Killing Mr. Griffin Read online

  By the time she was a year old, Betsy had accepted the fact that little girls who handed out smiles and kisses could name their own rewards, and the self-confidence this knowledge gave her served her well. In kindergarten she was selected to serve the juice and hand out pencils; in grammar school she collected more valentines and received more phone calls than anyone in her class. To be “Betsy Cline’s friend” was an honor eagerly sought by her classmates, and to be “someone on Betsy’s shit list” was social suicide. When Shauna Bearman, a black-haired, porcelain-complexioned beauty, was selected to play Snow White in the fifth-grade play, she found herself the only one in the class excluded from Betsy’s tenth birthday party, and was thereafter totally ostracized. Peer pressure reached such a point that on the night of the play Shauna burst into tears on stage and the curtain had to be lowered. In the Christmas Nativity Tableau, Betsy Cline was Mary, and her teacher sighed with relief.

  “Thank the Lord we’ve got one little actress without temperament,” she told everyone.

  Betsy was being asked for dates by the time she was eleven, and once in high school she was the only freshman to attend the senior prom. Adults considered her unspoiled and wholesome. Her contemporaries liked her for her sparkle and charm. The fact that she was not traditionally pretty helped her popularity, for it kept boys from being uncomfortable around her and girls from being jealous.

  “Cute” was the word people used for her, and it was the way she thought of herself.

  “I’d rather be cute than beautiful,” she had said once to her mother, who had smiled and agreed.

  “It lasts longer,” Mrs. Cline had told her. “Prettiness fades, but a girl can be cute right into middle age.”

  There were only two people she knew who seemed immune to Betsy’s cuteness, and one was Mr. Griffin. This semester, for the first time in her life, she had found her papers getting marked down for such things as “lack of originality” and “overuse of clichés.”

  “I don’t know what he means,” she had complained to her parents, who were as bewildered as she. “What’s wrong with saying things the way other people have if it’s the best way to say them? You can’t just make words up out of the air.”

  Her mother had written Mr. Griffin a note requesting that he “go easier on Betsy, who is very sensitive to criticism,” and her father had offered to go to the principal and have her moved to another section of senior English.

  Betsy had left the note in Mr. Griffin’s box in the office. She found it later, returned with one of her papers, with a notation on the bottom that said, “The best way to avoid criticism is not to earn it.” The paper had received a D.

  She had turned down her father’s offer, saying, “It just isn’t right to change classes. If one person does it, then everybody will want to.” The truth was that she would not have left the class for anything in the world. It was the only class all day that she had with Mark Kinney.

  Mark was the other person in Betsy’s life who did not seem to notice her cuteness. At first she had thought it was because of Lana. There were boys who were attracted only to older women, and Lana, a college sophomore, had had a certain sophistication about her that Betsy could never equal. But after the thing had happened last semester, when Mr. Griffin had recognized Mark’s term paper as one he had read several years before when he was teaching at the University of Albuquerque and had carried the thing to such extremes—dropping Mark from the class, checking with the college English Department to determine who had access to the file of past papers—Lana’s father had had her transferred to a small college in the southern part of the state.

  “I want her out from under that boy’s influence,” he had been heard to say. “He’s a sick kid. My daughter would never have thought of rifling that file if he hadn’t put her up to it. She’s obsessed by him. If he told her to jump out a window, she’d do it. It’s gone far enough, and I want her out of here, now.”

  So Lana was out of the picture, and Betsy was secretly overjoyed. Surely now Mark would notice her as someone more than just a girl who had hooked up with his best friend. But it did not seem to happen. Nor did Mark appear to grieve particularly over the loss of Lana. He remained the same as he had always been—cool, expressionless, in complete control of every situation—except the one in which he had been forced by Mr. Griffin to plead for reentry to the class. He accepted Betsy, as he always had, as part of a group of which he himself was the center. But he made no effort to see her alone or to advance their relationship any further.

