Joseph Finder
Suspicion
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Finder
For Dan Conaway
PART ONE
1
Sometimes the smallest decision can change your life forever.
Abe Lincoln’s bodyguard decides to stay for another drink at the bar at Ford’s Theatre during intermission.
The archduke’s driver makes a wrong turn in Sarajevo because he refuses to ask for directions. (Men, right?)
You finally listen to your know-it-all brother-in-law and invest everything you have with a guy named Bernie Madoff. Steady returns, dude. A no-brainer.
The tyranny of small decisions, someone once called it. The gate of history turns on small hinges.
Danny Goodman’s nightmare began with a quick handshake and a friendly smile.
Whenever he drove up to his daughter’s private school, the Lyman Academy, Danny couldn’t help thinking of stately Wayne Manor, the baronial mansion outside Gotham City where Batman lives as Bruce Wayne. If only he were driving the Batmobile instead of a 1997 Honda Accord.
Lyman was the most exclusive private girls’ school in Boston, and most of the other cars in the pickup line were gleaming luxury SUVs: Range Rovers or Mercedes-Benzes or Land Cruisers. Today, though, Abby would be spared the public humiliation of an Accord sighting, because her father had arrived twenty minutes early for the afternoon pickup. He had an appointment with the head of the Upper School, Tinsley Thornton, whom everybody called Lally.
Lally. No wonder the place made Danny uncomfortable.
He parked in the side lot, where the teachers parked, and where his dented old Honda didn’t look quite so out of place.
The office of the head of the Upper School was at the end of a long corridor next to the headmaster’s office and Admissions, which might as well have been labeled REJECTIONS. You either had to know someone-several someones-to get into Lyman or be able to write a check sizable enough to build a new library. Danny had been fortunate: The foundation his late wife, Sarah, had worked for was endowed by a guy who also happened to be chairman of Lyman’s board of trustees.
Lally Thornton welcomed him to her large, oak-paneled office with a concerned look, clutching his hand in two of hers. Her steel-gray hair was held back with a black velvet headband. She wore a black turtleneck, a double strand of pearls, and perfume with the strong floral smell of urinal cake. Her air of lethal graciousness always reminded Danny of that socialite girls’-school headmistress who shot the diet doctor years ago.
“Is everything all right with Abby at home?” she asked with hushed concern, settling into a low brocade chair while Danny sat on the couch at a right angle to her.
“Oh, yeah, she’s-doing well.” He swallowed hard.
“It must be so difficult for her.”
He nodded. “But you know, Abby’s a strong kid.”
“Losing a mother at her age. What a terrible thing.”
Danny nodded. She must have just reviewed the file. “I had a quick question about the Italy trip,” he said.
She lit up. “It is such a profound experience,” she said. “You’ll see. It changes them. They come back different people-more aware of the world, more appreciative of different cultures, and, well, it seems to just dissolve all those cliques, all those silly tensions between the girls. I’d even call it transformative. Abby-oh, she’s going, isn’t she?”
“Well, see, that’s the question.”
“She must. She absolutely must. It’s the trip of a lifetime.”
He blotted his damp palms on the knees of his suit pants. “Right, I know, I’ve heard… But Abby-well, you know how idealistic these girls can be at that age. She’s sort of concerned that some of her classmates might find it difficult to go.”
“Difficult?”
“The five thousand dollars, I mean. Not everyone can afford it, and, you know, that bothers her.” Danny tried to sound casual. As if he were a hedge fund tycoon with a social conscience. Instead of a writer whose advance on his latest book had run out months ago.
What Lally apparently didn’t know was that he was more than a month late with this semester’s tuition. He had no idea how he could possibly come up with it-let alone five thousand bucks for a trip to Italy on top of that. Lyman had the biggest endowment of any private school in the United States. He was fairly certain they’d squeak by a bit longer without his lousy sixteen thousand dollars.
He imagined her reply: Why, that five-thousand-dollar fee, that’s merely a suggestion, a recommendation. Of course it’s waived if it’s a hardship for any family.
He felt a single fat bead of sweat trickle down behind his left ear, then down the side of his neck, and under his shirt collar.
“Isn’t that thoughtful of her? Well, you tell Abby that if any of her friends aren’t going to Italy because of the money, their parents should say something to Leah Winokur right away. We have scholarships for deserving minorities.”
“Of course.” He’d come here to try to finagle something that might enable Abby to go to Italy. A price break, maybe. A loan. Something. A scholarship for minorities didn’t exactly help. The only minority that Abby Goodman, blond-haired and blue-eyed, belonged to at this school was Girls Whose Parents Didn’t Have a Summer House. “You know, I do wonder whether it might be difficult for other parents, too-not minorities but not, you know, the very wealthy. To pay that kind of money on top of everything else.”
“I doubt most Lyman parents would consider that a hardship. After all, no one has to go to Italy.”
With a smile as cold as a pawnbroker’s, she said, “Was there anything else?”
2
The halls were crowded with teenage girls. It rang with squeals and shouts and laughter. Some of them walked arm in arm or hugged one another. Danny often marveled at how affectionate girls that age were and couldn’t help contrasting them with teenage boys, who smelled like old gym socks and zit cream and expressed affection by punching one another on the shoulder.
He waited for Abby with a deep sense of dread.
Not going on the Italy trip, she’d said, would be social death. She’d be a pariah. He’d told her he’d think about it. He’d see what he could do.
Meeting with Lally Thornton had been a desperation move, a Hail Mary pass that didn’t complete. No need to let Abby in on just how bad things were. How they were basically living on fumes. He wanted her life to be as normal as possible, given the circumstances.
She was doing better than a lot of girls her age would have done. She was strong, but her mother’s death had hit her hard. For months, her default expression had been a Darth Vader mask of anger. Who could blame her?
He didn’t look forward to giving her the bad news about the one thing she was looking forward to.
From behind him came a rumbling basso profundo. “Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes,” sang a school security guard, Leon Chisholm. He was a black man of about sixty with close-cropped white hair and a wide, open face. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a gap between his front teeth; the vibe was part professor, part prizefighter. He’d spent twenty years with the Boston Police Department, so he was probably able to handle a few mean girls in Lululemon yoga pants.
“Officer,” Danny said with a grin, and clapped him companionably on the shoulder. When Leon’s oldest daughter, Rebecca, had graduated from Bunker Hill Community College-the first in the family to go to college-Danny had helped her get a job with a publisher in Boston. Leon liked Danny, one of the few Lyman dads who said hi and actually chitchatted with him. To most other Lyman parents, Leon was invisible.