The Ghosts of Lovely Women (The Teddy Thurber Mysteries) Read online

  “True.”

  “But that makes motive easy and understandable. What makes someone kill a girl like Jessica? A pretty, nice girl who was friends with everyone?”

  I could see that quiet, even-tempered Chris was on the verge of tears.

  I sighed. There were several reasons why a person would kill a pretty girl, and none of them were acceptable; they certainly weren’t things I was prepared to discuss with these already hurting young people. “It’s a fair question, Chris, but I can’t answer it. We’ll wait for the police to tell us just what happened.”

  I was concerned about Rosalyn; she hadn’t said anything since she’d heard the news. She sat in her desk, white-faced, looking down at her hands. At one point I noticed her rummaging for something in her purse.

  Tracy Olzewski spoke out, looking angry. “This is going to just kill her mom and dad. I mean, they love all their kids, but Jessica was like this star of their family. And she was the only girl.”

  Her classmates nodded, their faces looking very young, yet suddenly old.

  * * *

  I managed two periods and then fought my way through the crowded halls and down the stairs to the teacher’s lounge, where I hoped, finally, to make copies.

  There were people in line at the far copier because the other two were not working. Someone had written “OUT OF ORDER — AGAIN!!!” on two pieces of paper and then taped them on the malfunctioning machines.

  “Oh, for CRAP’S SAKE!” I said. My colleagues looked at me with mute despair from the line, clutching their handouts and obviously clinging to the hope that the one working machine wouldn’t suddenly give up the ghost.

  The only one who seemed unconcerned was Lucia Donato, one of the Italian teachers. I pretended to resent her because she was blessed with every advantage, the most obvious of which was her gorgeous body. Today it burgeoned generously under a red knit dress and matching red heels that set off her long dark hair. Lucia was forty but looked thirty; she had a beautiful Italian accent. She was also intelligent and kind.

  “I hate you,” I said as I got in line behind her.

  I noticed that the new guy — Derek (there, I remembered)—was gawking at us in what I call Stage One of Lucia fascination. At first her looks are just beyond belief. She’s an extra helping of everything.

  “You don’t,” she said, shrugging.

  “No, but I should. If I wore that dress I would look like an ill-paid prostitute, and you look like some glorious mythological queen.”

  She threw back her head and chuckled her throaty Lucia chuckle. Derek, who was using the paper cutter, almost amputated his fingers.

  “Oh, Teddy. You always make me laugh.” She edged forward slightly in the line and consulted a pretty silver watch on her wrist. “Besides, you don’t need to envy anyone. You’re one of those small and pretty girls that men love.” She eyed me, nodding. “Do you have Italian blood?”

  “Sorry — just English, as far as I know.” I scowled at her. “You also smell like a field of flowers. What perfume is that?”

  “Oh, what did I put on today? I think it’s called Bacio. Would you like me to bring you a bottle? I have an uncle in Italy who sends me cases of it. He knows I like it, so.”

  “By uncle you mean lover.”

  She laughed again, probably because it was true. Then she sobered. “Teddy, do you believe this about little Jessica? She was such a pretty girl, and her Italian was excellent. She told me that when she was finished with college she was going to take a trip to Florence, just to see all the places we talked about. Oi, so sad.”

  “I know. Do you know I saw her this summer? We had coffee and talked. She was a thinker; I always feel like those kids who are independent thinkers will go the farthest. One of the girls told me Jessica had gotten a part in some Broadway show. Do you know if that’s true?”

  She shrugged again, then moved forward again in the line when someone left with a stack of papers. “Who knows? A lot of facts will come out in the next few days, right? Oh, darn, I forgot my workbook. Where did I put it? Save my space, Teddy.”

  She walked swiftly on her red heels back to the mailboxes. Derek stood frozen at the paper cutter. Lucia has, as my Aunt Nora from Indiana used to say, “a swing in her back yard.”

