Schooled in Death Read online

  Schooled in Death

  A Thea Kozak Mystery, Book Nine

  Kate Flora

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  Please Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright 2018 by Kate Flora. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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  Published by ePublishing Works!

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-947833-98-2

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Before You Go…

  Death Comes Knocking

  Purchase Death Comes Knocking

  Also by Kate Flora

  About the Author

  One

  It was Monday. Always the worst day of the week in the working world. So when my phone rang before I’d showered, brushed my teeth, or even opened my eyes, I knew I was about to be the recipient of bad news and a summons to someone else’s troubles.

  I was not wrong.

  “Is that Thea, then?” a man’s voice asked.

  Reluctantly, I agreed that it was.

  He didn’t need to give his name. His gentle Welsh lilt announced my caller was Gareth Wilson, headmaster of The Simmons School. Gareth was the most optimistic person I knew. Usually, just hearing his voice improved my mood. Today, his tones were shot with pain at the situation he found himself in, a situation he rapidly described. One of their young boarding students, a girl no one knew was pregnant, had given birth in her dorm bathroom during the night and left her baby in the trash. It was only because another student had heard the faint sounds of crying that the tiny infant had been found and saved. Now the baby was in a neonatal ICU and the terrified mother, only a child herself, was facing potential criminal charges.

  Gareth needed my help—or rather the help of my business, EDGE Consulting—to manage the situation on his campus and in the wider world. Immediately if not sooner. That was the problem with being a private school trouble-shooter—when people called me, their emergencies were usually already underway and they were rarely something I could handle over the phone. Today was no exception. Gareth needed me on campus now. He was two hours away in the crawl of morning traffic and my calendar was already full.

  “It’s complicated, Thea,” Gareth said. “The girl insists that she has never had sex, never mind been pregnant, and the baby can’t possibly be hers, even though she has obviously just given birth. And she seems, as much as one can judge under these circumstances, to be utterly sincere.”

  In the background, I could hear the soothing music of a Palestrina mass. Gareth definitely needed soothing.

  A million questions immediately presented themselves about the girl and her situation. Questions of drugs and date rape, or of mental illness, among others. But those would wait until Gareth and I were face to face.

  On the other side of the bed, my husband Andre gave up trying to sleep and grimaced at a clock that said five forty-five. He tossed off the covers and stood. Naked. Gorgeous. The outline of his little red Speedo the only untanned part of his body. A wonderful sight to start the day. It’s not just me, though I readily admit to being prejudiced in his favor. Perfect strangers of the female persuasion stare and sigh softly when he passes. He mouthed, “Shower. Join me?”

  I nodded as he headed for the bathroom, throwing off my own covers so I could cross to the desk and make some notes on what Gareth was saying. Damage control was my specialty. I was the girl in the white hat, the word-slinger who rode into town and made things right again. He needed me there as soon as possible. I would have to do some rearranging if I was going to be able to help.

  “She’s not been arrested, which is something,” Gareth said. “They took her to hospital and she’s now in our infirmary. But the investigation’s on-going, and the police are considering charges.”

  “What’s our girl’s name?”

  “Heidi,” he said. “Heidi Basham.”

  That name, Heidi, conjured up images of blond pigtails and the Swiss Alps and Grandfather feeding some goats. My mother had been a great fan of the book.

  “What year is she?”

  “Sophomore. But this is her first year at the school.”

  So yes, I thought, the girl is awfully young. “You’ve called her parents?”

  “Of course. And they’re on their way. Her mother and stepfather, at least. Flying into Boston from the West Coast,” he said. “It’s a divorce situation. The mother said she’d let the father know.”

  I wasn’t comfortable with his decision to let the mother control the notification, but discussing that could wait until I was showered, dressed, and on the road. I preferred to handle important details when my eyes were open and my brain was fully operating.

  As if he’d read my mind, he said, “We’ve tried to reach the father. This time and others. He’s…uh…difficult to reach. I gather he travels a lot.”

  The traveling parent. Another reason kids got sent to private school. No one at home had time for them. I felt a spike of sympathy for this girl, wondering if this pregnancy might have been a grab for attention that went horribly wrong.

