The Bitterest Pill

Seven

Jesse wasn’t often surprised, but he was when he entered the art room. There was a teacher’s name listed, Clay Mckee. That wasn’t who he found there seated on the desktop, facing the class. The students were busily rendering the colorful bowl of waxed fruit on a table by the classroom window.

“Maryglenn, what are you doing here?” Jesse said in a whisper, tapping her lightly on the shoulder.

She lit up at the sight of him. Maryglenn was a local painter who lived in a loft above an old carriage-house-cum warehouse next to Gayle Pembroke’s art gallery. Maryglenn and Jesse had met a few months back during all the trouble with the white supremacist group that had tried to start a revolution in Paradise.

“Keep working,” she said to the class. “Remember, this isn’t about getting it right. It’s about getting it.” She turned back to Jesse. “Let’s take it into the hall.”

Maryglenn, dressed as she always was in a loose-fitting black T-shirt, black jeans, and running shoes, all rainbow-speckled in paint, led him through the door. When the door closed behind them, Maryglenn grabbed Jesse’s right hand. It was the most intimate thing that had ever passed between them.

“You’re here about the dead girl, Heather,” she said.

“I am, but that doesn’t explain—”

“—what I’m doing here. No, it doesn’t.” She let go of Jesse’s hand. “I’m a certified art teacher and I’ve been subbing for the last year. It’s a way for me to get some partial health benefits and I like working with the kids. There’s never enough funding for the creative parts of education. These days it’s worse than ever. All the money gets poured into math and sciences.” She caught herself. “Sorry, Jesse, I’ll get down off the soapbox now.”

“No problem. So you’re subbing today.”

“Actually, I’m not.” She smiled a crooked, disarming smile at him. “The regular art teacher, Mr. Mckee, took an unexpected medical leave of absence for the term and I was asked to take his spot.” She shrugged. “I figured, why not? The money is good and I get full benefits and—”

“—you like working with the kids.”

Her smile was in full force now. There had always been a low spark of attraction between them, though neither was the other’s type. Jesse was usually drawn to beautiful blondes like his ex-wife, Jenn, and his late fiancée, Diana. Women who were always conscious of their appearance. Maryglenn wasn’t like that at all. Besides her paint-splattered black uniform, she had let gray creep into her short-cut brown hair. She didn’t always wear makeup and didn’t spend much time at the gym. But she always seemed so comfortable with who and what she was that Jesse kind of liked it. There was no pretense about her. And for Maryglenn, an artist and onetime social activist, the idea of being attracted to a cop, even one as ruggedly handsome as Jesse, would normally have been an anathema. But there they were, smiling at each other.

“Did you know her, Heather Mackey?” Jesse asked, breaking the spell.

“A little, I guess. She had some talent for line drawing. Would you like to see her work?”

“Maybe later. What I need to know is did she display any outward signs of depression or... I don’t know.”

“I do. One thing that art class does is give kids a place to express themselves freely... well, as freely as they can in this setting.” She nodded at the classroom door. “I know it’s unlikely the next Basquiat or Weiwei is sitting in there. I just try to let them let go and express themselves without judging too harshly. They get enough of that in their other classes.”

“And.”

“Look, Jesse, I don’t really know these kids like a teacher who had seen them develop over a period of a few years, but, yes, Heather seemed... distracted and a little withdrawn. At least, that’s how she seemed to me. Yet she produced good work, so I’m not sure it means anything.”

“Did she have any close friends in class?”

Maryglenn thought about it before answering. “Megan Alford, Darby Cole, and Rich Amitrano.”

“Are they in that class now?”

She nodded at the door. “Those are sophomores, Jesse. Heather’s class doesn’t meet today, and my guess is they wouldn’t be in class today anyway.”

“You’re right.”

“I should get back in there.”

“Okay,” Jesse said. “Thank you.”

“I don’t know how much of a help I was.”

“You were honest.”

She looked perplexed. “What does that mean, ‘I was honest’?”

“I was a Robbery Homicide detective in L.A. for ten years. People are hesitant to speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead person is a pretty young girl. People don’t mean to hurt investigations. I know it’s not malicious. Anything but. Still, I can’t tell you how many times we were hindered in getting to what really happened. Sometimes, by the time the truth came out, it was too late. There was this one case I worked, a housewife, a very attractive former actress, rich husband, two kids. Her body was found in a shallow grave in the hills. She’d been raped, her body brutalized. But to hear it from her friends and family, she was a saint. No one is a saint, Maryglenn. After weeks of getting nowhere, her best friend came to us and told us that the victim had been working as a high-end escort two afternoons a week because the whole Suzy Homemaker thing was boring her to distraction. The case is still unsolved. If the friend had told us the truth to begin with, we might have caught the guy. When we asked the friend why she hadn’t come forward sooner, she said she didn’t want a woman she loved to be remembered as a whore.”

Maryglenn nodded in understanding. With her hand on the door, she turned back to Jesse. “I’m not very good at this... but can I buy you a drink sometime? I mean, we’ve been dancing around each other for months and I don’t enjoy this kind of dancing very much.”

“Not a drink. I don’t drink anymore.” He felt both silly and proud saying it.

That didn’t scare her off. “Dinner, then?”

“I’d like that.”

“What’s your phone number?”

He smiled. “Nine-one-one.”

“A wiseass, huh?”

He handed her one of his cards with his cell number on it. “If you hear anything else about Heather, anything at all, call me about that, too.”

After Maryglenn disappeared behind the classroom door, he stood in the hallway, remembering that long-ago case and how hesitant people were to speak ill of the dead.