  I leaned toward Derek. “She’s spoken for.” This was true in more ways than one: about five men were in love with Lucia, and she had strong feelings for at least three of them. She complained of the difficulty in choosing one over the other. She regaled me with tales of romantic moonlit dates, impromptu trips to Sicily and Rome, mountain wildflower bouquets sent to her home, baskets of exotic fruit shipped to her at school. There were occasionally chocolates that she offered to me because “I get so many, Teddy.”

  Derek reddened beneath his well-trimmed brown beard, seemingly distressed to have been caught in Lucia’s siren spell. He left the room, holding the little pile of papers he’d been cutting. I felt badly, now, that I hadn’t asked if everything was going all right for him. I’d assumed that it was, especially after some of his first period students had come into my second-period class proclaiming that he was “really cool” and that his psychology class was “going to be so awesome.”

  The copy line inched forward; Lucia reclaimed her spot. “Who was that man who just left?” she asked. “I didn’t want to ask while he was standing there staring at you.”

  I sniffed. “He was staring at you, voluptuous. And he’s the new social science chair. Kathy Olchen is going to be furious.” The previous department chair, James Gruben, had left under mysterious circumstances a month before; the administration had told us only that he had a “personal health issue,” which we knew could mean anything from a real health problem like a dodgy heart to a euphemism for “he was asked to leave because of unacceptable behavior.” Lucia was convinced that he’d made a pass at a student. Our friend Joshua swore that he’d smelled marijuana on Gruben on more than one occasion. Neither of these had seemed like very likely reasons to me.

  In any case, Kathy Olchen, a most ambitious but not very good history teacher (or so I heard on the grapevine), had applied for Gruben’s job, and had interviewed along with several other candidates. Jonas had won, and I could only imagine what Olchen would be saying right now. It was spring, but summer loomed, and that would give her time to get used to the new reality.

  I taught my period four class. They were a group of sophomores who had not known Jessica Halliday very well, so things were a bit more calm. We discussed the first act of Macbeth and managed a lackluster vocabulary drill; then the bell rang and I went to a Period 5 committee meeting, lugging my sad brown bag lunch with me.

  At St. James, teachers were required to be on what seemed about six hundred committees, all of which were exhausting and rarely yielded results. Today’s meeting was for the school’s new image. Our principal, Anthony Fairchild, had announced at the beginning of the year that we had received a grant from a local bank to improve the landscaping at St. James, a lovely old building much admired in Pine Grove. We had 5000 dollars to use as we wished; Anthony had asked for volunteers to serve on the committee, research various landscape options, and discuss feasibility. We had met four times and had not reached a consensus. Joshua and I had gotten so frustrated that we had started to suggest ridiculous and outlandish things while maintaining a serious demeanor, and sure enough, our committee took them seriously and debated about them.

  Today we sat in an empty classroom and endured all sorts of gossip about Jessica Halliday. “I heard she was found in an alley, sitting in the front seat of her car,” said Chad Rivera. “Someone was likely hiding in the back seat. They could have just jumped up and strangled her — not much time to fight that.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she was killed in her car,” said Tricia Ellis. “Don’t you watch the cop shows? She could have been killed somewhere else and then moved to her car. They always move the body, right? Especially if it’s a crime of passion.”

  “
True,” said Chad. “Wherever it happened, they could have driven her car closer to her home, then put her body in the driver’s seat. Made it look as though it was done there.”

  “Who would do that?” someone protested.

  “God knows. I can’t imagine the girl having enemies.” That was from Josh.

  “We don’t really know our students,” Marnie Taylor said. “We think we do. We idealize them. But we don’t know them, or what they go through. What their demons are.” She rested her hands on her pregnant belly, as though to calm the swimmer within. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  That silenced the gossip. We got down to committee business; I think people were almost relieved to let the subject drop; instead we listened to Kathy Olchen, who had grown surprisingly silent during the Jessica chatter, drone on about the various kinds of pine trees and the surprising advantages of decorative wood chips. Joshua put aside the essay he was grading and held up his hand. “Kathy? I got those figures on what it would cost to uproot some Florida palms and have them planted here.” He scanned his sheet of notes with a look of great concentration. Since Pine Grove is just west of Chicago, it was a particularly obnoxious suggestion.

