“I’m so upset, I just had to have a few minutes to myself.” I put on a teary pout. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
Sarah Ann got that breathless look she gets when she thinks there’s good dirt coming, and she whipped a chair out from the table and sat down on it. “Of course I won’t tell. Is it about Dex? Did he dump you?”
“Dump me?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but I knew she’d fill me in if I gave her half a chance.
“Yeah. I saw you guys in Walters’ last night. Looked like you two were getting ready to, you know, hook up.”
The lingerie. She thought he was choosing stuff he wanted me to wear. Gross! I had to put my face down so she wouldn’t see me laugh. “It was so…heartbreaking,” I choked out after a minute. “We were just about to…you know…and I found out he was really fantasizing about my being…another girl!”
I peeked up and saw Sarah Ann looking like her head was going to explode. “Who?”
“You!” I just choked out the word, threw my head down on my arms and really let myself go. I figured she’d see my shoulders shaking and assume I was crying my eyes out. It was crappy of me, but I’d had a bad week.
When she started patting my back, I brought my head back up and made a big fuss about drying my eyes. I knew the only way I’d keep her attention now would be to spill some more stuff about Dex lusting after her. I launched into this story about his telling me that he’d tried to get her attention the other day in English class when Dorbinette went out of the room, but that Sarah Ann hadn’t noticed, and then everybody found out about Caitlin, and he hadn’t had another chance to make his move yet.
“But Dorbinette was out of the room for ages that day!” Sarah Ann’s eyes went all sticky-outie. “How could I have missed Dex like that?”
“Maybe it only seemed like a long time to you. Dex told me he hardly had a chance.”
“No way. Dorbinette was gone for nearly twenty minutes. He said he wasn’t feeling well and gave us an open book test. He was in the john forever.”
The look on her face was funny, and I really did laugh, which meant I had to cover by getting all bitter and jealous. “And you just did your test like a good girl instead of noticing Dex trying to make you be bad.”
“Well, I’m not going to make him wait any lo—” she hesitated, looking at my flushed face.
“It’s okay,” I said like I was being all noble and giving up the last rocky road bar on earth to a kid who’d never had one. Then I squeaked out “It’s you he wants” and threw my head back down onto my arms. This time she didn’t bother patting my back, and when I looked up she was gone. Well, Dex was more than paying his dues for getting me a reputation as a lingerie-buying slut down at Walters’.
Now I had more stuff to chew on. Like, if Dorbinette killed Caitlin, how come? I looked at my watch and decided I might as well check out Dorbinette’s classroom for a clue. He’d probably be on his way home by now.
On my way to Dorbinette’s end of the building, I passed Dex looking all wild and sweaty, like he’d been running. “You’re in big trouble, Allie,” he said as he speedwalked toward me.
“Aw, you know you love it,” I told him when we passed each other, and he slapped my tattoo-free tush.
Sarah Ann nearly knocked me down as I turned the corner to the change rooms, where Detective Stewart was standing with some other cops. Even though they’d had a whole weekend, plus another day when school was closed for the kids to have a grief break after Caitlin’s so-called suicide, it looked like the cops still hadn’t finished doing their detecting. There was yellow police tape over the door to the girls’ change room and everything.
“Hey, Detective Stewart,” I said when he saw me. “Taking a pretty close look, huh?”
“Just making sure, Allison,” he told me in that way-too-soothing voice of his. Aren’t cops supposed to be authoritative? Maybe he was trying to go easy on me, what with me being the one to find Caitlin and all. Please.
“Sure you’re making sure. You know I’m right, don’t you?”
He didn’t say yes or no, but he did tell me to come to him if I had any more information.
“I might,” I told him. “I mean, I will if I do, and I might. I’m not sure yet. I have to check something, and then I’ll come back, okay?”
I don’t think he liked that, but one of the other cops came over then, so I headed up the stairs.
Dorbinette’s classroom was empty, all right. I went in and over to the window to check the parking lot in case his car was still there, and it was, but since he was just opening the driver’s door, I figured I was okay to check his desk. Just as I was stepping back, though, I noticed a woman come out from the trees behind Dorbinette’s car and start talking to him. She looked like she was being sneaky. I squinted to see if I knew who she was, but the sun was too bright, and she was too far off. I decided I should go through the guy’s desk fast, while whoever it was kept him busy.
Even while I did it, I figured it was probably really stupid to bother looking. I mean, if they’d been having an affair and he killed her to keep it a secret, Dorbinette wouldn’t have kept nude photos of him and Caitlin in his desk at school. Would he? After I had checked all four drawers, I figured I was right about that if nothing else. He just kept ordinary things like his birdwatching binoculars and a calculator and a lot of rulers. But then I had a smart idea. If he did have something that he wanted to keep a secret, something most people would look for at his house, then it’d make sense for him to hide it at school. My mom does that all the time with her diamond rings when she goes out without them. She finds a place no thief would ever check, like underneath her treadmill, and she puts them there.
So I got under Dorbinette’s old oak desk. The only interesting thing was this gap at the back, between the drawers and the front part of the desk that all the kids see. I ran my hand up into the gap on either side and sure enough, I found a purple flannel drawstring bag taped to the back of the upper right drawer.
After I’d gotten up from under the desk and dusted myself off, I looked back toward the window and remembered the binoculars. Now that I knew he was hiding something for sure, I figured it was worth checking to see if that lady was still out there talking to him. I took the binoculars over and looked out and saw that she was Caitlin’s mother. I was just thinking how weird that was when Dorbinette looked up at the window.
I jumped back right away. Not that he would have recognized me behind those big black goggles, but I guess anybody standing at the window of his classroom with the binoculars from his desk drawer might make a guilty guy a bit mad. Then I looked down at myself and realized I was wearing my lime green flowered shirt, which a guilty guy might remember if he went looking for the kid who was messing around with his desk and watching him talk to some woman in the parking lot who was acting like she knew him as a lot more than just the English teacher of her dead daughter.
I crammed the binoculars back into the desk drawer and got out of there fast. I mean, I really flew down the stairs to the first floor, but Stewart and all his buddies were gone already. While I tried to decide what to do next, I weighed that drawstring bag in my hand, wondering what was in it, and stupid me, I checked it first instead of going straight to the office where Dorbinette couldn’t bother me without looking pretty suspicious.
It was so weird. The bag was full of marbles. Big ones mostly, with amazing colours and stuff in the centre, sort of like the kind Caitlin’s mother had shown us how to make when our art class had a field trip to her glassblowing studio, but nicer. More sparkly, somehow. I’d just dropped them back into the bag and pulled the drawstring when I saw Dorbinette coming down the hall toward me. He didn’t exactly look thrilled.