serpent. She knew exactly what it was, a drawing of Ragnarok. She had been teaching Seth’s class of juniors about Norse mythology so they could understand the pagan darkness in Beowulf better, where lives were ruled by wyrd. The wolf was Fenrir, who devours middle earth at the end of time. Under the drawing someone had written a note in runic letters: There is no one who will be spared.
And on the back of the page someone had neatly printed out a riddle:
A man tries to speak
with his throat torn
One woman shrieks
blood in the corn
Man in a pit
her without sleep
one drowns in shit
the other weeps
Wolves under moon
child in her skin
the end comes soon
she will suffer for her sin.
Someone knew. Someone knew about the notes she had been keeping.
The first note she discovered near the overhead projector, pleated in a neat square with her full name printed on the outside. It was Clara’s third day as a long-term substitute, and she needed to get the journals written out on the transparencies for first period. She unfolded the note, wondering who had left it there:
You have such a nice laugh, it makes me warm inside. But even when you are laughing your eyes look sad. You look like the loneliest person in the world.
Clara didn’t know what to do with it. She searched her mind for the faces of those who sat near the overhead, who might have slipped this note here. Part of her wanted to throw it away. Keeping it invited an intimacy. Keeping it meant the words printed there were true in ways she wasn’t ready to think about. She put it in her desk drawer, telling herself she would throw it away after school. But she never did, and every other day when she came in the notes were waiting for her in the same place, tucked carefully under the big bulky overhead.
He’s always gone at night. Where does your husband go? Where could he go with such a pretty wife at home? If you were mine, I wouldn’t leave you alone like that.
He was watching her. She was being watched even after school. But she always had that feeling, living in a small town for the first time in her life, like everything she did or said was being measured and judged. The handwriting of the notes was blocky, printed in all caps, and in places the ink smudged. Someone worked on these in the late hours.
She thought she knew the writer, even though there was never a name. She thought she caught it in the glint of his eye when he watched her up in front of the room. And as deeply as they disturbed her, a small part of her was flattered. She was pregnant, after all, a married woman. Any day, any time, she only had to turn the letters in to the principal. To tell him her hunch, but then so what? It’s not like she could prove anything.
The thing that troubled her most was why she held on to the letters afterward, why she had them still downstairs in a kitchen drawer under the hand towels, the pages folded and refolded so many times that some of the words blurred. She had wanted to turn them in when the sheriff came to interview her. She needed to show her husband. But by now it would have made her look guilty as well, and she hadn’t done anything, had she? She hadn’t encouraged him in any way. Or was it enough, sometimes to simply return his look in class, to stand talking as though there weren’t anyone in the room but the two of them?
I don’t know what to do anymore. Sometimes I watch you. Late at night. You keep a light on even after your husband has come home again. Do you feel me out there in the dark? I love you, dumb as that sounds. It’s what I wanted to tell you. One day I will find the guts to tell you with more than these words. I will tell them all in a way no one can forget.
HER HANDS TREMBLED AS she smoothed the edges of the paper she held now. Seth. She had seen him working on this very same drawing the week before the shooting, and now someone had brought it here to her door. Seth Allis Fallon. There had been nothing between them. The only thing between them was that she had wanted to mother him, a