It was Monday morning, and Jazz had just opened her desk and pulled out the grim painting she’d found hung outside Bernadette’s classroom on Friday when Sarah Carrington sashayed into the office. That day she was decked out in black pants, a black T-shirt, and a filmy kimono top in shades of pink and blue and an earthy green that matched the stripe of color in her blond hair. She plopped into Jazz’s guest chair and blew an errant curl out of her eyes.
“What do you think?” she asked Jazz.
“About…?”
“About how today is going to go, of course. Friday went too well. The girls were…” As if she could snatch the right word out of the air, Sarah fluttered her hands. “They were calm. Accepting. Almost as if they knew Bernadette was dead and it was no big deal.”
In an attempt to get rid of the chill that crawled along her skin, Jazz rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Don’t say that. They were stunned, that’s all. They were shocked. We all were.”
“And now they’ve had all weekend to think about it.”
“It’s going to be a long day.” Jazz said what they both were thinking. “There will be counselors available all week for the girls.” She darted a look at Sarah. “And for the teachers, too.”
Sarah didn’t miss the subtle inference. “How about for the staff?”
Jazz dropped into the chair behind her desk. “I don’t need counseling. I need answers.”
“You mean, who killed her?”
“And why. Maybe that’s what we all need. Maybe that’s the only way things will get back to normal around here. We can’t act like nothing happened. We can’t pretend life just goes on. That wouldn’t be fair. To the girls or to Bernadette.”
“Bernadette.” When Sarah shook her head, her pink beaded earrings swayed. “Doesn’t it figure she’d be the one to go and get herself killed here at school?” As if she expected Jazz to lecture her, she instantly added, “You know what I’m talking about, Jazz. She was…”
“Strange?”
If only Sarah knew!
Jazz tucked away the thought. This was not the time for gossip. And Sarah was certainly not the person to tell. Not about the mystery man who’d been visiting Bernadette here at school. And certainly not about the angels. Until Jazz knew more—and was certain of every bit of it—she’d keep her mouth shut. Sarah had a tendency to say too much to too many people about things she knew too little about. It didn’t make her any less lovable. It just meant Jazz knew she had to be careful.
“Speaking of strange…” Jazz handed the gloomy painting across the desk to Sarah. “Did you happen to see who painted that on Friday?”
Sarah took one look at the painting and let out a long, low whistle. “This I would have noticed,” she said. “Though I have to tell you, there were so many girls up in the art room, I couldn’t keep a close eye on them all. Besides…” Her mouth thinned, she slid the picture back in Jazz’s direction. “You don’t really need to ask, do you?”
“I was thinking.…” No, that wasn’t really true. Jazz wasn’t just thinking about the situation. She was hoping. Praying. She would have liked nothing better than to find out she was wrong. “I just want to make sure before I say anything. Was Maddie Parker up in the art room with the other girls?”
Sarah’s gaze flickered to the painting. “If I told you no—”
“I wouldn’t believe you.” Jazz ran her hands through her hair. “You know Maddie’s not going to be here next year. Well, not after summer school.”
“I heard.” Sarah pulled her gaze away from the grim painting. “Right about now, that’s sounding like a good thing, isn’t it?”
“They were close.” Jazz wasn’t sure that fully explained the Bernadette/Maddie relationship, but it was a start, and Eileen had said the truth, but not the whole truth. “Of course Maddie’s upset. It will be good for her to get away next year.”
“Sunny Honduras!” Sarah smiled. “A year abroad while her parents work at some clinic down there. Couldn’t come at a better time for Maddie. The sooner she’s away from here, the sooner she’ll forget Bernadette.”
“You know it’s not that easy.” Jazz shouldn’t have had to remind her. “Bernadette tutored her. Bernadette had a problem with dyslexia, too. I think that’s one of the things that brought them together. They both had challenges and it was kind of Bernadette to help Maddie. They were … friends.” Did that explain their relationship any more than saying they were close? Jazz didn’t think so, but maybe now it didn’t matter. “Maddie’s taking Spanish in summer school.”
