11

NINE MILE School was located in Madeira, northeast of the Kenwood exit of I-71, a cluster of white stucco buildings, vaguely Spanish in style, nestled in the wooded hillside above the expressway. It was a little past two when I got out there. As I turned onto the access road that led to the complex, I passed a couple of riders in jodhpurs and boots, urging their horses up a trail beside the road. It was that kind of neighborhood, that kind of school.

I parked the Pinto close by the entrance gate and stepped out into dappled shade, redolent of spruce and horse piss. A couple of kids standing by a red Mercedes watched me closely as I walked across the gravel lot to the white stucco buildings—like I was someone who bore watching. The lot was filled with Mercedes and BMWs.

An archway in the front building led me directly onto a pillared portico, running around a quadrangle of sunburnt grass. On the complex side of the portico, windowed doors opened onto airy schoolrooms. I followed a series of signs hung from the rafters to the main office.

Inside, a plump middle-aged woman in a flouncy peasant dress was sitting at a desk behind a countertop. She had a haggard face and long gray-brown hair, cut in bangs and worn in a ponytail down her back. The length of her hair—or perhaps the fact that she was still wearing it that long into her late forties or early fifties—made her look a little desperate. The gold in her smile and the peasant colors added to the air of wilted youth.

Behind her and to her right a varnished wood letterbox, stuffed with memos, depended from the wall. The polished wood caught the sunlight coming through the open windows on the lot side of the building. Everything in the room was bright with sunlight, floors, desk, whitewashed walls.

“Can I help you?” the woman said, smiling amid the glare.

“My name is Stoner,” I told her. “I’d like to talk to your headmaster about one of your teachers, Mason Greenleaf.”

The woman dropped her eyes to the desktop, like she’d been slugged from behind. “You’re a police officer?”

“I’m working for Cindy Dorn, a friend of Mason’s.”

“Of course. I’m Helen Tobler. Assistant headmistress here at Nine Mile.”

“Would you mind answering a few questions, Ms. Tobler?”

“No. I wouldn’t mind at all. I was very fond of Mason. All of us here were fond of him. It’s a terrible tragedy.”

She gestured to a chair in front of her desk. “Please sit.”

I came around the counter. As I sat down, I noticed that the fingers of the woman’s right hand were stained blue with mimeo ink. She caught me staring at them and shrugged. “Can’t afford to Xerox everything.”

“I would have thought you could,” I said, smiling.

“I know,” the woman said. “People see the cars in the lot and the horses on the trails and think we’re as rich as our clientele. Well, I assure you we are not. Private schools like ours are run on very tight budgets. Most of our staff and personnel do far less well financially than they could in the public schools.”

“Then why do they teach here?”

“We offer them small classes and the chance to work with gifted children. You’d be surprised how attractive that is to a certain kind of teacher. The ones for whom teaching is a calling.”

“Like Mason Greenleaf?”

She nodded. “Yes, he was extremely dedicated. I would say he was among the most dedicated and effective teachers we had.”

“You think it would be possible for me to talk to any of his students?”

The woman sighed, drumming her blue-stained fingers on the desk. “If it were up to me, I’d see no problem with it. But the headmaster, Tom Snodgrass, might object. Frankly, some of the parents might object, too. You understand that one of the things we’re supposed to offer is privacy.”

“Perhaps I could talk to Snodgrass myself?” I asked.

She nodded. “He’s at lunch, but he should be back shortly.”

I cleared my throat, trying to think of some decent way to broach the question of Greenleaf’s motive for suicide. But the woman didn’t need coaxing.

“Obviously, you want to know why Mason did what he did?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, I’ve thought about it quite a lot,” she said, leaning back into a sloping beam of sunlight. “And all I can say is that whatever problems he had, he didn’t say a word about them to any of us here at Nine Mile. In fact he was such a sweet, positive soul that it makes what happened especially disturbing.

“Frankly, I can’t understand it,” she said, dropping her eyes again. “Unless something just overwhelmed him, like somebody dying, or maybe finding out that he had cancer, or Cindy leaving him . . . ?”

There was an undisguised note of curiosity in her voice. And who could blame her for being curious? I told her the truth. “He wasn’t ill, and he had no recent problems with Cindy.”

I didn’t mention Del Cavanaugh—given the clean bill of health that Dr. Mulhane had reported, there was no need to broach the subject of AIDS. But I did bring up the solicitation incident from six years past. The off-chance that he’d been enmeshed in a similar situation at Nine Mile was the chief reason I’d come to the school. “You do know that he’d had a problem with a student some years ago?”

