Nina Evans replied with a noncommittal shrug. “At morning recess the boys were evidently teasing Jennifer and saying naughty things to her. She waited until noon and then punched them out when they were all three supposed to be on their way to the lunch-room.”
“Both of them at once?”
The principal nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve been told. Jeffrey’s parents took him over to the dispensary to have his thumb looked after, Gordon Smith’s mother picked him up about half an hour ago. Jennifer’s the only one still here. I didn’t want to send her home wit someone else without first having a chance to discuss the situation with you in person. It’s far too serious.”
“I want to see her,” Joanna said. “Where she?”
“In my office. You can go on in if you want.”
In the fifteen years since Joanna’s eighth grade graduation, the Greenway School principal’s office had altered very little. Personnel changes had occurred because elementary school principals come and go, but the same gray metal desk still sat in one corner of the room with the same old-fashioned wooden bench sitting across from it.
On the wall above the bench hung the familiar, but now much more faded, print of George Washington. The print, too, was exactly the same. Joanna remembered the cornerwise crack in the glass. She remembered how she had sat on the wooden bench herself and craned her neck to stare up at George Washington’s face on that long-ago spring afternoon when her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Fennessy, had sentenced Joanna Lathrop to a day in the principal’s office.
Jennifer glanced up nervously as the door opened. Seeing Joanna, she dropped her eyes and stared at her shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said once.
Joanna walked across the room and sat n on the bench beside her daughter. “Tell about it,” she said quietly. “What did those boys say to you?”
For a time the child sat with her head low-and didn’t answer. Joanna watched as a fat, heavy tear squeezed out of the corner of Jennifer’s eye and coursed down her freckled cheek before dripping silently off her chin.
“Tell me,” Joanna insisted.
Jennifer bit her lower lip, a gesture Joanna recognized as being very like one of her own. “Do I have to say it?” the child whispered.
“Yes.”
“They said Daddy was a crook,” Jennifer choked out at last. “I told them they’d better take it back, but they wouldn’t, so I beat ‘ em up. Daddy wasn’t even a black hat, Mom, so why would they say such a thing?”
Joanna draped one arm across Jennifer’s small shoulder and pulled the child close. Milo had told her the town was choosing up sides. Now she understood far better what he had meant. Unfortunately, some of the first stones thrown had landed squarely on Jenny.
“What happened to Daddy didn’t just hap-pen to us, you know,” Joanna said slowly, groping for words. “We’re not the only people who are trying to figure out what happened and what’s going to happen next. Everyone else is, too. Those boys were probably just repeating things they had heard at home from their own parents.”
“You mean everybody’s talking about it? About us?”
“Pretty much.”
“And they all think Daddy was a crook?”
It was hard enough for Joanna to cope with the flurry of disturbing rumors. It hurt her even more to realize that Jennifer would have deal with them at her own level as well. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Not everyone believes that, Jenny,” she answered quietly, “but some people do. You’ve got to try to not let it bother you.”
“But it does,” Jennifer whispered fiercely. “It really does. It made me so mad, I wanted to knock Jeffrey Block’s teeth out. All I did was hurt his thumb.”
For a moment they sat side by side without speaking. “But it isn’t true, is it?” Jennifer asked forlornly, with a trace of doubt leaking into her questioning voice.
Joanna squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and held her tight. “No,” she declared, “but up to us to prove it.”
‘‘Can we?”
Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know if we can for sure, but we’re certainly going to try.”
“And then those boys will have to take it k, won’t they.”
There was a tough ferocity about Jennifer’s loyalty to her father that made Joanna smile in spite of herself. “Yes,” she agreed. “They’ll have to take it back, and so will Adam York.”
“Who’s he?” Jenny asked.
“Never mind,” Joanna answered.
“Will I have to stay here in the office until the bell rings?”
“No. You’re corning with me. I have lots of errands to run, and you’ll have to come along.” Joanna handed her daughter a tissue. “Here,” she said. “Blow your nose and dry your face. Did I ever tell you about the time I got sent to this very same principal’s office?”
Jennifer blew her nose with a bellowing, foghorn effect that belied her small size. “You?” she asked disbelievingly. “I didn’t think you ever got in trouble.
“It was in the fourth grade,” Joanna told her. “During arithmetic. The boy behind me was new to town. He didn’t stay long, but I never forgot his name-Kasamir Moulter. He copied all the answers off my paper. Mrs. Fennessy gave us both F’s.”
“How come she did that? If he copied your paper, he should have been the one in trouble, not you.”
“She thought I gave him the answers.”
“Even though it wasn’t true?”
“Even though.”
“Couldn’t you prove it was his fault?”
“How? It was his word against mine. Mrs. Fennessy believed him.”
“That wasn’t fair,” Jennifer protested.
“Two against one isn’t fair,” Joanna countered.
Jennifer looked up at her mother for a long time before nodding in understanding. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Will I come back to school tomorrow?”
Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mrs. Evans doesn’t want you in school for a day or two. She seems to think you’re a menace to society.”
For the first time, a hint of a smile played around the corners of Jennifer’s mouth. “I am, too,” the child said stoutly. “I did it just the way you taught me. You would of been proud Inc.”
“Would have,” Joanna corrected. “Come on.”
They found Nina Evans in the hall. “I’ll take Jenny home for now,” Joanna told the principal. “And I may keep her home tomorrow as well, but when she comes back, you might spread the word that if anyone else hassles her about what happened, they’ll end up dealing me.”
Holding jenny by the hand, the two of them marched down the hall. “Where are we going?” Jenny asked in a small voice.
“Did you eat any lunch?”
“No.”
“First we’ll go by Daisy’s and split a pasty,” Joanna said. “Then we’ll start working our through the list.”
Daisy Maxwell, the original owner of Daisy’s Cafe, had been retired for twenty years and dead for ten, but the restaurant she started still reflected her initial menu as well as the ethnic diversity of Bisbee’s mining camp origins when miners from all over the world had flocked to Arizona’s copper strikes. Along with the usual standbys of hamburgers and sandwiches, Mexican food, Cornish pasties and Hungarian goulash were featured as daily specials at least once a week. Grits were usually available, upon request, with breakfast.
Between the two of them, Joanna and Jenny wiped out most of the huge platter-filling pasty with its flaky outside crust and steaming beef-vegetable stew interior. Afterward they made a series of stops-at the mortuary, the florist, Marianne and Jeff’s-making sure the arrangements were solidified for the funeral on Saturday afternoon. They went by the Sheriff’s Department and spoke briefly with Dick Voland and Ken Galloway, both of whom readily agreed to be pallbearers. Joanna had wanted to speak to Walter McFadden about doing a eulogy, but they were told he had taken the afternoon off and had gone home early.