Family Honor

Chapter 4

Pauline Plum from Pinkett was everything the name promised. She was tall and slim and flutie with a prominent nose and the kind of clenched-molar WASP drawl that girls used to acquire at Smith and Mount Holyoke. She was wearing one of those hideous print prairie dresses that are equally attractive on girls, women, and cattle. She made a point to introduce herself as Miss Plum.

We talked in her office, on the first floor of the Pinkett School’s white clapboard main building, me in a maple captain’s chair with a small plaid cushion on it, Miss Plum sitting straight in her high-backed leather swivel, with her feet on the floor and her hands folded before her on the desktop.

“Millicent Patton is not a very industrious student,” she said.

“How so?”

“She is bright enough, at least she seems so. But she also seemed to lack any motivation.”

“Bad grades?”

“Yes, but more than that. She isn’t active in school affairs. She doesn’t play a sport. She is not on the yearbook staff, she has no extracurricular activities on her transcript.”

“She is not a resident,” I said.

“No, we are not a resident school.”

“Any special friends here?”

“Sadly, none that I know of.”

“No friends that she might have gone to visit without telling her parents?”

“None.”

“Could she have friends you don’t know about?” I said.

“Possibly,” Miss Plum said. “But I keep a close eye on my charges, and after you called I made it a point to refamiliarize myself with Millicent and her situation.”

“No boyfriends?”

“This is a girls’ school.”

“Doesn’t mean she might not have a boyfriend,” I said.

“We feel dating is better left to later years,” Miss Plum said. “We try to focus our girls on growing into accomplished young ladies.”

“And I’ll bet you do a hell of a job,” I said.

Miss Plum frowned. Accomplished young ladies did not speak that way.

“Our graduates usually continue their education at the best schools,” she said.

“Where do you suppose Millicent Patton is headed?”

“I fear that perhaps a public junior college would be her only option,” Miss Plum said.

“Eek,” I said.

“Did you go to college, Miss Randall?”

“Yes.”

I knew Miss Plum was dying to know where, but I was too perverse to tell her, and she was too well-bred to ask. I’d known a lot of Miss Plums, people who couldn’t form an opinion of you until they knew where you went to college, and what your father or husband did for a living, and where you grew up. I was sure in Miss Plum’s world that no accomplished young lady became a private eye.

“So what was wrong with Millicent Patton?” I said. “Why didn’t she fit in? Why is she the one that won’t go to a good school and has no friends and might end up, God forbid, in a public junior college?”

“As I say, she is unmotivated.”

“That’s not really an answer,” I said. “That is just another way of describing the problem.”

“What answer would you prefer, Miss Randall?”

“Why was she unmotivated?”

“I can’t say. I can tell you that the failure is not at Pinkett. We have tried every possible way to encourage her participation in the educational experience here.”

“Do you know her parents?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“And what do you think of them?” I said.

“I am not here to render an appraisal of Mr. and Mrs. Patton,” she said.

“Do you think her home environment has something to do with her lack of motivation?”

Miss Plum didn’t like this. No accomplished woman of any age running an exclusive girls’ school talked about the parents of her students, especially if they were rich and influential and might make a bequest. On the other hand, if there wasn’t a problem at home, then the finger of disapproval pointed back at Pinkett.

“Let me prime the pump here,” I said. “I’ve talked with Millicent’s parents. They seem very, ah, contrived. As if they were performing life rather than living it.”

Miss Plum didn’t say anything.

“They did not seem to get along very well with each other in my short visit.”

Miss Plum smiled a little uneasily.

“Millicent was gone for ten days before they took steps to find her.”

“Have they gone to the police?” Miss Plum said.

“No.”

“Wouldn’t that be the, ah, usual first step?”

“Yes.”

“Why did they hire you instead?”

“They mentioned something about discretion,” I said.

“Wealthy people often value that,” Miss Plum said.

“So do poor people,” I said. “But they can’t always afford it. What do you suppose they wanted me to be discreet about?”

“Why, I assume, Millicent’s disappearance.”

“Because it’s so shameful?”

“I don’t know. Miss Randall, these people are your employers.”

“Doesn’t exempt them,” I said. “This shouldn’t be adversarial, Miss Plum. You must want Millicent found.”

She was silent again, her head barely nodding, as she looked at her folded hands. Then she raised her eyes.

“I am,” she said, “a traditionalist in education. I believe in Latin, grammar, and decorum. I believe in math and repetition and discipline. I am not much taken with theories about self-worth and maladjustment.”

I nodded.

“But I believe two things about Millicent Patton. I believe that she has never been loved. And I believe that sometime this year something happened. Her grades and her behavior, never admirable, have declined precipitously in the last two marking periods.”

“You don’t know what that thing might have been?”

“No.”

“You think her parents don’t care about her?”

Pauline Plum took in as much air as she could and let it out slowly in a long sigh, and then fortified by the extra oxygen, she said, “That is correct.”

I nodded.

“We agree,” I said.

“But they have hired you to find her.”

“Decorum?” I said.

Miss Plum shook her head. She had already gone further than she wished.

“I really have a school to run, Ms. Randall.”

“Or maybe she ran away for a reason and they don’t want the reason known,” I said.

Miss Plum’s eyes widened with alarm. She was far too accomplished to discuss anything like that with a woman who, for all she knew, might have gone to a public junior college. She stood up.

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said.

I said I would and she showed me out.