Killing Mr. Griffin (11 page)

night gone? It’s a dream, that’s all, one of those crazy dreams that seem so real and yet you know all the time down underneath that in a minute you’ll wake up. A moment ago it was six o’clock—we were eating dinner, Mother and Gram and I—and then I went out—and I stopped at Susan’s—and then—and then They reached the door to the outside. Now they were through it, walking together across the parking lot. Where was the car?

“Over there,” David said. “That’s it—over there.” It was the only car parked alone and unmoving amid the turmoil of flaring lights and sounding horns. Sue was still in it. He could see her profile outlined against the lights of the cars beyond. Her head was turned at a right angle with her eyes focused on the gym doors. Her chin was high. She was still not crying. Even before entering the car he could tell that by the lift of her chin.

They reached the car and opened the door and climbed in. Susan turned, her glance going past David, past Betsy.

“Where’s Mark?”

“Coming. He had to wait for Jeff.”

“You said you’d get him. Did you tell him?”

“Yes. He’ll be along in a minute.”

“Are you okay, Sue?” Betsy asked. “You’re not going to go to pieces or anything, are you? You look like you’re okay.”

“Here they come,” David said with relief. “That’s Jeff, see—over there against the lights? Mark must have dragged him out before he hit the showers.”

“Did you tell him?” Susan asked again.

“I said I did, didn’t I?” Her calm was frightening to him because it was so unnatural. He reached out for her and could not find her hand.

He wished suddenly

that he could throw himself across the seat that lay between them and put his arms around her and hold her and tell her to go ahead and cry and cry. Cry for herself, and for him too, for Mr. Griffin alone on the bank of the mountain stream, for all of them. Jeff and Mark were closer now, a tall figure and a shorter one, working their way across the lot. Eventually they reached the car, and Mark opened the front door on the far side. “Shove over,” he said. “Move over, Sue, I’m getting in beside you. Dave, you get this thing going. Jeff, get in back with Betsy.” “Where do you want to go?” David asked.

“Anywhere,” Mark said. “Give me a minute and I’ll think of a place.

Meanwhile, just drive. Get us out of here.” David started the engine and drove out of the lot and turned east on Montgomery. After they had gone a few miles Mark said, “Pull in there.” It was a lot behind a row of apartment buildings, and David steered the car carefully into it and drew to a stop behind a garbage bin. He turned off the key, and there was silence. For a moment no one spoke. Then Mark drew a long breath.

“Well,” he said, “it looks like your dream came true, Jeff, old boy. We ‘killed Mr. Griffin’ for real.” “We didn’t!” Jeff said. “We didn’t do anything to him. Nobody’s going to stick this on me! I hardly touched him!” “Nobody can stick it on any of us,” Mark said. “We’ve got our alibis. Dave was with his grandmother all afternoon watching

television. You and I were at Betsy’s.” “We’ve got that solid,”

Betsy said. “The woman next door phoned Mom tonight while we were eating dinner and complained about how we played records so loud we woke her kid up from his nap.” “And tonight most of us were at the game. People saw us there. The best thing now is to show up at the Snack-‘n-Soda as usual and then hit it for home.” “You mean—not-tell anybody?” Susan said in amazement. “Why should we do that?” “Why, because—because—there’s a man dead!” “Would he be any less dead if we told people?” “No, of course not. But you can’t just have somebody die and not report it.” “If we reported it, we’d have to tell about the kidnapping,” Jeff said. “Who’d believe us when we explained how we were just having a little fun? They’d check over his body, and there’d be bruises on him where he fell down, and maybe the ropes have made cuts on his arms and legs. Whatever happened to make him die, that would be blamed on us too, even though we didn’t have a darned thing to do with it. We could end up in jail.” “We’re minors,” Betsy reminded him. “Minors can’t be jailed, can they? Besides, my dad’s on the County Commission.” “Hold it, Bets,” Mark said. “We wouldn’t be considered minors now.” “What do you mean?” Betsy asked in bewilderment. “We’re all of us underage.” “If somebody’s killed during the commission of a felony, it’s first degree murder,” Mark said. “Kidnapping’s a felony. No matter what our ages, we’d be tried as adults.” “But—that’s not fair!” exclaimed Betsy. “Besides, it

Wasn’t a real kidnapping! It was a joke!”

