“Has anyone called him?” Nora asked. She didn’t like Mary. Mary was a divorced, faded beauty who, thirty years and thirty pounds past her prom queen heyday, still acted like a bitchy high school girl. She’d circled around Adam when he first arrived, but Adam had been unmoved by her pushup bras and red-glossed lips no matter how many times she brought him coffee from the staff room. Now she lifted her shoulder in a who-cares shrug.
“I imagine. Isn’t he throwing that party today?”
That was when Nora started to worry about Adam, because that was when she remembered March 14 was Pi Day. 3.14, Adam had explained at last week’s staff meeting, was a national math holiday, and he was going to bring pies for all thirty-six eighth graders. The other teachers were surprised. They didn’t expect parties from Mr. Merkel. Or pie baking. Good for you, Nora had thought. In the hallway afterward, she told him it was a great idea.
“In Reno,” he said, “everyone in the math department brought a pie on Pi Day.” He smiled, but the sadness that had drawn Nora to him was still there. She’d gone to the University of Nevada in Reno herself, graduating with a major in anthropology. She’d planned to go to Africa to hunt the earliest traces of humanity. Or to Europe, to dig for Neanderthal bones in the caves of Spain. Anywhere, really, that was on another continent and promised a bunch of ancient mysteries that had nothing to do with Lovelock. Other people went to college and came back, as her best friend Britta never tired of reminding her, but Nora hadn’t wanted to come back, and she suspected that Adam hadn’t wanted to come here, either. Something in the way he carried himself, as if he were heavier than his bones, made her think his reason might even be as tragic as hers.
“I can help you bake,” she’d offered. She made a good rhubarb pie, her mother’s recipe.
“No, thank you. I can manage.” His eyes were normally a light gray behind his silver glasses, but that day they had a darkness in them. That darkness had almost been enough to make Nora insist, and more than enough to make her wish, later, that she had. Now, as she looked at Mary Barnes in her frilly pink blouse, she knew Adam wouldn’t miss Pi Day if he could possibly help it.
Dee was erasing the whiteboard when Nora walked into Adam’s classroom after second period. “Adam’s still not here?”
“No. He hasn’t called, either.” Dee snapped the eraser down on Adam’s desk with her long, organist’s fingers. The desk was so neat that even Dee, with her prim skirt and shellacked hair, looked disheveled beside it. An in-box, desk blotter, stapler, and tape dispenser were arranged with linear precision beside the district-issued Dell computer. The only thing that wasn’t utilitarian was a single chess piece, an ivory rook, that sat next to the stapler.
“He’s supposed to have that party after lunch,” Nora said.
“He’d better get here quick, then, hadn’t he?” Dee saw Nora’s frown and sighed. “Talk to Bettina if you’re worried. I’m too busy covering his behind.”
Bettina was the principal, a no-nonsense, white-haired woman who reminded Nora of Barbara Bush. Bettina would care more that Adam hadn’t arranged a substitute than about where he might be, so Nora went reluctantly back to her classroom. As it filled with seventh graders she tried to convince herself there was nothing to worry about. It was strange that Adam hadn’t called, but surely he would be here soon, and all would be forgiven in the glow of watching thirty-six eighth graders eat homemade pie.
Near the end of third period Bettina came on the loudspeaker and called everyone to the gym for an assembly that wasn’t on the schedule. Nora was in the middle of a lesson on Lovelock’s glory days, when covered wagons filled the Big Meadow, the last stop on the California Trail before the Forty Mile Desert. Every year she dutifully presented this piece of history as an exercise in civic pride, as it had been presented to her, even though she thought it merely highlighted the shabby ruin Lovelock had become in the 150 years since. Her students were grateful for the reprieve, but one look at Bettina in the doorway fanned Nora’s misgivings about Adam into full-blown anxiety. The principal was as pale as her white linen skirt, and as each teacher arrived she sent him or her to the staff room. Behind her, in the gym, Dee snapped orders at 130 confused and excited middle schoolers. Nora headed down the hallway with leaden feet.
In the small staff room the school’s seven other teachers and two counselors crowded together, buzzing about what was so urgent it couldn’t wait fifteen minutes until lunch. Nora wrapped her arms around her ribs and leaned against the counter beside the P.E. teacher, Josie Wilson, a bubbly girl who’d played soccer at the high school five years before and looked young enough to play there still. Then Bettina walked in with the sheriff, and everyone else stopped talking. Dee had let the students onto the playground, and in the silence they heard them: the shrieks of the sixth and seventh graders playing, and the lower tones of the eighth graders, gossiping, probing, posing.
The sheriff closed the door. Bill Watterly was the same age as Nora’s father, with a jowly face and the soft body of an ex-football player. His shoulders carried his weight with the ease that only a big man’s shoulders can, but they didn’t carry bad news well at all. He’d only been to the school once since Nora started teaching, when Chris Mitchell, a junior at the high school, shot himself with his father’s Colt and Bill needed to pull his sister out of class to tell her. His shoulders hadn’t been up to the task then, and they weren’t bearing up well now, either. Nora braced herself against the counter.
“We’ve found a body up by Marzen.” Bill looked at Bettina, and she nodded at him to continue. “We think it might be your new math teacher.”
The room erupted in shocked exclamations, but Nora barely heard them through the sudden chaos in her head. Adam Merkel was dead. Of course he was. That was why he wasn’t here. But he couldn’t be dead. He was having a party after lunch. He definitely couldn’t be dead up by Marzen. Marzen was a crummy little town in the hills where nobody from Lovelock went if they could help it. Adam probably didn’t even know where it was. Yet here was Bill Watterly, stocky and grim in his tan uniform, saying they’d found Adam’s body. Up by Marzen.
“How did he die?” she asked. Everyone looked at her, then looked back at Bill Watterly.
The sheriff puffed out his chest. “I’m not at liberty to say.” His belly hung over the black belt of his uniform and his crossed arms were smug against it. She’d misjudged him, Nora realized. He was enjoying this. She felt the slow tightening in her mind, like small screws winding shut, that meant she was about to lose her temper.
“Everyone in town is going to be talking about this by dinnertime,” she said. “If you don’t want speculation and rumors messing up your investigation, you should tell us what happened.”
A tide of pink crept up the sheriff’s thick neck, but a look from Bettina made him swallow whatever he was about to say. He drew himself up and looked around the room. When he felt he’d regained his authority he said, “You all might as well know what happened. We received a call this morning from the Marzen fire department. When we responded we found one male, deceased, about a mile from the town. The body was burned.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We’re treating it as a homicide.”