A+ For Murder

A+ For Murder

A Mystery Novel By Jonathan Brett

Copyright 2012 Jonathan Brett

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Dedication

To My Joy, who loves amateur detective stories and begged me to write one.

Acknowledgements

This book wouldn’t have happened if my supervisor at work didn’t suggest that I write a novel over the summer. Thanks, Denise.

Also, all amateur detective stories owe everything to the greats in the genre.

That’s why they’re the greats.

Chapter 1

Well, it wasn’t Cabot Cove, Maine. I mean, at least in the sense that it wasn’t Maine and there was no widowed mystery writer who lived in a nice house and solved mysteries.

The town I’m from is a small river town in Pennsylvania. By the way, our founders were a simplistic, unimaginative lot and called us Rivertown. Oh, and I’m not a widow (or widower, as the case may be), but my house isn’t half-bad and I do solve mysteries.

That’s just a hobby that I got into by accident. I’m an English teacher at the high school in town – go Mighty Minnows! My best friend is a cop. One day during the summer after my divorce, I got a little bored and rode with him to see what being a cop was like. I solved a couple minor issues he was looking into in our little small town and he thought it was a big deal.

But you don’t really care about that. You’re wondering why I compared my little town to Cabot Cove. Did you ever notice the general body count in Cabot Cove? How could a little Maine fishing village rack up a body count higher than an eighties Schwarzenegger movie and not be a ghost town? The truth is that I can’t answer that question, so I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it. But I can tell you that murder can happen in a small town without significantly decreasing the overall population of the town. Really. Trust me on this.

Murders aren’t a common occurrence in Rivertown, I mean, it wasn’t like we had a corpse on the ground every Thursday night at eight. But we had a few. And this is why my friend Jake – that cop I mentioned earlier – thought it would be a lark if I wrote down one of my adventures. As long as I didn’t make him look bad, of course.

But my story doesn’t begin there. It begins, as many stories do, with a girl. I’ll change her name for this story in case she reads it. I can deny it to my grave. In fact, I’ll change many of the names, just because. Anyway, it begins with a girl. Let’s call her Leigh. Leigh is another teacher at Rivertown High School and she started there almost right after my divorce. I’m an English teacher, so of course I believe in signs and foreshadowing. Leigh is an angel. The sun shines through her hair even on rainy days. Her eyes can pierce through the darkest gloom. She can…

Mister O’Brien, you’re spacing out again!

The problem with students is that they don’t understand a soliloquy. On the day this story begins, Leigh had walked past my classroom and had been framed, briefly, in the window in my door.

Right, I said. Sorry, Danny. Um, okay, where was I?

You think we were paying attention? Danny said. He looked down at the book in his hands like it was going to bite him.

You were explaining the difference between reading for a test and real reading, Muriel said from the desk right beside me. She lisped through her braces.

Yeah, that, I said. Danny and Muriel were my two best students. Muriel considered herself a superior life form than the other kids in the room and Danny’s truest talent was sarcasm.

I took off my glasses and cleaned them with my tie. I leaned on my desk and said, Sure, when you read to actually, you know, read, you spend more time on the words and looking for different meanings and so-forth. For standardized tests, they don’t actually want you to learn or understand things, they just want you to take the test the way they tell you to. So, looking at that packet I gave you, what’s step one?

All of the students looked down. I’ve been teaching for four years, so I almost know what I’m doing. I could tell that I had about seventy percent of the class engaged in this. Well, I’m making that statistic up. I mean, I’m an English teacher, so I’m really bad at math. I had well over half actually looking at the packet and trying to figure out step one. But what’s the problem with that, anyway? Sixty percent of statistics are made up – and, yes, I made up that statistic.

Is it the same as solving a mystery? Danny asked. One of Danny’s other skills was getting me off-task.

I wouldn’t know, I said. If I get Sergeant Stouffer in here again, you can ask him.

Danny rolled his eyes and a couple of the kids snickered.

Did anyone remember what step one was? I know we covered this at the beginning of the school year.

Yeah, and it’s almost over, so we’ve forgotten, Danny said.

Muriel sighed. Read the questions first so we can skim the content for the information they want us to vomit back at them.

I knew I could count on her for disdain. She did it naturally.

So, uh, you need to read the questions and begin to answer them, I said. I looked at my watch. And that should take you right up to the bell, where you will promptly explode out of here to enjoy this nice late-April day.

