The Body in the Bonfire (17 page)

It was Daryl. A very frightened Daryl.

“I'm in the headmaster's office. The police are here. I can't reach Mrs. Avery. They think I killed Sloane!”

Faith reacted swiftly. “Don't say another word until Patsy gets there. You have the right to remain silent and have your lawyer with you. I'll call my husband and we'll stay with you until she gets there. Don't worry. You know you didn't do it.”

“I do and you do, but they need somebody to pin this on.” He was almost hysterical. “Somebody told them what I said in class on Friday…”

“Daryl, shut up! I mean it! Tell them you'll be happy to cooperate as soon as your lawyer arrives to advise you. Tell them Tom and I will be with you in the meantime. Have you called your parents?”

“No way!”

“Never mind. Just try to stay calm. We're coming.”

Faith called Tom, who arrived immediately and helped repackage the kids in their outdoor clothes. It had snowed again during the night and it was bitter cold outside. Somewhat bewildered at returning to play with the beloved Miller dogs—Artie, Dusty, and Henry—so soon, the kids scampered through Pix's back door, and Faith returned to her driveway, where Tom had the car waiting.

“I left the Harcourts' number on Patsy's beeper. I don't think Daryl has that number. He must have been trying her at work and home. Pray she's not in court today.”

“Why do they suspect Daryl?” Tom asked.

“Remember I told you about the incident in class Friday? The Aunt Jemima ad in Daryl's bag and Sloane's racist comment? What I didn't tell you is what I—and the whole class—overheard Daryl say to Sloane, something about how Sloane better watch his back, because Daryl was going to kill him.”

“Great. The kind of thing kids say all the time in anger. And this is enough to hang a murder rap on the boy?”

“Apparently.”

Neither of them said what they were thinking—that a lot of people might think it was enough to hang the rap on a black boy.

No one was talking when Connie Reed ushered the Fairchilds into the headmaster's office and left. Daryl was standing with his back to the group, staring out the window. Harcourt was behind his desk and the police were in the two chairs in front of it. Faith went over to Daryl and put her arms around him. The boy had been crying. There were long lines on either cheek, like the first spring rain on the slopes of a dusty creek.

“Is Daryl under arrest?” Tom asked.

Lorraine Kennedy answered. Charley had stood up; she hadn't. Clearly, Faith Fairchild was the last person she wanted around. “We just want to take him in for questioning. He was heard to threaten the victim's life on Friday, which was shortly before he disappeared, and we are investigating the nature of those threats.”

Faith held her finger to his lips as Daryl was about to burst into an angry denial. “Wait,” she said softly.

Tom turned to Robert Harcourt. “This is a horrible business, and I don't have to tell you how it's going to affect your students and their families. Please call on me for any help. And I know my fellow clergy in Aleford will also want to be involved.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm meeting with the faculty shortly to activate our crisis-management plan. Then we'll be gathering in the chapel with the boys before dinner tonight to announce Sloane's death officially and hold a brief
prayer service. The news is out, though, and everyone is shaken. My assistant, Ms. Reed, has already been handling calls from parents and the media. How could something like this happen here? It's the act of a madman.” He looked over at Daryl in disbelief. Faith saw the look and hoped it was because Harcourt couldn't possibly imagine Daryl doing something like this, not because the student wasn't who Harcourt had thought he was.

The door burst open. Patsy Avery hadn't waited to be shown in by Harcourt's faithful watchdog. The lawyer was by Daryl's side in a flash and a bayou Valkyrie addressed the group in a booming, extremely precise voice.

“Could somebody tell me why you have dragged an innocent seventeen-year-old boy in front of a kangaroo court on the basis of a few angry words that kids say to one another, their parents, even their teachers”—heavy sarcasm—“every day of the year?”

Now Lorraine Kennedy stood up. She looked tired, or bored. “I take it you are Patricia Avery, the boy's lawyer?”

“I am Patricia Avery, the boy's friend, and his lawyer now,” Patsy spat back.

