A Farewell to Legs: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,81
and slammed my fist down like Bogart in Casablanca, except I wasn’t mad at Ingrid Bergman. Why hadn’t I just gotten up the courage to go talk to those parents? Was there still time to call them on the phone and tell them to go ask their kids if they were delinquents? This was probably going to lead to Anne losing her job after her contract was up, and after all my talk about what a good friend I am and how I appreciate all she’s done for Ethan, I had done nothing.
I was a bad friend. I was a bad person. I didn’t deserve to own such a fine dog.
The dog chased his ball into the kitchen, picked it up and ran out again, to much laughter. Leah, who had been chasing him, stopped giggling when she saw the look on my face. She suddenly reverted to the adorable six-year-old she used to be, and sat on my lap. I held her close, trying to forget that I was the scum of the universe.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?” she asked, stroking my cheek.
“I’m just a little upset, Puss,” I told her. “I promised someone I would find something out for them, and then I couldn’t, and I’m upset that I let them down.”
“Oh,” said my daughter. “That’s too bad.”
Yeah. That’s too bad. And wait until your next principal is some discipline-obsessed Nazi who’ll probably give your children detention for being cute. Luckily, I wasn’t blowing this out of proportion.
“I know,” I told Leah. “I’m sorry I’m not being happy about Warren. I’m just upset with myself, not anybody else.”
She gave me a Leah hug, which is rumored to be able to cause a smile on clinically depressed people for whom Prozac is a breath mint. I smiled weakly and hugged her back. Leah got up off my lap and headed out of the kitchen. No sense sitting here with a big old drag like this guy when there was a fun dog to play with.
At the edge of the dining room, she stopped and looked at me. “What were you supposed to find out, Daddy?” she asked.
I sighed. There was no point in trying to evade the question. “I was supposed to find out who threw the stink bombs in your school,” I told my daughter.
She got a strange look on her face, one that indicated that I must be on an intellectual level just a hair below Warren’s. “Susan Mystroft threw the stink bombs,” she said in a voice dripping with superiority. “Everybody knows that, Dad.” And she turned and walked out of the room, as I heard Abby yell, “no, no, Warren, not there!”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
I blinked a couple of times, then stood up. “Ethan!” I yelled. “Get in here!”
“What’d I do?”
“Nothing! Get in here now!” He showed up in a few seconds, over Abby’s pleas for paper towels and rug cleaner. Ethan looked worried, like I was going to kill him whether he’d done something wrong or not.
“Ethan! Who threw the stink bomb in the girls’ locker room?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Susan Mystroft. Why, did somebody say that I. . .”
“No!” I handed him the rug cleaner and paper towels. “Give these to your mother.”
He did that while I raced to the wall phone. I pushed the speed dial button marked “Melissa,” and waited until Miriam answered the phone.
“Hi, Aaron,” she said breezily. “What’s new?”
“No time,” I told her. “Put Melissa on the phone.”
“Melissa?”
“Your daughter,” I reminded her.
“I know who Melissa is,” Miriam said brusquely. “Why do you need to talk to her?”
“Miriam, I’ve got no time. Please. Melissa, now!”
In seconds, Melissa’s usually confident voice came on the line, sounding like a tiny bear cub looking for its mother. “Um, hi, Aaron,” she said. “Is Leah there?”
“Melissa, who threw the stink bomb into the girls’ locker room?”
“Not me,” she said. “I wasn’t even there that day.”
“I don’t think it was you,” I told her. “I need to know who it was.”
“Susan Mystroft. Everybody knows that. She thought they’d close the school down and she wouldn’t have to take her science test, but she did it over the weekend, and the only thing they closed was the locker room.”
“What about the other ones?”
Melissa’s voice took on confidence, as she realized I wasn’t mad at her, and was proud she knew something a grownup did-n’t. “The one in the gym was because she doesn’t like Ms. Van Biezbrook,” she said. “She made Susan do sit-ups, and Susan doesn’t like sit-ups.”