“That’s Nancy Quayde over at the high school,” he said, pointing to the receiver. “She sounds really upset. She says we can come right out and talk to her if we want to.”
“Good,” Gregor said, coming over. “What about the other one? Peggy Smith?”
“Peggy Kennedy these days. No such luck. She’s not at work today.” Kyle covered the receiver. “From what I’m gathering here, Nancy thinks Peggy got beat up last night. Peggy called in sick.”
“Does that mean she’ll be home?”
“Well, yeah,” Kyle said. “But I told you. I don’t like the idea of going over there when Stu is home and he’s always home, because he—”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Gregor said.
Kyle went back to the phone. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll be right over. You sound like hell … yeah, yeah … I know … I know … I’ve told him. We’ll be over right away. Hold on tight.” He put the receiver back in the cradle.
“So,” Kyle said, “you ready to go?”
2
The Hollman public schools—or a lot of them—were on the top of a hill in the Plumtrees section of town, cordoned off from the rest of the world by a low brick wall and a fancy stone gate with the words “Hollman Educational Park” embedded in one side of it. Above him, in the rain, the “educational park” rose up in a scattershot pattern of low brick buildings. The buildings all had metal letters on them that looked like brass, like the gate. The first one they came to said “Frank A. Berry Elementary School.” Hollman High School was three buildings up.
“What do you think?” Kyle asked.
“I think it looks like a women’s prison,” Gregor said.
Kyle laughed. “They built it our senior year. We didn’t actually get to go here. The town was really excited about this. Our leap into the twentieth century.”
“This is the twenty-first.”
“That was back in 1969. We don’t get around to things real fast up here. We’ll probably hit the twenty-first century in about 2088.” He pulled the car up to the curb in front of the largest building in the “park.”
“You want to make a run for the door?” Kyle said.
Gregor did want to make a run for the door. It was quite close—Kyle had parked right outside, in the fire lane. Gregor stepped out into the wet and bolted for the enormous plate-glass front of the lobby. Kyle was right behind him.
“You wonder what they’re thinking when they build places like this,” Kyle said. “It’s like living in a fishbowl. Literally. All glass.” He grabbed the possibly brass metal handle of the glass door and pulled it open for Gregor to go through. “Principal’s office to your right. There’s a sign.”
There was a sign. Gregor headed through it and found himself in a room very much like the room at the police station, a big space with a counter running across the end of it nearest the door, leaving a small area for people to wait until they could be spoken to. Unlike the area at the police station, though, this one contained more than a single receptionist. There had to be half a dozen secretaries, all working away at computers. Kyle came in and said, “Yo, Lisa. Where is she?”
A dark young woman rose from a desk at the back and came up to the counter. “Hello, Kyle. You must be Mr. Demarkian. She’s in her office. You don’t want to know.”
“We have an appointment,” Kyle said.
“I know you do. She told me. But it’s like I said, you don’t want to know. She’s been absolutely nuts all day, and I don’t mean her usual nuts. She’s been berserk. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Perhaps she’s upset about the death of, ah …” Gregor drew a blank. He kept thinking of the dead woman as “Chris.” He always seemed to think of all the women in Hollman by their first names, even if he hadn’t met them.
“She isn’t upset,” Lisa said as she opened the counter to let them through. “She’s furious. She’s having one of those full-scale attack things where she thinks she can storm the walls of Troy and bring it down single-handedly. Just a second and let me knock.”
Lisa knocked on a door at the very back of the big room. There was a sound from inside, and she opened the door and stuck her head in. “Kyle is here. With Mr. Demarkian.” There was another sound from inside the inner office, and Lisa stepped back to let them in. “I’ll get coffee,” she said, disappearing behind them.
Gregor let himself get ushered into an office that was small by federal standards, but probably huge by the standards of a small-town school system.