The Cereal Murders Page 3

  The voices of Julian, Macguire, and the headmaster warbled uncertainly out of the kitchen. Then the headmaster cried, “Keith Andrews? Dead? Are you sure? Oh, no!” I heard footsteps moving rapidly up the kitchen staircase. I stood staring into the living room, where the recent exodus of guests had left the tables and chairs helter-skelter.

  “What are you doing in here? Jeez, Goldy.” Julian leaned in toward my face. “You look even worse than you did five minutes ago.”

  There was a buzzing in my ears.

  “Did you get through to Arch?” I wanted to know.

  Julian nodded.

  “And?”

  “He’s fine…. There was a problem with the security system a little while ago.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Somebody threw a rock through one of the upstairs windows. It hit one of the sensor wires, I guess. The system went off. Once Arch found the rock, he interrupted the automatic dial.”

  I tried to breathe. There was stinging behind my eyes. I had to get home. I said, “Can you find something to put on? We need to go outside … to be there when they arrive.”

  He withdrew without a word. I went into the bathroom and stared at my face in the tiny mirror.

  I was not a stranger to death. The previous spring I had seen a friend die in a car accident that had been no accident. I began to wash my hands vigorously. Nor was I a stranger to violence. I tested my thumb, the one my ex-husband, Dr. John Richard Korman, had broken in three places before we were divorced. Trying to bend it, I winced. The warm water stung my hands like needles.

  In the mirror, my skin looked gray, my lips pale as dust. A problem with the security system. I shook droplets off my hands. My right shoulder ached suddenly. In the middle of an argument, John Richard had pushed me onto the open lower shelf of the dishwasher. A butcher knife had cut deeply into the area behind that shoulder, and I had paid for my protest over his extramarital flings with twenty stitches, weeks of pain, and a permanent scar.

  Now death, violence, brought it all close again. I looked down at my trembling hands. They had touched the cold, stiff cord wrapped around Keith Andrews’ body. The water ran and splashed over my fingers, but it could not wash out the slimy feel of the wire. I thought of Keith Andrews’ angelic expression. Saint Andrews. I had stared into his lifeless face … how like Arch he had looked, thin and pale and vulnerable…. What had Keith said? I’m learning to focus on the process rather than the outcome. Not anymore.

  There was a knock at the door: Julian. Was I okay? I said yes, then splashed water on my eyes, picked up an embroidered guest towel, and rubbed the flimsy thing against my hands and cheeks until they shone red.

  When I came out, Macguire called down that he and his father would be outside in a minute. I wrapped the raccoon monstrosity around my body. Together Julian and I trudged back through the deep snow to wait in silence next to one of the outdoor carriage lanterns, a respectful ten feet away from the corpse of Keith Andrews.

  Tom Schulz was the first to arrive from the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. When his dark Chrysler chopped through the snowy parking lot, his headlights sent a wave of light bouncing through the cluster of pines next to the old house. There was another car directly behind his; the two vehicles stopped abruptly, spraying snow. The Chrysler’s door creaked open and Tom Schulz heaved his large body out. Coatless, he slammed the door and crunched across the frozen yard. Finally.

  Two men got out of the second car; one joined Schulz. The other man came over to Julian and me. He introduced himself as part of the investigative team.

  “We need to know about footprints,” he said. He looked down at my shoes. “Were you the only one to go out to the victim?”

  I told him two other people had been out there. He shook his head grimly and asked which way we had gone through the snow. I showed him. He turned and pointed out a large arc around our path for the other men to take.

  Schulz and the man I assumed was a paramedic approached the body. They bent over it, murmured back and forth, then Schulz walked raggedly back and reached for the cellular phone. His voice crackled through the cold air, although I couldn’t make out any of the words. The other men stationed themselves near the corpse, sentrylike, ignoring us. Julian and I stood, mute and miserable, our arms clasping our bodies against the deep cold.

  Schulz walked over. He stopped and pulled me in for a mountain-man hug. He murmured, “You all right?” When I nodded into his shoulder, he said, “You want to tell me what happened?”

