A Murder of Crows (12 page)

I felt the testosterone level in the gym suddenly spike.

Great. Our new Family and Consumer Science teacher had clearly caught the eye of more than one male on the staff. If Rick and Boo started circling each other on the gym floor, I was going to have to call security.

How was that going to work?

Rick
was
security.

He was Savage High’s very own school police officer. Calling him to break up this fight would be downright awkward, if not physically impossible.

Before I could make that observation, however, Boo held up the basketball in one palm. “Have we got time for another five minutes of play?”

“You bet,” Rick said, simultaneously batting the ball from Boo’s hand and heading back towards the basket at a run.

Boo took off after him. Just as Rick stopped to shoot, though, the Bonecrusher, unable to stop his forward momentum, plowed into Rick from behind, sending him sprawling face-first across the gym floor. Boo tripped into a heap beside him.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

A groan came from Rick.

Another groan came from Boo.

“I think I just got hit by a semi,” Rick said, his voice muffled by the floor. “Am I roadkill?”

I walked over to where he was spread out on the floor.

“You will be if you don’t get up,” I told him. “The first-period gym class plays volleyball in here. I’ve seen some of them in action. They’re merciless. They don’t care who they have to step on … or over.”

Boo lifted himself up to a sitting position. Blood ran out of his nose and down his chin. He grabbed a handful of his jersey and held it up to his nose to stop the bleeding.

“I am so sorry,” he told Rick through the cloth covering his nose and mouth. “I didn’t see you’d stopped until I hit you. I’m not very good at stopping once I get going.”

Rick rolled over onto his side, squeezed his eyes shut, and let loose with a string of profanity. A grimace of pain accompanied his words.

“That bad, huh?” I asked him. “You want me to just shoot you and put you out of your misery, Stud?”

“Shoot him first,” Rick replied, gritting his teeth and nodding toward Boo. “I think he broke my ankle.”

“He’s probably going to arrest you as soon as we get him vertical,” I warned Boo, “though I’m not sure what the charge will be. Hmm, let’s see … charging? Unnecessary roughness? Sheer stupidity on his part?”

“It’s going to be for publicly humiliating me,” Rick informed us. He sat up slowly and probed his ankle with his fingers, wincing all the while. “Although stupidity might take precedence. My mind says I’m eighteen, and my body just laughs.”

“You really think it’s broken?” Boo said, wiping off the last bit of blood from below his nose.

“Nah,” Rick told him. “A bad sprain for sure, though. I’m going to have to stop in at the ER and get it wrapped. I’ll probably have to stay off of it today and maybe tomorrow. Keep it elevated.”

He turned to me. “I don’t think I’m going after that hawk tomorrow, Bob. It’s all yours.”

“I’ll take pictures,” I assured him.

“You’re still going to Stevens County?” Boo asked.

I nodded. “The Ferruginous Hawk waits for no man,” I said. “It’s tomorrow morning or not at all. You still want a ride?”

“You bet. Unless you happen to get yourself injured before then, too. In which case, I’ll pass.”

“I’m not planning on it,” I told him.

“Like I really planned this,” Rick groused from the floor. “Will you guys help me up, or are you going to chitchat all morning?”

Boo and I both reached a hand to Rick and helped him up off the floor. As soon as he touched his left foot to the floor, he choked out a few more choice words. He shifted his weight to his right foot and gingerly drew his left foot up so only the toe of his sneaker tapped the floor for balance. I grabbed his upper left arm to give him more support as he hobbled to the locker room door.

“I guess I won’t be taking Gina dancing tomorrow night, either,” he complained. “Could I have any lousier timing?”

I looked over at Boo to tell him what time in the morning to expect me, but the words caught on my tongue.

I could have sworn he was trying not to grin.

Chapter Eleven

The rest of the day was uneventful. I helped three seniors finish completing multiple college applications, referred two juniors to our chemical dependency counselor, advised one sophomore to quit mimicking his math teacher—especially since said math teacher had angrily herded said sophomore into my office after hearing himself being mimicked in the hallway between classes—and found a partridge in a pear tree.

No, wait. Wrong season.

