The Bitterest Pill

Fifty-five

The kids were loading onto the buses in front of the school as Jesse drove up. This visit wasn’t meant as showtime for the students, so he parked around the back of the school in the teachers’ lot and went in through the side entrance. On the way up to Principal Wester’s office, he stopped at the art room. He needed to straighten things out with Maryglenn if they were going to salvage whatever it was they had.

Jesse looked through the door glass. Her back was to him. She seemed to be intently studying an array of line drawings taped to the wall. They were all of the same model — a boy dressed in his football team jacket, a pen or pencil dangling out of his mouth, a human skull in his right hand. Some of them were pretty good, but Jesse knew very little about art. He knocked and entered.

Maryglenn smiled in spite of herself.

“Some of them have talent,” she said.

“Talent only gets you so far. Lots of people have lots of talent.”

“Jesse Stone, philosopher.”

“No, Jesse Stone, former professional baseball player. Everyone I played with was the most talented baseball player in his town. Every one of them had been all-city, all-county, all-state. Not everyone makes it. Why is the kid holding a skull?”

“It’s from Shakespeare, a scene from Hamlet. Do you know it?”

“To be or not to be, but that’s about it. I know that it’s about a kid who can’t make up his mind.”

“Most of the kids are reading that play in their English classes, and Hamlet would have been around their ages. Maybe a little bit older. It’s a play about death, love, treachery, madness, and revenge. A lot about death. Teenagers are kind of obsessed with those things. What are you doing here, Jesse?”

“What I’m doing in your classroom is to ask you to dinner after my meeting tonight. I’d like to clear some things up.”

“I’d like that.”

“What I’m doing in the building is delivering bad news to Principal Wester. Chris Grimm has been murdered.”

Maryglenn bent over, grabbing her midsection as if she’d been kicked in the stomach.

“I can’t give you any details,” he said, “but it will be out soon enough. I better go give her the news.”

Freda was away from her desk, so Jesse walked to Virginia Wester’s door and knocked.

“Damn it, Freda, how many times do I have to tell you, you don’t have to knock when I’m in here alone?” Wester shouted.

Jesse opened the door, but Wester was looking down at papers on her desk.

“It’s me, Virginia, not Freda.”

Wester’s face went from annoyed to worried.

“Jesse, I’m sorry.”

“No need.”

“What is it?”

He gave her the details, the few that he had, about Chris Grimm’s murder.

“Oh my God!”

“It was pretty brutal, Virginia. I wanted to tell you myself so that you can inform the faculty and students. Have counselors here if you think you need them.”

“Thank you, Jesse. What’s going on? I know Paradise has had its share of crime. In this world, what place doesn’t? But this, to torture a boy to death, even if he was a drug dealer... I can’t fathom it.”

Jesse said, “Drugs equals money, lots of it. And money can make people justify anything. It starts with legal prescriptions and ends with a dead girl and a murdered boy.” He repeated the line about the war on drugs he’d read in a novel.

“Has the war on drugs really been going on for fifty years?” It was a rhetorical question. When Wester’s eyes refocused on Jesse, she said, “I can see by your expression you have more to say.”

“I have a confidential informant that claims one of your teachers is involved.”

“Involved? Involved in what, the drugs?”

Jesse nodded. “And, by extension, the murder.”

She pounded her fist on the desk. “Who? Who is it? I want to know.”

“I don’t know, Virginia. If I knew, they’d be in handcuffs. But I’ll be back over the next several days to interview them. We can do this the hard way or the—”

“No, Jesse. No court orders. You’ll have my full cooperation, the school board be damned. If they want my hide, they can have it. This has to stop. Now.”

Jesse shook her hand. “Thank you.”

He hadn’t told her exactly what Rich Amitrano had said about the teacher being a woman. For one thing, he wasn’t sure there wasn’t more than one teacher involved. For another, it was always good for the police to have a piece of information that the public wasn’t privy to.