Diane Davidson - The Cereal Murders

Luminous scarves of cloud floated across the inky sky. The moon lifted from behind a shred of silver moisture, illuminating silhouettes of mountains to the west. The bright, frosty landscape rolled away from the headmaster’s house like a rumpled fluorescent sheet. Puddles of shadow from the guests’ footprints formed stepping-stones out to the van. At one point I skidded forward into a shelf of snow and the heavy box slid from my hands. It landed with a loud metallic chink. Cursing, I decided to take my first rest of the evening. I inhaled deep icy breaths, sighed out steam, and looked around. Snow clung to the branches of the stand of pine trees next to the house. The little grove looked like an ice castle inside a Faberge egg. At the end of the grove, someone had overturned a sled and left it abandoned in the snow. Gritting my teeth, I tried to worm my hands underneath the box to get some leverage. I took a deep breath, heaved the box up with iced fingers, and headed for the van.

It was slow going. Lumps of snow fell into the sides of my shoes; pinpricks of ice melted into my ankles. Approaching the parking lot, I could see my van wore a trapezoidal hat of snow. It would probably take me fifteen minutes to warm up the engine. I lugged the carton to the van door, slid it open, and heaved it inside. The moon dipped behind a cloud. The sudden darkness sent a shiver down my back. II opened the driver-side door, turned on the engine, then flipped on the headlights. They shone on the evergreens frosted with new snow. Next to the overturned sled, half-buried in a hollow, lay a coat. I groaned. One of the unwelcome punishments that comes from catering big dinners is that you end up being the guardian of a bewildering cache of lost-and-found objects.

By the pale glow of the van headlights I trudged through snow and by trees to where the sled was, up-ended. Skidding down the slight incline, I leaned toward the edge of the coat. It was dusted with snow; perhaps it had been dragged or dropped. I brushed some of the icy powder off. Something was wrong. The coat did not respond to my attempt to pick it up. It was too heavy. My near-frozen hands moved rapidly to find edges of cloth.

I could hear my breath rasping in the cold. The night air was frigid. I turned the heavy, hard thing over just as moonlight blazed out again.

It was not a coat. It was the valedictorian, Keith Andrews. Blood from the back of his head darkened the snow. Instinctively, I felt for a pulse. There was none.

2

“Oh, no. Please.” I shook Keith’s shoulders. The boy didn’t move. I couldn’t touch his head. His slick hair lay in a dark puddle of blood and snow. The moon lit his frozen grimace. The open mouthed expression was ghastly, contorted with the fear of death. My fingers caught on an icy cord that had been wrapped around his torso and attached to the sled.

I pulled away. My voice made high, unhuman sounds. The deep snow disintegrated like quicksand as I clambered backward. I raced to the headmaster’s house, careened across the slate floor of the empty entryway, and dialed 911.

The operator impassively took my name and asked for the fire number, a standard localization procedure in the mountainous section of Furman County. Of course I didn’t know it, so I screeched for somebody, anybody, in the house. Julian appeared from the kitchen. A bewildered-looking Headmaster Perkins came tripping down the stairs from the living quarters. Behind him was a lanky, acne-scarred teenager who looked vaguely familiar the one who had made the Stanford comment. The headmaster’s tweeds were disheveled, as if he had begun to get undressed but had abruptly changed his mind. He couldn’t remember the fire number, turned to the tall boy, who crinkled his nose and mumbled off six digits. Perkins then trotted off quickly in the direction of the kitchen, where, apparently, he believed I had started a fire.

The voice on the other end of the phone patiently asked me to repeat what had happened, what was going on. He wanted to know who else was around. I told him, then asked the tall teenager his name.

“Oh,” said the boy. He was muscular in addition to possessing great height, but his acne made him painfully repulsive. His voice faltered. “Oh, uh, don’t you know me? I’m Macguire. Macguire … Perkins. Headmaster Perkins is my father. I live here with him. And I, you know, go to the school.”

I told this to the operator, who demanded to know I how I knew the boy in the snow was dead.

“Because there was blood, and he was cold, and he … didn’t move. Should we try to bring him in from outside? He’s lying in the snow – “

The operator said no, to send somebody out, to check for a pulse again. Not you, he said. You stay on the phone. Find out if anybody in the house knows CPR. I asked Julian and Macguire: Know CPR? They looked blank. Does the headmaster? Macguire loped off to the kitchen to ask, then returned momentarily, shaking his head. I told them please, go out and check on Keith Andrews, lying still and apparently dead in the small ditch in the pine grove.

Stunned, Julian backed away. The color drained from his face; bruiselike shadows appeared under his eyes. Macguire sucked in his cheeks and his ungainly shoulders went slack. For a moment I thought he was going to faint. Go, go quickly, I told them.

When they had reluctantly obeyed, the operator had me go through the whole thing again. Who was I? Why was I there? Did I have any idea how this could have happened? I knew he had to keep me on the phone as long as possible, that was his job. But it was agony. Julian and Macguire returned, Macguire slack-jawed with shock, Julian even paler. About Keith… Julian closed his eyes, then shook his head. I told the operator: No pulse. Keep everybody away from the body, he ordered. Teams from the fire department and the Furman County Sheriff’s Department were on their way. They should be at the school in twenty minutes.

“I’ll meet them. Oh, and please, would you,” I added, my voice raw with shock and confusion, “call Investigator Tom Schulz and ask him to come?”

Tom Schulz was a close friend. He was also a homicide investigator at the Sheriff’s Department, as Julian and I knew only too well. The operator promised he would try Schulz’s page, then disconnected.

I began to tremble. I heard Macguire ask if I had a coat somewhere, could he get it for me? I squinted up at him, unable to formulate an answer to his question. Was I okay? Julian asked. I struggled to focus on his faraway voice, on his anguished eyes, his pallid face, and bleached, wet hair stuck up in conical spikes. Julian rubbed his hands on his rumpled white shirt and tried to straighten his plaid bow tie, which had gone askew. “Goldy, are you okay?” he repeated.

“I need to call Arch and tell him we’re all right, that we’ll be late.”

The area between Julian’s eyebrows pleated in alarm. “Want me to do it? I can use the phone in the kitchen.”

“Sure. Please. I don’t trust myself to talk to him just now. If he hears my voice, it’ll worry him.”

Julian darted toward the kitchen with Macguire Perkins striding uneasily after him, like a gargantuan shadow. I was shivering uncontrollably. Belatedly, I realized I should have told Macguire my jacket was in the van. Moving like an automaton toward the front hallway closet to look for a blanket, shawl, jacket, something, I could hear Julian’s voice on one of the phone extensions. I pulled a huge raccoon coat off a protruding hanger. I had an absurdly incongruous thought: Wear this thing on the streets of Denver and you’d get spray-painted by anti-fur activists. As I was putting the heavy coat on, one of my coffeepots tumbled out of the dark recesses of the closet, spilling cold brown liquid and wet grounds on the stone floor. What was it doing in there? I couldn’t think. I was shaking. Get a grip. I kicked at the hanging coats to make sure no other surprises lurked in the closet comers. Then I walked down the hall, looking into each of the large, irregularly shaped rooms with their heavy gold and green brocade draperies, dark wood furniture, and lush Oriental rugs, to see if there was anybody else around.