“I’d like to think quite a few of my pupils can spell better than this,” she said dryly. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Aragon. I appreciate your promise to keep quiet about Donny Whitfield. Things are already bad enough. The Cleo story won’t look very pretty in the newspaper: School Counselor Elopes with Retarded Heiress.”
“The local paper is usually more tactful than that.”
“Not where Mr. Jasper is concerned. He’s for oil-drilling in the channel. They stand opposed. They wouldn’t pass up a chance like this to get at him, perhaps at me as well. Some people resent having a school like ours in their vicinity. They consider our students dangerous. They’re not, of course.”
Neither of them mentioned the name of the exception.
He told her he would be interested in hearing the outcome of the board of directors’ meeting and wrote down on his card the telephone number of his apartment and of his office, which had a twenty-four-hour answering service.
As he watched her pull away from the curb he hoped her driving was a little better than her parking and a lot better than that of Mrs. Griswold, who’d returned the basset hound to the Jaspers.
He remembered his wild ride through the city streets following Mrs. Griswold to her tenant’s bungalow to pay the reward money.
Timothy North must have laughed all the way to the bank.
10
Shortly before two o’clock the members of the board of directors began arriving. From the north windows of her office Mrs. Holbrook could have watched them, noting which ones had found time to come to a meeting so suddenly arranged. She stood instead at the south window, surveying the grounds of her school. She knew every square foot of its acreage, the tennis and basketball courts, the pool enclosed by an eight-foot chain-link fence with its gate double-padlocked, the picnic grounds, the corral and dog runs; she knew how much the new roof for the stable had cost; she knew the names of every horse and dog, of every shrub and tree on the property. It was her small kingdom and for thirty years she had lived in it and for it.
Tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision. Everything seemed to be moving, as if the first tremor of an earthquake had struck. There was a knock on the door. She blinked away the tears and said, “Come in.”
A girl entered, carrying an oversized canvas tote bag with the name Gretchen printed on it. She was sixteen, large and sturdy, with a moon face and round eyes and the faint trace of a mustache.
“I came to clean,” Gretchen said.
“You cleaned yesterday, Gretchen. Things haven’t had a chance to get dirty.”
“I see dirt that other people can’t.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
The girl began her work at the bottom shelf of one of the bookcases. She sat on the floor, removed a dustcloth from the tote bag and started wiping each book individually. She hummed tunelessly as she worked. The noise didn’t bother Mrs. Holbrook. Gretchen was happy at these times and Mrs. Holbrook was happy for her.
Her gaze returned to the school grounds. A picnic was in progress and a group of boys was playing basketball, coached by their athletic director, Miss Trimble. A girl was working a quarter horse in the training ring but the pool and the tennis courts were empty. Only one student was using the playground. He was swinging on a tire suspended from a limb of a huge cypress tree.
His name was Michael and he was new and very quiet and Mrs. Holbrook was worried about him. She went down the hall and out the back door and crossed the lawn to the cypress tree. The boy didn’t turn his head or indicate in any way that he was aware of her.
“Hello, Michael,” she said. “Do you like swinging?”
His eyes were closed and he might have been asleep except for the movement of his legs.
“Have you had lunch, Michael?”
He made a sound that could have been yes or no. She was quite sure it was no. The dietitian had already discussed Michael’s case with her. A problem eater given to hunger strikes, he was at least twenty pounds underweight.
“I have a bowl of very nice apples in my office,” she said. “Or perhaps you and I could walk down to the grove and pick some oranges. Would you like that?”
He spoke without opening his eyes.
“I hate you.”
“I don’t hate you back, Michael. I think you and I can become good friends. Your mother’s driving down to see you next month. Did you know that?”
“I hate you.”
She felt the sting of tears again. She would have liked to hate him back but... Instead, she wanted to hold him in her arms and comfort him. He was helpless and possibly hopeless. There was no apparent cause for his condition. He had loving parents, three sisters and a brother, all normal, and no history of childhood illnesses or accidents. He was probably, as one of the counselors had pointed out, the victim of the commonest and most mysterious cause of all, a failure of genetic programming, a fancy name for rotten luck. She tried to remember which counselor had said it. Perhaps it was Roger Lennard and perhaps he was talking about himself, not this quiet boy on the swing with his eyes closed to the world.
“You can’t see anything unless you open your eyes, Michael,” she said gently. “It’s like being blind, and you wouldn’t like to be blind, would you?... I know. I bet someone has glued your eyelashes together. Let’s go to the tap over there and wash away the glue, and presto, your eyes will pop open again. How about it?”
“I hate you.”
“That’s okay. I’m not so crazy about me, either.”
She turned and went back to her office, pausing only to pick up some bark that had peeled off the lemona eucalyptus tree and toss it in the trash bin. A failure in genetic programming. Rotten luck. She was almost sure now those were Roger’s words and that he’d been talking about himself. Though he had never openly indicated dissatisfaction with his role in life, she sometimes sensed his uneasiness, his awareness that he was out of sync, out of tune.
In the office Gretchen was still at work on the bottom shelf of books, still humming, still happy. Mrs. Holbrook picked up the phone and called Roger’s number as she had done a dozen times in the past two days. She was about to hang up when she heard the click of a receiver being lifted.
“Roger? Is that you, Roger?”
The only answer was a whimpering animal sound followed by the thud of something falling, or being thrown.
“Roger, it’s Rachel Holbrook. Are you drunk? Answer me.”
She waited for a full minute before hanging up. She felt dizzy with anger, days, weeks, years of anger, at the Rogers and Cleos and Donnys and Michaels and boards of directors, years of anger she had never shown, never even realized she felt.
She spoke as quietly and as calmly as possible to the girl sitting on the floor. “I have an important errand, Gretchen. Perhaps we’d better postpone the rest of the cleaning to another day.”
“No, I can’t. Everything’s terribly dirty. It’s going to take me six months to finish up.”
“I need your cooperation, Gretchen. My secretary had to go to the dentist. When he returns I want you to give him a message for me. Can you do that?”
“No. I’m very busy.”
“Gretchen, for God’s sake—”
“You told us not to swear,” Gretchen said. “God is a dirty word.”
The carport beside Space C of Hibiscus Court was occupied by a car Mrs. Holbrook recognized as Roger Lennard’s, a red Pinto station wagon with Utah license plates.
She stopped her Seville behind it and was about to get out when a man came hurrying toward her. He was an old man, so brown and wrinkled he looked as though he’d been hung out to dry in the California sun like a string of chili peppers.