Helen Tobler pursed her lips as if she wanted to spit. “The school board thing was a travesty. But those are the times we are living in. When Mason came to us after being disciplined, we did not hesitate to hire him—and believe me, our standards are the highest. They have to be—they’re what our reputation is founded on.”

She didn’t mention that Greenleaf had apparently had an in with Tom Snodgrass. It made her umbrage slightly less impressive.

“You aren’t aware of any such incident that might have occurred here at Nine Mile?”

“Absolutely not,” Helen Tobler said flatly. “In fact I don’t believe there was an ‘incident’ to begin with—just an overzealous father who had lost custody of his son in a divorce hearing and was trying to score points against his ex-wife. Mason became his whipping boy, thanks to the prosecutor’s zeal to persecute homosexuals.”

“Prior to the week that he dropped out of school, did Mason seem distant or preoccupied to you?”

“Not to me he didn’t,” Helen Tobler said. “But our schedules were such that we didn’t see a lot of each other that week. He may have complained a bit about the heat, about having trouble sleeping at night. He didn’t look particularly well rested, but then neither do I. I mean it’s been hot, and our classrooms aren’t air-conditioned. You really ought to talk to Tom. He’s a longtime friend of Mason’s and would have seen more of him than I did. He should be back any minute.”

I glanced at my watch, which was showing a quarter to three. Since I wanted to talk to some of Greenleaf’s students, I decided to wait.

******

I sat in the office for a good quarter of an hour, watching Helen Tobler run circulars off the noisy mimeo machine. After a while she gathered a bunch of the papers in her blue hands and walked around the counter to the door.

“I’m going to distribute a few of these up and down the quad. You’re welcome to keep waiting here until Tom gets in.”

A few minutes after she left, a boy came through the door. He was about seventeen, thin, dark-haired, with a sharp-featured, handsome face. He stood by the counter for a second, staring at me.

“Where’s Ms. Tobler?” he said with a touch of suspiciousness, as if I’d done something to her.

It dawned on me that he was one of the kids giving me the eye in the parking lot.

“She’s delivering some forms to the classrooms.”

“Uh-huh. Who are you?”

He said it like he had a right to ask anybody anything he wanted. Which was probably how he’d been raised and educated. It gave me a slightly different feel for the nature of the student body than the official version I’d gotten from Helen Tobler. “I’m a truant officer,” I said.

The kid smiled. “No, you’re not. You were asking about Mr. Greenleaf.” I wondered just how the hell he knew that, until he glanced at the open window. “I heard you talking.”

“You always snoop at the window?”

“I heard you mentioning his name.” The kid ducked his head. “It’s awful what happened to him.”

“You were a student of his?”

The boy nodded solemnly. “I was in his senior honors seminar this summer. I’m Lee Marks.”

He held out his hand across the counter, and I started to feel a little better about his manners.

“Harry Stoner,” I said, shaking with him.

“Do you know why he did it?” Lee Marks said, resting his elbows on the countertop and staring at me with an earnestness that was touching.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t, Lee.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard,” Lee Marks said with emotion. “None of us could. He was such a nice guy. It’s so unfair.”

It’s a hard lesson, that one about what’s fair. And it’s surprising how often you have to learn it before it sticks, if it ever really does.

“Trimble’s taken over the class now,” the boy went on. “But it’s not the same. Greenie was like a kid himself. I mean, he knew how to connect with his students. He wasn’t snotty or condescending like most of them are. He made you feel the relevance of whatever he was teaching. It was a gift.” Lee Marks shook his head again. “I won’t forget him.”

In spite of the fact that we’d gotten off on the wrong foot, I liked Lee Marks who, as Helen Tobler had said about Greenleaf, seemed to be a sweet, positive soul.

“You’re going to college in the fall?” I asked him.

“Harvard.”

Behind him the door opened and a tall, balding man with a thick-lipped, scowling face came into the room. His knobby cheeks were red and sweaty from the heat, adding to his general look of unappeasable ire, like a Hindu god. No one had to tell me that he was the headmaster.

“Who are you?” he said to me in a no-nonsense voice.

I told him who I was—quick, like a bunny. “Your assistant, Ms. Tobler, told me to wait here for you.”

The man turned the thermostat down on the red, irritable look. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he tamped the sweat on his brow as he walked around the counter toward Helen Tobler’s desk. Almost as an afterthought, he glanced back at the boy.

“What is it, Marks?”

“Nothing,” the kid said, straightening. “I was just talking to Mr. Stoner.”

That didn’t sit well with Tom Snodgrass. “Get back to class,” he snapped.

