Murder Had a Little Lamb (5 page)

I got off the phone as quickly as I could, then turned back to the Worth website.

Okay, I thought, so now I know a bit more about Cousin Nathaniel. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly enough to point a finger at a likely killer.

Still, while I hadn’t discovered anything new about the black sheep of Nick’s family, I had learned that the place where he’d worked for the past decade and a half wasn’t your average high school. And I had to agree with Dorothy that it was a very good place to begin my investigation. Fortunately, I’d already come up with an idea of how to accomplish exactly that.

It may be June, rather than September, I thought ruefully. But it looks as if I’m going back to school.

•   •   •

Early Monday afternoon found me driving my 26-foot clinic-on-wheels down a tree-lined lane with gated mansions on both sides, a sure sign that I’d arrived in Long Island’s famous Bromptons.

I was no stranger to the area, since one of the best things about working out of a van instead of an office was that I spent my days tooling around all of Long Island. I had a number of clients here on the South Fork, including both summer and year-round residents—and thanks to some juggling, I was able to combine a last-minute meeting with the headmistress of the Worth School with a bunch of house calls.

As for that juggling, I had Sunny McGee to thank.

I’d met Sunny while I was a temporary cast member
in the theater group Betty Vandervoort belonged to, the Port Players. Her real name was Sunflower, but the spunky twenty-year-old couldn’t bring herself to use it. She was much too firmly rooted in the twenty-first century to see herself the way her parents, former flower children, had envisioned their daughter.

When we first met, Sunny had a job with a cleaning company whose clients included Theater One, the theater in which the Port Players performed. But after we struck up a friendship that became even stronger when she helped both save my life and catch a killer, she came up with the idea of becoming my assistant.

We agreed that we’d try it out for a while. But it didn’t take me long to realize what an asset she was. When I’d met her, she’d dressed only in black, had a bright blue streak in her spiky dark hair, and wore so many studs in her left ear that I suspected she had to steer clear of magnets. On her first day of work, however, she showed up looking like a recent graduate of the Harvard Business School, complete with tailored blazer and metal-free ears.

But her appearance didn’t matter to me. What did matter was the fact that she was a whirlwind when it came to organization. During a down period, the woman actually alphabetized my spices. She was also good with clients, animals, and a boss who sometimes went off in too many directions.

In other words, Sunny was a gem.

I’d called her the evening before and asked if she’d mind rescheduling my appointments so that I had a block of time Monday afternoon. She’d worked her magic, within half an hour accomplishing exactly
what I’d asked. Giving her the afternoon off so I could spend part of it trying to wangle my way onto the faculty of the Worth School seemed like a suitable reward.

So far the rest of my plan had been going just as smoothly. Dr. Goodfellow’s assistant, Ms. Greer, had sounded interested in having a real, live veterinarian teach a summer school class in animal care. Especially when I mentioned that I’d do it for free. In fact, when I told her I’d be in the area that afternoon and would be happy to stop in so the headmistress could interview me, she was more than eager to give me a two o’clock appointment.

I made one more turn, which took me off the wide residential street and onto what looked like a driveway. Sure enough, the stately gate I’d seen on the school’s website immediately came into view. It even had the school emblem on it, just as it had in the photo.

I was glad that combining house calls with this visit enabled me to show up in my van. The folks at the Worth School clearly kept track of who came onto their campus, since passing through that imposing gate required checking in with a uniformed guard who poked his head out of a tiny kiosk. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed him in the photo on the home page. Besides, I figured that arriving in my office-on-wheels was guaranteed to lend credibility to the story I’d told when I’d called the school’s administrative offices first thing that morning: that I wanted nothing more in life than the opportunity to teach Paris Hilton wannabes about animal care.

My van was not only the source of my livelihood, it was also my pride and joy. While most other veterinarians work out of offices, I’d decided early on that I much preferred to treat dogs, cats, and whatever other types of animals needed medical care from a mobile services unit. In other words, a clinic-on-wheels. My van had everything I needed, from an examining table to an X-ray machine to a cabinet stocked with every medication imaginable. Stenciled on the door in blue letters were the words:

Even though I’d had it for years, I still felt a little thrill every time I saw the big white monster waiting for me to climb in and do my Dr. Dolittle thing.

