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Temeke turned off Rio Grande into an avenue of cottonwoods, finding a parking space outside the school granary between a Ferrari and a tradesman’s van. He walked to the main entrance which exuded the sweet smell of honeysuckle and where a peacock sauntered over the peristyle roof of a small courtyard, train shimmering in blues and greens.
He could smell furniture polish as soon as he walked into the foyer of Los Poblanos Academy; the realm of the privileged. It reminded him of the dining table Serena’s father had given them for their wedding. It was gone now, along with the family he no longer saw and he dismissed the thick wave of gloominess as soon as he met the principal. Phoebe Baca, middle-aged with deep set eyes and a blast of perfume.
“Come in,” she said, holding out a hand and scrutinizing the badge he offered. “Miss Baca. You must be Detective Temakay.”
“Temeke,” he offered. “As in Entebbe.”
“It’s about Lily Delgado, isn’t it? Yes. I thought so. Coffee?”
“No thank you, ma’am.”
She pecked her way over hardwood floors in high heeled shoes, hair locked with some kind of industrial strength foam that even a high wind couldn’t shift.
“We’re dealing here with a girl who is missing, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She gave a half smile and led him into an unoccupied study and closed the door.
“Are males segregated from the females at night, ma’am?”
Miss Baca cast a glance in his direction and squeezed herself into a narrow chair. “The boys occupy Sisneros House, the girls are in Quartermaine. Classes are taken together.”
“Tell me about Lily?”
“Quiet girl. Rather introvert as I recall. She was one of the few resident students I had. The rest are usually overseas or out-of-state. When Alice committed suicide, Lily blamed herself. We all tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault and so did the police. Quite frankly, it didn’t help that her mother thought it was foul play. It wasn’t of course. Anyone could see it was a suicide.”
“Must have been bloody awkward finding her dead on your watch?”
“Awkward, detective? Hardly an appropriate word. It was frightening, actually. I expect you’ll want to see the bathroom.”
“If that’s not too much trouble, ma’am.”
He tried to piece together facts, analyzing different scenarios and formulating consequences, and he came to the not so startling conclusion that Miss Baca may have unwittingly left out a crucial piece.
“Do you smoke?” she asked, waving a hand in front of her nose.
“I do, ma’am.”
“You won’t be allowed to smoke in here.”
He wasn’t aware that cigarettes caused such a stench, except when Malin complained ‒ which she did with maddening regularity.
Temeke followed Miss Baca into a well-lit room. There were twelve tables arranged on a hardwood floor and beneath the stone fireplace was a high table where the principal and administrators sat. Four French doors opened out onto a swimming pool and a lawn irrigated by an elaborate mist of water.
“Alice sat here next to Zarah Thai.” Miss Baca approached a table and tapped one of the chairs with both hands. “Zarah was Korean, descended from Emperor Gwangmu and one of his concubines. Lily sat over there by Rosa. And on this side were Senator ‘Lucky’ Barnes’ twin granddaughters. Both played a Stradivarius and―”
“Does the school have its full quota of students this year?”
Miss Baca raised an eyebrow. “Not quite.”
“Why?”
“There were, shall we say, some cancellations. Let me show you around.”
They entered the first classroom to the sound of scraping chairs as the students leapt to their feet and droned a greeting. Miss Baca allowed him a brief look before leading him down a narrow hallway where a grand piano was nestled in the crook of a sweeping staircase.
“Students and visitors are never allowed use the front stairs.”
“I would take off my shoes, ma’am, but I haven’t changed my socks in a couple of days.”
“This piano was often played by Asha Samadi, especially in the evenings,” she said, leading up the staircase. “Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat major. No one has mastered it since. Lily shared a room with Rosa. She was an opera singer. Sang the national anthem at the Yankee stadium last year.”
The one in the photograph, Temeke thought, whose name he had forgotten. The bedroom faced east and looked out on a wide expanse of lawn where a small gazebo stood at the northeast corner, capped with a dome and supported by four pillars. He squinted at the weathered stone, gray and silent as if there was no life in it. His thoughts were interrupted by hers.
“We call it the Pepper Pot,” Miss Baca said, following his gaze. “Lily was clever though, you could see it in her eyes. Then her father died. It was like a dark cloud across the sun. All teenagers have it. A black hole between fourteen and eighteen. They want to write gloomy poetry and hang themselves in the bathrooms. In some cases, I wish they would. You’re not taping this are you?”