“I’m glad it’s not art.” Sarah’s attempt at humor fell flat, and her shoulders rose and fell. She leaned forward and grabbed the painting. “Truth is, I can only tell you she was in my art room on Friday. I can’t tell you if she painted that picture. Or even how long she hung around. I had thirty girls in a space designed to hold twenty and I knew they were hurting so I let them mess with my iPod and play some music and I dug out the snacks I keep in my bottom desk drawer for emergencies.”
Above all else except for her children, Sarah loved the candies she got from a vegan-friendly chocolatier, and her stash was hidden and secret. “You shared your peanut butter cups?”
Sarah fluffed off the thought. “The girls needed a distraction. And to my way of thinking, chocolate and peanut butter cures just about anything.”
“Did it help them?”
“It hyped them up.” A smile flitted across Sarah’s face. “And hey, if it helped them forget, even for a little while, it was worth it.”
Jazz made a mental note to pick up more chocolates for Sarah at the same time Sarah said, “I couldn’t keep track of every one of the girls, what with them singing and washing brushes and digging out every jar of acrylic paint I had in the art cabinet. Early on I saw Maddie in the back of the room sitting by herself. But sitting by herself, that’s not unusual for Maddie, is it?”
It wasn’t. Maddie, a junior, was a quiet kid with a learning disability that made her self-conscious. She was middle-sized, with straight dark hair and a splotchy complexion, one of those girls Jazz knew would grow up to be a poised, confident adult—if only she could get through the awkward teenage years intact.
“Maddie and Della Robinson are pretty friendly, but I know Della’s mom came and picked her up early after word about Bernadette went out on Friday,” Jazz told Sarah. “Maddie probably didn’t know too many of the other girls who were in your room.”
“Probably,” Sarah conceded. “Or maybe Maddie didn’t want to sit with anyone who would see her drawing.” She reached for the painting and slipped it closer. She made a face. “She’s upset.”
“You think?”
Sarah laughed. “Well, at least give me credit for making a stab at a little psychology! Honest, Jazz”—with a sigh, she set down the picture—“I hate the thought of Maddie being in such a dark place.”
Jazz nodded. “I’ll talk to Maddie and strongly suggest counseling.”
She put the picture away. “I’m surprised I didn’t hear from you over the weekend,” she told Sarah. “I called.”
“And I should have returned your call.” Sarah’s cheeks flushed. “I was kind of busy.”
The blush, the smile, could only mean one thing. “Let me guess, Matt had the weekend off.” Matt Duffey was a firefighter like Jazz’s two brothers, and he’d been a friend of the Ramsey family forever. He and Sarah had just started dating, and Sarah was still feeling the first rush of love. That would explain why at the mention of Matt’s name, she practically melted into a puddle of mush.
“He’s so terrific.” Sarah might be closing in on middle age, but she giggled like a St. Catherine’s girl. “Honest to gosh, Jazz, I can’t even believe it myself. He’s so sweet and he’s so romantic. He cooked Saturday night. Can you even imagine it? The guy actually cooked dinner for me.”
For a woman who’d grown up with a dad who frequently offered to make dinner so he could use his family as guinea pigs for the recipes he’d make for his fellow firefighters, it came as no surprise to Jazz. But for Sarah, divorced, devoted to her job, and the mother of two young sons, Jazz could only think it must have been a luxury.
“What do the boys think of him?” Jazz wanted to know.
“They met Matt for the first time on Saturday. Before they went over to Loser’s.” Sarah’s face twisted the way it always did when she talked about her ex. “I think they were a little confused about seeing a man in the house. Lord knows, they shouldn’t be. Loser’s had a string of women in and out of his house since we split up. You’d think the boys would be used to it by now.”
“Except then it didn’t involve their mother.”
“They’ll be fine with the whole thing once they get used to Matt. They’d better!” She smoothed a hand over her kimono top. “I think it’s safe to say he’s going to be around for a long time.”
