Rip?" I whispered. "You want to wake up? Dinner's downstairs."

  "Huh? Umm," he replied. "Oh, it's you. Where you been?"

  I was going to have to re-educate my family, vary my schedule, alter expectations. Or else keep my cell phone on like everybody else.

  Rip had reached semi-consciousness, so I told him, "I took Nicky D'Avanzo home. His grandfather says there isn't another donor, that Randy just wants to get out of jail."

  "Um. That was nice of you." Obviously, my husband wasn't totally awake.

  "There's something you need to know about Randy," I tried again.

  "Yeah?" Rip propped his fists behind him like the training wheels on a bicycle.

  "He had some letterhead printed that says, 'Bryn Derwyn, Incorporated,' and there's a checking account using that name, too. Know anything about it?"

  "Nope. I'll look into it. How'd you find out?"

  "Found a receipt in his office." That seemed to be enough of an answer for now.

  "Oh, right. You get that mailing done?"

  "Not yet."

  My husband patted my arm. "Hang in. What's for dinner?"

  "Pepperoni."

  Rip nodded. I couldn't tell if it was approval or acceptance of the inevitable.

  A knock on the door interrupted the first bite of my second slice. My heart lurched and I almost choked. The clock on the living room VCR said 6:20.

  "Early," I observed.

  "Too early." Rip rose, probably to back me up in case it was a particularly rude reporter.

  Lt. John Newkirk stood on the doorstep, peering with pseudo-shyness over his mustache. "Come in?" he asked.

  I stepped back from the door. "We're eating," I said, just to say something.

  "That's what I figured," he replied. Nodding to Rip, he said, "Sorry for the intrusion, but there's an oddity I need to discuss." Then he turned back toward me.

  "You say you were in the Community Room to clean?"

  From either side of the dining room table Chelsea and Garry watched Lt. Newkirk as if he were Columbo pacing back and forth on a rerun, their eyes wide with awe.

  "So what I need to know is, how much cleaning did you actually do? Before you left, I mean."

  I thought about it. "Not much at all. I unloaded a couple shelves, decided I needed to borrow a Dustbuster from the Faculty Room and went to go get it."

  "A Dustbuster." Newkirk rubbed his chin. His eyes danced with interest as lively as the kids'. "And where is that Dustbuster now?" he asked.

  The question hit me like a brick. Where indeed? I'd forgotten about the hand vacuum in the easy way you forget something that isn't there.

  "I have no idea," I answered. "When I first got back to the Community Room, Richard and Randy were meeting with that couple, so I set the Dustbuster outside the door and went to watch the chorus rehearse."

  "Was the vacuum there when you went back the second time?" The time I found Richard's body.

  Instinctively, I glanced toward Rip, my personal lifetime supply of moral support. His fingertips touched the tabletop in a loose mousetrap of tented fingers.

  I shook my head. "No. I don't think it was."

  The lieutenant nodded. Then he turned to Rip and asked, "Mind if we take a look around the school for that thing?"

  "Sure," Rip agreed, reaching into his pocket for keys. "But there are five of them. Gin knows where to look." The purchase had been made to help the maintenance staff keep ahead of the creeping filth the Mop Squad had labored so long and hard to abolish. Quite a lot to ask of five small household appliances, yet they had already proven to be a brilliant investment, especially in the lunchroom.

  I got my long wool coat out of the closet, took a final sip of Diet Coke from my favorite Phillies World Series plastic cup, buttoned up, and said, "I'm ready." Ordinarily, I knew Rip would have preferred to escort Newkirk around the school, but the Board was about to arrive.

  At the last minute, I grabbed my nearly cold pizza slice. Rude or not, it was dinner; and I needed it.

  Outdoors, the atmosphere was thick with moisture. Most telling of all, the sky looked pink.

  "Gonna snow," Newkirk remarked.

  For the first time I smiled at the man. So what if talking about the weather was feeble; I found it touching. He was reaching out, smoothing the rough edges.

  "Cold enough for you?" I asked in return, and he snorted.

  Just like that we became real to each other. Now we could search through a frigid, spooky-dark school building without being overly concerned about bumping a sleeve. If the dampness made our noses run, we could wipe them without feeling self-conscious.

  “You married?" I asked while I fitted the front door key into the lock with my mittens.

  "Yeah," he said. "Twelve years. Four kids."

  "That must be fun."

  “Yeah. I go to work to relax.”

  Only the safety lights illuminated the halls, so I went into the office, found the circuit box hidden around a corner, and threw the switch that brightened all the corridors like a circus. More than one person had sworn they saw ghosts roaming the school at night. With Richard Wharton already on my mind, I didn't care to encourage similar thoughts.

  When we passed the squad car, Newkirk had reached into the back seat for some large evidence bags; and now he borrowed the carton Joanne used for recycling office paper.