At the moment, however, I had other things to think about besides my satisfying career choice. In five minutes, I was due to meet the Worth School’s headmistress. And that word—
headmistress
—conjured up a frightening image of the stereotypical prim educator, a dour woman with a drab suit, a pair of glasses swinging from a chain around her neck, and an eternally disapproving expression on her pinched face.

I had to admit that the physical appearance of the headmistress’s assistant, Ms. Greer, wasn’t far off from my fantasy. Not only did she wear her gray-streaked brown hair in a tight bun, she actually kept
her glasses on a chain, as if they had a history of running away.

Yet while Ms. Greer fit the part, as soon as she walked me into her boss’s office I saw that Dr. Elspeth Goodfellow didn’t come close to matching any of my preconceived notions of what the headmistress of a girls’ school looked like.

The tall, willowy woman who stood up to greet me was probably in her early forties, with a head of thick, wavy red hair she wore drawn up into a loose topknot. The fact that more than a few strands had escaped made her look like a cross between a Victorian lady and an aging hippie. That same peculiar combination was also reflected in her makeup—none except a slash of bright red lipstick. Her dark red suit would have looked conservative if it weren’t for the gauzy Indian shawl splashed with bright reds and golds draped around her neck.

I was pretty sure I could see signs of Harvard, the Sorbonne,
and
the School for Spiritual Intellectualism.

Dr. Goodfellow’s office was just as much of a surprise. The room had a traditional Old School look, with dark, heavy furniture, thick Oriental carpets, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stuffed with old leather-covered tomes. But superimposed over it were a few overtly modern touches—especially the artwork. The pieces hanging on the wood-paneled wall included an Andy Warhol that looked positively stodgy next to the tremendous paintings of swirls and globs beside it. In one corner was a gigantic marble sculpture of what, to me, looked like drops of water the size of bowling balls.

“Good morning, Dr. Goodfellow,” I said pleasantly as I reached across her desk to shake her hand. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“Not at all, Dr. Popper,” she replied in a voice that quivered slightly. “Thank
you
for coming in. Please, take a seat.”

I sank into a red velvet chair that threatened to swallow me up.

“I understand you’re interested in teaching a course here at the Worth School,” she began. As she spoke, her fingers fluttered like hummingbirds. I got the feeling she noticed that
I
noticed, since she immediately picked up a pen and began fiddling with it. Meanwhile, her eyes darted around the room, as if she was having trouble focusing on just one thing. “Something about animal first aid?”

“All aspects of animal care, actually,” I corrected her. I surprised myself by how confident I sounded. Almost as if I were the center of my own private universe. “I would cover first aid, but also day-to-day care, including basics like feeding and exercise. My goal is to help your students take the best possible care of the animals they love.”

“It sounds interesting,” Dr. Goodfellow said, still tapping her pen. “Here at the Worth School, we try to expose our girls to as many different subjects as possible. Our student body is so wonderfully diverse, and we do our best to make our curriculum reflect that same variety. We have students from all types of backgrounds, in terms of financial status, ethnicity, and, well, life experience. They all have their own style
of learning, too. Some of them sail right through, barely needing to study. But others are getting through high school within their own time frame.” With a wan smile, she added, “Which I suppose is my way of telling you that a class like the one you’re proposing would fit right in with the philosophy we espouse here at Worth.”

Her mouth quickly turned downward. “But I must tell you up front that we don’t really have a budget for that kind of thing.”

I couldn’t help glancing around her office, taking in the mahogany paneling, the Warhol print, the ornate Oriental carpet so faded that it had to be an antique, and what looked like a rare-book collection—at least if the amount of dust on each volume was any indication. The idea that the woman who ran this elite educational empire couldn’t scrape up a few bucks to round out her students’ education struck me as highly unlikely.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m willing to teach the course for free.”