It wasn’t a partridge. Or a pear tree, either.

It wasn’t Christmas yet. It was almost Halloween.

It was Mr. Lenzen, waiting outside my office at the end of the day.

Trick or treat?

Believe me, it wasn’t going to be a treat, I was sure.

“I understand you were involved in a rather gruesome discovery at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum this past weekend,” our assistant principal began, carefully brushing some lint from his immaculate suit jacket sleeves.

“Yes, I was,” I admitted.

Since I was clearly busted—thank you, Rick—I decided to make the most of it.

“The blood wasn’t even dry yet. And the ripped out guts—have you ever smelled torn flesh and bloated—”

“Mr. White!”

Mr. Lenzen, his face visibly paling, stopped me in mid-sentence. I gave him my most innocent expression.

“What?”

He pulled a pressed handkerchief from his back trouser pocket and delicately blotted away the beads of perspiration that had appeared above his upper lip. “I assure you, I don’t need the details.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” I agreed, “especially since I’m also sure that Officer Cook already beat me to it.”

“Officer Cook?”

“Officer Cook. You know—our school police officer who gladly rats me out every time I so much as jaywalk.”

He gave me a stern stare. “You jaywalk, too?”

I was getting nowhere fast, when all I really wanted was to go home.

“Mr. Lenzen,” I said. “Was there something you needed?”

“To be perfectly frank, I think I need some antacid. Between you and Ms. Knorsen, my ulcer is going to land me in the hospital.”

“What about Gina?” I asked, not wanting to let him know what I knew before I knew what he knew.

Mr. Lenzen sighed dramatically. “You’ll have to ask her, Mr. White. I don’t carry tales about our faculty members.”

That’s right. I’d forgotten. Mr. Lenzen was the president of the Savage Secrets Club.

I expected him to whip out a detention pass at any moment. Instead, he brushed more lint from his sleeve.

“Although I expect you’ll have a hard time asking her anything right now,” he noted. “She just left the building in the back seat of a patrol car.”

“Why would Rick put her in the back seat?” I blurted out. “I thought they were dating.”

Mr. Lenzen gave me a smug look.

“It wasn’t Officer Cook’s squad car,” he said. “I believe it was the same police detective who stopped in yesterday.”

“Gina’s seeing another cop?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Mr. White,” he primly sniffed, “and, quite frankly, I’d rather not know about it. What Ms. Knorsen does on her own time is none of my business. Unless it impacts her teaching in the classroom,” he qualified, “which is, at this moment, no longer a concern.”

He checked his wristwatch. “As of twenty minutes ago, Ms. Knorsen has been suspended from her teaching duties until further notice.”

“Because she left in a patrol car?”

And then I realized what Mr. Lenzen was trying to not tell me.

Gina had been arrested.

Rick was going to be a mess.

“Thank goodness we have fall break tomorrow,” Mr. Lenzen continued. “Please don’t do anything … controversial … over the weekend, Mr. White. I don’t want to have to add a second suspension to our staff.”

“Got it,” I absently replied, still focused on what Rick’s reaction to Gina’s arrest might be like. “No bodies and no headlines.”

“Exactly.” Satisfaction filled Mr. Lenzen’s voice. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my office to line up a substitute for Ms. Knorsen for next week. I hate to leave these things till the last minute.”

I watched him walk away, wondering how soon I’d hear from Rick.

“Earth to Mr. White.”

I blinked and turned my head to the left. Sara Schiller was sitting at one of the tables out in the counseling department reception area. A bag of flour stood on the table in front of her.

“Hey, Sara.”

I walked over to the table and checked out the front panel on the flour. “You’ve still got Robin, I see.”

“You can’t have him,” she was quick to inform me. “You’re a cannibal. You ate my last baby.”

“It’s a bag of flour, Sara. It’s only pretending to be your baby.”

“Ms. Knorsen said that a lot of times, a woman’s maternal feelings don’t kick in immediately after birth,” she reported. “That sometimes, it takes a while for the mother to bond with the baby because her hormones are all screwed up and she’s really worn out. I figure that’s why I didn’t do so well with my first baby—my hormones are always screwed up, and I was really worn out.”