  The first Dustbuster resided behind Rip's assistant's desk. Black and Decker's current style amounted to a foot-long, flattened cone of gray plastic with a handle continuing off the top. You operated the thing with a thumb switch and emptied it by removing the cone to reveal a small, re-useable dust bag on a plastic frame that sealed the dirt away from the motor. With gloved hands Newkirk carefully lifted Joanne's out of its wall holder and delicately sealed it inside one of his plastic bags. Then he labeled it with a tag, gently settled it in the box and rose with satisfaction.

  Together we passed between the reception desk and lobby’s mitten tree. Then as we juggled our way through the fire door leading to the hall on the left, I said, "I take it your forensics people didn't find any evidence near the body."

  "You could say that," the lieutenant agreed, although letting me say it was not quite the same as him saying it.

  "I didn't clean the table or the floor at all, you know."

  "So I gathered."

  I stopped outside the Faculty Room. "Do you really think the murderer used my Dustbuster to clean up after himself? Wouldn't it make more sense that somebody connected to the school borrowed it back? Or maybe Jacob or Patrice saw their equipment lying out where it could get stolen and put it away?" I liked that idea much better than an impulsive killer recovering quickly enough to vacuum up trace evidence.

  Newkirk stared at me with a peeved expression. "Mind opening this door?" he asked. "I got four kids waiting at home, remember?"
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br />   "Oh, sure." And I have fifteen Board members coming to tea.

  After bagging and tagging the one from the Faculty Room, we found two more just inside the door to the cafeteria. The fifth required quite a bit of hunting, and we finally found it on the science room desk. Scattered around the hardwood floor were little flakes of white paper, as if somebody had torn pages from a ring binder while ineffectively holding it over the wastebasket. Although someone had brought the vacuum to the mess, they hadn't gotten around to using it.

  After all five appliances were gathered in the box, Newkirk asked if I had any idea which one I had borrowed from Patrice.

  They all looked relatively new and interchangeable to my eye. Yet his question was important, so I peered at each one very carefully.

  "None of them seems right," I admitted.

  "Probably trying too hard," Newkirk sympathized. "Happens all the time."

  We retraced our steps. I closed and locked doors behind us, shut off the brighter hall lights, tugged and rattled the front door to be certain it was secure.

  When we emerged from the shelter of the entrance overhang, a chilling breeze of stinging snowflakes worked at my cheeks and the hem of my coat. Newkirk's eyes squinted protectively as we walked back to his two-tone squad car and deposited the loaded carton. Teeny snowflakes trickled down past the spotlights, illuminating the school's driveway. Elsewhere they were invisible except as a dullness on the windshields of the several vehicles gathered near our house.

  "Sorry for the bother," the lieutenant told me as he shut himself into his driver's seat. He nodded goodbye, then proceeded to back around and pull away.

  I stood at the end of the path to our house hugging myself against the weather until he was too far into the darkness to glance back.

  Then I scurried back through the tiny, biting flecks of ice and unlocked the door of the school for myself.

  Chapter 26

  THIS TIME I didn't bother with the brighter hall lights. Having just toured the school building with a policeman, I could afford to be brave.

  I didn’t much care for betraying a friend’s trust, but there was an emergency Board meeting going on at my house that added urgency. As I saw it, my behind-the-scenes deadline was Friday, the day of Randy Webb's Grand Jury hearing. If I could point the police to someone outside the school community before then, Bryn Derwyn stood a better chance of survival. That meant ruling out insiders with good reason to hate the murder victim. Unfortunately, my childhood friend was one of them.

  I opened Kevin’s office door and went in. If I was careful, he would never know I had been there and would, therefore, never suspect my disloyal thoughts.

  I took a deep breath and flipped on the overhead light.

  Kevin's cubicle revealed an entirely different persona than Randy's office next door. For decor he had robin's-egg blue walls, the same color as the kindergarten classroom, which told me that Kevin primarily worked inside his head.

  Also, the condition of the room seemed to protect its tenant, all but shouting—Go away, he's busy. Piles of stuff littered every available surface—the desk (especially the in/out tray), the credenza against the left-hand wall, the two file cabinets, under the computer desk, plus a couple piles on the floor in a corner, which was the only place they wouldn't have been kicked over on a regular basis. Even Kevin's briefcase, a nice quality burgundy leather one, was opened in the middle of his desk, revealing folders and brochures of roof shingles, spreadsheets, colored pens, a calculator, and a Hershey bar.

  My search of the briefcase made one thing crystal clear–that catching a crooked business manager was beyond me. It would take weeks just to grasp the scope of his job. Figuring out if he was honest? Forgetaboutit.

  After fifteen minutes, the only oddities I came across were three easy-reader books in his deep, right-hand desk drawer: Green Eggs and Ham, an Encyclopedia Brown, and something about a goose. Puzzling, but scarcely incriminating.

  Just as I bent to poke through one of the paper piles on the floor, I heard a sound that froze me and dissolved me all at once—the school's front door closing.

  At least that's what I thought I heard. Noise usually travels through the empty building like voices across a lake, but now there was nothing.

  My ears could have been wrong, but my nervous system didn't believe it. The murderer had returned. The lobby carpet was muffling any footsteps, that was all.

  I turned off Kevin's light. Then I decided I wanted a weapon, but nothing in the business manager's office came to mind except mess.

