Killing Mr. Griffin Read online

  “Do you like cats?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Neither do I. I’ve got a plan. Something I’m going to do with a cat. You coming?”

  “Will it take long?” Jeff had asked. “I’ve got a paper route.”

  “Not long.”

  “Okay, I’ll come then.” He had looked at the boy more closely now, at the odd, wide-cheeked face, the tight, tan skin, the sparkling gray eyes. There was something almost magnetic about those eyes. “What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Where are you going to do it?”

  “Behind the school. Behind the cafeteria where they keep the garbage cans. I’ll meet you there at three thirty.”

  “Okay. Why not?” He did not know why he agreed. He had no real interest in meeting anybody anywhere when school was over. But he had said, “Okay.” And he had gone.

  Now, five years later, he heard himself saying again, “Okay. Okay, why not?”

  “Good boy,” Mark said, and Betsy flashed him a smile of approval. Jeff slid his hand along the back of the seat until it rested behind her head. This time she did not pull away.

  “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Like a game. We ought to have something fun to remember from high school. When my dad was in school, do you know what he did? He and a friend of his got a copy of a key to one of the doors of the building, and one night they took a horse out of a farmer’s pasture and put it in the girls’ restroom. He still talks about it—the way a bunch of girls went in the next morning and came out screaming!”

  “We’ll remember this the same way,” Mark said. “You’ll tell your kids about it. Griffin, thrashing and crawling, begging us not to hurt him—that’ll be something to remember.”

  He wasn’t smiling. Mark seldom smiled. But his face was aglow with a strange luminosity, an inner light that seemed to come through his skin and give it an odd, ethereal radiance. His eyes, what could be seen of them under the drooping lids, had the glint of smoked glass caught in a ray of sunlight. No one would ever have called Mark Kinney handsome, but there were moments when he had a special beauty, something so striking and strange that it stopped the heart and caused those near him to catch their breath.

  It was a transformation Jeff had come to recognize. He hadseen it for the first time back in junior high school, on that day they had met each other—the time that Mark had set fire to the cat.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Davy, is that you, dear?”

  “Yes, Gram. Who else?”

  “Aren’t you going to come in to see me?”

  “Sure. Just a sec.” David finished spreading mustard on a slice of bread, laid a hunk of cheese on it and doubled it over. Picking up the sandwich with one hand and a glass of milk with the other, he left the kitchen and walked through the small, dark living room into the bedroom beyond.

  The old lady was in her accustomed place in the armchair by the window, the spot from which she could look directly across into the bedroom window of the house next door. She was wearing her blue flowered housecoat, and her long hair was pulled back and held in place with a blue ribbon, so that it fell, limp and gray, over the slanted shoulders and down the back in the style of a teenage girl.

  “So, an after-school snack is more important than coming in to say hello to your grandmother?”

  “Not usually, Gram. Today, I missed lunch.” David crossed the room and leaned over to place a dutiful kiss on the pink, rouged cheek. The skin felt cool and dry to his lips, and so soft that it seemed to sink beneath the pressure of the kiss and lie there, indented. “What have you been doing today?”

  “What do I ever do? Watch the game shows. A lady today from Kansas City had to guess something behind a curtain that cost five thousand dollars. What do you think it was?”

  “Any clues?”

  “The man—the one who asks the questions—he told her, ‘It runs.’”

  “A motorcycle?” David guessed.

  “She thought it was a small car, but it turned out to be a horse, can you imagine? Did you ever think a horse would be worth that much money? The poor lady didn’t get anything except some little consolation prize like a hair dryer or something. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? They kept saying things to make her think it was going to be a car.”

  “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess.”

  “But it wasn’t fair.” The weak old eyes settled upon David’s sandwich. “What is it you have there, Swiss cheese? That does look good.”

  “Would you like me to make you one?”

  “Well, maybe just a half. Your mother went off to work this morning and didn’t bother to leave anything fixed for my lunch, only a little bit of tuna. She didn’t even leave some Jell-O. I know we have some. I saw the package last night when she brought it home from the store.”

  “I’ll make it up. If I do it now, it’ll be jelled by dinner.”

  “Make up the green. It’s got the most flavor.”

  “The green it is.”

  He left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen. The remains of the sandwich makings were spread out on the table, and he eyed them carefully, wondering if he had left enough cheese for the promised sandwich. Deciding that he had not, he took some out of his own and replanted it between two fresh slices of bread. He put a pan of water onto the stove to boil and opened the cabinet where his mother stored foodstuff. There were two boxes of Jell-O: cherry and orange.

  “Good old Mom,” he muttered resignedly. “She bought everything but green.”

  There were times when he wondered if his mother did this sort of thing deliberately, knowing that the old woman liked lime Jell-O and knowing too that he would be the one stuck with telling her that it wasn’t there.

  As soon as he allowed such a conjecture to cross his mind, he was swept with guilt. His mother did well to make it to the grocery store at all after a full day typing and answering phones in an office. In her place another woman would have forgotten the Jell-O completely, or maybe even not have come home at all. There were women who did that, just took off and went when things got too rough for them. He had read an article on that subject only recently. The author had given some surprisingly high number of such cases and had said that runaway wives in America were soon going to equal or exceed the number of runaway husbands.

