With Friends Like These... (14 page)

“My students—” I began.

“My mother named me for a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Sybil Vane. She said it was because Sybil was so pure, so beautiful, so perfect.” Sybil Zacharias laughed impurely, unbeautifully, imperfectly.

“But she was all those things,” I said.

“So what? She was also dead. Ruined by Dorian. Destroyed by the man she loved. She murdered herself because of his corruption and vanity and stupidity. The name was like a curse on my head, a prediction.”

“I’m sure your mother meant well.” She had reduced me to inanities. How did I know what her mother intended? Maybe her mother was stupid, or illiterate—or truly malevolent. In any case, Dorian’s first victim was a peculiar inspiration for a name.

“Destroyed,” Sybil repeated. “But this Sybil refuses to be. No matter what he does. And I won’t let Reed be destroyed by him, either. The truth is, I can’t afford—figuratively or literally—to wait. I have to protect my son.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” We stood outside the opaque glass doors of the office, away from human traffic. My stomach walls rubbed together, found nothing, and growled a protest, but Sybil probably couldn’t hear it above the student racket. She probably wouldn’t have cared if she had heard.

“Her.” Sybil made the word sound like something foul she’d been forced to swallow. “The Merry Widow herself. The luckiest bimbo on earth. God knows she wanted to get rid of him and keep the money.”

“I really don’t understand,” I murmured, very intrigued.

“She hates Reed. She’s always been jealous of him, of every second his own father spent with him, and there weren’t that many seconds, believe me. And of every cent Lyle spent on him, as if he took each penny out of her pocket. And Lyle was so afraid of his baby wife’s tantrums that he was pushing Reed right out of his life.”

Had Sybil decided that her son would be better off with a dead father and an inheritance rather than a living, weak father and a stepmother who was chipping away at fatherly support? Or had, perhaps, the microbiology-loving Reed himself felt that way? Maybe they were a team, in collusion. I took a step backward.

“And all the while,” Sybil said, “she was only using him.”

“Him? Who? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Sybil eyed me as if I embodied human ignorance. “Tiffany was using Lyle, of course. Everybody knew.” She spoke half as quickly as she normally did. I was, after all, a slow learner. “It isn’t like they even tried that hard to hide it.”

I shook my head. “Tiffany and Lyle? Hide what?”

“I mean Reed, poor dear, his voice is still high. Hasn’t changed yet. Once, he picked up the phone and said hello and was mistaken for Tiffany herself. Reed was flabbergasted. The man on the other line went on and on about being all alone an entire night with her—with you, he kept saying, of course. He talked about where to meet and what to wear—and not wear, like undergarments.”

“I take it the man on the phone was not Tiffany’s husband, Reed’s father.”

Sybil sneered. “You take it right. Lyle might—in fact has—shocked his boy by being inappropriately romantic in front of him. But no, it wasn’t his father on the telephone. Not at all. It was Shepard he heard.”

My mouth opened, ready to ask if she meant the McCoy Shepard, but what other one could she mean? It was hard to find the ones who guard sheep here in Philadelphia. I readjusted my lips.

She shook her head with irritation. “Wasn’t it obvious? Good Lord, it’s been going on for nearly a year. No surprise, really. Almost no secret. That’s how she is about men. That’s how she got my—got Lyle. That’s how she’ll get whoever’s next.”

I am always amazed at how long the fury of betrayal burns. I could still feel the heat of Sybil’s rage.

“Even last night!” Rusty blotches stained her cheeks. “Like a dog in heat. Did you see when she left the room between courses and he trotted right after her? I couldn’t believe my eyes for the blatancy of it! At her husband’s birthday party! If Lyle wasn’t such a blind, egotistical, self-centered fool, he’d have noticed. Everybody else did.”

Except me. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the news depressed me for many wrong reasons. Not only because Lyle Zacharias had been another fool of a middle-aged man, in deep trouble even before he died. Not only because his young wife was unfaithful or because I was suffering metaphysical angst for the meaninglessness of contemporary marriage vows.

No, I felt a stab of grief for having thought that Shepard McCoy had been coming on to me last night and that I had skillfully kept him at bay. In retrospect, with this new information, it was obvious that I had been sitting on a direct eyebeam line with the voluptuous Tiffany, and that by nuzzling my shoulder, leaning over me, pointing his face in my direction, Shepard could view his beloved clearly. The moony eyes had been aimed past, not at, me. How humiliating to resent attentions that weren’t for me in the first place.