  Kathy looked aghast, as did several other committee members, all of whom were eating unimpressive looking sandwiches. Chad Rivera’s PBJ looked as though he had sat on it before starting it, and the smell of peanut butter was overwhelming in the little classroom.

  “The fact is, the trees are quite expensive just to dig up; then to transport them and have them planted here would be equally expensive, and there’s always the chance that they would die anyway once transplanted. We’d be looking at well over 100 thou.”

  Everyone stared at him; Kathy’s mouth hung open slightly. Her normally neat red hair looked rumpled. “We have 5000 total,” she said.

  Joshua tapped his teeth with a pencil. “That’s why I’m thinking this might not be feasible. But I’m going back to the internet, see what I can find out. What if we PLANTED some SEEDS? It would only take twenty or so years for us to see the fruits of our labors, assuming the seeds took to our Midwestern soil.” He nodded, pretending to like this idea.

  I would have felt sorry for my colleagues if it weren’t for the fact that they were just so perpetually humor-impaired. Joshua had worked here for ten years. How was it that some of them didn’t know that he refused to take things seriously?

  Josh put his arm around me. “Teddy thinks it’s a good idea. I’m going to delegate some of this research to her.”

  Just then our principal, Anthony Fairchild, poked his head in the door. “Hey, this is the landscaping committee, is it not?” he asked. As usual he was elegant in a three-piece suit while the rest of us were bordering on business casual. My black pantsuit actually looked, I thought, quite professional, but the secret was that it was stretch knit: comfortable as pajamas.

  “Yes, that’s us,” Joshua yelled, squeezing my shoulder and adopting a faux “I love this committee” face.

  Anthony pushed in someone I’d seen before. “This is Derek Jonas; he’s our new social science chair, and I’ve selected some committees for him so that he can start getting a sense of St. James. I know you’ll show him the ropes.”

  Kathy Olchen’s face turned sour; Anthony, ever professional, refused to see it, but sent a radiant smile to us all and smoothed a hand over his bald brown head, as though to tame the memory of his hair. Then he disappeared.

  Derek Jonas scanned the room with a bashful smile and sat next to me. Joshua’s hand slid off of my shoulder and he turned to bait Kathy, who had suggested that palm tree seeds might not be the way to go.

  “Sounds like compelling stuff,” Derek Jonas said.

  “If by compelling you mean painfully boring, then yes.” I was looking through my bag for anything chocolate and then realizing I hadn’t packed any. I’m sure my face fell.

  “Not a good lunch?”

  “No. I must not love me.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t you have anything?” I asked.

  “Didn’t think of that this morning. I’ve been sort of rushing around.”

  I shook my head. “We’ll share my sandwich. You’ll need the protein to get through the day.” I handed him half of my turkey on rye and munched my half while I listened to Joshua teasing Kathy with great skill.

  “I should stop him, but it’s just so fun,” I whispered to Jonas.

  “I’m taking quiet revenge,” he murmured back. “She cornered me this morning and gave me a piece of her mind.”

  “Oh, God!” I turned to him, scandalized. “Not on your first day!”

  “I made the mistake of cutting one of her projects. It’s entirely inappropriate, with no apparent pedagogical value.”

  “The ‘people who are disturbed in my family?’ project?”

  He chuckled. “That’s not what she calls it, but yes.”

  Kathy taught two psychology classes; she had horrified the faculty with her annual project, which encouraged students to apply current psychological maladies to their own families, i.e. who might be manic depressive, obsessive-compulsive, agoraphobic, etc. and why. The worst part was that the kids loved the experiment and somehow Kathy had gotten approval from Fred and Anthony and, apparently, the recently resigned James Gruben.

