Stalking Death Read Free Page B

parents. We'd craft language reassuring them that their children weren't living in a place where students were stalked and terrorized. Tell them a careful investigation had found no evidence anything scary had taken place except in the overwrought imagination of a student. Our challenge was to make the school look good without making the student look bad.
    I hoped he had conducted the investigation properly and been sensitive and kind in handling his troubled student. I didn't want to get into this too deeply or have to spend a lot of time on campus establishing the facts. I was already too busy. Sometimes it happened. I'd arrive thinking there was one job to be done and find myself up to my ears in another.
    I left the winding Maine roads and set off across New Hampshire. St. Matthews was located in the heart of the state, in one of those picture-perfect New England towns with a green sporting the requisite Civil War memorial and a pristine white bandstand, surrounded, at this season, with vibrant orange mums. Facing the green were a few blocks of big white houses with rolling lawns and wide porches with wicker furniture and porch swings, punctuated by the rare and even more imposing brick house.
    I never entered such a town without a brief longing to live there. Small towns had a down side, though. Unless you worked like the dickens to keep your secrets, everyone knew your business. Private schools were like that, too, little inbred communities where people lived in each other's pockets and secrets were hoarded like gold, their keeping traded like favors.
    I flipped on my blinker and steered down something called Academy Lane, which, according to my directions, would bring me to Bishop Hall and the headmaster's office. Bishop Hall was one of those imposing white houses I'd been admiring. A discreet black and white sign identified the visitor parking, empty now in the darkness of a Sunday evening. I pulled into the space closest to the door and shut off the engine. Closest to the door out of habit. Despite the eye-glazing sound of it—consultant to independent schools—my work life has been anything but uneventful.
    But the night was pleasant and benign, the area well-lit, and I'd only come to talk about a letter. The only danger I could foresee was that Todd Chambers wouldn't like what I was about to tell him and that despite his good breeding, he might express that displeasure in a loud voice. Guys who like to yell are tiresome, but they don't scare me.
    I got out and walked briskly to the door, looking neither left nor right to see if there were bad guys in the bushes, firmly repressing the skin-prickling sensation that someone was watching.
    A woman waiting just inside the door popped out of her chair when I came in. "Ms. Kozak?" Her voice was throaty and slightly accented. I nodded. "If you would follow me?" She turned and glided down the dimly lit hall, assuming I would follow.
    She wore a flowing dress in a deep shade of purple, and was draped in a vast scarf in intricate swirls of purple, lilac and turquoise blue, caught at the shoulder with a rhinestone brooch. Her black hair was confined in an impeccable chignon. She was slight, no more than five feet tall, and elegant in the striking, bony way of some Frenchwomen. Next to her, I felt like a giant. She didn't look much like a secretary, even if Chambers had a secretary who would work on Sundays. She didn't introduce herself and I wondered who she was.
    She led me to an imposing door, nearly 8 feet high and painted a dramatic, shining black, stenciled, in gold letters, Headmaster's Office. She knocked and opened the door to a lovely room, long, high-ceilinged and well proportioned. The books on the shelves were old, with gold-embossed leather bindings. The four fine paintings had elaborate gold frames and small signs identifying the painters, like old paintings in museums. A dark cabinet held a magnificent set of Cantonware. It conveyed St. Matthews' tradition of