  I pulled back to look at him, the man who had invaded my life a year earlier and stubbornly would not leave. Golden lantern light illuminated the large, unpretentiously handsome face that was now somber and grim. His serious mouth, his narrowed eyes with their tentlike bushy brown eyebrows—these showed willed control in the midst of chaos. His faded jeans, white frayed-collar shirt, and sweater the color of cornflowers indicated he’d been relaxing at something before the call came in. Now Schulz pulled himself up, his stance of command. “What happened here, Goldy?” he repeated crisply. I’m in charge here now.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I saw the sled when I was loading the van, and then I saw the coat, so I went over …”

  Schulz’s sigh sent a cloud of steam between us. Behind us, three more police and fire vehicles drove up. He reached out and pulled the fur collar snugly around my throat.

  “Let’s go in. That’s quite a getup. The two of you. I swear. Come on, big J.,” Schulz said to Julian as he put one arm around him. Behind us, strobe flashes went off like lightning. “Be lucky if pneumonia doesn’t take you both. Honestly.” Another deputy silently joined us. Schulz and the other policeman walked with Julian up the narrow path that skirted the pines and led to the big stone house. I followed, clumsily trying to step in their footsteps.

  The headmaster was tripping down the carpeted front stairs when we pushed through to the house’s elegant entryway. The upturned collar of Alfred Perkins’ black trench coat framed his horrified eyes behind round hornrimmed glasses. Above his high forehead, the cottony mass of white hair was wildly askew. His boot buckles clickety-clacked as he marched across the foyer toward us. When Schulz identified himself, the headmaster demanded: “Is there any way we can keep this out of the papers?”

  Schulz raised both eyebrows and ignored the question. Instead, he said, “I need some information about next of kin so we can get back to the coroner. Can you help me out?” The headmaster gave the names of Keith’s parents, who were apparently in Europe. The deputy wrote the names on a pad, then disappeared. Schulz started his characteristic swagger down the hallway, poking his head through each doorway. When he found a room he liked, he beckoned with a thumb to Perkins.

  “Headmaster, sir,” he said with a deference that fooled nobody, “would you wait in here until I have a chance to talk to you?” When the headmaster nodded numbly, Schulz added, “And don’t talk to anyone, please, sir. Press or otherwise.”

  The headmaster clomped to his assigned spot. Schulz closed the heavy door behind him, then turned and asked who else was around. Julian called to Macguire, who trundled in and was assigned to another room. Perkins’ son looked deeply stunned. In a kinder tone Schulz asked Julian to sit in the living room until he’d finished talking to me. “And try not to disturb anything,” he added. “But get yourself a blanket to warm up.”

  Julian’s face had a lost look that tugged at my heart. He obeyed Schulz in silence. But as we headed down to the kitchen, I heard him choke on exhaled breath.

  I said, “Let me—”

  “No, not yet. I’ll take you back in just a couple of minutes. We need to talk before the investigative team is all over this place.” Schulz paused, then gestured for me to sit on one of the old-fashioned wooden stools. I obeyed. After looking around the kitchen, he sat on another stool and pulled out a notebook. He tapped his mouth with a mechanical pencil. “Start with when you had me paged and work backward.”

  I did. Keith’s body
. Before that, the cleanup, the after-dinner talks, the dinner itself. The blackout.

  Schulz raised one thick eyebrow. “You’re sure it was a fuse?” I said I’d just assumed so. “Who fixed it, do you know?”

  I shook my head. “Oh, and one of my coffeepots was in the front hall closet. I didn’t put it there.”

  Schulz made a note. “You have a guest list?”

  “The headmaster would. Thirty seniors, plus most of the parents. About eighty people altogether.”

  “You see anybody you know wasn’t invited, seemed out of place, whatever?” I didn’t know who had been invited and who hadn’t. No one seemed out of place, I told him, but the senior-year anxiety had been palpable. “Anything else palpable?” he wanted to know.