  But his mother would not be one of them, of that he could be sure. To begin with, she wasn’t a wife and hadn’t been one for over ten years. On top of that, she was super-responsible. Everybody told him that—his aunts, the neighbors, even their minister.

  “I hope you appreciate your mother,” the Reverend Chandler had said one Sunday after services. “There aren’t many women who would do what she has—taken an invalid mother-in-law into her home to love and care for after being deserted by her own husband. Your mother’s a saint, son, and don’t you forget it. You’re a lucky boy to have the opportunity of growing up in her home.”

  “I know it, sir,” David had assured him, conscious of his mother standing behind him, knowing without looking that she had heard the minister’s words and was pleased by them.

  When they reached the car she had been smiling a little and the harsh lines between her eyes and at the corners of her mouth had softened. At that moment she had looked startlingly like the girl in the wedding picture that David had found one day in a suitcase in the attic.

  “Would you like to stop and pick up some ice cream on the way home?” she had asked him.

  The pleasant mood had stayed with her most of the rest of the day.

  “Davy?”

  “Coming, Gram. I’ve got your sandwich.” He carried it in to her on a plate. “Do you want some milk?”

  “No. It curdles in my stomach. That’s what happens when you get old. Have you made the Jell-O?”

  “I’m getting ready to now.”

  Back in the kitchen he poured the boiling water into a bowl and mixed in the orange gelatin and added ice. He set the bowl in the refrigerator and
ran more water into the sink over the breakfast dishes. He squirted in dish soap.

  David Ruggles, President of the Senior Class, King of the Sink! His lips curled wryly. What would everyone at school think if they could see him now, playing the maid in a house that didn’t even have a dishwasher?

  David had never overestimated himself. He knew exactly who he was and what he could do with what he had. He knew he was handsome. It was an unusual sort of handsomeness, but it was there, and it worked.

  He looked exactly like his father. He couldn’t remember his father very well, but he knew what he looked like from the wedding picture. His father had been a small man, slightly built, with the most beautiful face in the world. When David looked at himself in the mirror he saw that face looking back at him, fine-boned, delicate, perfectly shaped with gentle eyes and a fine, sensitive mouth.

  He wondered sometimes what his father had been like as a person, with a face like that. He compared the face with his mother’s, strong and sensible, and he tried to imagine the two of them together, laughing and joking and holding hands, kissing perhaps. It was impossible. In his mind his father’s face was floating on a cloud, his mother’s coming in the door behind a bag of groceries. One was a dream, the other reality.

  He finished sponging the dishes and ran hot water from the tap straight over them to wash off the suds. His mother didn’t like him to do this, as it used up too much hot water, but it was fast and easy.

  From the back room his grandmother called, “Davy? Is the Jello-O ready yet?”

  “No, Gram. It’ll be a couple of hours. I just put it in the fridge.”

  He left the kitchen and went in to pick up the sandwich plate.

  “Do you need anything else?”

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “I have to go to the little girls’ room.”

  “Oh, Gram, can’t you wait awhile?”

  “I’ve been waiting all day.”

  He knew this was not true. There was no way his grandmother waited all day for something like that. When she was alone in the house, she got up and did whatever it was she had to do. He knew for a fact that she went to the refrigerator and took out the lunch his mother left prepared for her, and there were times when he found things around the house—candy, movie magazines—that must have been purchased down at the corner store.

  But now, helpless in the flowered bathrobe, she appealed to him.

  “I have to go.”

  “All right, Gram. Okay. Hold on to me.”

  He helped her out of the chair and, slipping one arm around her scrawny body and a hand beneath her elbow, he half led, half carried her to the little bathroom that sat between the bedroom and the kitchen.

  “You okay now?”

  “All right, Davy. I’ll tell you when I want to go back.”

  “You do that.” His voice was sharp. He caught it and forced a gentler tone. “You call me, Gram.” That was better. “I’ll be right here.”

  He went into the living room, a dark, small room with a musty smell. He had often wondered why it was called a “living room,” since it seemed to have less life than any other room in the house. The blinds were usually drawn to protect the rug from the morning sun, and they were seldom raised in the afternoon because no one thought to raise them. The couch was covered with a plastic casing. The books and CD player were in his room, the television in the room shared by his mother and grandmother.

  The only thing alive in the whole living room was the telephone, and it sat silent on its hook so much of the time that it might as well not have existed at all. He sat down next to it and considered dialing a number. Any number, just to hear a voice. But he didn’t know anyone’s cell numbers and no one else was sitting around with nothing to do, like him. Mark would be out somewhere with Jeff and Betsy, or some of the rest of the group that always trailed around after him. What they did when they “went out somewhere” was never exactly explicable. Most of the time they just rode around in Jeff ’s car, stopping at one place after another, wandering aimlessly about town, honking the horn at friends and laughing and kidding around.

