Killing Mr. Griffin Read online

  “A surprise? Why, what in the world—”

  A moment later he was back with a bowl in his hands. “Green Jell-O!”

  “Why, I thought there was just that orange stuff.”

  “I made this special.” He grinned at her. His eyes were very bright. He seemed excited, jumpy and nervous, but at the same time happy. “I fixed it this morning before I went to school so it would be jelled for your snack when I got home.”

  “What a sweet thing, Davy.” She reached for it eagerly. “Aren’t you going to get something?”

  “Nope. I’m not hungry. I’ll sit here with you, though, while you eat it. Let’s watch some television, shall we?”

  “I thought you didn’t like daytime TV,” she said in surprise. “You know it’s the game shows.”

  “That’s okay. I want to see somebody win a horse.” He clicked on the set and began to fiddle with the dials, adjusting the picture. “How is it? Jelled enough?”

  “It’s just fine,” she said, taking another mouthful.

  Actually, it wasn’t as tasty as usual, but she didn’t want to hurt him by saying so when he had gone to so much trouble to please her. That slightly bitter taste was probably only in her imagination, or more likely her taste buds were failing her, which she supposed happened to people when they got older. All the old pleasures diminished. Nothing worked as well as it once had. Or maybe it was just so long since she had had the green Jell-O that she’d forgotten what it was supposed to taste like.

  David turned the dial from one channel to another.

  “Oh, hey, cool! Here’s that newlywed show where they ask them questions about the things they don’t like about each other and stuff. That’s a favorite of yours, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “I do like that one.”

  She continued eating.

  When the bowl was empty David carried it to the kitchen and washed and dried it and put it back on the shelf. He washed the spoon and dried that also. When he went back to the bedroom his grandmother was nodding.

  “Tired, Gram?”

  “Of course not. What should I be tired from? I’m not one of those people who nap in the daytime. You know that, Davy.”

  He sat with her until she was asleep, and then he got up and went over to stand by her chair. He looked at her closely. She was breathing heavily and slowly. He reached down and lifted one arm and shoved back the sleeve of the blue flowered robe.

  The pulse in her wrist was strong and even. He had not overdone it. But it had taken longer than he had expected.

  Leaving the old woman asleep to the canned gaiety of the television game show, David left the house and headed at a run back toward the school.

  The women were seated around the card table, and it was Liz Cline’s turn to deal when her hostess went to answer the telephone.

  She came back to say, “That’s Betsy for you, Liz. She wants you to call back after this hand.”

  “Is she at home?” Mrs. Cline asked.

  “Yes, and from the sound of things there are boys with her.”

  “That’s normal for Bets. She can’t date one boy without taking on all his buddies.”

  She played out the hand, and excused herself. She found her cell in her coat and called her home phone.

  “Hello, dear. It’s Mom. Is something the matter?” The voices in the background were loud and unmistakable. “What is Jeff yelling about?”

  “Nothing, Mom. He and Mark are just horsing around. We’re going to watch a movie.”

  “All right. Fine. What is it you called about?”

  “I just wondered if we could have some of the cake,” Betsy said. “I didn’t want to cut into it if you were saving it for something.”

  “Of course I’m not saving it. Cake is for eating. But keep it controlled, will you? I know how those boys eat. Leave something for dinner.”

  “Okay,” Betsy said, and, muffling the receiver, “Jeff, cool it, will you? My mother’s on the phone, and I can hardly hear her.”

  “And keep the racket down,” Liz Cline said, “or the neighbors will have fits.”

  “Will do. See you later. When do you think you’ll be home?”

  “Oh, sixish or so I imagine. Good-bye, dear.”

  She replaced the receiver on the hook and returned to the card table.

  “I don’t know why my daughter has to do everything to extremes. Not only does she date the tallest basketball player on the team, she picks the one with the loudest voice. And that odd friend of his, Mark, never opens his mouth when he’s around us, but he must be as bad as Jeff when they’re alone. I could hear both of them as though they were right here in the room with me.”