Jazz was glad. Or at least she would have liked to be. She loved Matt like another brother, but he did not have a good reputation when it came to women. He had a tendency to love ’em and leave ’em, and when it came to men Sarah tended to lose interest sooner rather than later. When what they had of a relationship fell apart—
With a twitch of her shoulders, Jazz set the thought aside. It wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t her responsibility.
“I’m thrilled everything’s going well,” she told Sarah, and didn’t add for the moment. “Now if we could figure out what went on around here when Bernadette died…” The thought dissolved on the end of her sigh.
“Where are you going to start?” Sarah wanted to know.
Jazz logged on to her computer and checked Maddie Parker’s schedule. “I think I’ll just pop up to the library,” she told Sarah, who slapped a hand over her heart, pretending to be astonished.
“You’re not actually going to read a book?”
Jazz grinned. “Not a chance!”
Still smiling, Jazz left the office and stepped into the hallway and dodged a couple sleepy-eyed teachers so she could make her way to the third floor. There, the chapel dominated one end of the building. The other was taken up by the school’s library.
“A hidden Cleveland treasure.”
That’s what Sarah called the library, but since Jazz hardly ever went up there, she couldn’t say if Sarah was right or wrong. She did know that when she pushed through the wooden swinging doors that led into the library and they swished shut behind her, she felt as if she was in a different world. The room smelled like knowledge and history, like plans and dreams.
Jazz was not the fanciful type, and she grinned at her own crazy runaway imagination and concentrated on what she was best at, what was real. The library was paneled in rich wood, just like Jazz’s office, but here one wall of the room was dominated by three stained-glass windows that had been in place since the building was a seminary. The center window featured the resurrected Christ, his robes blindingly white and his right hand raised in a blessing. The windows that flanked it showed Saint Theodosius on the right and Saint Sergius on the left (or was it the other way around? Jazz could never remember), with their bristling beards and in their priestly robes.
The morning light hit the window and color spilled over the floor at Jazz’s feet. Green and blue and red.
Like blood.
Her smile dissolved and she shook off the thought and the shivers that crawled along her spine and looked around, from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to the computers at stations throughout the room, the 3-D printers, cloud computing, virtual reality. The girls of St. Catherine’s had advantages students in other schools never dreamed of.
There was no sign of Maddie Parker and that was unusual. Three years earlier, Bernadette had convinced Maddie to volunteer at the library. She told the girl that reading the titles on the spines as she reshelved books would help with her dyslexia, and from what Jazz had heard from Maddie’s mom, Bernadette was right. Maddie’s disability wasn’t serious, but it was enough of an inconvenience to cause problems for Maddie when it came to getting her homework done and finishing tests on time. Since she’d started at the library, both test times and homework had improved, and Maddie never missed a morning of work.
Jazz grumbled under her breath. Maddie’s mother hadn’t called her in sick. She had to be around somewhere.
A choking cry took Jazz to the other side of the room. She followed the sound between two long rows of bookshelves. At the end of them, in a dark corner she found Maddie crumpled behind a book cart, her butt on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chin, the sleeves of her blue cotton blouse pulled down around shaking hands.
“Hey, Maddie.”
The girl’s head came up and she scrambled to her feet.
“You okay?” Jazz asked her.
Maddie scrubbed the cuffs of her blouse over her face. It got rid of the tears that glimmered on her cheeks, but it did nothing at all for her swollen eyes or a bottom lip that trembled.
“I’m … I’m…” Maddie sucked in a breath.
Jazz stepped back and motioned toward the nearest table. “If you want to sit and talk…”
Maddie’s voice bumped over a sob. “I … I’ve got work to do, Ms. Ramsey. I need to get these books back on the shelf.” She spun toward the book cart and grabbed up a handful of books, and she would have taken off down the nearest aisleway if Jazz didn’t step in front of her.
“It’s all right, Maddie,” she told the girl. “We all know you and Ms. Quinn were close. The news of what happened, of what we found upstairs on Friday, that must have hit you very hard.”
Maddie’s shoulders shot back. “Not really. I’m … I’m fine.”
Jazz dared a step nearer. “We’ve got counselors here all day and—”
Maddie sniffled. “Why would I need them?”
