Stalking Death (3 page)

"Don't try to drive back tonight if you're tired," he said. "Find a motel." This from the man who would drive all night to be by my side if I needed him.

"I'll try to make it quick. You know I will."

"You're driving to New Hampshire to give this man a quickie?"

"Andre..."

"Yes, dear?" he said innocently.

I threw his clothes at him. "Get dressed, will you. I can't stand the temptation."

"I've married a woman who can't handle temptation?"

"Where you're concerned, you're damned right you have. It would be easier if you were fat or ugly. Or dressed." I grabbed a fistful of underwear and shoved it in the suitcase. My hands hurt. I wondered if there was a job-related injury called trigger-blister, if you could get carpal tunnel from steadying a firearm. I'm a big, strong woman but Macho Man had chosen a cannon for today's exercise instead of some sweet, ladylike Barbie-pink Smith & Wesson.

"Black lace underwear to sort out a confused headmaster?" he said.

"Honey, darling, sweetie-pie," I said, sticking out my chest, "a bra this big in hot pink looks like a pair of beach umbrellas. And white is boring."

He leaned back against the pillow, hands behind his head, showing off his arm muscles, his chest muscles, his rock-hard abs. "I like big girls out of their underwear."

"Not out on the public street you don't. Not behind the wheel."

"Good point," he agreed, reaching for his tee-shirt. "At least, not when they're you. Other girls?" He shrugged. "When I was a highway trooper, you wouldn't believe the things I'd see. Walk up to a car to check some girl's license and registration and she'd have her skirt up to here and her blouse unbuttoned down to there." He demonstrated with suggestive motions of the sheet. "I'd just lower my eyes and look away."

"Oh, right."

The phone rang. "It's your mother," he said, checking his watch.

She was calling to complain that we still hadn't sent her wedding pictures, and I wasn't in the mood for it. I had to get on the road. "Tell her I'm not here."

He picked up the phone. "Hi, mom."

I could tell he was getting an earful. Didn't I understand that decent people didn't work on Sunday. They played golf or visited their mothers. Dusted the dracena or taught manners to their almost perfect children. But I was not letting her upset me.

Andre murmured some soothing sounds and put down the phone. "Brace yourself," he said. "She wants to know if we have any good news for her."

She, with her own history of miscarriages, shouldn't be hinting about pregnancy. I was getting a headache. She sends them, telepathically, to punish me for being such a rotten daughter. Even now, she was marching into my father's office in high dudgeon to tell my father, for the zillionth time, what an impossible girl I was. At thirty-one, I'm old enough to stop letting her give me headaches. Some of us are slow learners.

I grabbed my toiletries bag, shoved it in and started zipping my suitcase. "Don't forget to pack a sweater," Andre said. "Warm socks. And your umbrella."

I made my hand into a gun, and pointed it at his heart. "Don't start."

"Can't help myself," he said. "You're too much fun to tease. And admit it. You do sometimes need looking after."

"And you're just the man to do it."

"You bet your ass." He stood there, grinning, letting his eyes travel over me in an imitation of rude cop attitude. When other cops do it, it makes my blood boil.

"I'm late." I jerked the suitcase off the bed.

"Aren't you going to wear a suit?"

"Why? It's just a meeting."

"For when you meet the press."

"Not meeting the press, honey."

"Better take a suit. With your track record, you'll get there and all hell will break loose."

"That's reassuring. If my clients thought like you, I'd never get any business." I narrowed my eyes. "What's this stuff about a suit, anyway? You don't like me in suits."

"Exactly," he said. "Suits make you look grown-up and dumpy." He was grinning again. Bastard. He had the most backhanded way of giving compliments.

"So no one will notice me, right?"

"Right," he agreed. "It's so easy to miss a beautiful woman when she's nearly six feet tall and stacked."

"Stacked?" I crossed my arms defensively over my chest and glared at him. "What has gotten into you today?"

He turned toward the window. "Guess I'm having trouble letting you go."

Our history read more like an adventure novel than a romance. We had good reason to fear separation. Still, duty called and I had answered.

I was wearing black pants and a green sweater. I walked to the closet, got my black jacket, and put it on. "You see," I said, pirouetting slowly. "Suit."

"Damn," he said. "Hot damn. You don't look the least bit dumpy." I could have dragged him to bed once more, but we were out of time. And, like Scarlett O'Hara's mammy, my mother had tried to teach me to exhibit ladylike appetites.

I stopped by the office and picked up the papers Todd Chambers had faxed, reading through them on my way to the car. Someday I'm going to fall and break my neck trying to do two things at once, one of which involves forward momentum.

Even a cursory reading told me I had to stop him from sending the letter. While it might calm some worried parents, if he already had an upset student on his hands, sending a letter suggesting she'd made it all up would be like throwing gasoline on a fire. It stopped just short of calling her a crazy liar. There had to be a better way. My job was to figure that out between here and his office, then present it to him diplomatically.

The roadsides were banked with a thick tangle of flowers—goldenrod, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, and masses of pink and purple asters. In the fields, the drying cornstalks were turning gold and pumpkins growing orange. The mountains of Western Maine were a mixture of late summer's fading greens sprinkled with bits of yellow-green and deeper gold and the occasional early maple in brilliant reds and oranges. The wide lakes reflected the blue of the sky, quiet after a summer being churned by propellers. Wedges of birds were gathering for the journey south.

I wanted to savor this before October's chill and November's bleakness. But the day was already softening into darkness, the shadows deepening as I pressed westward. Todd Chambers' problem had begun to permeate my mind. I felt uneasy about what was waiting for me.