As Snodgrass turned away from him, Lee Marks gave me an odd, inquisitive look. He was out the door and Snodgrass was in my face before I had a chance to make anything of it. But I figured I’d already heard what I needed to hear—that Greenleaf was as well-liked by the groundlings as he’d been by the staff.

“Helen didn’t give you permission to talk to the students, did she?” the man said, sitting down at the desk.

“No. She said I’d have to ask you.”

“Then let me tell you right off that I’d prefer that you didn’t talk to them. When a popular teacher like Mason passes away, it’s like a death in the family. And when he takes his own life—well, it’s even worse. The kids need some time to heal. So do I.”

“Ms. Tobler told me that you two were friends.”

“We went to grad school together, Mace and I, twenty years ago. He’s known my wife, Sheila, even longer than that—since college. Quite frankly, neither Sheila nor I can understand why he did this. He was a survivor, Mason.”

I thought about Del Cavanaugh, who was not going to survive, and said, “Sometimes survivors feel guilty.”

Sighing, Headmaster Tom Snodgrass folded the handkerchief up and packed it neatly into a pocket. “I’ve said the same thing to myself. A lot of Mace’s friends, a lot of our friends, have died recently. It adds to the weight, no question. You get up in the morning and you feel heavier, more burdened. Nothing ages you like friends dying, Stoner. It’s the real clock on the wall.”

“There wasn’t anything troubling him here at school, was there?” I asked, already knowing what he was going to say. What everyone had said.

“I don’t think there was,” Snodgrass said. “I mean, I can’t know what he didn’t tell me, but he wasn’t complaining about the job, if that’s what you mean.”

“Was anyone complaining about him?”

Snodgrass raised his head sharply as if he caught my drift—and didn’t much like it. “You’re make a reference to his problems with the Cincinnati School Board?”

“I’m just looking for a reason why he killed himself.”

“Do you know what happened six years ago?” he said, leaning forward across the desk.

“I’ve heard several different versions.”

“Well, let me tell you the one that I know,” he said pointedly, as if he felt obliged to dispel the rumors and false impressions. Given the fact that he’d hired Greenleaf after the incident, I could understand his sense of accountability. “I heard this from Mason himself when I interviewed him for this job. And I had it confirmed by a mutual friend, a supervisor in the public school system.”

Snodgrass made a church out of his fingers and stared red-faced over the steeple. “Mason had a student named Paul Grandin, a senior interested in theater arts. Paul was a troubled kid from a split family. His father was a nasty, brutal man who had physically abused Paul from an early age. His mother was an overweening alcoholic who couldn’t say no to her husband or to Paul himself. The kid grew up hating both of them and despising himself. He had no confidence, no sense of purpose, and a conflicted sexual identity. As an adolescent, Mason had many of the same problems, so he strongly identified with Paul and treated him the way he wished he’d been treated at that age—with compassion and intelligence. He found the boy a psychotherapist to help him work through his neuroses; he got him a part-time job at the Playhouse-in-the-Park; he encouraged him to become involved in extracurricular activities at school. Naturally the boy was very grateful and very fond of Mason, as Mason was of him. There was never anything more than a bond of affection between them.”

“I was told about some letters?”

“If Mason made any mistake, it was writing those notes to Paul,” Snodgrass conceded, sinking behind his tented hands. “Paul had graduated that June and gone off to a theater arts camp in Wisconsin before his freshman year at college. Mason wrote the letters to him while Paul was at camp—just as anyone would write to a friend who was away. Paul brought the letters back home with him when he returned to town. Somehow Paul’s father found them.

“If a heterosexual had written such a letter to a friend, no one would have thought twice about it. But as you undoubtedly know, Mason was bisexual and, at that time, involved with a man. Apparently someone told the father that Mason was bi, and the father blew up. The police really put Mason through the wringer, you know. If his lawyer hadn’t secured a restraining order, I think they would have hounded him to death. Even at that, if he hadn’t found Cindy, I’m not sure he would have survived.”

Given the upshot, I didn’t have much confidence that his relationship with Cindy had been the answer to his problems, either—or that Mason Greenleaf had ever allowed anyone to know what that answer might have been.

Thanking the man for his time, I got up from the chair.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help, Mr. Stoner,” Tom Snodgrass said. “I hate to say it, but I’d feel less troubled and confused if Mason had been killed by accident or even murdered.”

It was a little shocking to hear it put like that. But as I walked back out to the lot, I realized it was just another way of saying that, like everyone else I’d talked to that blistering July day, he really didn’t understand why his friend had taken his life.