  Well, she was worth noticing, and today, Betsy thought, shehad proved it. It was she who had provided the alibis for them all.

  “We’ll use my tape recorder,” she had told them, “and we’ll be able to plant voices anywhere we want them.” She had even thought through to the disposal of the cake.

  “No originality, huh?” she had remarked to herself with satisfaction. “This should be original enough for anybody.”

  And it had gone almost perfectly. When her mother got home from her card game, three dirty plates in the sink would testify to the fact that three hungry teenagers had spent the afternoon there. She had left the house in Jeff ’s car in plenty of time to make the action at the school ground. She even had her own nylon stocking mask in her purse. It was the stupid policeman who had fouled up everything by stopping her when she was barely enough over the speed limit to register on the speedometer.

  The more she thought about it the angrier she became, and by the time she reached the clearing where Mark had parked Mr. Griffin’s dull green Chevrolet her initial enthusiasm was masked by fury.

  She ran the car up to a point where it paralleled Mr. Griffin’s, gave the key a twist, and got out. The entrance to the path, widened by the unusual amount of traffic, was no longer completely concealed by the rock. Quickly Betsy shoved aside the few interfering branches and began the short hike that would take her back to the waterfall.

  The condition of the path showed that Mr. Griffin had not been led along it without a struggle. The earth was scuffed and in places bushes were trampled and broken. At one spot there had evidently been a major scuffle, for there was an imprint in the soft earth as though someone had fallen heavily, and on the ground were some scattered coins that had apparently tumbled from a pocket. A few feet farther there lay a plastic bottle containing several pills. Betsy picked the bottle up, noting that the name on the label was “Brian Griffin.”

  She hastened her footsteps, and suddenly she was upon them. Pulling herself to a halt, she drew in her breath with a combination of shock and delight. There on the ground before her, tied and blindfolded, lay Mr. Griffin. The startling part was that he did not look much different than he did in the classroom. The blindfold across his eyes only slightly diminished the severity of the sharp nose, the neat mustache, the straight, firm mouth. His shirt and jacket were smeared with dirt, but the neatly knotted tie was perfectly in place.

  Betsy’s mood of anger fell away as though it had never existed.

  “It’s just like he was getting ready to give a lecture!” she breathed in amazement.

  Jeff motioned her to silence. Coming over to stand beside her, he said in a low voice, “You can’t talk out like that. You’ve got to put on an accent or talk through your nose or something. We don’t want him to recognize our voices, remember?” He glanced behind her. “Where’s Sue?”

  “She wouldn’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. She just didn’t want to. She looked like she’d been crying.”

  “That’s all we need, to have her crack up on us.” Jeff put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m glad you’re a girl with guts. Griffin’s a fighter. He’s not the pushover we thought he’d be. We may have to rough him up a little to get him where we want him.”

  “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Betsy said excitedly. She found her breath coming faster as she and Jeff moved closer to the man on the ground, standing so that they could stare do
wn into his face.

  Mark and David were on their knees beside him.

  “So how does it feel?” Mark was asking in a high, nasal twang, as though he had just been imported from the back hills of the Ozarks. “How do you like it being on the ground for a change? It’s not so great is it, being down where people can walk on you? Well, now you know how your students feel all the time.”

  Mr. Griffin lay silent. Only the straining of the tendons in his neck showed that he was conscious and listening.

  “Well, how does it feel?” Mark repeated. “We want an answer. Did you hear me—sir?”

  “Yes, I heard you,” Mr. Griffin said shortly.

  “Your answer—sir?”

  “My answer,” Mr. Griffin said in his cold, clipped voice, “is that if you know what’s good for you, you’ll untie this rope this instant. If it’s money you’re after, I don’t have any on me.”

  “We don’t want your money,” David said. “We’re not thieves.”

  “What are you then?” Mr. Griffin asked him. “Besides punks and kidnappers, that is?”

