“I’m not sure you ever learn anything, Claire.” He shot me a discouraged look. “To continue, I also discussed the letters with Cheryl Anne, who was properly ashamed of her conduct and bravely offered to turn in her crown. Once she stopped sniveling at the idea, she pointed out that neither she nor Thud could enter the lounge without being noticed.” He propped his feet on his desk, toppling a stack of folders, and crossed his arms. “That’s pretty much what I’ve learned in the last few days. May I assume you’ve been equally open, despite your innate tendencies to the contrary?”
“You may assume so, Peter. I was trying to help Miss Parchester,” I said, sighing. “I seemed to have mudaed things more so than usual, and I’m sorry. If you’re adamant, I will call Bernice Dort and tell her I won’t be available to substitute tomorrow. No matter how deafening the jackhammer, I’ll stay in the Book Depot and mind my own business. It needs minding, actually. I haven’t been in for a week; the mice have probably invited all their friends in to nosh the paperbacks.”
He rubbed his forehead, crossed his arms, rearranged the pile of folders, made noises under his breath, and generally allowed me time to suffer. I remained determinedly penitent. There were rumbles outside his office, cars coming and leaving, voices barking into telephones, lots of footsteps in the hall. All we needed were a few locker doors to be slammed, and we’d be in dear old Farberville High School between classes.
When I was about to exit with whatever dignity I could muster, he finally looked up and said, “You are convinced Emily Parchester is innocent. Despite your continual, maddening, eternally intrusive interference, I do value your opinion-if not your tactics. I suppose you might as well continue to substitute so that you can keep an eye on things in the lounge. You will, of course, report everything to me, without regard to your personal analysis of its value to the proper authorities.”
“Of course,” I murmured, somewhat disappointed I hadn’t been ordered back to the bookstore for the duration. the thought had appealed. “May I be permitted to make amends to you?”
“Of course.
I gave him a bright smile. “Would you like to go dancing with me tomorrow night?” I suppose I might have mentioned the five hundred or so teenagers who would accompany us, but it must have slipped my mind.
TEN
The events of the last week paled in the onslaught of the Homecoming madness. Most of the students wore some variation of red and gold in honor of the big day, and they chattered like starlings through the first two periods. The freshmen seemed to have either forgiven me for bumping off their principal or forgotten about it. No one paid any attention when I tried to quiet things down, so I settled for an aspirin and a long, solitary visit to the darkroom. Fourteen hours until the dance.
There were three bottles of aspirin beside the coffee pot in the lounge, standard equipment for such holidays. I gulped down another for luck, then slumped on the green-and-mauve, closed my eyes, and lulled myself with a pleasant reverie of books, bookracks, temperate bookbuyers, invoices, and quarterly tax estimates as yet uncomputed. The images evoked a quasi-religious rush of longing.
I kept my eyes closed as a few souls drifted in and out of the lounge, mission unknown. One was, I supposed, Evelyn’s student teacher on her hourly breakdown; another was apt to be a Fury. I really didn’t care. Now that Peter had asked for my help, I couldn’t rally the energy to sniff out clues or grill suspects. That was too unsettling to think about, so I sank further into the plaid to doze.
“Burned out already?” Evelyn said in my ear. “Most of us survive a few years before we seek greener pastures elsewhere.”
Yawning, I went into the lounge to get a cup of coffee. “I think it’s psychosomatic,” I called. “Anything to avoid chaperoning the dance tonight. The thought sends chills down my spine.”
“You’ll be in good company. Sherwood has the boys’ rest room, Miss Bagby and I have the front door, and Jerry has the back door, to keep the smokers contained. Paula has the concession stand during the game, but I imagine she’ll come with her beloved to ensure that he keeps his eyes on her and off the senior girls.”
The coffee almost sloshed out of my cup. “Are you implying that Paula will attend this unspeakable function-even though she isn’t required under penalty of death to do so?”
Evelyn laughed at my expression. “Paula’s sweetness and light on the surface, but she has a stainless-steel interior. When she got fed up with Sherwood, she told him off with the acumen of a professional hit man, and he was so stricken he made nary a wisecrack in Latin for almost two weeks. It was truly amazing, not to mention refreshing. To everyone’s regret, he finally recovered and is now much worse than before. I can count the Latinless sentences on one hand.”
I stared at the formica table, trying to recall a bit of conversation that had occurred at the fatal potluck. “What did Weiss say to Sherwood about a manuscript that provoked a menacing Latin riposte?” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Ars longa, or something like that?”
“Ars longa vita brevae,” Sherwood said from the doorway. “Art is long, life short. I didn’t expect my delphic aside to be taken quite so literally by an unknown hand. Nor did I expect to continue to be your favorite suspect, Claire; I thought we’d resolved that last night, in transitu.”
“But have the sophomores abandoned you?” I said in a futile attempt to divert the direction in which we were aimed. It didn’t work.
Evelyn raised an eyebrow at Sherwood. “Last night? I didn’t realize you two were getting all that cozy.” She raised the other eyebrow at me. “You didn’t mention anything when you called me to discuss the Miss Demeanor shenanigans.”
Sherwood’s eyebrows were up, so I raised mine, too, just to be companionable. “I asked Sherwood to unlock the building for me,” I admitted. “I wanted to look at jerry’s personnel file to see if I could find whatever Weiss was holding over him. Sherwood was kind enough to comply, and we did discuss motives in passing.”
“What did you find in Jerry’s file?” Evelyn asked, thawing to early spring if not out-and-out summer.
I ignored Sherwood’s glower. “I didn’t find anything at all. It was all quite innocent-recommendations, teacher certification, good grades through graduate school, academic awards, that sort of thing. I was wrong when I hypothesized that he didn’t have his degree. Degrees he has, and admirable ones.”
Upon this seemingly innocuous revelation, Sherwood choked and sputtered through a mouthful of coffee and Evelyn turned an unbecoming shade of white. Both of them goggled at me as if I’d mentioned the coach’s propensity for bestiality or the dismemberment of his first seven wives.
“What?” I said, unamused by their antics. “What’s wrong with good transcripts and warm letters from old coaches?”
“Graduate school,” croaked Evelyn.
“It’s where you go after undergraduate school,” I said. “I went to one myself, although I never got around to writing a dissertation. It’s not a topic for ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘That’s Incredible.’”
“Jerry is a coach,” Sherwood said, proving he too could croak. The pond was filling up; all we needed were lily pads.
“Jerry is indeed a coach, and probably a very good one,” I said as tolerantly as I could. “He also has a doctorate in English literature, which is more than I can say after my three years of tuition, research papers, and white wine from a jug.”
“A doctorate?” they croaked in unison. Lily pads couldn’t be too far in the future, along with dragonflys and cattails.