“We just want to know what went on between your client and Sloane Buxton on Friday. The kid was very much alive then, and now he's ash, some teeth, and a bone or two in a cardboard box. We're trying to find out what hap
pened in between. Nobody's arresting anybody. Nobody's accusing anybody.”

“Was Sloane at dinner Friday night?” Faith interjected.

Lorraine ignored the question and looked at Patsy to continue, but Patsy wasn't about to say anything.

After a short pause, the detective answered, “No, he wasn't.”

“And he wasn't eating pizza in his room with his friends or anything like that?”

Harcourt answered now. “No. They looked for him in his room before going to the dining hall, and he wasn't there. They assumed he'd gone on ahead, but they were surprised he wasn't there, either. They always eat together.”

Faith knew all about cafeteria segregation—the popular kids' table, the jocks' table, the nerds' table, the druggies' table, the bottom-feeders' table.

“So, he was most probably killed shortly after I saw him. Dinner is at six, right?”

“Right,” Harcourt replied, looking puzzled. Obviously, he was wondering where Faith was going with this. Patsy picked up on it right away. She pulled Daryl closer to the window, and after exchanging a few words with him that the others couldn't hear, she announced triumphantly that if it was all right with everybody, she'd be taking Daryl to her house for dinner.

“Because there is no way he could have killed the boy, put the body in whatever got burned up
in the bonfire,
and
been at chorus rehearsal until five minutes before six, then dinner, where any number of students and faculty saw him, followed by attendance at a viewing of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
and
Johnny Mnemonic
videos in his dorm lounge.”

Daryl looked like he'd just heard he'd won the lottery. Dazed, but happily so.

Lorraine Kennedy wasn't about to give up so easily,

“A boy has been murdered. We need to know as much as possible about what appears to have been his last day on this earth.”

“Then you do that, but my client has nothing to say that could help you.”

“Why don't you let me be the judge of that?”

“Because you are
not
a judge and Daryl Martin is not being charged with anything. I think you'd better let this go.”

The two were very evenly matched. Detective Kennedy turned to Daryl. “Go have a good dinner, Daryl. If you decide to cooperate with us, here's my card. We'll be in touch.”

Daryl took it silently.

Patsy looked at the headmaster. “Then with your permission, we're out of here. Depending on what Daryl wants, I'd like to keep him overnight at our house. He's had quite a shock.”

“Certainly. Of course. We have his parents' approval form on file, but I'm sure he'll want to call them. See you in the morning, Daryl,” the head
master replied, some of his former vigor restored. Protocol. A form filed, a rule followed. These were things he understood—things that were not murder.

Tom and Faith prepared to follow them out, but Connie Reed walked in, temporarily blocking their exit. Faith put her hand on Tom's arm. She wanted to find out what was going on.

“The Beverly police have finally reached the Buxtons and they are on their way. Yesterday, they went from here straight to Foxwoods—you know, that gambling casino in Connecticut.” The woman did not even attempt to hide the contempt she felt for such places and the people who frequented them. “They were sure Sloane had a good reason for being wherever he was, they told the authorities, so they weren't worried.”

Faith didn't find this unreasonable. Sloane had always seemed like someone who knew what he was doing. Until the end, that is.

“In light of their arrival, I've rescheduled the faculty meeting until after dinner and mobilized the various teams to go into each dorm and talk with the boys immediately. The police are keeping the media at bay and I have informed them you will be issuing a statement tomorrow. Here are the calls you will need to answer personally, although I've told these parents that our top priority at this time is the student body and that you will be with them, of course. These are the calls I've taken care of.” She waved another sheath of
pink memo slips. “These parents simply needed a little reassurance.”

A tour de force, and there wasn't a person in the room who wasn't impressed.

“The main point I've been stressing is that this was a random act of violence”—the old itinerant-tramp theory again, Faith thought—“and that there is absolutely no cause for any concern regarding their children's safety.” Connie stood up straighter, if that was possible, locked eyes with the headmaster, and declared, “There is absolutely no cause for any alarm whatsoever at Mansfield Academy.” Her voice rang with truth and her cup ranneth over.