“I don’t know about the hormones part, but of course you were worn out,” I agreed with her. “You’d just driven to Wisconsin and back.”

She gave me a glare.

“Only because a
certain counselor
,” she emphasized, “loaded me down with an impossible class schedule that was so bad I had to get away for a day so I wouldn’t have a total mental and emotional collapse.”

“So it’s my fault you ditched school and drove to Wisconsin?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Sara, I think we need to work on the concept of personal responsibility a little bit,” I suggested. “You ditched school. That was your decision, not mine.”

“I know, but—”

“No buts,” I cut her off. “No matter what the reason you had for skipping classes, it was your decision to act on those reasons in that particular way. You have to take responsibility, Sara, for both the good and the bad you do. That’s what growing up is about.”

Sara gathered the bag of flour into her arms and pulled it against her chest.

“I was going to say ‘but I talked it over with Ms. Knorsen’ before I was so rudely interrupted,” she said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Sorry,” I apologized, only mildly repentant. “Yes, I want to hear this.”

She sat back in her chair, the bag of flour clutched against her body.

“When I told Ms. Knorsen that you had switched my baby because I had left it with you, she said that we all make mistakes—even, sometimes, when we think we’re doing the right thing—and it takes a mature person to own up to it and to learn from it. She said, if I wanted, that I could give the assignment another try since it was clear my maternal instincts were just slow in developing the first time.”

She slid the flour up to her shoulder and gently patted its back.

“I really don’t want an F in the class, Mr. White,” Sara explained. “I want to pass all my classes so I can graduate and get out of high school and get on with my life. Ms. Knorsen is the first teacher who’s even tried to understand me, and I want to prove to her I can do better. I want to show her I can take responsibility.”

I stared at the young woman in the chair. She wanted to pass her classes and graduate? She wanted to be responsible?

Who was she?

“If I’m ever going to have kids of my own,” the Sara imposter said, “I’m going to have to set an example for them. And that means being responsible.”

Holy cow. Gina Knorsen was a miracle worker with a bag of flour, and Sara Schiller was a born-again student.

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“And if I were responsible, then maybe Ms. Knorsen would introduce me to Noah,” Sara added.

“Who’s Noah?”

Sara slid me a sly grin. “Ms. Knorsen’s brother. I saw him talking to her Monday morning before class, and I’m guessing he’s like twenty-six, which is sort of old, but I could make an exception for him.”

She patted Robin on the back again and sighed dreamily. “I could definitely make an exception for Noah.”

Wonderful. Just what I didn’t need to know: Sara Schiller had her eye on a twenty-six-year-old who happened to be the brother of a faculty member.

“Although he’s kind of a crab from what I could tell,” she continued. “He was arguing with Ms. Knorsen about something, and he left all angry, and then she was pretty upset during class.”

My eyes drifted to the clock on the wall.

It was after four, and I didn’t want to hear anything more about Gina or any other Knorsen, especially one that Sara had a crush on. As far as I was concerned, business hours were over, and I was done for the day. Besides, I had a couple of errands to run before dinner, and then I needed to check the MOU postings on the computer list serve to see if the Ferruginous Hawk had made an appearance in Stevens County today. If it had, there was still a good chance I could find it tomorrow.

“Was there something you wanted to see me about?” I asked Sara, beginning to back up toward my office, already planning my route home.

She bolted upright in her seat, Robin still glued to her chest.

“Yes! I know it was a mistake to ask you last time to watch my baby, and I take full responsibility for that, but could you take Robin—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask!”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, turning my back on her and heading into my office to collect my jacket and briefcase. “I’m going out of town,” I said over my shoulder, “I’ll be up in Morris tomorrow.”

I grabbed my jacket and briefcase and then locked my office door. When I turned around, Sara was still in the chair at the table, glaring at me.

“So what’s up in Morris that everyone is going there?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s where Ms. Knorsen’s brother said he was going when he stomped off on Monday,” she explained. “He said his job was done down here and he was going home, whether she liked it or not. I think he quit his job or something, and that’s what they were arguing about.”