  “Well, I approve of your actions,” I whispered, offering him some potato chips from my carefully portioned baggie. He reached in and I noted his forearm, covered with a golden-brown layer of hair. Not too hairy, but masculine. It was the same color as the rest of his hair — the plentiful, wavy burst of it on his head and the neatly trimmed mustache and goatee that should have looked ridiculous but in fact looked attractive.

  I turned away abruptly, trying to key in on the current debate. “If palm trees weren’t ridiculous enough, what in the world would be the point of a giant ice sculpture that would only last a DAY?” Kathy was saying. I watched her pick up an important-looking briefcase which I envied (I toted my papers in a Whole Foods bag) and spin the little gold combination locks until the numbers matched. Then she flipped it open, I half feared to retrieve some sort of weapon to use against Josh. No — just more research material, submitted for the committee’s approval.

  I heard Derek laughing quietly beside me, but I didn’t look at him again until the bell rang and he leaned in to say, “Thanks for lunch,” and then was gone.

  Joshua tapped my arm. “It’s almost too easy with that girl,” he sighed. “So what’s with the new guy? Any gossip about him yet?”

  “No. Leave him alone; he seems very nice.”

  “Nice?” He stared at me.

  I ignored him.

  “Okay, fine,” Joshua said as we moved out of the room. Kathy and several committee-ers had stayed behind, probably to raise hell about Joshua and me. It could only be hoped that they’d lodge a complaint and that we’d be kicked off the committee.

  A wave of exhaustion and sadness came over me. “You know I’ve been thinking about Jessica all day. Her ghost is following me around.”

  He sighed. “She was a bright one. All that talent, for God’s sake. I don’t even like to talk about it.”

  “I don’t understand why men kill girls and women. I’ll never understand it.”

  Josh turned and raised his eyebrows as we paused in front of my classroom. Mark Twain leered at us from a poster on my door. “What makes you assume it was a man, Ms. Thurber?”

  I laughed, but I felt grim. “Oh, it was a man, Josh. Mark my words, it was a man who killed that girl.”

  Three

  “Oh, Kristine, I feel so light and happy! Won’t it be lovely

  to have stacks of money and not a care in the world?”

  —Nora, A Doll’s House, Act I

  By the time I reached the parking lot at close to four o’clock, I was exhausted. I’m sure all jobs are exhausting in their own way, but teaching required something I hadn’t anticipated in my student days: the ability to be “on” for l
ong periods of time, class after class. One needs to channel intense amounts of energy to guide, inspire, entertain, inform — all while trying to prevent distractions. It involves great planning and then high levels of performance. In between those bursts there are the meetings, the substitute teaching during free periods, the detention monitoring, the co-curricular planning, the grading, the grading, the grading. I had a stack of essays in my bag that would probably keep me busy until evening.

  But when I sat in my car and closed my eyes, it was the image of Jessica Halliday that floated behind my lids: her face, tanned and pretty, as I had seen her seven months before.

  I had been running errands in town when I ran into her; she was wearing a tiny top with spaghetti straps, a pair of short blue jean shorts, and flip flops. She looked effortlessly beautiful the way that an eighteen-year-old girl can in any outfit. Her blonde hair had grown out a bit, and she wore it in a tiny ponytail; there had been little rhinestone studs in her ears, and they glinted in the sun as she leaned forward to hug me, to say “Hey, Ms. Thurber! I was just thinking about you!”

  I ended up asking if she’d like a cup of coffee; we were by Common Grounds, a local coffee place that had better seating than Starbucks. She seemed pleased that I’d offered, and we walked in while she regaled me with tales of New York, how awesome the college looked during her visit, how thrilling it would be to become independent, autonomous, a free young woman.

  There was a certain euphoria in leaving home, at least for girls like Jessica. She was a free spirit, and her anticipation of college must have felt like a wonderful new beginning. There were some who were homebodies, and for that reason they picked schools in or near Chicago so that they could visit home whenever they wanted — or perhaps even keep living at home and commute to school. Not Jessica, though; that never would have pleased her, much as she seemed to love her parents and her brothers — and her boyfriend.

  “How’s Danny?” I had asked her. Her face furrowed.