“I see.” Stewart looked totally confused. He probably wasn’t old enough to have any teenagers of his own.
“I’ll make this simple for you, Detective Stewart. Caitlin Anderson was a fringe girl. Even if she was going to kill herself, she would never have done it at school.” Stewart didn’t seem to be getting it. “Look, just last month she tried to get in with the jockettes by bringing a bunch of marbles to school from her mother’s glassblowing studio. Thought she could get them to sit down on the ground like fourth-graders and shoot marbles for fun. Social suicide.” Bad choice of words, Allie.
Detective Stewart must have thought so too, because he got all soothing on me. “All we’re trying to do is figure out how Caitlin ended up in that stall. So far, the only thing we know for certain is that she’d been a little down this year.”
“Of course she was down. She was an unpopular fringe girl, and her parents just split up. But there’s no way she’d decide to off herself, and then do it with a knife wearing her oldest swimsuit while she’s in a crummy change room stall surrounded by a lot of people who didn’t like her.
“Here’s how I see it. When swim class is in last period, Caitlin had permission to get out of the pool ten minutes early so she could make her piano lesson. Today Coach Flannigan kept me back to talk about some new team thing, and I was super-bored about it and I was watching the door to the change rooms. I can tell you that all the other girls went through it in clumps. Nobody in our swim class could have stabbed Caitlin without all of the girls being in on it, and that just wouldn’t happen, because most of the class is made up of two cliques, and they’d never side together on anything. But I figure there were maybe five minutes when somebody could have gone into the change room from the hallway, stabbed Caitlin, and gone back out before anybody noticed.”
I didn’t expect the guy to give me a medal, but I sure didn’t expect him to flash me a look like I’d handed him a squawking turkey in church or something. Then he stood up to let me know I was dismissed, which I thought was pretty rude considering.
“Thank you, Allison, this is very helpful. As I said, we’re looking into many possibilities.” Yeah, I’ll just bet he was. The way I saw it, the cops were so busy figuring out why the local jewellery stores kept getting robbed, they practically had to write off a kid like Caitlin as some crazy teenager.
Boy, I was ticked. I mean, it was bad enough that Caitlin died in the first place, but to have to sit there while Detective Stewart got snotty and told me he was wasting time on possibilities? That really burned me.
It burned Dex, too. I saw him the night before school opened again, in Walters’, our local department store, mostly because he saw me first.
“Can you do me a favour, Allie, and take this stuff through the cash for me?”
Geez. I still don’t get how Dex can say he’s all comfy about being gay and then go and ask me to buy his silk undies for him when he decides to get experimental. Hasn’t he figured out yet that anybody who single-handedly beats the Panthers five games in a row can pretty much do anything he wants in this town? I vetoed the yucky stuff he’d picked out and took him back to the ladies’ department. He shouldn’t have been asking the jockettes for fashion advice.
“I am so cheesed about Caitlin,” I told him while we looked for a leopard print thong in his size. I’d just told him about the stupid police thinking she might have done the depressed diva dive. “What did you do to get your name lined up with hers on that change room stall, anyway?”
“Nothing. Well, I helped her with her math homework a few times. Last time was the day before she died.” He looked really sad, and I knew how he felt. We were probably the only two kids in school who’d even bothered to get to know Caitlin.
“Who could have seen you together? Where did you study?”
“In the library, after last period.”
Well, that ruled out most of the planet. The library at our school isn’t exactly a zoo in normal hours, and once classes are over for the day, it’s deserted.
“Okay, so maybe whoever killed Caitlin just picked you because you’re popular and wrote your names on the inside of the stall door after stabbing her.”
“Was there enough time?” Dex is so practical. “If I’d done it, I would have been outta there right after doing my thing with the knife.”
“Okay, maybe the killer went early, wrote the graffiti inside the privacy stall, then waited for Caitlin to come in from the pool. Everybody knows she always used that stall to change.”
“Everybody? You mean the other kids, right?”
“Who did you think I meant?”
“Nobody gets a spare at the end of the day, Allie. All the other kids would have been in a class, not sneaking into the change room with a knife.”
“You mean, you think one of the staff did it?”
I was still thinking about what Dex said at school the next day, but I was super confused. Why would one of the staff want to kill Caitlin Anderson? Or any of us, for that matter? And how many of the staff would know about Caitlin always using the privacy stall? It’s not like that was a hot gossip item. Whoever it was must have known her pretty well. Maybe she’d been having an affair with a teacher? It happens, but I couldn’t imagine even Caitlin being dopey enough to want to sleep with any of the ones at our school. They’re all so geeky, like Mr. Dorbinette, who’s a birdwatcher, for God’s sake. Still, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to find out who’d been roaming the halls that afternoon.
“I didn’t hear about your special project, Allison. How nice.” Mrs. O’Reilly is the cutest school secretary ever, I swear. She looks like one of those sweet little garden gnomes, but without the hat.
“Oh, it’s really interesting, Mrs. O’Reilly. I get to draw a map of the school and then plot out where people go all day long, and figure out which rooms get used the most, and when, and stuff like that.”
“It’s unusual to get such a complex assignment this late in your final year though, isn’t it?” Mrs. O’Reilly went through the school schedules and waddled over to the copier, and I tried not to feel guilty about lying to her.
“It’s a makeup thing. You know, I’ve missed a lot of class time lately.”
“Oh, yes.” She gave me the gnome smile that scrunched up her eyes, and she pinched my cheek. “Our little athlete!”
Of course I didn’t go over the lists in the hallway where a homicidal teacher or attendance cop might find me. I mean, I was skipping gym. I did it in the yearbook room, which was mostly deserted now that everything had gone to the printer, except for when some jockette decided to use it as extra locker space. It took me right up to the end of the last period, but I finally figured out that the only teachers not in a class when Caitlin was killed were Miss Rumsey and Mr. Clark, and everybody knew those two had taken off early that day for a long weekend in Vegas. We all figured they’d do a quickie wedding there, but it turned out they didn’t even get engaged.
I was writing down which teachers were close enough to the change room to kill Caitlin on a bathroom break when Sarah Ann Felding came in and yanked a jean jacket off the coat rack in the corner.
“Oh, hi, Allie!” She was acting all bubbly at me, but she looked like she was cheesed underneath, as usual. She’s one of those jockette girls who carries around grudges like they’re fashion accessories. I didn’t