Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (20 page)

Without turning her head, Susan slewed her eyes to the left to look at Miss Fondevant.

Though it would have been easy to believe that her teacher was so stern faced today from grief and regret, Susan knew that she was simply angry about all the to-do. Miss Fondevant had murdered James Phillip when she’d put her hand on his forehead. Susan felt the knowledge settle into her, as immutable as the multiplication tables.

After Mr. Kosper finished speaking, a woman Susan had never seen before told them how important their feelings were. It was certainly the first time any of the children had heard this, and they gaped at her. Then there was a long announcement about how Father Perry and the Reverend Hutchins were going to stay in the auditorium to talk to any kid who asked to leave class to speak to them. That was kind of weird and exciting.

Even kids who hadn’t liked or known James Phillip were unsettled by the time the assembly was over. None of the kids in Miss
Fondevant’s class asked to return to the auditorium except Jillian, the girl who’d cried that morning.

Miss Fondevant let Jillian go without even a stern look. And she didn’t touch anyone all day.

Susan’s mom asked her that night if she’d talked to any of the counselors.

“No,” Susan said. She turned her head back to the television. She loved
Gunsmoke
. Matt Dillon was always right, and Miss Kitty was always supportive.

“Are you feeling sad?” Merlie sat on the couch by Susan. “You know you can tell me about it.”

Susan turned to look at her mom. For one second, she hoped she could. But then she went through the conversation in her mind.
Mom, Miss Fondevant put her hand on James Phillip’s head and killed him. She just couldn’t stop herself. The kids in her class are good because she makes us be good.
“I’m not feeling sad,” she said hesitantly. “But I’m pretty mad.”

Her mom looked surprised. “That’s not what I expected,” she said. “What makes you mad?”

“Miss Fondevant,” Susan said.

“But, sweetie . . .” Her mom took a deep breath. “It’s not James Phillip’s fault, exactly, that he didn’t give her the note. I think his mom should have called Miss Fondevant at home to explain. If only he hadn’t forgotten the note. Or maybe he thought it would make him stand out, and he was embarrassed.”

Susan, who saw she simply couldn’t tell her mother the truth, struggled to frame a question about something else that had bothered her. “He didn’t have a dad, James Phillip. I mean, he has a dad, but his dad is in the army and he doesn’t get to come home much. And I don’t have a dad. But I’m not sick, right?” Miss Fondevant had been able to kill James Phillip so easily because he was already ill.

Immediately, her mom’s face got that wounded look, the one Susan had learned to dread. “You are just right as rain, baby girl,” she said very quietly. “Your dad . . . well, the doctors weren’t able to find out what happened inside his body. But you and me, we’re okay.” For a moment, Susan’s mom looked unlike the naturally lighthearted woman that Susan instinctively knew her mom to be. “Honey,” Merlie went on, “I’ve known Miss Fondevant for two years. She’s always kept a quiet classroom, and she’s always known every kid very, very well. It’s just crazy, the way she can tell you about each and every child in her room. She’s a marvelous teacher.”

“Right, Mom,” Susan said, turning back to the television.

The day after the assembly was a little more normal than Monday had been. Miss Fondevant removed the bow from the desk. Wednesday was even better. A new kid entered the school, and she took James Phillip’s place. Of course the other children told her that she had a dead boy’s desk, and JerriDell pretended to be terrified, but Susan could tell JerriDell didn’t have a lot of imagination. James Phillip didn’t seem real to the new girl.

That was actually good for the other kids in the class. JerriDell fit in very easily.

Now it was Frieda’s willful ignorance that worried Susan. When she tried to talk to her best friend at their usual meeting place at recess, Frieda said, “We probably just thought we saw something.” Frieda was trying to sound grown-up, but instead sounded unbearably condescending. Susan glared at her, keenly feeling the betrayal. Frieda recognized Susan’s anger and became more adamant. “Everything is
all right
,” she told Susan defiantly, and then she ran off to play jump rope with the Lucky Girls. The ones who had dads
and
moms
and
nice houses
and
clothes. Susan had fallen out of that group when her father had died and they’d had to move to a smaller house. To Frieda’s (and Susan’s) astonishment, the Lucky Girls let Frieda in the game.