“Who’s going to believe that?” Jeff asked. “We could spend the rest of our lives in jail! And talking about your dad, think what this would do to him. It would be all over the papers—“County Commissioner’s daughter indicted for murder.” Christ!” “And my mother.” David felt a wave of nausea hit his stomach. “There’s no way I could tell my mother.” “We have to tell!” Susan insisted. “We don’t have a choice! People will be looking for him! Mrs. Griffin will call the police, and Mr. Griffin won’t show up to teach tomorrow, and everybody will know he’s missing.” “Lots of people turn up missing,” Mark said. “It happens every day. Right, Dave?” David nodded. “They do. Men leave home. They go—just light out and go—and years go by, and nobody ever finds out where they went. Their wives go on all right. It’s tough, maybe, but they make out.” His own mother’s face rose up before him, the lines etched deep around the corners of the eyes and mouth. A “saint,” the Reverend Chandler had called her. She had liked that. Not every woman had the chance to become a saint. It was rough, of course, but was it really any worse than being a widow? “We’re clean as soon as we get rid of two things,”

Mark said, “the body and the car. Once those are gone there’s nothing left to worry about. We can’t do anything tonight, it’s too dark and too late. And we can’t cut school tomorrow. It’ll have to be tomorrow afternoon. Who can get hold of a shovel?” “I can,” Jeff said. “We’ve got one in the garage.” “What about an extra license plate?” Silence

followed the question. Then Jeff said, “Maybe Tony-” “No way,” Mark said firmly. “We’re not letting anybody else in on this. There are too many of us involved already. If we take the north road down from the mountains we can come into town via Coors Road. That should be pretty safe if we time it to hit the evening traffic. All those people who work in the Levi and Singer factories come home that way. We’ll be part of the swarm.” “And then what?” Betsy asked. “Once we get the car back to town, what do we do with it?” “We can park it at the airport. That lot’s always full, and cars get left there for months at a time. When they do find it, if they do, it will look like Griffin took a plane someplace.” “And—the body?” David forced out the question. “You’re planning for us to bury it?” “That’s simple enough.

Right where it is now is a perfect place. Nobody ever goes there, and the dirt will be soft because of the stream.” “No!” The word burst from Susan’s lips like a cry of pain. “We can’t do that, just take Mr.

Griffin and stick him in the ground! We can’t pretend it never happened, that we’re not responsible! We killed him, all five of us!

Somehow we killed him! I don’t know how, but if we hadn’t done what we did, he would still be alive this minute!” “You can’t know that,” Mark said reasonably. “I do know it! People don’t just fall down dead for no reason!” “And they don’t ‘just fall down dead’ from being tied up for a few hours.” “I don’t care what you say, we’ve got to tell

somebody! My father-” “Sue—sue—simmer down, baby.” Mark’s voice was

suddenly gentle. “I know how you feel. You and Dave were the ones who found him. That was rough, and that’s over now. You don’t have to go up there again. The rest of us will take care of everything. It’s going to be all right, baby, I promise.” “It can’t be all right!”

Susan cried miserably. “Mr. Griffin is dead!” “Did you stop to think he might be dead regardless?” Mark placed his hand under her chin, turning her face to his. “Look, sweetie, we didn’t do the guy in, and you know it. Dolly Luna got kidnapped by her students last semester, right? She didn’t fall dead on them. It’s a sick person who dies like that, without a reason. It could have happened anywhere—in his home, behind his desk at school, walking down the street—when your body quits on you, that’s it. Wouldn’t it have been worse if he had been behind the wheel of his car and plowed straight into a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus?” “If he had been at home his wife could have called a doctor,” Susan said. “My own dad was at home when he died,” Mark said softly. “It would have been better if he hadn’t been.

He was in his bed asleep, and the house burned down.” “Oh, Mark!” She regarded him with horror. “How awful!” “Darned right, it was awful.

The point is, when it’s your time to go, you go. You can’t keep saying ‘if this’ and ‘if that’; it doesn’t change anything. You can’t go back and change anything, you’ve just got to keep on living. Wrecking our own lives wouldn’t bring Mr. G. back, now would it? It wouldn’t help at all. It would just destroy us and the people who love us.” “My

parents couldn’t bear it,” Susan said. “Nothing like this ever happens to people like my parents. They’re so nice and normal. They just think about things like cooking and property taxes.”