“I warned Lyle, tried to wake him up,” she said in a low voice. “He told me I was a dried up, bitter old…” She looked away.

“But that’s beside the point now.” Her voice became brisk again and back to business. “Now the problem is what Tiffany will do with the money. Lyle agreed that Reed would be happier in a smaller academic environment where the special needs and individuality of each child is respected.” She had memorized our brochure. “Honestly,” she said. “I’m telling the truth.”

Is it possible to believe anybody who says that?

Sybil’s face was like the satellite weather map on TV. Strange clouds suddenly shadowed what had seemed an impervious terrain. Unstable conditions.

“Yo, Miss Pepper!” Raffi Trulock is the star basketball player in our school. His real name is Gavin, but his neck is long and his legs begin at his Adam’s apple and continue for about a week. He had been compared to a giraffe for so long that a diminutive form of the word became his name.

It gives me a crick to look up at him, but once I do, his goofy smile and stalky clumsiness are oddly and instantly endearing. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Did you hear the Cavanaugh burned?” He looked from Sybil to me. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, though,” he added with a forward dip of his neck.

“I have a lead on a possible new place,” I said. “We’ll talk later today.”

“Great! I knew you’d do it. You’re the—that’s great!” And with a duck of the head, towering over the classmate who’d been waiting for him, he bade farewell. His buddy gave him an elbow to his side. I watched a mock scuffle, then both boys looked back at me before truly departing for lunch. For a flicker, less than a second, I wondered if they could be the note-writers. They seemed so intent on me. But then I discarded that theory as ludicrous.

“That’s why I have to get Reed placed immediately,” Sybil said. “Like, um, as of last week. At least then my lawyer can make a case for keeping the status quo. It isn’t fair to take things away from an orphaned boy, is it? But if I wait, that bitch will refuse to pay for it, won’t admit that this is what her husband wanted for his son. She wants every penny. She probably did it.”

“You mean because of…Shepard?” Good thing Sybil worked with plants, not people. A begonia can handle angry incoherency a lot better than most folk.

“Because of Lyle’s life-change,” she said. “You know—the simple life he talked about last night, just before… Retiring. Quitting his job, selling his house—everything. Of course, now I know his show was being canceled. He was saving face. Or maybe he was really burned out, or going crazy. He told me he was through with all the leeches—meaning me, of course, and his own flesh and blood, his son.”

“He said that? He called Reed a leech?”

“First he called Richard the leech. After Richard’s partner had a heart attack and dropped out, he came to Lyle for a loan.”

A little slowly, I targeted her Richard as Richard Quinn.

“Lyle said that was the final straw. That everybody wanted something from him. Everybody was a leech. Guess who else he meant. But of course the simple life business was an excuse to screw me and his son. He was going to deliberately make himself poor—at least as far as the courts could see. Can’t get blood out of a stone. A farm in the unfashionable country. Vegetables. You think his bimbo wanted that? Lyle without bucks? Without parties?”

And what about you? I wondered. What good timing, what good luck, what a coincidence that Lyle died before he could hide his assets. “Good luck to you and to Reed,” I said briskly. “My lunch hour is about to end and—”

“Do you think this principal of yours, Haverwhatsis—”

“Meyer. Havermeyer.”

“Whatever. Is he—how much of a stickler for…” She straightened her shoulders and became almost belligerent, as if she were preempting predictable objections. “I mean,” she said emphatically, “what difference would it be to anybody except poor Reed if he had been officially enrolled here say, two weeks ago? It’s not as if it’s any crime I can think of. He’s quite bright. He’ll be an asset to the school.”

I didn’t know which way to bobble my head to show that I couldn’t see how it would matter, either.

“Then do you think he—Mr. Haverstein, will—”

“Meyer. Havermeyer. Doctor.”

“—object? I mean I did call several weeks ago. I might have come sooner. It wasn’t
my
fault that he didn’t have an appointment open until today. At least not one that fit my schedule. It’s no more than a technicality. If he’s a rational man, this Mister—Dr. Haverman, he’ll have to agree.”