“Because you’re upset. We all are. Not just the students, but the teachers and the staff, too. We all feel bad about what happened to Ms. Quinn.”
“Bad? I don’t…” Maddie choked over a sob. “I don’t feel bad at all.” She lifted her chin and her voice was suddenly flint. “Why should I? Why should I?” She shoved past so fast, Jazz’s head snapped back, her feet tangled, and she banged into the nearest bookshelf. Before she could right herself, Maddie was running down the aisleway, heading for the door. Her voice echoed back at Jazz from the high ceiling.
“Why would I care? I hated Bernadette Quinn! I’m glad she’s dead!”
Jazz knew going after Maddie would upset her even more. On the way back to her office, she talked to Maddie’s homeroom teacher and to Jessica Shore, St. Catherine’s guidance counselor. Their concern and advice would mean more to Maddie than Jazz’s ever could and she left Maddie in their hands.
If only it was so easy to get rid of the questions that pounded through her after the encounter.
“Maddie and Bernadette were close,” she said when Eileen arrived for the day and she finished telling her what happened in the library. “You know.”
“Only too well.” Eileen poured a cup of coffee from the machine in Jazz’s office. “I hope to God there wasn’t more going on than we were aware of.”
Jazz had thought the same thing. She just wasn’t brave enough to put it into words. “Maddie never complained about anything inappropriate.”
“No, and none of the digging we did at the time uncovered anything. Still…” Coffee in hand, Eileen hurried into her office. “I’ll make sure Jessica has a long talk with Maddie.”
Jazz took the dark painting out of her desk and gave it to Eileen. “She might want to mention this.”
Eileen studied the picture. “We’ll get Maddie’s parents involved, too. They’re good people and they love her to the moon and back. They’ll want to know what’s going on.” Eileen added, “I’ll call them.”
For the next couple of hours, Jazz kept busy with morning announcements, the details of the day, and putting the final touches on the next day’s church service in Bernadette’s honor. By the time she was done with that—and the three cups of coffee that fueled her while she worked—it was lunch hour. She knew exactly how she’d spend it.
Jazz hurried to the cafeteria, the better to be there when the girls started to arrive. She wasn’t surprised when Cammi Markham breezed into the cafeteria ahead of the crowd. Now a junior, Cammie knew her way around the school, its rules, and its invisible power structure. There were girls who were more popular than Cammi. There were plenty who were brighter and more talented.
But not many of them had as much chutzpah.
Unfortunately, Cammi didn’t always know how to use it wisely.
Jazz stepped back, waiting patiently until Cammie found where she wanted to sit, looped her purse over the back of her chair to mark it as saved, and went up to the serving counter for chicken stir-fry. When Juliette Briggs joined Cammie with the identical lunch, Jazz made her move.
“Hello, ladies.” She slipped into the chair across from the girls and was gratified when Cammi winced. “I didn’t want to pull you away from your classes. This is perfect. We’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
The girls exchanged looks. Juliette, a tiny girl with short blond hair and big blue eyes, was the weaker link and Jazz knew it. While Cammi dug into her stir-fry, Juliette fumbled with her silverware.
“I was just thinking about the good old days,” Jazz told them. “You remember Titus the cat.”
Juliette gulped.
Cammi had long dark hair streaked with gold and she tossed it over her shoulder. “Let me guess, because of the stupid cat, you think we killed Ms. Quinn?”
“Did you?” Jazz wanted to know, and even Cammi was shocked by her nerve. She choked, coughed, washed away her surprise with a drink of water.
By the time she collected herself, the bored look she wore like a second skin was back in place on Cammie’s face. “Why would we do that?”