  He knew he was welcome to join them. Mark had asked him more than once, and Jeff had also.

  David had said, “Thanks, but I’ve got stuff to do at home,” and let it go at that. He knew they would never understand his mother’s reasoning that there should be a definite, preplanned activity or time was being wasted.

  “Where is it you’re going?” she would ask. “What is it you’re going to do there? Where can I reach you in an emergency?”

  It wasn’t that she forbade him to go places, it was just that by the time they finished hashing things over his enthusiasm had usually faded to the point where going was hardly worth the effort.

  “Unless there’s a reason,” his mother said, “a real reason, it’s nice for you to be at home in the afternoons. Your grandmother sits there alone all day, you know, and your homecoming at three is the high point of her day.”

  In the evenings they ate later than most people because his mother wasn’t up to facing the kitchen immediately after a day at work.

  Then there was homework.

  “It’s important to keep up with your studies,” his mother told him. “You’re our hope for the future, Davy. Anything good that happens to this family will come through you.”

  This was true, he knew, and he thought about it often. His mother’s salary as a secretary was not going to increase, and there was no place she could move within the ranks of the company for which she worked without more training. She couldn’t afford school, and with outstanding bills and bad credit, no one would give her a loan. Her life was at a stalemate, and remarriage for her seemed highly unlikely. It wasn’t that she was unattractive; at forty-two she still looked remarkably good, with a lean, strong figure and hair as dark and thick as David’s own. But she had no interest in meeting men or in going out with them.

  “One marriage is enough for anybody,” she stated firmly. And then, after a slight pause, she would sometimes add, “More than enough,” with a note of bitterness in her voice.

  So when David was grown, his mother would be there still, slaving away to make ends meet. And, for all he knew, Gram would be there too. For an invalid, Gram seemed amazingly healthy, scarcely ever coming down with the illnesses other people were prone to. Perhaps it was because, cloistered as she was, she never got exposed to any germs. Anyway, despite her age, she didn’t show any indication of leaving her present world for the next one at any time in the near future.

  When he hit the job market, David figured, he could count on two people to support other than himself. For that reason it was important to have the best educational background possible. His father had gone to Stanford. That, for David, was out of the question, but with a top-notch transcript and high ACT scores, he figured he would definitely be in the running for the special scholarship offered annually by the president of the University of New Mexico to an outstanding and needy student from the Albuquerque area. In the long run, he had his hopes pinned on law school. To this end he ran for school offices and took part in debating and other speech-oriented activities. Such things looked good on your record if you were aiming for a prelaw program.

  Now, in his last semester of high school, that record looked good, but since the president’s scholarship was not awarded until final grades were out, what concerned him was the upcoming grade in English. He had always considered himself a good English student; he read his assignments faithfully and was meticulous about his essays. Dolly Luna, last year’s teacher (formally she was “Miss Luna,” but the first day of class she had told them, “Call me Dolly”), had given him A’s on all his papers, followed by strings of exclamation marks.

  But the same sort of essays submitted in Mr. Griffin’s class brought C’s.

  “Mechanics okay,” Griffin had written on one paper. “You have a grasp of grammar and punctuation, but the writing itself is shallow. There’s nothing to it. Don’t parrot back my lec
tures. Get under the surface. Tell me something about Hamlet I don’t already know.”

  “Something he doesn’t know!” David had exclaimed in frustration when that paper was returned to him. “He’s supposed to be the expert. I’m just a student. If there’s stuff about Shakespeare he doesn’t know, what’s he doing teaching it?”

  And now, today, those blown-away papers added an F to his grade list, which very likely brought the average down to D. He had done what he could about it, even skipping lunch in order to rewrite the paper, but true to his word, Griffin would not accept it.

  “I thought I made it clear, Mr. Ruggles,” he had said in his cool, crisp voice, “that I do not take late papers, no matter what the excuse for them may be.”

  So that whole hour’s work had been for nothing, and unless he could ace the final, which seemed unlikely, he would probably find that D permanently situated on his transcript.

  “I can see why Mark did what he did last semester,” he muttered angrily. “I might be tempted to try the same thing myself, if I thought it would do any good.”

  A chime rang out.

  Startled, David reached for the telephone receiver, stopped, waited. Then he realized it had been the doorbell.

  Who on earth? he thought, getting up and crossing the room.

  He opened the front door.

  “Oh, hey, I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were, huh?” Mark’s lean figure stood slouched in the doorway. “You got a girl in there or something? Why’s it so dark?”

  “You know my mom,” David said. “She doesn’t want the rug to bleach out. You got the gang with you?”

  “Jeff and Betsy are out front in Jeff ’s car. Want to go cruising? We’ve got an idea about something we want to talk over with you.”

  “I can’t right now. I’ve got stuff I’m supposed to be doing here.” David was acutely conscious of the old woman in the bathroom only a couple of yards away. Any moment now her voice might ring out asking to be taken back to her room. Mark knew more about his family life than anyone at school, but details like this were more than he needed to be subjected to.