Ten
The day was over and I was heading for the parking lot when I ran into Trent in the hall.
“You got five?” he asked.
I followed him to his office. He had his suit jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, not a look he adopted very often but a sign that it had been as long a day for him as it had been for me.
“New watch?” I asked.
It had a blue face with white numbers and a brown leather band. I caught a glimpse of the name timex on the face. He glanced at it, rolled his eyes, and said, “Yeah, the battery on the last one died.”
Classic Trent. It was easier to buy a cheap new watch than take a dead one someplace to have a battery replaced. As long as I’d known him, I’d rarely seen him fix anything. He wasn’t mechanically minded and, more than that, he couldn’t be bothered. Toaster broken? Don’t try to determine what’s wrong with it. Pitch it and get a new one. Your stick vacuum won’t suck because it’s clogged? Replace it. It drove his wife, Melanie, crazy. “At least he hasn’t replaced me yet,” she’d said on more than one occasion.
He’d already told me about the available counseling services, so I didn’t know what this meeting was about. He asked Belinda to hold his calls for the next few minutes, then waved me to come around to his side of the desk. I stood at his shoulder as he dropped into this chair and opened a browser on his computer screen.
“Guessing you haven’t seen this,” he said.
“Seen what?”
“Noon news.”
He was on one of the local TV news sites. Trent clicked on an item.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh hell,” he said. Before he could show me the news item, we had to wait for one ad to finish, and another to start. As soon as he was allowed to skip the rest of the ad, he did so.
I saw a familiar face. It was one of the news reporters who’d been here Monday. She was standing on the street in front of a house I did not recognize.
“Whose house is—”
Trent raised a hand to quiet me.
The reporter said, “Angus and Fiona LeDrew buried their son yesterday, but their ordeal is far from over. Their boy, Mark, died tragically on Monday at Lodge High School, and his parents want to know why.”
“Boy?” I said.
“While they acknowledge Mark came to the school with an explosive device, which subsequently detonated, no one else was harmed. They believe Mark could have survived if greater care had been taken in dealing with the situation.”
Then Mark’s parents were on-screen, sitting in their living room, the mother dabbing at tears on her cheek, the husband’s head bowed as he spoke.
“We want to know what that teacher who talked to Mark said exactly, whether he told him the best thing to do was take his own life, to go ahead and blow himself up outside the school to save others. Why weren’t the police called? Why wasn’t there a bomb specialist there? Why aren’t teachers trained to deal with these kinds of situations?”
Back out front of the house, the reporter summed up: “The LeDrews have launched a multimillion-dollar suit against the teacher, Richard Boyle, the school’s administration, and the quarry where their son once worked, where it is believed he acquired the dynamite. This is Lorraine Wilders reporting.”
Trent stopped the video and swiveled around in his chair to look at me. A bird could have flown into my mouth.
“I know,” Trent said. “It’s nuts.”
“I got him to change his mind. He tripped on his goddamn bootlaces and let go of the button. They didn’t cover this shit when I went to teachers college.”
“That’s what you’ll tell them. The lawyers. Everyone. I’ve got a call into the board now. Maybe you sit down for an interview or something, for TV. Make people understand you deserve to have a school named after you, not get sued.”
I was numb.
Trent said, “They’ll try to make something out of the fact that no one else really saw or heard what happened. There’s a couple of cameras, one just above the door that looks out onto the schoolyard, and another at the other end of the hall that looks down toward the west entrance, but none of the surveillance footage really shows that very well, and they don’t pick up sound. They can’t prove their allegations.”
“You were around the corner. You were ready to take a shot. You must have heard something.”
Trent shrugged. “Not much, but it’s irrelevant. Trust me, this suit isn’t going anywhere. You’ve probably got a case of your own you could file against the LeDrews. You’ve got to live with that trauma for God knows how many years.”
“Why would they do this?”
“Well, money, first of all. And look, they’re probably blaming themselves. Not knowing how distressed he was. Not knowing he was making a bomb. They need to find someone else to lay this off on. Putting the blame on you, the school, the quarry, it takes some of the pressure off them.” He paused. “I know a little about him, the father. He wasn’t much of a presence in Mark’s life. Distant, uninvolved. Maybe this is his way of coping with the guilt over that. Going after everyone else.”
I had no more words. I turned and walked out of Trent’s office and left the building.
Once in the car, I texted Bonnie, asked her to call. But she had the same job Trent did, so she could be in a staff meeting or dealing with a parent or putting out some other kind of fire. There was always something.
I went straight home.
Depending on what after-school activities we might be involved in, Bonnie and I usually weren’t back at the house until around five. So when Rachel finished school, she went to Mrs. Tibaldi’s place one street over. Mrs. Tibaldi ran a home day care, so she had five kids through the day, then took on another four school-age children once school was out, supervising them until their parents came to fetch them.
It was only four, and I could have picked up Rachel early, but I needed time to think about this latest development.
I was getting out of the car when someone called to me.
“Mr. Boyle?”
I spun around. There was a young man standing there. Mid- to late twenties, I was guessing. Jeans and a sweatshirt, ball cap. As a teacher, you were always a minor celebrity in your own town. Former students spotting you, wanting to say hello after not seeing you for years. Maybe that’s what this was. Or just as likely it was someone who recognized me from the news and wanted to offer some words of congratulations or gratitude. If that was the case, he clearly hadn’t heard the latest.
“Yes?” I said.
“Mr. Boyle from Lodge High?”
I nodded.
“Remember me?” he asked.
A former student. Sometimes you knew who they were but just as often you couldn’t place them. Given this young man’s age, he’d probably graduated from Lodge within the last decade. I was struggling to recognize him.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” I said, smiling apologetically.
He smiled and said, “Billy Finster.”
I was rifling through a mental Rolodex, trying to place the name.
Finster. Finster. Finster.
The name registered, faintly. I didn’t think he’d been a student of mine, but you couldn’t remember all of them. Well, Bonnie could. She was amazing that way. Five hundred students in her school, and she could probably name four hundred and fifty of them. For me, it was a little harder.
“Right,” I said, nodding slowly. “I remember the name, but you’ve probably changed a lot since you graduated.” I grinned. “You’ve grown up.”
“I guess,” he said. “So you’re the big hero now. Saw it on the news.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been quite a week. Listen, it was nice—”
“I need to talk to you about something,” he said.
“Maybe another time,” I said, glancing at the house and then my watch to suggest I might have some pressing engagement. “But thanks for saying hello.”
“I really think you’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” he said. “It’s time to have a talk about what you did to me.”