  I stared at him. He was all business. Anything else you could touch? He gave me just the slightest flicker of a smile. John Richard Korman always said I expected him to read my mind; Tom Schulz actually could. I wished for the two of us to be somewhere else, doing anything but this.

  Reading my thoughts again, Schulz said, “We’re almost done.” Then he tilted his head back and drummed the fingers of one hand on his chin. “Okay,” he went on, “anybody who was not here who should have been?”

  I didn’t know that either, and said so.

  He looked me straight in the eye. “Tell me why somebody would kill this boy.”

  Blood jack-hammered in my ears. “I don’t know. He seemed innocuous enough, really more like a nerd….”

  Silence fell around us in the old kitchen.

  Schulz said, “Julian fit into this scenario at all? Or the headmaster’s son? Or the headmaster?”

  Miserably, I looked at the big old aluminum canisters in the kitchen, the wooden cabinets painted a buttery yellow, before replying. “I don’t know much about what was going on in the senior class, or in the school as a whole, for that matter. Julian and Macguire went back out to check for a pulse when I was on the phone with the 911 operator. I don’t know if Julian, Macguire, Keith, anybody, were friends.”

  “Know if they were enemies?”

  “Well.” I involuntarily thought of Julian’s recitation of the class rank. He hadn’t talked about any nastiness to the competition. I refused to speculate. “I don’t know,” I said firmly.

  The deputy stalked into the kitchen. Snow clung to his boots and clothing. Ignoring me, he said to Schulz, “We got drag marks to the gatehouse, where whoever it was got the sled. They haven’t finished with the photos, but it’s going to be a couple hours. You got a kid having a hard time down the hall.”

  Schulz nodded just perceptibly and the deputy withdrew.

  “Goldy,” Schulz said, “I want to talk to Julian with you there. Then I’ll deal with Macguire Perkins. Tell me if this headmaster is as much of a moron as he looks.”

  “More so.”

  “Great.”

  Julian was sitting in the front room. His eyes were closed, his head bent back against the sofa cushions. With his Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling, he had a look of extraordinary vulnerability. When we entered, he coughed and rubbed his eyes. His face was still gray; his spiky blond hair gave him an unearthly look. He had found a knit throw that he had pulled tightly around his compact body. Schulz motioned for me to go on over by him.

  I moved quietly to a chair beside the couch, then reached out to pat Julian’s arm. He turned and gave me a morose look.

  “Tell me what happened,” Schulz began without preamble.

  Wearily, Julian recounted how the dinner had ended. Everyone had been putting on their coats and talking. He had stayed afterward to see if a girl he knew, who sort of interested him, he said with lowered eyes, would like a ride home. She had airily replied that she was going home with Keith.

  “I said, ‘Oh, moving up in the world, are we?’ but she wasn’t listening.” Julian’s nose wrinkled. “Ever since I told her I’d rather be a chef than a neurosurgeon, she’s acted like I’m a leper.”

  Schulz asked mildly, “Keith was going to be a neurosurgeon?”

  “Oh, no,” said Julian. “Did I say that? I must have been confused….”

  We waited while Julian coughed and shook his head quickly, like a dog shaking off water.

  “Do you want to do this later, Julian?” asked Schulz. “Although it’d be helpful if you could reconstruct the events for me now.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Julian’s voice was so low, I had to lean forward to hear it.

  Schulz pulled out his notebook. “Let’s go back. Before the girl. We have a dinner party for eighty people and a kid ends up dead. Goldy said the party was about college or something. How’s that?”

  Julian shrugged. “I think it’s supposed to help people feel okay about going to college.”

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, you know, like everybody’s going through the same process. Have to figure out what you want, have to look around for the right place, have to get all your papers and stuff together. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Have to write your essays. Be tested.” He groaned. “SATs are Saturday. We had ‘em last year, but this is the big one. These are the scores the colleges look at. The teachers always say it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, which makes you know that it matters. It matters, man.” There was a savagery in his voice I had never heard before.