“But darling, you have it the wrong way round. I didn't seduce
him;
he seduced
me
.” Zoë Harcourt sounded amused—and proud.

“You must have been mad.”

The Harcourts were on the path that led from the parking lot to the chapel and main campus, concealed from Faith's sight by the rhododendrons. It was the next morning and she was late. The students were waiting, but she stayed where she was. Robert Harcourt's voice had been resigned. Zoë's wasn't.

“Oh, grow up, Robert. Sloane fancied himself quite the cocksman—unlike you—and he wasn't half-bad. Nobody got hurt. What was the harm?”

There was a momentary pause; then Robert said softly, “What about the harm to me?”

Zoë laughed. “You shouldn't have brought it up; then you wouldn't have known anything about it.”

There was no trace of her sultry Slavic accent.
Her matter-of-fact delivery was straight from New York.

She continued: “This place is beginning to seriously bore me. I'm ready for a new chapter, and if you want to stay, that's your decision, but I can't keep bailing you out.”

“I thought we'd settled all this. Are you threatening me again?”

The words were white-hot with anger. The change was startling.

“Be good for you to do something else. You're in a rut. And there's no need to be so dramatic.”

“I asked you a question. Are you threatening to pull your money out of the school?”

“Figure it out for yourself, darling. Must run now. I have to be in town.”

Faith jumped behind a thicket of bushes as Zoë walked past, her head high and her lips curved in a smile. The sky was overcast and snow was predicted, but apparently everything was sunny and bright for Mrs. Harcourt.

 

“Sorry I'm late, guys,” Faith apologized. It was going to be a challenge turning her thoughts to how to chop onions and make meat loaf when she wanted to think about what she'd just overheard. Zoë and Sloane. Zoë and a whole lot of others. Who had been in the car with Zoë the night of the faculty sherry party? Had it been Sloane? Zoë's answer to her husband's accusation implied that
it wasn't her custom to go after students, but when opportunity knocked…

Brian Perkins and the other ninth graders had their notebooks out. Everyone was sitting or standing, displaying varying degrees of uneasiness. There was none of the nonchalance, or even amusement, that had been apparent after the chapel meeting on the Harcourt theft. And what was going on with that? Were the trinkets still among the missing? But Sloane had been found—found dead—and every single boy in Faith's class was frightened.

She couldn't ignore it.

“Let's take a break before we start. I made brownies. Get some glasses and milk.”

Her suggestion met with neither approval nor disapproval. The boys poured milk and grabbed a brownie. Everyone except Zach.

“Not hungry,” he said tersely.

Faith nodded. She hadn't been hungry since she'd heard about the murder, either.

“I know you were his closest friends.” She nodded toward Sinclair and James. “This must be terrible for you. It's hard enough to lose someone your own age, but in this particular way…” Her voice trailed off. She really didn't know what to say.

Daryl had a wary look on his face. It had been there when Faith walked through the door and hadn't altered in the slightest.

“Dan Miller says you've solved a lot of crimes.
That you help the police. And you're here, I mean, obviously you're here, but are you trying to solve this one?” Brian asked.

Some of the boys looked skeptical. The cooking lady, a detective? Not likely.

Without detailing the number of times corpses had turned up on her watch, Faith simply said, “I have worked with the police on some cases that involved my firm, for example. But no, I'm not trying to solve this one.” She paused. “If I were, though, what would your hunches be?”

Zach shut down completely. It was astonishing. His body telescoped into itself, as if he were trying to disappear.

“Some kind of weirdo pyromaniac,” John MacKenzie offered. “Maybe he didn't know Sloane was in the piano case. Maybe Sloane had climbed in there to sleep one off and when the bonfire got lighted, it was Sloane of Arc.”

Nobody laughed and John blushed. “It was just an idea.”

“Asshole,” Sinclair said angrily. “Don't you think he'd have woken up when they moved the case? You were there when we built the bonfire. The cases went on the bottom.”