  “We are your students, present, past and future,” Mark told him, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly with the closest Betsy had ever seen him come to a smile. “We are representatives of every poor kid who has ever walked into your dungeon of a classroom. We come to bring you ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ We’re here to deliver revenge.”

  “If this is a joke,” Mr. Griffin said, “it’s not funny. It’s the sort of childish demonstration I’d expect from five-year-olds, not high school seniors. How many of you are there?”

  “A lot,” Jeff said. “Twenty—twenty-five—thirty!” He glanced at Betsy and grinned. “Would you believe fifty—a hundred—everybody who’s ever had to take a class from you?”

  “That’s ridiculous. There can’t be more than three of you. I’ve only heard three voices. And all of you are boys.”

  Mark glanced up at Betsy and nodded.

  “Are you sure of that?” she asked, holding her nose as she spoke so that her voice came out as nasal as Mark’s had been. “I’m not a boy. There are a lot of us girls who hate you too, you know.”

  Mr. Griffin gave a start of surprise. Quite evidently he had not expected this. “Then there was another car,” he said. “Some of you came in another car.”

  “There are lots of other cars,” Jeff said. “Dozens of them. I told you, we’re all here. None of us wanted to miss this.”

  “Miss what?”

  There was a slight pause. Then Mark said, “Nobody wanted to miss watching you die.”

  “You want me to believe that you brought me here to kill me? Just because you don’t like the way I teach? That’s ridiculous.”

  “You used that word before,” David said. “You’re repeating yourself. You shouldn’t use the same adjective twice in a row like that, you know?”

  “You’re sick,” Mr. Griffin said.

  “All of us?”

  “All of you who are in on this. I’m sure it can’t be the entire class. There can’t be that many teenage monsters wandering loose around Del Norte.”

  “Talking about ‘sick,’” Betsy volunteered suddenly, “look what I found!” She held up the pill bottle.

  The boys turned to look at her.

  “What is it?” Jeff asked.

  “A container of pills I found back there on the path. It’s Mr. Griffin’s. It’s—” She studied the label—“This can’t be right. It says it’s ‘nitroglycerin.’”

  “You mean the explosive?” David broke into laughter. “Maybe he was one jump ahead of us and was planning to blow up the school.”

  “ ‘Take one for pain of angina,’” Betsy continued reading. “What’s that?”

  “Yeah, what’s that, Mr. G.?” Mark gave him a hard prod with his balled fist. “Wake up down there. Don’t take a nap onus.”

  “Untie these ropes,” Mr. Griffin said icily.

  “I guess he doesn’t want to answer.” Jeff took the pill bottle out of Betsy’s hand, opened it, and poured a few pills into the palm of his own hand. “Is this stuff really nitroglycerin? Will it blow up?”

  There was no response from the man on the ground.

  “Let’s try it and see.” Bending down, he placed the pills in a small pile on the top of a flat rock. He picked up another, smaller rock and held it poised over them. “How high will it blow, Mr. G.? Is this gonna shake the forest?”

  “It won’t detonate,” Mr. Griffin said. “There’s not enough explosive in those to amount to anything. They’re for medical use only.”

  “They won’t explode, huh? Well, we’ll see about that. Stand back, everybody.” Jeff brought the stone down hard and the pills crumbled into powder. “Well, hey, now, he was telling the truth. Nothing happened.”

  “Put those back in my pocket,” Mr. Griffin said.

  “He can’t. They’re gone.” David was leaning over him, reaching to check the rope around his wrists. He paused and then asked in his natural voice, “What’s that ring?”

  “My wedding band.”

  “No, the other ring. The one with the tree on it. I’ve seen that before someplace.”

  “Watch your voice,” Mark hissed.

  “What’s the ring with the tree?” David struggled to force his voice into an accent that was a mixture of French and Spanish, but his eyes did not move from Mr. Griffin’s right hand. “Have you always worn that ring?”