In her despair, Susan did something she had never, ever imagined she would do. She waited by the outside water fountain for Taylor, and she voluntarily spoke to him. She’d taken great care to time it so they were by themselves. “Hey. Taylor. Do
you
understand what happened to James Phillip?” she said.

“Yeah. She killed him,” Taylor said, holding still with an effort. He glanced from side to side, reassuring himself they were not being watched. “And when she puts her hand on my shoulder, sometimes I think she’ll kill me, too.” The manic light in his eyes was gone, as was the overabundance of energy that had made him move constantly before Miss Fondevant had gotten a hold on him. For a moment, he seemed like a ghost of himself. Then his face reanimated, he grimaced grotesquely, and Susan felt a great relief.

“We have to stop her,” Susan said.

And then JerriDell ran up to get a drink, and Susan and Taylor split away in opposite directions.

For the next two weeks, the odd conspirators met at snatched moments, each terrified the other children would detect and publicize their partnership. Susan continued to reign as the class smart person, and Taylor continued to be the just-reined-in bad boy, thanks to Miss Fondevant’s shoulder squeezes. Sometimes Susan wondered if Miss Fondevant suspected something, because her shoulder squeezes became more frequent. One day, she gripped Taylor’s shoulder twice. He found a chance to talk to Susan behind a tree on the playground. “I don’t get it,” he said. “She doesn’t come to my house at night and drink my blood.”

“She’s not drinking blood,” Susan said, “she’s stealing your energy.”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “Maybe she’ll take it all.” He trudged away.

One evening as they were driving home, Susan’s mom asked, “Does your teacher . . . grab people by the shoulder?” She was trying
so hard to sound casual that Susan was instantly alerted. She had a flash of hope. Someone suspected!

Susan nodded vehemently.

Merlie looked straight ahead. She said, “Mrs. Costello was telling me that.” Mrs. Costello taught in Room 1, right across the hall. Merlie took a deep breath before she continued. “Do you . . . has she ever done that to you? I would hate to think she . . . when she became your teacher, I just figured how nice it would be for you to be in a quiet room, after last year.” The fifth grade had been awful for Susan, and her teacher had not been any kind of disciplinarian.

Susan thought hard about how to respond. “Miss Fondevant doesn’t grab them to make their shoulders hurt,” Susan said, trying to tell her mother the vitally important thing without mentioning the word she knew would make her mom quit listening. “She squeezes some, and they get really quiet. Like she’s draining them.” She waited, hopeful.

“She just touches their shoulder, huh?” Susan’s mom looked vastly relieved. In fact, she laughed a little. “Well. Okay. As long as she’s not hitting kids, or paddling them.” Merlie shook her head. “I know that woman’s sixty, and she doesn’t look a day over forty. I’ll have to ask her what her secret is!”

“No, Mom, don’t!” Susan’s cry was involuntary and from the heart.

Merlie looked right at Susan then. “You think that would be rude? Well, maybe. No reason to get all in fuss, Susan.”

Susan was desperate. “Mom, you know what her secret is,” Susan whispered. How could Merlie not understand?

For the second time, Merlie shied away from the truth. She laughed far too shrilly. “Oil of Olay? Pond’s Cold Cream? I’ve tried ’em all, honey, and I haven’t looked a day younger.”

Susan’s disappointment was so sharp that she almost summoned up the cruelty to ask her mother why her father had died. That was a
question that always made her mother get quiet and sad. Susan knew only that her father had been found crumpled by his car in Lake Crystal Park, at the west end of town. When her grandmother had come for the funeral, she’d also been silent about the way her own son had perished.

After her grandmother had gone home, her mother had said to Donna Lynn,
I know what people are saying behind my back. They’re saying he didn’t go there to run, he went there to meet some other woman.
Susan had been angry that no one had thought of telling
her
that. Surely she should know what people were saying about her own father? There was no way at all that her dad would meet up with some other woman in the park.

But now, Susan knew she should be kind to her mother, who couldn’t help being blind. Susan said, “Mom, you always look pretty, Oil of Olay or not. I can tell Mr. Kosper thinks so.”

