“This is amazing,” Cheryl said. “I don’t know how you work with these little things, and it all looks so neat and finished. I was in charge of decorations at the hotel last weekend and I had an awful time.”
“It showed” was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to aggravate her.
I let Cheryl praise the minty tea and explain how she didn’t eat sweets this late. Still very trim and muscular, she looked like she didn’t eat them early in the day, either.
“I’m assuming you have something on your mind, Cheryl?” I folded my arms across my chest. I used this body language rarely in my classroom, but when I did, words came tumbling out of the student in front of me. And it was words that I needed now from Cheryl. Fortunately for me, tonight she looked more like Cheryl Carroll, my C-average ALHS student than Mrs. Walter Mellace, important society wife and charity fund-raiser.
We took seats across from each other in the atrium, ready for business.
“I know you’re working with the police on David’s case, and I think you have an idea that I was involved in his murder.” Cheryl waved a finger at me and spoke in measured tones, as she might to her children.
I seemed to be locked in a power struggle, trying to be Cheryl’s old teacher while she was trying to be my mother.
“What makes you think that?”
“I didn’t do it,” she declared.
“You flatter me by thinking you have to answer to me, or that I have any official status with the police.”
She took a sip from her glass, leaving a large red lipstick mark on its rim, then looked at me sideways. “Come on, Gerry, everyone in town knows your, quote, status, unquote, with the Lincoln Point police.”
One point for Cheryl, for reaching the “Gerry” stage. In his time with me, Barry hadn’t gotten past “Mrs. Porter.”
“While you’re here, Cheryl, I do have a couple of questions for you.”
“I’m sure you do, and I’ll just tell you straight out that, yes, David and I had started seeing each other again. It wasn’t the biggest secret in the world, though we hadn’t exactly gone public with it yet.”
I decided to ask the most important question. “Cheryl, why did you put the room box in the woods near the crime scene and then call the police?”
Cheryl blinked several times and took another drink. I could tell I’d surprised her and I got the feeling she wished the drink were stronger than ice tea. She hung her head. I tried to remember if she’d been a member of the drama club.
“I’m ashamed of myself. I put it there because I didn’t want the police looking at me. I knew I’d made a bit of a spectacle of myself Friday night. I’d had a little too much in the hospitality suite, you know?”
I recalled that another Mellace, her husband, excused his behavior in accosting me, by invoking the same reason.
“How did you know where to put it?”
“I have a friend in the dispatcher’s office. He told me where David’s… David was found. That clearing was a special place for us, you know.” Cheryl’s eyes seemed to drift up and off to the right. An onlooker might have thought she was stargazing through my open roof.
“The clearing is not as private as you think.”
She dropped her gaze and seemed to freeze in time and space. “What? What do you mean?”
“Everyone knows, Cheryl.” I couldn’t believe I was the first to alert Cheryl that everyone past freshman year knew that the clearing in Joshua Speed Woods had been the teenagers’ haven for decades. I remembered the time a group of parents decided to drive to the parking lot where I’d been earlier today and camp out, hoping to head their children off at the edge of the woods.
“I have to go,” Cheryl said. Looking at her expression-eyes glazed over, lips tightened into a thin line-I wondered if I should let her drive.
I opened the door, hoping to see the LPPD escort that Barry had received.
The street was clear except for Cheryl’s own low-riding sports car, its top down. I watched wide-eyed as she climbed over the driver’s side door to enter. It was as if she’d gone back thirty years and was trying out for the cheerleading squad. I couldn’t imagine what had put her over the edge, literally and figuratively.
I mentally took out my grade book from the days of yore. As of this interview, my verdict for Barry Cannon was “not guilty,” for Walter Mellace, “guilty,” and Cheryl Mellace, “deadlocked.” It crossed my mind that Walter was suffering from not having knocked on my door for a late-night drink.
In spite of the hour, I was wired from Cheryl’s visit and wished Skip would come by. I felt it would be disloyal to Maddie if I called him myself, but I’d be blameless if he showed up and asked me to share.
Until I could unload all the little findings of the past day, I’d have trouble sleeping, I knew. Sometimes writing things down helped me let go, so I made a list of what I needed to tell Skip.
I wrote my cryptic notes: room box journey from hotel to woods; e-mail chronology off; Larry? Cheryl?
I surprised myself by putting Larry Esterman on my list. Rosie’s father, a murderer? I doubted it, but as more and more people told me how angry he was at the students who perpetrated the terrible humiliation on his daughter, I found it hard not to entertain the possibility. Carrying a grudge for thirty years could make anyone snap.
The last, Cheryl? referred to a nagging bit, a possible clue I’d thought of while Cheryl was here. It might not even have had to do with her, but something that came to me by my looping, associative mind.
I took the notes with me and put them on my night table.
There. Now I could sleep and let some other force do its part.
Chapter 23
Maddie was torn between two good options on Wednesday morning.
She swung her cereal spoon to her left. “I really want to go to class today because I have big things going on with my project.” She swung the spoon to her right. “But I don’t want to miss anything.” She aimed the spoon at me. “Do you promise not to go to Uncle Skip’s office before I’m out of school?”
“I do.”
She paused a minute. “Do you promise not to invite him here?”
“I do.”
More thinking. “Do you promise-”
“Sweetheart, I promise to wait before I talk to Uncle Skip about what you and I, mostly you, figured out, until you are by my side.” That ought to cover it. It took fewer words for many legal procedures.
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t crab anymore.”
She kept her promise through breakfast and even on the short ride to the Rutledge Center.
I was grateful for a cooler day in the forecast as I headed for the library. I much preferred to have all the windows open in my car to using the noisy, windy air conditioner. Maddie, on the other hand, wanted the air conditioner all year long, it seemed. You might have thought she grew up in the Bronx as I did, and hadn’t been cold since leaving the Grand Concourse.
My morning would be taken up with a tutoring session at the library with Lourdes Pino. Otherwise, I’d have bitten my nails to the core waiting for permission from my granddaughter to contact my nephew.
It never took me long to refocus when I met Lourdes Pino. Her enthusiasm and energy for studying was contagious. If she’d been in any of my high school English classes at ALHS, she might have inspired some of the duller students whom I was unable to reach.
Although Lourdes had earned her GED last spring and was ready to start her first year of community college, she asked if we could continue our weekly sessions in the Lincoln Point Library.