  “Well, at least you know where she is and who she’s got with her.” Her hostess shook her head despairingly. “Now, with my Cindy—”

  At the Cline house, Betsy hung up the phone and clicked off the tape recorder. The background noise stopped. She took the tape out of the machine and went into the bedroom and put it in the top drawer of her bureau under a pile of underwear. Then she went into the kitchen and cut three thick slices of chocolate cake and put them on plates. She took out three forks. Using each fork in turn, she systematically took a bite from each of the cake slices. Then she smeared the frosting onto the plates.

  She scraped most of the cake off the dishes and put it down the garbage disposal. Scattering crumbs, she placed the plates and forks in the sink. She went into the den and switched on the stereo, and the DVD she had selected started playing. She turned up the volume.

  Then, like David, she left the house and started back to the school grounds. She had farther to go than David, but she did not have to run. She had Jeff ’s car.

  * * *

  “I’m here,” David said. His face was red and his breath was coming in gasps.

  “Yeah, I see,” Mark said coldly. “You sure took your own sweet time about it.”

  “I ran all the way,” David said. “The pills took longer to work than I thought they would. You can’t regulate something like that.”

  “You could have doubled the dosage.”

  “I didn’t know how strong they were. Too much could have killed her.”

  “That’s crazy,” Jeff said. “Betsy’s mom swills them down like there’s no tomorrow and she’s still alive and kicking.”

  “My gram’s different. She’s an old lady.”

  “Shut up, you guys.” Mark’s eyes were focused on the door of the building. “Get in the backseat, quick, Dave. I think they’re coming.”

  “They? You mean Sue’s with him? She was supposed to split and go in the other direction.”

  David opened the back door of the car and scrambled hastily inside. Pulling the door closed, he disappeared behind the back of the front seat.

  “I think—yeah, it’s both of them. She’s with him all right. She’s walking him right out here like a good little puppy dog.” Mark gave Jeff a nudge. “Get the mask on.”

  “No way, man,” Jeff said. “I’m not going to show myself. He’ll know me by my size.”

  “You don’t have to ‘show yourself.’ Dave’s going to get him from behind. But if he does happen to get an accidental glimpse of you, you’d better have something over your face.” Mark was pulling the nylon stocking over his own head. “Okay, you know what to do. He’ll go around to the driver’s side and get in. When he starts to put the key into the ignition, Dave will stand up and shove the bag down over his head. As soon as he does that, you throw open the door on this side and jump in. Try to get his arms pinned to his sides. I’ll run around the front of the car and get him from the driver’s side.”

  “What about Sue?”

  “What about her? She’d better get the hell out of the way, that’s what. Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Jeff muttered.

  The stocking over his face made him feel ridiculous. The eyeholes didn’t line up properly, and the nylon half blocked the sight of his left eye. He wo
ndered where Betsy was. She was supposed to be here by this time with his car. What if something had gone wrong and her mother hadn’t gone to her card game after all or Betsy hadn’t been able to contact her there? Or, worse still, what if Betsy had had a wreck on the way over? She wasn’t a very good driver, and Jeff ’s car wasn’t the easiest in the world to handle.

  We shouldn’t have let her take it, he thought now, worriedly. Butif she hadn’t, she would not have been able to get home in time to set things up and return to the school yard.

  He could hear their voices now, Susan’s high and strained, Mr. Griffin’s crisp and businesslike the way it was when he gave class lectures. It was evidently the end of a discussion that had been started back in the school building.

  “—didn’t think it would have to be perfect—” Susan was saying, and Mr. Griffin—“That’s the whole point, Miss McConnell. Anything worth doing is worth striving to perfect. If you are able to do it well, why should you do it halfway?”

  They were beside the car now, on the side facing the building. On the other side Jeff and Mark crouched, heads low, hands braced on knees, in the position of runners waiting for the shot.

