School Days - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,40

the Internet."

"I'm not really sure. I know he spent a lot of time online, and the little that he would reveal to me of his inner life, he had some lurid fantasies."

"Like?"

"Violence. Dominance."

"And you feel he played those out online?"

"I know the Internet was his solace. He used to access websites that appealed to those fantasies."

"Got a name?"

"Of a website?" Beth Ann said. "No. He may have told me, but, frankly, I find them repellent."

"Porn?" I said.

"Perhaps. I did not investigate."

"How often did you see Jared?" I said.

"Not often enough, I'm afraid," Beth Ann said. "He was very reticent about getting help."

"How about Dell Grant?"

"No. I never spoke with him."

"So you don't have any theories about him."

"I can't, I'd merely be guessing."

"And what would you guess."

"No," Beth Ann said. "I won't speculate. If I had seen him enough, in a therapeutic setting, perhaps. But speculation is more about the speculator than about the, ah, patient."

"But Jared's behavior, you feel, was the result of bullying."

"Which was fed by fantasies of violent domination," Beth Ann said.

"Were the fantasies the result of the bullying?"

"I can't say. I did not have enough of him. Certainly one reinforced the other."

I nodded.

"Most of the time, there never is a clear reason," I said. "Kids do something like this. Theories are offered. None is established. Most of the time, we don't know," I said. "Do we?"

"Perhaps," Beth Ann said, "had the perpetrators spent enough time with a therapist for us to have a clear understanding of why they did it, they wouldn't have done it."

"And afterwards, there's all the clutter," I said.

"Clutter?"

"People trying to justify their behavior," I said. "People trying to deal with grief. People trying to deal with rage. People trying to cover up failures. People trying to place blame. People trying to shift blame. People eager for revenge. In effect, it's done now, and we've caught the bastards. What difference does why make?"

"One can understand that feeling. A lot of innocent people died, for no good reason."

"We don't know what the reason was," I said. "We don't know if it was a good one or a bad one."

"There is no good reason for people to be murdered."

"Maybe not," I said. "But that's the slippery slope to abstraction. I'm just trying to find out what happened here."

"Unfortunately," Beth Ann said, "we know what happened ... and I'm very much afraid that we'll never know why."

We both sat looking at the ground we'd replowed. Beth Ann was wearing a yellow flowered dress with ruffled shoulder straps and a low, square-cut bodice, which framed the ebb and fall of her bosom very nicely as she breathed.

"Did Jared do a lot of fantasy searches on the school computers?" I said.

"Oh." Beth Ann smiled. "Surely not. They are carefully restricted."

I nodded. Without doing anything, Beth Ann seemed to radiate sexual possibility. With Susan's absence, I was becoming steadily more preoccupied with sexual possibility, and neither Rita Fiore nor Beth Ann Blair was helping. I stood. Beth Ann said, "You have my card."

But what I seemed to hear was Would you like to come to my home in Lexington and have sex until the autumnal equinox?

"Yes," I said. "I have your card."

Chapter 39

THERE WAS A FOR SALE sign in front of the Clark home when Pearl and I parked in front and I got out. A sprinkler was watering the front yard to the right of the front walk. I heard the vacuum cleaner going when I came up the front walk. It shut off after I rang the bell, and in a moment, Mrs. Clark came to the front door wearing sandals and jeans and a white tank top. Her hair was done, however, and her makeup was on.

"Mr. Spenser," she said.

"I'm sorry to intrude again," I said. "But may we talk a little more?"

"Ned's not home," she said.

"You'll be just fine," I said. "I just need to ask a little more about Jared."

She didn't invite me in. But she didn't shut the door, either.

"Please leave him alone, Mr. Spenser," she said. "You can't help him. You can only make it worse. I've begged my mother to let it go. But she won't. She never does..."

She shook her head hopelessly.

"Mostly I'd just like to borrow Jared's computer for a few days," I said.

"Jared didn't, doesn't, have a computer."

"Has he ever?"

"No."

"Isn't that unusual?"

"Jared was an unusual boy," Mrs. Clark said.

"Did he ever talk about being bullied?"

"No."

"Would he have told you?"

"I don't think he was being bullied," she said. "I would