By playing video games and watching television, Danny said.

I sat down in my chair, which is a rare occurrence for me. Somehow, I had been more thrown by Leigh’s wandering by my door than usual. I mean, when I’m at school, I’m usually the textbook eccentric English teacher. I wear the uniform requested by my superiors – except I wear Converse All-Stars since they, believe it or not, never put in a dress code for footwear other than no flip-flops. They don’t require jackets, but I wear ties and will occasionally break out a jacket (not always tweed). My mind is usually filled with Englishy things. But Leigh threw off my groove, and it took me a moment to get it back.

I was lucky that this was my best class. Usually I found my disastrous electives stacked at the end of the day, but this year found me with an end-of-the-day English class that was made up of mostly good kids. The bad kids actually had a reaction to the medications given at lunch that made them kind of sleepy, so the only problem I had with them was keeping them awake. If this goddess-induced fugue had happened in my third period Honors class, I probably would have been eaten alive.

The bell rang and everyone exploded out. It’s funny to watch twenty-two tenth graders all try to go through the same door at once. I waited for the bottleneck to work itself out and then stepped out into the hallways of our school.

Rivertown High School was built in the 1930s, so it looks like it could work as Gotham High in a Batman movie: high ceilings, designs that could only be described as art deco, and even a bell tower that rose above the main building and had gargoyles on it for the Dark Knight to sit upon.

The halls and old lockers that creaked when I went here were now full with kids trying to hurry up and do whatever it was that kids their ages do.

You locked up when Miss Hepburn (yes, I’m using a pseudonym here) walked by, Muriel said. She and Danny were usually the last ones out of the room. Occasionally it was to talk to me, but it was mostly because they didn’t want to deal with the traffic jam in the door.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.

Pretend that you’re not as middle-schooly as we are all you want, Danny said. You should ask her out.

I smiled. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Have you ever seen Mister O’Brien ask someone out? Muriel asked.

I don’t want either of you discussing my love life.

Or lack of one, Danny said. I gave him a look over my glasses that I hoped carried a warning.

I saw him at a party once that my mom threw, Muriel began.

Oh, no, I said.

Yes, I saw it, Muriel said with a wicked grin. Her eyes sparkled. You walked right up to that blond and said…

I think you two should get going, I interrupted. The halls are clearing out.

You said, ‘Hi, my name is Matt.’

That’s a perfectly okay pickup line, Danny said. If your name wasn’t Mike.

Go away, both of you. My face was hot.

My point is, Muriel said, this is one teacher you should never go to for relationship advice.

He doesn’t give it anyway, Danny said. Come on, Muriel, I think we can go embarrass the art teacher again. It’s more fun when she gets flustered.

The two of them vanished into the ocean of adolescents. I slipped back into my classroom and sat in my comfy chair. I actually got into a fistfight over that chair. Anyway, I got into my chair and checked my email. The superintendent’s secretary sent out another email about the fundraising dinner that night. It wasn’t required for us to be there, but it was strongly encouraged, especially since it was the superintendent’s idea.

I counted six spelling errors and a subject-verb agreement problem in the email. It’s heck being an English teacher. I have my problems with commas, but I’m pretty good overall. Anyway, this was the same woman who sent us an email inviting us to join the Weeness Committee, so errors should be expected. My errors happen because I’m trying too hard not to miss anything (I almost typed to there, which would have been wrong).

Back to my story: I knew Leigh would be there. Maybe I could go and introduce myself by the wrong name.

That was the night when my little hobby of solving petty crimes got a bit more complicated.

Chapter 2

I did a couple of laps in the school pool before heading home to get ready for the fundraiser. One of our gym instructors came up with an exercise routine for me, and I’ve been trying to follow it since my divorce. I do pretty well during the school year.

I got the house in the divorce. I suppose I should be happy with that, but it’s a mortgage and I would have liked to be free and clear. Then again, I hated renting and didn’t like living in the middle townhome between couples who got laid far more often than I did.

If I described my house as a traditional American Dream home with a white picket fence and a perky apple tree, would you believe me? Yeah, probably not. It was a modest home, and if you know real teacher salaries, you would understand. We’re hardly rich, consistently paid below people of equal education levels, but I digress. It was an okay place, a little older, and I wish I could say it was haunted or had some sort of terrible, dark secret, but I can’t. The guy I bought the house from was a sweet old Mennonite who took fantastic care of it.