“Wouldn't someone have noticed that one case was heavier than the others?” Faith asked.

“Not necessarily. The maintenance guys had been chucking all sorts of stuff in them. So the fire would have a good base,” James answered.

Faith remembered the broken chairs and other
things piled to the side the day she had toured the campus with Daryl. It wouldn't have been too difficult to take a lot of the material out, place the body inside, and cover it with newspapers or something else combustible.

“Do you think it's a serial killer?” Brian asked. He appeared to have the utmost faith in her. “Some of the kids' parents have taken them home.”

Faith didn't think it was this type of murderer. This wasn't a random strike for kicks or the kind of crime that someone could duplicate again and again, getting off on the victim's pain, the bloodshed, the snuffing out of a life. It was actually a very tidy murder. She presumed Sloane was dead before he was placed in the box that served as his coffin. A quick death, she hoped, and, since it was committed on campus, she was sure she was right. The killer couldn't have chanced someone's happening along—or hearing a scream for help.

“No,” she said firmly. “I don't think so. I think whoever killed Sloane Buxton intended him as the victim and the only victim.”

“And that person would be who?”

Paul Boothe wandered in and picked up a brownie. He seemed to have had a liquid breakfast and his clothes looked as if he'd slept in them.

He straddled a chair, turning it around, and repeated his question to the room at large.

“So, who did it? And why? Elliot, Smith. You
were his buddies. Spill your guts. You've
got
to have thoughts about this.”

The boys looked at each other. Sinclair cleared his throat. When he answered, his voice was shaking.

“We have no idea, Mr. Boothe. The police asked us, too. Sloane didn't have an enemy in the world.”

The teacher stood up. “Somehow, I find that very hard to believe. The problem here is figuring out which one had the strongest motive.”

He left, leaving confusion and even more fear in his wake. So much for crisis-team intervention, Faith thought. Maybe Boothe had missed the training sessions—or perhaps he was simply sadistic. But he was right. Motive. That's what it came down to at this point. Means had been gruesomely established. Opportunity abounded. But motive? So far, the only one Faith had come up with was jealousy. Sloane was screwing his headmaster's wife. A crime of passion?

The rest of the class was a blur. She gave Daryl what she hoped was a reassuring smile as he left. When she turned around, she was surprised to find Zach still sitting in the kitchen, in the same position he'd been in for most of the morning.

“The police questioned me.”

“Because of the bullying?”

Zach nodded. “Somebody told them about it. I told them I stayed as far away from Sloane as possible. I wouldn't have taken this class if I'd known he was in it, but Mrs. Fairchild…”

“Yes?”

“I didn't tell them about being here on Sunday night—or that you were here.”

What was the boy driving at? Sloane was very, very dead by that time.

“What were you doing here anyway?” he asked, focusing a sharp gaze, very different from the lack of affect she'd seen up until now.

“What were
you
doing here?” It was another cop trick. Answer a question with a question.

It didn't work.

“I asked you first.”

“Look, we're not in third grade here. Everybody was at the bonfire. You were supposed to be there, too—even if there wasn't a rule about it. You certainly weren't supposed to be sneaking around a dorm that wasn't even yours.”

“And you weren't supposed to be sneaking around, either. We didn't have a night class and don't tell me you needed a spatula or something.”

It was a stalemate and they eyed each other warily.

Finally, Zach sighed and looked at his watch. Faith had the advantage when it came to tardy slips.

“Look, Mrs. Fairchild. I like you. I don't know what you think of me, but I should tell you that I'm out the door in a very few minutes and I can leave with both of us in the dark, so to speak, or not. But you have to go first. I know something's
going on. Clue me in and maybe—no, make that probably—I'll tell you why I was here.”

Faith made one of her typical snap judgments and decided to reveal Sloane's persecution of Daryl Martin.

“I knew he was a shit, but not that much of a one.” Zach's mouth was wide open.

