“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.”
Lola had been brought in for questioning and she hears other students will be, too.
“Anyway.” She lightly steers the conversation. “Our hope is that the fact that this fishing expedition they went on was a complete dead end will encourage the police to keep casting a wider net. Look around. Think of the broader reach of the school and people around.”
“How are the parents feeling, though? What are people saying? What do people think happened?”
She tries to suppress the small surge of dread she’s felt at every mention of Miss Ollie’s murder, of which there have been many, unavoidable instances over the last couple of weeks. She feels the impact once again flood her nervous system like two hair dryers plugged into an old electrical outlet, threatening to break her circuit.
The memory swims through the filter of the incredible pain she was in that day. The mere mention is enough to conjure a phantom version of it. She can feel the outline, the physical shape of it, throbbing right there in her right eye socket, drilling through to her brain. She wanted to hurl. The entire morning, through the awful psychologist appointment, in her car, every instant, she fought down vomiting.
What she most wanted to do that day was crawl into her bed or sink into a hot bath or do both simultaneously somehow. She thought: Can we please get this day over with already?
That was her intent. She went to school for the meeting, but then decided it would be better to pick Noelle up early and reschedule for a time she felt more like herself. Like today! Today would have been an excellent day for the meeting with Miss Ollie. Today, she could have looked Darby right in the eye and said, I’m sorry, I adore you as a friend, but the girls don’t get along anymore because Lola has issues, something you might want to have looked into. And then Mary Beth could have pulled out a few websites and phone numbers as resources to help Darby process the information and Miss Ollie would have been there to back her up and together, they could have gotten through to Darby before it was too late. But it was not today. She made her decision to pick up Noelle early and now she thanks God she did, for who knows what would have happened otherwise.
“What do people think happened?” she reflects, at the same time clocking a faint throb of pain that has begun pressing against the nerve behind her right eye. Oh no. She wants to believe it’s a phantom pain again. From the memory. However, it’s the stupid, little, nothing pain—not the agony of a cracked bone or the spasming strain of childbirth—that starts to break her heart. And doesn’t the very fact that the ghostly pain returns at the memory of that day lend credence to the doctors’ infuriating suggestion of anxiety? “Someone in the congregation, a vagrant even, staff, a friend who knew where she worked.” Her voice cracks. “Not a lot of great answers.”