Debra Angelo watched the morning news with a mixture of fascination, horror, and relief—fascination that frail, unbalanced Meg Davis might actually be a vicious killer, horror at the realization that all the time the woman had spent lurking near her house, Debra’s own family could have been targets, and relief that this high-profile arrest should take the heat off her.
And Maxi could have been killed! She’d been trying to get Maxi on the phone since she heard the news, but had only reached her answering machine.
Her lawyer, Marvin Samuels, had phoned earlier this morning. He and Debra were due at sheriff’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles at ten, but as soon as he’d learned about Meg Davis’s arrest, Samuels called Mike Cabello to challenge the detective’s reasons for questioning his client. He was told they would table the session, for now. When he was notified yesterday that they wanted Debra for questioning, he’d asked why they were calling his client in on the Carlotta Ricco murder. He reminded Cabello that Sheriff’s Homicide had managed to come up with nothing on Debra Angelo in the Jack Nathanson case, and that the county was courting a wrongful-arrest suit as it was, not to mention civil charges for destroying her livelihood. Cabello told him that whoever killed Carlotta Ricco had sailed right through the locked front door, so they would be talking to everyone who had keys to the Nathanson house, including cleaning help, gardeners, and other service people. Debra had a key, and she knew the Nathansons’ alarm code. She said it was in case she ever arrived there to drop Gia off before anyone in the household got home—rather than keep her daughter waiting outside on the doorstep, she could take her inside and sit with her.
Debra had told Samuels that the Nathansons’ key usually hung on a hook in her kitchen, near the garage door. When Bessie would drive Gia to her father’s house, she, too, always took that key with her. And, in fact, Jack had had a key and knew the alarm code to her house, too, for the same reason.
She jumped when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Daugherty, the principal at Gia’s school, sounding even more rigid than usual. It was necessary that she come to the school immediately and take Gia home, the woman told Debra in icy tones. Westview could no longer accommodate her daughter.
“Please, Mrs. Daugherty,” Debra tried, “this is the worst possible time for Gia to have more changes in her life. Tell me what happened, and I promise I’ll see that she does better.”
“It’s too late,” the woman responded. “Please come in immediately and pick up your child. She’s sitting outside my office, she’s crying, and she is not welcome back in class.”
Sensing she’d get nowhere on the phone, Debra told the woman that it was a forty-minute drive from her house to the school, and she would leave right away.
Now what? Debra thought, as she drove through Malibu canyon toward Westview Elementary. She could tell from Mrs. Daugherty’s tone that she would have to muster all of her powers of persuasion to turn this one around, but she was pretty sure she could pull it off. Again. Ridiculous as it seemed to her Italian mentality, movie stars were this country’s royalty, and she might as well take advantage of it.
Debra pulled into the parking lot. The school looked more like a country club, she considered, as her gaze traveled to the tennis courts, the Olympic-size swimming pool, the high-tech playground, the performing arts theater. She walked up the stairs and down the long corridor to a door marked PRINCIPAL, and went inside.
Gia was sitting on a bench against the wall of the outer office, head down, one pink sneaker on top of the other, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked very small in her regulation pleated plaid skirt and navy blazer, white shirt, and white socks. Debra sat down on the bench beside her.
“What happened, Gia?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tell me nothing, young lady,” Debra fumed. “Tell me exactly why I’ve been called here.” Gia started to cry again.
Mrs. Daugherty’s assistant appeared at the doorway and beckoned the two inside. The principal sat behind her desk, imperious in a severely tailored gray suit with a white ruffled blouse, her dyed black hair pulled up in a knot. She peered down at them through wire-rimmed glasses, and Debra had a palpable sense of how intimidated Gia must feel. “Please be seated,” Mrs. Daugherty said crisply, indicating the two chairs in front of her desk.
“Tell your mother,” she addressed Gia, “what you did to Susan Kostner in class this morning.”
Gia lowered her head. Debra looked from one to the other, waiting. I can’t make her talk, she thought dismally. Let’s see if this poker-faced harridan can.
“I hit her,” Gia said in a small voice.
“And would you tell your mother why you hit her, Miss Nathanson?” Mrs. Daugherty pressed.
“Because she said dirty things to me,” Gia whimpered.
“What dirty things?” Debra asked her daughter.
“I said I wanted to play with her at recess, and she said she wouldn’t play with me,” the girl responded weakly. Debra’s heart was breaking. Of course Susan Kostner didn’t want to play with her. Given Gia’s misanthropic behavior, she didn’t wonder that other children shunned her.
“And so you slapped her across the face!” Mrs. Daugherty snapped. She turned to Debra. “Parents entrust their children to us, to teach and to safeguard while they’re in our care. We can no longer expose them to unprovoked attacks by your daughter. At the very least, she puts us in danger of lawsuits,” the woman intoned. “Furthermore, she thrusts her classes into disarray, destroying the kind of climate in which teachers are able to teach and students are able to learn. We can no longer tolerate her behavior.”
Debra’s heart sank at the finality in her tone. She could not disagree. Everything the principal said made dreadful sense. “Please, Mrs. Daugherty,” she implored. “It’s so soon after Gia lost her father—all I ask is one more chance.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We’ve had complaints from other parents.” With that, she turned her attention to some papers on her desk. Debra was dismissed. The doyenne kept her stolid gaze riveted on her paperwork. Debra straightened, scooped up Gia’s hand, turned, and slammed out the door with her daughter.
In anger and frustration, she propelled Gia toward the parking lot and ushered her into the Jeep. Mother and child drove through the long canyon to the beach without speaking. When they emerged at the coast, the sight of the rolling ocean waves and the briny smell of the salt air restored Debra’s spirits, as they always did. Looking over at Gia sitting silently, studying her own hands twisting in her lap, thoroughly ashamed, she knew it wasn’t her baby’s fault. Children are given to us as so much clay, she reflected, and this, sadly, is what she and Jack had molded. When Jack died, she’d committed herself to do whatever it took to repair the damage.
* * *
At home, Debra found a message from Maxi on her answering machine. She reached her at her house, and Maxi filled her in on the bloodcurdling events of the night before. And she told her about the tests that the police technicians had done on Yukon’s grisly gashes.
“Meg Davis has been released; they couldn’t hold her,” Maxi went on. “The investigators have put a gag order on the crime-lab information, but Detective Cabello told my boss the results off the record, and Pete told me off the record, to warn me—and now I’m warning you, Debra. The stab wounds that nearly killed my dog were made with the same weapon that killed Carlotta— Meg Davis’s Black Sabbat cross!”