  Leaving the door open, I rushed to Randy's door, frantically fitted keys into the lock, then stumbled through the dark to the shelf where I knew there were bookends, miniature skiis leaning against what I remembered to be very lumpy brass mountains. I hefted one of them in my hand and forced myself to think.

  Who could be here, really? Rip looking for me? I doubted that he remembered my existence with the Board meeting going on; but if he had come looking for me, he certainly would have shouted my name, if only to save me from the terror I was presently experiencing.

  So who else? Not a student. No teachers had exterior door keys. It wasn't cold enough or snowy enough for Jacob to be checking the heater or his supply of rock salt.

  If, as I was inclined to believe, the evening visit was related to Richard's death, I realized that I was probably hiding in the intruder's destination. Randy was in jail. What better time to sneak into his office to plant incriminating evidence?

  Too late for escape. Clutching the bookend for dear life I scurried through the semi-dark hallway back to Kevin's mess.

  The interior fire door creaked open just as I ducked out of sight. No time to shut the door. Hiding further out of reach risked making noise, so I merely huddled against the wall beside the doorjamb and tried to breathe silently.

  Heavy heels clacked on the tile, a man's footsteps made with dress shoes. Not Jacob, who always always wore rubber-soled work boots, even in summer. I wanted to groan, or possibly scream.

  A hand reached around the corner next to my face and flipped the light switch.

  I let out a guttural "arrugh" and raised the bookend high over my head.

  "Hey!" Kevin said, jumping back. "Put that down."

  I slumped to the floor.

  He let out a nervous laugh and reeled back a little, as if he still feared a blow from a bookend. "What are you doing here?"

  Honesty is the best policy, Mom always said. Besides, I was too shook up to lie. "I was collecting evidence with Lt. Newkirk. And you?"

  "I don't see Lt. Newkirk anywhere, Gin. What's going on?"

  I stood up. Knowing my Mom, she meant complete honesty. "Okay. I did bring Newkirk over here, but after he left I decided it was a good time to search your office."

  Kevin's college-boy face went stiff. His moonstone-blue eyes darkened into granite. He said nothing. He didn't have to.

  "I'm sorry." Instinctively, I wanted to add his name to the apology, but to presume upon our family friendship would have come across as manipulative rather than sincere, and I certainly did not want to sound insincere. Kevin Seitz was no longer a sleeping, honey-blond boy slung over his father's shoulder. He stood before me a six-foot-tall adult at the peak of his strength, and part of me still wondered whether he had swung a shovel into Richard Wharton's head.

  "I was getting desperate," I continued. "The Board is over at our house making 'contingency' plans. They're afraid the reason for Richard's death might be internal, especially now that Randy's been arrested."

  "And you prefer the idea that I did it to avenge my father. Sweet, Gin. That's really sweet." He fell against the doorjamb.

  "I said I'm desperate. I said I'm sorry."

  He looked at me with disgust. Then he sighed. "Shit. I guess you really are desperate."

  I was quick to agree.

  "Gimme that," he said, referring to the bookend. "You're cutting off your circulation." He sounded like my big brother might have sounded,
if I'd had one. He set the bookend on top of his in basket, while blood rushed painfully to my hand.

  "So why are you here?" I asked, feeling myself blush at my own temerity. Much more of this and I would be nothing but blotches.

  "I've got a 7:30 meeting with a roofer tomorrow morning and I'm not ready. Luckily, the snow reminded me."

  "That doesn't sound like you."

  "Yeah? Well, sneaking around behind my back doesn't sound like you."

  If possible, I blushed harder.

  "So did you find my secret game plan? The one with the diagram of the shovel?"

  "Of course not,” I assured him. “But I would like to know who you were talking to on the phone the first time I came by Friday afternoon."

  "When was that?"

  "About three."

  "How should I know? Probably roofers. Does it matter?"

  I shrugged. "You see anybody in the hall other than that couple or Richard or Randy?"

  "No. I didn't even see you..."

  "...because you were on the phone with some roofers." We recited the words at the same time.

  I thought a minute. "You weren't here during the murder, or you'd have heard something. Right?"

  "I guess. Right."

  "So where were you?"

  "Jeez, Gin. The police asked me that, and I just plain wasn't sure. I'm all over this place all day, you know? How would I know when I went where or why?"

  "Okay, so you were somewhere else at the critical time. Do you remember seeing a Dustbuster in the hall next to the Community Room door?"

  He wrinkled his forehead and nose. "One of our new ones? In the hall? No. I'd have noticed that. I would have put it away."

  "Okay. What are you doing with Green Eggs and Ham in your desk?"

  "Green eggs? Oh, the books. They're for–come to think of it, that's none of your business."

  "Au contraire, mon cher. 'Fess up."

  Kevin laughed. "If it'll get you off my back—hey! That's probably where I was: putting the books in Patrice's locker. I always wait until after school, when nobody's around, and I probably did it early because it was Friday. I'll bet that's it."

  "That's what?"

  "Where I was during the murder."