Deadly Lessons. David Russell W.

hell out of my way, okay? I need to talk to Trish. I will not sit here and watch my life go to shit because of her.” His voice was steely cold. I actually felt just a little threatened, at least enough to step aside from the door.

      “Okay.”

      “I’m just going to talk to her, all right? Maybe I can fix this.” Almost as quickly as his rage had come, it was gone.

      “All right,” I told him. It wasn’t.

      He put his hand on my shoulder momentarily, then walked out the door.

      Days like that rarely get better, and this day was no exception. The kids were kids, not wonderful, but no one went out of their way to make the day difficult for me either. Carl had largely taken that task on himself.

      The most disturbing part of the day came at lunch. When teaching days are going poorly, there are basically two approaches to lunchtime. The first is that you lock yourself away in your classroom and catch up on marking or maybe read the paper. I had already read two newspapers before arriving, and the thought of reading my law class’s assignments, in which they discussed—probably quite poorly—‘sexual harassment in the workplace laws’, seemed a little too much to bear on this day. So I went to option two, which was to join my colleagues in the faculty lounge for empty chit-chat, bitching shop talk and plans for Christmas vacations. I can only spend so much time with adolescents before I need a bit of adult face time.

      Walking into the staff room, I bumped headlong into Carl. It was as though he didn’t see me. Without so much as an “excuse me,” he shrugged by me and headed back towards the science wing.

      “That was odd, don’t you think?” asked Christine, a petite English teacher who had walked in with me.

      “Yeah,” I replied nonchalantly, “he must be having a bad day.”

      “That’s just not like Carl. He’s always so friendly.”

      “Yeah. That’s always been my impression of him too.” I let it drop at that, not wanting to get drawn into a conversation in which I pretended to speculate on the cause of Carl’s surly disposition.

      For the second time in as many days, I made myself scarce after school, but not before looking in on Carl. To my surprise, he wasn’t in his biology lab, where you could almost guarantee he would have students in after school getting extra help on frog gutting and pig fetus dissecting assignments, but I couldn’t tell if he had gone for the day, and I didn’t really want to know. I knew he needed to blow off steam, and after the way we had parted before school, I didn’t want to get in his face until he had time to cool off and reflect overnight.

      I had to admit it didn’t look good. His unexpected outburst aside, I still couldn’t shake my gut instinct that Carl was telling me the truth. That being the case, I totally understood why he was so angry at the thought of Tricia going to the principal. He was right. He and I would know, but to everyone else around the school, Carl Turbot would be damaged goods once this got out. Even the innocent are usually believed to have done something to warrant this kind of accusation from a student.

      By ten that night, I was outright tired not only of mulling over Carl’s legal problems, but also of marking the aforementioned law class papers, so I surrendered to my Wednesday night weakness for Law and Order. Ten minutes into the program, and ten seconds into one of Fontana’s complaints about dirt on his Italian leather shoes, I put down my wine glass as the phone rang.

      “Hello?” I asked on the third ring. Damn, I wished I had set up the VCR to tape the show.

      “Winston? Winston Patrick?”

      “Speaking. Who is this?”

      “Hey, Winston. It’s Ralph Bremner. From school,” came the gruff voice of the school’s P.E. department head.

      “Ralph, what’s up?” I asked, not realizing that our meeting yesterday had cemented a friendship that warranted post ten p.m. phone calls.

      “Sorry to call you so late. It’s kind of official. The principal called and asked me to take a few names on the phone list. We’re having an emergency staff meeting tomorrow morning. I’m just helping to spread the word.”

      “Oh, all right. Any idea what it’s about?”

      “Yeah, unfortunately I do. It’s a bit of a doozy. It’s actually about that kid you were talking to in my gym class yesterday. Tricia Bellamy.”

      “What about her?” I asked, alarm rising in my throat like floodwaters.

      “Jeez, Win, did you get to know her at all yesterday?” Ralph asked tentatively.

      “Did I get to know her? Ralph, what’s going on?”

      “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Win. She’s dead.”

      Seven

      The boyish, peach-fuzzed police officer shook his head. “Some sort of emergency?” he asked.

      “An emergency meeting. I really need to be there.”

      “Yeah. Best if you get there in one piece, counsellor,” he replied, handing me back my driver’s licence.

      “Thank you, officer,” I sighed, reluctantly signing the traffic citation. I’m generally hesitant to inform a traffic cop of my profession—albeit in the past tense—as a member of the bar. Like most of the population, cops consider lawyers one of the lower species on the food chain. Trying to talk your way out of a radar trap on the basis of being a lawyer usually just makes them mad. But this one looked young enough that I thought I might be able to bluff my way out of the ticket. I was wrong.

      As a lawyer, I should have known better. As a teacher, I should have been going slower. I was clocked speeding through a school zone.

      I was operating on less than two hours sleep. Since Bremner had called with the news of Tricia’s death, I had paced a path in my living room carpet not even the vacuum would get out. Going to bed had been no use either. Despite my use of many of the devices various therapists and doctors have suggested, sleep had been an elusive beast that night. I had read an entire novel in hopeful anticipation of bringing on shut-eye. But no matter how hard I had tried, each time I had closed my eyes, my previous images of Carl romantically involved with Tricia Bellamy were replaced with images of Carl killing her.

      I had no idea how she’d died, where she’d been found or any other relevant details. Who knew how much more information the principal would be able to provide? It was even possible the two events were coincidental. If Tricia was the kind of student who could concoct wildly believable stories in order to wreak revenge for some imagined wrong, she may very well have been the kind of person who was engaged in extracurricular activities that would endanger her life. In fact, if she was making up the story she had told me about her and Carl, this kid was probably into all kinds of hallucinogens and was running with the type of crowd that could provide them for her. She also could simply have been hit by a car.

      Still, I couldn’t help thinking that Carl should have called me. He had to know if Tricia’s story had gone any further than the three of us, sooner or later the police would be looking at him as a suspect in her death. I had made it clear that I was his lawyer now; the fact he hadn’t called me to express concern threw all kinds of new doubts into my opinion of his credibility.

      An eerie gloom hung over Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School when I pulled into the parking lot. Usually one of the earliest to arrive at school in the morning, I could see that today most of the faculty was already present. Seeing a Vancouver Police squad car at the front of the building wasn’t an entirely unusual sight for an East Vancouver high school. Seeing five of them was.

      The administrative office of the school was the only place where activity was raging. Phones were ringing off the hook as hapless secretaries confirmed to anxious parents what they had already heard on their morning news shows: