A Hard Day's Fright Read online

  “Ariel told me how you two sat down and went through the old yearbooks,” Ella said, practically crooning the words. “That’s more sharing than she’s done in as long as I can remember. We had a bonding moment, Pepper, a real bonding moment!”

  I might have been as excited as Ella if only the library/ yearbook exercise had gotten me anywhere in terms of my investigation.

  When Ella ambled over to a clearing surrounded by the monuments to a family called Greenleigh, I galumphed along behind her, thinking all the while. “You know,” I said, lying through my teeth without so much as a pang of guilt, partly because I was getting really used to lying and partly because, even as I said it, I realized it was a good idea. “I don’t know if she mentioned it to you, but I asked Ariel to do some research for me. You know, about your friend Lucy. I thought if I put her in charge of a little project about Lucy—”

  “It would help drive home my message about staying safe and keeping in touch. Yes!” Like an Olympic athlete, Ella poked a fist into the air. Right before she did a little dance step and spun around. I’m not sure how she managed since her boots were as clunky as mine. I can only think that a woman who habitually wears Earth Shoes is more used to making do when it comes to oh-so-unfashionable footwear. “I told you you’re a genius. This proves it.”

  “Well, I could be more of one. If I knew more.” I pinned Ella with a look. “Are you sure there isn’t more you can tell me about Lucy? Anything that would help?”

  “You mean help Ariel realize the dangers of being out in the world alone.” Ella nodded. “Yes, I see.” There was a teeny heap of fast-food wrappers piled against a headstone, and rather than risk damaging the stone with her metal-tipped poker, Ella bent and plucked the papers by hand. She dumped them in my bag and brushed her hands together, nodding all the while. “It does sound cruel when you come right out and say it, but this is all for Ariel’s own good. We want to make this whole running away and being missing thing look as scary as possible. We’ve got to emphasize how it can have dire consequences. Even if Lucy really is still alive, Ariel doesn’t have to know that.”

  The only way I could keep my mouth shut was to bite my lip. And keep my mind on my investigation.

  “Is there anything you haven’t told me about Lucy?” I asked her. “Anyone you think could have been involved in her mur…er…disappearance?”

  “Well…” Ella jabbed her stick into the ground and leaned against it. By now, the sun was peeking over the trees and the air was quickly heating. She swiped one sleeve of her sweatshirt across her forehead. “There was Patrick Monroe, of course.”

  The name was vaguely familiar, but it took a second for the why of it to click in. When it did, I grinned. “You mean the poet? The one who visited your school.”

  “Senior year. That’s right.” Ella was pleased I’d noticed it in the yearbook. “Oh, he was something, all right. Patrick Monroe.” She tipped her head back. “Every girl in school was madly in love with him.”

  This did not exactly scan with the pictures I’d seen in Ella’s yearbook. I gave her an uncertain look. “Beard? Dirty jeans? Long scraggly hair?” I demonstrated, my hands raking over my own anything-but-scraggly locks. “Are we talking about the same Patrick Monroe?”

  Ella laughed. “It was the sixties. And Mr. Monroe…” She shook her head. “By the time he came back to Shaker for that assembly when I was a senior, Mr. Monroe was a world-famous poet. Come on, Pepper…” She poked me in the ribs. “You know how it is. There isn’t a woman alive who can resist a poet.”

  I was pretty sure this woman could.

  Rather than dwell on it, I glommed on to something else Ella said. “You said, when he came back to Shaker. Does that mean this Patrick Monroe guy—”

  “He was a teacher at the school. Of course, you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t run across his picture in one of the older yearbooks! Mr. Monroe was in the English department. He quit teaching when that poem of his was published. Oh, you must know it.” Thinking, she snapped her fingers together, and when she finally gave up, she shook her head in disgust. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. I’ll think of it. I’ll bet it’s a poem you studied when you were in high school. That’s how famous it is.”

  She made her mistake there. Studied and high school in the same sentence.

  “Anyway…” Ella stabbed up some more debris and put it in my bag. “Everybody else was taken in by him, but me…I always wondered if Mr. Monroe had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance. Shaker wasn’t his first teaching job, you know. The rumor going around school…” As if it hadn’t happened forty-five years before, Ella leaned closer, sharing the confidence. “Rumor had it that he’d been asked to leave his first teaching job somewhere in New York. Because of…you know…an inappropriate relationship with one of the girl students.”

  Finally, something interesting connected with my case. Gross, but interesting. As for whether it had anything to do with Lucy, there was only one way to find out.

  “Did Lucy ever say anything about Mr. Monroe coming on to her?”

  “Oh, really, Pepper!” Ella fanned her face with one hand. “We weren’t quite as blatant about discussing things like that back then as you young people are now. But no, there’s no way.” There was a fast-food burger wrapper across the road and Ella headed that way. She stabbed it and said, “If Mr. Monroe was doing something inappropriate, Lucy would have told me. And she would have reported him. She was that kind of girl. I told you, she didn’t put up with any sort of unfairness and she didn’t keep quiet in the face of what was wrong. She didn’t—”

  Ella’s cheeks turned suddenly ashen. Her mouth fell open.

  I put a hand on her arm.

  “I just remembered,” she said on the end of a breath. “That night of the concert, when we were on the rapid…I remember there was some talk about Lucy having an appointment with the principal. I can’t remember…I don’t know who mentioned it or if Lucy said it was true or not, but if it was…”

  Interesting and more interesting!

  “Did she say what she was going to see the principal about?”

  Thinking hard, Ella squeezed her eyes shut. “She didn’t. I’m sure of it. But I remember everyone seemed surprised.”

  “So she didn’t confide in anyone?”

  “Well, she certainly didn’t tell me about the appointment. If there was really an appointment. In fact…” She thought some more. “Everyone was surprised to hear about it except Will. Apparently, Lucy mentioned it to him. But then, that wasn’t anything new. Will was one of those guys the other kids confided in, a natural-born psychologist. From what I’d heard, any student brave enough to to see our principal needed some sort of therapy! Mr. Wannamaker didn’t believe in being friends with his students. He was tough and he was strict. Not the sort of person you’d just stop in on to chat. If she really did make that appointment . . .” Ella sighed. “Lucy must have had a very good reason to want to talk to him.”

  “And do you think it might have had something to do with this Monroe character?”

  She shook her head and my hopes plummeted. “Even if it did, the police investigated Mr. Monroe thoroughly after Lucy disappeared. I mean, everyone was talking about how he’d been let go from his last job. That was no secret. The police heard the stories, and of course, they checked out Mr. Monroe. Even after school started that fall, I remember seeing cops in the hall, and once, I saw them talking to Mr. Monroe. They apparently never really thought it was him, though. Or they never found a way to connect him to Lucy. Otherwise, I don’t think they would have dropped it. Especially since Lucy took that summer school poetry class with Mr. Monroe.”

  This, too, was news, and I perked up, but apparently Ella didn’t notice since she was busy poking and stabbing. I urged her on with a hopeful, “And…”

  “Oh, the summer school class?” Like it was no big deal (and for all I knew, it wasn’t), Ella shrugged. “That’s the class Lucy got an F in and we thought sh
e wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Beatles concert, but her parents let her go, anyway.” Her smile was bittersweet. “Fate is a funny thing, isn’t it? Lucy almost didn’t get to go to the concert. But she did go. And she had such a wonderful time! She even kissed Paul McCartney. And if she did die…I mean, I’m saying this theoretically, not because I believe it or anything…but if she did die that night, then the concert was her last happy memory.” She sighed and got back to work.

  And I got what looked an awful lot like an insight into why Lucy was stuck on that rapid. Her last happy memory, of course. Better she should be stuck there than in the horror of what happened after she got off the train.