  Anticipating my next question, he said, “And yes, I was on the phone to our lawyer as soon as ever it happened. Once he’d established that she hadn’t been arrested, I got a quick paragraph of instructions and a ‘call me back in the morning,’ which I took to mean at a more civilized hour. We’ll for sure get him in later this morning, but I’m expecting he’ll be telling me that the poor girl will need her own lawyer. I’ll get some suggestions from him so we’ll be prepared when her mother arrives. Obviously, Heidi being a minor, we’ll need mother’s consent for that.”

  The clock was ticking. I had calls to make to free up my day if I was going to drive to Simmons, so I said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can, Garet
h. I’ll call you from the road.”

  “I’m beyond relieved to know you’re coming,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m a bit thrown by all this.”

  “All this” had happened in the night, but the facts would soon spread across the campus. Boarding schools were like small towns. Everyone—students and faculty alike—lived in each other’s pockets and news and gossip traveled at the speed of light. Gareth was already reeling from the implications of the event for his school and anticipating the sorrow and confusion his students would feel over such shocking behavior by one of their own. Any headmaster would be struggling with this. Heidi’s unusual situation, and assessing her denial of the facts and getting at the truth, was a significant complication.

  The other complications were the kind that occurred whenever there was a crisis involving a student on a boarding school campus: managing the disclosure of information to the media, to the involved student’s parents, the student body, and their parents, in a manner least damaging to the school. Divorced parents made things even more difficult, as often the divorces were so bitter the parents couldn’t even be in the same room together, despite the fact that the matter concerned their child. Far too often, when EDGE came into these situations, part of our job ended up being to babysit, or verbally control, a set of warring parents. Also complicating things, of course, would be dealing with the police.

  Our business, EDGE Consulting, works with independent, meaning private, schools. We work with schools on their image, on “branding” their special niche in the education world and helping them to promote and protect those brands. Simmons’s brand was particularly vulnerable in this situation. It was a small, elite, non-denominational private school north of Boston with a reputation for educational excellence. Their special niche was nurturing a responsible, caring, community-oriented student body with particular attention to environmental science, social justice, and global awareness.

  The Simmons campus was so green and vegan it was practically a sin to wear leather shoes. Students worked in the greenhouses and campus gardens and helped run a day-care center for low-income children. They valued diversity of culture and opinion. It was a self-selected community of budding activists, humanistic citizens, and locovores. The last place on earth, in short, to have a pregnant student fly under the radar, never mind surreptitiously deliver a baby and abandon her newborn to almost certain death. The situation would have been bad anywhere, but the value the school placed on personal responsibility and open and honest communication made it a particularly bad place for someone to deny responsibility for endangering a vulnerable life.

  Mostly, EDGE worked on promoting positive images. Branding was the buzz word. Gareth had called me at such an uncivilized hour because of the importance of protecting an image. He needed immediate help with public relations and damage control. My job was shaping the message to the student body, parents, and public in a way least damaging to the school. Not that this situation would ever be all right, but the timing was terrible. Acceptance letters had recently gone out and prospective students were choosing their schools for next fall.

  In this case, the school’s unusual character would be a double-edged sword. Gareth would have better control of his students, and what they communicated, because they believed in discussion and consensus within the student body, and a more difficult job explaining to his students how one of their own had veered so far from the school’s core values.

  In most school populations, information control was difficult. Between cell phones and social media, students were so connected to the world that keeping the story under wraps was impossible. Still, Simmons was a community, with shared values, and a sense of responsibility to that community and the wider world. Students chose to go there because of that. It was a better place for shaping the message than most.

  I wanted to disconnect and get dressed so I could get on the road, but there were a few more issues we needed to discuss.

  I urged Gareth to email his students, explain the dilemma they faced, and ask them to hold off discussing it until the administration could explore the details of what had happened. His message should be that the situation was complicated, called for open minds and compassion, and that when he had the facts, he would bring them together as a student body to explore the implications. That was how they worked at Simmons. Community. Open communication. Respect for a diversity of opinions.