I didn’t correct her this time. I wasn’t her tutor. And I didn’t tell her that Dr. Maurice Havermeyer was willing to bend any rule, particularly if the weight used to bend said rule was a heavy check. My principal’s principles were simple and focused: goodness was money. Goodness incarnate was a person who brought money to his school. He wanted good people’s children around him, and the rules—especially picayune ones like the date on the acceptance—be damned.

Sybil looked at her watch. “I’ve been standing here talking and I’m nearly late now!” She looked at me accusingly. “The last thing I want is to make a bad impression!” We reversed places. I moved away from the office door and she entered it without a fare-thee-well.

I wondered if she had ever been gentle, or subtle, or likable. Did a man’s defection warp a woman’s personality or simply heighten what was already there? In any case, I was glad to contemplate lunch and gladder still to see the last of Sybil.

I wanted to be rid of the Zachariases. The living Zs were exceedingly unpleasant, and if Sybil was to be believed, the deceased had trundled around on two clay feet. If I didn’t want to think ill of the dead, I’d better stop thinking about him at all. I had promised to take my mother to visit Lyle’s aunt Hattie in the hospital, but after that I would be finished with that family except for Reed. But I’d cross that Zacharias when I found him in my roll book.

The afternoon passed almost gracefully. The newspaper meeting was actually fun, as the reporters behaved like Clark Kent hot for the Cavanaugh Hotel fire scoop. I told them about The Scene and also was coerced into finding out whether, by chance, the Bellevue had an available night—a cancellation, perhaps. They, in turn, listed a dozen other possibilities—improbabilities, in truth, but places they’d investigate.

I walked out of school into the dazzle of poststorm purity. If it had not been for the definite damper of having a faceless kid’s threats feel like a chronic ache, I would have been tempted to do a soft shoe down the school staircase. It was that kind of afternoon.

But then I saw Mackenzie unfold himself from a park bench across the street. I don’t mean to imply that the sight of him is anything but pleasurable, but he looked so deliberately casual about this unscheduled visit that it was obvious something significant had happened. And Mackenzie’s variety of significant news is always, inevitably, bad. The intimation of doom that began last night and bloomed poisonously at the mailbox this a.m. grew so thick and tight, I felt as if I might suffocate.

“This has to do with the note, doesn’t it?” I asked as we walked toward Broad Street.

“Don’ know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“There was a creepy anonymous note in my mailbox this morning. And clippings.”

“Kids you teach have the worst sense of humor,” he murmured, obviously thinking about something else. My Mackenzie—the noncop part I irrationally filter out and think of as the real man—was missing in action.

“Then what brings you here, officer? I know I’m irresistible, but during business hours?” Was anybody still home in there?

There was. “That you are, lady,” he said. “And only irresistibility could have made me willingly sit there an’ be giggled over and unsubtly examined and discussed by three dozen teeny boppers. Felt like eighth grade schoolyard all over again. So what the hell—might as well be crazy and bold.” And he took my hand, even though teenage mutant spies could be lurking anywhere.

“So this is a social visit.” Relief is one of my favorite feelings. “A beautiful day for a stroll.”

“Not exactly,” he said softly. He could walk and produce anxiety at the same time. “Wanted to tell you in person. Because of the irresistibility.”

And immediately I wanted to be very resistible for at least a few trauma-free hours. What I didn’t want was whatever news Mackenzie had chosen to deliver in person. I took a deep breath.

“It appears,” he said slowly, his deceptively soft voice like background music, “that your friend Lyle Zacharias spoke the truth, much to all of our distress. Didn’ die of indigestion or stroke or heart attack. Something, somebody, somehow, poisoned him.”

I was surprised and flattered that he’d come all this way to tell me that in person.

“And there’s somethin’ else.”

Now I got it. “Don’t worry. I was annoyed the way you said it last night, but in truth, I agree. I have no interest. I don’t like what little I know about those people, and I have no ties with them, so there’s no problem. I’m not involved and I’m not in any danger. Except, maybe, from the crazy kid who left me that note.”

“The somethin’ else is kind of major,” he went on, as if my words had been no more than dust motes. “It appears that Lyle Zacharias left the dinin’ room during dinner and did some serious nibblin’. Guess you reach a certain age, nobody warns you about ruinin’ your appetite.” He sighed again, such an enormous intake and exhale of air, I was almost ready to administer CPR—but I wasn’t sure whether he’d need it or I would.