But you want to know what it looked like: it was a house. It had windows and doors, a front porch with a roof. It was gray with blue shutters. A big oak tree grew in the front lawn, obscuring part of the front from the street. It had a garage, but it wasn’t attached and was built sometime in the seventies, I think.

Good enough?

So I got home and shaved and showered. It’s always a good idea to look your best at these events. Truthfully, I hate things like this. I have to act like I really want to talk to a bunch of people when I’d rather be at home reading a good book. I fought with my hair for too long, trying to get it to look like I was British – if David Tennant can get his hair to look awesome while he’s saving the universe, why can’t mine look good when I just got a shower and the universe barely knows I exist? Speaking of my hair, you may think I’m crazy, but I’m sure there’s red it in. It’s mostly a light brown, but I can see red. Sometimes I wonder if my ex-wife left me because she didn’t see the red. She could see the small smattering of freckles and didn’t really like them. She didn’t like my straight nose, either, but she loved my chin. She said it was my best part – kind of like Cary Grant’s chin. I suppose that’s why I immediately shaved my head and tried to grow a beard when she left. I wanted to look badass, but I just looked silly. My moustache wouldn’t connect with my beard and the dimple in my chin made it look like I had a bald spot on the front of my face. I grew my hair back and I’m certain that it has more red it in now. But maybe that’s just the Irish talking.

I put on a suit and then put on my gold-rimmed glasses. My eyes, I think, are my best feature. They’re bright blue, bluer than my father’s. The glasses are a thin, light frame and I have to wear them because of an astigmatism that can be corrected by contacts, but is difficult to do so.

I looked at myself in the mirror and the suit looked good. I shined up my dress shoes and got back into the car I had just vacated three hours before, and the world was rapidly getting dark. Our big, gala event was being held at the ballroom in the only hotel in town. I’m sure the superintendent would pass me around as the crime-solving teacher again, trying to get more money for this or that. I remember when fundraising events were more dignified for schools, but that was a thing of the past. I don’t like politics – I can’t change it, so why waste my time? But I do wonder why recent political theory is to destroy public education and vilify teachers. What did we ever do to you except make you read The Jungle or Crime and Punishment?

Okay, so maybe we deserve it.

I got there early, which is this bad habit I have, and that’s where I conveniently overheard a conversation in the parking lot that will come into play later.

Woman: There’s no reason for you to tell anyone.

Man: What you worried about? Afraid it’ll hurt your precious reputation?

Woman: You’re a monster.

Man: I got information on so many people that this event could be as lucrative for me as for the district.

Woman: I could kill you! I…I could! I wish you would just die!

Man: Take a number and get in line, honey. Poison my drink if it’ll make you feel better.

At that point, I almost called out that if you take a number, then you have a seat. The point of a number was to eliminate the need of waiting in line. I fought that urge.

The man lit a cigar and I watched him from the shadows of a few trees that lined the parking lot. I could briefly see his face and noticed a hawk-like nose. I couldn’t see the woman, but I heard the click of her heels as she stormed toward the hotel.

The river roared as I used shadows as much as possible to work my way around the man without being seen. You never know when conversations like that would become important, so I didn’t want him to know I had overheard him. It sounded like he was intending to blackmail some people, so I planned on recounting the conversation for Jake when I got the chance.

Inside the building, the ballroom was decorated as tastelessly as it could be. Someone had the bright idea of painting a river mural on the walls and then putting up fake palm trees – and that was the usual way the ballroom looked! They added some faux-lantern lights and pictures of our mascot. Minnows are rarely the most intimidating of high school mascots. It gets really awkward when people are telling their mascots to roar and we have to – blow bubbles? Splash? Wiggle your tail?

The superintendent saw me immediately. He got away from the waiters and came over, offering his hand.

Mike, I’m so glad you could make it, he said. He grinned. Our superintendent was a young-looking man of fifty who had a respectable moustache. Think Tom Selleck.

I wouldn’t miss it for the world, I said. I tried to sound genuine.

Your father couldn’t make it? He disengaged the handshake and my hand felt like he had broken several bones.

He’s working.

Shouldn’t he be close to retirement?

I shrugged. Someone should tell him that.

The superintendent looked disappointed and then switched to practically gleeful. We have some business owners coming in for this! Real ones, too. Some good money to raise at this event.

I’m hoping it will work out well, I said. I didn’t add that requiring teachers to pay fifty bucks for dinner was