Шарлин Харрис - Small Kingdoms and Other Stories

“Now this man has shown up, making this weird claim, and his conversation is irrational,” Anne continued. “Could he be harmless? I hate to call the police on someone who’s so… disoriented.”

“You poor thing,” Lois said indignantly. “I’m so sorry. You really need to talk to a psychologist, not me, I’m just a school nurse.”

“To heck with just, ” Anne said. “I’ve noticed how good you are with distraught students.”

Lois tried to hide her rush of pride. “Thanks,” she said. “But really, this man sounds as though he might need to be hospitalized. What a strange fixation! You’d never seen him before?”

“Never. Is that not weird? I have no idea where he came from or who he is. Maybe I’ll never hear from him again.”

“I hope that’s the case,” Lois said promptly, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I’m just glad I’ve got a good security system at home,” Anne said. The nurse patted Anne’s shoulder. Anne suppressed her snarl. Instead, she looked brave and worried.

The rest of the day passed quietly.

That evening, Holt stopped by Anne’s house to tell her he’d heard from David Angola. No one from David’s staff had recognized the photograph Holt had taken. “But my P.I. tells me that Tom Wilson is staying at a Best Western close to the interstate. And he got into the room when Wilson went out for dinner. He took pictures of everything in the room.”

Holt and Anne pored over them. Holt had a second laptop and a second account under another name for just such transactions; he didn’t want them on his work laptop.

Just in case.

The sequence of pictures started with a shot of Wilson’s rental car. Then the private detective had moved into Wilson’s room and photographed an open suitcase, a cheap, black roller bag.

Wilson’s clothes were absolutely average: khakis, plaid shirts, boxers, loafers, all national brands and easily purchased at any shopping center in America. Nevertheless, Holt and Anne examined each picture with a magnifying glass, just to be sure.

The first interesting discovery was that Wilson had more cash than Anne would have expected. Of course, there was no way to tell how he’d come by it. He could have withdrawn it from his own ATM. But there was no transaction slip with it, so maybe the cash had been a payment.

The only other subject of the private eye’s camera was the inside of Wilson’s shaving kit. Disposable razors, shaving cream, comb, Tylenol, toothbrush, and toothpaste. But also, a prescription: pills in the usual golden-brown plastic cylinder. “Why didn’t he turn the pills over so we could read the label?” Holt muttered. When they looked at the next picture, they found the private eye had done just that.

The prescription was for Risperidone.

“That’s for treating schizophrenia.” Holt was grim. “If Wilson is sick enough to be taking it, he’s unpredictable. I assumed we were dealing with a person who could appreciate consequences. We’re not.”

They found out just how unpredictable Tom Wilson was the next day.

Anne was standing in the hall outside her office during the senior lunch period, which tended to be the noisiest. The bell rang, and the oldest kids swarmed out of their classrooms to go down the central hall that ran the length of the school, culminating in the cafeteria. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades had all eaten and returned to their classrooms. Getting the seniors to be reasonably quiet as they passed the crossing halls that housed each grade was nearly impossible, but Anne’s presence had an effect, especially since she could greet most of the kids by name.

Two of Holt Halsey’s baseball players went by. “Chuck, Marty,” Anne said. “I’ll be at the game this afternoon.”

“We’ll win,” Chuck said confidently. He and Marty paused to talk. Anne was popular with the baseball players, due to her status as Coach Halsey’s girlfriend.

Anne’s back was to the front doors as she listened to Marty’s analysis of the Panthers’ pitching roster. So she missed Tom Wilson’s entrance through the main doors, his passage through the metal detector without a beep. The startled faces of the boys warned her. Anne swung around, alerted by her survival sense.

Wilson was smiling, his teeth gleaming in the overhead lights.

He decked her. Anne could have taken the blow easily, and it took every scrap of her self-control to keep from leaping on the man and dislocating his shoulders or breaking his arms. But she had to go down, because Principal Anne DeWitt would not know how to deflect a punch.

Anne landed on her back on the linoleum. It was in character for Anne DeWitt to lie there, breathless and stunned. To her immense gratification, Chuck and Marty landed on Tom Wilson like a ton of bricks.

It was all Anne could do not to smile, though she was bleeding from a bitten lip.

The whole school thought it was romantic that Anne had been saved by her own students, and Anne’s popularity soared. It was also delightful that Coach Halsey had dashed out of the teachers’ lounge and ploughed through the crowd of students like an ice-breaker. Coach had checked that the police had been called (they had, by multiple cell phones), that Anne was conscious and wanted to stand (no, she had to wait on the paramedics, Lois Krueger insisted), and that Wilson was being restrained by the students until the police arrived (there might have been some unnecessary roughness involved).

Tom Wilson smiled through the whole episode.

Holt told Anne that night, “I had wondered if the Risperidone might be a cover, or a plant. But he needs it.”

Anne’s face was bruised, and her lip swollen, but since Wilson didn’t know how to hit, nothing was broken or fractured. She glanced in the mirror and away. No one likes to look battered , she told herself. “It took everything I had to just lie there. It was demeaning.”

“But way smart,” Holt said practically. “You’re certainly the darling of the school now.”

“That’s great, but I guarantee the school board is going to have questions about this,” Anne said. “They’re going to wonder why this first husband—one I completely deny having married—is stalking me. They’re going to think I did something to spark this incident. They’re going to wonder if he’s—by some weird chance—telling the truth.”

It was true. Rumors were flying fast and furious through Colleton County. People who’d never heard Anne’s name before were talking about her now. In a very short time, Anne realized she was in peril. Sympathy had swung to curiosity, and then to gossip.

A story like this was not what the people of Colleton County wanted to hear about their high school principal.

“Who would want such a thing?” Anne said to Holt, as she pulled lasagna out of her oven. “Who wouldn’t know my original name, and yet want me disgraced or dead? Because if Wilson had brought a gun, I would have been bleeding all over the Travis High floor. He didn’t even slow down at the metal detector. He could have shot me from there.”

“Someone that crazy… if he knew your real name… he would have said it by now,” Holt agreed. “He doesn’t know. But who have you scared or angered that much, as Anne DeWitt?”

“Well, Delia was a ‘suicide,’” Anne said. “And no one has ever hinted any different. I think that’s out. We adjusted Sarah Toth’s situation. We fine-tuned a couple of others. What about your ball-player?”

Holt was getting plates out of the cabinet, and he turned with them in his hand. “The last time I saw Clay’s parents they couldn’t stop talking about what a success Clay is having at U of A. He’s not the starting pitcher, but he’s gotten on the mound several times. They’re in hog heaven.”