  “Thank you,” Susan said, “for staying to talk with me.”

  “It’s pleasant to have a student show enough interest to request a conference,” Mr. Griffin said. He opened the car door and then, unbelievably, asked, “Have you far to go? I have to make a brief stop at a drugstore, but I’ll be going straight home from there. I can drop you off at your house on the way.”

  “Oh, no—no, sir—thank you anyway.” Susan’s voice was shrill and splintery, anything but normal.

  That idiot, Jeff thought angrily. In another minute she’s going to be bawling. He’s got to suspect something. He’ll look in the backseat for sure and see Dave there. But, no—he was climbing into the car. He was closing the door. Now he was rolling down the window and making some final remark to Susan.

  Crouched silent, tense with expectation, Jeff could hear the jangle of the keys. Then there was a thump and Griffin’s voice rose sharply in a muffled shout.

  “He’s got him!” Mark exulted, and then they were both moving.

  Jeff had the car door open in an instant and had hurled himself upon the thrashing figure. From his position in the backseat, David was holding the bag down with difficulty as the man in front twisted and shoved at it with frantic hands. Jeff grabbed for his wrists and struggled to bring the arms down to the sides, finding it far less easy than he had anticipated.

  A line of poetry sprang into his head, unexpectedly. “Who would have thought the old man had so much strength in him!” No—that wasn’t it—it was “blood”—“had so much blood in him.” Where had he heard that? In class, of course. It was something from Shakespeare. The realization filled him with a surge of unreasonable fury. Griffin had them brainwashed! Shakespeare was coming out of their ears!

  Mark had the other door open now and was trying to loop the rope.

  “Pin his arms, damn it!” he growled.

  “I’m trying!” Jeff got a grip on Griffin’s wrists and heaved himself up so that his entire weight was bearing down on the struggling figure.

  “There—that does it! Get the rope around him!”

  “Damned bastard’s a wildcat!”

  “Man, you can say that again!”

  Between them they hauled him forward on the seat and began winding the ropes around him as though he were a mummy. Mr. Griffin’s efforts were weaker now; they came in spasm-like jerks. He raised his knees suddenly, jabbing Mark in the ribs. Mark brought the flat edge of his hand down hard on one kneecap, and the legs went limp.

  “Okay now. I think we’ve got him where we want him. Let me get this knotted.”

  “What about the bag?” David panted. “He can’t get much air in there. We don’t want him to suffocate.”

  “We’ve got to leave it on for now,” Mark whispered. “It keeps him quiet, and we don’t want him yelling. When we get outside the city limits we’ll substitute a blindfold.”

  “Do you think he can hear with that over his head?”

  “Not much, but it’s still better to disguise our voices. Don’t use names or say anything you don’t want him remembering later.” Mark’s face was glowing. “Hey, man, didn’t I tell you we could do it? It went just perfect!”

  “So far, at least.” Jeff leaned against the back of the seat, breathing hard. He still found himself astonished at the teacher’s strength. “He’s a live one, you’ve got to say that for him. What’ll we do now?”

  “Just what we planned to do. Take him up to the waterfall.”

  “But my car isn’t here yet.”

  “We’ll take his. The girls can follow when the other car shows up. They know where to go.”

  From his place in the backseat of the car, David rolled down the window and leaned out. Susan was standing several feet away. Her face was white, and tears were streaming down it.

  “What’s the matter?” David asked her.

  “It was awful—just awful. You said you weren’t going to hurt him.”

  “We didn’t. He’s just fine. If I pull off this bag, the first thing he’d do would be spit in my face.”

  “You said yourself that he can’t breathe!”

  “If he passes out, we’ll open it up. I’ll keep watch on that, don’t worry. That’s my job. I’m ‘bag boy.’”

  “We’re going to go on now,” Mark said. “It’s too risky to stay parked here. Besides, we don’t have too much time if we want our alibis to work for us. You”—he gestured to Susan—“stay here and wait for—her. It’s best we don’t use people’s names when we talk about them. As soon as she gets here, follow us up. Got it?”

