Claire and Present Danger Hardback - 2003

Excerpt

One

“Always thought it was kids who were reluctant to go back to school, not teachers.” Mackenzie sat on the side of the bed, tying the laces of his running shoes.

“Another popular myth shot to hell,” I muttered. “The big thrill was getting new notebooks, lunch boxes, and backpacks.”

“An’ I was too insensitive to think of buyin’ them for you. Guess I’m not a New Age kind of guy, after all.”

“I didn’t get so much as an unused gum eraser.”

“But you aren’t actually re-entering. You did that two days ago.”

He meant prep time. A duo of days designed to quash whatever optimism had built during summer. Days of listening to a lazy end-of-summer fly halfheartedly circling the room while Maurice Havermeyer, Philly Prep’s pathetic headmaster, droned along with them. The difference was this: The fly’s noises were interesting.

Our headmaster’s spiel was stale from the get-go with the same meaningless jargon-infested exhortations to be ever more creative, innovative, and effective. I fought to keep from putting my head on the desk and falling asleep, and wondered if I could peddle copies of his talks as cures for insomnia.

He reassured us he’d be there to offer all the help and resources he could, but he was careful to never define precisely where “there” might be. Maybe he didn’t have to. Anyone who’d worked with him knew it would be as far away as possible from the problem or question.

Two days of sprucing up classrooms, filing lesson plans with the office, checking bookroom stores against class lists, and creating colorful bulletin boards nobody except our own selves would appreciate. And all of it surrounded by the loud silence of a school without students, which was not, to my definition, a school at all.

But now, here we were. The real stuff. Back to school.

“Thought you loved teachin’,” Mackenzie said.

I do, although what love affair isn’t a roller-coaster ride? “It isn’t that,” I said, looking at a to-do list I’d prepared the night before. “It’s everything converging at once.” I felt stupid even saying that. It wasn’t as if anything came as a shock, and it wasn’t as if there were that many everythings. What was exceptional was how daunted I felt by my list of obligations.

I had to teach. No surprise.

I had a part-time job after school to help our personal homeland security, but I’d been working there along with Mackenzie all summer, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary, either.

Starting to push things over the edge, however, was an obligatory appearance at a ninetieth birthday party for a former neighbor. Given her advanced age, I couldn’t rationally beg off and promise to be at her next big bash, even though the only living creature to whom old Mrs. Russell had shown kindness was Macavity, my cat. Her house had served as his summer camp and spa, and it would have been more logical for him to attend the festivities, but I didn’t see how to swing that, either.

But to really make the day require at least forty hours, I had Beth. My event-planner of a sister was thrilled by my engagement, which she and my mother saw as a victory for their side, capitulation and unconditional surrender on mine. Beth was so delighted and relieved, she was doing her damnedest to absorb me into the world of wives before I was one. At the moment, this translated into attendance at a dinner she had orchestrated and produced, a fund-raiser for an abused-women’s shelter. “You’ll love these women. They’re the movers and shakers of the whole area,” she said. She wisely left off the “even if they are married,” although her point was that life went on after a wedding ceremony, and that I’d better set a date soon.

“Half my reason to be there,” she continued, “is to network. There are nonprofit consultants, foundation heads, and corporate executives.” People who could help build her business. Plus, it was all for a good cause and one I subscribe to—but dressing up and eating dinner as a way of helping the less fortunate has never made sense to me. Not being able to afford to go to such events is one of the few perks of living on a shoestring.

This time, I couldn’t use poverty as my excuse, because Beth had comped my ticket. Besides, she was doing me an enormous favor in a few days, and being cheering section, back-up, and support for her networking attempts was a form of prepayment for what I metaphorically owed her.

Before it even began, the day cost me hours deciding what I could wear that would see me through my four lives. I settled on an outfit that wasn’t great for any of them, a gray suit I’d had for years that I hoped was so unremarkable, it belonged nowhere and anywhere. The bed was piled high with my rejects.

And that’s why, at 7:30 a.m., instead of being exhilarated by a new school term, I was worn out.

“If it’s too much, skip Ozzie’s.” Mackenzie came over to where I was packing up my briefcase and kissed me in the center of my forehead.

“Ozzie’s not the problem.” I was moonlighting. Actually, both of us were moonlighting. After years of deliberation, Mackenzie had taken the plunge, leaving the police force so as to attack crime from a different perspective. He was now a Ph.D. candidate in criminology at Penn. Despite his partial fellowship, moonlighting was going to be necessary for at least the next four years.

Need I say that my mother’s hysterical delight in my engagement had been tempered by this switch in careers? “He had a good, steady job,” she said. “Why on earth . . .”

“This is what he’s wanted for a long time, and it’s fascinat- ing, Mom. He’ll study sociology and criminology and law and biology—it’s a great course. And then he can go into research, or teach, or—lots of things.”

“It takes so long!”

Translation: How could you marry a man with no income for the next how long?

Further translation: Your biological clock is going to strike midnight before you’ll be able to afford children.

“But Mom,” I said. “When he’s done, he’ll be a doctor. Your son-in-law, the doctor.”

“. . . . .”

Translation: A Ph.D. in a cockamamie field is not a doctor.