  “Was Keith Andrews nervous about all this? First big step to becoming a neurosurgeon?”

  Julian shook his head. “Nah.” He paused. “At least he didn’t seem to be. We called him Saint Andrews.”

  “Saint Andrews? Why?”

  A hint of frown wrinkled Julian’s cheek. “Well. Keith didn’t really want to be a doctor. He wanted to grow up and be Bob Woodward. He wanted to be such a famous investigative reporter that whenever there was a scandal, they’d say, ‘Better give Andrews a call.’ Like he was the Red Adair of the world of journalism or something.”

  Schulz pursed his lips. “Know anybody he was investigating? Anybody he offended?”

  Julian shrugged, avoiding Schulz’s eyes. “I heard some stuff. But it was just gossip.”

  “Care to share that? It might help.”

  “Nah. It was just … stuff.”

  “Big J. We’re talking about a death here.”

  Julian sighed bleakly. “I think he was having his share of problems. Like everybody.”

  “His share of problems with whom?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody, nobody.”

  Schulz made another note. “I need some specifics on that. You tell me, I won’t tell anybody. Sometimes gossip can help a lot. You’d be surprised.” He waited a beat, then clicked the pencil and tucked it in his pocket. “So the lights came back on, the girl said no to you. Then what?”

  “I don’t know, I guess I like, talked to some people—”

  “Who?”

  “Well, jeez, I don’t remember—”

  “Keith?”

  Julian reflected, then said, “I don’t remember seeing Keith around. You know, everyone was talking about the lights, and saying, see you Monday, and stuff like that. Then I came out to check if Goldy needed help.”

  “Time, Miss G.?”

  I looked at my watch: eleven o’clock. Schulz cocked his thumb over his shoulder. When had Julian come out to the kitchen? I said, “I don’t know. Nine-thirtyish.”

  “Did anyone go into the kitchen looking for Keith? This girl you mentioned, for example?” We both said no.

  “Okay, now, Julian,” Schulz said impassively, “tell me who Keith’s enemies were.”

  “God, I told you, I don’t know! You know, he was kind of holier-than-thou. Smarter-than-thou too. You know. Like, we watched an Ingmar Bergman film in English class, and the film’s over for like two seconds and Keith’s talking about the internal structure. I mean, huh? The rest of us are going, okay, but what was it about?” He grimaced. “That kind of smart attitude can lose you some friends.”

  “Who, specifically?”

  “I don’t know,
you know, people just get pissed off. They talk.”

  “What about the National Merit Scholarship?” I said before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to talk.

  “What about it?” Julian turned a puzzled face to me. “It’s not like they’re going to give it to somebody else now…. Keith was number one in our class, president of the French Club. He did after-school work for the Mountain Journal. People can hate you just for that.”

  Schulz said, “Why?”

  “Because it makes them feel bad that they’re not doing it too.” Julian said this in a way that made it clear any fool would reach the same conclusion.

  Schulz sighed, then rose. “Okay, go home, the two of you. I’ll be talking to the rest of the guests over the weekend, then I might get back to you depending on—”

  “Schulz!” boomed an excited voice from down the hall. “Hey!” It was the deputy.

  We found him looking at the coffeepot that had fallen out of the front hall closet.

  “Oh, that’s my—” I began. I stopped.

  “Your what?” demanded the deputy.

  “Coffeepot,” I answered inanely.

  The deputy regarded me with deepening skepticism. “Y’had a couple of extension cords on it?”

  “Yes, three, actually. You see, they have a problem with fuses—”

  But the deputy was holding up the machine’s naked plug. Belatedly, I realized where the extension cords had ended up.

  3

  Julian led the way out of the parking lot in his four-wheel-drive, a white Range Rover inherited from wealthy former employers. I could see him checking his rearview mirror for me. My van crawled and skidded down the prep school’s precarious driveway. Overhead, cloud edges glinted like knives. The moon slipped out and silvered the snowy mountains. As I thought about the events of the past few hours, my stomach knotted.