Cutting Teeth(70)
“Paused isn’t stopped, though, right?” He toys with his chin.
“Of course not. I check the office regularly for any new slips. And, you know, a few of the parents thought it would be nice to earmark a portion of the money for Erin’s funeral expenses. We could give it to the family as a gift.” She doesn’t mention that “some of the parents” were just her, actually. “I need to deal with that paperwork, but—”
“How much do they want to earmark?”
“Oh. I don’t know exactly. A couple thousand dollars might be appropriate. I can get you hard numbers.” She grabs a pen and planner from her purse and makes a note.
He sits forward, elbows on knees, his shirt pulling tight across his broad shoulders. She remembers when Doug’s shirts used to do that. Now they just sort of bunch up around the love handles. Not that she’s complaining. Just noticing. A woman’s allowed to notice, isn’t she? Especially given—given that their 30-Day Challenge has hit the skids. There, she said it.
“I understand the school is going through a really difficult time,” he’s saying gently. “But I also find that’s one of the reasons we should pull together now more than ever. As a community.”
“As a community,” she echoes. Gosh, she loves that word. “Right. True. Give them an outlet, something positive in the future.” She mulls it over. “So, you’d like me to restart the efforts in earnest then?”
He considers. “I think that would be what Erin would have wanted.”
She makes another note and frowns at it. Her handwriting looks sloppy. “It might not be tomorrow,” she says, still staring at her shaky cursive. “But I’ll get the wheels moving. We’ve all had a lot on our plates.” She clicks her pen and, with a note of finality, snaps her planner shut. Gung-ho Mary Beth to the rescue. Just one more task to tick, but tick she shall.
“Of course, no problem. I’m curious actually. Tell me about that. Have those two officers—what were their names?”
“Detective Bright and Officer Princep,” Mary Beth recites, the set of her mouth wavering. Bright and Princep have both been recurring characters in her dreams the last several nights. Stress dreams. Like the ones she used to have in college when she would realize at the end of a semester that there was a class she’d forgotten to attend all year. Only now her stress dreams are these two police officers. They’re never doing anything. Sometimes she might show up to a dinner party and find them seated across the table from her. Or get coffee only to find one is her barista and yet also somehow still a cop. Always she knows on a subconscious level that it’s a dream, but she can never wake herself out of it and so she has slept fitfully, their presence haunting her.
“That’s right,” Ben says, as if the answer had been on the tip of his tongue. She doesn’t think it was. “Have they stayed out of your way since I had a word with them?” There’s a small puff of pride: Oh, you know how men get. However, the way he came in was gallant, she must admit. And he absolutely deserved credit for smoothing things over. She doesn’t know what might have happened otherwise. She could have been in handcuffs. Then she would not have had a nice Mary Beth morning with her nice girls in her nice house. It’s like everything is balancing precariously. She wants to do her Mom-Voice: Step back, just a smidge, please, you’re too close to the edge.
“Thank you.” She puts feeling into it and hopes he knows how much she means it, truly. “They’re very … persistent.” She rubs her palms over the skirt of her dress.
“There are good and bad types in every profession, unfortunately.” He shakes his head dolefully.
“I guess that’s true.” Though she wasn’t assuming that Bright or Princep were bad necessarily.
“And the—the stool sample—did they ever even, you know, bother to test that?”
Oh good, she loves when she can impart useful information. “They did,” she says with authority. Part of the reason for her improved disposition. “They compared the stool sample collected from Poodini—sorry, that’s just a name that some of the parents are calling the child in question, I actually started it, not that that’s important at all, but it’s a little funny, not funny ha-ha, but you do have to find the humor in these situations. So yes, they compared the cells or DNA or whatever they do in labs against all of the DNA and follicle samples and what have you found at the scene of the—” She always trips at this part. “—the murder, and there was no match.” She feigns wiping her brow. “So that’s one worry crossed off.”
“Interesting.” He rubs his fingers and thumb hard into the socket of his eyes. He looks like he has a lot on his plate himself. “So, sorry, I’m in the dark. What’s crossed off?”
“Well.” She lets her eyes drift to the ceiling as she puffs her cheeks. “I guess the logic is if the Poodini sample had been a match, then the police would have thought that there was a really good chance that—that one of the kids was involved. A child acting out one way might act out another and so on.”
“Except for those children’s footprints you mentioned. So they still must think one of the kids might have seen something, right?”
She feels the eleven between her eyes deepen. “I don’t know. I can’t even get my daughter to tell me who she played with at school, so if any of the kids saw anything, they haven’t bothered mentioning it.”