  “It’s my college ring. Yes, I’ve always worn it. How long are you going to keep playing this game? Take off the blindfold. I want to see who you are.”

  “How about begging us, Mr. Griffin?” Mark said quietly.

  “Begging you? To take off the blindfold?”

  “We want to hear you beg.” Mark’s eyes were shining dark pockets under the half-lowered lids. “To take off the blindfold, sure. To untie you, sure. But isn’t there something more worth begging for? Like your life?”

  “You really want me to believe you’re planning to commit murder?”

  “You’d better believe it, because it’s true.”

  “Why? What would you gain by doing an insane thing like that?”

  “I told you before—revenge. Revenge for every stingy, cruel, rotten, stinking thing you’ve ever done to us, any of us. You made us crawl—now, you shit, we’re going to make you crawl. Beg us, Mr. G.! Plead with us! Let’s hear you whine!”

  “I most certainly will not,” Mr. Griffin said.

  “God, he’s a stubborn bastard,” Jeff said under his breath to Betsy. “You’ve almost got to like him a little, you know?”

  “I don’t like him.” She moved closer and bent over, studying the man’s face. She had never been this close to Mr. Griffin before. She could see the afternoon growth of hair prickling beneath the smooth white skin and the black mustache moving slightly with the breath from his nostrils. His neck was thin and pale and his Adam’s apple jutted out like a doorknob. She thought, he’s ugly. Even uglier than the policeman. In her mind the two images drew together, overlapped, and became one. If she were to remove the blindfold, she knew she would find beneath it the policeman’s cold, insolent stare.

  “Make him cry,” she said to Mark. “I want to see him cry.”

  “He’ll cry, all right. We’ll make him cry if it takes a week.” Mark’s face was flushed and feverish looking. “How about a nice, slow death, Mr. G.? Like lying right here on the ground and starving to death?”

  “I don’t believe you would do that. You have too much to lose.”

  “We don’t have anything at all to lose. All we have to do is go home and leave you here. Nobody will ever find you. Nobody knows about this place but us.”

  The man on the ground made no answer.

  “Look,” Jeff said, aside to Mark, “time’s running out on us. We need to get back if the things we’ve set up are going to work. Maybe we ought to loosen the ropes so he can work his way out of them and take off. What do you think?”r />
  “I think you’re nuts,” Mark said. “He doesn’t get out of here till he begs. We agreed on that.”

  “But it doesn’t look like he’s going to.”

  “He’s going to. Don’t you worry your head about that. He’ll break.”

  “But we’re out of time.”

  “Then we’ll leave him,” Mark said.

  “Leave him? You mean right here?”

  “It’s as good a place as any.”

  Mark got to his feet. “Do you hear that, Mr. G.? You’re in for a long, cold night. Want to change your mind?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Your wife will worry about you.”

  “I’m sure she will. She’ll also call the police.”

  “A lot of good that will do her. They’ll never look for you here, you can be sure of that.” Mark dropped his hand to David’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s with you? Wake up, man.”

  “I’m with you.” David got up slowly. “Look, let’s have a talk.”

  “What about? There’s nothing to talk over.”

  “Yes, there is. Come down this way.” He drew Mark a few yards downstream and dropped his voice. “We can’t do that. It’s carrying the game too far. Why don’t we take him back now, the way we planned? He won’t forget today, that’s for sure. We’ve scared him plenty. That’s what we were after, wasn’t it?”

  “He hasn’t begged yet. He’s got to beg.”

  “That really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, just saying the words?”

  “It matters to me.” Mark’s voice was like a gray steel knife. “He made me beg, remember? ‘Please, Mr. G., let me back into your class. I’ll be a good boy. I won’t cheat again.’ And then he wouldn’t do it. ‘Next semester,’ he said. ‘Next semester you can take it over again.’ He had me where he wanted me, didn’t he? No English credit, no graduation. And the principal backed him up. No other English class would do. It was Griffin’s or nothing. Remember?”