office, and puts the package on the counter. It’s plastered with stickers, a few of Christmas trees and holly and Santas, many more of Scottish guys in kilts and Black Watch caps honking on bagpipes.
“So,” he says, taking his reader off his belt and aiming it at the address label. “What’s Nemo Me Impuny when it’s home with its shoes off?”
“The Scottish national motto,” she says. “It means No one provokes me with impunity. Mr. Griswold’s Current Affairs class has a partner school in Scotland, near Edinburgh. They email and Facebook and send pictures to each other and things like that. The Scottish kids root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, our kids for the Buckie Thistle Football Club. The Current Affairs kids watch the games on YouTube. Calling themselves the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society was probably Griswold’s idea.” She peers at the return address on the label. “Yup, Renhill Secondary School, that’s the one. Customs stamp and everything.”
“Christmas presents, I bet,” the delivery guy says. “Gotta be. Because look here.” He tips the box up, showing her DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 18 DECEMBER, carefully printed and bookended by two more bagpipe-blowing Scots.
Mrs. Keller nods. “That’s the last day of school before the Christmas break. God, I hope Griswold’s kids sent them something.”
“What kind of presents do Scottish kids send American kids, do you think?”
She laughs. “I just hope it’s not haggis.”
“What’s that? More Latin?”
“Sheep’s heart,” Mrs. Keller says. “Also liver and lungs. I know because my husband took me to Scotland for our tenth wedding anniversary.”
The delivery guy pulls a face that makes her laugh some more, then asks her to sign the window in his reader gadget. Which she does. He wishes her a good day and a merry Christmas. She wishes him the same. When he’s gone, Mrs. Keller grabs a loitering kid (no hall pass, but Mrs. Keller lets it go this once) to take the box to the storage closet between the school library and the first-floor teachers’ room. She tells Mr. Griswold about the package during the lunch break. He says he’ll take it down to his classroom at three-thirty, after the last bell. Had he taken it at lunch, the carnage might have been even worse.
The American Club at Renhill Secondary did not send the kids at Albert Macready a Christmas box. There is no such company as Pennsy Speed Delivery. The truck, later discovered abandoned, was stolen from a mall parking lot shortly after Thanksgiving. Mrs. Keller will excoriate herself for not noticing that the delivery guy wasn’t wearing a name tag, and when he aimed his reader at the package’s address label, it didn’t beep the way the ones used by the UPS and FedEx drivers did, because it was a fake. So was the customs stamp.
The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless. The school’s security protocols—the cameras, the main door that’s locked when school is in session, the metal detector—are good, but they’re only machinery. She is (or was) the human part of the equation, the guardian at the gate, and she let the school down. She let the kids down.
Mrs. Keller feels that the arm she lost will only be the beginning of her atonement.
2
It’s 2:45, and Holly Gibney is getting ready for an hour that always makes her happy. That may suggest certain low tastes, but she still enjoys her sixty minutes of weekday television viewing, and tries to insure that Finders Keepers (nice new digs for the detective agency, fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown) is empty from three to four. Since she’s the boss—a thing she still finds hard to believe—that isn’t difficult.
Today Pete Huntley, her partner in the business since Bill Hodges died, is out trying to track down a runaway at the city’s various homeless shelters. Jerome Robinson, taking a year off from Harvard while he tries to turn a forty-page sociology paper into what he hopes will be a book, is also working for Finders Keepers, although only part-time. This afternoon he’s south of the city, looking for a dognapped golden retriever named Lucky who may have been dumped at a Youngstown, Akron, or Canton dog impound when Lucky’s owners refused to pay the demanded ransom of ten thousand dollars. Of course the dog may just have been turned loose in the Ohio countryside—or killed—but maybe not. The dog’s name is a good omen, she told Jerome. She