He saw the change come over her face before the doctor and nurse did, because she was turned toward him. It had seemed impossible a moment ago that anything could have been added to the emotion she had undergone already, and yet now something was. A climactic excess of horror, to top all the other horror she had experienced, seemed to spread slowly over her face like a cold, viscous film. She pressed two fingers to the outer edge of each eyebrow, as if to keep her skull from flying apart. “Not here!” she whispered.
“That’s what he says,” Wanger breathed back unwillingly.
“Oh, no — no!”
He correctly translated the meaning she gave the harried negative; not a denial of the person’s existence, a denial of the accusation — simply because it was so unthinkable.
“Then there is—” he persisted gently.
“The child’s—” She pointed, hardly able to articulate. Tears, no longer of grief but of mortal terror, welled unchecked from her eyes. “Cookie’s — kindergarten teacher—”
If there was anything could make what had happened seem even worse than it was, it was this: to have the cause of it take form, materialize into human shape, cease to remain just an abstraction — become, from an impersonally barred door, the young woman who was in charge of her own child several hours each day.
She crumpled; not in a faint, but her legs gave under her. The nurse and doctor caught her, supported her between them. They pivoted her slowly around to face the door, started her over toward it, taking small steps. She was incapable of saying anything further, but nothing further needed to be said. It was all in Wanger’s hands now.
Just before the door closed on the pathetic little procession, the doctor snarled crankily over his shoulder, “You fellows make me sick.”
“Can’t be helped,” answered the detective doggedly. “Had to be done.”
She was in the middle of a flock of kids in a subdivided section of the school yard, separated from the rougher activities of the older children. They were playing games, marching one at a time under the arched hands of two pivots, and then being imprisoned there and swung back and forth, and then being given a whispered choice of two incalculable treasures, and then being posted behind one or the other of the two pivots, according to the selection they’d made. They’d never played that in Wanger’s day, down on East 11th Street, so he couldn’t follow it very closely.
He hated to do this more than he’d ever hated any job before, even though it was not an arrest yet or anything even remotely resembling it. He supposed the sight of the kids made him feel that way. There was something brutal, almost unclean, about hauling her off from here, to find out if she had taken a human life.
She saw him watching and left them a minute and came over to him. She was a short, slender little body with coppery gold hair; young, not more than twenty-four, or — five; pretty behind her shell-rimmed glasses. In fact, even pretty before them, if a trifle more austere. Sparingly gilded with freckles on her cheekbones. They were becoming.
“Were you waiting for one of them?” she asked pleasantly. “The session won’t be over for another—”
He’d asked that he be allowed to find his way out here to her unescorted — or rather guided only by a “monitor,” one of the older children, who had now gone back — and hadn’t explained his business to the principal; it seemed more considerate. “It’s you yourself I’d like to speak to,” he said. He tried to do his job without frightening her unduly. After all, she was just a stray name on a child’s lips, so far. “I’m Wanger, of the police department—”
“Oh.” She wasn’t particularly frightened, just taken aback.
“I’d like you to come over and see Cookie Moran — you know, Mrs. Frank Moran’s youngster — with me as soon as you’re through here, if you don’t mind.”
“Ah, yes — poor little soul,” she commiserated.
The game had stalled meanwhile. The children were still in playing formation, all faces turned toward her for further instructions. “Should we start pulling now, Miss Baker?”
She glanced at him inquiringly. “Finish your class out first,” he consented. “I’ll wait for you.”
She went back to her charges immediately, no premonition of impending difficulties seeming to mar her attention to her duties. She clapped her hands briskly. “All right, now, children. Ready? Pull!.. Not too hard now... Look you, Marvin, you’re tearing Barbara’s sleeve—”
In the classroom later, the children all safely packed into the bus and sent off, he watched her clear the desk at which she held sway over them, putting things neatly away into the drawer. “Those little crayon drawings they do for you — like those you’ve got there — don’t they take them home every day?”
It was the idle question of a man standing by watching something he is not familiar with. It had that sound, at least.
“No, Fridays are our days for that. We let them accumulate during the week, and then on Fridays we clear out their little desks and send everything home with them to show their mothers how they’re progressing.” She laughed indulgently.
He picked up one of the color plates at random. It was an oversize robin perched on a limb. He chuckled with hypocritical admiration. “Is this pattern from last week or from this week?” Another of those idle, stopgap questions, as if simply to make conversation while she was straightening her hat.
“This week’s,” she said, glancing around to identify it. “That was their Monday afternoon assignment.”
Monday night was the night—
They took a taxi to the Moran house. Wanger was the more diffident of the two, kept looking out the window on his side. “Is this a police matter you’re taking me over on or... er... an errand of mercy?” she finally asked, a little embarrassedly. It wasn’t the embarrassment of guilt, it was the uncertainty of a totally new, uncharted experience.
“It’s just a bit of routine, don’t pay any attention to it.” He looked out the cab window again as though his thought were a thousand miles away. “By the way, were you over there the night it happened?” He couldn’t have made it sound more inconsequential if he’d tried.
Not that he was being unduly considerate or leaning over backward about it; the situation so far didn’t warrant any heavier handling. He would have been out of order.
“Over there at the Moran’s?” She arched her brows in complete astonishment. “Why, good heavens, no!”
He didn’t repeat the question and she didn’t repeat the denial. Once each was enough. She was on record.
Wanger had looked on at many confrontations, but he thought he had never been present at a more dramatic one than this. She was so defenseless against the child, in one way. And the child was so defenseless against the whole grown-up world, in another way.
He was overjoyed to see her when the matron brought him in. “H’lo, Miss Baker!” He ran across the room to her, clasped her below the hips, looked up into her face. “I couldn’t come to school today because my daddy went away. I couldn’t come yesterday, either.”
“I know, Cookie, we all missed you.”
She turned to Wanger as if to ask, “Now what do I have to do?”
Wanger got down on his haunches, tried to keep his voice low and confidence inspiring. “Cookie, do you remember the night your daddy went into the closet?”
Cookie nodded dutifully.
“Is this the lady that was here with you in the house?”