School Days - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,58

the cop said, and looked at Garner and Beth Ann.

Garner gathered himself.

"I'm afraid it was just a lovers' spat, officer."

The cop looked at Beth Ann.

"You agree with that?" he said.

She smiled at him, which was pretty impressive.

"Yes. I feel like a fool," she said. "But Roy and I ... we lost our tempers at the same time."

"You?" the cop said to me.

"I happened upon them, and intervened and managed to reconcile them."

The cop looked at me and shook his head. But he didn't comment.

"Either of you wish to file any kind of complaint?" he said to the happy couple.

"No, sir," Garner said.

"We're fine," Beth Ann said.

The trooper looked at me.

"Everything's fine," I said. "You people better learn to settle your differences another way," he said. "I get another complaint and I won't be so easy about it."

He and I both knew that was a crock. He hadn't even taken their names. But he and I both knew also that idle threats work sometimes.

"It won't happen again, officer," Garner said.

"Absolutely not," Beth Ann said and smiled again at the cop.

The smile was effective. It managed to suggest somehow that she'd like to have sex with him. Which, of course, could have been true. The cop looked at me again.

"That your Mustang there?" he said.

"I'll move it at once," I said.

He nodded.

"You all have a nice day," he said.

He walked back across the parking lot and stopped next to the second cruiser. He spoke to the second cop for a few minutes, then got into his own car and both of them pulled away. The three of us at our picnic table were silent for a bit.

Then Beth Ann looked at Garner and said, "You cocksucker."

"You keep your damned mouth shut," he said to her. "Just remember what I told you, and keep your damn mouth shut."

Garner stood then and stalked away toward his car, which he couldn't drive away in because I had him blocked.

"Could you move your damned car?" he said.

Chapter 59

BEFORE I MOVED M Y CAR, I reached in and took the keys out of Beth's. When Garner was gone, I walked back to the picnic table, sat across from her, and put the keys on the table.

She didn't speak. Neither did I. We listened to the steady sound of traffic from the pike. A burly woman in pink shorts and a white T-shirt walked a very small fuzzy white dog near us. I smiled at the dog. The dog paid me no attention.

"What do you see in him?" I said after a while.

Beth Ann looked at the table and shook her head.

"He's kind of soft and dumpy," I said. "But he's very annoying."

Beth Ann shook her head again. It might have been disagreement. It might have been regret. The white dog accomplished its mission on the small plot of grass, and the burly woman took it away. She was wearing some sort of sandals with elevated soles, and she walked with a lumbering wobble. From my inside coat pocket I took a copy of the photograph I'd found in Beth Ann's freezer and placed it on the table in front of her, next to her keys. She looked down at it without any reaction for a moment. Then she said, "It was you," and turned the photo facedown on the table, and put her face into her hands and moaned. I didn't say anything. No one was near us. I sat, quietly listening to the traffic and the wind and the occasional scraps of conversation that the wind brought us from people as they walked to their cars. The cooking smell from the restaurant was strong.

"You have it too," she said finally.

"Too?" I said.

"He has a copy."

"Garner?"

"Yes."

I sat back. It wasn't that I couldn't think of questions. I thought of too many, and they were all jockeying for position. With her face still pressed into her hands, Beth Ann said, "It's not what you think."

"I think it's a picture of you naked with Jared Clark when he was even younger than he is now."

She kept her face in her hands and shook her head again.

"Oh, God," she said.

While she was contemplating whatever ruins she saw in the palms of her hands, I got my questions sequenced.

"Garner has a copy of this picture?"

Face in hands, she nodded.

"How did he get it?"

"He ... he's so weird," she said. "At night, sometimes he goes through the school, searching lockers."

"What lockers," I said.

"Student lockers, faculty lockers. I don't know why. He said