For the first time since I’d come in, she stopped tapping. Apparently even in a place like this, “free” was a magic word.

“I thought Ms. Greer said something about that,” she said. Frowning, she added, “Usually, she’s completely on top of things. In fact, I’m always telling people that she’s the one who really runs this place. But I was certain that this was one of those rare times she’d misunderstood.”

“It’s my way of giving back to the community.”
Even though it’s a far cry from putting in a few hours a week at a soup kitchen, I thought wryly.

“It’s quite a generous offer,” Dr. Goodfellow said, looking pleased. “And I like that you’re interested in serving your community. The concept of community involvement is something we take very seriously here at Worth. In fact, right now we’re gearing up for an outreach program we’re all hoping will be a great success. It’s a Blessing of the Animals that our school chaplain will be overseeing. Come to think of it, that’s something you might want to participate in.”

“Definitely,” I said, nodding fervently. After all, I thought, the more contact with anything at all related to this school, the better.

Still doing my best to sell my volunteer services, I said, “I’d be happy to provide you with references. And while I’ve never actually taught a course like this, since last fall I’ve been doing a fifteen-minute spot every Friday on cable television …”

“I know. I catch your TV show whenever I can. I’m a big fan.”

“So you’re a pet owner,” I said. I was starting to relax, since with each passing moment, it looked more and more like I was getting this gig. “What kind?” I was genuinely curious, since I can often tell a lot about a person by the kind of animal he or she chooses to live with.

“Oh, I’m a cat person,” Dr. Goodfellow said. “I have three right now, and they’re all completely different. The one I’ve had the longest is Seamus, a black-and-white tuxedo cat. I always tell people his middle
name is Trouble, since that’s what he’s always getting himself into. He even knows that ‘timeout’ means he’s misbehaved and has to go into his room with the door closed.

“Seamus’s transgressions usually involve bullying his sister, Chloe, a gray and white tabby,” she continued. “She’s the sweetest cat in the world and she’s absolutely terrified of him. She’s always jumping up to get away, so she’s constantly knocking things over. My other cat, Lizzy, is a white and orange tabby. There’s nothing she likes to do more than look out the window at the birds. The other day, a robin landed on the windowsill and stayed there for a while. She was in heaven. It was the closest she ever got to a bird.”

As she described her cats to me—first physically, but then their idiosyncrasies—I could practically feel her relaxing. I’ve noticed that inviting people to talk about the animals in their lives never fails as a way of getting them to open up.

In fact, by this point I was ninety-nine percent certain I had my foot lodged firmly in the door of the Worth School. Which made this a good time to take a chance.

“I might even be able to mention that I’m teaching here at the Worth School on the air,” I said casually. Studying her face so I could gauge her reaction, I added, “That might be good for Worth School from a public relations perspective. I understand that one of your teachers recently suffered a personal misfortune.”

All traces of her smile faded.

“Ye-e-es,” Dr. Goodfellow replied. “There was
that rather … unfortunate incident involving our art teacher, Mr. Stibbins.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “I read about it in the paper.”

Dr. Goodfellow’s red lips twisted downward. “Frankly, I’m worried that we might lose students over it. So many of the parents here are concerned with how something like that looks. They seem to see it as a personal affront, rather than the tragedy it truly is.”

Sounds like somebody I know, I thought, picturing Dorothy’s disgusted scowl as she’d contemplated how an untidy murder might reflect on the family’s reputation.

At the moment, however, it was Dr. Goodfellow who was my concern. I held my breath, hoping she might say something revealing, like “Too bad old Mr. Witherspoon, the geology teacher, never got over the fact that Mr. Stibbins won the potato sack race at the annual school picnic.”

Instead, her face tensed into a stricken expression. “For those of us at the school, it really was personal,” she said in a pinched voice. “Nathaniel—Mr. Stibbins—was a rising star here at Worth. He was extremely talented, but it was his passion for his art that set him apart. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that many people in the art world considered him nothing short of brilliant.”