“They don’t have to know. Nobody does. It’s all right, Sue.” He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her over against him. “It’s all right, Sue-Susie—it’s all right, baby. Just trust old Mark, okay?

It’s all going to be all right.”

The tears came at last with the suddenness of a dam bursting, one gigantic sob that seemed to shake the car, and then the wild, heavy weeping. Mark’s other arm came around her, and he held her through the storm, his face still and impassive, the heavy-lidded eyes half-closed, staring out through the front car window into the darkness beyond.

He held her that way for a long time.

When the weeping slowed, he turned to David. “Do you have a handkerchief?”

David did, in his back pants pocket. He dug it out and handed it to Susan, who took off her glasses and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Let’s head for the Snack-‘n-Soda,” Mark said to David. “We’ll hang around there just long enough to have a Coke so people will see us.

Then we’ll go home.”

“Is he gone already?” Irv Kinney asked. His wife Jeanne glanced up from her coffee and nodded a pin-curled head. “Jeff came by for him earlier than usual this morning. He was honking the car horn out there at seven-thirty, and Mark was out the door before I could even ask him if he’ll be here for dinner.” “Why should he be here for dinner?” Irv asked her, getting a bowl out of the cabinet and opening the top of the new box of breakfast cereal. “Sometimes I wonder if the kid lives here at all. Days go by and I never see him. He sleeps in till his friend blows the horn for him in the mornings, and he doesn’t come home at night till after we’re in bed. Where does he eat, anyway?” “I think he picks up hamburgers,” Jeanne said. “You know how kids are.” “I know how our kids were, and it wasn’t like that. We had our ups and downs with them, sure, but they sat down at the dinner table with us

like they belonged to the family, and we saw enough of them evenings and weekends to remember what they looked like from one month to the next. Mark’s been living with us four years now, and I swear, I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation.”

“Our kids were real outgoing. Everybody’s not the same.”

“That’s for sure.” Irv carried the cereal bowl over to the table and sat down with it. He reached for the milk carton. “Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing, taking him in like that. We raised our family once, and starting all over again at our ages—what made us think we could do it?”

“We didn’t have much choice, did we, with your brother Pete dead and Eva with a nervous breakdown? Mark was only thirteen. He’s your nephew. Who else would have taken him?”

“That’s it, of course. There wasn’t anybody but us. I kept thinking Eva would come around after the shock was over. Still, if we’d said no, the courts would have had to come up with something for him, a foster home, maybe, with people there who were used to handling weird kids.”

“Mark’s not weird,” Jeanne said. “You keep comparing him to our kids, and you just can’t do that and be fair about it. He’s gone through things they never had to go through. Imagine, seeing his own house burn down with his father inside it, and then having his mother crack up and turn on him like that and say she never wanted to see him again—why, that’s enough to make any boy—different.”

“Weird—‘different’—what does it matter what word you use? What it boils down to is that the kid gives me the creeps. I say that, even if he is my brother’s boy. I’ve tried to reach him, Jeanne. You know

that. You remember how I stuck up for him after he got in that trouble at school? I went in with him and stood behind him and tried to get them to give him another chance in another English class.” “He appreciated that, Irv.” “Did he? I never could tell. Why did he do that anyway, crib on that paper? He’s smart enough. He didn’t need to do that.” “Maybe his girl friend put him up to it. She was older than he was. Young boys can be influenced a lot by girls like that.”

“Where does he go nights, that’s what I want to know. You ask him, and he says, “Nowhere much.” Now, what kind of answer is that—‘nowhere much’? Last night I heard the front door open and close around eleven-thirty. That’s the earliest he’s come in all month. You don’t think he’s into drugs or something, do you, Jeanne?” “I don’t know any better than you do,” his wife said. “If he is, there’s nothing we can do about it, so what’s the sense agonizing? He’s almost eighteen.

He’ll be graduating in another month or so. There’ll be enough left from his father’s insurance so he can make out until he gets his feet on the ground. You and I will always know we did the right thing.” “I guess you’re right,” Irv said with a sigh. “I just have this feeling—” He let the sentence fall away, incomplete. “I wonder if he’ll keep in touch with us after he leaves.” “Probably not,” Jeanne said, taking a sip of coffee. “You’re not eating much this morning,”