  I actually might have gotten all melancholy if Ella hadn’t started talking again. “Then,” she said, “when Lucy and I were on the train and she said that thing about how she had a secret boyfriend and a broken heart—”

  “Whoa!” I put a hand on her arm to stop her. “You never told me that Lucy said anything about a secret boyfriend.”

  “Didn’t I?” Ella is a lousy liar. When she tried to play it cool, I called her on it with a no-nonsense look. She was probably a lousy poker player, too, because she caved in an instant. “She told me in confidence. And I did tell the police about it when they questioned me. I mean, I didn’t think the confidence extended that far. They obviously never thought anything of it.”

  “And you don’t think it had anything to do with her disappearance?”

  “It couldn’t have.” Ella was sure of herself. “Lucy told me they’d already broken up, so if it was over between them—”

  “Then her boyfriend might have been plenty pissed.”

  “No, no.” She dismissed the idea with a shake of her head. “Lucy was the one with the broken heart. That means he must have broke up with her.”

  “And she never said who it was?”

  There was a paper lying on the ground and Ella stabbed and lifted it. “Not a word,” she said.

  “And do you think she might have been talking about Patrick Monroe?”

  Ella was about to make another stab, and she stopped mid-stride. “I never thought of that.”

  “And when he came back to Shaker to talk to your senior class?”

  She shrugged. “I never said a word to him. I mean, I wouldn’t have dared. By then, Patrick Monroe was as famous as Dylan.”

  My blank look said it all.

  “Bob Dylan,” Ella said. “Patrick Monroe was living in Greenwich Village and writing these incredible, soulful poems about love and loss and longing.”

  “Longing for high school girls, you think?”

  She twitched her shoulders. “Like I said, I always wondered if he had anything to do with Lucy’s disappearance. Especially since I saw him talking to Lucy at the Beatles concert.”

  OK, that did it! I flung my trash bag on the ground and faced Ella down, my hands on my hips. I would have been more imposing in my suede pumps, but the green boots would have to do. “A little something else you might have mentioned?”

  She wasn’t as cowed as I expected. In fact, even in the face of my righteous indignation—and it was plenty righteous—Ella had the nerve to smile.

  “Pepper!” She wagged a finger in my direction. “You’re not just looking into Lucy’s disappearance to help me out with Ariel. Now that you know Lucy’s story, you’re hooked. You’re going to use your talent for figuring out mysteries and you’re going to find out what really happened to her.”

  There was no use denying it. Especially since I wanted to hear about the concert. Right after I admitted my interest in Lucy had taken a very detective-like turn, I asked, “Monroe was there?”

  “Oh, well, so were thousands of other people.”

  “But you saw him talking to Lucy?”

  Ella nodded. “We went up to the ladies’ room during intermission and I thought I got done first so I stepped into the hallway to wait for Lucy. Then I realized she was already out of the restroom. She was standing over near a refreshment stand, talking to Mr. Monroe.”

  “About her appointment with the principal?”

  Ella shrugged.

  “About that F in her poetry class?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Did they look really friendly?”

  “I told the police all this,” Ella said. “If they thought there was something between them—”

  “So they did look friendly?”

  “He had his hand on her arm.”

  “And she?”

  There was nothing like loyalty that stood the test of time. Ella glanced away. “She didn’t look like she wasn’t enjoying it,” she mumbled. “But really, Pepper, if something was going on between Lucy and Mr. Monroe, she would have told me. We were best friends. We were sisters. I thought he might have had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance, that she might have run away with him or something. But that was just me being young and stupidly romantic. By the time Mr. Monroe came back for that assembly my senior year, I figured he couldn’t have been involved. For one thing, Lucy wasn’t cruel, she wouldn’t have let her parents suffer that long if she could have told them she was OK. For another, if Mr. Monroe had anything to do with it, the cops would have found something out by then. And Mr. Monroe wouldn’t have had the nerve to come back to Shaker. Not if he was responsible for Lucy…you know…going away.”