  As I stumbled across the cold floor to grab some clothes, I ached for the pain they would be feeling. For a student body who felt their values had been betrayed, and for the student whose situation—about which we knew so little—had led her to betray them.

  I knew how the world would judge them. I feared for how the parents would react, even though they’d chosen this special community for their children. But I hoped, a hope Gareth echoed, that within their community they could come to understand what had happened, offer forgiveness and support, and emerge stronger.

  We both knew he had other things to worry about: the impact on applicants for next year’s class, on skittish parents who might consider withdrawing their children, and damage to the school’s reputation as a close and caring community if something like this could happen under their noses. Schools acting in loco parentis were always vulnerable to the charge that they had failed.

  I was about to disconnect, but as I pulled out underwear and tights, I had another thought. “You said the girl denies that she was pregnant?”

  “She does.”

  “And her denial seems genuine?”

  “She wasn’t in the best of shape to answer questions, in the circumstances, but I’d say yes. She seemed credible.”

  These were critical issues—the age of the young mother, the events leading to the pregnancy, the mother’s mental state, the reaction of her family. It was all part of building the story, of translating Heidi from heartless monster to someone deserving of compassion. From someone indifferent to the welfare of an innocent baby to a desperate child herself, possibly even unaware of her pregnancy, with few options and impaired judgment. Perhaps a victim herself.

  I was not being a weasel. Truth mattered. But there were often many versions of the truth, depending on whose point of view you told the story from. There is a Rashomon element to most stories that involve more than one person. “So have you…or will you…get a good psychiatrist involved?”

  “We will. I agree that it’s essential. It’s not a good time of day to try and reach anyone.”

  An embarrassed silence as we both shared the thought that he hadn’t hesitated to reach me.

  “We have some good prospects in hand,” he said, “and as soon as the hour’s more civilized, we’ll be making those calls.” He hesitated again. “I’ll ring off now, Thea, and let you get ready. But do, please, call me when you’re under way.”

  He didn’t say, “And hurry!” but that was what he meant.

  I would hurry. Of course. But first, despite the urgency of my client’s situation, I needed a shower, and the world’s best inducement awaited me.

  I carried my clothes into the bathroom, pulled off my nightgown, and stepped into the shower.

  Two

  Less than half an hour later, I stumbled down the stairs and headed out into the cold, dark morning. I wore stretchy black pants that felt too tight and a loose black knit tunic. The combo seemed too informal for the work that lay ahead, but most of my clothes didn’t fit anymore. I had no time for shopping, and I wasn’t going to wear anything bright or colorful to deal with a crisis like this. I had tried to counter the informality with a hand-painted silk scarf in shades of gray, black, and navy. It helped a little.

  As I unlocked the car, I could hear birds twittering in the fat pine trees across the lawn. At least the birds were in a good mood. Me, not so much. I was still very tired. I need more sleep these days.

  I was getting better at taking care of myself. I used to throw myself headlong into everything. I used to go hours without eating while I focused on my work
and then ravenously devour food that was bad for me. Now I had Kind bars and almonds in my briefcase and carried a go-cup of coffee. I was clean, dressed, and utterly unenthusiastic about the task ahead.

  Don’t get me wrong—I love my work. I love helping clients out of difficult situations, bringing order out of chaos, and calming people who are thrown by campus mishaps of all sorts. I’ve been doing it for quite a while now and I’m good at my job. Given the number of times I’ve had to go up against recalcitrant, or downright dishonest headmasters, stubborn boards of trustees, careless or indifferent faculty, hostile families, and even armed bad guys, I have dubbed myself “Thea the Great and Terrible.” I’m a trouble-shooter. I am not someone to tangle with. I don’t back down from hard work and serious challenges.

  This case, though, presented a unique challenge. Pregnancy and babies are kind of a tender subject for me. Finally pregnant myself after a traumatic miscarriage, I worried that I might not be able to muster the detachment and compassion that Heidi Basham, Gareth, and Simmons would need to get through this. I’d briefly considered sending my partner, Suzanne, instead. But Suzanne was nursing an infant, and had temporarily stepped back from any work that involved travel. It would have been quite a picture, though—the mother of a newborn defending a mother who’d abandoned hers.