Merlie looked startled. “Really?” she said. “He said something to you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Susan said. “He said he wished you taught at his school.”

The rest of the way home, Merlie was thoughtful, cheerful, and (most importantly) diverted.

Susan missed her father something awful. Maybe she could have made him understand.

That night, for the first time in fourteen months, Susan opened her father’s box.

Though Susan thought of it as a sacred object, it was just a brown cardboard box stuffed into the back of the shelf in the hall closet, where her mother kept the vacuum cleaner. It had always been very hard for Susan to reach, and she had to be very quiet while she did it.

She managed that this evening. Merlie was working on student evaluations, and she’d put on a record album (Three Dog Night) to listen to while she worked. So Susan was able to set up the folding
steps, reach the shelf, and pull the box forward. It was much easier than it had been the last time she’d done it—a measure of how much she’d grown the past year.

She crept to her room with her burden. By now the objects in it were very familiar. The largest one was her parents’ honeymoon photo album, which her mother couldn’t bear to see these days. And there were framed things: certificates, commendations, and diplomas earned over her dad’s thirty-five years. Underneath those was a small shoebox of pictures of Howard Langley’s childhood, spent in a baffling world of deep snow and canoes in mysterious waters, and relatives Susan had seen only a couple of times. Wisconsin seemed like another world to her.

But after a quick glance, she put all these things aside for her favorite memento: her dad’s high school yearbook. It was almost magical to her, her dad so young and handsome, the clothes so different. Howard Langley had played a game called lacrosse. Susan had never heard of it, but she’d looked it up. The yearbook showed Howard in his lacrosse uniform, and decorating the school for the Winter Carnival (whatever that was), and in a group of athletes giving a talk to younger kids. Those kids were the size of Susan now, so she enjoyed that picture more than all the others. She turned to it now. It was a whole half page.

Her dad was controlling a puppet, its wooden feet against the teacher’s desk, and another brawny boy was manipulating his own puppet to engage in battle with her dad’s, and the kids were laughing, and even the teachers way in the background were smiling . . .

Susan clapped a hand over her own mouth to smother a yell.

One of the teachers was Miss Fondevant.

No
, Susan thought.
It can’t be.
She took a deep breath, clamped her lips together, and looked at the picture again.

The teacher’s hair was in a different style, but not that different. Her clothes were a different style, too, but looking at the other
teachers in the picture, they were right for the time and place. Her figure was the same. The way she held her head was the same.

She wanted to run to the TV room to show her mother. But Susan thought,
Sit for a minute before you do something. Think about it.
She took some deep breaths. She read the caption under the half-page picture.

Lacrosse seniors Howard Langley and Dave Parnell demonstrate their puppeteer abilities to Miss Franklin’s seventh-grade class.

Miss Franklin was Miss Fondevant.

In that crystalline moment, Susan understood how her father had died. He had gone to run at Crystal Lake. He
had
gone there to run. But that evening, Miss Fondevant had been there as well. He must have seen her at his job at the bank. He had let her know that she reminded him—what an amazing coincidence!—of a teacher from his youth back in Wisconsin, of all places! How shocked she must have been to be starting over in a new place, far away, and be recognized. What had Susan’s father thought when she grabbed ahold of him and wouldn’t let go? Had he not wanted to hit a woman, especially an older one? But then realized she was killing him . . . too late?

The enormity of it made her almost as weak as her father must have felt. Though she returned the box to its place before she went to bed, she kept the yearbook and hid it in her room in an old satchel on her closet floor.

It took Susan two days to recover. She was carrying around something too big for a person her age, too big for a person any age. She told herself that it was good Frieda was not her best friend anymore because she would have had to ignore her while she tried to get back to normal. She missed Frieda bitterly, in every sense of the word.

On the second day after she’d opened her father’s yearbook, Miss Fondevant gripped her shoulder.

Susan had gotten careless, hadn’t been paying the careful attention she’d given the teacher ever since the James Phillip incident.
Since James Phillip died
, she told herself harshly. She’d been thinking of the picture again, a terrible mistake when she was actually in Miss Fondevant’s presence.