“We never got any hard evidence though. He had a Hotmail account, which couldn't be traced and I searched his room, and his friends' rooms, without coming up with anything.”

“Ah, but I have his laptop. That's what I was doing here. He'd sold it to me a week ago and I'd given him the money. He said he needed it in a hurry, but had to keep the laptop until exams were over. You didn't say no to Sloane; besides, I had a customer for his computer. I don't know why he was selling it. It's a G three, very nice. Not a G four, but maybe that's what he was trading up to. Very sexy, very expensive.” Zach wrenched himself away from Macintosh land and continued. “Anyway, when I heard he'd split, I decided to go get it. It would be just like him to keep stringing me along and not deliver the goods. When I told you I wasn't stealing anything, I wasn't lying. I even have the agreement he signed.”

“But I don't see how that helps us.”

“He didn't know I was going to take it, so he wouldn't have erased anything, and if there's anything to find, I will.”

A man with a mission.

The police had sealed Sloane's room. Faith knew she really ought to take the laptop to Lorraine Kennedy. On the other hand, there was no harm in waiting. Evidence of Sloane's racist vendetta against Daryl might make the police turn to Daryl as a suspect again. She'd talk to Patsy. This wasn't suppressing evidence. The computer belonged to Zach now.

“Hold on to it, but don't do anything until I tell you. You have to promise that. I want to be with you when you open his files.”

“No problem. You tell me when.”

The Uppity Women's luncheon was Friday and she'd planned to do the preparations on Thursday, but she'd have to shop. She was taking Amy down to Norwell to see Marian today, so she'd have to put off exploring Sloane's laptop until tomorrow.

“Late tomorrow afternoon?”

“Okay. Here is as good a place as any. You can't come to my room”—Faith didn't think it necessary to mention she was already intimately familiar with it—“but you can always invent some excuse for being here and so can I most days.”

Faith nodded.

“If there's anything on Buxton's laptop, we can get at it,” Zach said again. He smiled at her sweetly, one hacker to another.

 

Faith had just finished tying the sash on Amy's dress when the phone rang. She sat Amy care
fully in a chair, told her to think about a nice story to tell Granny, and raced to answer it. It was Charley MacIsaac.

“You certainly made a great impression on Lorraine Kennedy. It's seldom that you get the chance to hear the rich vocabulary that was coming out of the woman's mouth after we left Harcourt's office. She's not crazy about Patsy Avery, either.”

“And you called me to tell me this, because…”

“It's not why I called you. It was just the first thing I thought of. You never want to think that a kid has killed anyone, especially another kid, so I wasn't unhappy with the way things went. But you guys were wrong. She's a good cop and she wasn't jumping to any conclusions. She just wanted to talk to the boy. We still want to talk to him and a whole lot more Mansfield students. It makes you sick. This kind of case.” Charley's sentences were running pell-mell into one another.

“I know how you feel. Her cremation remark was crude, but it's how I feel. That I was standing right there a few feet away while a seventeen-year-old's life was being totally obliterated. Or at least that's what the murderer hoped.”

“They want to meet you. The parents.”

“Sloane's parents?” As soon as Faith said the words, she felt stupid. Of course Sloane's parents. “Because I was probably the last one to see him alive?”

“Yeah. They haven't been taking it well. I mean, how could you? He was their only child.
They can't even have a wake yet, let alone the funeral. Could you go and talk with them? They live in Beverly, up on the North Shore.”

It was possibly the last thing Faith wanted to do, yet she knew she had to go. If—and it would never happen—but if she were in this situation, she'd want the same thing. Impossible to see the loved one you'd lost, but you could see the last person he was with, the last person he spoke to—except for the person who killed him, that is.

She sighed. “I imagine they want me to come as soon as possible.”

“Sooner,” Charley said. “I knew you had the Mansfield class this morning, or I'd have called earlier. They know their son was in it, and they want to hear about that, too.”

Amy had her hands folded in her lap. She looked like a Hallmark card. The dress had been a bitch to iron.

“I'll go this afternoon. Tell me how to get there.”