Nonetheless, she was not that far off track. Poor R Us, and when we did the math on paying the mortgage plus luxuries like food, it seemed a good idea to bring in whatever extra cash we could. Philly Prep did not pay its teachers a living wage, unless you were living in a pup tent in Fairmount Park.

That’s why Mackenzie had gotten his P.I. license and was working whatever hours he could manage out of the office of Ozzie Bright, retired cop and current private investigator, and I was working for C. K. Mackenzie. With him, I liked to say and think, but the truth was, for. I wasn’t licensed, and so was more or less his apprentice, and he, my supervisor, although I’m not fond of thinking in those terms. I like to consider us a partnership, not boss and employee, or pro and peon, which is closer to reality.

Over the course of the summer, C. K. let me try my wings at everything from interviewing witnesses and new clients to clerical chores like handling the nonstop flow of papers for discovery. The words private eye prompted images of shady gents in fedoras and platinum-blonde dames in teeter-totter high heels. Of cracking wise and trapping bad guys.

The job wasn’t exactly that. Mostly, I sat in front of a computer, or filed papers. Solo. Since our schedules seldom overlapped—I was at school while he was working, and at the office while he was in school—the “working together” part was as fictional as the fedoras, but we were definitely partners at trying to help our communal bottom line.

Besides, most of the time I enjoyed the work, and Ozzie Bright, as idiosyncratic a man as he was, was several flights of steps up from Maurice Havermeyer.

“A regular Nick and Nora, you two,” Ozzie had said when we entered his lair, and who could resist that idea, either? What’s better than having fun and being in love while simultaneously squelching crime? So what if N&N were stinking rich all the time and stinking drunk most of the time? And then there was their adorable dog.

On our side we had unpaid bills, sobriety, and an overstuffed dust mop of a cat.

And mostly unimaginative cases. Nick and Nora messed with big-time baddies. Our clients were mild, straightforward, and their crimes white-collar, when there were any crimes at all.

For example, finding a long-lost high school love didn’t, in our case, lead to revelations that she was a serial killer we could cleverly snare. Instead, when we found her, happy, bland, and the grandmother of five, the drama was that our client threatened not to pay because after thirty-seven years, she wasn’t the way he remembered her.

We’d done background searches on two prospective corporate hires, and only one turned out to have all the credentials he claimed. We’d done interviews for the defense of a man accused of sexual harassment and, to my surprise, it appeared that the case had no basis and he’d be acquitted. Mackenzie was getting a good reputation in the biz, but in truth, not quite with Nick and Nora pizzazz.

But on this particular Monday morning, neither the pressures of back to school, the duties of my part-time job, nor the pileup of unappetizing parties made my nerve ends twang. It was the other thing. “Plus, there’s . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought honestly. Instead, I said, “Too much.”

“I haven’t seen you like this before. You don’t seem . . .” He stopped midsentence and laughed out loud.

“What?”

“I know about posttraumatic shock—but pretraumatic shock? You’re so efficient, not wastin’ time waitin’ till the actual trauma happens.”

“I cannot imagine what you mean.” Lying again.

“There’s no trauma in store, Amanda. I can’t fathom why you’re so worried. If we were kids, askin’ their permission,” he said. “If there was some big objection anywhere to our gettin’ married—maybe I’d understand. We’re even spared worry over whether Daddy’s gonna disapprove and disinherit me, ’cause there never was a thing to inherit except my good looks and charm.”

In a few short days, I was going to meet Mackenzie’s parents for the first time. I’d spoken with them on the phone. We’d exchanged notes and birthday cards and Christmas gifts, and in every instance they sounded warm, welcoming, and delighted with the prospect of my joining their family. I couldn’t have identified or quantified what worried me about meeting them, but worried I was. I constantly felt as if I had overdosed on caffeine, my blood hoppity-skipping through my veins and my skull expanding and contracting as if I were pumping up a leaky basketball.

“It’s stage fright,” I muttered. “That’s a pretraumatic shock.” And as close to the feeling as I could get. Would my performance be adequate? Would I get flowers and curtain calls, or be splattered with rotten tomatoes?

Their impending arrival had stirred the muck of memory, so that I recalled fleeting anecdotes, funny stories told over glasses of wine a year or two ago—anything that had to do with my beloved and other women. Now, with painful clarity, I remembered being told about a girl in C. K.’s hometown who Gabrielle, a.k.a. Gabby, Mackenzie had believed the “perfect match” for her son despite said son’s total lack of interest. That part was not exceptional, but I’d heard about her because Gabby Mackenzie continued to tout the virtues of the girl back home even after her son and I were living together. C. K. thought it was funny. I might have at the time, too. Now I didn’t.

I remembered everything I was supposed to have long forgotten. Every casual aside made in the past years. Every response, however terse and reluctant, to every question I’d asked. Stories such as the one about the girl back home that had been told as a funny example of how silly his mother could be.

The original context no longer mattered. I’d sifted everything out until I was left with the facts, which I examined and analyzed with the zeal of a scientist.

Media reviews

“Claire and Present Danger is a delightful mystery and schoolteacher Amanda Pepper is a clever, engaging sleuth, facing the challenge of in-laws and outlaws and sharing wry observations about life inside and outside the classroom.”
—ROCHELLE KRICH