P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, ma’am-”

This sent the girls into a spasm of giggles and the principal shushed them.

“I need to talk to you in private,” Louis said. “It’s about one of your students.”

The girls giggled again, and the woman abandoned her plate of turkey and mashed potatoes and steered Louis toward the entrance. Louis pulled out the Ardmore police ID, and the principal looked at it in surprise.

“What is this about, Officer?” she asked.

“I’m trying to trace one of your students who disappeared.”

The principal let out a sigh.

“Is this about Sharon?” she asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Louis said. “I don’t have a name yet. Just this.” He pulled a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket and held it out.

She took it, turning it over in her fingers, feeling the ring through the plastic. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

“Can we go somewhere quiet and talk?”

She nodded and started back down the hall. Back in her office, she shut the door and indicated a chair to Louis. She was still holding the evidence bag as she sat down across her desk from him.

“Who is Sharon?” Louis asked.

“Sharon Stottlemyer, one of our students here. She disappeared last year.”

“Disappeared?”

The principal nodded. “No one really knows what happened. One day she was here and the next. . she wasn’t.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Miss Wigginton was looking at Louis with great curiosity. “The police already talked to me a year ago. They talked to everybody around here. Why are you here? And why a policeman from Ardmore?”

Louis nodded toward the bag. “We found the ring in a grave near Ardmore. We think whoever owned that ring was murdered.”

She set the evidence bag on the desk and shut her eyes. Louis waited for her to recover her composure. When she opened her eyes, they were teary.

“I knew she didn’t run away,” she said softly.

“Pardon?”

“Sharon. The police thought that’s what happened to Sharon. That’s what they told her parents, that she ran off. But I knew that wasn’t it.”

“So you knew her?” Louis asked.

Miss Wigginton nodded slowly. “We only have three hundred kids here. I know them all. Some better than others, but I know them all.”

“Did you know Sharon Stottlemyer well?” Louis asked.

“She was a quiet girl,” the principal said. “Not one of the popular kids. She was on the fringes like some are.” She paused, thinking. “Eccentric, moody, always wore black and came in one morning with her hair cut off and dyed black. I remember at graduation, when she came up onstage to get her diploma, she shook my hand and gave me this little smile and said, ‘I’m outta here, Miss Wiggs.’”

“What about friends?” Louis asked.

Miss Wigginton was staring at the ring on the desk and she looked up at Louis. “Sharon had one very good friend, if I remember.”

She rose suddenly and went to a shelf, pulling down a dark green book. It was a yearbook, Louis saw, as she brought it to the desk. She flipped to the back and then turned the book around. “This is Sharon,” she said, pointing.

Sharon Stottlemyer wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense. Her hair was cropped like she had cut it off herself and dyed a flat black. Her eyes, rimmed with heavy black liner, held a sadness that the photographer, in his desperation to extricate a happy senior portrait, had been unable to disguise.

Miss Wigginton turned the page. “This is Allison Deitz, her best friend.”

Louis noticed that Allison Deitz had been a junior last year. “Is Allison still here?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s a senior now.”

“I’d like to talk to her,” Louis said.

Miss Wigginton hesitated. “I’d like to know more first,” she said. “How do you know Sharon was. . was. .”

“We found the ring in a shallow grave on the grounds of a hospital down near Ardmore,” Louis began.

“Hospital? You mean Hidden Lake?”

Louis nodded.

“What was Sharon doing at Hidden Lake?”

“That’s what I need to find out. Can I talk to Allison, please?”

The principal didn’t hesitate. She punched an intercom button and told her secretary to summon Allison Deitz to the office. An uncomfortable silence filled the small office as they waited. Louis could see the questions in the principal’s eyes. After a few more minutes of silence, the secretary opened the door and ushered in a plump girl. She looked up at Louis curiously from between two curtains of dyed black hair.

“Have a seat, Allison,” Miss Wigginton said, indicating a chair near Louis.

Allison slid into the chair, clutching her loose-leaf binder to her chest. Her nails were purple and she wore a ring on every finger, one of them a huge skull.

“Allison, this is Mr. Kincaid,” the principal said gently. “He’s a policeman and he needs to ask you some questions about Sharon.”

The girl’s heavily lined blue eyes came up quickly to Louis. She seemed to shrink in the chair. The principal nodded to Louis. He slid his chair closer.

“Hello, Allison,” he said.

She murmured a hello back.

“Miss Wigginton tells me that you were Sharon’s best friend,” he said. “Is that true?”

She nodded.

“I know this might be hard for you to talk about, but I’m trying to find out what happened to her, and you can help me with that.”

“Sharon’s dead, isn’t she?” the girl said.

Louis glanced at the principal, then looked back at Allison. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because I know she didn’t run away like everyone says,” Allison said. “She would never do something like that and not tell me. She just wouldn’t. We told each other everything.”

“Allison,” Louis said gently, “do you know what Hidden Lake is?”

Allison shifted in her chair, clutching her binder tighter.

“It’s a hospital,” she said softly.

“Do you know why your friend might have gone down there?”

Allison was quiet, her eyes downcast.

“Did you or she know anyone who lived around there?”

Silence.

“Maybe she went to visit someone in the hospital?” Louis prodded.

A bell rang out in the hall and the muffled noise of the kids changing classes filtered in to them. Allison sat there, motionless, her eyes on the floor. Louis focused on her hands clutching the binder. Her knuckles were turning white.

“Allison, you have to help me,” he said. “Please.”

When the girl looked up at him, her eyes were filled with tears. “I told her not to go there,” she said. “I told her there were crazy people at that place.”

“Why did Sharon go to Hidden Lake, Allison?” Louis asked.

The girl shook her head slowly, shutting her eyes tight as the tears fell, leaving black streaks on her cheeks.

“Allison. .”

“She made me promise not to tell anyone,” Allison said. “I’m sorry. . I’m sorry. I know I should have told, but I promised Sharon I wouldn’t.”

“Did Sharon go there to see a doctor?” Louis asked.

Allison’s face was hidden behind her hair. She ran a shaking hand over her face, sniffling.

“Allison, did Sharon go to Hidden Lake to see a doctor?”

An almost imperceptible nod of the head. Louis glanced over at the principal, who looked stricken. She pushed a box of Kleenex toward Louis. He plucked out some tissues and held them under Allison’s bowed head.

Allison took them and wiped her face. She was crying outright now, small hiccups of sobs. Louis touched the girl’s hand.

“Thank you, Allison,” he said.

Louis looked at the principal. She rose slowly and nodded toward the door. Louis followed her out and closed the door behind him. Miss Wigginton folded her arms across her chest as she looked back through the glass door at Allison Deitz.