Without thinking, Jeffrey slammed his fist into the man's mouth. A tooth went flying, followed by a stream of blood. The man dropped to the ground again, prepared to take a beating.
Jeffrey walked back to the store, a sickening feeling washing over him.
Chapter Nine
Robert E. Lee High School was what locals called a "super school." This meant that the building was designed to house about fifteen hundred students from the three cities comprising Grant County. As it was, the school was still not large enough, and temporary classrooms-what other people called trailers-were in the back of the building, taking over the baseball field. Grades nine through twelve were offered here, while two middle schools served as feeders for Lee. There were four assistant principals and one principal, George Clay, a man who from all accounts spent most of his time behind his desk pushing paperwork for the governor's innovative new education program-a plan that made sure teachers spent more time filling out forms and attending certification classes than actually teaching kids.
Brad fiddled with his hat as they walked down the hallway, his police-issue sneakers thumping against the floor. Without thinking, Lena had started to count his steps as they walked up the locker-lined corridor. The place was in-stitutional in its ambiguity, with its bright-white tile floor and muted cement-block walls. To match the school's colors, the lockers were painted a dark red, the walls a darker gray. There were posters cheering the Rebels to victory on every available blank space, but this served more to clutter than to encourage. Bulletin boards urged students to say no to drugs, cigarettes, and sex.
"It seems so small," Brad said, his voice a hushed whisper.
Lena did not roll her eyes at this, though it was hard. Since they had talked to George Clay, Brad had been acting like a high school freshman instead of a cop. Brad even looked the part, with his round face and wispy blond hair that seemed to fall into his eyes every three seconds.
"This is Miss Mac's room," he said, indicating a closed door. He glanced through the window as they passed by. "She taught me English," he said, pushing back his hair.
"Hmm," Lena answered, not looking.
All the doors on the hall were closed between classes, and all of them were locked. Like most rural schools, Lee had taken precautions against intruders. Teachers walked the hallways, and there were two officers, what Jeffrey called "deputy dogs," in the front office in case anything bad went down. As a patrolman, Lena had been called to the school more than her share of times to arrest drug dealers and brawlers. In her experience, perps picked up from school were a hell of a lot harder to deal with than their adult counterparts. Habitual juvenile offenders knew the laws governing their arrests better than most cops, and there was no fear in them anymore.
"Things have changed so much," Brad said, echoing her thoughts. "I don't know how the teachers do it."
"The same way we do," Lena snapped, wanting to cut off the conversation. She had never liked school and was not comfortable being here. Actually, since her interrogation of Mark Patterson, Lena had felt off. She was experiencing an odd mixture of self-assurance from being able to connect with the kid and an unsettling feeling that she had connected too closely. Worst of all, Jeffrey seemed to have picked up on this, too.
"Here we go," Brad said, stopping in front of Jenny Weaver's locker. He pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and started to unfold it, saying, "The combination is-" as Lena hooked her thumb under the latch and popped the locker open.
"How'd you do that?" Brad asked.
"Only geeks use the combinations."
Brad blushed, but covered for it by taking things out of Jenny Weaver's locker. "Three textbooks," he said, handing them to Lena so she could thumb through the pages. "A notebook," he continued. "Two pencils and a pack of gum."
Lena peered into the narrow cabinet, thinking that Jenny Weaver was a lot neater than she had been. There weren't even pictures taped on to the inside. "That's all?" she asked, even though she could see for herself.
"That's all," Brad answered, going through the books Lena had already checked.
Lena opened the notebook, which had a puppy on the cover. There were six colored tabs, one for each period, dividing the paper into sections. Almost every page was filled, but as far as she could tell there were only class notes. Jenny Weaver had not even doodled on the edges.
"She must've been a good student," Lena said.
"She was thirteen and in the ninth grade."
"Is that unusual?"
"Just means she skipped a grade," Brad told her, stacking the books back in the locker the way they had found them. He checked the packet of gum to make sure it was just gum. "She sure was neat."
"Yeah," Lena agreed, handing Brad the notebook. She waited while he thumbed through it, looking for something she might have missed.
"She wrote real neat," Brad said in a sad voice.
"What'd you think of her on the retreat?"
Brad pushed his hair out of his eyes. "She was quiet. I hate to say that I barely noticed her, but the girls pretty much kept to themselves. Mrs. Gray was supposed to be there to help out with them, but she got sick at the last minute. I didn't want to disappoint everybody, and the deposits were nonrefundable…" He shook his head. "The boys were a handful. I had to spend most of my time looking after them."
"What about Jenny and Lacey?"
"Well…" Brad's forehead wrinkled as he thought. "They didn't do much, is the thing. The other kids skied and had fun. Jenny and Lacey kind of kept to themselves. They had their own room and I only really saw them around supper time."
"How'd they act?"
"Kind of like they had their own language. They'd look at me and giggle, you know, like girls do." He shifted uncomfortably, and Lena could see exactly why the girls had giggled. Brad probably knew as much about teenage girls as a goat did.
"They didn't act strange?"
"Stranger than giggling for no reason?"
"Brad…" Lena said. She stopped herself before she told him why the girls were laughing at him. Telling him they probably thought he was a dork would only make him pout, and Lena did not want to deal with that for the rest of the day.
He stared at her openly, waiting for her to finish.
"Just…" Lena began, then stopped again. "Did it seem like Jenny was sick?"
"That's what the chief asked," Brad said, and it seemed like he felt this was a compliment to Lena. "He asked a lot of questions about Jenny and how she looked, who she was hanging around with."
Lena closed the locker and indicated that they should continue walking. "So?"
"She didn't look sick to me," he said. "I mean, like I told you, they kept to themselves. They didn't seem to like the other kids. Honestly, I don't know why they went. They're not exactly part of that group."
"Meaning what?"
He shrugged. "Popular, I guess. I mean, Lacey could've been. She's real cute, like a cheerleader." He shook his head, as if he was still trying to figure it out. "Jenny definitely wasn't popular. I didn't catch anyone being mean to her-I would'a done something about that-but they didn't go out of their way to be nice to her, either."
"Weren't you supposed to be chaperoning them?"
He took this as it was meant, and immediately became defensive. "I watched them as best I could, but it was just me there, and the boys were getting into a lot more trouble than the girls."
Lena bit her tongue, wondering how someone as dense as Brad had gotten on the force.
"Here we go," Brad said, stopping in front of the library. He held the door open for Lena, something Brad's mama had taught him to do from an early age. Working with Frank, then Jeffrey, Lena was so used to men opening doors for her that she barely noticed it anymore.