  Ella was probably right. I had no doubt the cops had done all they could to look into Lucy’s vanishing, just like I had no doubt that it would take a guy who was either really twisted or really dumb to show up as guest of honor at the school his victim attended.

  But then, who ever said killers were smart?

  6

  In terms of my investigation, the logical thing to do was to talk to Lucy about Patrick Monroe and that appointment she had with the principal.

  I would have done it, too, except that over the next few days, things got a little out of hand. For one thing, I was so whooped from dragging myself around the cemetery carrying that disgusting trash bag, I didn’t have the energy to get to the rapid, much less ride it. For another, when I finally regained my strength (thanks to a long bubble bath, a facial, and a well-deserved visit to Olga, a wizard with a file and a bottle of nail polish), and gave up my lunch hour on Friday in the name of my investigation, it was something of an effort in futility. I drove over to the rapid station and I was all set to hop on the train and question Lucy when I remembered the whole exact-change scenario, which, come to think of it, doesn’t make any sense at all and really is nothing but a big ol’ inconvenience.

  Long story short, all I could do was stand there on the platform like some lost soul and watch the train whizz by. That, and wave to Lucy, who—speaking of lost souls—was sitting on the train with her nose pressed to the window, waving back.

  And then there was the brawl, of course. The one in the biker bar.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  After my wasted trip to the rapid station, I wasn’t in the best of moods when I got back to the office. Finding Ariel sitting behind my desk didn’t help.

  “It’s too early for you to be out of school.” I dropped my Juicy Couture purse into my bottom desk drawer and stepped back, the better to allow her enough room to get her skinny little butt out of my chair.

  “Early dismissal. Parent-teacher conferences.”

  I pitied the child for thinking I was that naive. That was right about the same time I gave her a probing look. “On a Friday afternoon?”

  Oh, she was good. She never batted an eyelash. And believe me, I would have seen it if she had. She wasn’t wearing her clunky dark glasses.

  The silver stud was missing from her lip, too.

  Surprised (not to mention grateful and not repulsed), I guess I must have smiled.

  My mistake. She took it as a sign of weakness.

  “You might not believe there are conferences this afternoon, but my mother does.”

  “If your mother actually believed there were pare
nt-teacher conferences today, she’d be first in line to sign up.”

  Ariel grinned. “She went on Wednesday night. She thinks today’s conferences are for the stay-at-home mothers.”

  Like this made sense, I nodded. But was I about to give up? Not a chance!

  Since it didn’t look like Ariel was going to move, I strolled around to the front of my desk. “Wow,” I said, as casual as can be, “if I’d fooled my mom like that, I wouldn’t be here at boring Garden View. I would have used the extra time to hang with Gonzalo.”

  “Gonzalo. Hmph!” Matchstick arms folded over flat chest, Ariel glared. The entire performance would have been more convincing if I hadn’t used the same sort of posturing myself a time or two when I was trying to prove how much I didn’t care about Quinn. Of course, Ariel’s quivering bottom lip was a giveaway, too.

  I dropped into my guest chair. “Fight, huh?”

  “He’s unreasonable.”

  “All men are.”

  “He’s self-centered.”

  “Goes with the territory.”

  “He writes these incredibly intense poems . . .” She sighed in a very fifteen-year-old-girl way. “You know, poems full of pain and anguish, poems about this bleak, hopeless thing called life. And then…” She gritted her teeth. “And then I saw him over at Starbucks drinking a Caramel Frappuccino. How ordinary!”

  I was about to point out that the boy’s taste in drinks probably didn’t really have any direct correlation to how miserable he found life, but Ariel didn’t give me the chance. Now that she’d opened up about Gonzalo’s middle-of-the-road tendencies, she was on a roll. She jumped out of the chair and threw her hands in the air. “With Tiffany Slater!”