I switched on the radio to distract me, but the word "news" is just shorthand for "bad news." After a domestic murder, a 12-year-old girl who'd been snatched off the street and assaulted, and two fiery crashes on New Hampshire highways, I turned it off, but I couldn't quite forget that girl. After years working on girl's education issues, I'm proud of young women's growing independence, but the danger also seems to be growing. Too often, when I pass a barely dressed female jogger who's tuned out the world with headphones, my admiration for her athleticism wars with my desire to stop and ask if she's lost her mind.

I went back to the beauty outside my car and the job inside my head. Schools hired me because I was the competent outsider who could help them handle thorny problems. I didn't doubt my ability to do that. When I got to Chambers' office, I'd help him figure out what to tell his parents. We'd craft language reassuring them that their children weren't living in a place where students were stalked and terrorized. Tell them a careful investigation had found no evidence anything scary had taken place except in the overwrought imagination of a student. Our challenge was to make the school look good without making the student look bad.

I hoped he had conducted the investigation properly and been sensitive and kind in handling his troubled student. I didn't want to get into this too deeply or have to spend a lot of time on campus establishing the facts. I was already too busy. Sometimes it happened. I'd arrive thinking there was one job to be done and find myself up to my ears in another.

I left the winding Maine roads and set off across New Hampshire. St. Matthews was located in the heart of the state, in one of those picture-perfect New England towns with a green sporting the requisite Civil War memorial and a pristine white bandstand, surrounded, at this season, with vibrant orange mums. Facing the green were a few blocks of big white houses with rolling lawns and wide porches with wicker furniture and porch swings, punctuated by the rare and even more imposing brick house.

I never entered such a town without a brief longing to live there. Small towns had a down side, though. Unless you worked like the dickens to keep your secrets, everyone knew your business. Private schools were like that, too, little inbred communities where people lived in each other's pockets and secrets were hoarded like gold, their keeping traded like favors.

I flipped on my blinker and steered down something called Academy Lane, which, according to my directions, would bring me to Bishop Hall and the headmaster's office. Bishop Hall was one of those imposing white houses I'd been admiring. A discreet black and white sign identified the visitor parking, empty now in the darkness of a Sunday evening. I pulled into the space closest to the door and shut off the engine. Closest to the door out of habit. Despite the eye-glazing sound of it—consultant to independent schools—my work life has been anything but uneventful.

But the night was pleasant and benign, the area well-lit, and I'd only come to talk about a letter. The only danger I could foresee was that Todd Chambers wouldn't like what I was about to tell him and that despite his good breeding, he might express that displeasure in a loud voice. Guys who like to yell are tiresome, but they don't scare me.

I got out and walked briskly to the door, looking neither left nor right to see if there were bad guys in the bushes, firmly repressing the skin-prickling sensation that someone was watching.

A woman waiting just inside the door popped out of her chair when I came in. "Ms. Kozak?" Her voice was throaty and slightly accented. I nodded. "If you would follow me?" She turned and glided down the dimly lit hall, assuming I would follow.

She wore a flowing dress in a deep shade of purple, and was draped in a vast scarf in intricate swirls of purple, lilac and turquoise blue, caught at the shoulder with a rhinestone brooch. Her black hair was confined in an impeccable chignon. She was slight, no more than five feet tall, and elegant in the striking, bony way of some Frenchwomen. Next to her, I felt like a giant. She didn't look much like a secretary, even if Chambers had a secretary who would work on Sundays. She didn't introduce herself and I wondered who she was.

She led me to an imposing door, nearly 8 feet high and painted a dramatic, shining black, stenciled, in gold letters, Headmaster's Office. She knocked and opened the door to a lovely room, long, high-ceilinged and well proportioned. The books on the shelves were old, with gold-embossed leather bindings. The four fine paintings had elaborate gold frames and small signs identifying the painters, like old paintings in museums. A dark cabinet held a magnificent set of Cantonware. It conveyed St. Matthews' tradition of austere Yankee gentility perfectly.

Todd Chambers, blond, trim and slightly supercilious, was behind his desk, playing with a letter opener. When we entered, he stood but didn't come forward to greet me. His failure to come out from behind the desk told me that he expected me to work for him, not with him. Also, that the trustees might have hired him for his manner, but not for his manners. It didn't bode well for the discussion we were about to have.

Seeing him, I remembered that the other time I'd met Todd Chambers, he'd reminded me of those arrogant and unlikable fraternity boys in Animal House who'd made me root for the losers.

Normally, when I met with a school on a sensitive matter like this, the headmaster would have his deans with him, and often one or more trustees. Except for the silent woman, Todd Chambers was alone. I sat in one of the chairs facing his desk—chairs comfortable enough to be welcoming to visitors, yet sufficiently formal to convey the dignity of the office to students who were being "called on the carpet," and waited.

He didn't waste time on polite preliminaries, but dropped into a big leather chair that gasped slightly at the impact of his body. He scooped up some papers from his desk. "You've read my letter?"

I nodded.

"What did you think?"

The woman in purple had taken a chair to the side and slightly behind me, the indoor equivalent of being in my blind spot. Her silent presence spooked me. There's something eerie about a person deliberately sitting where you can't see them. Like the cop in the back taking notes during an interrogation, except the cop has an identified function.

"I think it's a good start," I said. "You've got an extremely sensitive situation here. It calls for some rather delicate drafting."

"You didn't like it?" he interrupted. "We thought it was pretty good. You have no idea what things have been like around here since that girl started stirring things up. No idea. My phone's been ringing off the hook."

"I have a pretty good idea, Todd. That's why you called me."

He waved the papers back and forth, like someone fanning a fire. "Of course. Of course. Just a figure of speech. Naturally. So, with your experience, knowing how fast rumor travels, you can certainly understand why I'm... why we're all... so anxious to get this letter out as quickly as possible. Did you want to suggest some changes?" His eyes flitted briefly to the woman behind me.