Jazz shrugged, the better to make it look like she really didn’t know and maybe she didn’t care, either. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” she admitted. “And I was thinking about how the two of you—”
“And Taryn,” Juliette reminded her. “Taryn Campbell—”
“Juliette!” Cammi elbowed her friend in the ribs to get her to shut up, and when she did Cammi turned a smile on Jazz. “Everybody liked Ms. Quinn’s classes, but nobody liked her,” she said. “It wasn’t just the three of us. She dressed funny. I mean, all those long plaid skirts.” Cammie rolled her eyes. “She never wore makeup. I mean, come on! She wasn’t cool, not like you, Ms. Ramsey, or Ms. Carrington.” Jazz suspected she was supposed to be thrilled at the compliment, but instead, she just sat and listened, and waited for more. “Ms. Quinn, she told us she never listened to music. I mean, not music that anybody cared about. One day she said we could have music on in class while we read and we got all excited. Then she played something that sounded like angels singing. Really? And you know, she never watched TV, either. She told us that. Said it was a waste of time and we’d ruin our brains. She said the same thing about social media, too. And shit…” She waited a heartbeat for Jazz to criticize her language, and because it was exactly what Cammi was expecting her to do Jazz didn’t.
When she didn’t get the rise out of Jazz that she wanted, Cammi went right on, “We were just eighth graders back then. I’m pretty sure eighth graders couldn’t kill anybody.”
“Why not?” Jazz wondered, and realized that like it or not, it was a legitimate question. “If you dislike somebody enough—”
Juliette swallowed a mouthful of food. “We might have disliked her, but—” On a look from Cammi, her words dissolved.
“It’s not like we were ever really mean to her.” Cammi thought better of the statement and added, “I mean, except about the stupid cat.”
“But you got into plenty of trouble for that,” Jazz reminded them. All three girls had been suspended, had plenty of work to make up, and were required to do volunteer time at the Animal Protective League. “I know you blamed Ms. Quinn for it, and I imagine both your parents had their own way of letting you know how displeased they were.” She didn’t have to imagine very hard. At the time, she remembered how Cammi’s parents grounded her and Juliette’s took away internet privileges.
“To teach us a lesson.” Cammi had the nerve to pull back her shoulders and clutch her hands together on the table in front of her. “It worked. It made us change our ways.”
“It obviously didn’t work for Taryn,” Jazz pointed out, though she was sure she didn’t have to. Not long after the Titus incident, Taryn had been expelled for plagiarism.
“Taryn’s a loser,” Cammi said. “Maybe you should be talking to her.”
It was something Jazz had already thought of, but she didn’t bother to mention it. Instead, she opened the file folder she’d brought along with her and flipped it open. Automatically, both girls leaned forward, eager to see what was in it.
“Your schedules from back then,” Jazz told them, and turned the folder so they could see she was telling the truth. “All three of you…” She glanced at Cammi. “You and Juliette and Taryn, too, all three of you were in Drama Club that year.”
“Oh, that was so lame!” Cammi said. “We tried it out because we thought it would be fun, but honestly—”
“Honesty would be appreciated,” Jazz told them.
Cammi bit her lower lip. “Hanging around after school so we could help paint sets wasn’t exactly what we had in mind,” she said, and shrugged. “So after that, we didn’t join again.”
“But you did hang around after school.” Jazz leafed through the papers in the folder, checking dates. “At least until after Christmas break. It says here that after break, that’s when you dropped out of Drama Club.”
“Like I said…” Though she wasn’t done with her lunch, Cammi set her silverware across her dish, wadded up her napkin. “It wasn’t as much fun as we thought it would be.”
“That’s not what Ms. McGuinness said.” Mary McGuinness was the Drama Club moderator. “When I asked her, she said she’s pretty sure the three of you had no idea what goes on in Drama Club. That when she needed you to paint scenery or move props, you three were never around.”
“And what, you think that means we killed Ms. Quinn?”
Cammi’s look was as fiery as her question, but Jazz met it with perfect poise.
“Actually, I think it means you might not have been where you were supposed to have been the day she was killed. Did you stay late that day? Did you see anything?”
Cammi looked at Juliette. Juliette looked at the ceiling.
Cammie grabbed her tray and stood. “If you’re trying to prove we killed her, you’re way off base. You ought to talk to Taryn Campbell’s father. Don’t you remember Taryn’s last day here? Mr. Campbell, he was the one who threatened to kill Ms. Quinn.”