Jonathan Kellerman - When The Bough Breaks

"Yes. I've said too much, haven't I?"

"In a closed system," I persisted, "publicity is the last thing the establishment wants."

"Of course. Jedson is an anachronism. It survives the twentieth century by staying small and keeping out of the headlines. My instructions were to wine you, dine you, see that you took a nice little stroll around the campus, then escort you off the grounds with little or nothing to write about. The Trustees of Jedson don't want exposure in the Los Angeles Times. They don't want issues like affirmative action or equal opportunity enrollment to rear their ugly heads."

"I appreciate your honesty, Margaret."

For a moment I thought she was going to cry.

"Don't make it sound as if I'm some kind of saint. I'm not and I know it. My talking to you was spineless. Deceitful. The people here aren't evil, I have no right to expose them. They've been good to me. But I get so weary of putting up a front, of attending quaint little teas with women who can talk all day about china patterns and place settings - they give a class here in place settings, do you believe that?"

She looked at her hands as if unable to envision them holding anything as delicate as china.

"My job is pretense, Alex. I'm a glorified mailing service. But I'll not leave," she insisted, debating an unseen adversary. "Not yet. Not at this point in my life. I wake up and see the lake. I have my books and a good stereo. I can pick fresh blackberries not far from: ere. I eat them in the morning with cream."

I said nothing.

"Will you betray me?" she asked.

"Of course not, Margaret."

"Then go. Forget about including Jedson in your story. There's nothing here for an outsider."

"I can't."

She sat straight in her chair.

" "Why not?" There was terror and anger in her voice, something decidedly menacing in her eyes. I could understand her lover's flight to solitude. I was certain the mental deadness of Jedson's student body wasn't the only thing he'd been escaping.

I had nothing to offer her that would keep our lines of communication open, other than the truth and the chance to be a coconspirator. I took a deep breath and told her the real reason for my visit.

When I was through she wore the same possessive - dependent look I'd seen in her photograph. I wanted to back away, but my chair was inches from the door.

"It's funny," she said, "I should feel exploited, used. But I don't. You have an honest face. Even your lies sound righteous."

"I'm no more righteous than you are. I simply want to get some facts. Help me."

"I was a member of SDS, you know. The police were pigs to me in those days."

"These aren't those days, I'm not a policeman, and we're not talking about abstract theory and the polemics of revolution. This is triple murder, Margaret, child abuse, maybe more. Not political assassinations. Innocent people hacked into bloody gobbets, mashed into human garbage. Children run down on lonely canyon roads."

She shuddered, turned away, ran an unpolished fingernail along the top of a tooth, then faced me again.

"And you think one of them - a Jedsonite - was responsible for all of that?" The very idea was delicious to her.

"I think two of them had some involvement in it."

"Why are you doing this? You say you're a psychiatrist."

"Psychologist."

"Whatever. What's in it for you?"

"Nothing. Nothing you'd believe."

"Try me."

"I want to see justice done. It's been eating at me."

"I believe you," she said softly.

She was gone for twenty minutes and when she returned it was with an armful of oversized volumes bound in dark blue Morocco leather.

"These are the yearbooks, if your estimates of their ages are correct. I'm going to leave you with them and search for the alumni files. Lock yourself in when I'm gone and don't answer the door. I'll knock three times, then twice. That will be our signal."

"Roger."

"Ha." She laughed, and for the first time looked almost attractive.

Timothy Kruger had lied about being a poor boy at Jedson. His family had donated a couple of buildings and even a casual reading of the book made it obvious the Krugers were Very Important. The part about his athletic prowess, though, was true. He'd lettered in track, baseball and Greco - Roman wrestling. In his yearbook pictures he resembled the man I'd spoken to days before. There were shots of him jumping hurdles, throwing the javelin, and later on, in a'section on drama, in the roles of Hamlet and Petruchio. The impression I got was that of a big man on campus. I wondered how he'd ended up at La Casa de los Ninos operating under a phony credential.

L. Willard Towle's photo showed him to have been a Tab Hunter - type blond in his youth. Notations under his name mentioned presidency of the PreMed Club and the Biology Honor Society, as well as captain of the crew team. There was also an asterisk that led to a footnote advising the reader to turn to the last page of the book. I obeyed the instructions and came to a black - bordered photograph - the same picture I'd seen in Towle's office, of his wife and son against a backdrop of lake and mountains. There was an inscription beneath the photo:

Under the inscription were four lines of verse.

It was signed "S."

I was rereading the poem when Margaret Dopplemeier's coded knock sounded on the door. I slid open the latch and she came in holding a manila envelope. She locked the door, went behind her desk, opened the packet and shook out two three - by - five index cards.

"These are straight out of the sacred alumni file." She glanced at one and handed it to me. "Here's your doctor."

Towle's name was at the top, written out in elegant script. There were several entries under it, in different hands and different colors of ink. Most of them took the form of abbreviations and numeric codes.

"Can you explain it to me?"

She came around and sat down next to me, took the card and studied it.

"There's nothing mysterious about any of it. The abbreviations are meant to save space. The five digits after the name are the alumnus code, for mailing, filing, that kind of thing. After that you've got the number 3, which means he's the third member of his family to attend Jedson. The med is self explanatory - it's an occupation code, and the F:med means medicine is also the family's primary business. If it were shipping, it would say slip, banking, bnk, and so on. B:51 is the year he received his bachelor's degree. M: /, 148793 indicates that he married another Jedson student and her alumnus code is cross referenced. Here's something interesting - there's a small d in parentheses after the wife's code, which means she's deceased, and the date of death is 6/17/51 - she died when he was still a student here. Did you know that?"

"I did. Would there be any way of finding out more about that?"

She thought for a mgment.

"We could check the local papers for that week, for an obituary or funeral notice."

"What about the student paper?"

"The Spartan is a rag," she said scornfully, "but I suppose it would cover something like that. Back issues are stored in the library, on the other side of campus. We can go there later. Do you think it's relevant?"

She was flushed, girlish, given over totally to our little intrigue.

"It just could be, Margaret. I want to know everything I can about these people."

"Van der Graaf," she said.

"What's that?"

"Professor Van der Graaf, from the history department. He's the oldest of the Old Guard, been around Jedson longer than anyone I know of. On top of that he's a great gossip. I sat next to him at a garden party and the sweet old thing told me all sorts of tidbits - who was sleeping with whom, faculty dirt and the like."