“No ma’am. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Ms. Baca clacked along the corridor to the bathroom, a white tiled room with French doors leading to a small balcony and a fire escape.
Temeke felt a stab of sadness when he saw the tub and its lion’s paw feet, shower attachment sitting on a silver cradle. The nozzle pointed to the left, suggesting a right handed user.
“This is where I found her.”
Her voice trailed off then and her eyes seemed to follow a dust mote as it settled against a double-hung window five feet to the right of the French doors.
“Do the girls also take showers?”
“Our foreign cousins prefer to bathe, detective. We provide both.”
It was a free-standing tub, white, elegant, the type you could fall asleep in. He recalled how Alice was found that night, head thrown sideways, water crimson with blood.
He walked to the French doors, each fitted with a security bar. Looking through the metal girders of the fire escape, he saw the parking lot, the lawns and the Pepper Pot. He checked the door. Locked.
“Everything’s to code, detective. All fire escapes are fixed, two on each side. The window used to stick a little. It’s secure now.”
“Any burglaries?” He wished he had been the reporting officer that night, wished he could have checked the locks then.
“None.” She seemed absolutely certain. “There is something I would like you to have.”
She led him back down to the study and unlocked the top drawer of her desk. It was a thin leather bound book engraved with the words, The Lilin Esoterica.
“Demonic nonsense.” She drew out the last word as if it was the most terrible of felonies and half smiled at the same time. “It belonged to Alice. I found it behind the bookcase in her bedroom.”
“Did she smoke?”
“They all did. We found cigarettes in bird houses, toilet cisterns, pianos. And vodka in shampoo bottles.”
“Teenagers can be quite enterprising.”
“Not quite. They were all in love with the same boy. Silly business. Alice confided with one of the younger teachers that someone had been flirting with her boyfriend. Of course, we never encourage intimacy with our students.”
“The boy’s name?”
“Patrick Brody. He not only hung out with Alice, but there was another girl he took a shine to. Adel Martinez. And then he migrated rather rapidly to Kenzie Voorhees. The air was thick.”
Temeke pulled the photograph of Alice’s funeral from his pocket and handed it to her.
“That’s him,” she said. “Do you understand now?”
Temeke wasn’t sure he did. He wasn’t even sure he’d heard all of it in those tight twenty minutes.
The four o’clock bell rang and she handed him the book. “Naturally I would offer you tea but tongues would wag. I don’t want your lot all over the place again. There are limits.”
Temeke made his way to the parking lot and lit up a cigarette. Snooty-ass cow, he thought, taking seven long drags before crushing the rest of it out under his heel. It left white shreds of paper and tobacco on the gravel.
He looked at the pale stucco walls and a coil of ivy that had snaked its way almost as far as the base of the fire escape. Wind whistled through the metal frame, and somewhere up there was a delicate ring, a wind chime whose terminals butted up against the girders. He hadn’t heard it from inside.
Turning his back to the building, he stood there for five long minutes, staring at the curve of a small path, cutting through the lawn and leading to the Pepper Pot. If he tried hard enough he could imagine a shadow behind a float of drapes, eyes set in a tight gaze, red hair tousled in the wind.
He looked back at the bathroom window, the horizontal platform and a fixed staircase below. The boys would have had no access to Quartermain house, at least not from the inside. He wondered how many had attempted that lofty climb just for a quick peek?
Perhaps someone else stood in this very spot the night Alice died. Someone who might have seen Alice with Paddy Brody. Someone who sneaked off again, only to come back later and pay her back in kind. The Martinez girl certainly had a motive. It wasn’t one of those surefire hunches, just a hypothesis born out of jealousy.
Hugging the book to his chest, he sensed the scrutiny of a workman in the parking lot, someone in a gray van parked next to his jeep. He lifted a hand and walked toward it, heard the engine turn over a few times before roaring into life. Saw the rear end fishtail as it hurtled up the drive toward the street.
Dumbass, he thought, clearing his mind and jumping into his car.
So what have we got? A slender, dignified redhead and a sister entrenched in witchcraft. There was nothing extraordinary about a redhead. It was the witchcraft that bothered him.