  Wordlessly, Susan nodded. The tears kept coming.

  “Oh, Christ.” Mark shot her a glance of disgust. “Cut the waterworks. Nothing’s happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Yes,” Susan whispered.

  “Okay. We’ll see you there.”

  Mark turned the key in the ignition and started the engine. It died on him, and he cursed and tried it again. This time it caught, and he pressed down on the accelerator. The car moved slowly across the parking lot and pulled out onto the street.

  Standing alone in the empty lot, Susan watched it until it reached the corner. Then it turned east in the direction of the mountains, and she could see it no longer. It was less than five minutes before Jeff ’s Ford pulled into the lot with Betsy behind the wheel. When she saw Susan her eyes widened with alarm.

  “What happened? Where is everybody?”

  “They went on,” Susan told her. “They said to tell you to meet them up where we had the picnic.”

  “Did it work? Did everything go all right? Do they have him tied up and everything?”

  “It went—just like it was supposed to,” Susan told her.

  “And I had to miss all the excitement!” Betsy brought her fist down hard on the edge of the steering wheel. “Everything went fine at my end, and then on the way over here I got stopped by a cop. He said I was speeding, which I wasn’t. And, of course, I had to explain it was my boyfriend’s car, which was why the registration was in his name, not mine. It took forever.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, hurry up and get in.”

  Susan said, “You go without me.”

  “Why?” Betsy asked. She looked more closely at Susan’s face. “Have you been crying? Did something go wrong that you haven’t told me about?”

  “No, nothing went wrong.” Susan bit at her lower lip to stop the trembling. “I just don’t want to go, that’s all. I’ve done my part—what I said I’d do. Now I don’t want to do anything more.”

  “But this is the part we’ve been waiting for! This is when we’re really going to bring him down!” Betsy’s blue eyes were shining. She had the same bright, sparkling look that she had on the edge of the football field when she was leading a cheer for the winning te
am. “Sue, you don’t want to miss out on this!”

  “I said, I’m not going.”

  “Well, that’s your choice, I guess.” Betsy gunned the engine. “Honestly, I don’t understand you.”

  “I don’t either, really.”

  As Mark had said, it had all gone perfectly, just as they had visualized it. But one thing had happened for which she had not been prepared. The word Mr. Griffin had shouted as the bag came down upon him had been, “Run!”

  His concern in that instant had not been for himself, but for her.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was not until she had bypassed the turnoff point by over three miles that Betsy realized that she had come too far, and it took her a long, slow trip back before she was able to locate the dirt road that led to the path by the waterfall. Once she did find it she drove slowly, afraid that a wheel might overrun the trail on one side or the other and sink irrevocably into the soft earth.

  Betsy’s driving experience was primarily limited to the use of her mother’s Honda, which could be maneuvered without difficulty on any ground. The width of Jeff ’s car was intimidating, and the traffic citation she had received earlier in the afternoon had unnerved her.

  The experience had been awful. The policeman, whom she had hoped to charm into letting her off with a warning, had not been susceptible. Not only had he been cold and unsympathetic, he had actually seemed grimly pleased to be writing her a ticket.

  “You may know my father,” she had told him. “Harold Cline. He’s on the County Commission.”

  “I don’t know any bigwigs, kid,” the policeman had said, “and I’m just as glad. It makes doing my job easier. Either get this paid within five days or make an appointment to appear in court.”

  He had left her seething, and arriving at the school parking lot to find the preliminary action over had added fuel to the flame of her resentment.

  Screw it! They might have waited, she thought angrily. They knew I was coming. They could have stalled somehow till I got there.

  Betsy was not accustomed to being thwarted. For most of her life she had gotten what she wanted when she wanted it. An only child, she had been born conveniently to parents who wanted a daughter. The fact that she had also been born blond and cuddly and had smiled early and often had made her reception even warmer.